← THE Bitcoin Podcast
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- [00:00]
A
I want to make abundantly clear. I think we should end the Fed. I think the Federal Reserve should not exist. I think central banks around the world are cartels to support unlimited spending by governments. I think the whole reason they exist has nothing to do with stable prices, which they clearly have failed at over the last century. We've lost all of our purchasing power of the dollar even while they've been on watch. It's not employment, maximum employment. They say it is, but it's not. They are the buyers of debt of last resort. And so if the government issues too much debt and the markets can't absorb it, they step in and put it on their balance sheet and we monetize our debt and we cause massive debasement in the currency. And they are the cause of inflation. They are not the fighters of inflation. I want to be abundantly clear about that. We should get rid of them today. We should fire all of them. The whole job is a farce. All of the PhDs who work there, their $3 billion renovation project, nonsense. They're stealing from the American people. I hate all of it. It should be ended. If I were the head of the Fed, the first thing I would do is fire myself and fire everybody else and shut the building down. Turn it into a giant or a roller skating rink or something. Bitcoin is the greatest savings technology that's ever been created. Trading it is a fool's errand for the most part. Most people will lose purchasing power if they do that for long enough. And most people learn to not do that over time. There's something beautiful about just providing value, living your life, loving your friends and family and stacking stats on the side. And the bitcoin price will take care of itself over time and life will get cheaper and your quality of life will improve the longer you're on a bitcoin standard. I believe that to my core.
- [01:33]
B
Greetings and salutations, my fellow plebs. My name is Walker and this is the Bitcoin podcast. Bitcoin continues to create new blocks every 10 minutes. The value of one bitcoin is still one bitcoin. And if you're listening to this right now, remember you are still early. If you're not already, go ahead and subscribe to this show wherever you're watching or listening. If new you're and share it with your friends, family and strangers on the Internet. If you want to follow me in the show on Noster and X, just head to the show notes to grab the links. If you're enjoying the Bitcoin podcast and want to support it by becoming a paid subscriber. You can download the Fountain app, search for the Bitcoin podcast, and subscribe. By paying with Bitcoin via Lightning or Fiat via Card, you'll get access to ad free episodes and early releases of select content. Plus, you'll help support this show. Head to the Show Notes for product discount links. Go to walkeramerica.substack.com to get episodes emailed to you and head to bitcoin podcast.net for everything else. Without further ado, let's get into this bitcoin talk. We are live. Well, nice doctor, welcome. You know, I'm always. When I first heard you were like an actual doctor, too, just like, knowing you from the bitcoin side, I was like, are you kidding me? Like, doctor and hedge fund manager. Are you still practicing these days?
- [03:00]
A
Or that's like, I retired for good, knock on wood, in January of this year of 2025. So I've been not doctoring for about eight months now, and it's been wonderful.
- [03:15]
B
Congratulations. Thank you. Is that. Is that quite. So you were. For how long were you both running a hedge fund and being a doctor?
- [03:23]
A
11 years. So I. So I had three. So I ran a hedge fund. I also had an ria, an investment advisory firm separate from the hedge fund, and was a doctor. And so, yeah, 11 years of three careers was pretty intense.
- [03:37]
B
Plus being a dad and a husband at the same time.
- [03:41]
A
Yes.
- [03:42]
B
So you were, you weren't. You weren't busy at all. Right. Had just too much time in your hands. Way too much free time.
- [03:47]
A
Too much time. I was a little out of control, I think. So I'm settling down now. I hit 50 recently, and I thought, you know what? I think it's time to chill out a little bit. A lot of people ask me, they'll say things like, oh, it must be nice. And I'm like, well, you know, having three careers for 11 years has its pros and cons, and there are probably quite a bit more cons than pros, so I wouldn't recommend it to anybody.
- [04:10]
B
I'm guessing your wife is probably happy that you've taken a little bit of some stuff off the plate now.
- [04:16]
A
Definitely. I'm definitely around. I get to hang out with my wife a lot more and hang out with my kids more. So life is much better. My quality of life is much better.
- [04:25]
B
That's awesome.
- [04:25]
A
Yeah.
- [04:26]
B
I mean, it's pretty impressive. You were also. Your hedge fund last year was like the top. I forget what the specific classification was. But it was like a top hedge fund in the world, right?
- [04:35]
A
Yeah, I'm trying not to talk about that anymore, but yeah. So it was the. It will be last time. I'll say. It is the top performing multi strategy hedge fund in the world in 2024 according to Barclay Hedge data set. So for what it's worth, yes, it's good, it pays and I just tell people that's not to brag or to flex, it's to say get on a bitcoin standard, including within your hedge fund. Everybody should have bitcoin, a bitcoin focus in their hedge fund or you're just going to get left way behind.
- [05:03]
B
So you've been running the hedge fund now for 11 years. Was Bitcoin a focus that early on or did it become a focus partway through?
- [05:11]
A
No, I went through the whole. I mean I don't know if we've ever talked about this, but so I figured out bitcoin a little bit back in 2015, 2016ish time. Similar to being a med student. I knew just enough to be dangerous and I instantly turned into a degen crypto trader. I was literally one of those people and it's so embarrassing to admit who said blockchain, not bitcoin, that blockchain was the tech technology that's incredible and forget about bitcoin. And I was also one of those people that then I kind of was starting to see, well, maybe there's something to bitcoin, but I'm going to be one of those people who's going to trade crypto to stack more sats. And I looked really smart. And by the way, none of this was in my hedge fund so I didn't even get bitcoin into my hedge fund until like 2018, 2019 time. But 2016, 2017 if you remember the if I don't even know it. Were you into bitcoin back then or is it a little bit before your time?
- [06:04]
B
So I ignored bitcoin for the first time in 2014 and then thought I didn't realize I could buy satoshis in 2017 and so got a couple of litecoins and then it wasn't until like you know, partway through 2020 that I started actually going like actually took more than two seconds to look at it and went down the rabbit hole as during all the COVID insanity and money printing and yeah, so it took me a long time ignoring it for it to actually spend like minute looking into it. So I have empathy for folks.
- [06:36]
A
Yeah. Yeah. So you're almost as thick as I was. So, yeah, I did that. And the funny part about my story is, and the reason why I asked about it, the exchanges back in 2016, 2017, in order to buy these nonsense crypto tokens, you had to exchange them for bitcoin pairs. They were all paired with bitcoin. And so I basically traded all my bitcoin away for a diversified portfolio of crypto. And then you can probably figure out how, when I just crushed it in 2017 and then got just decimated in 2018 and was left with a massive tax bill because of my gains in 2017 and all my trading and basically no bitcoin and just got wrecked. I mean, the portfolio was down like 95% ish. And I salvaged what I could and put some into bitcoin at that time and still didn't understand it. And like you, it was. For me, it was about 2019 until I finally kind of figured Bitcoin out. 2020 till I got serious about it. And then I started. And then. So coming back to my hedge fund, started teaching my clients about it in that time frame, felt like I had been through the school of stup myself, had, you know, had a lot to teach after that. And that's. So that's why I've been basically just a bitcoin maxi since then, telling people like, you don't need to go down this crypto nonsense. Don't get distracted by the shiny objects. You know, in any bull market when leverage is running hot and the economy is running hot, and I'm sure we'll get to this a little bit later, but when that happens, like, crypto tends to do well, right? The garbage does really well at the end of a bull market when leverage is running hot and the animal spirits are running hot. So don't get distracted by that. Just don't worry about it. It's nonsense. I consider them like bitcoin is the sun, and these things are like little matches. They flare up and they draw your attention for a couple of seconds and then they burn out and there's nothing to them versus the sun that's here for many billions of years. So anyways, that's my story.
- [08:25]
B
Matt did not know that about you, so I appreciate the context there. I mean, it's interesting. Just not to give too much breadth to altcoins now, but it seems the vibe I'm getting is that a lot of the altcoin folks are realizing that they are criminally underexposed to Bitcoin. And in fact, their entire little house of cards, which was beneficial for a very select few of them for a while, is kind of coming tumbling down. And there's no backstop for any of this, and there's no real demand for any of this. And it's also like, you know, there, there is bitcoin and then there are shitcoins. Like, bitcoin is finite, shitcoins are infinite. You know, Peter Schiff will make the argument, well, there's so many different cryptos. How can bitcoin be scarce? And it's like, you misunderstand, Peter. Like, bitcoin is scarce. These cryptos are not. And they're like, you can only spin up so many tens of thousands of coins on pump fun or whatever the new shitcoin generator du jour is before just people lose their appetite. And I feel like bitcoin treasury companies, like, are honestly scratching the itch of folks who want to do a little bit more like, you know, a little more gambling side of things. Like, you don't even have to get into crypto.
- [09:40]
A
Yeah. And I don't know if we want to get into those here, but I think that those are the flavor of this cycle. So they're what everybody's going to be excited about. Similar to 2021, I think, on the bitcoin side, I think bitcoin miners got a lot of attention back then because they were basically the only other bitcoin proxy that you could brokerage accounts. And then obviously the whole, you know, the. All of the crypto centralized exchanges, things like that. Very reminiscent of 2017, which was the whole ICO scam and all that kind of stuff. So every. Every cycle has its flavor. And I think this flavor and I. And by the way, I'm not totally opposed to the bitcoin treasury companies. I have feelings about them and I'm not totally on board with them. And I do think they're not. Well, I don't know. How much should we get into it? You just want to get into bitcoin Treasury.
