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- [00:02]
A
We're moving from an era of Fed dominance and treasury subservience to an era of United States treasury dominance. What we're doing away with is this forward guidance mumbo jumbo. What it really is, it's backstop. It's ammunition for the Fed to do all of the things we talked about. Qe, zirp. The game has changed. And it's very clear all of the players who were cooperating around this old business deal that lasted for 75, 85, they're now like, maybe it's too far to say they're at war with each other, but they're not seeing eye to eye, and they're definitely not cooperating anymore. Capital markets are war by another means. So when we say nothing stops this train, right? It's like, well, there's another train. And it's like, you know, that's what Scott Besant represents, all of that. So we'll see how this plays out.
- [01:00]
B
Matt Dines, good to see you, man. It's early in the morning here in Australia, and I woke up to a bit of a bloodbath in bitcoin and stretches down another nearly 8% today. What on earth has happened overnight?
- [01:13]
A
It's not too bad in bitcoin yet, but we're fighting the downtrend of a bear market in the bitcoin dollar, FX rate stretch and the perpetual preferreds. Yeah, this is a long story. I think it's. It touches on the bigger picture that we'll talk about as this conversation goes on. But there's massive change going on in the dollar at the structural level. If you think about America, we're about to be 250 years old. We've gone through several iterations of the dollar, and when we say the US Dollar, it's meant different things structurally, like at least four or five key different ones over the course of this great nation's short history. I'm American, so I'll show that bias, right, just to wear it on my sleeve. But in my framework, we just went through a big one. 20, 22 was a key acceleration, and I think a lot of us are still operating under, let's say, the offshore dollar or euro dollar or some of us in the bitcoin space. Influencers, they call it the petrodollar. I'll stick to the term offshore dollar, but big inflection going on, and there's a major transition. And this is one of the most important ones I think we've seen in American history. All right, so we'll start there. All right. Stretch. If you think about all credit in the world, we'll talk about this offshore dollar credit bubble. The whole strategy is built on. We access dollar credit capital in the US brokerage, like you know, the stock market liquidity pool. So we tap dollars in these perpetual preferred instruments at let's say 11, 12, 13%. That's a liability. That's how we source dollars. I'm saying we. It's not me, I'm not doing this. But just whatever, Royal we. And then we go long on the asset side, Bitcoin. Right. And so if you think about the strategy as a dollar strategy, just turn it on its head. Live in the Upside down of the Netflix show str. Right. It's not a bitcoin strategy. Think about it as a dollar strategy. You're tapping onshore dollar liquidity at 11 to 13% with these perpetual preferreds. And then you go long dollar liquidity in bitcoin, which is, it's a global market. Right. Bitcoin trades spot market. Every nation state has their exchange. But largely if you go to one of these websites, CoinMarketCap, whatever, I think something stands out here. Obviously the dollar is the biggest liquidity pair and the Bitcoin dollar FX rate. But very few exchanges actually support a bank deposit dollar like an onshore Federal Reserve regulated or similar. United States regulated usdt. Yeah. So the main liquidity pair is actually bitcoin to offshore tether dollar liquidity. Right. All right, so just think about it that way. It's, it's really built around that infrastructure. You're sourcing liquidity onshore and then you're long bitcoin dollar liquidity in this offshore pool. Now we had a massive act of Congress in the US last year, the Genius act. Besides this one big beautiful bill, it's the most consequential piece of legislation that's come out of this 200 and I think it's the 225th Congress. I can't remember just off by one at 226, 225, whatever around.
- [04:56]
B
Yeah.
- [04:56]
A
Or thereabouts. It's like computer science, right, that you start at zero for indexing that off by one error. You get it, right. It's been the most consequential piece of legislation. And what I'm talking about here is genius act with the dollar stablecoin regulation, which what it technically did. And we'll talk about structure because the structural definition is key. It pulled in these stablecoins which have been proliferating for over a decade. And it's a growing market Right over, I want to say 186 roughly billion dollars of tether circle has a lower market cap. It's not quite a trillion dollars yet, let's just call it half a trillion. That type of ballpark for money supply of this new stablecoin dollar that is emergent with Genius act passed last year. And this is a big change in the the future of the US dollar itself. The direction we were going to take because Biden and that administration was taking us one route which was going down a CBDC road. And with the Trump election and Scott Besant as kind of the architect here, we're going down a separate road with the Genius act stablecoins and a private issued stablecoin dollar that ultimately anchors back and is reserved one to one with US treasury debt. So treasury bills, short term low maturity IOUs from this legacy credit based dollar system where your dollar is a liability. What this has effectively done is pulled the dollar into like an asset based definition in a roundabout way. And this change has basically steered power control, the operating nexus of the dollar away from the old offshore standard which was centered out of London. We can get into that whole AR of global capital markets, foreign exchange, all of that and this dollar standard as the global reserve currency that I think bitcoiners really understand pretty well. But you've moved the nexus and the operating center of gravity for the dollar away from London and all these money center banks and this global patchwork and it's moving to Washington D.C. and New York. And if you kind of view everything through that framework, there's this like this major transition going on from this offshore dollar to this new stablecoin dollar. A lot more will make sense I think about you know, the geopolitics, credit markets, the tech play, the AI bubble, all of that. And then at the very frontier of that, when I say a frontier credit, what do I mean there like you and credit like start with like the highest quality IOU and an IOU based dollar system where everything's a liability. Everybody in the world wants to get closer to that center of gravity like the like Federal Reserve deposits, right For a regulated bank or if you can't get access to the Fed, like if you're not a domestic commercial bank in the U.S. the next best, best option is Treasuries U.S. treasury bill. And so in a roundabout way we've re anchored. When I say we now I'm talking about US Treasury, Washington D.C. power brokers, high net worth, ultra high net worth families who are the ones who are moving and shaking and making these decisions. They're pulling in the dollar one way and moving in one direction. And then everybody else on the rest of the world on this old offshore dollar standard, they're left to scramble, they're being left out to dry. And, and where you see this in policy, we've gotten used to this in Bitcoin, where the policy path from Washington D.C. and the federal Reserve and New York, the center of financial gravity, it was really built over the last four or five decades, or it really started post World War II. Bretton woods, all that. We don't have to go back that far down into the weeds. But Bitcoiners in 2020, we locked onto something very clear, like the whole what happened in 1971 narrative, where we broke the gold redeemability for international capital transfers, where banks could redeem their dollars to the United States treasury or the Fed and run off with the gold. Same thing happened domestically 1967 with the dollar and the domestic US economy. It was actually pegged to a redeemable weight in silver. And the dollars in your pockets were actually silver certificates from the United States Treasury. You had the Federal Reserve notes enter circulation at the same time. It's a similar analogy to where we were where we had two competing dollars and they trade at par with each other one to one. And everybody treats them as the same thing. Stablecoins, Stablecoin dollars and Federal Reserve note dollars. We still treat those as one to one, but they're $2 competing and one of them's. One of them's coming and one of them's going. Right.
- [10:13]
B
And in that period where they're competing, can they hold different values even though they are tradable? One to one.
- [10:20]
A
Great question. Yeah. So from an arbitrageur's standpoint, the answer is yes, they do have different values. And the difference is pocketed by the financial players who have scale and the ability to do so. I'll go through a few examples who did that with these silver certificates. Um, but for every day, you know, run of the mill, you know, economic transaction, say you're going out to eat, or let's say, I don't know if you've ever used a stablecoin dollar to pay for anything.
- [10:50]
B
I don't think I have. You know, I, I've used it on like bitcoin backed loans. I've been paid out in stablecoins, but I think that's the only time I've ever used them.
- [10:56]
A
Yeah, I know. For World cup tickets. FIFA made us pay for early advance tickets and stablecoin dollars. That was the one example. And you know, granted it's FIFA, of course, of course they're going to be involved in milking everything they can out of it. Right?
- [11:10]
B
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- [13:55]
A
so the answer is like for every day, you know, if you're paying your neighbor to mow your lawn back in the 1960s and you showed $1 like you paid them, maybe he'd do the job for a buck back then, like just the inflation, who knows? But if you gave him the Federal reserve note, which is like everybody recognizes those today, like they're the greenish tinted ones, they got the green seal. Or if you gave him the treasury silver certificate, which was like a much more wider background, it had a crisp blue seal, he might not have paid any difference. He wouldn't charge you a 10% premium for one versus the other. He'll take your dollar one way or the other for mowing your lawn. But the people who recognized what was going on and they recognized that the redeemability window for silver on those silver certificate dollars was closing, you had really clever guys like Henry Jarecki is a story. If you want to look this guy up. He advertised in all the newspapers around the US like, hey, bring me your silver certificate dollars. I'll collect them here every major city and just brought them in. He'd even pay people a little bit of a premium. And this is in the 1960s and 1970s. If you've looked at a long term silver chart, it's going, it looks like bitcoin the last 10 years and famously peaked at that $50 level back in 1982, right? So this like there were a few figures who, who pulled these silver certificates out of the economy and then they went to the treasury, redeemed Them for the, you know, silver bullion and sold that into, you know, a market, captured that risk free profit. I've done some calculations on what it amounts to, but basically like that transfer of or that transition from $1 to the next, I think it nets out to the arbitrageurs, probably captured 10% of the total silver certificates outstanding. So it was basically a tax the government was forced to devalue. You get these things from time to time. That famous story of George Soros and Scott Besant was there, famously now in the 30 years later type of history playing itself out, breaking the British pound, that story back in the early 90s. So yeah, the big hedge funds or the people with capital or access to dollars, yeah, they'll, they'll profit off of the transition and yeah, those same things will go around, go on this time around. Right, all right. But back to like these perpetual preferreds. I've, you know, just been warning about this environment, what's going on with interest rates and you know, potential for credit spreads to, you know, widen and go into that backdrop like a 2025, 2026 story, all that. But when we get like a late innings of a credit cycle, right, you get into a dynamic where the money supply, these boards, these figures, these men in suits and dark rooms, they can contract money supply, they'll raise it, they'll lower it on the cycles that work for them and in the late innings or the late stages of the credit cycle, economic cycle as well. Where you don't want to be when the musical chairs start getting taken away from the party, you don't want to be further and further out on the risk spectrum, right? So if you think about it like the riskiest, most frontier credits, like if you move from credit quality, right, the ratings agencies like aaa, that's your safest thing, keep going down notches, like everything down to triple B minus, that's technically investment grade. Some of those, like there's a lot of private credit stuff out there that I would still consider Frontier as a fixed income portfolio manager. Everybody follows these stories. The Blackstones, all of that private equity, private credit, insurance cos, all of this stuff going on, that's definitely Frontier. But then there's whole other levels of Frontier. You can get into high yield rated issuers who are doing things like subprime auto lending. Those stories are out there. And when the musical chairs go away, that's where it's harder and harder to climb that elevation to get to safety when tide's washing out, that type of thing. So edge of the frontier in credit right now, for better or worse, is these new perpetual preferreds that have been issued. This trade we talked about, don't think about it as a bitcoin strategy. Flip your mindset. Go live in the Upside down and think about it in terms of adoption strategy. It's basically a frontier outpost in the credit world right now. That's where you see, all right, Standard and Poor's, they gave strategy an issuer level rating, widely publicized. It's a B minus. It's the rating that they can get based on the hard rubric. These teams, they have very well established defined criteria.
- [19:25]
B
Let's ask you a question on that quickly because obviously I don't live in this world. So. So you have like junk bonds, you have investment grade bonds. This is somewhere in the middle. So what kind of. Sorry, you were gonna. You wanna jump in?
- [19:36]
A
No, go finish. Sorry. It's not even junk. Sorry, go ahead.
- [19:40]
B
Oh, this isn't even junk bond.
- [19:42]
A
It's. It wouldn't even. Yeah, you can't call it a junk bond. It's not rated as junk. Okay, so Keith, finish your finish.
- [19:48]
B
So I guess the question was like, who is this aimed at? Because one of the things that like Saylor and, and I guess like Fong's, the strategy guys have been saying is that they want to like attract institutional type capital to this market. But, but I know they've also said that 80% of the people that are buying this is still retail. So is this kind of a mismatch? Is this why the sort of big money isn't necessarily going into this in droves at the moment?
