The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin Waited Years For Today. It's Already Going Wrong

Episode Date: September 15, 2026

Markets are heading into a huge week with the Fed decision and Clarity Act vote in focus, while the 10-year Treasury yield breaks above 5% to its highest level since 2007. We also cover the SEC pushing ahead on crypto rules even if Clarity fails, the DOJ targeting $61M in Iran-linked crypto, and Robinhood moving to make stock tokens function more like real shares. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Crypto market has waited with bated breath for this very big day. It is the day that we finally get a cloture vote on clarity. And if you looked at prediction markets, it's already going terribly wrong. The world is ending and doesn't really matter because AI is coming for us within the next three months anyways. We're going to talk about the Clarity Act and everything else happening in crypto markets today with Tillman, Andrew, Andrew, Andrew and Ryan from Bitwise. Let's go. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to Middle Earth. Welcome.

I hope you're all having a wonderful day. I'm going to go ahead and bring on Ryan Tillman and Andro. Yeah, Andrew is my Nigerian scamer name. That's the name I use. Yeah, when I'm grabbing people's username, passports to log into their X. So, that's good stuff. Well done.

It's going to be my new DJ name. I like it. But it's not Andro with an O. It's R-E-A-U-X andro. Fancy. Oh. Yeah, that's good. It's a real tradition.

He's an LSU fan named Andrew. Well, anyways, good morning, gentlemen. It's a pleasure to be here. Happy Clarity-Clocher day to you. Happy 10-year-over-5% day to you. To all who celebrate. So first of all, I just have to address something that blew my mind yesterday. I made a joke in the morning.

I wonder if they're going to go full weekend at Bernies with Mitch McConnell for the clarity vote tomorrow. Of course. And these crazy bastards did it. Yeah. They brought him out. They rolled him out. I don't know if you guys saw the video actually of him. Well, here he is.

But I don't know if you saw the video of him coming out, but it was like really inspiring. Like it's really good. Yeah. There he is. I mean, Bernie, weekend at Bernie's looks better than he does. Looks better than he does. They rolled out Mitch McConnell unrecovered for the long. shots to bring him out.

Listen, big players make big plays and big games. You bring me into air listers. Game time. Ryan sitting here in disbelief of all things are happening. I'm sorry. It makes you proud to be proud of being American to see the political system working so smoothly and for so long. Like he's been gone a long time.

I mean, I can't believe he's back for this. I was totally kidding. And it's just a cloture vote. It's not even the real vote. It's just a closer vote. Don't tell people that, Andrew. Everybody thinks they're going to find out today whether the Clarity Act is going to become law. And it's not the case.

The cloture vote will pass. Everybody will get excited and then the actual Clarity Act won't pass. Like, that's literally what's going to happen. Well, I mean, actually, so rationally, we were talking about this before, it actually would make sense for the Democrats who might still be intending to vote against the Clarity Act to vote for Cloture today. Just like conversation can continue. Yeah, listen, like we're voting. for this today, but there's still a whole lot of concessions that we need. And the market's going to

price it today if it passes as if it's becoming law. I mean, Ryan, is that how you sort of view this? Because that's how I'm seeing it. Yeah, I think that's exactly what's going to happen. And I agree. I think most people don't realize that today is not the actual vote. There's still a lot of ground to cover if it passes the cloture today. But I do think that we'll get a surprise to the upside. I think probably market's pricing in around 20% odds that it gets signed into law this year. I think that's probably too high, but I think we'll get the cloture to pass today. Yeah, I have it. I actually have the Cal sheet here. So yeah, before, well, that's 2027. Okay, these are the long odds because I'm dumb. One second. Let me do the thing with the stuff.

Yeah, there you go. 7% before October 1st. Right. Right. Before November 1st, 16% before December 1st. So these are the actual odds of it passing, not of cloture vote. I actually haven't seen if there's a market on cloture or if people just don't wouldn't even understand how to bet that one. Oh, I'm sure that there's a market on cloture somewhere, buddy. I guarantee you, polymarket or calci, there's a cloture market. But it's probably just assume that cloture's going to pass. When you're rolling out Mitch McConnell for the cloture vote, it's probably somewhat assumed that cloture is going to pass. Again, it's all politics is all Kabuki Theater, generally speaking, at this point, sadly, as it relates to our country,

because, again, cloture will pass. That will give everybody cover for the midterms. And then they just run out the clock on this thing over the next year and a half. And hope, you know, the people that wouldn't actually vote for the Clarity Act are hoping that more important things happen. So they're not bothered by the crypto lobby, you know, 12 to 16 months from now. I mean, that, that's a effectively the playbook. Yeah. I'll sign any contract. I'll sign any contract if I can control the terms. You know, I think that's what's going on here. They're they like you guys have said, there's an out. It's political cover. It's just theatrics. It's not going to mean anything in the long run. But there are things that are meaningful that are going on in the space that are related

to banking and related to using crypto inside the banking system. So it's, It's two steps forward, one and a half for 1.75 steps back. We're still moving forward, though. Yeah, I think that also if you are anti-crypto and you have the ability to either pass cloture now and install out for the next year, year and a half, you're more likely to do that than vote against it today and have Paul Atkins and the SEC step in later this week or next week with a bunch of pro-crypto regulations that kind of slice up. up clarity. So I think the the siops of passing today certainly is real. And I think eventually we'll get the right legislation in place. But I don't think it happens this year. So I will see that and raise you on, which is that voting against it today puts fair shake against you in the midterm election and you get the crypto lobby fully coming for you when you're on the record against

something that you could just vote for today and let it slide for a few months and not have the one of the largest lobbies on the planet. you know, funding your, funding your opposition. It is a strange deal to see, like, the police force in Massachusetts before the Clarity Act or, you know, like, the Garbage Men of America from Kentucky come out for the Clarity Act. Like, it's very strange. And, you know, supposedly we're going to get a pretty remarkable speech from old Liz Warren today about how she's anti the Clarity Act. So she's, you know, she can bang the drums