- [10:29]
B
I mean, hey, it's presented itself.
- [10:32]
A
Let's do it.
- [10:33]
B
All right.
- [10:33]
A
We're going with the flow. So. So Saylor obviously has the original bitcoin treasury company. Right. And he. It has been super fun to watch him do what he is doing. And I think he is doing an exceptional job at mining Wall street, especially the debt side of Wall Street. So I love to see that these preferred stock issuances started with convertible debts, moving over to preferreds now. I'm sure you guys have talked about this with Guess. I love this and I love to see that he's doing that. And this is a way to basically I look at it as he's extracting purchasing power from the dollar based fiat markets and pulling it into the bitcoin network permanently. And I think that's great and he's doing an exceptional job. The next person who's doing an exceptional job, I think is Dylan Leclair and the team over at Meta Planet. I used to work with Dylan. I, I know him pretty well and I trust him as a fund manager that he knows what he's doing because he knows the inside out of both fiat markets and the bitcoin market and network as well. So I think he's doing a bang job over at metaplanet. I have more qualms about the next wave of bitcoin treasury companies that are coming. And the only real qualms I have to start are, is all of these guys are still untested. So I, like many of the people who are in charge, I don't have, in fact, I would consider some of them friends. I think they have good judgment, I think they're intelligent, but they're still untested. So we don't know how they're going to do with this incredible role and privilege that they've been given. And so it will be very, very interesting to see. And I think that as this market goes on, I think this, as the bull market goes on, I think these companies are going to do very well and attract a lot of attention. And I will be watching closely for the chief marketers who are pumping their stock and that will be a good thing in a bull market. Right. And then are also deploying a ton of leverage in the late phases of the bull market. That will also be a good thing. But those two things will combine to be a severe negative and a sever shock. I think when we hit the next bear market, there's always bull and bear markets. I believe everything is cyclical in markets all the time. And so I still think we have the huge bull run ahead of us at some point in the near future. But then what follows that is the inevitable bear market. And so I don't think that many of these companies are going to make it. I think that some of them are going to get liquidated, they're going to get margin called, including their shareholders, and they're going to lose the bitcoin on their balance sheets. And some people are talking about M and A, like they may get purchased by other Bitcoin treasury companies or might lose all their bitcoin and go out of business. And we'll see what happens. So that remains to be seen. So people ask me for my opinion on that a lot. I think strategy is doing a very good job and I think they're safe in a bear market. I think they're built to last. I think Meta Planet is similarly built to last and everybody else just remains to be seen. So it's impossible to answer that until we see how they react through this bull market.
- [13:28]
B
I am definitely not a trader. I'm trying to hold my Bitcoin for the long term. And if you're like me, you need to make sure you keep that bitcoin saf by going to Bitbox Swiss Walker and using the promo code walker for 5% off the fully open source Bitcoin only Bitbox 02 hardware wallet. Then get your bitcoin off the exchange and into your own self custody. Bitcoin is chopsolidating right around 100k. But we have companies, nation states and a whole lot of plebs like you and me who are stacking harder than ever. So it's going to keep ripping higher. But now is the best time for you to get your security locked down tight with Bitbox Plus. And I can't emphasize this enough, the Bitbox 02 is just easy as hell to use. Whether you're brand new to bitcoin, it's your first time setting up a hardware wallet, so you're a little bit nervous. It's understandable. Or you are a well seasoned psychopath. You will have no problem with the bitbox and again, it's fully open source and Bitcoin only. But you don't have to trust me, you can go and verify that for yourself on their GitHub. When you go to Bitbox Swiss Walker and use the promo code Walker, not only do you get 5% off, but you also help support this podcast. So thank you. I think that that's fair. There are definitely like kind of the, let's say the blue chip Bitcoin treasury companies at this point. And then there's a lot that are clearly trying to flip a few early investor dollars into some quick massive gains and then we'll see what happens after that. But I mean, I'm curious because you said, you know, you kind of feel that they're the flavor, like the flavor of this cycle. It's fair to say though that like the fundamental difference between these Bitcoin treasury companies being a vehicle for speculation and various shitcoins or NFTs or whatever being the vehicle or the ICO, you know, boom, and then subsequent bust being the vehicle for speculation is that all of those prior things, on the kind of crypto side of things, pulled capital that would have otherwise flown into bitcoin and pulled it into these, these other shitcoins versus these bitcoin treasury companies. They're basically acting as a proxy. So the bitcoin, like it ends up still being accretive for bitcoin, let's say it still brings demand to bitcoin. It just does it through a proxy vehicle. Like, is that a fair, fair distinction between the two? Like we can't quite call them the shitcoins of this cycle just because they're speculative. But like at the same time, like they are bringing capital flows into bitcoin through different avenues.
- [15:57]
A
Yeah, I do agree with that. So I think there's sort of a hybrid in between. And again, I think the responsible managers. So first of all, this is paper bitcoin we're talking about, right? So for people who own shares of these companies, you don't actually own bitcoin. You own a claim on the bitcoin that the company claims to have. So you're taking risks right there. You're taking operational risks, you're taking the risk that the, the manager in charge, whoever is the CEO or whoever's running the bitcoin strategy, that they're going to do a good job and they're going to do a good job in the bull markets and a good job in the bear markets. The trick that this, that this brings, and I kind of alluded to it before, is if times get difficult and if they are over leveraged, leveraged at the wrong times, and we could see examples of this with the bitcoin mining companies in 2021, they were just going off the charts, parabolic way outperforming bitcoin itself. And so they were accumulating debt and buying more miners and accumulating more debt and buying more and buying more and more. The market ate it up, right? Until it stopped eating it up and then they crashed and burned and some of the best miners of that cycle actually went bankrupt. And so I think that exact same thing is going to happen this time around. So you got to be careful. If people are hyping things too much and using too much leverage, they're going to get wrecked and they're actually going to lose their bitcoin. And the downside of that is it will, if it leads to this exponential move higher, the hockey stick higher at the end of the bull market, it's going to lead to an equally powerful and painful bear market where it just falls super far and super fast. And so maybe that won't. But I think human behavior is pretty predictable and cyclical and I do think a lot of greed will enter the market and a lot of leverage and that will have to get flushed out at some point.
- [17:35]
B
Yeah, I mean, my advice for folks has remained the same. And not that I give it financial advice because that's like illegal or something. I don't know, I need a special license for that. But if I were to be someone giving advice, I would say you should buy spot bitcoin and when you've accumulated a large enough utxo, you should transfer that to cold storage and you should go provide value somehow in society. And that is the best strategy that you could possibly employ.
- [17:57]
A
100%.
- [18:00]
B
But you know, at the same time, you want to like do whatever you want with your money, you want to speculate on these things, by all means do it. But like, again, at least for me, my, my goal with anything because I own a couple of shares of a few of these, like, and I own, you know, a little bit of microstrategy. But ultimately my goal is like, I'm trying to accrue more bitcoin. That is the goal here. The goal is not for me to get more fiat, the goal is for me to get more bitcoin. And so if that's not your goal and your goal is just to get more fiat, that's fine too. We're just playing a different game. And that's also why any of my exposure to these things is de minimis in the grand scheme of things, because my risk profile does not allow me to own very much. That's not just good old fashioned bitcoin in cold storage. And I think that's, that's probably the right approach for the vast majority of people.
- [18:53]
A
100%. Absolutely. In fact, I kind of, even though I enjoy this game and enjoy being a fund manager, part of me sort of craves just, I wish I could just be a simple person and just simply, you know, bitcoin is the, is the greatest savings technology that's ever been created. I know you know that we know that trading it is a fool's errand for the most part. Most people will lose purchasing power if they do that for long enough. And most people learn to not do that over time. They have similar stories to you and I and they and they just simply get to the point where, you know what, I would have been better and better off if I would have just simply stacked sats and stayed humble. You know, to paraphrase Odell. And so there's something beautiful about that and there's something beautiful about just providing value, living your life, loving your friends and family and stacking stats on the side. And the bitcoin price will take care of itself over time and life will get cheaper and your quality of life will improve the longer you're on a bitcoin standard. I believe that to my core. I counsel not only people, but organizations, universities, businesses, whom I have contact with. And I just say, do you want to provide better goods and services to your customers or to your students? And do you want to do that at a lower cost over time? Then you need to get on a bitcoin standard. And if you don't want to, then stay on the dollar standard and keep doing your things you're doing and keep raising your prices year after year and keep providing worse services or goods to your customer base. It's, it's honestly that simple. And people make it so complicated. But, you know, that's how the world is.
- [20:25]
B
No, I mean, amen to all of that, I say. You know, I do, I do want to ask you too, because you mentioned just a kind of the human nature that comes into these, these cycles.
- [20:35]
A
Right.
- [20:35]
B
There's been a lot of talk whether you want to call it a super cycle, whatever you want to, whatever you want to call it, that, you know, the death of the four year cycle, that we're, you know, this time is different. Insert whatever you'd like there. But there's been a lot of talk that this time is different. That because of all the capital inflows, not only from bitcoin treasury companies, the largest of which being obviously microstrategy, which is, you know, orders of magnitude larger than any others, but also from the ETFs, like, this is, this is a different paradigm from anything we've previously seen at a scale that is different than anything we've previously seen. Where are you at with that? I mean, do you think you said already you think that. Yeah, we still, if we get a hockey stick run up, we get still a blow off top, top. Right. Do you think we see like, do we start to see decreasing volatility in terms of the violence of those tops and those subsequent drops as, like just as a natural function of a maturing asset? Or like, where are you at? How are you reading this? How Are you positioning yourself as we go into these, these next few years and then like the subsequent decades to follow? How do you look at that?