- [20:11]
A
I think there's, there's a lot of reasons. It's a. We could go down a deep rabbit hole on this topic. It depends who you're talking to, right? Could you get a pension to buy this? So if you're looking at a pension, it sits on a giant pile of assets. It has different buckets, it has a fixed income bucket to allocate into. It has an equity bucket, it has alternatives buckets which would be non exchange traded, non public investments. So yeah, maybe a pension. You can find a risk bucket for anything. They have, you know, a multi asset framework. You can find something in the allocation model to, you know, plug it into for different investments. Say it's an endowment, something like that, where they have much stricter criteria. They have to hit certain total return targets and not miss them by a very wide degree. What's what? Like they might say, hey, we have a 5% total return target. We need to hit 5%. Like hit the dartboard right on the bullseye every time. Don't miss the dart board. Well, if you take a 20% loss on say a perpetual preferred like equity and you allocate it into it in size, you're like, well, we shot for 13 for minus 20 right now. Like we're all over that dartboard. But we really needed those shots right on the target. So there's some investors like it just may not fit into their target objectives. Just individual criteria, stuff like that. But if you go look at fixed income allocations, it's going to be very specific what type of credits are within the mandate. So there's all kinds of fixed income boutique managers out there. There's a lot of different accounts. But like the most popular is going to be. You have to have an investment grade that's going to be the bulk of all fixed income assets. Like just guessing shares, I would say probably at least half. It'd be the majority of all fixed income or just $IOUs in that old offshore dollar framework. Right. That we're coming out of, they have to get an IG rating if you're managing a big pool of IOU money type of assets. All right, so just getting into the weeds a little bit. So strategy has an S and P rating at the corporate issuer level, but that's just the outlook on the corporation and its ability to service its existing debt. Now it's very specific here. The only debt outstanding are these convertible bonds. That is a. If you look at the prospectus, it fits the definition of a debt security or a debt offering. Right. It's got a specified maturity date, a contractual rate of interest, all kinds of these things that collectively you look at the thing, it's like, does it walk like a bond? Does it talk like a bond? Okay, that's a bond. So the S&P5 or the standard and poor corporate issuer, that B minus, that's just talking about. Or that's an assessment of strategy as an issuer itself. No, the rest of these Bitcoin, treasury cos, they don't have that. It's actually a pretty high cost to. You have to pay Standard and Poor's or one of the ratings agency, like an annual. It's like a subscription fee and they just charge you like for their team within your given sector to maintain coverage against you. Right. Then when you go make a debt offering, like one specific bond, you can have the ratings agency rate that thing individually. And then if you're trying to like get Your like bond placed like to raise capital from, from, let's say it's a fixed income fund, like an etf, or it could be an insurance company or it could be a firefighter's pension, whatever. Like each one of those may have a mandate where they need to see certain things to include that security in their portfolio. Right. So these, all right, the convertibles, as far as I know or as far as I'm aware that those were not rated, that it'd just be a non rated security. Like if you look it up and Bloomberg or whatever, they'll just say NR rated. But if they wanted to get these rated at the individual level, yeah, you can pay a ratings agency, the team will tell you what it is. It's a very strict rubric of a credit box that you have to fall into as an issuer, terms of the deal, what type of cash flows are backing this, all of that. And so when S and P did that B minus rating, what they're really looking at like bitcoin is like it's not even in the world, it's not even in their framework. They're looking at the debt outstanding and that's just the convertible bonds at this point. And then the existing analytics, the software business, what those cash flows look like. And then they're looking at the cash flows, the projections, all of that. And they say, all right, how, how you know, credit worthy or how you know.
- [25:25]
B
So they're not even looking at the bitcoin sort of, no. Okay, interesting. So would it be fair to say then that rating is probably low considering they have all those assets on the balance sheet.
- [25:35]
A
What do you mean? Is it low? Like is it sandbag? Is that what you're saying?
- [25:38]
B
Is it like, is it rated worse than it is in reality?
- [25:45]
A
Well, with bit, okay, so if you're thinking about bitcoin, you're trying to put it into dollar terms like, like we're trying to plug a square peg into a round hole here with these two things. So you've got two things here. Your dollar liabilities. Like think about strategy. But most of these Bitcoin treasury companies are doing very similar things. Your liabilities where you have a, like say the perpetual preferreds, right, you have a conditional promise, but it's not an obligation, right, to pay these monthly distributions. Or now they're, they're trimming it down now it's semi monthly or daily or you know, you know, maybe they'll get us down to the minute next, you know, who knows. But it's not a, like it's not a contractual interest payment, obligation and the lender has or the security owner. Because I don't even know if you're holding these perpetual preferreds. If you'd be considered a lender and say a courtroom if the situation ever got there, if you could even take it there. But those daily cash flows or semi monthly cash flows at this point, those are at the discretion of the board. Right. So my point there, you've got short term cash flow obligations. You can turn them on or off. Right. If you turn them off. Right. Well that's going to have implications from the capital markets because it's the same thing as a rug pull. Right. If I tell my kids I'm going to get them ice cream this evening and I don't get them ice cream, like number one, my kids are going to hate me. But I'm also setting them up to not trust me at all. It's just not a recipe. As a parent you want to get into. All right, different analogy. Bringing in my own life there always. If you tell your kids you're going to get them ice cream, go get ice cream. You got to do it.
- [27:45]
B
Yeah.
- [27:46]
A
You have to do it. Yeah. So if you want, it's. Yeah, it's behavioral response. Right. If you want the behavior, hey, keep buying my securities, right. I have to buy them, I have to give them the ice cream. All right, so they've got a daily liquidity obligation or semi monthly. Right. They don't have any maturity date though. Like there's no, there's no tenure, you know, there's no 80 year. And you see like banks frequently issue perpetual preferred or not perpetual, but they'll put like a 2088. I can go into Bloomberg right now and find you a ton of Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, all kinds of similar issues. They'll give the. To make the hybrid security look a little bit more debt. Like they'll put a maturity date on it. But by look and feel it's a very similar thing to what these bitcoin treasury cos are doing. All right, so my point there, you've got short term liquidity obligations. Now with Bitcoin you do have a cash flow, right. But it's as the owner of the bitcoin, you can create a cash flow by selling your bitcoin, but it's of unknown nominal value, like nominal amount. And also you can control the time you sell and the most part unless you're forced liquidated, like a secured borrowing. That's not the case here. But they could, they do have that ability to create a cash flow, a dollar cash flow with their Bitcoin. But right now the credit agencies, I don't think that's part of their framework. I went through this process for a private credit fund that focuses on bitcoin backed lending. We got a preliminary rating, all of that. Let's just say you can qualify for ig. They could definitely qualify bitcoin backed lending for IG at this point. Or you could, I don't know if you could anymore. So it is possible. But yeah, so the timing here, you've got some problems because a lot of these companies like to keep paying these distributions, right? And I'm very specific, I don't use the word dividends. Dividends on an equity are, you know, think of them as like a, a return of capital to shareholders. You're paying generally financing that out of the retained earnings of the business for the most part. If you're not doing that, then your dividend is by definition not sustainable. These treasury codes that management has made very clear, they're not that, they're return of capital distributions. So very specific there. But I don't know, just to bring this back home, what we were talking about, we're talking about a frontier credit here. This is tip of the spear. It is within dollar credit itself. You're talking about a strategy that is novel, unique, not historically you've seen perpetual preferreds. We've got a lot of iterations in history where they've been important instruments in capital markets with the British consoles being the most famous. But this strategy, doing it, selling it, selling perpetual preferreds, flowing that into bitcoin, promising an interest rate on that ability, which at the end of the day all boils down to your ability as a company to access liquidity and capital markets. That's what's new and novel here in my opinion. So I think if you just take the zoom out view and we can start talking about this big dollar transition that's underway in these big transitions of history from $1 to the other or just monetary transitions in general. Those inflection points are where it's very hard to see when you're leaving an old world behind and moving into something new. And that's where you can get wrong footed, right? So if you build up a strategy, and this doesn't mean the Bitcoin treasury companies and those strategies are alone here, if you're building like a credit strategy or a carry trade strategy for an old world, this offshore dollar world that's being left behind, you can have problems if you're not along with the Scott Besant framework, in my opinion. So just kind of note or just seeing this all play out and realize what was happening. This is fourth turning stuff, right? This is what it looks like in capital markets. You don't want to be caught offsides. I'm going to make an American football analogy. Offsides and soccer, same thing. You don't want to be offsides when the ball is in the air. In American football, it's like you don't want to be across on the wrong side of the line of scrimmage when the ball is snapped. It's that sort of thing. Don't be too far ahead of your skis when that liquidity pullback starts to happen. Tightening in the system. And a lot of it's just manufactured out of the developments we're seeing Venezuela, Iran, those are dollar liquidity events. The tariffs of Liberation Day, April 2025, those were dollar liquidity events. And it's all coming from the policy of this White House and then the broader capital markets power factions who were ultimately the straws during the drink, in my opinion, pushing this transition ahead. And it's really that I've been trying to call attention to people doing this, like saying things like, hey, borrow on margin on your Robinhood account, then buy this perpetual preferred at 11 12%. I was like, guys, that's actually risk on risk, probably more dangerous than you think. And it was very hard to see what was going on to the dollar. Hopefully I will explain it here as I drone on a little bit. It's a much more interesting topic, I think, than I'll lead you to believe here. But that's what I was worried about. And I think we're in that world, we're just in the thick of it.
- [34:07]
B
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- [37:25]
A
I'm not going to go out and say, you know, hey, this is going to be the end of it. I just don't know. We'll see. They're in a street fight, though, or an alley fight. This isn't where I would want to be right now if I'm a manager. So they're going to have to figure out a way to punch their way out of this. But, yeah, you raised a good point there. So you think about strategy as a business before August 2020. And I come at this from kind of a. I've been aware of MicroStrategy as business, and we were actually a customer. So Rob Hamilton at AnchorWatch, CEO there, we actually worked at the same business for a little stretch. I think Rob actually overlapped a little bit after me, but we ran an ad exchange or worked at a small startup. But basically what that amounts to, I don't want to go too deep into it. Basically think, you know how commodities, you know, oil exchange, right? You buy oil on exchange, it gets delivered, et cetera. These businesses, like when your ad advertisements load, like when we were doing it, it was just desktop and mobile was big, and now it's smart tv. It's pretty much everything is running through these exchanges. But you get your supply, your, you know, your media site, the spn, whatever. When you load the page, they send their supply over to the exchange. They say, hey, we have a. We have a unit of inventory. We have some eyeballs here. Put an ad up, the cookies come through, all that stuff. You get your audience segments and then the demand side comes in. Toyota. All right, show this guy a car. We were in that business model. You had massive amounts of data, just tons of activity. And we actually use MicroStrategy like their analytics business. So, yeah, we were customers of that product, Rob and I. This goes back over a decade now, but prior to bitcoin standard era, like I find it very interesting, like this company, like you see how AI played out, right? Like 2023 was really when the, the, the LLMs, all of those products, the ChatGPT, it really hit public release, right? And the industry in the background was building up and preparing for that. And like the insiders knew, right?
- [39:43]
B
But that's when the world woke up to it for sure.
