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- [00:00]
Michael
He goes back to first principles of finite scarcity. Because at the end of the day, it goes back to, can Bitcoin credibly enforce the 21 million fixed cap supply? If it can, then it'll have value in the future. If it can't, then it won't. But nobody ever gets to that basis, including Drucken Miller. So this guy understood that. The other thing that's always interesting about him and where I think Lou Grohman come into it, is Paul Tudor Jones anecdote was that somebody put it across his desk back in 1718. And he looked at the UTXO set and he realized that when it retraced 80%, there was this insane number that never sold. He's like, that doesn't make any sense. These people are either crazy or I'm missing something. And it reminds me, very similar to different framing, but similar in what Luke Roman said, this is a currency problem. That conviction grew from there.
- [00:44]
Paul Tudor Jones (clip)
What you're telling me is that music is about to stop and we're going to be left holding the biggest bag of odorous excrement ever assembled in the history of daftism.
- [00:57]
Jackson
1974-1987-9297-2000, whatever we want to call this. It's all just the same thing over and over. We can't help ourselves.
- [01:08]
Brian
I say when we sell. Hey, okay. I say when we sell.
- [01:17]
Jackson
We are back. We are live. It's the last trade. We're live in Vegas. Brian Michael. Gentlemen. How are you doing?
- [01:25]
Brian
This is the penthouse suite right behind me. This is. Yeah.
- [01:29]
Jackson
Brian traveled with his art to Vegas. That's how important it is to him to have that backdrop.
- [01:34]
Michael
There's actually a story that the audience doesn't know about where we all got together. Maybe the first time meeting in person was the launch in Vegas. This was 2023 at Money20. And we did have a penthouse suite, but we were a young bootstrapping firm, so there was limited rooms, and some people we won't name slept on couches facing each other or not facing each other. The Vegas has a special place. I actually didn't tell the guys, but I called Venetian late last week because there's so many people asking if we're going to be there. And I was like, what kind of. What kind of penthouses do you got? And it was, you know, inflation's really hit. I think the rooms back in 2023 were 2000. They were like $4,500 a night. So anyway, we. We. We're not. We didn't Go to Vegas. But we've been busy. It was a busy five days, probably world setting, five days for onramp. As far as the onboardings from the finance, a lot of people that were listening reached out saying this was the thing to help them at least start in setting up to trade or multi institution. I think we saw a lot. I mean, we didn't think. I don't think we saw a lot of deposits. I think a lot of folks have been waiting for us to release some of this stuff so they can unify a lot of their just kind of bitcoin financial service life. So appreciate everyone out there. And then the last thing just to call out is Genesis is still out. So anybody that wants to sign up got all the swag. I'm actually picking up the shirts today. Parker, I gotta go stop by his house or wherever I'm meet him to get the books. But I'm going to be personally wrapping these things up. So if, if for nothing else, you just don't like my takes specifically on stretch, if you go sign up for finance, you're basically going to have me with duct tape. It's not really duct tape. We got a nice on ramp package. Putting together all the books and shipping them out personally one by one.
- [03:18]
Jackson
Yeah, that's probably the best way to spite Michael. So if you don't like him, definitely sign up for on ramp finance.
- [03:24]
Michael
It doesn't spike, though. That's the thing. It's like you got bitpaint out there. He might sign up. I think he might need a little bit of like, education on like bitcoin game theory centralization. So I offered anybody that's following him, he's been, you know, pumping up our business, that they can sign up, get extra sats. I'm not actually going to say the code because your listeners, you're pretty savvy. So if you go find it on Twitter and you find his code, there's actually more SATs than TLT than TLT.
- [03:52]
Jackson
All right, let's get into it this week. We got a lot to cover. Trying to get the image of Vegas in 23 back into the memory hole. That was something I had closed out of my memory.
- [04:04]
Brian
So good times.
- [04:05]
Michael
That was one of the best times. It's always. It's always the early days. You. You forget at the time. They feel a little bit uncomfortable.
- [04:11]
Jackson
But that was actually the sickest I probably ever been in my adult life. I came back from that trip and it was two weeks before my wedding, and I was just. I was out of Commission wasn't good.
- [04:20]
Brian
Worth it. Worth it.
- [04:21]
Michael
We had Asian. We had Asian, like at 12 o' clock at night. 1 o'.
- [04:24]
Brian
Clock.
- [04:25]
Jackson
Oh, yeah.
- [04:25]
Michael
All right, onto the series.
- [04:27]
Jackson
We're locking in loyal listeners of the last trade. Before we get into this week's episode, if you could do me a quick favor, I would really appreciate it. Leave a like and subscribe to the channel if you have not done so already and leave a comment. If you enjoyed the conversation, let us know. Comments, questions, feedback. I will respond to each and every one of them. Thank you for being here and hope you enjoyed the episode. I think a lot of the listeners have probably caught clips of this episode with Paul Tudor Jones on Invest like the best. It's a good interview if you have an hour to spare. Seems like a great guy. And of course, one of the best macro traders, one of the best hedge fund managers of all time. Gonna play this clip here real quick, see what PTJ has to say. On the topic of bitcoin.
- [05:08]
Paul Tudor Jones (clip)
And then in 2020, when you saw again all the interventions both by the central bank and the treasury, you just knew that the inflation trades were going to take off. And what was of all of them, what was the best one at that point in time? It was bitcoin. Bitcoin is unequivocally the best inflation hedge that there is. More than gold, because bitcoin is finite. There's only so much bitcoin that can be mined. The problem with it is inflation hedge is if you got into kinetic exchange, there's clearly going to be cyber warfare and anything that you have to deal with electronically is going down, including bitcoin. So strike one. And then secondly, quantum computing. Who knows if and when with AI advancing as fast as it is, that we may actually have quantum computing. Now, quantum computing, someone can come in and can hack any bank and hack anything they want to. So in terms of it being a great inflation hedge, gold increasing supply every year by a couple of percent, Bitcoin, there's a finite amount that can be mined. It's decentralized. And so in that sense, it has the greatest scarcity value of anything.
- [06:28]
Jackson
I wonder, Ryan, what do you think? I call you grimace in the middle of that clip? If I called that.
- [06:35]
Brian
Yeah, the kinetic warfare piece, it's like, well, it doesn't kill bitcoin. Like that's. I think that's kind of a fallacy.
- [06:43]
Michael
Was he saying it killed it or. I thought he was just explaining, like, what could happen if he was explaining
- [06:48]
Jackson
it's a perceived weakness for him, in the instance of cyber warfare, he perceives bitcoin to just be a weaker store of value than gold because of its connectiveness to the Internet.
- [06:58]
Michael
I, I think that's fair. I mean in the sense of like it doesn't kill bitcoin, it doesn't change the UTXO set, but it does prevent a lot of people. Yeah. Like an EMP as an example, may. You may want to hold some physical gold. This is where. Yeah, sorry.