for her own reasons and for own political purposes. Yeah, it's, I would say that the Clarity Act has been very, very useful in one way. It gives you a real idea of whose side people are on and why and how and how are they motivated and what are they motivated about or for? Very, very interesting associated with how the banking lobby has handled this stuff, how banks have been super duper. Yeah, Letitia James, super duper anti-clarity act,

but then now they're kind of a little bit not anti, because it's just, it's pretty, pretty nuts. That's, you know, what does the Attorney General of New York have anything to do? Well, right now, the issue is, so one of the sticky points in the ethics provision is state attorney generals, right? Yeah, it's basically attorney generals or the DOJ coming after, you know, the criminals. And Trump originally wanted DOJ and everybody else wanted state attorneys because DOJ is like his literally personal attorney, right? So that's not going to sense. And then they actually conceded a lot of that in the new ethics language that Trump just agreed to.

but apparently he didn't concede enough of it and there might be a loophole and maybe there's way that. So we're at the point where it's like, well, yeah, you said it, but like if he did this thing and this other thing, maybe he could get around it and, you know, which means there's just never going to be a consensus. He agreed, listen, I'm not like the most pro-Trump's

involvement in crypto guy out here. I think we all know that. And I think he's come pretty far on this ethics thing much farther than I would have anticipated. Yeah, I agree that one's going to happen today is that U.S. Treasury Secretary Besson testifying in front of the House Financial Services Committee. And I think, like, media is going to follow that a lot more closely and pay a lot more attention to that. So I feel like this clarity thing feels really important in Prypto today. And it's, like,

all anyone's talking about, all anyone's thinking about. But I would expect it doesn't even get that much coverage when you have Bessent testifying. I would just like you to know that Bessent is the correct pronunciation. And you're one of one out of 10 that pronounce it correctly when they come on the show, including myself. I did one Daily Wolf where I called him Besson and Bessent three times back and forth in the same paragraph. It's Bessent. And the fact that you still have a Yahoo show is really something after that. You know what?

You know what? I did it hold to minimize the sexual innuendo. It was a Pialis joke, right? It was a Viagra joke or something. I was like, this chart looks like it popped a Viagra. Yeah. I have no, that we have, we quickly derailed this show quicker than normal, quicker than normal on Tuesdays. Do we need to even unpack like the nuance of the clarity act further? Shall we move on? Really? As Andrew says, unsubscribe. Yeah, move on. Let's go to more important stuff.

There's much bigger things to talk about, like the rate hike. I mean, just it's, this is going to be forgotten about two days from now. going to be talking about it anymore. Well, yeah, I don't know. But markets are kind of waiting for it. You know, I think my framing yesterday was there's two things that Bitcoin might care about this week. And it's FOMC tomorrow, maybe, even though I think that that also will be forgettable two days later.

And the Clarity Act. So here you go. Ten-year treasury yield rises the highest since 2007 as Fed rate hike expectations rise. And then, of course, you've got, you know, I didn't think they'd hike, to be honest. and it's like 90% or something, so I was probably wrong. Counting the votes, Walsh faces a tough battle as the Fed Guards for expected interest rate hikes. I mean, this is a tough situation, right? Because they've done everything they can so far to try to talk rates down.

I mean, listen, Powell cut rates and mortgages and interest rates went up. Besson says that they're going to intervene in the bond market, and the bond market doesn't listen and interest rates go up. Now we're at a multi-decade high. And does anyone, maybe the right question, Ryan, I'll ask you first. you believe that even if they cut rates, that interest rates will come down? It didn't happen when Powell did it. I think marginally they could come down, but I actually am in the camp of I don't think they're going to cut rates tomorrow.

I think that we're going to just get a non-event here. And I think the markets will also forget about it. But I don't think that it has a big impact on the curve. Yeah, I don't think they get. My point is, and I don't think the Fed can do anything right now, short of like hiking a full point and like doing, you know, going like full. you know, like nuclear warfare against interest rates. I think that any small move, and the funny thing is a 25-bit hike is like saying that policy's been wrong for the last two years. Like what comes next after that?

I don't see a hike as being, I think maybe a hike comes today or this week, but I don't, I think the bigger story is the amount of printing that we're going to have to do in the very short term. And that wall is approaching faster than, you know, ever. And I'm just waiting for that. That's literally the marker to me of all markers. China just did it. Quantitative easing in this environment is the only solution that gets everyone's mind off of all of these doom and gloom headlines because everybody's fat and happy. And that's what you do. That's literally one of the levers that you have to weigh in using it is like how is the nation feeling and what can I do to change that and you know I don't see I don't see that being sustainable forever but I see it being sustainable way beyond you know our

lifetime and so people have been saying that it's unsustainable way before I was born you know the gold bugs if you go talk to any of them you know Peter Schiff for example that's his whole thesis and it has been his entire investment career his entire life. And so you just look at why has it gone up from being pinned under $300 basically for four decades to over $5,000 and now we're sitting at $4,000 on the retracement? Well, it's not because they started using gold a hundred times more industrially over that time.

It's because we're printing money and everything has to show that. And the game used to be to manipulate the markets behind the scenes. to not show the true inflation rate. And that's how, you know, the system worked for a long time across a lot of the commodities. And now there is no hiding. The volatility is here. And it's like rearing its head across every market. And therein lies a huge opportunity.

But at the same time, you know, if you're playing with any type of leverage, you get absolutely wrapped. And so I don't, all these headlines are driven towards getting us information that gives us alpha. and I think the only alpha is that we're going to print a lot more money and everything's going to be more expensive in the future because all of the headlines are just, they feel like, to Andrew's point earlier, it's like, why am I hearing about this from an actor in Hollywood? Like, what the heck does he know about it? It feels very salesy and very strategic. And so what is that? Well, it's an emotion inducer. It's like, oh, I've got, you know, Texas football guys started parading around going clarity act, clarity. I'd be paying attention because why? Because I love tech. So my point is, is like, they're just jerking emotion out of us to hide the fact that everything goes up. And the downturns are just buying opportunities on the long-term thesis.