- [39:45]
A
Yeah. But strategy, if you go back and look at their earnings calls, right, or their annual reports, they're talking about like baking in artificial intelligence. Like exactly what we're talking about today into their business intelligence, like data analytics stacks, like the product terms. They had this all trademarked. There was a product offering back then as hyper intelligence, all one word. And they called that the future of the company. And this was going to be the hyper intelligence decade. And what it was like, it was they were taking the company into AI, right? And they still have AI product offerings if you go search for them, but they're just not pushing them hard and they're like, if they were getting the traction in that market, it'd be a different story. We'd be talking about a different company today than the one we have. But I think, yeah, as you were going into it, that initial, the micro strategy version of the bitcoin company, right, it was an analytics company, the Treasury, I keep using the word we today when it's not me, but yeah, the management, the board, all of that. The bitcoin strategy then was, hey, we take our treasury reserve, which we talked, or a cash reserve, which was a melting ice cube, like direct quote, and we move it into bitcoin, problem solved. Right. And the idea was, if you go back and read the press releases, hey, we're still bullish. We're excited about growing this analytics business. Hyper intelligence, blah, blah, blah. All right, Right. Whatever happened over like a bitcoin bear market happened in 2022. The AI trend happened in 2023. And there was still some effort there on the AI product route, but somewhere was it like 2024 was kind of their year of convertibles. And then before the November elections in the US you got the 2121 plan or whatever. We're going to raise 21 billion of common equity and 21 billion of credit strategies. And that's where they did the equity first, cranked it up issuance. And it started on late October 2024. Saw the top on the strategy share price and the euphoria after the Trump election win and what we thought that meant for bitcoin Maybe in hindsight, we might have got ahead of our skis a little bit, but then we got the perpetual preferreds, all that. But I think it's not just one company, right? Like, you transition from this BI analytics, and then it was like, we're also doing BI plus AI, and then it's those two things plus Bitcoin. And then it's like, hey, what happened to the AI story? And now it's just all perpetual preferreds. Yeah. Like, if you're thinking narratives here, it's like, have you seen the movie the Prestige, the Christopher Nolan film with that great film? Yeah, I love it. It's crazy. Like, when I was like, mom, you got to watch this movie. I watched it with my mom. She's like, I hated it. I was like, why? These people, they live their whole life to take each other out. It's insane. But, yeah, I was thinking about that. It's like a narrative framework, right? It was. You start with the pledge, right? You present this thing, then you get the turn. It was like, oh, you make that transition, right? Something happens or you kill it. You make it go away. Well, I think that's kind of where we're at right now. It's the. Something's going away, and then it's like, all right, well, well, waiting here. The Prestige is coming next. Something's going to happen. The bird will come back in front of the audience. We'll present it. But the little girl in the movie, she sees like, no, no, no, no. That's not the same bird. Right. It's kind of the same way with this dollar transition going on, right? It's like, here's a dollar, here's a bird. It's like, no, it's a different thing. That's how I see something coming out of this, right? This is going to be. There's going to be something important happen here. You don't have almost 850,000 bitcoin out of a 21 million. And if you look at the actual recoverable supply, it's a much bigger share on a lower than $21 million number. So there's no way and Snowball's chance in hell that this thing isn't not important. As this world plays out in the next few years, I don't know what it's going to look like. The range of outcomes are very broad. But the point, the risk I raised here when these things were priced at par, like, par is perfection. Right? If the market starts pricing these things at 101, 102, 103. What are they going to do on this variable rate, especially like stretch, right. They're going to cut your interest rate so your upside is capped. If you're buying stretch at par or much of these other offerings. The downside was, all right, the ability to maintain these distributions for a lot of these treasury cos. The ability to service debt it's coming from. If you look at the financial reporting, the cash flow from operations doesn't cover say the operating expensive to just keep the core business. I mean the core business is selling securities at this point. And that's kind of your, that's your tell. But to keep that thing up and running, you don't have enough to make these distributions on your preferred equities or your, your digital credit, right. Plus your operating expense for a lot of the situation these companies in without that ability to raise capital to sell securities in to the capital markets in return for those dollars and that's cash flow from financing cff. If capital markets pull back for whatever reason, and I was arguing it's probably going to be a dollar story, right. We're still swim on like we talk about bitcoinization and all of this and I do believe that's happening over the long term. Long term here is, you know, probably a decades, multiple decades type of timeline. I expect this to take the rest of my life. Right. Is kind of how I am prepared for this to play out. But the waters we're swimming in, it's a dollar liquidity world, right? So if you're, if your strategy requires that dollar liquidity, your upside is limited as an investor, you have no margin of safety. If you're coming in at say par, there was only downside. So the only thing that could happen is that adverse outcome we're in now. Now could these things recover back to par? Yes, that's in the range of outcomes. But now you've got to dig yourself out of a hole as say like say your timing, right? If you wanted to pull your principal out of your holding that you're parking this into the brokerage account, you're dependent on secondary market liquidity. So when that's not there, you may not be able to get the price you want or you thought you wanted for your credit. So yeah, we'll see how this plays out. It's not an alley fight. Like the best way to stay out of an alley fight or a bar fight is like don't get in one. Right. But we're past that now. I say we. I'm not in this Alley fight. But everybody involved in this, I guess I kind of am long Bitcoin, just, you know, cold story.
- [47:02]
B
It's definitely going to affect us all.
- [47:03]
A
Yeah, but I mean, you know, don't store next month's rent money in bitcoin. Right. Is generally good advice without giving any financial advice here. But yeah, we are. Like if you're attached to bitcoin in any way, like you're going to be caught up in the blast radius of what's going on here.
- [47:24]
B
It's certainly going to be interesting to see how this plays out. Let's get more into your dollar thesis here because one of the things you said earlier is 2022 was a pivotal moment. The world kind of started shifting away from this petrodollar offshore dollar system. And I'm curious to know exactly what you mean and what was the catalyst there.
- [47:42]
A
Okay, so this World War II, I'm just going to start history at World War II right now. What do we do? We come out with the allied powers, they form an economic block and it's the largest trade bloc in the world. We talk about global trade. You see it in the headlines almost every day. That is the most important business in the world, that trade franchise. There's no public equity that foots to it. But if you think back in history, the Dutch VOC or British East Indies companies, like these are the largest market cap firms. And like those transitions that happen, like which nation state owns it or who,
- [48:24]
B
who nation state do they own?
- [48:26]
A
Yeah, or yeah, exactly, exactly. Like India, like the entire nation, like exactly. Or nation states. But yeah, that. So that trade block is the, I mean it's bigger than SpaceX, bigger than Google, all of that. And then the, the, the flip side of that, right? When you move a shipping container from, let's say it starts in hon strong, loads up the goods, delivers in, I don't know, Rotterdam. Right. If you're in Europe or you're in Australia, I don't know where your main port is. I'm gonna guess Sydney, Something like that. Yeah. Your counterpart of that is like flip it transaction is or sorry, money is one half of every transaction. Right. So when those goods move from A to B on the ocean, your financial centers, like your network, this offshore dollar network, market dollar just became coin of the realm, Right. It replaced the British pound, which replaced the Spanish silver dollar which replaced blah blah blah. But that global dollar network, that offshore dollar was actually tied to this post war like post World War II architecture that got set up and it's still holding together. Today, like NATO, your BIS member banks, right? These, the, all of these federal or central banks, like the nation states who opt into this system and settle, let's say between themselves at the bank of International Settlement. It's all of that that's part of this business franchise, right? All right, so what you've slowly seen since 2008, right, in this system is over time you started to see the, let's say there's cap table partners on this franchise and before World War II, let's say that London firms were the senior partners and the New York firms were the junior partners or the American capital was junior. It's become very clear at some point that role has flipped over the 20th century and in the last, let's say 10 to 15 years, ever since we've gotten through the GFC, the GFC was like the starting gun. Oh this offshore dollar, bub, this is not long for the world anymore. We need to move on to some other thing, some other framework. And it's been in process, like moving gradually, then suddenly. But in the last, I'd say you could say SOFR, the launch, like the Go Live of SOFR in roughly 2017, 2018 was a key seminal event, but it went even further than that. Obviously we can talk about COVID
- [51:09]
B
and
- [51:09]
A
its role in this, but 2022, when the bond market was selling off what the Fed did, we saw the inflation coming, we raised interest rates, we sacrificed the US dollar bond market, right? We let the price depreciation hit to account for the purchasing power, loss from inflation and all of that. At the same time, what we did is we moved the, the venue for the marginal dollar in this credit based dollar system from London, which was set by the London Interbank Offering Rate or libor, where all these capital market banks, like mostly, mostly firms based in the uk, but it included American banks as well. They have a presence in London just like HSBC, Standard Chartered, etc. JP Morgan's in the game there. But you move from this venue where all the banks with Libor would at the end of every trading day and set the overnight cost of short term dollar funding in a mechanism that was not. There was no market based transaction to it. All you did was reply to an email or something like that, report your number of what you would lend to your best customer on an unsecured basis for a short term dollar loan. You just report that into a spreadsheet. There's a statistical process you cut off the top, I can't remember, it's like the top four and the bottom four and you take the middle, I don't know, take average of those or whatever and oh, that's Libor and that's the reference rate for all of the dollar credit outstanding, like your adjustable rate mortgages, your auto loans, like credit cards. Anchored to the Libor in this process and very easy in that statistical process. You have no economic skin in the game. Right. There's nothing you're not going to lose. It's, it's, it's pretty easy to manufacture or like massage the, the number that comes out of that process. If you're, you know, one of let's say the 15 or 16 money center banks who is, who is a contributor or has a vote in that process. So you can see in that framework how that's more important than the Federal Reserve. Right.
- [53:23]
B
And people talk all the time about the Federal reserve being like 12 people in the room that get to pick the rate. And this is essentially the same.
- [53:29]
A
Yep. Well, more so. Right. Because the Fed has had to respond to them. All right, so this is where I say I wrote a piece on Substack, maybe put the show notes but I explain it in terms of, in this era. So think about, it's an offshore dominated era. The whole point of this system is you've got this block coming out of the western side of the Allied powers west of the Iron Curtain post World War II. They've got a financial system and the economic model was hey, we're going to build up credit, dollar credit. Where at the beginning of this framework at Bretton woods you started with all of the local currencies in FX markets were all pegged to the dollar and then the dollar would be pegged to gold. And that's for cross border capital transactions. And then domestically your dollar was pegged to silver for households, businesses in the US over 20 years after World War II we broke that, that metallic peg famous Nixon 1971 window. And then after 1971 we allowed think about Nixon. What he did is defending the US Gold vaults. We'll start there. I'll just not go any deeper than that. But once we got off of that metallic redeemability or anchor to the dollar, now you're on the credit standard. And that kind of the economic framework for this trade block, the idea was okay, well if you just expand credit like money is credit, right. They're the same thing. You print dollars into thin air. It's debt, but it's, you're printing the dollars. What you were doing is you're, you're generating incremental economic activity, like you're moving a shipping container of HDTVs from, you know, China to Rotterdam. You raise the amount of dollar credit outstanding and it's a one way trade up for money supply. And this is how you get a offshore dollar credit bubble plus onshore dollar credit. It's hundreds of trillions of dollars. And in that framework where credit has to, it has to increase, you can't let that thing contract, otherwise the whole thing just deleverages upon itself. The US has to be subservient to the rest of the world. And then you have to have, inside the US you have to have a framework where the central bank is dominant. So I call this era. Once we get into 1981, Volcker raises rates to 20%, squeezes out the inflation of the CPI inflation of the 1970s. You get a policy framework in the US where the Fed dominates. And what it's doing is every time that the global economy wants to, it goes into recession. The US like the onshore institutions had to bail out that offshore bubble. Right. And it's increasingly every time. Right. So let's say in 1987 we get into the flash crash. Right? Right. What do we do? Oh, we cut interest rates. Right. Then once we get to the next version in the late 90s, you got the Southeast Asian financial crisis taking place, Russia's defaulting, all that stuff. LTC is collapsing with all of its Nobel laureates, the hedge fund operating out of New York. What do we do? Oh, we start to do the typical lower interest rates. But then you're starting to add in qe which is like main and Lane facility central banks coming in as the A not even lender of last resort. They're like relique the system. They're sopping up all of the excess credit that exists and then monetizing it, issuing it out. And that's what QE is. And each cycle like 2008 gets worse, Covid gets more. So that's why we all recognize it, right. And bitcoin, we all nailed it. And everybody came around the table, listened to the podcast 20202021 and we got that. And then we just extrapolated that story and said this thing's gon on to infinity. All right, so you had a role where, all right, it's Fed dominance. And then you also had Congress as well. Right. You had the Keynesian approach where what do we need? We need more fiscal stimulus. Right. You just, just fiscal spending acts that don't make any sense, like they're just boondoggles there's diminishing marginal returns on this. These same projects, like I make the analogy. So fiscal spending in the 1950s, what did we get for it? You got the Eisenhower Interstate system in the United States, which is awesome. Right. I've been to a lot of countries in the world and like our high system is pretty great. I haven't seen the German Autobahn though, so maybe that's. I haven't seen the best of the best. But by and large, the Eisenhower Interstate system, it did wonders for the US economy. It was great. Clearly a good use of credit and federal government spending. But by the time we get into 2008 with the American Recovery act, you get into things like, I can't remember exactly the size of it, like just ballpark it. Trillion dollars. What we got out of it was my city, where I came from and growing up in Missouri. We got one more interchange on our highway. It's like whoop dee doo, right? Didn't make a bit of economic difference to anybody. It was just one more stoplight on my way home. And I think most cities in America, there are probably thousands like that. And then by Covid, it's like CARES act, we're going in, we're were taking on these trillions of dollars of debt, placing it on the public tab. Right. And we were literally just paying people not to go to work. So it's like the.
- [59:25]
B
We just makes less and less sense over time.