- [07:16]
Brian
Yeah, no, that, that's was kind of my only qualm with it. But no, interesting, some interesting quotes. I. I just appreciate it because I feel like Paul Tudor Jones and Stanley Drunkenmiller were like the two probably earliest, like tradfi, more macro hedge fund guys that got into bitcoin. And I think we talked about this maybe a few months ago that Drunkenmiller sold his bitcoin within the past three or four years. Maybe he still has some. But I think he materially at least trimmed his position and now is all into stablecoins and stuff. So shout out to PTJ for having conviction to hold through, not only be early, but not get shaken out and sell his position. And obviously he's still focused on it because he's thinking about whether it's an EMP or he's thinking about the quantum stuff. He's staying up to date on potential risks. So good to see from him.
- [08:19]
Michael
Yeah, all I can think of is that's what a boss looks like. I mean this guy is one of the greatest traders regarded from Tradfi and he goes back to first principles of finite scarcity. Because at the end of the day it goes back to can Bitcoin credibly enforce the 21 million fixed cap supply? If it can, then it'll have value in the future. If it can't, then it won't. But nobody ever gets to that basis, including Drucken Miller. And so this guy understood that. The other thing that's always interesting about him and where I think Lou Grohman come into it is Paul Tudor Jones anecdote was that somebody put it across his desk back in 1718 and he looked at the UTXO set and he realized that when it retraced 80% there was this insane number, whatever it is, 60, 80% that never sold. He's like, that doesn't make any sense. These people are either crazy or I'm missing something. And it reminds me very similar to different framing, but similar in what Luke Roman said when that similar that same time frame that this isn't this is a currency problem. And that conviction grew from there. Now they, they're traders, so they trade around it. They're very smart, so they're probably making a lot of money trading around it because they just have access to information that we may not or temperament. But he fundamentally gets that, that finite scarcity and then think he references gold because everyone's talking their book and you can imagine his, who he's advising, who he's capital he's managing is in gold. They understand it. It's probably overallocated to gold versus Bitcoin. So he has to reference why he has that position. The last thing I think that's the most important is it's just math. Like there's gold in bitcoin, there has a certain level of scarcity as compared to the rest of traditional assets across all other asset classes. And then that are outside money that you can take delivery and reduce all counterparties. That doesn't exist. It' guy's a big boy. So when you're 65, 70, running real money, you're not buying all this other crap that has you exposed. And so if Paul Tudor Jones can do it, you can too.
- [10:19]
Jackson
One thing he said in the interview as well, he was talking about his early days as a fund manager and the Hunt brothers, who are the brothers that pretty much cornered the silver market. I forget the guy's first name, but he became the richest man in the country, I guess in the world for a brief period of time. And PTJ connects back to that anecdote and that memory from early in his career about the illiquidity of these precious metals markets. So he saw this guy go from essentially he was the richest person in the world to essentially bankrupt in a matter of days, maybe weeks. And he cites that specifically as a trader not wanting to be in a, in a corner, backed into a position where he's not able to get liquidity. And so he didn't necessarily connect the dots back into the bitcoin story because it was a very brief part of the interview. But I'm sure that plays a role in his calculus for how he allocates to bitcoin relative to other other types of, let's say commodities as well.
- [11:12]
Michael
I mean even crypto, right? If he went and had to underwrite bitcoin and then you look at crypto and how can you unwind those positions if you're a large holder, it becomes increasingly untenable.
- [11:22]
Jackson
One other piece I want to talk about on this interview real quick, just because again, great interview, it's got a lot of attention in the past day or two. And the other piece besides the bitcoin clip, the other aspect of the interview that's been clipped a bunch, we don't have to watch it. This is actually the full podcast. But the other point that people are pointing out quite a bit is Paul Tudor Jones talks quite a bit about where equity markets are relative to gdp. And I'll connect this back to bitcoin in a second, but he says that we're at 252% of stock market cap to GDP. In 1929 we were 65%. In 1987 we got to 85, 90% in 2,170%. So we're far above previous let's say bubble periods in terms of the stock market to gdp. He didn't necessarily say that this is a bubble, but he kind of inferred that valuations are stretched. And when you have a forward looking approach to markets, that typically means that returns are going to be diminished into the future. Now where I kind of struggle with this, and he started going into some of the math is if you know 10% of our tax receipts are capital gains, if you have a big mean reversion event in equity markets and call it 30, 35% or so drawdown, then that actually starts to, that starts to impact not only the tax receipts from the capital gains, but then you start to bring into the equation consumer spending. So we didn't go really far down this rabbit hole, but the top 10% of the US is like 50, 60% of consumer spending. So as I was listening to this, I was kind of making the case in my head, well, regardless if the equities go down or the dollar goes down, just for more accommodative monetary policy and a lot of the stimulus that we saw in 2020 repeating at some point in the near future. Either one of those scenarios is actually incredibly bullish for bitcoin because I can't imagine a scenario where we'd actually see a significant correction in equity markets that plays out over a sustained period because we're just so dependent on that part of the economy now. I mean, it affects consumer spending and affects tax receipts directly from capital grade capital gains. And then it actually challenges directly the confidence that investors would have in the US treasury as well. Because if you start to see this fiscal position erode, then the investors that are already starting to move away from US treasury assets may be more inclined to do so at an accelerated rates. I think actually he didn't connect the two in the interview. But I think that's probably the most important piece, at least it was for me, where either one of these scenarios that he was discussing is incredibly bullish for bitcoin long term.
- [13:46]
Michael
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I mean, this ties into what we've been talking about, the whole notion of real versus nominal and how you can kick this can much further down the road than we expect. Because when you're the largest tradfi firms in the world and you're married to a 60, 40, the individuals just looking in nominal terms, how they're increasing, you know, X percentage year over year, but the math doesn't equate to keeping pace in real terms. And so, yeah, it's just, there's no way out of here. You can go up and then think about that. That's only for the people that have traditional financial assets. What about the rest of the market that isn't playing the stock market? They're just going backwards because all that capital coming into juice, the stock market goes to higher cost of services, goods, it seeps into the system and then people's wages aren't keeping up. So it's, it's a, it's a relentless flywheel that's just going backwards.