Now, a lot of people want it faster than that gives it to them. And so they trade it and they trade it on leverage. And that volatility can make you rich in a week. And that's the headline. And then it makes you equally as poor the next week. I'll die. I can't watch, Andrew. There's a dog in your ear, and now there's magazines flying into your ear.

Well, at least it's not Jim Kramer whispering into my ear. Listen, markets are endlessly dynamic, right? Whether you cut or you raise, you know, will the 10-year respond in a way that, you know, Bessent and Warsh want it to, probably not. even the guys that are effectively the masters of the universe associated with rates and bond yields and just the state of money and finance across the globe, you know, have a very difficult time moving markets the way that they want to move them. And so, yeah, the dynamics of markets are hard to predict.

They're very, very difficult to manage both. micro and macro. And so the question then becomes, how do you benefit from markets in terms of how dynamic they are and why and how and when and where? And so it's, you know, I've been saying this for a while.

You know, we got AI Dumerism on, you know, over the weekend, right? You know, Patrick, Bet,

David, saying, oh, there's going to be a blood bath on Monday. And I just laugh. I just, I look at that stuff and I'm thinking, one, can he possibly believe that if he believes that he's retarded in terms of the markets?

And then three, how has a guy like that not figured out what kind of the underlying, you know, sort of foundation of what markets are now? Like if the markets are down a percent to start the day, every advisor on the planet is calling all their boomer clients saying, here's an opportunity to buy. Should we move some of the $9 trillion in money market accounts that you are a part of into some of your favorite positions? Yes, thanks, click, right? That is the nature of the markets and why they're, until further notice, bloodbats are very, what is a bloodbath? I've been around a long time, a 7% dip in a single day on the NASDAQ or the S&P.

That's a bloodbath. Been a long time since we've seen that because of the dynamic. When's the last time that somebody called for like, you know, the Bloody Monday or whatever and it actually happened? I mean, I mean, it's like, I can't remember it. You know, like Black Monday is coming. We had that for so many of those calls of late. Peter Schiff was doing it.

Because it happened once in 1987, right? Black Monday happened in 1987. Well, that's not why they're doing it because fear cells. Again, that's the headline that evokes the emotion. that gives them the desired response. They're listening. Listen, people's attention is the most precious commodity that exists on the face of the earth

and everyone's seeking it. Those are just, they're just traps. That's, you know, it's same old same. Also, Ryan's background is the best curated background on this show and he's not getting enough runtime. There's not, so Ryan, the floor is your- I'm not here in Narnia, like I relocated.

Yours is, listen, you know, all respect, Yours is terrible. So Ryan, go ahead. It's hard to compete with Scott's background there. But no, I appreciate that. I'm up in Seattle, Washington. So I had to bring the plants in this morning. But, you know, look, I think that the fear and short-term volatility that the financial

media and media more broadly loves to inject into markets is like a gift for long-term investors. Everything we're talking about here in terms of long-term money printing to boost markets. rates at some point are coming down, whether that's this week or which is not going to happen, but whether it's later this year, next year we're going to see rate cuts eventually because the economists, the folks in charge at the FMC, they don't want to see rates elevated. And you have this massive AI productivity boom that is going to happen. Meanwhile, September is just historically a crappy month.

And the financial advisors that we speak to and the investment committees are well aware of this. They talk about this. They are sitting with cash on the sidelines because they knew this F1. MC meeting was coming in the middle of September. They knew September was historically a bad month for equity performance and it's highly volatile. And they're sitting on the sideline. So I think any dip gets bought here on a lack of rate hikes, which is my kind of base case.

And, you know, crypto market will have some idiosyncratic shock related to the Clarity Act today. But I don't think that has a long-term impact on where crypto is headed. Like what we haven't talked about in the past few weeks, while there's been so much focus on clarity is all these other tailwinds that push crypto higher and all these different mega trends that are continuing to build momentum over the long term for crypto. And so I sit and look at these dips and these pullbacks as a massive gift for the long term oriented investor. Could I agree more. Yeah, that's the clip of the week, honestly, is like it's a gift. No, I'm serious. Like, think about it. When you're trying to dollar cost average into something and you're getting exposure

to a curve. You know, in 25 years ago, you were hoping for a little volatility to give you that. Now, I mean, you're just getting these wild swings across every board. Man, the patient wins. Yeah, it is a, if I'm pretty sure Tommy Boy could have predicted that we're not going to get much from the rate hike. You know, again, it's very strange. that a large portion of the world of finance is borderline rooting for a rate hike. And yet, Bacen is out there saying, you know, mocking Bloomberg terminal pros. If that's not a tell that he already knows how it's going to go tomorrow, I don't know what it is. Right.

Like, I mean, you know, it's kind of, they're kind of putting it out there to make it clear. And again, I think I think that's the strategy associated. with, again, them trying to pull back the 10-year and shorter-term rates and it hasn't worked. But didn't Trump literally threatened tariffs against Morse

if he raises rates? Probably. No, he did. We need lower rates, and if we hike rates, I will tariff, blah, blah, blah. And it was like, you're having to force. You can't tariff him. Like, he's not,

who are you trending? I mean, there's also that foundation. truth that Trump put abortion there to not hike rates and to bring rates down. I mean, we can start there, right? But he has to work inside of the Fed and there's actual votes

and people that vote and all that stuff inside the Fed. So he's got to work inside of that quote unquote political environment. Yeah, I think we get out of this meeting more of a split on where rates are headed in terms of more of the FMC members saying

that they be okay with with hiking rates, but it still isn't the majority at the last meeting were in favor of it. There was a few dissents. I think you have to move the entire group to that side of the equation before you start to actually see rate hikes. And in the market's pricing in what we said, 90% plus chance of a hike. Warsh specifically said he doesn't want to telegraph to markets what he's doing. So I just think markets in general are reading this wrong.