- [21:39]
A
Okay, yeah. So there, There are about 10 great questions in rabbit holes when you go down there.
- [21:43]
B
I tend to do that. I'm sorry.
- [21:45]
A
No, so it's great. Okay. So I think that the concept that bitcoin price moves related to the four, approximately four year halving cycles. I don't think that's true. You know, I'm a macro investor. I will say that people who make fun of macro and macro investing don't understand it. And if they say that they can't invest well or make good decisions based on macro, you should believe them that they can't. But there are fantastic investors over decades who use macro important macro signals. And there's mostly nonsense, it's mostly noise. There's a little bit of signal in the macro world. And if you know what macro signals to look at, you'll generally do pretty well. And so what do I mean by that? I think these macro assets are driven by a few different factors. We've talked about this before. Liquidity is a huge thing and everybody talks about liquidity now. I'm telling like three years ago nobody talked about liquidity, now everybody talks about liquidity. I see it on cnbc, Bloomberg, it's on Twitter. You know, I'm not even on social media anymore, but it's just everywhere. That's a huge driver of asset flows. And I think though bitcoin itself is the great absorber of liquidity and it's literally the inverse of fiat currency. So if, if fiat currency is rapidly expanding around the world, bitcoin at some point is going to absorb that. And then I, I like to break things down into three categories. And I don't mean to talk about gold here because there's a lot of gold haters. But I came from bitcoin previously as a gold because I was looking for sound. I'm like Peter. But instead of staying on gold, I actually went to the next step and said, oh, Obviously Bitcoin is 1000 times better than gold, Peter. But anyways, that's neither here nor there. Fiat is a depreciating store of value over time. Gold is a stable store of value over time. And you can go back and look 2000 years ago during the Roman Empire and the cost of goods and services cost about the same per ounce of gold as they do today. That's remarkable, by the way. So I always like to give the golf clap to gold for Being a stable store of value and the best alternative form of money over the last several thousands of years for humans. So golf clap to gold. But then came along the digital age. Thank you. Came along the digital age and then came bitcoin. Right. And so Bitcoin is now the much more perfect form of money. It's an appreciating store of value. And so this appreciating store of value moves based on macro factors similar to other major asset classes. So similar to stocks and bonds and real estate and private equity, things like that. Like you know there are many different sorts of asset classes that can absorb liquidity and act as store of values. Bitcoin. So I'm trying to hit your little questions, your points along the way. So as it gets bigger. So it's about a 2 trillion market cap right now. I do expect it to become slowly less volatile. So yes, I think we'll have a smaller hockey sticks up and smaller percentage losses during the bear markets. But I do think we will still definitely have cycles. I don't think we're going to get just a steady slow climb. That would be nice and boring but that's not going to happen for quite a while I think. I think it needs to get more probably like 10x bigger about the size of gold. 20 trillion market cap. Ish. Till it really rings out. A lot of that volatility. I will tell people, be careful what you wish for because the less volatile it is, the more unlikely it is that you're going to have huge life changing gains in a short period of time. That's just how it works with volatility. I think Saylor has picked up that quote volatility is vitality. I believe that very much and that's true in the markets. The things I look at and I talk about this three burner analogy for how the price of bitcoin reacts. So three burners. So the first burner is liquidity. We've talked about that ad nauseam. Liquidity has been doing well. The monetary supply around the world has been expanding generally throughout the world for the last three years. It bottomed in about what, the fourth quarter of 2022 and it's been heading higher ever since. That's just sort of steady up and to the right. The second thing that's super interesting is the US economy continues to lag. So the US manufacturing indices that have been coming out, they've literally manufacturing has been in a contraction or in a bear market since 2022. So we' three years of basically a recession for the manufacturing sector. Now, on the one hand that's terrible and it's terrible if that's the sector you work in and that's your line of work. On the other hand, the US economy is about 90% services oriented and 10% manufacturing oriented. 10 to 15%, depends how you look at it. So it's not that huge of a deal overall for the overall economy. The services side of the economy is actually doing a little bit better. I'm glad you, you brought this up and I'm going off on this huge tangent recently. We just got a couple metrics that just came out. So the S and P global manufacturing and services indices just came out as well as the ISM services and manufacturing PMIs. Those are two basically different data sets and they came out with pretty wildly different numbers. So both of them were still showing that manufacturing was in a contraction for the month of July, barely, which is disappointing and I think is what has led to this disappointing bitcoin price action. And this all leads back to Bitcoin, by the way. The second thing is the services which has been holding up the US economy for the last three years while the manufacturing sector has been dragging. The ISM Services PMI showed a very weak, barely positive expansionary Mode. So basically 50.1 on their scale where 50 is neutral. If you're above 50, you're expanding. If you're below 50, you're contracting. It was 50.1. That was disappointing. But what's interesting is the S and P Global Services PMI which is, it's, it's a, it's a little bit of a different data set, but that was actually much stronger coming in at about 55.1. Why does this matter? The S and P Global survey focuses more on American companies and it's only the America, the business that they're doing here in the United States across small mid caps and large cap US companies, it's showing that we're getting a very healthy rebound since we bottomed in April. We're back at levels now that we saw in the fourth quarter of 2024 once President Trump, he got nominated but wasn't yet inaugurated and the economy started really booming for a little bit and then it got scared off by the tariffs. Bottom into April has been rising again. It's actually looking pretty good. Meanwhile, the ism, and this gets confusing, I'm so sorry, I wish I had charts to show you this, but the ISM services PMI is very low, sitting at 50.1, barely positive. But the difference between that one is the ISM survey is large cap companies looking at their international business. So US companies that have international business, what that tells me based on what we're seeing here is the world is still confused about the tariffs. It's the supply chains are messed up because they're still trying to figure out what to do. We finally got clarity with the tariffs at the beginning of August here. So I think we're going to see that smooth out. And what I expect is this one, this lower one, the ISM survey tends to lag the S and P global survey even though the laggard gets more attention. So the markets follow the ISM numbers and so they were disappointed. So you could actually feel the disappointment in the price of bitcoin. Recently it was starting to get up to about 120ish, and then these numbers came in and they fell all the way down to 112 or so. How I look at that at this as a fund manager is one, it's disappointing. But two, I expect the ISM numbers to quickly catch up to the S and P global numbers because the U.S. economy, if you look at that survey and employment surveys and earnings from companies that have been coming in for this most recent quarter, US companies are actually doing extremely well. And all of the pro business deregulation, good tax measures, things that are coming through are starting to take hold. So that was a really long winded and esoteric way to come around to say I'm very bullish on where the economy is going. I have been as disappointed as anybody with the US economy and what's been going on. And I believe getting back to burner number two for a bitcoin price action, that that's what's been holding down the price of bitcoin because that burner number two hasn't been turned on yet. And I think that we're going to see an acceleration in these numbers where the ISM PMI for services and manufacturing are going to start to shoot upwards in the coming months and that's going to light up burner number two under the price of bitcoin and it's going to start and once you do that, you can get beyond just what the liquidity metrics are doing and it will start to push up it higher and you can start to get that par, that exponential move higher and then that leads to burner number three and then I'll stop talking. Burner number three is at once we get, once the economy is running hot, once people are feeling confident in the economy and they're Making money and they have money to speculate with, they start using leverage and they start pushing up the price of bitcoin. And that's when they go further on the risk curve and do stupid stuff like bet on crypto nonsense and altcoins. And I think that's why we'll have a little bit of a cycle for those as well. But I don't really care about those. Those but I still think the good times are coming. It's just been delayed by several months because of all of this. The new administration and their policies that have created a bunch of uncertainty in the economy. Does that even make sense? Did I describe that?
- [31:38]
B
Okay, no, it, it, it makes great sense and actually that's perfect because the next thing I was going to ask you about was this three burner theory. So like you, you just led right into it. Also, this is your first time on the show, but just know this is always a safe space for rants and tangents. I, I, I like to encourage that because you never know what's going to come out of them.
- [31:51]
A
Appreciate it.
- [31:52]
B
But I do want to ask because I think that explanation makes a ton of sense. So to bring that back to kind of like the cycles, you're basically, and correct me if I'm wrong here, but reading between the lines, it's like the cycles or the four year cycles for bitcoin being having driven, you think is more of just like kind of a narrative and, or meme versus this actually being a function of. Yeah, it just so happens to coincide with these larger kind of cycles of liquidity, general economic conditions and then leverage. Is that fair characterization?