- [14:38]
Brian
Yeah, 100%. That, that data that you just pulled up is good. It's, it's basically, if you've ever heard of the Buffett indicator, which is like it uses, it can use different equity indices. It's typically the Wilshire 2500, I think, but it's equities to GDP. And it also reminds me of, if you guys remember, there's some chart or infographic that shows 50 years ago what the market cap of gold was relative to what the stock market was. And it's like they were about the same. And now it's like the stock market's many multiples, the size of gold's market cap. So it's kind of a similar story where it's just like, yeah, the equity market has increasingly for the past 30 to 50 years been used as a store of value. Whether that's right or wrong, I guess is kind of a separate question. But the reality is is that now, yeah, it's, it's super integrated, as you were saying, Jackson, into not only the fiscal situation, what, you know, the sort of maneuverability that the government has in terms of tax receipts, but also just for the everyday person, like that is their savings. And so we really can't afford for there to be like a material correction and anytime we've gotten a glimpse of that, you've seen what happens. Like there's efforts to stimulate the economy do some form of QE under a new name to prevent exactly that from happening. And it also just speaks to the overall fragility of this entire thing and why you actually want outside money. Gold or Bitcoin.
- [16:09]
Jackson
Right. And you reminded me of one other aspect to this as well. Another data point that was relative to the conversation that was interesting is so this is the same thing, right? Paul Tudor Jones talking about we're over equitized as a country and ties into. Brian, your point that you made about the Warren Buffett indicator. And so this tweet says, using Fed data, the average investor equity allocation is at 55% as of October 2025, which is at an all time high, at least back to 1945. So the initial thought that I had here was, well, that rationally makes sense if you exist in a world where you perceive your only options to allocate capital are public equities or public fixed income, which is most people 60, 40 portfolio. Naturally it would make sense to have a higher equity allocation and maybe even higher in the context of where we find ourselves the past couple of years where real rates are clearly negative, even if the CPI and data from different inflation metrics are manipulated to say otherwise. So this actually sets up very nicely for Bitcoin, of course, but also this other chart that I saw with gold. So this was a survey bank of America on asset allocation. And you can see here, well, first of all, this is talking about the sleep like a baby portfolio, which is 25% stocks, 25% bonds, 25% commodities, 25% cash. It's having its best year since 1933. I thought the most interesting aspect of this tweet was the bank of America private clients hold just 0.4% of their allocation to gold, despite its annualized 31% annualized run rate. So as this tweet says, it's a glaring underweight. And if you tie it back into this conversation, where equity markets are stretched. But if you're a traditional investor, where do you go? You don't go back to bonds. You don't want to just see your purchasing power get destroyed year after year. So naturally you're going to be seeking out things like gold and you're going to be seeking out things like bitcoin. So this is just like a really nice macro setup for these asset classes longer term.
- [18:06]
Michael
I love that you brought this up because it goes back to Sleep like a baby is like sleep like a baby from the beginning of time is the whole notion of a third of your money goes into money, right? It was gold. A third goes into your craft, your business, and then a third goes into your land. And if you think about it from risk mitigation or management, that is like what you're doing, right? Because you have the capital for the uncertain future, you have the craft that's delivering value, so in case that moves away, you can retain it and then you have your land so you can at least live off of. And I just can't help but go back to like how insane the financialization of the economy where this is just understood that everything gets basically pushed out, away from you and you have to manage this crazy portfolio that's outside of your domain of expertise and control. Because all of these things are external factors that, that are factored in your livelihood and your family's livelihood is dependent on it. It's just a very insane place. We got to that. I think we just haven't all got back to first principles of like, do we have to live in that? Because you can actually it's overused, but you can't and not be acquiesced or reliant on whatever the hell the Fed's going to say or a stock market or the overpriced housing market relies on. You rely on.
- [19:19]
Jackson
Yeah, right. It just takes so long to get. And it's an interesting point you make there, Michael. It just takes so long for people to get there though, right? Because most people are doing the exact opposite of what you described. They're at an employer, their Savings is their 401k. It's in markets that to your point, they have no control over and they probably don't understand in most cases, right? Most people aren't investors. And so what you're describing is so far away from what they're currently doing. But I think it's going to like, that's the direction people have to get to and they're going to be rewarded for doing so sooner than later.
- [19:48]
Michael
And one thing just to add TO that is sayFedeen probably has, if you had to pick one podcast or books or channels, if you listen to nothing else related to Bitcoin, it's that because it's more of just like money and it's not even, I don't wanna call it Austrian, it's just like first principles. How do you think about value? And one of the things he said, and this was, I think in another book, but it was referencing the very first thing after you do a save for optionality is you invest, but you invest in yourself. Because if you invest in yourself, then you can make more money because you're opening your skill set. And I think that's one of the big things we lacked, because when we took the money and then invested into other things, we're effectively like pigeonholing ourselves into optionality, what we do. But if you took that extra cash and went and bought some extra cloud tools or whatever it is, and you increased your mobility, that opens up optionality to make more capital. And then you can ultimately go out on the risk curve if you would like. But you have to first start with yourself. And I think that's a big component to all of this.
- [20:39]
Brian
Yeah, that kind of opens up a can of worms, though, because then it speaks to the basically the faulty nature of what academia and universities had become, because people think by going to a university and paying hundreds of thousands of dollars that they're investing in themselves. That's rapidly changing in terms of, like, what does that degree actually mean? How does that actually allow you to produce value and earn into the future? Like, that's rapidly changing and has been for a while. But like. So I think the other part of that story that you reference is like, people were sold a bill of goods, that that's how you invest in yourself. And when you know that's really no longer the case, basically.
- [21:15]
Michael
Yeah. And the math doesn't check out, whether it's the stock market or academia. If everyone's doing it, then where's the alpha? Like, if everyone goes and gets a degree, then what's. It actually is inverted when you don't have a degree and you have a trade is where the capital is. So it's like you gotta think independently.
- [21:33]
Jackson
Yeah, I agree with that. And so the last thing I want to do before we get into some signal noise is this one other data point I think. Brian, this is from you. I'm not sure if you have any comments, but I want to at least give you some airtime. So Ronnie Stoeferly had this point about. It's actually Citi's take about Bitcoin and portfolios, and he's just talking about bitcoin being incredibly unloved right now. And so, Brian, do you have any thoughts there before we move on?
- [21:57]
Brian
Yeah, I thought this was interesting. Just from the perspective of we're sitting still in the 70k range, nobody's at the bitcoin conference. I would say retail sentiment is still pretty Poor. I would say the average speculator has kind of moved on from Bitcoin. They're gambling on prediction markets, they're waiting for the 247 leverage perps on whatever platform they're going to do that on. While at the same time you have Morgan Stanley launching their etf, Goldman filing for an ETF and then this pretty fair and balanced take from Citi. I won't read the whole thing, but it's basically saying Bitcoin's shown resilience relative to gold and equities amid sort of the Iranian conflict. And it's showing these characterizations of a decentralized asset with limited supply and being a hedge for debasement. It's basically in formal suit speak words laying out the bitcoin thesis. And I think it's easy to lose sight of this that like that is the discourse happening in various tradfi circles. And retail is always going to come later. Like retail is always going to hop on the train once it takes off. And so I would expect to see these types of informed takes on thesis and its relative strength in a period like this from the cities of the world. And so I think it's very encouraging at a time when like you could get pretty pessimistic about the price action or sentiment like this is what's actually going to move things going forward.
