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Bitcoin has plummeted back to $66,000 as the operation, aka war in Iran, rages on. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, AKA here on the home front, crypto regulation in the United States is hitting a critical inflection point, and the cracks are seriously starting to show. Now. Coinbase is once again refusing to support the Clarity act shocker, citing concerns over stablecoin yield restrictions even as lawmakers like Tim Scott claim the bill is close to bipartisan support. With industry alignment now the final hurdle. And the pushback is sparking backlash across the industry with growing debate over whether Coinbase's stance is protecting innovation or slowing progress. And at the same time, key voices are shifting. Former SEC chair Gary Gensler, aka Mr. Burns, aka the Grinch who stole crypto, is openly opposing stablecoin yield, while David Sachs stable steps away from his role advising Donald Trump on crypto policy, raising questions about future leadership in Washington. With regulation, politics and industry interests colliding, the direction of crypto policy in the US Is more uncertain than ever. We're going to discuss this and more on the Friday freestyle. Let's go. We have got to go now. Let's do. That's dope. Sometimes it's important to remember when you're starting a show that there's a button you need to push to make the intro music come on so you don't have to be redundant and say, here we go twice. And I did that. You might notice we have a beautiful Formula One car behind us, as you may know. Although I'm kind of dismissive as of being a massive sports fan, I do love McLaren, and they have had a rough, rough run back. I've been working with OKX for years, but in practice for Suzuka in Japan, Oscar Piastri just came in first. So I thought that I would pay homage to them because it's my show and I can put whatever I want behind me. So I'm gonna. It would have been cool, actually, if it looked like I had a helmet on, like, you know, Snapchat and you get the little filter and I was like, in the garage and stuff. But instead we got this picture. So let's dive in to what's happening here with the market. Opens, coin market cap checked, price bad price, bitcoin back below 67,000. Nobody wants to see 666 at the beginning of your number because it's Satan. And that's what I see. I open this, I see 666. I don't even see the other numbers behind it. Yeah. Bitcoin down $66,634, down 4% in 24 hours. Looks like Ethereum tracking down 4%. Solana down 5%. XRP outperforming down 3%. BNB as well. So listen, we might wonder why our beloved coins are not pumping at the moment. Because we're so, we're so used to all coins going up. You know, that's sarcasm. They suck. But the reality is that bitcoin has been outperforming the broader global market since the Iran war started. But it can't just trade in a vacuum and go up based on good news for the crypto industry. In an environment where we don't know what truth is going to come next, or tweet if we're going to call them that, we don't know what news is going to break next about the war in Iran. We don't know what's going to happen with oil. We don't know what's going to happen with gold, unfortunately. Now, to be a bitcoin investor or trader, if you're actually going to look at price, which you shouldn't, and track these things, you have to all of a sudden be a macro expert. You have to be have a master's in geopolitics, a PhD in oil pricing, and have to understand, of course, conspiracy theories about the Fed and government economic policy. It's exhausting. I don't want to wonder about the price of oil or to find out how hyper liquid traders are positioned with 100x leverage on the next truth social post about it. It is frustrating, it is annoying, and there's very little chance right now that bitcoin will be unleashed to reach its full, full potential while all of this is going on now, that's fine. The reality is I really like buying Bitcoin at 66. 6, devil Satan. I like buying it better there than at 125 or 150. Right? So to me, if we understand that this will eventually end, bitcoin will be unleashed. We will have another bull market. I'm really excited actually to buy at a 50% discount, but that doesn't mean that I want a geopolitical conflict and war to rage on for that to happen. And meanwhile, you take a look and this just in. There's now 0% chance of rate cuts through at least March 2027. Now, once again, we sat here and we talked about how Fed Chairman Pal was being difficult and maybe it was political and he wasn't lowering rates. Turns out that Pal's not looking like the dumbass that many of you thought he was, I believe, pal. Actually, as much as I hate the Fed think it should be abolished, I deeply understand the problems of it. And I don't like Jerome Powell. So he's actually probably been making the right decisions because you never know with President Trump and his economic policy what's coming next. Tariffs. Hard in the context of tariffs to make a decision before, you saw how tariffs ran through the system, whether they're good or not. So I understand why Powell wouldn't have cut or raised during that period. Now we have a war and we still have debate over the tariffs. How can they make a decision? So right now, what's being priced in? Even with Warsh coming in, a new Fed chair who will be probably a Trump puppet, we still have a 0% chance being priced in until a year from now. The good news is that the bar charts here and the predictions of what's likely to happen rate cuts have been wrong 100% of the time for years. So they could cut next week and they'd be