- [32:23]
A
Absolutely. So they're being driven by the liquidity cycles which are also, they influence heavily the economic cycles. And so that's what we've been seeing since the great financial crisis. So since 2008, 2009 that reset everything. And then we've been on these four year loops and what happens is companies take out huge amounts of debt and then when companies take out debt, they have to refinance it about every three to five years or so. So on average four years. That's why we get these four year cy. And during these refinance segments what happens is we get into a liquidity shortage in the US and around the world because businesses need to refinance and there's just not enough dollars out there. So that causes a bit of a panic in the markets. And that's usually then when central banks come in and they flood the markets with more liquidity that allows businesses to Again, refinance for another four years, and they roll their debt and that starts the next cycle. And so that's why we have this cyclical behavior. It's super interesting once you kind of see what's going on. And for me, what's been the most interest, Walker, is that this cycle has been so different. It's been really unusual. We had our peaks in 2013 and a peak in 2017 and a peak in 2021. And I've been saying for a couple years, I expect a peak in the fourth quarter of 2025. And when it just, it didn't come and then the next month data would come out and it still didn't come, and then it didn't come again. And so it's been this sort of crab choppy, sideways market I know people were asking about, is the crab market back? It is back for now. And that's very disappointing because this is the part of the phase where historically we should be ramping up much higher. I think it's all explained by what the Trump administration has been doing, right? They came in and they threw the kitchen sink at the economy. They were going to do austerity. They were talking up Doge Elon played a big part. And if you've noticed, they basically pushed all of that just off the cliff and said, okay, we're going to grow our way out. That's what they always do, right? They're like, they're taking the easy path. They're like, we're going to flood the money with or flood the markets with liquidity. We're going to just do, you know, we're going to do all these pro business things and we're going to try to grow our way out of the economy and they're going to massively increase debt and they're going to massively increase the amount of doll flowing around in the markets. And they're going to encourage everybody to take risky behavior and move further out on the risk curve. And that's coming. And so we're starting to finally see that in US Businesses that this is happening. And I think now that the tariff debate, or whatever you want to call it, is settled as of August 1st, you know, he just set dates or set rates for everybody. So now everybody, I think, except China and a few other outliers, they're still waiting to see what happens. But for most of the world, now we know what things cost. So if you're a business manager, you can file. Okay. I know that if I import goods from pick a country it's going to be 20% or whatever the rate is. We can pass some of that onto the consumer. I can ask the exporter to take a hit, I can take a little bit of a hit, blah, blah, blah. We can now make business decisions because we have an actual outline to work with. And I think this is where we'll see the economy start to boom. So as we head into the fourth quarter and first quarter, which I didn't expect, and I want to tell everybody that, you know, I had my high price target for the fourth quarter, I don't think we're going to get there because of these delays. I think we're going to get pushed into the first half of 2026, which I think is actually a good thing. It will extend the cycle and I don't know what it's going to do after that. But I'm pretty bullish for the next several quarters in the United States.
- [35:42]
B
I want to get into bullishness there. But just as a comment, as somebody who runs a business that involves physical goods, I know that we saw huge behavioral shifts at the start of the tariff talk where people just basically said, nope, we got a pause on all spending because we don't even know if we order something now, what kind of treatment it's going to receive by the time it's ready to ship. So we're just pausing. And that's been the case. We saw a little bit of a pickup in July, just like a little one. But then now we expect there to be hopefully back to business as usual because people now have at least a little bit of a roadmap to say, okay, we can plan ahead. Now. It's really hard to run a business business when the rules of the game are changing, you know, midair, like it's, it's impossible, you know, it's, it's, it's difficult. So, and I like to bring this up about that.
- [36:31]
A
Yeah, and I like to bring this up, by the way, even if you're pro Trump in general and even if you are favoring his policies, you still can't run a business if you don't know what your prices are going to be and you don't know what and you don't know if the supply chain will be available and that so multiply your business now times about 10 billion and that's what's going on in the world right now. And so the US finally has clarity. The US Related businesses that are functioning just in the US but the international businesses for the first time now, since Trump got elected, they have clarity as of August 1st. So they know other than China, again, that's the wild card and that's a big wild card. But other than China, they have clarity on and they can start running their businesses. So I predict what we're going to see now as we head into the second, the later half of 2025 and into 2026, is a surge in the business cycle and this long delayed, including the manufacturing sector, we're finally going to see a resurgence and we're going to get that spike. And I think if we get that. So if we see these PMI numbers that I talked about earlier on, go past 55 and start heading towards 60, that's when Bitcoin really starts to rev up. That's when the animal spirits come out. That's when all the retail investors get on board. To your point about the ETFs, like people are going to be piling into. These are going to pile into bitcoin proxies. They're going to pile into altcoin nonsense too, I believe, unfortunately. And I think all of those are going to rip higher and that will potentially give us this exponential move higher, that hockey stick higher.
- [37:54]
B
Well, and it could be a very violent move because this is also going to presumably coincide with the Fed finally cutting rates. That's been the super fascinating thing to me. People would always anti bitcoin. People would make the argument as bitcoin was ripping up in the early Covid era that oh well, bitcoin just performs well because it's a low interest rate environment. And then we saw the, the most rapid increase in interest rates ever, basically. And they were kept after saying we're not even thinking about, thinking about raising interest rates. They apparently were thinking about it and then they did it and they did it really, really fast. And then they've kept them high, I think longer than most analysts expected. But during that time, bitcoin has also been chugging along and had various periods where people thought it was really boring, whether that was at the 58k range forever or back in the 80k range for the 85k range. And now the, you know, 100k and then now 100 and whatever. We're at now 115k but like we've been steadily chugging higher in an environment that is supposedly inhospitable to bitcoin, making moves higher. What happens now when presumably, I mean, I don't know. I'm curious if you think Jerome Powell is going to be ousted before the end of his Tenure or if they're just going to wait it out, avoid the hassle, and then put in somebody super dovish. I mean, do you think this is kind of like the perfect storm for a really, really just a violent explosion in bitcoin price action?
- [39:20]
A
So I do think. So I do think the Fed will turn dovish for sure. I think Powell is going to last. I talked about this on Preston's show a month or two ago. I think he'll stick it out. He's very stubborn. I kind of like the guy. I don't envy him his job. And I want to make abundantly clear, I think we should end the Fed. I think the Federal Reserve should not exist. I think central banks around the world are cartels to support unlimited spending by governments. I think the whole reason they exist has nothing to do with stable prices, which they clearly have. That over the last century we've lost all of our purchasing power of the dollar even while they've been on watch. It's not employment, maximum employment. They say it is, but it's not. They are the buyers of debt of last resort. And so if the government issues too much debt and the markets can't absorb it, they step in and put it on their balance sheet and we monetize our debt and we cause massive debasement in the currency. And they are the cause of inflation. They are not the fighters of inflation. I want to be abundantly clear about that. We should get rid of them today. We should fire all of them. The fed funds rate, the only thing that we need to with that is it should Simply track basically 1 month t bills or 1 day t bill or whatever short term T bill you want to do. There's no reason why that shouldn't be determined by the markets. The whole job is a farce. All of the PhDs who work there, their $3 billion renovation project nonsense, they're stealing from the American people. I hate all of it. It should be ended. If I were the head of the Fed, the first thing I would do is fire myself and fire everybody else and shut the building down, turn it into a giant disco or roller skating rink or something. So you can be more productive certainly.
- [40:52]
B
Than what they do in there now with their like 800 or however many PhD economists like you need. Like how many PhD economists does it take to be smarter than the market? And the answer is like the limit does not exist because they can't be.
- [41:03]
A
Exactly, exactly.
- [41:04]
B
The hubris is just astounding. So I appreciate the caveat.
- [41:07]
A
Yes. Yeah, that's My one. Yeah. Little side caveat. That's my favorite.
- [41:10]
B
Just a little side caveat. Yeah.
- [41:11]
A
How I feel about. So do I think it will be dovish? Yes. I think that they're going to appoint somebody, Kevin, you know, Wersher Waller or whatever to be the, you know, the next chair. Do I think they'll be dovish? Absolutely. Do I think Trump is putting a ton of pressure on them and Besant. Absolutely. The Fed and I do by the way, believe the fed funds rate should be lowered for the record short term and short term rates want to go lower. And the reason we know that is because the two year yield, so the two year yield basically projects out looking two years ahead and it says this is where you should be. So when we're talking about like the one month and the three month and the fed funds rate, the two year yield which is currently sitting at 3.705 so about 370 that's saying to the fed funds rate which is at 4.33 right now percent that it should come down about 50 basis points, if not more like right now it's like you're too high. What are you doing? Come down, come down, come down. That's what the bond market is telling the Federal Reserve. And the reason why I care about this is because this Great. So they talk about, about their fight against inflation which they cause by the way they talk about their fight against inflation. They're here to help the lower income Americans who are suffering. They are causing suffering for the lower income Americans. And I'll tell you exactly why. The prime rate in the United States is based completely derived completely from the federal funds rate. The prime rate is the rate that all of short term debt in the United States variable short term debt is based off of. So if you have credit card debt or a home equity line of credit or small business debt or you're you have a loan out for your car because you can't afford to buy a car, so you know you took out a loan for it. That crazy higher rate you're paying right now is directly related to the federal funds rate. And so if Jerome Powell said, hey you know what, let's give Americans who are really hurting right now and who have are maxed out on their credit cards just to buy groceries and to pay for their gas and to pay for their car. If we lowered that by a 1 percentage point from 4.5 to 3.5%, that would instantly lower the credit card debt rates and the HELOC rates and the short Term business loan rates for all Americans instantly. It literally would do it overnight. And that's why I actually get mad at him for what he's doing, because they say they're doing this, but they're clearly not doing this. They're the buyers of debt, of the US Government's debt of last resort. And it just makes me so angry because the American, like we have this K shaped economy right now where we have the people who own assets, the owner class who's doing pretty well, and then we have the renter class and they're just getting decimated and they're getting so upset and they're literally dying. They're starving. They're working three jobs to try to support their families and they can't support their families. And so we're doing all of these policies that are helping a select group of people who are up here near the, the money printers, right? The people who control, create and control the distribution of money. And everybody else down here is just barely making it. And this is how wars start and this is how coups start and this is how civil wars start. And I just feel like we're right on the precipice right now and these guys could actually do tangible things to make the world better, but they refuse. And it just drives me nuts, as you can tell.