- [23:35]
Michael
Yeah, good on them for at least reporting it. And Ronnie, high signal over at Incrementum the I lost my train of thought. It was related to the retail interest. Like what would be fascinating is if you could see portfolio managers allocations or portfolios. Because my instincts tell me that these individuals that are working at Citi are starting to build their own positions way before because they have the ability to before they can start to push others. Because the way they always talk about this is hedging in these small nominal amounts versus really sizing it appropriately because there's too much risk.
- [24:14]
Brian
100% you position yourself before you start selling it to your clients.
- [24:18]
Jackson
They can. Yeah, I think they can. And they can't though, right? Because I don't know what city. Does Citi have a big wealth group or no? Do you know, Brian?
- [24:27]
Brian
I'm not sure. But why, why are you saying they wouldn't be able to do that?
- [24:30]
Jackson
Well, no, I'm not saying they wouldn't be able to or I guess I kind of am. So like think about Morgan Stanley or Merrill. Think about a shop that has a really big wealth management platform. They make so much of their money selling product that are related to traditional portfolios. And so I'm just. I just had a thought where what you guys are saying is true, but there's also probably some nuance in there as well because they don't want to just talk the book against too much of where all the money is made for those firms as well, if that makes sense.
- [25:01]
Michael
Well that. That's what I'm saying. They can't. Like that's the whole point of some of these other larger firms that are sitting on trillions of dollars in assets that are heavily exposed to the 60, 40 that they can't. They can only dance around this subject while they're individuals. Like the people working at these firms are stacking coin. And it would just be an interesting experiment to be able to get an insight into their portfolios to like how they're moving because you can imagine it's starting to move up into the right. Another random thought that somebody needs to develop podcast software where you're just talking and then the AI is like giving you the actual real. Like how big as well. Like imagine we were talking on the right side of building C. CIT well, it shows. It shows Citi's wealth management under assets. Under management.
- [25:45]
Jackson
Then we wouldn't have any. We wouldn't have any interesting takes at that point. The droids would just take us over. That's happening sooner or later. If something happened to you tomorrow, could your family access your bitcoin? Not. Probably not. They would figure it out with certainty. I thought about this a lot. You may feel confident managing your own keys, but are your loved ones. Billions in bitcoin have been lost already because someone died without a plan. With Onramp, inheritance planning is built in directly into your custody setup. Your bitcoin stays segregated and in your control, insured through Lloyds of London and accessible to the people you choose when they need it. Get started in 15 minutes. Book a free consultation at onramp bitcoin.com onramp secured by three controlled by me. All right, so let's get into some signal or noise. I just wanted to do this one real quick from Larry Lepard. You don't need to read through all of this. And Michael is pretty staunchly against talking anything related to the Fed, even though we got some news at the Fed today. But the short of it is. So there's a post here from Larry. I thought it was interesting because he's talking about is going through. That's going to be next. That's going to be on May 15. And what he points out here that I wasn't previous aware of. Brian. Maybe you are since you're closer to these types of pressers is he recently was speaking to the inflation stats. Just he doesn't think they're accurate. He thinks that they're overstated. And he was suggesting using a trimmed mean which throws out outlier prices and is currently printing much lower than headline cpi. And so Larry was kind of making the case that this is teeing up or allowing or green lighting more accommodative monetary policy. He even says here I wouldn't be surprised if there's 100bps rate cut on May 15th. I mean that would be incredibly aggressive. I don't know if I agree with that or not. But the main point I do agree with Larry is the data is going to be manipulated to fit the narrative to allow for there to be more accommodative policy. And then this kind of ties into his big print thesis. He says is it this time around he said yes and no and explains a more nuance here. So if you guys want to check it out, you can find his post. But Brian were even aware about the trimmed mean inflation data.
- [27:58]
Brian
I haven't heard that, but that's not surprising. Like it's just you find a new tool in the toolkit to manipulate the data. Like you know, it makes total sense what Larry's saying here in terms of they want the at least the perception of inflation to be lower so that they can be more accommodative because if inflation, if they, if they acknowledge inflation for what it is and let's say they didn't change how CPI is calculated over the past 30 years, they'd be in a much tougher spot. They would probably be being pressured or at least there would be the perception that they should be raising rates instead of lowering rates. And so yeah, I mean none of that's surprising. I would say 100 basis point cut is probably aggressive, I don't think. I think Warsh is going to have to slow play it a little bit. I don't think he's going to be able to come in and cut that aggressively basically because he will then run the risk of again this is all perception in theory games. But he would then run the risk of being perceived to be just like Trump's little henchman who's going to do exactly what he says. So he's got to slow play it. He's got to maybe do a little 25 basis point cut here or there. Yeah, what do you got?
- [29:11]
Jackson
Michael loves It.
- [29:12]
Michael
I just think of Fugazi. Fugazi. I look, I appreciate reading the tea leaves that you guys are wanting to do that. I think I always feel like find myself defending the whole lack of interest in Fed speak. And it ties back to this that they're always just going to manipulate the things. We see this all the time with the job data, inflation. They peed on your back. They tell you it's raining. Even if the. If inflation's not tempered in whatever way they want, they'll still figure out a way to cut rates. The thing I'm most concerned looking at as a participant in the real world is like, what is the catalyst that they potentially use? We saw Covid as a huge reason to print an insane amount of money. That's the thing that kind of keeps me up at night. That's the thing I think about because that impacts the business, that impacts individuals, that impacts our lives. If, like, is it a war? Is it X, Y or Z? I think that is still hanging out there. My hopes are it doesn't get used because we've already used this in 2020. But that's actually what I'm probably like, more, I guess, interested in or keep an eye out, trying to see around the corner of what's going to be the catalyst. Because they need an actual normie catalyst. Not like this.
- [30:19]
Brian
Because how many Crisis.
- [30:20]
Michael
Yeah. Energy crisis. Because how many people pay attention to, like, the tea leaves there and then that. You're just quelling that area of the market, but there's still a whole bunch of other people. You have to acquiesce.
- [30:31]
Jackson
Yeah, I don't know. I agree with you, but I just had to stop paying attention to the theories of what. What it could or couldn't be in terms of the next catalyst. Because I was just going insane, man. Like years ago. I just. I couldn't do it anymore. So I have no idea. But unfortunately, I think you're right. There's just going to have to be something that would justify massive, you know, massive intervention in markets. Massive intervention, economy. I don't know.
- [30:54]
Michael
I think it's when Jackson wanted to write a newsletter referencing lizards, and we had to stop him. And now, you know, he was just like, maybe I shouldn't pay attention.
- [31:03]
Brian
It was published.
- [31:05]
Michael
It was published. It just wasn't polished from on ra. Yeah.