like, oh, it changed, right? I don't know what prediction markets are saying about this, but they're probably more accurate. The bottom line is, though, listen, when I was a kid, I'll tell you a fun story. It's not that fun. When I was a kid, my dad was an emergency room doctor at the University of Florida and he used to work 7:00pm to 7:00am or 7:00am to 7:00pm, you know, three or four days a week. And one of his policies he had for myself and my brother and then our friends, because their parents liked it, was that we had to spend an entire shift with him in the emergency room at the University of Florida from 7pm to 7am before we could get our driver's licenses because he wanted us to see how utterly redacted college students were when they came and wasted. But we saw a lot more than drunk college students. My brother actually, when he went there was a kid on acid and they kept putting the light on above the bed and he thought it was a spaceship and they would turn it off and turn it on just to troll him. Great story, but when I went in, this kid came in with a hole in his foot. He was probably 12. It was really sad, he was wearing no shoes. But what this kid did, because I grew up in Gainesville, Florida, and this hospital was for the surrounding areas, put a shotgun on his foot, he put the barrel on his foot, put the things in and closed up that double barrel shotgun and Shot a hole right in his foot. That's a perfect analogy for what the United States government is doing to our economy right now. Whether you agree with it or whether you don't agree with what's happening in our economy, you can agree that the wounds are completely self inflicted right now. And if Trump spent all of those months trying to get Fed Chairman Powell to cut rates, well, starting a war wasn't the way to keep that going. Because now we have to worry about oil shocks and inflation and very few people believing the deflation is imminent unless your name is Mike McGlone. And so right now, there's really just nothing that the Fed can do that could affect the price of your beloved assets, including Bitcoin if we do not get the liquidity. But one way or another, I think they will find a way to print money and to stimulate the economy, whether interest rates go up, they down, or otherwise. Because the Fed has had its Rocky Mountain oysters snipped right off. Jerome Powell has no balls. You heard it here first. Okay, and maybe the biggest story right now, of course, because we have to talk about the Clarity Act. Coinbase again reportedly rejects support for Clarity Act. Coinbase representatives reportedly tell Senate offices that it couldn't support the latest version of the legislation. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Senate Banking Chair Tim Scott basically saying the government has to bend the knee to Brian Armstrong, which is wild. The crypto market structure legislation has bipartisan support. Just tell Coinbase to move to Canada. I'm referencing someone named Dagnum PI. I have no idea who that person is or whether they're reliable. So I apologize. But that does seem to be largely what's happening here. And I've been saying over and over again that if you just zoom out, the very fact that, like, it's like Brian Armstrong versus Jamie Dimon and friends for whether legislation gets passed shows you just how effectively and functionally broken the United States government is. Like, when did these people dictate policy? I love that we have a lobby. It's great that crypto is playing the game and trying to defend our interests and all those. But even I don't think that Brian Armstrong should be the one who's able to hold up legislation, even if I end up agreeing with the reason that it's happening. Like, has money become so powerful in our government that. That it's no longer even under the service? We're not even, like, doing the quiet part or pretending anymore. Now it's just like whoever donates the most gets to go in and dictate policy and nobody even cares. It's literal insanity. Like how anyone supports the government at all anymore. I said this the other day. Like, people accuse me now of having tvs. I'm anti war, okay? I don't think that should be a controversial policy. That I think war is bad. That gives me tvs. You guys should zoom back to the last four years at the level of BDS that I had for Biden. Biden derangement system. It's her syndrome. It turns out I just have gds, which is government derangement system. And that's the reason that I bitcoin in the first place. Like, yeah, I don't think you can be like a true bitcoin and believe in freedom and all of these things and somehow have the cognitive dissonance to be a sheep and to defend everything that either party does or that your government does in general, because it's completely broken. I mean, look at this. You have the United States government saying, well, if Brian Armstrong would just agree, maybe we could move on to the next point. How is that even a thing? It absolutely blows my mind. And, you know, meanwhile, we know that that's also bullshit and that Tim Scott is full of it, because there's no way that just getting the banks and the crypto industry to agree on stablecoin Yield is the ultimate solution to getting the Clarity act passed. And do we even want the Clarity act passed? Maybe Brian's right. I don't even know. But the fact is, we may not even want this bill. And we haven't even gotten to the hard parts. This is the easy part that the press has grappled onto, because stablecoin Yield makes for a great story, but it's the ethics clause that's going to be actually the political hot potato that's going to be debated. And all