- [44:33]
B
Yeah, I mean, and I think it should for anybody that has a, for anyone that understands this stuff and like you obviously do and many people do, but then also you have to add in, has a conscience and has the ability, is not just a raging psychopath without the ability to feel, feel empathy. Like who, who actually, you know, cares about their fellow man to any degree or at least cares about their own family. Like I think you legitimately, if you understand this and you don't get angry about it, like you're, you're probably a psychopath. Like that's. And 1% of the general population is so like I, you know, and if you look at the folks at the Fed, I'm sure, like you've got to be a bit of a psychopath. Like, and not in the, not in the cool bitcoiner way, but I mean like in the legitimate, like cannot feel empty, empathy, narcissistic like the real psychopaths. You'd have to be a bit of a psychopath to think that you can control the free market, that you know better than the free market. And that despite the now decades, many, many decades, no over, you know, over a century of evidence to the contrary that what you're doing is Somehow helpful when in fact it's incredibly, incredibly detrimental to the average person. Like, it's, you know, it should piss you off. Like, and I think that's the reason why bitcoiners are so passionate about fixing the money is because like, once you go deep enough down the bitcoin rabbit hole, you realize how screwed up all this is. And it's just, it becomes to a point where you're like, well, this just isn't fair. Like, this isn't fair at all. This. The rules of the game are different for different people. And like, I'd say, you know, bitcoiners, I don't think are ever. We're not the. Usually not the commies clamoring for or from each according to their ability, to each according to their need. No, no, no, it's just make things fair. Make the rules of the game the same for everybody. And get the goddamn bankers out of these bureaucratic positions of power where they are able to exert full totalitarian control over the economy. I mean that is literally like centralized control of credit issuance is literally one of Karl Marx's like 10 different step by step points from the communist manifestation manifesto on how like what you should do to usher in a communist state. Like, like the Federal Reserve is fundamentally, from a theoretical perspective, a communist institution. And so I mean unless you're a commie, you should want to end the Fed. That's just, that's. That's all I'm saying, you know?
- [46:47]
A
Yeah. And nobody knows that. And, and what, what kills me and I know what drives a lot of fellow bitcoiners is the people who are being most taken advantage of are the ones who don't understand this. They just don't get how it works. They think that this is just kind of how the world is and there's nothing I can do about it. And so I feel like as bitcoiners who time studying how money works and how the central bankers work and all this kind, it's like the wizard of Oz, right? It's like we're pulling back the curtain and we're like saying, look, this is who's doing this to you. Like this is the problem. And so we're trying to help as many people as possible. And most people just think to your point are that we're a bunch of psychopaths. And like, I don't even care about money. That's another thing is like I. This, my goal isn't to get rich. I don't care. I just want to have, you know, Love my family, be around and enjoy my friends and do things. I'm not trying to get like excessively rich. I just want to help people get out of this thing that they're stuck in and I want to be a part of. I don't believe you can overthrow the system. I believe you can defund it though. And I think that's what Bitcoin is actively doing is we're defunding dc, we're defunding Davos and all of these places that are these people doing these terrible things who control money printing and creation and distribution and just ruin people's lives by stealing their purchasing power. We can defund these people. And it's starting to happen right now. And I think when Bitcoin 10 x's and then 100 x's from where it is right now, the defunding will be very noticeable. And I think by 100x from now when Bitcoin say 200 trillion ish in market cap, it will be very noticeable. And I think the current institutions as we know them today won't even exist or they'll only exist as a small little fracture, little fraction of their current selves.
- [48:28]
B
I hope so anyway. And I think that is like the natural state and that's kind of like what I view when people. It's interesting and I love your take on this too but when you see a lot of knee jerk reactions to quote the, let's say financialization of Bitcoin, right. Or to Bitcoin's incorporation and embrace by the traditional finance system who, you know, it's like I thought we were, you know, we were fighting the bankers and now the bankers are coming in and they're part of this too. And when you've got, you know, BlackRock, black. I was just complaining about BlackRock controlling the world five days ago and now they're issuing ETFs and I have some in my retirement account. What's going on? I hate this, like, look at this cognitive dissonance. But like for, for me and I've, I've said this, you know, for anyone who's a regular listener, listener of the show, you'll have heard this many times before, but I think this was like this is what bitcoin winning looks like. Bitcoin winning looks like it being embraced by Wall street street and by governments and by anybody who is looking at it winning and saying I want a piece of that action. I want a piece of those gains that I see are coming and coming and that wow, it's the Best performing asset in the world. Why wouldn't I want a part of that? And so I think that that is natural. And again, the beauty of this, of bitcoin being what it is is that it doesn't matter if they embrace it because they cannot cope co opt it. And if you try to co opt it or you try to change it in a way that like, if you were to change it in a way that was, would somehow impact its security or its scarcity, well then it's going to get forked. And anybody with money in that game who like would have been the only one who could have exerted a change on it in the first place by trying to fund whatever campaign they could, you know, maybe another change, the code campaign we saw, well that worked out. But they, they have a vested interest in not screwing up bitcoin. And that's the beauty of this like this positive sum game theory. And so like I, you know, I think, I think it was American Hodl who said like, like guys like we're like, we're in the Trojan horse right now. They've let us in the door. Just shut up. Like just, just shut, you're going to blow it. Like be quiet, you know. So like I don't know, I'm curious where you sit on that. Like, like how do you think about it? Is this an inevitable part of bitcoin winning? And is there a risk of bitcoin being co opted or are we the ones who co opt? Is bitcoin the one who co opts?
- [50:45]
A
Yeah, yeah. So I agree with your whole train of thought there. So I think it is inevitable. I mean we've been talking about this for five years at least I have. The embrace by Wall street is inevitable. We're not going to like it because they're going to financialize it in ways we don't like. And I always say to people, it's our job as bitcoiners who do understand it, to maintain the heart and the integrity of bitcoin and what it stands. And I think that just the Trojan Trojan horse analogy I think is perfect because we are entering into Wall street and what they don't understand is bitcoin is going to eat Wall street from the inside out. It literally will take over and consume it. Kind of like when Neo went into Agent Smith's body and then he like went around and blew it up. Like that's how I envision bitcoin going on, a kind of a slow motion term. It will eventually just become too big for Wall street. And too powerful and Wall street will become less important and less relevant and bitcoin will just absorb all of that. So, yes, it's inevitable. Yes, we need to be aware and cognizant and protective of what bitcoin stands for. We got to make sure we don't get sucked into the concept of, I just, I'm here to only get rich, right? Like, we have to preserve the fact that bitcoin is better money for a better world. We need to keep building. And that's why I love people like Odell, Jeff Booth, Lynn Alden, Preston, these guys who are doing this work kind of over in the private equity side, early stage development, we need to be building out this other system. We need to be building, not just a collaborative system between fiat and bitcoin, we need to be building a completely separate monetary and financial network built on bitcoin, because that's where the world is going eventually. We live in this really interesting time where we're in this sort of transition hybrid phase. I tell people it's sort of like these hybrid cars that are half, you know, combustion engine, half electric vehicles, or like a spork. A spork's not really a very good spoon or a fork, but it sort of does both. Like, that's the phase we're in right now. So it feels weird and awkward and we can take advantage of that. And that's what these bitcoin treasury companies are. They're taking advantage of the fact that you can borrow or you can short fiat currency and buy bitcoin. Like, that's an incredible privilege right now. And that won't last. This window is only open. I called it the trade of the century a couple years ago, and I still believe it is. If you can borrow short at a low interest rate, a depreciating currency and buy an appreciating form of money, you should do that all day, seven days a week if you can, because you sort of can't lose. If you can sell a depreciating asset and buy an appreciating asset with the proceeds, you should do that all day. That's how people get very wealthy. And so anyways, so I'm a huge fan of the people who are building out the bitcoin network. So people who are working on layer two solutions. I personally can't do any of that stuff. I don't have the skills set, but I'm a huge fan. And so this is kind of where my passion is. These bitcoin treasury companies are great and they're siphoning purchasing power out of the fiat system. And they should do that. But I want to see them now start to siphon that into the bitcoin network. And part of that is just by causing an appreciation in the purchasing power of bitcoin. But I think they can actively help the growth of these other layer two, layer three, layer four solutions that are going to create this new monetary network and financial system for the world. World. That's sort of where my heart is. But we'll see. We'll see what happens. It's going to be a very interesting five to 10 years.