Like I was listening to CNBC, I think yesterday and they were saying that the market's going to be extremely disappointed. if we don't get rate hikes. And that just feels so disconnected with the average investor and reality and the financial advisors that we speak to. And so I think everyone's overreacting here as is typical around these types of events. Yeah. I mean, think about that.

I think about that. Because I think, again, 90%, you know, you're going against the grain there. But I also think if you're looking at trying to represent independent thought against monetary policy like they have been. Like that's been a big thing since Trump put him in is like, this is just a puppet. This proves, you know, that theory wrong once and for all. And I would think that the most prudent move to your point would be nothing, just a zero, nothing burger.

Don't do anything. Let's see how this plays out for a little longer. There's a lot on the board right now that would be meaningful to the decision. So, you know, it's the prudent thing, kind of like a doctor, is like, do no harm. you know, and that, that I think would be the best move for everyone, including the Fed, from an optics perspective, right? They're not picking sides. They're doing something that's prudent for the people, you know, based upon moving slowly,

which I don't, I'm for that, right? I don't want need jerk reactions in monetary policy. I want those guys to, you know. Panicry. Like raising rates a little bit looks panicky. Very much so. When there's a consensus that Warsh and Bessent are friendly, you would think that that would be showing panic

that he's trying to talk the bond market down while also having his buddy raise rates on the other side when we know that that's not the mandate. I'm not saying they won't do it, but it, you know, that's like hitting Bessent and Warsh directly against one another to some degree. Yeah, I think a percentage is are really high that much like this show, nothing happens tomorrow.

You know what I mean? They've been a lot here. Yeah. I'm not an honest word. I think the other reality is even as recently as over this weekend, we're clearly in the midst of an oil shock. And that's having a big impact on inflation numbers. And Warsh is very data-driven. And it'd be impossible to be highly data-driven.

It'd ignore short-term anomalies around the inputs that go into the data you're reading. So I think that's a really easy leg to stay at. on in terms of wait and see, don't do anything. We know that we're in the middle of a war. We have global oil supplies being shocked with the Saudi Arabia's pipeline being shut off. We have, you know, advancements from Iranians, all of these things. Coming in and raising rates 25 basis points, I agree, kind of feels like a move that says we're responding to pressure rather than surveying data and taking a data-driven approach to what we're deciding. Yeah, I do four times that hike if you want to actually have an impact on the market.

Right. Do it, do it all now. 25 and then we all debate what happens at the next meeting endlessly is just stupid. Well, it's just more uncertainty. We don't need any more uncertainty. We've got plenty of it on the horizon. And there is, in my mind, a repricing of commodities that's going on right in front of us that we may never return back to, you know, the old prices. I don't think gold's going back under

$1,000 ever again. And so I agree with that. Yeah. But think about it. It stayed under $1,000 for like four decades. I mean, like for five, like for basically its entire existence. And then all of a sudden you see this parabolic price. Oil hasn't been repriced because of its, you know, need and its use of value to us. Gold doesn't have that. Silver has a, a little bit, and that's why I think you've seen kind of the guardrails be put on the true inflationary price being revealed in those commodities. I think oil is going to be managed. It has to be managed. And there's a lot of levers to pull on the oil side of things. Like, you will never get a straight answer in terms of really what reserves look like and what

demand. Like it's, uh, there's plenty of it. The question is, is how much regulation allows you to get. And that's, that's not a manmade, that's a manmade problem. That's not an energy problem. So the oil is one of the tells as to, you know, how well they're being able, they're able to manage it. But again, the fact that the whole straight thing has caused, I mean, I think it's just an excuse to reprice it a little bit above 100 and maybe the hundred, a hundred to the new norm. It seems to not be hurting the economy that bad. And if you print a bunch of dollars into that, nobody's going to care about a six dollar diesel price if you've got a bunch of money in your pocket. I just think this is a new norm that we're going to have to get used to across pretty

much every market, that volatility is going to push to new prices. That price discovery is either going to stick or it's going to fail. And I think a lot of that stickiness is determined based upon legislative clarity and, you know, runway. Well, you know, really the truth about, you know, oil slash gas at the pump is other than some short-term blips to the downside, you know, gas has effectively been above $3 for about five years, really across the board. Now, again, you know, in my neck of the woods, middle, middle America, you know, seeing it above $4, you know, on the sign at the gas, that, you know, oh, okay, well, something's going on. And most Americans, you know, kind of feel the same way. Yeah, that's a tough one to get a, get a handle on. You know, I get all of

my oil and gas information from the show Landman. And so, I know, you know, there was a diatribe that it gave, like, you know, above $80 a barrel. It's good for us, but it's bad for retail and it's bad for the consumer. So it's a problem. You know, if it's under $40, it's a problem for us. It's a good for them, but it's a problem for us. It's not as profitable to bring it out of the ground. You know, about around 68, 72 is the sweet spot.

And we're meaningfully above that right now. So, yeah, you know, defer to, you know, Billy Bob Thornton slash Tillman Holloway when it comes to oil and gas. Again, like you said, though, there's too many variables to make that a hard rule, right? The variable really, what you just said is absolutely the facts. When prices get high, it hurts at the pump more than anywhere else. But if you're printing money to those people, you know, I've been in the oil space for a long time. I grew up in Texas, and it's funny, I know a lot of guys who've made billions of dollars on oil,

and they still complain about the gas price at the pump. And I'm like, hey, you know, you're kind of involved. You're kind of the problem. But, you know, I think that at the end of the day, everything is going to get a lot more expensive at a pace that we're not used to. But that's not that when we die, that resets. No one cares. Like, you know, if you go to my great-grandmother, who's not alive anymore, and you tell her how much, I paid from my house.