- [59:27]
A
Yeah, it's into absurdity and decadence and all of the above. All right, so that's the fiscal route. And we just had a Congress that would go along with it. And I don't know how much time we could beat this dead horse. But I view Congress as just a total deadbeat organization in the United States. And we don't have any way out of this. We can't. Unlike a European democracy or constitutional structure, most of them have the ability, the king or the prime minister or something, they can disband Congress, send them home, hold snap elections, all that. US, we can't do that. So we have a Congress that's compromised, bought and paid for, all of that. And they'll pass any fiscal spending bill up until, I mean, maybe modern day, but we still do it. Right. I haven't seen a Congress yet who has turned down like a fiscal stimulus bill. So I called that era, the era of Fed dominance from a U.S. framework. And what that was, you had Fed chairs like Alan Greenspan, who just passed away this week, age 100, Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen, And I'd include Jay Powell in this bucket where they're willing to just keep cutting, like doing what needed to be done to bail out this offshore dollar credit bubble. And he kind of had to right the guns to your head. You can't just change the system on a whim. They put people in these roles who would do what the system needed them to do. So what do you do? You cut interest rates every cycle, lower lows, lower highs, till we got to ZIRP. Europe, Japan, they tried to do NIRP, negative interest rate policy, QE, rinse, repeat. But 2022 was that moment where, all right, there was a tug of war. And at the end of the day, all of this offshore dollar bubble is parked on the economic potential. And you could just say the existing economy itself as well, of the domestic United States. The system requires the United States treasury to go into ever increasing amounts of debt. Like I said, if you're offshore, you don't have access to the Fed. So your next best IOU is that U.S. treasury Security? Right. It's the Treasury's IOU. That's the highest quality dollar you can get with minimum credit risk. That's as close as the money printer as you can get in this framework. So this system requires not just a Fed that'll dominate domestic policy, but it requires a United States treasury that is subservient to the central bank and then also subservient to the rest of the world, the other G7 countries or whatever. And if you think about it in that mindset, that's how you get the America first seeds springing up in the 2010s, and it starts to make a little bit more sense. But your treasury secretaries, in this Fed dominance era, or I'll call it it, equivalently, the other side of the coin is treasury subservience. You get treasury secretaries who will just do whatever that system needs. They're guys like Larry Summers, Timothy Geithner, Hank Paulson, Jacob Blue, like we just named Janet Yellen. And they'll do whatever that offshore system needs them to do, which. Which includes running up a debt to $40 trillion, like every stop of the way. All right, so the seeds of this transition from this offshore dollar to the stablecoin dollar, which we've seen materialize, that I've talked about, it didn't happen overnight. It was in the works. I worked at Citigroup back in the early 2010s. I came in post GFC and had no idea what I was getting into. Yeah, let's just say that it's shocking, like balance sheet, like we were looking at like a couple trillion dollars in subprime like asset exposure on the balance sheet. And that was a time when like I didn't even know what a trillion dollars was. Just seemed like an insane amount of money. Back in 2011, you know, 2012 era, and our team was publishing like basically the rate card of Citigroup's mortgage rates for like all of its branches in the United States. It was like, oh, lots, right? A lot of, a lot is riding on the line of us getting these numbers right, you know, people's mortgage payments for the next, you know, 10, 20, 30 years potentially. All right, so even in those meetings, and I was just like an analyst starting out, we were still talking about replacing Libor and moving to something else. We knew LIBOR had to go away and SOFR was already on the table. I'll explain SOFR a little bit as early as those days and most of us at the non executive level, we didn't even understand what the heck was going on. Coming through university, I did a master's in finance. Very quantitatively focused. We didn't go through any of this. How the dollar structure worked, it's just not there. You're learning quantitative formulas, number crunching, all of that, pricing exotic derivatives. How the system actually works isn't taught to you or isn't a focus. Maybe that's changing, who knows? Actually it's the podcast circuit. Like now that it's talked about, people can find this and that's made all the difference in my opinion. All right, but this was going on at least since the early 2010s and that transition to SOFR, we spun up that system in, I think it went live like for scale in 2018. And those dynamics, let's just say Covid showed up at a very opportune time for this transfer away from London based pricing with the LIBOR model to New York based pricing, the SOFR model. And the key thing about sofr, right, we talked about the banks. Like you literally just make up the number. You don't need that much evidence to support your submission at the end of every business day. With sofr, it functions differently. It's actually published by the Federal Reserve bank of New York. They're operating as a middleman, a custodian. Call it a tri party lending relationship. Three players involved here. Think about the Federal Reserve bank of New York is like the house and then you've got a borrower and lender showing up. Borrower needs dollars on a Short term basis lender has dollars that they can deploy into that loan but the borrower and SOFR has to post collateral. Right. And for the most part like most popular collateral, it's to going to be treasuries.
- [66:13]
B
So now the skin in the game.
- [66:15]
A
Exactly. You can lose your highest quality credit, the risk free rate in this system's framework. Right so. Or your risk free asset. Right so. So if you mess up, you over lever yourself, you've actually. Yeah, there's consequences now which is obviously
- [66:30]
B
how it should be.
- [66:31]
A
Like that makes total sense a hundred percent. Right. And in a perfect world that hope, I mean there's no such thing thing. But as we move along, notice here, your skin in the game is just another IOU on this treasury debt that keeps ballooning but moving from nothing to something, it actually is a massive step. And then eventually hopefully it'll be a real economic asset like let's say gold or Bitcoin where you lose something of consequence. And, and the private sector, households, businesses, they have a say as well. If you zoom out in the bitcoin story right now, it's starting to make sense. Like Genesis block, Chancellor's on brink of second bailout of banks. Right. What was that saying like when bank of England or the Fed or whatever central bank, when they come in in qe, what they're actually doing. Like think about it, like think about it like a poker game, right? You've got your players who are playing this game shrewdly wisely, they're building up a chip stack and then your counterparties, your other players at the table who don't calculate their risk correctly or take too much risk, they get off sides, take too much risk at the wrong time in the cycle, you get rinsed as maybe is going on right now in Frontier Credit topic we mentioned earlier. But the whole point, like Chancellor on brink of second bailouts of banks being in the genesis block was when you change the reserve money or you can just willy nilly inject more chips if you're the house at that poker table. So the short stacks get relique every time the big stack is about to take someone out, all the incentives break. Exactly. So that's what bitcoin does. It's a reserve money, unlike gold, it's a ledger money and it's an even playing field for everybody who chooses to play at that poker table. Is not the right analogy here. Never bring the casino games into a financial analysis is what I've been taught to do in speaking with clients. But it makes sense to me though.
- [68:46]
B
So in terms of this transition then I guess this isn't something that's just happened in the last couple of years. It's been a long thing which maybe started or you know, started in 2007, 2008. You then have the sort of 2017 Libor switch to sofa.
- [69:00]
A
Then 2020-20, it wasn't switched yet in 2017, 2018. Okay, we'll get into that.
- [69:05]
B
That transition starts, I guess. And then 2020, 2022 is. You have Covid. And it's also like the end of the 40 year bond bull market, which I imagine is a part of this.
- [69:16]
A
Oh absolutely, yeah. The end of the 20 or end of the 40 year bond bull market was your second. Yeah, it was like one of the three worst returns for US dollar denominated credit in the nation's history. I think like 1929, 30, like you had won by the Great Depression, maybe won by the Civil War, something like that. But that we talk about the fourth turning framework, right. As a way to understand this like 80 year type of transitions. It's like, oh, that was that. We're in it. Yeah, exactly. So, so. Yeah, exactly. So SOFR spends up. It's your competitor. Like now you're like whatever. You were running your little scheme, you know, on Lombard street in London, your end of day process, like that's cute. But over here, this is where you actually have to go for dollars. And we're going to set our interest rates with tri party collateralized repo. And that's where the puck is headed. At the end of the day, it's the US dollar we're talking about here, right? We own this or it should be our real estate to own. And we spent four years with that process and contest. But 2022, the hiking was kind of the last straw. But right when the hike started, March of 2022, Putin invaded Ukraine, created the commodity spike similar to what we saw in Iran with epic in the first quarter of 2026. That created, you know, the final, the alley fight. Right. Someone had to tap out and we, we stopped pricing the marginal dollar in Libor and we started pricing it in sofr. And at some point in the last like year or two, we just stopped even printing Libor as any reference rate because there's all kinds of old credit outstanding that was benchmarked to this thing, someone's car loan or home loan from 2001. Those loans are still out there. Someone's paying based on Libor. We figured out what's the number, how many Basis points do we add to convert this over from LIBOR to sofr. It's a business negotiation, same way that these ceasefires or these deals between Iran and the United States are. I view them at the end of the day as a business negotiation. It was that process. So 2022 was that moment where that kind of power struggle, the tug of war, what was formerly a cooperative partnership like the Cross Atlantic framework, NATO being the military front, but then you have WTO for the trade, that framework. And then know you, you had this offshore dollar cartel. Think about it, bis, imf, all the central banks opt in. You've got the Basel III framework, which are still in open negotiation and implementation. 2022 was that moment where if it was an arm wrestling match, yeah, US just other side's fist hit the table.
- [72:34]
B
So that's kind of the last remnants of the old world power giving the baton over to the us.
- [72:40]
A
That's how I view it. Exactly. Yeah. And then. Okay, and then on a separate front, domestically, this is where you get into. All right, the Fed was responding to its, its interest here. Like the Fed, its shareholder, it's public private institution, right. It's got some public oversight, has to report to Congress, all of that. The President gets to elect or nominate board of governors members, all that process. So you do have some public input into the management of the organization, but the shareholders are the domestic US Fedwire banks. And so Fed chair pushing this thing along, ultimately you have to have the backing of the domestic US Capital, for lack of a better word, behind you to push this ahead. So that's what I think when Jerome Powell was doing this, you can view Jerome Powell will go down as a very interesting transitionary figure because he was doing all these things that a Fed dominance era Fed Chair would do. He qed the crap out of the market, he zerped the market and didn't say anything wrong with the fiscal state. He wasn't opposed or didn't raise his hand to CARES Act, American Recovery act, all this stuff. But then he also did these things for moving from LIBOR to sofr. So I view him and the decision recently after his tournaments, we were in the worst Fed now he chose to stay on. I kind of view him as like he's your transitionary figure. He's kind of like in history. I think of him as like a man for the last war. But you have him in place as a general to just maintain institutional integrity. It's like, all right, very interesting figure, complicated, complex figure is how I think he goes down all right. But in the meantime, now you've got a political process we still have to get through, like the White House's say and Congress's say on what direction this domestic dollar is going to take. And that's where the difference between the Biden White House and its Treasury Secretary and National Economic Advisor Lael Brainard and the direction they wanted to go down are the polar opposite of what we got coming out of the November 2024 elections. So in the big picture of United States monetary history, that, that like the November 2024 election, in my opinion, will be about the, the fork in the road that the US Voters chose. And what they were actually voting on was the future of the US Dollar. Like, I'll explain this same time that the Fed started hiking in 2022, and we were going through this transition from Libor over to SOFA for strangling it to death in the bathtub. Right. All that gruesome analogy, but capital wars, right? That's kind of what happened in the Biden White House. And those players involved Yellen and Brainerd. There was an executive order that was like the standing memo to all of these governmental agencies that basically said it was paving the way for the cbdc. They instructed the Fed, occ, all the agencies, all these technocrats, these bureaucrats, all of that. They were tasked with figuring out this path to get the future of this dollar system from the United States framework onto a cbdc. What do I mean by cbdc? It's a good bank of International Settlements paper today on this exact topic. I'll just TLDR are bis and this legacy framework, call it Offshore Dollar framework, which is dying. They don't have that anymore. You call it Davos, man. That type of globalists, they don't like bitcoin and they don't like the genius act stablecoins. They want something else. And that something else they want is they want the base money money or the money that banks use to transact and settle between themselves to be central bank money that sits outside of the private sector. So you as a household, you as a business, you can't interact with the Fed. Right. You need a bank charter to do that. You need a piece of paper. That's how it works in the United States. Current standard. And most central banks in the rest of the world as well.
- [77:16]
B
Well, so they want to gatekeep, they want to retain control.