this has to be done, by the way, in six weeks or it's table till 2027. At that point, we'll have a Democrat Congress and we'll either get a much worse version of the bill probably, or no version of the bill at all. Because, let's be honest, everybody is exhausted and nobody wants to hear about crypto's interests anymore. Like, the broader world does not care about the Clarity act anymore. This is something that's very important to our echo chamber. And now, you know, of course, we get like, all kinds of back and forth. Like, there's a lot of people saying that Brian Armstrong needs to stop. But then you go back and of course you have chief legal officer from Coinbase Paul Grewal saying, you know, my memory is a little better than to trust future rogue regulators to faithfully apply the law. And he makes a great point here and one that we've made a lot on this show, myself and my guests. If we get legislation passed, it will be for the next hundred years. We're still talking about whether security is security because of the Howey test from the 1930s. They have to get this right. And I'm starting to lean towards no bill is better than a bad bill, although that's become a very unpopular opinion apparently. But, yes, listen, Coinbase is obviously fighting for their own business and for the ability to maintain yield. But whether intentionally or not, they're definitely also fighting to get this right because of the unintended landmines and consequences that will inevitably be in this bill for the future. Right. I mean, if we don't get the yield right now, people are saying we can go back and amend it. What happens when we have a less favorable environment in a stronger banking lobby and the amendments go against us? There have to be basic protections in line and basic sensibilities in this bill that make it something that the American people and crypto enthusiasts would actually support and want to be a part of. The very idea that we're being told that we can't have yield because the banks don't like it. Like, zoom out and think about how insane the debates that we're having right now are. Like, we should all be absolutely appalled by. By the fact that this is even a conversation. And I am. Oh, and guess what? When you need to make a really strong point about yield, about crypto, you go back to the well and bring on Mr. Burns. Excellent. AKA Gary Gensler. As I said, I'm going to call him the Grinch that stole crypto. Gears a little bit here and get your thoughts on what we're seeing in the crypto market. Galaxy last week basically flagged that this is, quote, the end of the that didn't work era. That with a digital asset taxonomy, moves that have been made here. We've had reports just in the last couple of weeks that one of the biggest buyers now in the treasury markets are stablecoins and stablecoin holders like Tether. How do you see this moment? Well, Mike Novogratz, who runs Galaxy, and I were at Goldman Sachs together many years ago, and Mike's got a good and closer sense of this than I do. I do have some concerns about what with interest being paid on these new forms of money, stablecoins does it undermine the banking system. And that's something that Congress is sorting through now. Really. Do they want to destabilize the banking system by allowing the interest to continue to be paid on these so called stablecoins? Get this, get this lovely American citizen off my screen. I was gonna say something. I'm trying to like warm myself up for my Yahoo show. I don't know if they're gonna allow me to cuss or not. Also there should be prediction markets, honestly, on how fast I get kicked off. Oh, we want personality driven content. Scott's great. What did he just say? Yeah, but anyways, they had to go back to the ghost of Gary Gensler to talk the bank's line here, which shows you exactly where he stood the entire time during operation choke point 2.0 when they were trying to kill the crypto industry. But yeah, it's gonna. We have to defend the banks, as Matt Hogan said. I don't have the exact quote, but he said something to the effect of we're not trying to, you know, the banks are not trying to stop customers from leaving, they're trying to stop their profit from leaving. Like, how is it not okay that a stablecoin issuer that's fully backed, 100% guaranteed, audited, and wants to give their customers part of that yield instead of keeping that as their own profit? That, that's not allowed. But the banks can give you a 0.056 interest rate and go lend that money out indefinitely. 5, 8, 9, 10 times over and over and over and over again, earn 5% yield. Are you guys familiar with how fractional banking reserve, you know, fractional reserve banking works? I mean, it's the most insane process that we accept every single day, right? I mean, yes, it's much more complicated than this, but I give a hundred thousand dollars to the bank, they give me, you know, 1%, let's call it, and they keep 5%. But right now it's a liability. So they need to turn that into an asset. So they go loan 90,000 of that to another person. It becomes an asset on their books. And then the next bank goes down 10%, 8100. And they loan that to the next person and magically your $100,000 becomes a million dollars in the system. That's largely how money is printed. And it's all good until you want your $100,000 back and so does everybody else. It's absolutely insane that this is what's allowed to happen. And that's what we are protecting by not offering Stablecoin yield. Oh, and by the way, during COVID they got rid of the 10% reserve requirement and went down to zero. Banks don't need to hold one penny of your money. They're allowed to