- [31:07]
Jackson
Yeah. Then I was never allowed to touch the newsletter again. It's all right.
- [31:11]
Brian
All right.
- [31:11]
Jackson
We got to check in. We got to check in and see what's happening in Vegas. Apparently there's some Signal. Apparently there's some noise. Let's check in. We'll see what happens. A big announcement. Strategic Bitcoin reserve is coming in the next few weeks. Patrick Whitney, Was this just the individual who took over for Bo Hines? Do you know it kind of looks like executive director's. Yeah. So Bo Hines Jr. Let's see what he has to say here.
- [31:40]
Michael
It says Department of War.
- [31:42]
Jackson
What'd you say?
- [31:43]
Brian
I think it says he's got multiple Department of War, strategic capital war, all the things.
- [31:48]
Jackson
So he's just. Okay, all right, well, we'll call him Bo Jr on Bitcoin.
- [31:53]
Michael
Did you say Bo Jingles?
- [31:54]
Patrick Whitney
The president signed the strategic Bitcoin reserve executive order last year. And we've gone to work and figuring out exactly the machinations, necessary and legal interpretations that we need to. To get that right and solidify that and protect the digital assets, but specifically bitcoin that we have on the government balance sheet. So in the next few weeks, we'll be making a big announcement. I think we have a bit of a breakthrough there, and obviously that needs to be followed up with legislation. Senator Lummis, Bitcoin Act. Over in the House, Representative Begich has talked about the ARMA act that he has put together. So we need to codify it. But in the meantime, we do believe we're going to be able to take a big step forward from the executive branch side of the next few weeks. That's huge on bitcoin.
- [32:42]
Jackson
As an Brian, next few weeks, what do you think? Is the audit. Is the audit coming?
- [32:47]
Michael
Matching baby weeks?
- [32:49]
Brian
You think it's the audit? Maybe it's the audit.
- [32:52]
Jackson
I don't think it's anything.
- [32:53]
Brian
I think this is just more gaslighting. I don't like. There's. Now there's a new bill, if you pull up that. Connor Brown, who tweeted. Yeah, the American Reserve Modernization Act. So now there's a. Is it a separate bill? Is it replacing the Bitcoin Act? I'm not exactly sure, but yeah, man. I mean, I won't believe anything until I actually see it. I think everyone that's associated with this administration has lost all trust. They said a lot of things. Haven't followed through on basically anything. So hard to. Hard to have a lot of faith in anything they say at this point. And it's also just insane that half the panels at the bitcoin conference seem to be people in the government.
- [33:36]
Michael
Yeah.
- [33:36]
Jackson
I mean, and the Guy Mining Bitcoin 20 years ago, of course.
- [33:40]
Brian
Yeah, that was crazy.
- [33:42]
Jackson
Go ahead, Michael.
- [33:43]
Michael
No, I was just thinking about that. You always get into those conversations like I found Bitcoin in 2009 and I was mining 20 years ago. I look, I'm as skeptical as anyone, maybe overly skeptical. I do think something happens here, but I think it really has to do just with what we continue to say that there is geopolitical consequence for the US to figure out this whole game from the treasury market to dollar to China. And that came out this past week about the UAE moving over from opec. We've already been talking about gold settling for oil. That I think bitcoin is going to play a strategic role. I think it's part of all of this. And if you go down that trail, you could see how it makes sense that they would figure out a way for the US to have a reserve in some capacity for a number of strategic reasons. How they get those we have, but
- [34:37]
Brian
we have like, we have bitcoin. So what's, what is the announcement?
- [34:42]
Michael
Well, yeah, I don't know. I don't necessarily know more.
- [34:45]
Brian
We're, we're market snatch buying like what
- [34:47]
Michael
is my instincts, without thinking deeply here is having a favorable bent towards an accumulation of a stockpile because it's a strategic asset. You kind of saw two weeks ago whatever they pulled out with the Lowry stuff about this is of strategic importance. It probably is a second and third order beginning of how it ends up being seized because you're like, this is geopolitical significance and blah, blah, blah. But I do think this is the track they're going down. I think that there is a machine that's moving in this direction to get it embedded into the US So that's the only reason give some like credence to. They keep putting this stuff out unless they're just completely like, you know, insane and they just like have to go because they, you know, went to the conference, they want to get some.
- [35:29]
Jackson
Because V. Trump's children are. Are running American bitcoin company. They have said you have to do this.
- [35:35]
Michael
Yeah.
- [35:36]
Jackson
I mean a business here.
- [35:37]
Michael
So. So this kind of just ties into a little bit related of how I've just heard anecdotally when you talk to folks in the industry that go to conferences and they come back and how everyone's like beaten down and, and just investors feeling uncomfortable that it really is a true like no man's land we're in because all the things everyone ever wanted in bitcoin, to get it to go to the moon or to get it to be like a name brand investment in Households effectively happened and then it never did any of it. So now everyone's just sitting around like, wait, what the hell else is going to be the catalyst for that? And so I can see how you hear these things. And everyone's just like in this weird spot and they don't know how to react to it because we got everything you wanted and the price is sitting, you know, basically, yeah, this one, I
- [36:20]
Jackson
think this perfectly encapsulates what, what you just said. Crypto will likely go down as the biggest opportunity cost asset of the decade. And it's. You have this tweet here. $100,000 invested 5 years ago in Ethereum is worth $85,000 today. 100k invested 5 years ago in Nvidia is worth 1.4 million today. That's to look at for, for many people. And then imagine the one other thing I have to say, and then go ahead Michael, is the, the other aspect of this is that all these altcoins that people were trading in 2020 and 2021 are just down 99% from their all time highs. And so that is really where the. I mean we know that bitcoin is long term a good place to be. If you bought the top in 2021 at 69, most people didn't do that. Most people are DCA. Right. And so most people are still doing pretty well just regardless of where they got in. But imagine being a bag holder of like pretty much any shitcoin from 2021 to present and then just watching everything else just moon. I mean, that one's got to hurt quite a bit.
- [37:20]
Michael
Yeah, the crypto part is a different story. But I think a couple of things is related to you. And what we talk about is like the whole notion of time in the market versus timing the market. It's why you don't want to be in these other ancillary exposures. You want your BTC because when bitcoin moves, it moves. And there's all those stats around number of days in a year that you're holding it. And that's where also this is going to just tie into one of the most hated rallies. Because this apathy, my background's not in investment management, but I know that this discussed around apathy is the thing that kills is people not being able to sit on their hands. And so all this capital is flowing into these stronger holders, these ETFs, the DATs, and the people are just not holding BTC. So when this thing finally rips, there's just. And you already See this Now there's very few people that actually hold real material bitcoin hanging around from 2117. So if you're holding, it's bullish because when this thing goes, it's going to go and there's going to be a lot of people on the sidelines.