- [77:18]
A
Yeah. And the term for that would be outside money versus Bitcoin. If bitcoin emerges as a base money, that would be an inside Money, which means the private sector has the ability to own, hold, transact and basically market make. We talked about this upfront at the conversation, right. In the old days of the Federal Reserve dollar versus the silver certificate dollar and the contest that worked between it with the dollar that's redeemable into silver. What that does is it acts as an arbitrage mechanism where the central bank or the state can't direct the central bank to go out and issue too many credit claims. Like, if they were doing that, what you would do as a household or business would be, I'm going to put my dollar to you, I'm going to redeem it for the silver. That's right. So if we had an inside money so we could redeem for gold or redeem our dollar for Bitcoin, that would be like a check on the monetary power of, you could say the state, but also the private banking interests. This is the definition of sound money that everybody talks about. What they're actually asking for is that ability as a private sector entity to hold your banks, which are that intermediate layer between the public sector, which is the state, and the private sector. Right. And then also hold your state accountable from committing monetary tyranny. Right. So what the Biden administration was instructing with its executive order for all of these agencies to go out and do was figure out, you know, legally, how do we do this technically, how do we custody, we're going to need some blockchains, go hire the ETH Bros, the Solana devs, all of that. They'll build this thing for us. And that was the standing Management Policy directive under the Biden administration. We were marching down that path. We still have the EU marching down this path. That's what the digital euro is. They just made an announcement today, this digital euro is going to have a pilot test at the end of 2026. And they're shooting for a 2028, 2029 launch because they're going to need it at the end of the day to do what they want to do, like prosecuting a broader war with Russia, let's just say, or industrializing or monetizing private sector savings to prosecute said war. They will need this cbdc, this digital euro as the base money to go out and do what they intend to do. All right, so Biden administration was on those grounds. What happens? November election happens. Day one, we get an executive order or it's like Thursday, right? If inauguration was like a Monday or Tuesday, it was in that first flurry of executive orders. What did it do it. The first one on, like the monetary roadmap for this new administration, the Trump administration, it repeated that standing executive order that said, hey, let's go down, let's figure out what's the project management roadmap, the Gantt chart, all of that to get the United States onto a cbdc. First executive order pulls that, rescinds it. That's dead in its tracks. No CBDC from a White House directive standpoint. Next you get. This is where I see, say we're moving from an era of Fed dominance and treasury subservience to an era of United States treasury dominance. And then Fed is going to be reformed. It's going to play a totally different role. It's not going to be used in this era we're heading into. It's no longer going to be used as this behemoth to keep bailing out the offshore dollar or everybody else's monetary systems that, that are squatting on the US Economy, in my opinion, or have been for the better part of a century at least. We're moving to an era of treasury dominance. And so the next executive order that after repealing what Biden was doing with the cbdc, the next one, and this is how I view it as key. You had a lot of bitcoin in custody that had been like, let's say criminal asset seizures or civil asset forfeiture, all that say it's sitting in debt. Different branches of this government bureaucracy that is Washington, D.C. it's in some U.S. marshals file cabinet, some bitcoins over there, some is in the FBI file cabinet over in Virginia. It's just scattered all around. The next executive order gave a directive. All of that bitcoin that is technically within the ownership of a US or an agency that reports into the federal government chain of command, all of that now needs to move to the treasury, right? So now the treasury is the United States treasury is the custodian and holder of the bitcoin that the federal government has claimed to title ownership. All that stuff, all right, that's huge. We were looking for as bitcoiners, we were looking for the strategic bitcoin reserve. Like, when are we going to get it? When are we going to get it? It's a sequence of events. There's a process to get there. And if you look at these little steps along the way, you're like, oh, now the treasury is asserting dominance. It's not just going to be the bottom in this relationship and do what the rest of the world needs and keep racking up this $40 trillion of public debt, the number's still going to go up, but we're asserting dominance and saying, no, no, no, those bitcoin are over here. And then gradually you're going to start seeing all of these steps implemented to ultimately, if you look at Scott Besson's statements, what he's telling you is this bitcoin reserve is coming. It's just going to take more time to do it the right way. You got to follow parliamentary procedures, figure out custody, all of these things that need to be taken into consideration to do it the right way. Make sure someone's not just going to walk your bitcoin out the door like an intelligence community hack or nation state attack, all that stuff. Do it the right way. That'll take time, but series of events. I'm trying to think of other executive orders, but I guess just quickly on
- [84:00]
B
that, the question I would have is obviously saw the strategic reserve executive order go through and like a lot of bitcoiners, probably expect it to happen quicker than it has. Do you still think it's likely to happen? And then as a part of that question, what do the treasury want to do with it? Why do they want it held in the Treasury?
- [84:18]
A
Okay, all right, let's answer the timelines here. There's no probabilistic guarantee that we're going to get a strategic bitcoin reserve. There's still a lot of milestones that we need to hit to get to that end game. So think about it like a couple of weeks ago, we had Representative Begich from Alaska, United States, introduce the American Reserve Monetization act, which is. It's an updated version of the bitcoin act that Senator Lummis introduced about a year ago. And my answer to that is I don't think we have a Congress to get it done at this point. So same thing in November 2024, what we were actually voting on was which fork in the road we were going to go down. Down CBDC route with Biden or a bitcoin route with Genius act stablecoins. I didn't get into specifics why the backing one to one of stablecoins with T bills is important. We'll get into that. And second part of my answer to this question. But I don't think right now we have a Congress that would pass the ARMA even though it had 22 sponsors. Can we get the majority, like 215 votes? I think it would take to. To pass Congress. I think Speaker Johnson would introduce this if he knew he had the votes to get it done. I think what we don't know is do we have the votes to get it done with this Congress? So that's an important thing. I think we're voting on this November. I get it. Bitcoiners were confused about what's going on geopolitically with Iran. Maybe I can put that into context how I think about it. But there's going to be a lot at stake in November like what we're voting on. And if we want that strategic bitcoin reserve, we're going to have to send a congress to Washington D.C. that gives it to us. So full stop there. So not guaranteed it's going to happen. I do think in the best framework. He was in congressional testimony, I want to say two weeks ago, he got asked a question by Tim Scott, senator from South Carolina, I believe, who asked about progress or are we still working on this? And Scott Bessant's answer was like, we're working on it with all deliberate speed. Right. That just goes to the order of operation. This isn't something you can just spin up overnight like there's no precedent for this. It's a big change to have a bitcoin reserve, have a Treasury stockpile, all that stuff. It's not something you just ask ChatGPT, how do I do this? And press a button and it's like, does this work? Like, no. A lot goes into this. So what's the end game? All right, let's think about this. And this is where I'll get into maybe a little bit of speculation because I don't know how this is going to play out. What I'm thinking about though is prior iterations and these dollar transitions where we move from one definition of the dollar. Say it's an asset backed dollar, like silver certificates, for example, we move to a credit dollar and then we move back towards that asset backed dollar. The one I like to think of is during the American Civil War, right. The Greenbacks, very similar time. Like thinking about the fourth turning kind of framework. It's like all the institutions are going through a big transition. We have to find a new steady state equilibrium for all the social order, financial order, all of that to reestablish stability. Right. Civil War was kind of that. Right. Like America. There were also military conflicts all around the globe at that time too. All of them playing into each other. But you had a dollar that was on a silver standard, gold standard, bimetallic standard, coming out of a financial panic with the panic of 1857. Kind of an analog of the financial crisis of 2008 if you think about what we're going through currently. Currently. But that just wiped out credit. And the President at the time, Buchanan didn't bail out the banks and so that he got replaced. We got Lincoln as President, we had the war. The United States treasury was in a position where we didn't have the financial resources, we didn't have the gold to fund the soldiers, purchase the armaments, all of that for the Union, Union to get what it needed to win the war. And what we did is we by roundabout way created a dollar, the greenback, that was a Treasury issued iou. No interest rate, no maturity. This was the precursor to the Federal Reserve note. Legal tender dollars redeemable for nothing, only payable like legal tender for credit arrangements. All of that. Once the U.S. once it was clear that the Union was ultimately going to persevere in the struggle probably 1864, the discussion around Washington D.C. and within the capital markets in New York started to switch to. Instead of this massive proliferation of literally that was like money printer, we just printed greenbacks off the press. The discussion in capital markets and policy circles started to shift to ooh, actually we're going to win this thing and we can start to rein in money supply. And within the span of civil wars coming to its conclusion in 1865. And then by 1875 that discussion of oh, we're going to remonetize, we're going to repack to some base money and this won't just be funny money, paper script anymore anymore. The dollar won't be paper script anymore. You had the Gold remonetization Act of 1875 and we were back on the gold standard pegging to the base money that the world was choosing at the time. Gold in the second half of the 19th century. So this can go quickly. If you think about it, we're going through the same thing in American re industrialization right now. We're in the very early phases of that. It's built out on this AI trade, right? All of the capital flowing into that is part of this massive energy investments like all the above. But you can see a world like it's fuzzily coming into existence where. All right, think about this. We're already in a world where that liability based IOU dollar that's gone with the wind, right? It's a prior era. We're moving on. Trains left the station, we're moving to these stablecoin dollars. They're backed by a Treasury bill one to one that's genius. Act 45 days or less maturity. Interestingly, what's the collateral for SOFR to get a marginal dollar in this credit based system. It's also more and more just a Treasury bill as the most common favored collateral and repo markets lowest haircuts, all of that. And you see this world now that we're moving from that liability based offshore dollar to this asset based stablecoin dollar, give this thing enough years, let these trends keep riding like just keep extrapolate them. I can see a world where we're just calling someday these stablecoin dollars. We're just going to call them dollars the same way after the silver certificates were pulled from circulation and all we had was the Federal Reserve notes. We just, they're dollars from the private sector, we'll just call them dollars. They're technically backed by treasury bills. So they're backed by an IOU in the old system. What we're seeing as this offshore dollar bubble, as we're reining it in, what's happening, the capacity for lending further and further out. So if you look at let's say for example the 30 year treasury bond, right, it's like $15 billion is the auction size and they hold it once a month, month. If you look at the treasury bills, these things might be for the four week bill, it's like $80 billion and they do a new issue every week. And they have not just one 30 year once a month or one 20 year once a month or a 10 year once a month which are like 10 to 20 billion, that type of size or scale. These treasury bills are like $80 billion. Each auction, they hold a new one every week. And there's a four week, an eight week, a 13 week, a 26 week, a 52. So, so the maturity of the debt profile as this offshore dollar credit bubble, the old post World War II framework that's kind of transitioning to its next state, it'll be a major upheaval. We can all sense it. The maturity profile of the debt in that system is just coming smaller and smaller. And so I can see a world where let's say five to ten years of letting these trends play out more and more of the the liability based dollar and those IOUs like the credit stack, it's naturally shifting more and more. So T bill heavy. And you can see it in the Treasury's debt outstanding, it's becoming more and more treasury bill heavy.
- [93:42]
B
And is that intentional? Because I remember when Scott Besant before he came in, he was criticizing yellen for doing everything on the short end but has then continued to do the same thing. So that's an intentional move rather than. It's just a force of the market.
- [93:57]
A
No, it's a force of the market as you put it. Yeah, it's. If there were a better like people are like oh you idiot, why didn't you, why didn't you lend all of, why didn't you extend all your debt out at 30 years back when it was a 1.25 coupon in March 2020? It's like because you couldn't. The capacity wasn't actually there. The treasury bills is the direction like the system is, is telling you what it needs to do. And as the operator here at the helm, you just take what you get. At the end of the day you can play the poker hand very well. Right. You can be a good player or a bad player, but at the end of the day the dealer's just going to deal you the cards you get. So that's how I view it. So naturally that debt profile is just shrinking, shrinking, shrinking credit maturity. So you can think about this. In the US we recognize this as a problem that longer term or like longer maturity financing, it's going away when we can feel it. So earlier this year, remember that feeler tweet? I think Trump sent it out. It's like what do you guys think about a 50 year mortgage, guys?
- [95:08]
B
Yes, I do remember that.
- [95:09]
A
That's part of that. We're trying to figure out how to extend maturities longer or get more people into housing or underwrite mortgage loans that borrowers can qualify for. We're trying to extend it out but there's just no capacity there. So you're squeezing all the blood you can out of the rock and after 70 years of doing this, there's just not that much. There's nothing left really is what's happening. So as that maturity profile shrinks, we become more and more treasury bill concentrated in that treasury debt stack as this stablecoin like genius act proliferation really kicks in. And that old offshore dollar like if you're looking at all the dollars outstanding and the stable coins start to grow their market share eventually there's a tipping point. But more and more of like we talked about, the arbitrage incentives where can you generate the most bang for your buck on $1 of capital. That same way that Henry Jarecki all those fellows cleverly arbitraged away walked away with 10% of the purchasing power power on another dollar transition. The way I see this More and more of those treasury bills are going to find their way into stablecoin issuers like genius act regulated, they'll become stablecoin dollar rails. And then what's happening here, Venezuela, Iran, all of the like Cuba coming soon to a theater near you, Greenland. Like what's happening is we are re re architecting the dollar payment rails and all of that kind of orbit and we're bringing in the commodity suppliers and the trade of the base layer goods in the economy, right, your energy resources that everybody needs, those will increasingly settle in stablecoin dollars. And if you think about this from the Venezuelan perspective or Iran's perspective, you no longer like if you participate in this version of the dollar which is more New York, less London this time around, you no longer have to pay the one extra hop through the whole foreign exchange swaps, all of this offshore dollar credit kind of vig transaction costs that is just paying this financialist cartel at the end of the day they're sucking off whatever the share is. What is it, 10%, 20%, who knows of the actual real growth on all those ships moving through the Suez Canal, moving through the Panama Canal, moving through the Strait of Malacca, crossing the Pacific Ocean, all the above. Now to get the dollar you need, which is the coin of the realm to buy your energy resources or critical minerals. Headline keeps showing up in the papers. You no longer have to cross through all these middlemen foreign exchange counterparties and you go straight to what you need which is that treasury bill counterparty risk, that dollar settlement rail. And you get at the end of the day you get wholesale pricing or sorry you get retail pricing for your commodities and you aren't selling your goods at wholesale pricing anymore or deep discounts say on the black market too, say Iran oil, Iranian oil going to China for example at deep discounts or Russian oil being sold into India at deep discounts. So what's happening? Like this system is all, you know we're transitioning from an old offshore dollar system onto this US like centered stablecoin dollar system. There's economic incentives for the resource producing countries to do it and go along with it. That's where if you look at the mosquito you that was just sign with Iran. The most important thing is like oh you're going to re enter the swift system first. But really what you're coming into is a stablecoin system. Same thing with Venezuela selling its oil, right? They settled through, I think it's like Qatar but you're now going to be on these stablecoin rails there's going to be lower transaction costs, all the above. You're going to get better, more transparent market based pricing for your commodity exports that your economy relies on. And over time, what this is doing is we're replacing that old post war, the last vestiges of the Bretton woods system with this new, I don't know what to call it, genius act system. All right, so next, what happens once this stablecoin dollar becomes like they're all the dollars, right? Well, at some point if your stablecoin money supply is bigger than the $100 trillion or you know, multiples of that that's in this offshore dollar system and you're backstopping with Treasuries, eventually you need something else to repeg your stable coins to. And that's where the bitcoin reserve.