lend it out and keep lending it out and keep lending it out and keep lending it out until the Ponzi scheme dies and they get a guaranteed bailout from the United States government. They know it will collapse and they know they will get bailed out and they know that you will pay for it in the hidden tax called inflation when the government prints a shit ton more money and you have to deal with it. And that's what we're fighting against. And nobody seems to care because Clarity act needs to pass. We need good legislation and, and by the way, I need to hear the stories about Novogratz and Gary Gensler being at Goldman Sachs together. Because if they don't start and end with Novogratz. Used to beat me up and pull my underwear up and put my head in the toilet at the beginning of each working day. I'm over it. I also went to school with Donald Trump Jr. Oh, doesn't mean that we were like friends. The guy used to get drunk and piss himself every day. Called him Diaper Don't. That was his nickname. I'm not very popular. I shouldn't have said it. It's on the Internet, but I shouldn't have said it out loud. I've kept that. Yeah, and I made Diaper Donkey go viral many years ago. But it was true. That was literally his nickname because he would be so drunk. Okay, we're going to move on and the next story that we're going to talk about right now. I shouldn't have said that. David Sacks is happen to be living in a camp. David Sacks says his time as Trump's crypto and AI czar has ended. Of course we get endless hot takes, bad takes, good takes, no takes about what any piece of news means. Oh my God. David Sacks has abandoned us for a permanent role with the all in podcast. But the reality is David Sachs had like a 200 day contract as some sort of special counselor and it's up. And Sachs isn't like leaving the United States government. In fact, if you take a look, Sachs had to divest like billions of dollars in portfolios just to be a part of the government. But after all the accomplishments in our first year, President Trump has even bigger priorities for 2026. President's Council of Advisors on Science. Technology is hitting the ground running to deliver more wins so he's moved to another part. It does, though, leave a question as to what happens to having somebody directly in charge of crypto at the White House and advising. And there are still huge questions in the air, as there would be with any sort of situation like this, which is like all the promises that were made. I'm not saying by sacs, I'm saying by the government, that we're being overseen by the White House. The White House crypto and eyes are that we haven't gotten answers to yet. Like, I don't know, like, are we going to get a strategic bitcoin reserve? More importantly, how much bitcoin do we have? Remember in the first hundred days we were supposed to have an audit of the holdings of the United States government for the strategic bitcoin reserve and the digital asset stockpile checks. Watch. I don't wear a watch. If I wore a watch, I would look at it right now and I would go 100 days, 300, 200 round to the nearest, divide by seven. We don't have an answer. We do know that in that pig butchering, or what do they call it? Pig murdering. Butchering, Slaughtering. Cambodian scam, we stole like 112,000 bitcoin over there. 120 or something from a bunch of victims. And we know the United States government has a supreme knack for sticking our faces into, you know, things happening in other places and then taking all their money and not, not giving it back. I'm old enough to remember when Bitfinex got hacked. The United States government recovered the Bitfinex coins. They put Rasal Khan or whatever that rapper chick and her boyfriend in jail. And last I checked, part of that hundred thousand bitcoin that the United States was still rumored to have was the Bitfinex coins. How are those the United States government's coins? So let me put it this way. Robber comes into my house, goes into my closet, steals my wife's engagement ring. Okay? Cops go arrest the guy, take the engagement ring. That's now the police's engagement ring. It's not mine. It's not my wife's. It's their ring. That's the strategic bitcoin reserve, right? Listen, I'm not particularly worried about the fact that David Sacks has moved on. But what I do find notable is that we don't have news yet about a replacement. And I think that that's something that we are going to to want. And listen, I didn't even finish the stablecoin story. Tether hires KPMG for USDT audit brings in PwC. That's Pricewaterhouse Cooper, I think gears up for US expansion. Tether Truthers are in shambles right now. There are people who have made entire careers out of fudding Tether and it seems that Tether is going to get the full audit. Now listen, I think we all agree that everyone in crypto probably was doing things wild and loose in the beginning days. I'm not saying there was ever a time when Tether was not fully backed, but they may have been backed with commercial paper and you know, less ideal, less liquid things. But I think we all agree that in the last few years Tether is definitely fully backed, more than over collateralized as we know. And now they're going to have the audit to prove it. And I'm here for it. So the next story that we have here today on this show is that the feds Randall guy, I don't know how I'm just going to show him. I don't know how you say his name. It's G U Y N. I don't do diligence for this show. I just show up and say stuff. But we're no cbdc. Let's see friend of the show here, Warren Davidson. I've had him on here spaces a bunch of times growing this guy. Let's, let's watch it.