- [38:18]
Jackson
Yeah. And the shit coins got one shot of by the prediction markets as well. So we got the new form of gambling replacing the old. Let's do one more on the conference real quick. Michael, you. You forced me to bring this one up, so you better have a take on it.
- [38:34]
Michael
Look, I shared a few. I don't actually have any huge takes like there. There's a few that we can talk, we can touch on that I thought were noteworthy. There was BL turning on 800,000 merchants. I think they actually rolled out a few other things. There was. I don't even know the firm's name, but offered a bitcoin line of credit up to a million dollars on a card. Their background's interesting because they're like Coastal Ventures backed $100 million plus raised. They started in home equity line, which I don't know how I feel about getting, you know, access to a credit card on your home equity. But independent of it, they came in, which is a bigger name in Silicon Valley. There was like one or two other deals that I thought were just noteworthy to call out. I don't think any of them are like of any insane significance. It's honestly part of the testament of like how long we've been in a bear market that there's like such little innovation happening, such little things that are able because you could actually make the case that Square could have done this also 5 years ago. I don't know what drastically changed outside of like Jack and reorienting the organization around bitcoin because all of these rails, maybe lightning got a little bit better. The one thing I will. We'll talk about on final Settlement. I do think lightspark and Spark are doing interesting stuff because they rolled something out with Visa. Like 100 currency pairs, some crazy stuff. But they. They get it from the sense of. Marcus came from PayPal. He was at Libra. He understood you needed a unified ver universal money, which is bitcoin. But then they understand flows in partnerships. And I thought that probably was the low key, most interesting thing that I've seen come across from the conference.
- [40:02]
Jackson
Tune into final settlement next week. So that was signal, that piece of signal. We said, clearly the announcement.
- [40:07]
Michael
Jackson isn't too happy about any of this shit.
- [40:09]
Jackson
The announcement of the announcement was noise just to be clear. And the reason why there wasn't much to cover I don't think this year on our side for Vegas was just because the most exciting thing for most people is Michael Saylor. And so I don't think we need to get into that topic today unless you really want to. Unless you want to poke the bear. But I think that's probably where most of the excitement is at the conference would be related to the different product suite there at Strategy. Otherwise I haven't really been, I mean I haven't been paying attention at all. That's why I didn't have many licks links besides Bo Jr saying the thing about the announcements.
- [40:45]
Michael
Bojangles, that's his new name. Patrick Woods Bojangles from now on.
- [40:48]
Jackson
Yeah. So that's that. Let's see what else we got here. Go ahead.
- [40:55]
Michael
Well just without going deep on the sailor microstrategy it's worth calling out for anybody that that hasn't been online or on our email you should sign up. There was a few pieces written about just stretch DATs, MSTR and just market structure just pointing out different risks that live within that that stack tomorrow which we're recording today. So when anybody listening tomorrow on Thursday Glenn Cameron, Brian and the team have been working on pretty long report to go deep there because a lot of folks were kind of a little interested in like well what was the methodology or can you expand on X, Y or Z? Had insane amount of responses from Our client base CEOs in the industry happy to be able to just like articulate that. Risks do live within these constructs and they're not all as they're marketed. So if anybody's interested in checking it out, sign up for research or you'll see it on Twitter and LinkedIn.
- [41:45]
Jackson
Boom. If the bitcoin price doubled tomorrow would you feel good about how it's being secured right now? Most people have not really pressure tested that and I get it. I have talked to people who have self custodied for over a decade and others who stayed on exchanges because they could never get comfortable managing their own keys. Both camps have real concerns. That is why we built on ramp multi institution custody so no single company can lose it, move it or use it. Lloyd's of London Insurance inheritance planning built in and a team that can walk you through the entire setup. Get started in 15 minutes. Book a free consultation@onrampbitcoin.com on ramp secured by three controlled by me. All right Brian, I think this was yours. So you're going to tell us if it's signal or noise here. I think it was yours. Oh yeah, Bitcoin hard fork.
- [42:35]
Brian
Good old Paul.
- [42:36]
Jackson
Tell us what's going on here, Brian.
- [42:38]
Brian
Good old Paul. Yeah, I mean this is an interesting one where I'm going to couch some both signal and noise. The fact that this guy is going to fork bitcoin. He wants to do a hard fork of bitcoin. He's calling it Ecash, which is unfortunate because there are implementations and legitimate projects in bitcoin that use Chami and Ecash and he's kind of like taken that name for something that has nothing to do with Shami and Ecash. But basically the idea is like it goes to the kind of what we were discussing last week on this whole discussion around whether or not to freeze Satoshi's coins, seize them in some way and his suggestion is basically yeah, we're going to seize those and then distribute them to investors in my new hard fork. Completely ridiculous. This guy I think isn't very credible, hasn't been for a long time. The only piece of signal from this which I thought was interesting. And Michael, I'm curious if you have thoughts or any knowledge knowledge on this topic of. Because I wasn't really as deep in the bitcoin cash days so I didn't, you know, I didn't receive any forked coins to a bitcoin wallet. But what this post here is describing is like there's basically some risk associated with like attempting to claim forked coins. If there's not relay protection basically associated with those coins, it could get rebroadcast on the bitcoin chain and then you could actually lose your actual bitcoin by attempting to claim the forked bitcoin. So I thought this was just worth calling out in that sense. Like that would be the signal of like be aware of this thing. The fork itself is complete noise.