- [100:11]
B
This was going to be my question because like I see the transition that you're talking about from the petrodollar to this onshore dollar system, that's stablecoins backed by treasuries. What I wasn't sure is where bitcoin plays a part, but this is where bitcoin plays the part well.
- [100:24]
A
So think about this. So what happens when stablecoin supply, and this is why I go into co market cap or whatever the majority of liquidity is in right now, it's old Tether usdt. Tether's in process of transition. Another key highlight, we talked about the executive orders, the 2024 elections, the fork in the road in monetary history. I want to say, was it December 2023 where tether made the announcement that they were cooperating with? I want to say it was the FBI for enforcement of the United States Treasury's OFAC sanctions. That was a huge tell. Now Tether is on board with what was happening when we talked about the United States, the American capital base moving in one direction and over the 2010s that event. And I don't know Tether guys, I've never met them, I don't have any inside information. But looking in hindsight, but that announcement from Tether which preceded, I want to say the election result, that was a huge directional tell that they were going to cooperate with this new version of the dollar that was being pushed through. So if you think about that quote, 2020 taught us nothing stops this train. We're all stuck in this mindset that this whole system is still running on the architecture, the blueprints, the players involved, the incentives. It's just what we saw in the past. We had 2001, then 2008, then 2020, we're just going to get more QE, more ZIRP, more stupid fiscal spending from Congress. I think the game has changed. And it's very clear all of the players who were cooperating around this old business deal that lasted for 75, 80 years, they're now, maybe it's too far to say they're at war with each other, but they're not seeing eye to eye and they're definitely not cooperating anymore. And the US is definitely now asserting itself on the international stage and not just geopolitically, what we've seen during 2026, but it's now an extent ended story that they're asserting themselves in the international capital markets arena, which is just one plane. Right. Capital markets are war by another means. So when we say nothing stops this train, it's like, well, there's another train. And it's like, that's what Scott Besant represents, all of that. So we'll see how this plays out.
- [103:09]
B
But what does it mean for, for monetary policy? Because like either domestically or globally, whenever there's a problem, it's either stimulus money, printing, swap lines, whatever it might be. How do they do that in this new system?
- [103:23]
A
Well, did you notice how much of a fit that the legacy institutional media, politicians like Elizabeth Warren, that camp Christine Lagarde at the ecb, everybody from the establishment, from this prior business order who was like an elite who benefited from being at the top of the system. Did you notice how much of a fuss they raised about Kevin Warsh and his nomination?
- [103:52]
B
Not really, no. Maybe I wasn't following it close enough, though.
- [103:56]
A
Oh, it's a. Oh, central bank independence. Like Danny, this is terrible. We need central bank independence.
- [104:01]
B
I did see that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [104:03]
A
This guy is going to be Donald Trump's sock puppet. Like the framing of what Kevin Warsh and like his chairmanship, like you haven't seen anything like from a boj, like a Fed board, a governor's nomination, until going back to like the Judy Shelton nomination. I want to say that was 2019, thereabouts. In Trump's first term. They raised a huge fuss about that. Right. For Judy Shelton, I would just say more Austrian leanings and monetary policy. It's like, no, no, no, we can't do that. We got to stick to the Keynesian consensus. We can't take any non orthodox views here around this boardroom. Right. We do groupthink. But yeah. So Kevin Warsh, what he represents so notably. Right. Kevin Warsh was nominated to the Board of Governors back in the 2000s by George W. Bush. Bush.
- [105:01]
B
And he was very anti money printing then, wasn't he?
- [105:03]
A
Exactly. He resigned, I want to say 2011 or 2012. Once he saw the GFC response, he's like, I'm out. So I talked about this era of Fed dominance. Federal Reserve was going to dominate monetary policy, public policy as it relates to money itself within the domestic United States. And it was going to cooperate in a subservient world to everybody. This global offshore dollar standard that it proliferated. Kevin Warsh was the opposite of that. He's not a Keynesian, he's a monetarist. And you saw that at his first press conference almost two weeks ago now. But he came out and he said we're getting rid of all these things, the dot plots, forward guidance. What is this whole like, we're getting into like jargon here, but forward guidance is this monetary. It's a central banking policy framework. It's, it's a 2000s era development. Like this wasn't handed to us like on the stone tablets at Mount Sinai, right. This did, this is new. We, we literally made this stuff up in very recent history. But the idea is if you, if the central bank communicates to capital markets what it intends to do with short term interest rates, the rest of the livings out there, the private sector, banks, et cetera, but also households, businesses who make credit borrowing decisions with their real economic activity. If the Fed can just be upfront and telegraph with these dots what the interest rates are going to be for the next three years and then longer term it'll be a self whatever reinforcing reality and we'll just spin this into like the castle will just build itself up in the sky is kind of the framework. It's truly just wizard of Oz bs, but it really is like part of your central bank dominance framework. You really believe that? If you as a central bank dominant thinker, if your economic models and your DSGE econometrics, all of this stuff, what you say GDP is going to be, what's unemployment going to be, all this stuff, they're all wrong by the way. They never play out. Their track record is terrible. For the 10 or so years that we've been doing this. These were Bernanke inventions, the dot plots, I'm talking specifically, but it's all like Tinkerbell clapping for fairies. If we all believe in her, this will work out. Kevin Morse comes in on day one. So think of him as the new manager coming into an existing operation or a new coach coming in to coach a sports team is the way I framed it on my podcast after we saw that first press conference. What you come in to do if you want to instill change in an organization that maybe used to be great or was a winning or functional organization and it's gradually slipping and losing, its a good to great framework. Well, you're not even great anymore. You're slowly just figuring out ways to explain away your lack of success or losing. If you're coming in as a new manager into that environment, if you just try to change processes whole hog, cold turkey, all of that almost guaranteed you're going to run into resistance. The people staffed around the building are from that old organization. So if you come in and try to change things and tell them what not to do, they're going to reject you. Right? So what he does is he comes in, he says, number one, we're not doing forward guidance anymore. We, we still did the dots. Everybody submitted a vote, but I made it clear I didn't submit a vote or I didn't submit a dot, which as a leader, what you're doing, you're modeling behavior and you're telling people, say there's 11 other people who are voters at this meeting. You're literally showing them. As time goes on, it's like, well, if you don't want to do it, I'm the manager around here. I'm the one who would hold you accountable. So if you don't do it, what I'm telling you is like, you're not going to be punished for not doing this. And then over time, same way like sports rosters or like they'll, they'll, they'll transition over time. Same way like you're going to see new people come in who are more aligned with the view of like where the dollar is going that we talked about. And this reform that's happening down to the structural level, at every level of the dollar and you'll get new staff at plays, right? So the players playing with like Victor Wembanyama this year, like go through an offset. You're going to bring in new players that play with him and do what the coach wants to do. And so it's a slow process, but what we're doing away with is this forward guidance mumbo jumbo, which is really what it really is. It's backstop. It's ammunition for the Fed to do all of the things we talked about, qe, ZIRP and then accommodative fiscal stimulus to support this offshore dollar framework that's all being thrown on the wayside. And then slowly you're going to see a less Fed centric monetary system within the United States and it'll get back to being a lender of last resort specifically for money markets or short term commercial paper markets or sofr or enforcing these policy interest rate corridors within those overnight capital markets that we talked about that were so important with LIBOR to sofr. All of that.
- [111:09]
B
That's interesting. So your take is they've kind of brought Wash in. They're going to build the team around Walsh and it's not that he's going to necessarily end the Fed, it's they're going to drastically reform the Fed and its sort of powers.
- [111:22]
A
Yeah, exactly, exactly. So it'll be a totally different. Like the Fed is changing, changed. We talked about the dollar going through all these different metamorphoses over the history of the United States. The Federal Reserve act of 1913, the Fed we had in those eras. It's not the Fed we know today. All you had was the regional banks. With the Federal Reserve act you got this, the Washington D.C. the mothership fed in the 1930s under FDA are and then it just became this centralized behemoth that it is today. But that was a process to get there. So we're going through one of those processes. So as we change this, as we just re architect restructure this dollar financial system, the Fed's role will change. So the way I think about it, there's $3 right now there's all right, the easy one for bitcoiners to understand is the stablecoin dollar dollar. But then there's also two flavors of the stablecoin dollar, right? There's Genius act compliant which are going to be backed by T bills and there's going to be non Genius act compliant which is like old tether that's going away. But stablecoin dollars with Genius act, they're anchored into this onshore system through the treasury bill. So that's key. And then you've got the onshore dollar. That's our US Commercial banking system system. Right. It's your Fed wire members. You could also say like credit unions in the United States, there's some other entities involved but like the Fed is the king of the hill. And then the offshore dollar is this hodgepodge of just purely liability based dollars where your dollar is only as good as the credit worthiness of your counterparty. So like let's say you're HSBC Hong Kong or something like that or whoever like, and you've got all these money center jurisdictions, like the big ones, Tokyo, London, Frankfurt, I mean New York would be the western hemisphere sponsor. And you got all these secrecy jurisdictions like the Cayman Islands, Panama, Gibraltar, Dubai, which are like part of that network, but that offshore dollar. So what you're actually doing here, if you read the history, all of this, you're actually like the name of the game is to be able to enforce par, like enforce your hundred cents on dollar, your claim. Same way that stretch is trying to defend par measured in a hundred dollars, right on its perpetual preferreds. All of these dollars are going to be tasked with maintaining their hundred cents on the dollar. So if you think about the stablecoin genius act, you're defending par by anchoring to the treasury bill, which is a short duration treasury bill. And they limit, you gotta be backed one for one stablecoins outstanding with treasury bills in custody onshore. So there's a good mechanism for defending par versus algorithmic stablecoins would be an example. Say you want to try to make a US dollar but you're not going to interact with the American banking system. Well, good luck. We've already seen what algorithmic stablecoins do. You can't defend them, it's very hard. You got to over collateralize all this stuff. But at the end of the day, it's a very tough game. You're fighting a losing battle. Okay, so the onshore dollar, you got the Fed wire banks, they have a very robust mechanism. This is why your JP Morgan$, your Wells Fargo dollar, your hundredth smallest bank in the United States, if they're a Fed member, they all because you have the Federal Reserve System, they've got a defensible mechanism for defending par their 100 cents on the dollar. Now if you're offshore, you don't have access to the Fed. This is where you need your treasuries, right? You need that dollar flow which is draining out. The US is exporting treasuries to the rest of the world. But what it's actually doing is it's leaking, taking economic value from its own real economy to the rest of the world to prop up the offshore dollar. So if you're, let's say some Cayman Islands bank, you've got to reserve a whole bunch of treasuries to Backstop all those IOUs, those liabilities you've underwritten on your own balance sheet to keep your money good. And it's a market, it's a vicious market, right? If these arbitrageurs can Spot weakness. Like, if you've got a hundred billion dollar prize just sitting there like a sport animal, these people hunt this and they'll go and they'll attack you and they'll extract your hundred billion dollars of weakness and they'll put it on their wall. I'm not kidding. This is how the game works. It's a poker game. You lose the hand, hand, there go your chips. So the offshore dollar, they now have to defend par, right? And that's where it gets hard. And that's why you follow the tick reports. All this stuff you see, like, all right, who's buying treasuries? And yeah, so that's going to be the name of the game these next few years, especially as what this administration is doing. And when we say that the Trump administration, it's also the military, right? Like, like, if you think about this thing as a giant game of risk, I don't think Trump is the only one playing, what is he, 4D, 5D chess or whatever. And he's just the only one playing this game. It's like, no, the generals, the war planners, they're the ones actually organizing strategy. And the President has to get it and understand it and ultimately, as commander in chief, make the go, no go calls. But there's, there's generals being fed the playbook. Yeah, there's a war college, all of that. And then the same thing for the capital market side. Like, there's definitely, like the astute players, they, they know how this money game works. They've designed this strategy. They've been doing it since before Trump even, you know, came down that escalator in 2014. So there, there's, yeah, there's a lot backing this. I guess we'll just stay say that. So there's a totally different trade. And that's where I think the framing is. Like, can you stop this train? If you're the offshore dollar, you've got to defend against this train. And I mean, if you have to place chips on the table, you've got the onshore dollar, they've got robust mechanisms to defend and also a capable military. They've got the stablecoin architecture set up ready to go. You don't just pass a major piece of legislation that changes the dollar framework and you're just going to say, as history plays out, is this thing going to be important or not? It's like, no, that's not, that's generally not how this works. Like another famous act. When I flip to that, the History of the Dollar Pieces of Eight by Edwin Vera Jr. For anybody listening, that's your seminal book on the legal architecture and structural framework of the dollar changes of the United States history. But in general, if you see something of that important or that scale coming out of Congress, like, Genius act was in 2025 and all these other developments, we've been following along since the 2010s, but really kicking up with the November 2024 elections. It's like the line when you're looking at screenwriters, Right. If you introduce a gun as a prop in Act 1, it has to show up in Act 3.