She's going, what? That's more money than that's in the whole town that I grew up in it. And so it's just relative to the lifetime that we live. And that's the thing that we all forget because we think we're gods and we live forever. But all these price shocks don't mean anything to our kids. They didn't grow up thinking about gas being under a dollar like I do. I still think about like when I saw 97 cent gas in. Aspen, Colorado for all in all places. So, you know, times change. And, you know, we, it's hard to get

used to it. But if you look at like, if you had the benefit of being around any older people, like old, old people, they all talk the same. Like, I don't even recognize the world anymore. It's totally. And I just think that's part of the dynamic. But it's accelerating. And it's only going to get faster. And so we're measuring it on a curve that looks like this and it's parabolic, but it's against a much greater curve that a lot of people don't account for it. All my ears, I can't hear Aspen, Colorado without thinking of dumb and dumber. A little place called... Your clothes like wine. And the women flock to you like the salmon cup of Astrona. Swanson, Swanson, Samson, I was way off.

Oh, good. You know, all my times of Afghanistan, I just walk around and think, yeah, I'm in and dumber. It actually was filmed in breath of your answer. I won't think that by the way of that. I still think that because of structurally how inflation works and who feels it, that $6 at the pump is going to be a very big problem regardless of how much money they add for your average person because that money doesn't make it to them. Well, it's very weird, by the way, that we talk about money printing and, you know, we all kind of harken back to COVID. And when they gave out, you know, COVID stimulus checks, like, Those stimulus checks, it's strange to me that somehow they made this huge impact from an

inflation and all that stuff. But they were only like 800 bucks a check. They gave out $1,500. $5,000 in November. Yeah, well, there's your inflation, right? We're $1,600. And now we're going to $5,000, which, by the way, I thought about that. That'd be like a trillion dollars to add to the deficit.

1.2, 1.3. It's a rounding. already at 40. You've already said 40 is just an added an extra trillion. I mean, that would make that would make Ryan and Matt have a little bit of convulsions as the bitwise, you know, guys giving out, you know, thoughts on the economy and in the world of finance. But, you know, I don't know.

I don't know how much it would move the needle. I mean, we're running at $2 trillion already this year. So the reality is, is that the numbers have gotten so large that something, you know, And we live in such a crazy world that $5,000 checks from the U.S. government to every citizen is actually something that could happen. And the impact that would have on the deficit is relatively immaterial over the long term because we're already headed so much higher into the right in terms of deficits. And the only way to get out of this is to grow our way out of it. And I think AI productivity will help. But I don't see how you how you escape this ever-increasing.

pile of debt and interest payments. It's already, you know, out of the bottle. And so what's another trillion when you're staring down the barrel of 40? Well, we're talking about, in my opinion, like first principal fiat issues. And, but I would harken to like play that game theory out. And whoever has, we're forced to use fiat because that's the choice that the government's given us to use. So at the end of the day, the vast majority, of people are always going to use whatever the government gives them to use. So whose fiat are we going to use? Well, whoever has the most guns.

That's literally how it's going to be how it works. And that's going to buy us enough time. That's why I don't think it'll happen in our lifetime because that's a race that we have a very large head start on. And there's there's no benefit to trying to overthrow that with equal might because it's mutual destruction. And so no one wins. if you're trying to play an economic game and there's nothing left to play for, the game,

you know, that's like hitting the board up in the air. The game's over. There is no economics anymore. So if you have any economic sense and you want the world to survive, there, you can chip away at the dollar dominance over long, long periods of time, but you're never going head to head with it unless you bring an army with you. And that's the truth. And what does that allow us to do?

It allows us to pay off cheap debt with more cheap dollars. because we print into new paradigms with every generation that passes. And that's going to be the same thing that we do, next generation, next. Until proven otherwise, until somebody comes knocking and gives us an alternative. I think that's what the thesis of Bitcoin was. It's like this is the, how did that work out for us? It's been, you know, we. You know, Tillman's genius knows no end because he comes up with these little things on a daily,

basis like mutual destruction is the best name for a new show on your your your network podcast scott where it's just it's just weiss burger and mcglone arguing with each other about bitcoin mutual destruction i think i heard tellman say something about the jerking motion or jerking emotions and i thought the cop was wild i don't even know what was happening no see i try to Keep it PG with what I just said. I don't even look at the comments. We might as well be on a Zoom call with each other. I want to talk about an actual topic.

My God. Ryan, Robin Hood planned share redemptions, voting rights for stock tokens after criticism. So like, let's have a conversation about tokenization. Basically, you know, to my knowledge, in Johan here, not Johan, Johann Cabrat here from Robin Hood. Basically, I said, hey, these things blew up and we're figuring it out. These are backed one for one, but we're trying to figure out how to give voting rights and all of the rights that come with owning an actual share because of obviously the massive debate between the AMC CEO and Vlad. So sets the table for here the state of tokenization and how you're viewing this. Yeah, well, Vlad's a Chad here.

I think that Robin Hood is really accelerating at an oppressive rate their step into crypto. And they're competing with folks like Coinbase in terms of fighting for the retail crypto user. But it's a lot easier for a company like Robin Hood to get into crypto than a company like Coinbase to get into the traditional market. Now, I don't think Coinbase is going to struggle with that over the long term. But I think the dynamics are a little bit in Robin Hood's favor there. And they're clearly leaning in with the Robin Hood chain, with trying to actually figure out tokenization. I think the SEC is going to play a big role in how tokenization actually flows through markets. And this is just like another example of why the Clarity Act isn't as important day-to-day or as everyone makes it out to be.