- [44:28]
Michael
And yeah, it's a good thing to bring up this. Actually I was talking to a person that's been around a while about relay protection and this is again a little beyond my depth. But there's two aspects of this. So with isolating them, there's one related to whatever what Paul's attempting to do with creating a hard fork and then ultimately taking those satoshi's coins and maybe others and then redistributing. I think that this is important to pay attention to. We talked about it a little bit last week that I look at this like a test net for what is probably going to come because if you listen to the narrative of the quote unquote tastemakers and I say that with very big quotes they're already, they already broadcasting or projecting that this is where the industry is going to go. They a leap. They take multiple things and this is really hard for individuals that are just on the cursory. It's the same thing with the DAT stuff. We just like take for granted that DAT should exist when from first principles. A closed end fund shouldn't theoretically trade above M nav unless they're adding it and showing value. But going back to this is a quantum is theoretical. It's not a foregone conclusion. People are working on it. So you shouldn't have to like just jump and accelerate to something that may be less secure but then B that it's just understood that you have to seize and move and effectively steal somebody's coins because you're changing the code, you're changing the governance that people signed up for. But what you're also doing is just putting another theoretical that A they would be hacked, B they would be dumped and C that the market wouldn't be able to absorb it and it would die. So you're taking all of those and that's what's being perpetrated or talked about right now anyway. I think that's, that's the signal I get from this is that like I think people know Paul doesn't have credibility. I think they mentioned his company was like failing. They needed, he needed to spin out some fork and make some money. Whatever. The other side to all this is that replay protection because it's my understanding that if it's like a soft fork and if it doesn't have replay protection, there's a component where you can spend the coins. It would have to be a hard fork if you're going to be able to effectively go and take either coin and market sell. So I have to go dig deeper. We, we need to have somebody on to talk about that. But my understanding is a hard fork would have. Would have replay protection because it would just basically be two separate change and the miners would be following whichever chain that they decided to. I think the broader thing for individuals that's probably the most relevant is you if you're going to work with anybody, like if you hold your own keys, you don't really have to worry about any of this. You can sit back and you can just watch it play out and you can decide if you want to sell. I think what's going to ultimately happen is if you have entities you're working with, you want the titling and the right governance in place. So you have optionality not only for any direction that the chain goes, but also that you're not giving away that governance. I think this is going to be a big deal for ETFs, centralized custody, the DATs of the world, because when you centralize that amount of economic capital, you're given that right away, but you're also going to have to move with that area of the market, because if your bags are so heavily predicated on their living, existing, growing, that. And they decide to go. And you can see where this goes with Coinbase and other large firms that what you signed up for today may be fundamentally different 24 months from now. And I don't think people are that aware of that. And I expect this to pick up more in the coming months. And the biggest thing is, I think there's gonna be sophisticated participants that just sit back and they may not say anything because they don't want to be effectively stigmatized in saying, oh, we're gonna do X or Y. And then people won't do that because I expect people will not start going to certain institutions that may not signal. Like, even from an institutional investor, if you think about what you read in the S1, it's like you have no rights to that. So if you're gonna go allocate in size, you at least want rights to be able to decide which direction you're going or have right, have exposure to both. And you give a lot of that away when you go sign centralized custodian or an ETF or a dad. For sure.
- [48:42]
Brian
Yeah, all well said.
- [48:45]
Jackson
All right, let's get through these next couple things here pretty quickly. I guess that was signal and noise somehow.
- [48:52]
Patrick Whitney
Yeah, the rare.
- [48:52]
Brian
The rare double signal and noise.
- [48:54]
Michael
Jackson, where's your signal? I feel like these topics aren't interesting for you. What are you excited about?
- [48:58]
Jackson
Look, man, I don't do this for myself. I do this for the listeners. So let's.
- [49:04]
Michael
Do you want to talk about your Sunday walks? Because I see that pop up on Sundays with your dog. Do you want to just talk about something related to Jackson's life? Would that. Would that excite you? I want to see your smile, man.
- [49:13]
Jackson
I mean, I. I like walking my dog. What can I say? It's time. Time well spent. Better than monitoring the situation, I'll tell you that much. All right, so you got a couple things here. I'm going to run through them, and then let's Channel whenever is relevant. So we got Charlie Bilello, who is the CIO at Creative Planning. Global inflation rates, they're ticking up. It's manufactured data anyway, so it's much higher than we expect. But. But I don't know, could tie back into what we discussed a bit earlier where there needs to be some sort of catalyst for broader reset or broader intervention in the market. So, you know, we're seeing pressures in agriculture, more specifically food, energy, utilities, et cetera. So one thing to monitor here, this survey and just caught my attention, but it's actually kind of like a terrible survey, but. So I don't know why I'm talking about it, but it's from Gallup and it says the high cost of living continues to top America's list of most important financial problems facing their families.
- [50:09]
Brian
Duh.
- [50:09]
Jackson
Well, yeah, I mean, like that is the actual problem, right? Is like everyone, if prices are higher, then it puts pressure on people financially. But you can see here, high cost of living, energy costs, cost of owning or renting a home and healthcare costs. These are all things that people are thinking about. It ties back into what we said earlier, right, where 50, 60% of consumer spending is driven by the top 10%. The concentration of wealth in the top 1% or 0.1% because of the manipulation of markets post great financial crisis is insane as well. And so you really are just seeing this. You're seeing a lot of pressure on the bottom half of this country and you're starting to see stuff like, you know, wealth, taxes and all that. All that stuff is playing out. There's going to be more and more tension there. And then this is interesting from Willem Mittelkoop. I didn't actually read the research report yet from deutsche Bank. It's 20 pages. I just came across it shortly before we started the show here. But this may be something worth checking out out reading over the weekend and seeing what's going on here. The return of history, Gold, the dollar in the monetary future. And Willem points out in this chart here, the thing that he highlights is the 1990s began with a declaration by historian Francis Fukuyama that humanity had reached the end of history. We argue in this paper that history has returned, but the contest and its leaders will be different. This is the lens through which we think about the resurgence of gold, the decline of the dollar and the international monetary architecture that may await us this century. So this is probably a good read. I doubt that bitcoin is discussed. I didn't control last I can. And we can see what happens
- [51:42]
Michael
while he's doing that? It's just fascinating because, remember, Zoltan came out with this like five years ago. It just takes time. But this is just. It's math and its history. The system is unsustainable.
- [51:57]
Jackson
Yeah. And then one other good one, and there were no bitcoin. Nothing came up in the control f. Last one from Luke Roman. If the world is breaking up into blocks again, then this chart is going back to where it traded the last time the world was broken into blocks. Gold is still one of the cheapest assets on the board. Would need to rise 2 to 3x to mean revert, assuming central bank reserves never rise again. Yeah, I mean, this really ties back into everything that we've discussed. These assets are unloved, particularly bitcoin. No one likes bitcoin right now. I don't even know why people listen to this show. I didn't know that people liked it at all. I thought it was all about strategy at this point. Bitcoin's unloved. Gold is unloved. We saw that in that survey from BofA. 0.4% average allocation from private clients. Really? You see the barbell we've talked about probably in second half of last year with gold, where it's either the sovereigns are buying or you had just like retail lining up at Costco and depleting all. All of the ounce silver and gold ounce coins. But yeah, there's a lot of room to run here. And I think that's why it's just so challenging right now to think about how to allocate everything that we brought. Michael, he didn't have a formal education at all actually, but he's not a finance guy. Right. But Brian and myself went through the finance undergrad, did the Wall street stuff, and all this stuff that we're talking about, it was not discussed at all. So it's like everyone is kind of coming to conclusions at different rates. And people are still trying to figure out, well, what does this all mean? Because it challenges everything that we've been taught.
- [53:26]
Brian
I go work for a gold dealer. He has. He has better education than. Than either of us on this.
- [53:32]
Jackson
That's true.
- [53:32]
Brian
The.