- [54:07]
B
Yeah. I mean, what I'm extremely bullish on is like, you've got the bitcoin treasury companies obviously, who are, you know, going for like a pure play type thing, which a lot of these new ones are, right? Like, there's not even an operating business. It's not like, like Semler has an operating business. I mean, Meta Planet, you could argue, like, kind of still has an. They're closer to a pure Play, though. A microstrategy obviously still has an operating business, but it's, you know, you know, it's cash flow positive. Like, they can still use that, but like it's, you know, fairly small in the grand scheme of things now. But some of these pure play ones, like, they're, it's, they're just like, we're, you know, we're just, we're buying bitcoin, right? You know, we're, we're getting cheap money and we're using it to buy bitcoin. But what I'm really excited about, I mean, there's a lot of companies out there that have had bitcoin treasuries for a long time. They're bitcoin companies, right? Like, you know, like Fold comes to mind. And there was a. Will Reeves, the Fold CEO is just like a great dude. Was up on stage with, I think, like with metaplanet and similar Scientific and somebody else during the bitcoin conference. And it's kind of interesting because, like, Fold's been stacking bitcoin and many of these other ones too, like Adam o' Brien with bitcoin. Well, they've had, you know, more companies. I can count bitcoin companies have had bitcoin on their balance sheet. But they're not, you know, that's just because that's the prudent thing to do. Like, they're doing that because they're bitcoiners and they, and they say, well, of course we're going to have Bitcoin on our balance sheet. We're a bitcoin company and we know that bitcoin is literally the best asset we could possibly have on our balance sheet. So yeah, duh. I think that the nice thing about bitcoin number go up is that all of those companies benefit in tandem and that allows them to have even more capital to deploy to make even better products for this parallel system. And so that, I'm sorry, super, I'm super bullish on that. And who knows, maybe some of these bitcoin treasury companies that start out as pure plays, maybe some of them kind of branch into, okay, we've got all this capital, maybe we should deploy some of it to working with like you said, siphoning some of that into actually the bitcoin network from an ecosystem perspective. I would love to see that.
- [56:07]
A
Yeah, let's create goods and services that make it a better world with our huge bitcoin stash. Totally agree. And I do think by the way, another inevitability is that all companies in The S&P5, if they want to survive in the next 10 to 15 years, will have bitcoin as reserve assets. You just have to, if you're the CEO or a CFO and you're listening to this, one of your jobs is to put your cash into assets or projects with the best ROIs, right? The best return on investments and BIC. If you can't outperform the hurdle rate of bitcoin, which currently is somewhere in the 40 to 50% range and foreseeably for the next 10 years, probably you could say 30 to 50% or so. If you don't have a project that can outperform that, you shouldn't be putting that money into that other whatever asset or line of business or service or whatever you want to do, you should be saving that in bitcoin. And so I think that that's inevitable. And I, you know, I, I still remember and I'd probably nobody but me remembers this but, but like probably two years ago I was in a big spaces and I believe Saylor was in the room and I actually said publicly in front of him that at some point point the operating business of Microstrategy, back when it was so called MicroStrategy, will become so small relative to the bitcoin they have on their balance sheet and so irrelevant with such a small ROI that they'll probably just let go of it altogether because it's just. And I said, I don't mean this to be offensive and I'm sure it's a great business, whatever, and it's chugging out some cash flows, but it's so tiny compared to what bitcoin is going to to do that you're not even going to care about that anymore. And you're just going to turn into a bitcoin strategy company at some point. And then that's kind of what happened. And that's actually what I think is going to happen to companies all throughout the S&P 500, is they're going to start with these core bitcoin positions that are going to grow and grow and grow at a much higher ROI than all of their other lines of business. And they're going to be like, what are we even doing this for? And so the S&P 500, the happy effect of that is, even if people don't like bitcoin is they're going to have a lot of bitcoin exposure simply by owning index funds in the S&P 500 and in the NASDAQ and things like that. That's the good thing. And at some point, and then as we talked about, it's Bitcoin 10Xs and then 100Xs and now it's just this huge behemoth monetary network. It will have slower growth at that point. And I think about 10 years from now that will be the time when the growth slows down to start thinking about how can I create better business lines, what products and services can I create that can actually outperform the baseline growth of bitcoin? But I still think we're about five to 10 years away from that for most business, most businesses.
- [58:48]
B
I agree. And to your point about the S&P 500, I saw a great chart recently. It was like the S&P493 or something. It was basically S&P500 minus the Mag 7. And looking at the performance of that, it's like, oh my God, this is terrible. You take out the Mag 7 and the S&P493 is way below even inflation. It's performing terrible, terribly. And so you look at that and it's like the Mag 7 will probably, just because they have the least need to, they will probably be some of the last to really actively adopt bitcoin. Right. Just maybe they're also, because they're so big, they're going to be more slow moving. It's going to be harder, it's going to be harder to get that pushed through. Right. But for the rest of these companies, it's like, geez, right now you are bleeding against fiat as a starting point bad enough, but you are like, you have an axe wound in your, like half your leg is gone. From a bitcoin perspective, like you, you need to do something real quick. Like Saylor was, you know, always talking about like zombie companies. It's like a lot of companies that don't think they're zombie companies actually, actually are when, when you look at them, especially when you start to price them against the hurdle rate of bitcoin.
- [59:57]
A
Right. So yeah, and to your point, I mean, how embarrassing is it to be losing against the debasement rate of your own fiat currency? And most of these companies are, I'll tell you, I'm optimistic for most of these companies though going forward because of bitcoin as a balance sheet option now and because of AI and I think the effects of AI and we can or cannot talk about that, that's fine. But what AI will do is it's going to significantly increase the operating margins of every company that starts to deploy it. AI is going to become commoditized, it's going to be smarter than every human by far and it's moving really, really quickly. And then it's also going to this embodied AI. So robotics with AI is going to, I think completely transform businesses which will greatly increase operating margins. So these 493 and all the thousands of smaller companies that are left behind right now and have been left behind basically since the global financial crisis, they're going to finally, I think, catch a break and start doing well. The one downside of this is that doesn't mean that people are going to be gainfully employed. I think the world is changing really fast and I think a lot of people will be out of, of work, first on the white collar side and then later as the robotics side catches up, even the blue collar side will be affected by it. But it's, it's a crazy world out there. So, so from a business perspective, I think their time is coming, thankfully for these, all these other businesses that have been left behind and they will start to be able to do good for the world and create good products and services and actually do it profitably. The downside is, is the world is changing and for people who don't realize that, who are behind on Bitcoin 1 and behind on AI, behind on robotics 3, I think they have no chance to survive the next 10 to 15 years or so unless they get educated quickly.
- [61:46]
B
Well, let's dive into that a little bit deeper. I mean, I assume you Also ascribe to kind of Jeff Booth's general thesis about where this is going. But can we get into that a little bit more? Because for anybody who hasn't heard yourself or me or Jeff talk about this before, I have a news flash. But technology is naturally deflationary, like everything. And like AI is accelerating that, right? And with each new technological revolution like that, deflation should accelerate. But shocker, the, you know, the money printers have been, have been stealing those technology gains from you. So everything, instead of getting cheaper, has gotten more expensive and you've been on the losing end of that trade. But how do you see this playing out? Because I think a lot of people see, like they rightly ask, okay, well, yeah, everything's naturally deflationary. Okay, you're telling me that now AI is going to be so deflationary, dictionary that like, in order to basically stop the system from exploding, they're going to have to print so much more fiat just to like to keep. Because otherwise, like, this doesn't work. This whole system, this house of cards doesn't work. If every prices start falling to the marginal cost of production, right, like they must inflate or everything collapses, how do you square that circle? How do you see this playing out? And what like, do you have a timeline for this where you're looking at this, like kind of this, this transition to, through AI, AI and robotics, like, and this massive workforce overhaul that is going to happen.