Because you have regulation coming in place and you have traditional companies and fintechs and crypto companies all pushing in this direction of financial assets moving on chain. And if you look at the data, the value of tokenized stocks is continuing to rise, volume or on tokenized stocks is continuing to rise. The actual infrastructure underneath tokenized stocks is expanding outside of crypto-first firms with things like Robin Hood chain and the NASDAQ and the New York stock chain and everybody moving towards tokenization. So this is one of those megatrends, particularly that we speak with financial advisors and wealth managers about that they approach us and say, how do I invest in tokenization?

What's happening here? I keep hearing that everything's going to move onto blockchain-based rails. No, by the way, I believed digital ledger technology and blockchain was disruptive and is really strong technology five years ago, but all I could invest in then was Bitcoin. I didn't understand it. And so I didn't do that. But now they can invest in financial services companies like Robin Hood, like Coinbase. They can invest the underlying blockchains, the infrastructure, et cetera.

So I think this is going to bring a lot of capital not only onto blockchains, but investing into the underlying software and technology that's been built for the past five, six years. and we'll get the regulatory piece that allows all this to flourish, either from legislation or from the SEC and CFTC. Those are the structural things that are pushing crypto higher over the next five to 10 years, more so than what's happening with rates this week. I mean, FCC Atkins backs Clarity Act, but says agency will keep pushing crypto, Raj, without it. Like, we keep hearing this rhetoric.

Like, this is not stopping regardless of the Clarity Act and all of these companies like Robin Hood and Coinbase and OKX are competing to be the all in one app for tokenized stocks and prediction markets, and literally nothing is stopping it. It's just not going to. Nothing can stop that. Listen, over the last 15 years politically, that's how stuff gets done. So regulatory agencies just make rules, rules, rules, rules, rules, rules, like enormous amounts of rules, enormous amounts of changes that nobody necessarily notices. We're going to notice on this show because we're in the midst of it, but that's how stuff gets done in Washington now, like agencies or new agencies or all sorts of agencies, you know, go, go do a deep dive on, you know, Department of Homeland Security

and everything that's that changed about our culture in America when that came into being in all the stuff that they've done since then, right? There haven't been any votes. There was a vote to create the DHS, but everything that's happened since, there are no votes associated with that. It just goes into, you know, part of the regulatory framework and you've got to abide by it. So I'm certain that the SEC will push and push and push. As far as Robin Hood is concerned, man, kudos to them for the effort that they're putting it into this, the leadership that they're showing. And, you know, there's a big difference.

Robin Hood and Coinbase are at each other's strokes. That's the best way to say it. Like they are competing, hardcore. with each other. And Robin Hood has a little bit of a leg up right now because they haven't been completely crypto beholden, you know, as the core of what they are, right? They're a financial, you know, exchange company, right? And whereas Coinbase, hey, if Bitcoin and others are going up big time, then everybody's activated inside of Coinbase. Whereas Robin Hood is different. So they're leveraging that and they're pushing the envelope across the board and kudos to them.

I just I think there's an opportunity to you know, they're tearing down silos. Like these services like sports betting, sports betting used to be relegated to Fandul and the sport. And then before that that was regulated and allowed, it was your bookie. And so these silos are breaking down. And so what is a brokerage? Well, it's not what it used to. It's not what it used to to be. And when you connect markets, it's a single source entity that holds your funds. It's a bank that then has all this, you know, tissue, connective tissue to it in services and exposure opportunities. And, you know, Bitwise is at the forefront. I'd love to hear more about the vaults and how that plays into the real world assets. But if you think about like, what does Larry Fink want? What does

Jamie Diamond want? They don't want to make a bet. They don't care about Bitcoin. They want volume. They want traffic. And if we've learned anything from the ETSs, the traffic follows these things. And if we learned anything from all of the, you know, hyperliquid stuff, Robin Hood's following them. So it's just a, it's a, it's a, it's a land grab in terms of how many services can I provide my clients so that they have no reason to ever leave or ever pull funds out of, you know, my, my, my account. And here's what's interesting about real world assets to me. me, everyone intuitively knows that Silicon Valley is not a level playing field. Everyone knows it.

Everyone knows that we didn't get IPO offers into the thousand Xers in Silicon Valley that made billionaires out of lots and lots of people. And so this notion that you're going to get to invest into private companies through tokenized real world assets and that potential upsets. and that potential upside in terms of getting seed opportunity investment in some of these. I think that's a narrative that sells all day, gets a lot of volume, and I think that's what all the big boys are thinking about, because if you can get the level of risk of tokenizing small private companies below what the public offerings risk is right now, then you have no

reason not to do it. And that's the, that's what tokenization provides. I mean, even if you, even if you look at like real estate investment funds, typically there are very large minimum minimums that retail does not qualify to meet, even though it's just real estate. It's like, why do I need to be so sophisticated to understand that you're building a mall? You know, you don't. That's the answer. They don't want to deal with you because it's too much relative money to your net worth. And they don't want you barking up their tree every day. And they don't want to give you paperwork that cost them a bloody fortune. All that. management's gone with tokenization. All of it's gone. So you can scale investments across a much broader market and manage that effectively with automation and vaults and vault managers. And I don't know what they're being called the curators. I think that's the word for it. But I just think it's an expansion of markets in a way that it's the holy grail. It gets everyone access to generational money-making opportunities. So I'd love to hear Ryan about the vault situation and the real world.

You guys, he didn't say bitwise, but I heard him say Larry Fink, they only care about volume. No, he put bitwise in there. He threw a bitwise in there. You don't care about it. I heard a, I heard a nineer in there. I said, listen, I will say this, company conviction should be different than employee and or executive conviction. They're not the same thing. Yeah, yeah, well, look, what, when Black Rock came into ETFs,

to the entire Bitcoin ETF market, right? So I think BlackRock will eventually be curating vaults. And I think that will just be another stamp of legitimacy on an industry and on disruptive technology that offers all the benefits that Tillman just spoke about. Like the ability for tokenized assets, whether they're stocks or other types of real world assets like real estate or other commodities or private companies, private credit, et cetera, This just opens up access to all different investor types and the ability to create more dynamic products that actually pass through the returns to investors because you've removed all of these expenses and processes from the stack. We're moving towards this world where asset managers are starting to operate on software like margins through things like tokenization and blockchains.