- [53:33]
Michael
This is super fascinating because you can just feel like, you know, the air with these macro analysts calling, but they're just on the fringes of the Internet. And a few things came to mind. One is like, the money was so cooked that, like, people literally had to invest their. Their capital into magic and beans to preserve it. Like, that's just kind of a It's like a corollary to like Eric Case and saying, like, man, the millennials got so pissed off, they just like took the money. Like they just said, we're going to take it all and just create a new one. But the other thing that's really just fascinating is yes, like gold when you think about it. And I hope like maybe these conversations, because anybody listening that's tired of us or me talking about gold, I think the guys were there. But as we just get to so many conversations like this and with individuals and investors and institutions, the solution is similar, the problem's the same, and for a lot of people, gold just makes more sense. But what's interesting from the volatility, right, and the appreciation and keeping par with inflation. But what's interesting is what makes gold unattractive, right, is the fact that you have to physically, if you're going to park all your wealth there now you have a problem with delivery is what makes bitcoin attractive. But the thing that makes bitcoin attractive also makes it unattractive because you can't touch it. And so it makes sense that it exists in this stigmatized world. Because there's the other angle that, that your version of what you said being coming from that area is that like the gold dugs were stigmatized. It's like, what are you, a Luddite? We don't, you don't want to invest, blah, blah, blah. And it's reality. It's like couldn't be further from the truth that this is like the safest asset. It's shown. And there's all these like macro, like charts or directions where Luke will call out whether it's oil, energy production, food, where gold is going to have to go to its 2 to 5 to 10x to to keep pace with sovereigns offsetting what they need in consumer like expenditures incoming and external and going out. And so gold is going to do its thing. I think 5k is just the beginning. But in that world, naturally people will not settle in BTC as well. And that's where you'll see the appreciation, you know, higher.
- [55:41]
Brian
Well said. They're simpatico. They, they go hand in hand. Like that sort of complementary nature is what you just described. And for a lot of people it's just like a natural path. Like it's. In my mind it's a lot easier to understand why bitcoin would matter if you understand gold first. And the reality is like going back to that those B of A allocations, the average person doesn't even understand gold. So it is a helpful, complimentary asset.
- [56:09]
Michael
And the thing for you guys, I'll figure out, we'll do like an offside and I'll get my hands on some. Most people, especially anybody listening, has never put their hands on like 10 ounces of gold coins. Forget about a bar, just 10 ounces, 20 ounces. It's the closest thing you can probably get to magic that exists on the Earth because you have this thing. It's been used for money for thousands of years. But the density, you can't put a price. You can't feel it, you can't talk about until you feel it. And you, when you do that, you can realize, oh, maybe I want some of this. Like, there is some value here. Especially it's been utilizing. It's universal. And so I think, like, we just forget the way humans are wired in our DNA, that this thing's money. It's been money. And the sovereigns are telling you that it's a $35 trillion asset class. It's the largest asset class in the world.
- [56:52]
Jackson
Yeah. We are so far away collectively about understanding money. I'm not going to pull it up. But I saw from James Seyford at Bloomberg, he covered a filing for an ETF that is just allocating to prediction markets. And so just like we can't get further away from understanding what money is right now. We'll try our best. All right. We're coming up on time or actually over on time. But I want to do last take real quick, make sure we do it. I'm going to do mine just quickly. Mine is, is definitely investment advice. Next time the government buys 10% of a company, you go all in. You don't ask any questions. You sell all of your Bitcoin and you go all in. Remember when the government, I think it was in August, September, took a 10% stake in Intel. They're up 350%. What are you doing? You're holding Bitcoin, you're down 50%. You could have been up 350 on intel and then you could have bought way more coin. So my take is next time the government is buying equity positions in companies, it's probably something worth looking at. But then the counterbalance of that is you got Jim Cramer. Intel is such a horse. I have no bear case. So you could just actually disregard everything that I just said. If you want to take the inverse Kramer approach here. What I said is not financial advice, by the way. I was kidding. So that's my last take. Pay attention. To what the government's doing. I will say one other thing, though. I was very bullish last year because I saw Trump. I saw what Trump promised, at least on the campaign trail, and what he was discussing early in his presidency about bitcoin and golden age and all this. And then I saw his family getting involved. Put the meme coin stuff aside for a second. That was, you know, that's a big issue. But I saw his family getting involved in different companies, board seat here, executive here. I thought for sure we would be ripping last year, and I was totally wrong. So maybe you don't want to buy any company that the government takes a stake in.
- [58:51]
Brian
Yeah, it's hard to put aside the Trump coin thing, unfortunately, especially in the normie brain. That seems to be what people now tie not only him and his family to, but also broader crypto when they hear the word crypto. My last take is short and sweet. I'm excited that the bitcoin conference is in Nashville again next year and no longer in Vegas. I think it makes zero sense that they held that thing in Vegas two years in a row. The whole concept of Las Vegas is completely antithetical to saving and wealth preservation. And it really rubbed me the wrong way that it was held there. So I'm happy to see it's going back to national next.
- [59:31]
Jackson
Well, it did make sense.
- [59:32]
Brian
Maybe we'll go.
- [59:33]
Jackson
It did make sense in the context of last year being the conferences. You start dumping the bags on retail for the treasury, and that was at a casino. Right. So that made sense at least.
- [59:43]
Brian
Yeah, I guess you're right.
- [59:44]
Michael
It definitely rubbed Larry Lepard the wrong way. If you've seen any of his tweets on Twitter. Larry Legend. I think the thing I have is checking out. We have a webinar coming up, and it's going to talk about everything we've been doing, launching. I think there's still Genesis spots left, so you can sign up, but if you use TLT, you get more SATs. I forget the number, but it's somewhere. Our. Our ops and finance teams have it. But you get more if you use tlt. But then even if you're not ready, look out for the webinar that's gonna be coming out, because we'll walk through why we're building. I mean, I talk about this a lot. Like, I just genuinely pinch myself when we sit in the position we're in because we know where the market's going, the smartest people in the world. Whatever Jackson pulled up, I wasn't ready for it. But there's like five different tradfi firms and analysts explaining that the world's changing. It's going to sound hard assets. Gold's one of them. Individuals can onboard get a unified experience for dollars, earn rewards on it. BTC and gold that doesn't exist today. I expect that to be the future. But when that becomes the norm, we're going to be so far ahead offering other financial services, mortgages, all the other things associated. So if you're interested in what we've been doing, sign up at least to the webinar.
- [60:50]
Jackson
All right.
- [60:51]
Brian
Good stuff.
- [60:52]
Jackson
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, thanks for listening to
- [60:55]
Brian
this week's episode of the show. If you found the information valuable, please share the episode with a friend or leave a rating on your favorite podcast app. All the links we discussed in today's show will be in the show Notes inside your podcast app. Before we finish, a quick reminder that On Ramp Media is for informational and entertainment purposes only and nothing should be construed as investment or legal advice regardless of where you are on your Bitcoin journey. Me we'd love to hear from you. Visit onrampbitcoin.com contact to schedule a consultation with one of our private client advisors.