- [63:06]
A
Right. Well, so all of these, and I'd love to touch on all of these. And then also the other thing that I see, which is very concerning, I don't know if you're a fourth turning kind of person, but I think we're spiraling towards war. I think we are actively actually in a war right now with basically the BRICS nations. And so far it's not a hot war where we're actively fighting and losing soul soldiers, but financially we're in a war with these nations. I think that my guess is that before Trump is out of office and if assuming he makes it through his four years, which I think he will, I think we might be in a hot war with China. And I think the precipitating event will be Taiwan. I think there's going to be an invasion and we're going to butt heads and we're going to clash, and I hate that that's going to happen, but I think that's what's happening. Everything I see reading between the lines and is that the Trump administration is firing up the military industrial complex in the U.S. all of these tariff things, all of these deregulations and the things they're promoting, the rare earths, the drones, the technology sector, semiconductors, steel industries, automobiles, these kind of things. This is all, at least as far as I'm concerned. It's under the guise of we're going to make America great again and create manufacturing back in America. But what we're really doing doing is we're revving up America to become the manufacturing powerhouse of the world like we were back in the 1930s and 1940s. Can he succeed? I don't know. But they're trying really hard to do that and I think there will be some tangible benefits. But what I'm very concerned about is that we're headed towards a major actual hot war. And why do I bring that up is because the, I've been saying for a long time the only thing that could cause hyperinflation of the US dollar I think is if we get into a massive war, world war with China and Russia, something like that. I really hope it doesn't happen. But we would obviously have to print so much money, the government would borrow so much money that would cause massive debasement and that could cause heavy inflation, super inflation. I don't know about hyperinflation, but a lot of inflation and at a much higher rate than it currently is. That's very concerning to me. So then what I think about is what would they do to fight that? Right? In the 30s they cut off ability to own gold. Would they cut off the ability to own bitcoin somehow and make it really difficult for people obviously like an underground market for bitcoin would still exist. But I could see them doing something like that if they were desperate. The other thing that I think they're going to do by the way, and why they're embracing stablecoins so much and they just passed the genius act and all these other things. What they want it. So right now isn't, I believe tether is number seven or something like that in the seven or 17, seven maybe in the world for the amount of treasuries that they, they own. To me this is like the best thing ever to happen to the US government. What they can do is promote the heck out of stablecoins. Everybody in the world can own the US dollar, you know, proxy called a stablecoin. These tether circle US banks will all be a part of this. They will all then own treasuries to back one to one the, the synthetic dollars, the CBDCs that they're distributing to everybody. And then what they can do, then the government can do basically financial repression. So the central banks could say, the Fed can say, we're going to keep the 10 year treasury rate locked at this amount. So we're doing yield curve control. In effect, we will buy anything if the rate goes higher, we're going to buy the heck out of every bond that's out there. And basically what they can do is they can let inflation run super hot, they can keep the interest rate power pegged, everyone who owns dollars, which is everybody who owns a US stablecoin anywhere in the world and they can literally just debase everybody. After World War II we did that and the Americans were like, I guess it's the price we pay for winning this war and to rebuild America. What's going to happen if this happens? And if stable coins really take off, which I think they will, and if we borrow this just insane amount of money is we're literally going to debase the entire world who's holding the US dollar system. So to me this is like jackpot for the US government and for central bankers. They love the concept of stablecoins and love the concept of, to me this is like the Euro dollar but just expanding massively. We can debase the world and still run our war machine. Even though we're already massively bankrupt, we can still pour all of this, all of these dollars into creating this military industrial complex to fight China and Russia. It's crazy. It's all just crazy to me. But to me it's inevitable that this is where we' and I really hate to see it. And that's the dystopian view. And then what we were originally talking about is where do we see this going in the Jeff Booth world of technology is deflationary. First of all, war is super inflationary because it destroys capital. It causes people to put all of their time and efforts into the war machine who then consumes it and eats it up and just destroys capital and it leaves the country with nothing. Even the winning country is left with nothing. The losers are, are just, you know, decimated and everybody dies and it's horrible. And so you don't want to see war, right? You just, it's just awful and terrible. But it looks like that's where we're headed. So I hope I'm wrong. The optimistic view is AI is super deflationary robotics. I, I, this is incredible, Walker. I mean like I'm a former doctor, right? I look at what AI can do already and I'm like, we're already about at the point where doctors don't actually don't really barely need to exist, right? I mean the human contact is one thing, but if you said if you put any doctor up against chat gbt, I would choose chat GBT to pick the right answer. Because all of doctoring is just algorithms. You look at a patient, you look at the symptoms, you look at the blood work, you look at the, the radiology exams, you go blip, blip, blip. If this, then this, if this, then this, if this, then this. I think you have this diagnosis, here's the treatment. That's what like computers are made for, right? And that's doctors. And this is the area I know. What about attorneys? What about everything else you know that involves your brain? I think that we're almost already at this AGI level, this artificial general intelligence where AI is as smart as any human in any subject around the world. And then we, and once we surpass that level officially, you move to artificial super intelligence where we can't even like understand what it's doing at that point. IQ is so far above the human level IQ that it's discovering new things and they don't even make sense to us. And it has to try to teach us like we're like a two year old because we can't even, you know, I mean that's what's coming. And I think it's coming much sooner than people believe. And I believe it would happen even faster across industries if industries didn't fight it. I like, I think healthcare is going to fight it tooth and nail because doctors like making their salaries and they're going to talk about how important it is to have. And I'm not hacking on that. I think the doctor patient relationship is super popular and the human touch is super popular. But you definitely wouldn't need the amount of doctors and you certainly don't need the amount of lawyers we have in America. Right.
- [70:16]
B
I was just going to say lawyers. Lawyers are screwed, like especially the paralegals, like anybody who is not a trial lawyer basically where like if your work is just in the background, like I'm sorry, but AI is like, it knows every precedent for every case ever like within seconds. But lawyers are going to fight it hard too because they're lawyers.
- [70:35]
A
Right, exactly.
- [70:36]
B
They built this whole system to enrich themselves. They've made it all complicated on purpose like tooth and nail.
- [70:41]
A
So these huge organizations, especially the well paid professionals, are going to fight it as long as possible, but eventually they'll just be overwhelmed. And eventually what's going to happen is it's going to be one lawyer with an AI that can handle 100 times the cases because the AI just does everything and the lawyer overwhelmed, oversees everything. One doctor overseeing, like say I'm a radiologist or former radiologist. One doctor with a bunch of equipment to do MRIs and ultrasounds and CTs and the AI reads it all and the doctor just says sure, yep, yep, I approve, I approve, I approve. Sign off, sign off, sign off. And all of the other doctors won't last because they won't because they're very expensive. It's expensive to have a doctor. That's going to happen I think across the world and across, across all different white collar professions and it's going to be transformative and it's going to cause GDP to skyrocket and it's going to cause unemployment to skyrocket too. And that's. Can I talk about one more thing I've been thinking about? This is the kind of stuff I do. If unemployment is skyrocketing. So I'm a hardcore free market capitalist. I think that's by far the best system and economy for humans. What do you do though? If unemployment is 30 or 40% or 50% and all of the biggest proponents of free market capitalism are unemployed and they can't find a job and now they can't even go be an Uber driver because they're self driving Uber drivers now. You know, cars. Does capitalism work in that society? And that's what I've been spending a ton of time thinking about over the last few weeks is I don't think it does. And I think that's going to be this huge shift in humanity in a transition into an entirely new system where humans are the second smartest species and they're unemployed, but they still need to eat and have a place to live and they still want to pursue happiness and freedom and what do you do in that world? And I think this is the crisis that humanity will face in the, the next 10 to 15 years at the most. And it's going to be a shockingly different world 15 years from now than it is today. And that's not even talking about war, that's just talking about AI and robotics expanding exponentially.
- [72:58]
B
That's a super interesting question because basically the point there, if I'm taking the next logical leap, is that it won't be capitalism because basically everybody will be on Ukraine ubi and that's going to be the only option because literally Just a vast swath of the population are unemployable. There's no job for them to do. I mean, but don't you think this has also been. Is this time different when it comes to AI? Because this is also the same argument that's made during every sort of industrial revolution, right? Every technological revolution is that everyone will be unemployed. What will the horse and buggy drivers do? But is this time doing difference? Is that what you're saying?
- [73:37]
A
So I've spent a ton of time thinking about this, sitting here alone in my office, and so I'm probably kind of crazy. And I get it. I was the person making fun of people being the Luddites, right? Because every technology shift has the group of Luddites who are opposed to it. I'm not opposed to it, but I'm saying I think it will destroy way, way more jobs than it creates for the first time, history. And I think that humans, especially Americans, are going to have to rethink how we think ourselves. Meaning when you go to a party and you're small, talking with people, you say, hey, I'm Jeff. What do you do? Like, that's like the normal question. And we're not going to ask that anymore because nobody's going to do anything, right? Like. Like, for a job, like. Like doc. And I'm. I'm not. I'm not into this, but a lot of my colleagues, Colleagues are like, I am a doctor. Like, I see myself as this doctor, as a social status sort of thing. Attorneys can be like that. You know, politicians are like that. That. What do you do when you don't need doctors anymore? Because AI is a thousand times smarter than the smartest doctor, right? Like, what would you go to a person for? Just crazy. And so. And so I think that it's going to be this entire cultural shift that's going to just blow our minds and some of us won't be able to handle it. Like, the dual doers, the ambitious people are going to just be like, I'm going nuts. Like, I don't know what to do. Like, I. Like there's. There's robots mowing my lawn and cleaning my house and doing my dishes. I. I could go do a project if I want to for fun, but I don't need to do any of that. I don't have, you know, if I'm not giving value to people as a physician or as a lawyer or as a fund manager. Right. What do you need a fund manager for if. If AI can do it a thousand times Better than I can do it. And all you need really to do is save in Bitcoin.
- [75:27]
B
Right.
- [75:30]
A
How do we define ourselves as humans? And then how do you set up a government in an economy for people who aren't working? Because the machines and the AI are doing all of the work. To me, this is super fascinating. And it's going to come so fast because I'm watching this come so fast already because it's moving exponentially and we're thinking like this, and it's going like this that much faster. It's like we're going to be dealing with these questions in the next few years, I think, and it's going to just rock people, like, blow people's minds. So, anyways, this is a really weird conversation, but this is the kind of stuff I've been thinking about lately. I think the world is going to change rapidly.
- [76:12]
B
I think it's a super important conversation to have, though. Like, I'm glad you brought this up because I think people, like, as much as everybody's, like, yeah, okay, AI's changing things. Yeah, people are going to lose their jobs. You know, like, there's a. There's a great south park episode I don't know if you saw it was from like the last season they did, where basically all the white collar workers are out of a job, you know, and. And the only people left are the. The handymen. And it's like. Because nobody knows how to do anything actually. Like, nobody can fix anything around their house. And the handymen are basically. I don't know. I don't. This isn't spoiling it too much. It's still funny. You should watch it. But they basically, by the end of it, like, these two competing handymen are the Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, and they're in a space race because they've accumulated so much capital because they're still the only ones who can do anything, you know, but it's like. Like may. You know, maybe that's. That's, like, south park is usually fairly prescient with some of these things. And. And, like, I'm like, maybe that is where we're going. I'm curious. Where do you think podcasters fall in this? Do. Do we still have a little bit of reputational capital that we can. Can deploy, even when there's. You can have a million different AI avatars reading you the news or, you know, we could both be AI and, you know, would. But would people miss us? That's really the question.