And it means that more and more products will be available to more and more investors. And a lot of folks in the U.S. I think struggle to understand why tokenization in part will be so important. I think that's because we have access to the biggest companies in the world, the biggest stock market in the world. It's relatively easy to gain access to other types of more exotic assets, quote unquote, if you have access to ETS. But if you are in South America or India or Africa or elsewhere and you want access to U.S. companies, the way you're going to get it is through tokenized stocks on something like Robin Hood chain or on base or on Salana or hyperliquid because it's easier to access and because you just want to have that in your portfolio. And then you start to package up other assets like real world assets being underwritten and dropped into vaults. that just allows investors to build more diversified portfolios that have yield from some corner of the market they haven't previously been able to access. They can rely on a regulated asset manager that has a risk management committee underwriting the collateral behind the vault.

And they can get something like five, seven, eight, nine percent yield. And so I think vaults are going to be absolutely massive. They actually are still something like 30 percent below where they were at in October 2025 before we had the big liquidity crisis in vaults. So vaults haven't recovered the October 2025 highs in terms of AUM, but we're definitely seeing more and more activity around the vault space. A bitwise, we just launched a tokenized, world asset vault, which takes things like figures, helox, and other of those similar types of assets, drops them into the vault, allows investors to underwrite those kind of via this curated strategy, while our risk management, team and quants are doing all of the legwork to get there and manage that for them. And if you can beat the going rate of the market, the risk-free rate, you're going to draw in capital.

I think vaults are a really incredible movement of on-chain assets that are really just getting started. Like we are in the absolute like first pitch of the first inning of the pregame warm up in terms of where faults are headed at $9 billion in the U.M. It's going to be in the trillions. It's just a matter of time. It's fundamentally giving people more diversification, which is you can't argue against. And it's giving them more access. And it's allowing more capital to be placed in the places where it needs to be placed. The cream rises to the top. Those are all good things for the economy, good for the investor, good for everything. Yeah, I agree with all that. By the way,

Andrew, you made a comment earlier about how things get done in Washington. People just keep sending me of these memes now. It's killing me. It's how it gets done in Washington. Well, look at it. There was, I saw one meme that

that uses that where it said your dog getting its last pup cup before you take it to the vet to be put down. It's horrible. It was a pretty well-known woman in crypto that actually put Caitlin. I forget her

I forget her last name. But yeah, by the way, you know, investment advice or not investment advice, I would be investing the heck out of, you know, the rails of tokenization all the way up for the next three to five years until you see, you know, a 2x Y combinator privatization ETF come out. You know, invest all the way up until that happens. And then we're probably at a meaningful maturity level with tokenization. So we're probably a few years off from that. But that's the way I'd look at it. Like to Ryan's point, we're at the first pitch of the first inning. You know, it's like naked gun three and a half.

Play ball. Well, what's going to be really interesting is what this does. Like there's like these unintended consequences that, you know, we haven't talked about. But if you have real world assets that are represented in tokenization or tokens on chain, you know, that opens up. the lending market, like you would not believe. Like, you talk about loan value on chain against dollars lent in digital currency. That's a new, that is the, that is the new he lock.

Instead of being relegated to go down for your, you know, your title loan at whatever title loan company at usury rates that you want to choose on the corner. Now it's just online, on chain. There's all, I mean, this, this is just, again, I don't think anyone can get their arms around how big it is. And I think the people who, to Andrew's point, are investing in building the rails and also investing in the true work that's involved in finding out what consumer wants and needs. You can't, you can guess, but it's a hypothesis until you take it to market. And, you know, Bitwise took vaults to market. I don't know how early compared to other.

I've never heard about them before Bitwise talked about them. And that's a testimony. That's a testimony to their desire to break down those walls, no different than Robin Hood and Coinbase. And these other firms is like, to me, that it allows me to know. It's like sitting at a poker table with somebody who's played a lot of poker and you know they're really good. You may not see the hand they see, but you know they see a hand. And so you just start to trust the fact that there's a lot of really smart jockeys out there. And you can bet on the jockeys.

You can bet on the horse. there's a lot of different places to play in this space. But pay attention because every big financial firm in the world is stopping everything they're doing and paying attention to this. That's as big of a testimony to the scale that this thing can go. Right. Before I let you go, any final thoughts, words, anything we missed or to address? Because I know we kept you way over probably your time. No, no, I appreciate being here.

Look, I think it's absolutely right that tokenization is. is one of the leading initiatives at every major asset manager. Firms that have been around for 100 of years are focused on this. Stable coins are major focus at all of the world's leading banks. Those things don't just change on a dime. These firms have been studying this for a long time, hearing about it for a long time, and are now investing a lot of capital and resources in rolling out their own stable coin or stable coin infrastructure, rolling out tokenized assets, tokenized funds,

or building tokenization infrastructure. So I think that those are two different mega trends that push crypto higher. We talked a lot about money printing and interest rates and nothing stopping this train. And I think we're going to see a lot, a lot, a lot of interest in debasement trade, kind of surging again this year as it did last year. And things like gold and Bitcoin are where the wealth managers that we speak to turn to when they start worrying about debasement. And so I think those are kind of three things.

that are moving in the right direction. Like whether Clarity Act passes, it's a cloture vote today or not, is not ultimately going to matter to us a month, two, three months from now in terms of where prices are headed because regulators, you know, as Andrew mentioned, have been stepping in for years. And you can just look back at the past years and see what the SEC and the CFTC have done in terms of pro-crypto regulation that's helped move the industry to where it is today and move the industry forward.