- [119:15]
B
3.
- [119:16]
A
So if I'm placing bets here, it's like, all right, this is the way the dollar wants to move. So you want to organize your behavior, your portfolio allocations. I'm a fixed income manager. You want to build along that because that's the tides, that's the oceans, and it's the big picture. Those are the forces you can't change. Same thing with, let's say, bitcoin treasury company. So we haven't really heard this, like, enter the Zeitgeist or the communications, but it's like, guys, your. Your dollar strategy here has to foot to the big picture of. Of what's going on. And, you know, maybe I. I think we're getting that. Yeah.
- [119:58]
B
The really interesting thing to me here is, like, I've had a lot of people on who talk about how, like, the. The dollar Ponzi can't continue. Like, there's going to be a big print.
- [120:06]
A
And.
- [120:06]
B
And it's really like, can it survive? How many more big prints can it survive? All this kind of stuff? And it sounds like you're saying it doesn't matter. The changed.
- [120:15]
A
Yeah, exactly. So same way, the greenback. We're like, well, yeah, can the union just keep printing greenbacks? Well, it's like, well, that's not the right question to ask. It's, can they print and procure the resources they need to win this competition? Right. Versus the Confederacy, or same thing in other conflicts. World War II, can the US and the UK procure through the financial system, can they raise the capital they need to defeat the Nazis and also defeat the Japanese imperialists in the Pacific Theater? That's the question. And I think, yeah, if you're like, Matt, this isn't World War II or the Civil War. It's like the Secretary of Defense just gave you a huge signal. They changed their name to the Department of Defense is now the Department of War. I think that's your tell. That's your pr. Like, they view themselves as at war.
- [121:19]
B
Oh, man, it's so interesting. How are you for time? Because we began for nearly two hours. But I have. I do have more questions.
- [121:24]
A
I'm good. I'm good.
- [121:26]
B
Cool. Because, like, I kind of sidetracked it before a little bit when I was asking you the role that bitcoin plays. And I want to get that a little bit more concrete in my head, like, how bitcoin plays its part in this new system.
- [121:37]
A
Okay. All right. The way I view it, it. All right, bitcoin is like, it just wore it on its sleeve in the genesis block, right? The chancellor's on brink of second bailout of banks published in the Times of London. Right. Like, printing presses are literally down the street from, you know, Lombard Street. And where this problem originated from, Libor, all of that subprime mortgage originations in the United States anchored to, like, variable rate. Libor was the reference rate. What we realized there is, oh, gosh, we can't just squeeze all this, you know, blood from the rock that is the United States economy. It's like, there are limits to this system. We're going to need a new framework. All right, so what was bitcoin like in my mind? Like we've heard it described, it's a solution to the Byzantine General's problem. It's like, okay, dive deeper for me, because that's just joke jargon in my mind. Like, it's. What it simplifies down to is it is a level playing field as a money where any participant who comes in cannot change the rules of the monetary protocol. So what it does enable is a fair playing field for two. Unaffiliated or disinterested parties to come together for an economic transaction and settle together in that base money. And so who are these two participants? Right. Well, think about it. It's like, oh, the oil is leaving Iran and it's headed to China. What are you going to pay in? Well, you got to settle in on money. So at the end of the day, all right, you got the businesses, an oil refiner in China importing from the producer in Hong Kong within the financial initial endpoints of that transaction. You got a bank at both ends. Prior to this, they were dealing, the world was on this global dollar standard, which was running through centralized intermediaries. And what we realized is those centralized intermediaries, over the course of 100 years or longer, they become corrupted. They fail to, like, political influence or capital influence or whatever it is, is the playing field could definitely be tilted from one counterparty away from the other. And so that's what like my mind, that's what Bitcoin showing up in 2008 arrives right at the Lehman collapse. It's like problem solution, right? But what it is is it's that level playing field money that allows for economic trade to take place with, without or by bypassing these centralized intermediaries that, that have become corrupted over time. So if you think about what's going on, this adoption of Bitcoin as, as a reserve asset doesn't happen overnight. It starts off as we know, like early days, it's hobbyists, it's anarcho libertarians and then it moves into, I don't know, crypto bros, whatever. And then at some point we get into like US public equity market. It's the non operating companies like you talked about this before, like Block is actually running a business and accumulating Bitcoin. SpaceX is running a real economic business. Accumulating Bitcoin strategy does have a real economic business and is accumulating Bitcoin. But the tilt has gone very clearly with management's focus. Like in my opinion on the matter or reading this as a third party observer, it's definitely skewed more towards just pure play financialization type of player versus running a real operating business. But I think that like what these Bitcoin treasury companies represented for capital markets integration in the 2020-2025 era, that was part of the process of moving towards more mainline adoption. So what's a signal like in Bitcoin you'd be looking for if this is getting deeper and greater gained into the financial system? Well it's like well first BlackRock launches the ETFs and the Ibit Bitcoin, it's its single largest product revenue line or an individual revenue line at this point. So they see it, they're like oh well we got to get a bitcoin income statement revenue line for the future of our company. Same thing. Morgan Stanley then is like oh we're doing an ETF. This is in the 2026 era. And things like this week you see Schwab, a legacy brokerage which itself at one point was a disruptor of the stock market brokerage industry. The way equity trading used to work, it was basically limited to your high net worth, ultra high net worth families and huge commissions for shares to trade. So it was like it was the wealthy man's game. Like you wouldn't see your Uber driver today giving you stock picks back in 1960 or whatever. Charles Schwab when They came in, they were the disruptor. What he did is he said, oh, we're going to use mainframe technology when get rid of or eliminate back office, you know, pen and paper, ledgers, all of that stuff. Processes for execution and settlement of, of trades for our clients. So instead of $100 per trade, we're going to, we're going to charge 7. The industry was like you idiot, you're killing, you're going to kill the, the, the, the golden goose. What are you thinking? No, they hated him and he, he did it. And what he actually shows is by, by brand cost down, you actually get more trade and you expand your market. As you know, instead of just wealthy business owners in your town or maybe a few people in every city having access to buying stocks on the New York Stock Exchange, you now have Robinhood. Well, that's where we go is the logical endpoint. There's a whole different geopolitical bag of worms to unpack there. I do have a take on that, but let's not go there. Cut it down to seven. But you get this massive market and boom. It's just wow, the pie is way bigger. And it's like yeah, I brought you 10 golden gooses where you had one before. But Charles Schwab in the last few weeks they opened up trading of not Bitcoin ETFs like for their client base. Now they're letting their customer base buy UTXOs directly. I haven't piloted their product but I don't know if you can withdraw to like a self custody wallet. But that's a huge step. Right? So you're cutting middle men like exposures in that hot between the actual beneficial owner. Now there's no BlackRock, there's no ETF wrapper that you have to buy like if you're a Charles Schwab client to get access to your bitcoin. And that's a huge tell on where the US securities market is going for the years ahead. So this went kind of under the radar and financial media, but it's a big deal in the back end, like the back office side of the financial industry. So the way corporate bonds used to settle prior to 2022, they settled T +2. So if I bought a bond today, on Wednesday, June 2024, we would actually not settle the transaction until Friday, Friday morning open a business. Right. And this is the way it had been for.
- [129:20]
B
That's like this podcast. This is podcast T plus two.
- [129:23]
A
T plus two.
- [129:24]
B
Yeah, it'll be out on Friday.
- [129:26]
A
Yeah, awesome. But in 2022 we shrunk the time for back office settlement of corporate bonds and Basically all non US treasury bonds used to trade T +2. We shrunk that to T +1. This April and May you saw all the leading exchanges in the U.S. securities market. So NYSE, NASDAQ, CME, they said they're going 24, 7 trading with real time settlements. So you can see where the puck is going here. So the whole tokenization trend, right? So if you look up like the real world assets tracking, what does Davos man want to do? He wants to tokenize everything. Like that timberland and the Canadian, whatever, Alberta, British Columbia, all that, tokenize that, that becomes the collateral for this offshore system which won't be an offshore dollar system anymore. So instead of Treasuries, we need something else that's being taken away. We need your timber, we need your commodities or it could be we need your equity. So if you go to the trackers, well the number one tokenized security is actually stretch by total assets. Then behind that it's actually your AI plays like tokenized Micron. But what's going on is it's that same way in my framework that anchoring of like the offshore capital market system want to anchor to the US dollar and then kind of squat on that real value being created by the domestic economy. Same thing. So let's say we want to tokenize Tesla shares, tokenize MSTR, tokenize SpaceX, whatever. Like if you look at the graphs on just total capital outstanding in that, but it's the offshore bucket shop of crypto tokenization. It's the replacement plan for this offshore dollar. And my understanding of what's going on, what the US capital players are saying is like no, no, no, no, no, no, no, you're not going to disrupt us here. Nasdaq, nyse, cme, they're going to match you feature for feature on liquidity. So they're going, we'll allow 247 trading, will allow near real time settlement. So your brokerage coming on on bitcoin, what do you get with bitcoin? Bitcoin is your, it's not yet your base money. We have to work up to that. It'll take at least, I mean thinking decades to get there. But if you're thinking about 247 trading and liquidity pairs, you need that, you need Satoshi's solution to, to settle frictionlessly on that level playing field in real time to accommodate that tokenization. But what it really means is like 24,7 near real time settlement of securities and trading, liquidity, all of that. And then the other thing you see is this adoption of prediction markets, right? So Calci, Poly Market, all that stuff. Stuff. There's also huge developments there with the cftc. And you can see this. Like a few weeks ago the cftc, the US regulator for commodities, gave Kalshi the approval to launch their own Bitcoin perpetual futures product. And that actually hit the stock prices of the legacy players in the U.S. so CME Intercontinental Exchange, they were down like 8, 10% on that news. My read on what happened there is kind of the legacy incumbents, their shareholders realized like, oh, we don't have a moat anymore. The disruptors now are going to encroach upon this territory. So we're going to have to respond. And they have equity exposures, they're investors in Polymark Cowsie. They see where the puck is headed. But you can kind of see slowly this thing coming together and it's going to go extremely fast because like the 247 trading for commodities, like in July, Comex is going to start settling gold futures, 247 for the micro contract. And then oil starts like the next month. So those are your two biggest commodity pools for liquidity, most important commodities and hard commodities. In the real world, CME is already there. And what you see with these, what do you call, prediction markets, whatever, which are just starting to really, the growth is huge. If you just look at the chart, the assets involved in all this complex, it's just like you could see, it's like, oh, this is like the Internet in the 1990s and this is where capital is going. If you look under the scene at how polymarket works, right, they're binary contracts and it's a hundred cents each. The person with the long they own, yes. The other counterparty owns, no. They add up to a hundred cents on the dollar. That's all there is. And the way polymarket works, I found this very interesting. Like they're funding in stablecoins, not the us. The US app is just a sports betting app. It's very early on. But what they do for the global market, for polymarket, you fund in USDC and then each counterparty in a given contract is fully collateralizing their position. Let's say it's. What is it 100 cents for? Yes. No. I don't know. Big event, England wins its next World cup match. Yes. Maybe they put in 60 cents. No, puts in 40 cents. That's 60 cents of stablecoin, adds up to 100. The exchange here just takes A fee they're not. As opposed to CME which is fractional reserve you put down could be like 10 cents of margin. And this is where you get the basis trade. All these carry trades. You post your treasury as collateral, you buy 10x that you lever up and you ride the carry magic money tree with the poly market world and where prediction markets are going stable coins, all of that. Think about this. The long and the short. The contract is fully collateralized. They're funding in a genius act stablecoin which is reserved one to one with treasury bills. So if you think about the hoops that these positions where does the counterparty go? Start off long or the short. You got 100 cents on the dollar that's sitting in circle USDC. Behind that is a treasury bill and there's some yield generated on that like I don't know, 3.6% today. And that yield is being passed to all of the participants up this value chain. So if you go look at polymarket what they're actually doing to incentivize the build out of volume they have these special contracts or events like 2028 elections or Bitcoin prices one one of them where they'll pass through the interest on those T bills to grow liquidity and build up the market share. So it's part of this stablecoin adoption story and this just want the audience to know hear me out. It's like am I a stablecoin maxi? No, these are all it's IOUs all the way down. But what I'm talking about here is a system like a framework that gets us to that end stage. I think that everybody on the what bitcoin did audience wants to see which is a financial system if it's not hyper bitcoinized and we're not all settling in sats. Well at the next best thing would be a financial system where your counterparties at the end of the day have to reserve and a sound money they have real skin on the game. And for a base money behind their swaps, their collateral, all of that if they get it wrong or they try to bend the rules and steal purchasing power from the rest of the market that they're not entitled to that there's no bailout coming and they'll have to post a hard collateral and risk losing something of dear important which is your UTX those.
- [138:05]
B
So bitcoin ends up just being sort of the base layer of everything. The base layer of the financial system. Yeah.
- [138:13]
A
And then the answer is like what timeline are we thinking on Right. Because if you're thinking about a dollar order and you're trying to, you can't cold turkey this post World War II system and this framework and just move straight to, hey, we're fully on Bitcoin. And all of that value tied up and stored in the hundreds of trillions of dollars has just evaporated overnight. That's where the read When Money Dies about what happens to a society when that happens. You probably have it on the bookshelf.
- [138:39]
B
I actually recently bought it. I've not read it yet.
- [138:41]
A
Okay. It's not a good tale. So you don't want to live through that. You want to work through this. It's like the Indiana Jones scene where he's swapping out the idol he's after with the bag of sand. It's like you want to do that to the best degree possible because there's a lot of people capturing drowning. They've saved their purchasing power in this system. And if they get rug pulled, go look at Weimar Germany. I did a big deep dive on Bismarck because I was looking into Social Security. Otto von Bismarck in Germany created the first nation state level public pension scheme or mandatory retirement savings scheme. I asked, okay, well, it's probably not in survival anymore. How did it fail? Because everybody who's looking for Social Security is like, all right, how does it fail? Right? You look at what Bismarck did. It was actually the loss in World War I and then the Weimar hyperinflation, that it didn't actually totally kill the pension system, but for that generation. They rinsed their claims, they wiped out their purchasing power, and what you ended up with was your grandmothers all lived their end of life period in complete destitution. It's just not good for societies to go through that social breakdown. Like once you get in that state. If you look at the Russian Revolution, like the October Revolution, it almost happened in Berlin coming out of World War I as well. That's where the Bolsheviks come in, the disorderlies. If you think this Mamdani situation is bad in New York right now, just, oh, wait and see what happens. If you have a complete monetary breakdown. It is, it is very difficult to defend city hall, all of the governance institutions away from what are ultimately, I think most of society would agree, the people we don't want holding the keys to the car. All right? So if you can do this and preserve broad system stability over the course of, let's say, decades, or conduct this handoff over a generation or two, you can get through your society, your civilization. We can get through this process without face planting. And the problem, the entire global economy talked about this starting as the Western allies coming out of World War II, running this coalition. The other side of that was the Russia, the USSR that's collapsed, collapsed. We've incorporated China, Japan, the whole world is in this basket. So if this old system just base plants here and we're like oh dollar's going to hyperinflate tomorrow. It's like okay, but you do realize that is going to be extremely costly, disruptive, chaotic, random. Good luck defeating the Marxists, the Bolshevists, all of that versus if you can do it and maintain stability, we can actually get to that world we want. And we actually don't have to go through a century of humiliation. Like a wasted century, something like that. So the way I'm seeing this play out, this dollar transition, it's happening. I'm not a fanboy cheering for this. It's like no, I can my take reading the players like genius X stablecoins were going that way. That transition away from the offshore dollar towards the stablecoin dollar and then the reformat of US onshore regulation, all of that is happening. And at the same time from these same figures, like Scott Besant, I mean not just in his testimony to Congress, like he was at the pub key Washington D.C. opening night. Like someone spotted him in a photo. It's like oh there's signal there. Kevin Warsh also, I mean he does some crypto investments, all that stuff. But I understand it, he's, he's favorable to bitcoin as well with his other shitcoiner bags as I understand it that he has capitalized and made investments into. But yeah, the way I see it, and Congressman, we have a ton of congressmen who are supportive of Bitcoin and 10 years ago that number was probably exactly zero. And we don't have 215 votes at this point I don't think. But we have more than than 22 sponsors on that bill I think was the last I saw. So this is that process playing out. It's not a guarantee that we get bitcoin in this process. We may end up, I don't know, stablecoin, shitcoins, all of that and we short circuit ourselves. We have to actually go out and make it happen. So this is a global audience we're talking to, but this November election, we're 2 hours and 17 minutes in and this is the payload. Like I know it's hard right now to see what's going on. Geopolitically we thought we were getting out of forever wars. What are we doing in Iran? What are we doing in Venezuela? It's part of this fourth turning. But the biggest thing we have riding on this is like, we need to. If you want that, that, that strategic bitcoin reserve and you want the dollar system to go this way and lean into bitcoin coin, we have to elect the Congress to make it happen. And that is the straw that stirs the drink at the end of the day. Like, it's a, it's a United States. Like we're living in a multipolar world, but the United States is. Maybe it's going above the line. I don't want to offend anybody and say, like, it's the, it's the biggest, most important player, but it is, it is. Yeah, yeah. So if we do that, then it'll put us on that trajectory towards that bitcoinization endgame that I think most people listening here to WBD would agree they want to see in the world.
- [144:47]
B
Matt, this has been unbelievable. This is the best explainer of the transition to this potential new future that I've ever heard. It makes me so bullish on bitcoin, the fact that we're sat at $60,000 right now, we're still so early, there's so much winning to do.
- [145:00]
A
I agree.
- [145:02]
B
At the very start of the show, you were talking about how you really don't want to position yourself during this transition. You don't want to be way out on the risk curve. Bitcoin by the market is still perceived as being very risky. I think if you understand what bitcoin truly is, you don't necessarily see it as risky as that, but how do you think it will sort of perform through this transition? What do you think happens to bitcoin? Hmm.
- [145:25]
A
So the name of the game here, you gotta realize, like back in the 2000 and tens, right? I was young, had no capital. I was selling bitcoin for, let's just say, like payoff, student loans, things like that. Like, things I wish I didn't have to do and could have held those early stage bitcoins that I no longer have those cost basis. So what I would say so early on in those days, I realized, like capital was year, but I didn't have the ability to hang on to those UTXOs, those decisions. If you're young right now, like, you realize if you're parting with your bitcoin or if you're buying a credit claim on bitcoin or someone else's IOUs and they'll pay you some percentage of the bitcoin and they'll reduce the volatility for you. I think over this whole process what we're learning, we're all fighting over those 21 million UTXOs. Those and I mean fighting literally in some sense, right? Iran, if you look into it like their cost of energy. I don't know if this is accurate or not, but once when their oil was sanctioned, their access to the dollar system shut off. Oil was trading at the equivalent of like 12 cents a gallon in Iran. So they just like dirt cheap energy at that price. Like plug in your bitcoin miners. Doesn't matter if it's 60,000 or down 50% in a drawdown, it's still the highest and best thing you can do with your stranded energy resources at that point at any price of bitcoin is plug them in, mine the bitcoin, get a hold of those UTXOs. So I think, yeah, we talked about what do you do as an individual here. Name of the game. I know it feels hard in this cycle and I think, I think whatever happens to these treasury companies, a lot of people got caught up in that. If it gets worse from here. This is June 24th when we're recording this. It was a bad day on the equity or the common equity, the preferred shares across the complex. So I don't want to kick any of these management teams while they're down. They've got a knife fight in the alley they need to get out out of. But whatever happens here, people should like realize those bitcoin you own, you hold custody of. And even if you can't manage your keys yourself, if you don't want to manage a hardware wallet, there are other collaborative custodians out there who can give you access to keys and make sure what you own is not paper bitcoin at the end of the day. So as this process goes on, it's going to take years. We're going through one of those bear market values. For a lot of people this beating we're taking is going to be extremely hard to hold on to your UTXOs through and that's the definition of bear markets. If it were easy to hold for the long term term, we'd all, you know, we'd all be in yachts and all that stuff. Right? So I think, yeah, just that, that mindset, I know some of our friends say at Matt o', Dell, stay humble, stack sats, it's going to be an extremely volatile geopolitical process as well. I know we have that MoU sign between the US and Iran. What it really is, it's 60 days. We have to get to the next stage of this and it's over. Like the nuclear question, like that has to be settled. I don't see that getting done by 60 days. So all of this volatility, all of this chaos, I hope it's resolved. But I'm preparing. My base case is like, we're not through it yet. So, yeah, batting down the hatches, everybody plan for the long term. And at the end of the day, yeah, you see in the bear markets, the drawdowns go on. X. All of the non bitcoiners, they're dunking on us right now. Now. But I think one of my friends, Parker Lewis put it well back when FTX collapsed, day of, we were at a conference, Pacific Bitcoin down in Southern California conference that no longer exists. Just tells you how fast these things move, how much happens in a short amount of time. But I was down there, we were working on a business deal and FTX collapses. I go, this is terrible. This is so bad. This sets bitcoin back for. And Parker's like, no, no, no, no, no. I see a different, totally different way. This is fractional reserve bitcoin. We're getting liquidated at all points in times. The way he thinks about it, someone has to own those 21 million units. And we're all just trying to get our claim, maintain our claim, own as many of those as we can over time and be able to hold onto them too, because defending is also part of the game. So, yeah, that's what I would, I would say as, as the, the end state to this. And then also there's agency. I know you had Simon Dixon on and recently, and he went deep into this and yeah, he has some coverage. You know, intelligence community, all of that stuff. I don't get down in the weeds, like to the full degree. But I think where I would say I disagree with him is in his framework. He just kind of puts it aside that there's no, you can say the sovereignties movement for each one of these nation states. But even more important is the American sovereignties movement, which I think is going on. And any given leader, like you can say, if Trump is your figurehead, he may be compromised, he may not. So don't ever put all your chips in one man. We have yet to have a George Washington arrive on the scene or an Abraham Lincoln arrive on the scene. In my reading of what's going on. But this idea that we as the electorate, the people, we have no control over or no agency in this process, I think we're actually a lot more powerful than you think. And what we've seen take place in the the pull of the center of gravity of the US dollar away from that offshore dollar, away from London, towards the domestic United States. And it sits in New York now as the center of power. But within the United States itself, that power center is also decentralizing. You have Dallas spinning up, the Texas Stock Exchange. You have Miami spinning up as a major capital market center. A lot of the finance industry is moving down there. Citadel, everybody's setting up their offices down in Miami. So Even within the U.S. the capital markets, the center of gravity is distributing as well. So my point there for people, I do think Americans, you have agency. You've got the most important government structure in the world where the people are the sovereign. No other constitution has that framework at the base level. And I think, yeah, this is the time to not just lose conviction in bitcoin, but don't lose your conviction in America itself. We're celebrating the 250th anniversary. I know you're not an American, Danny, but we have worked out to do. So let's get out there and go do it. So yeah, it's a bear market.
- [153:10]
B
Amazing.
- [153:11]
A
I love it, man.
- [153:12]
B
This has been awesome. Before we close out though, just tell everyone where they can check you out on substack podcast everything that you're doing
- [153:19]
A
all right on X my handle is levered USTs. It's just a play. Just took the handle. It was free real estate. Can't believe it. But yeah, the offshore dollar system, it's just leveraged USTs all the way down. That's where you can find me day to day. And then my business partner Cameron Atsuka and I do a weekly podcast where we just take the biggest news stories of the week, we crunch them into one update, try to get it done in 30, 45 minutes and give you the real time update on all these things and try to get an audience the core of what's going on in the big picture developments. And that podcast is mindprint or YouTube channel substack. You should be able to find us just about anywhere on that one.
- [154:01]
B
Awesome. I'll make sure all the links are in the notes. One of my favorite episodes I've done in such a long time. Thank you so much, man. We'll have to do it again at some point. Maybe I'll come over and we'll do it in person next time.
- [154:11]
A
That sounds awesome. Thanks, Danny.