So I think there's a lot of doom and gloom around September and around what's going to happen at this week's meeting, FOMC, or what's going to happen in D.C. this week. But taking a step back, I think things are headed much, much higher on several different catalysts. And I know we're really excited about that a bit wise, as are our clients. Sounds good. Rag and roll. Thank you. Ryan. He does have a great door and a great plan. All right.

See you, Ryan. Thanks, guys. Good point. You guys like this or you like this? Definitely not so zoomed in. Myself. Right, that's here. Can you mean forward real quick?

Is there a zoom out feature? Can we go even further? Pay this out into like you. Andrew, I got something for you. Tom. Hey, there it is. So I want people to zoom in on the AMD there. And forget about the 141K that's sitting there.

Look at the realized cash on $100,000. seven and a half months, right? So that's a year-to-date number. So if you'd take 100 grand using our strategies on advanced micro-devices, which has been around for 40 years as a public company, you generated $141,000 in cash yield so far year-to-date. I'll say that one more time,

$141,000 in cash yield year-to-date on $100,000 inside of our strategies. So to the reality that is volatile, volatility associated with markets now. That is the alpha. Buy and hold is absolutely dead. It's absolutely dead. DCA can be compelling and interesting, but volatility in being able to capture yield, capture bottoms, be able to exit tops to create yield. There it is staring you in the face. You know, year to date, so far this year, the the cash yield associated. with a stock like AMD, 141 grand on top of the 100 you started with.

Same with iron, by the way. You know, the number of retain. The point is the same with a lot of markets. Like the volatility is here to stay. And the connectivity of the, everything we just spent, you know, 50 minutes talking about is driving volatility because it's driving new users, new access points, new storylines, media sweeping people in and out of, like, it's just, it's just, it's. It's not something that investing didn't used to look like this.

Investing was more methodical over longer periods of time. Technology accelerates everything, and this is just an example of that. And I will tell you, like, if you don't understand what harvesting volatility looks like and you're curious, we literally have made the product free for you to use. If we just launched a new website, it's Oath functional and capable for Gemini and Coinbase. So if you have a Gemini or Coinbase account and you want to see automation firsthand at no cost, literally go to our website, Archpublic.com, and click get started. And you can be up and running in literally five minutes.

It's that quick and that easy. So we continue to iterate to make it that easy because a lot of people stay away from this type of technology. because it's very difficult to learn. And it has been. And that's the truth. And so that literally is the mission of arch public, is to break down those difficult barriers and to bring it to everyone in a way that allows them to very quickly see the benefit and then apply it.

It's like four clicks now to take your first trade. It's nothing. Very easy. We work very, very hard to put us in that position so that people can, again, experience what it is that we've been talking about here on this show for two years. And, you know, we, again, we've got it down to four clicks. It's just click, click, click, click, and you're done. You can do it on your phone, you know, when you're, you know, at your kids' baseball game or soccer game or football practice or, you know, when you're sitting on your dock looking at the ocean at Scott's house, you know, when you're doing that.

Yeah. Listen, if you have. have ever used automation. This is radically different than what you use. This is not a one tool automated strategy that you plug in and play. This is a toolbox that allows you to literally accomplish whatever your mission is in any of these spaces. So, you know, we can say a lot, but the whole reason why we made it free for you to try is because we can't say enough. And that's the point.

So you come try it. You know what would be neat in this moment of the show is if. Scott pulled up our actual website. Like that would be, that would be something that I think would be useful or meaningful. I mean, you know, I know it's a lot to ask. I get it. It's a tough, it's tough work, you know. You know, Scott's just working into coal mine.

You know what I mean? He's taking his lunch fail and he's green. Wait a minute. Shut up. If I'm going to wake up this early, at least we get to laugh. Yeah. Yeah, you know what I mean? Interestingly, he doesn't even believe I have a Yahoo show.

The people in the comments couldn't believe it. Oh, man. I just told people to sit in the bay and... By the way, just an FYI, we are hosting our own little conference down in Tampa where Scott is. I don't live in Tampa. Well, whatever. We're hosting a...

It's where your boat will be parked for the week, Yeah, we're hosting it at the Motor Enclave for our concierge clients. It's going to be really, really cool, really, really fun. We do these multiple times a year. And it'll be a full day, just one day. We'll only have maybe two, two and a half hours of actual panels and content. The rest will just be really fun stuff. And so if you're a concierge client, you're going to be getting a communication about that today.

And if you're not a concierge client, this is another. reason to become a concierge's client beyond all the communication and staff and everything you have access to at arch public so very very cool stuff the motor enclave is sweet yeah yeah it's like a gajillionaire playground it's not really because it's Tampa so we don't really have that it's yeah it's in New York or something but yeah it's you buy a garage everybody owns them and you pour your cars and then there's a full-on track so you can take your cars out on the track and then they have like the dirt track for side-by-sides which apparently By the way, is the most fun thing there. But yeah. It is.

We're going to, the first three hours of the day are going to be on track for our concierge's clients. So just so you get understanding of how much fun we like to have. That's why I'd be only if I crash into one of them. Well, I mean, you know,

I think they've got precautionary measures to account for that, including insurance. But listen, we did, we went and raced in Vegas and I'm a big guy. And anything that gets me going that fast, if I showed you the video of, you know the passenger cam when i went on the drift experience i was laughing so hard that i was

choking and my face turned so beat right it's one of it's a it's a once in a lifetime experience yeah it's fun the drift yeah it's fun the drift experience is i like it better than race and all the you know really nice cars because you're you the driver you're in some like Subaru you know front wheel drive machine and he's literally just peeling the tires off the thing It's incredible. I want to do that. Sounds fun. All right.

So we'll see you all in Tampa in a month. It's a month. Exactly. Absolutely. It'll be fun stuff. We'll be back next week to talk about how we were wrong about rate hikes and clarity. Well done. Very well done.

See you guys and more door. All right. See you.