- [77:17]
A
I think the people who are Used to podcasters would miss podcasters, but I think the people who are on the outskirts wouldn't miss them at all. And I think podcasters days are number two. No offense. You're great now. You'll last longer than everybody, and you'll be at the top of it before it goes down well.
- [77:35]
B
But, I mean, but even, like, looking at, like, look at, like, the traditional, you know, like, legacy media, you know, like cable news, whatever you want to call it, that is a job that is just, like, reading the news. Like, okay, that's just a. You could just spin up an avatar. Like, it's. That's. That's super easy. Yes, but by the same token, it's like, maybe we put. We put too much emphasis on like. Well, I would need to know that's a real person, and I need to know that they're. That their reputation. I need to know I can trust them. Because it's like, we're also at this point where people don't. People don't trust news personalities anymore because they've found out that they've just been lying to them for. And been mouthpieces of the regime for so many years. So it's like, yeah, like, I don't care if they're a person or not. I just want the truth. You know, I don't. I don't know.
- [78:19]
A
Or. Or you might just do it just for fun, right? I think, like, communities will be more important. Like, humans will just kind of want to band together. My question for you is, would you do this? And maybe this is too personal, but would you do your podcast if you didn't need to? Like, if you had all of your needs taken care of and you could provide for your family and you had, you know, enough money to take care of your kids and your grandkids for future generations, are you. You know, a lot of people are driven to do the. And I know because I used to do this kind of stuff, I was driven to make money, right? And to. And to grow business and to whatever, grow your brand. Would you still be motivated to do that if you didn't need to do it?
- [78:59]
B
100%. And I've talked about this before, but, like, I never started this show with the intent of making money. Like, I still have. I have a fiat job that provides for what me and my family need, and I like having that fiat job, too. It's also. It's like a family business, so there's a different bit of satisfaction to it because you're working within the family. But I Like having that. Because that means that even if I have no sponsors, which, like, right now, for instance, I'm in between some sponsorships ended, these shows are just going to be value for value for a few episodes. And I'm still doing them and releasing them because I want to. Because I. I love being able to have these conversations. And honestly, like, the, the deeper reason, too, beyond, like, selfishly, I like being able to talk with cool folks like, like yourself and all the other people who are generous enough to share their time. I. If I can do some small thing to be able to move the needle where somebody listen. Like, I got podcasts helped me go down the bitcoin rabbit hole. Like Peter McCormick, Guy Swan, Preston, Stefan Lavera, like, all these people helped me go down that bitcoin rabbit hole. And you. I, I didn't know what episode was going to resonate with me particularly. And that's the same thing for so many people, I think is like, that's how they get, you know, that first spark, some particular guest, some conversation resonates with them, and then they go deeper because you have to actually go down the rabbit hole on your own, but you can be shown the entrance by somebody. And so for me, it's like, would I do it? Yeah, absolutely. Like, I enjoy doing it. It's a lot of fun for me, and I hope that it makes some positive impact because I think that bitcoin is the most important thing I could be podcasting about right now amidst all the other. I could probably be a lot more successful with a political podcast or one of those ones where they get dumb guys and girls to say stupid things to each other, but that seems like such an absolute waste of time to me that I. That I would not do. But this. This a bitcoin podcast. Hell, yeah.
- [80:55]
A
Right. And. And, and to your point, too, like, we, some of us, we love teaching and we love learning, and I think humans will always be like that. And so, yeah, could there be a role then for just people who love to teach and learn or to commune with other people, for sure. Or like these other ones, these stupid ones where they're just talking about nonsense or, you know, these young kids today follow, like, influencers while they, like, put their makeup on and eat food and, like, they'll sit and watch these people do nothing all day, all day. And it just seems insane to me, but that's how people are. They just love to be entertained and goof off. And so will that increase or decrease? I guess. I don't know. I don't know the answer to that. I think more from a professional white collar kind of business. And then seeing where this is going and seeing the leg of robotics behind there, like it's a different world is coming. And I think it's coming more quickly than most people realize. And so just try to be aware of it. If you're a bitcoiner, like, look around you a little bit. There's other stuff going on the world too, besides bitcoin. Even though bitcoin is probably the coolest.
- [81:52]
B
Thing that's going on, it's true, it is hard to, to pick your. To pull yourself out of the rabbit hole every now and then. But I'm curious too. Just this, a slight sidebar here. But you have been off. It's like been almost a year since you've been off, like ever any social media except for noer. Is that correct?
- [82:10]
A
Correct. Yep. How have you.
- [82:13]
B
How have you felt? Why did you do that first? And how have you felt? Found it? Like, how's that been for you?
- [82:17]
A
Yeah. So great question. So I noticed that social media was one consuming a huge portion of my time in my life. And I was thinking about it all the time. This. So this is originally. So back when I had every, you know, I had Facebook and I had LinkedIn and Twitter and whatever else. And I noticed though, that the more I used those sites, the worse my mood was. Like, I would, I would be agitated and especially during the political scene seasons. I hate politics to begin with. And then you get shunted down these things and then you like get shunted down watching these videos where like people are beating each other up and people are dying and like, just horrible things. Right. And I would just be like, what am I doing spending my time doing this? First of all, I'm like way too busy, so this is crazy that I'm spending any time. So I got rid of everything but Twitter. And I did that for a while. And then even Twitter started sending me down into this darkness hole. And I'll tell you that what did it for me is when I decided to shut down my investment advisory firm and quit trying to promote my brand. And so I get it, by the way, for people who rely on social media to grow your brand, like, you kind of need it. So it's a very tough situation for them. When I got to the point where I didn't need it anymore because I'm not trying to get new clients and I wasn't trying to get patients as a doctor or anything. I literally don't want to do Anything that has to do with growing me or my brand or my business or anything that made it really easy. So I finally was able to pull the plug on Twitter. That was very hard for me. It literally felt like I was like pulling off an arm or something because I was so attached to Twitter and I was just on it all the time and I loved it and I loved the interaction and I loved the spaces and my pocket friends. Like all these people that I would interact with all the time. So that felt like almost like probably how it feels like to give up smoking or something. Like I just went cold turkey and quit and just went full on nothing. I say, Nasr Nostra Nasir. And that was good. And I instantly noticed, literally, like day of and continuing on, that I just was in a much lighter mood. The algorithms, there aren't algorithms that push you down into these holes of darkness, you know, to gain retweets and whatever and followers. And so I just was in generally a better mood for quite a while. And then I'll tell you. So that's how I started. So I would recommend to everybody, if you're thinking about it, just go ahead and do it. You won't regret it. I have regretted for even one second closing Facebook or closing LinkedIn especially, which was just a cesspool of solicitation. Can't stand it. Twitter was the hardest one. But I haven't regretted that either after the first week or so. Even now, though, I'll tell you, Walker, I look at, you know, what Palantir does, you know, Peter Thiel's company, and I see these guys who harvest dark data and coalesce it for governments to survey their people, and knowing that all of us and including this talk right now, is going to be somewhere in their system, and they're going to use that to determine if we're a good guy or bad guy, depending on who the administration is, and then if they should act against us in the future based on predictive models. That's literally like what they're doing. And I think about this and I feel like a crazy conspiracy guy with a tinfoil hat. But I'm like, I don't want to have a digital footprint where these people can just know everything that I have done and that I'm going to do. It just weirds me out. Like, I literally just think about it all the time. I'm like, I can't stand that this is like this permanent digital record. And they're like, people are keeping track of me. Like, I'm literally Not a crazy guy. I'm just like. Just like, kind of like living my life. And. And then I see my other friends that they don't even have social media, and they don't know what any of this stuff is. They don't care at all. They just live their own lives. I'm like, that just seems kind of nice. Like, what if I just kind of, like, hung out with my friends and family and had a beer once in a while and, you know, touched some grass and so I'm saying all this to say I'm contemplating very seriously, like, just getting rid of Noster as well and going completely offline, maybe doing the occasional interview, but that's where I'm at right now. So if people ever see that, suddenly I'm just gone. It's either, you know, somebody has abducted me and put me in prison or something, but it's probably just that I've shut down my social accounts and I'm living my best life.
- [86:45]
B
Man, I hope the abduction is not the case. You need whatever dead man switch or whatever in case they try to put you away. Maybe that's a good micro app for somebody to build. Maybe Jeff. We'll vibe code it together. We'll see what we can do. But no, I love that. Because you had a pretty decent sized Twitter following too, when you gave it up.
- [87:09]
A
Yeah, it was like 98,000. So.
- [87:12]
B
Yeah.
- [87:12]
A
Not huge.
- [87:13]
B
Yeah.
- [87:13]
A
Not small either.
- [87:14]
B
I mean, that's, That's. That's. It's pretty. I come from a town of like, 2,000 people, so that's, you know, like 50 of my. My hometowns right there, you know, But I always. I always benchmark things against. Against those early childhood numbers. But I think that that's really cool. And I think, you know, it's. The first step is being conscious of what these algorithms, these centralized platforms are doing to you. Like, you need. You need to identify it first before you have any chance of kind of being, you know, resisting it. Like, you must be aware of it.
- [87:44]
A
That's.
- [87:45]
B
That's the thing that most people just aren't. Aren't even aware of it or are aware of it in some kind of general way, but they haven't actually really thought about, like, oh, like, why am I. Why am I getting angry at this third video I watched? You know? Like, I just, you know, especially with, like the. With Tick Tock is I've still never downloaded TikTok, have no plans to do so. Carla had it downloaded for a little while only on her phone when we were posting Our crypto couple videos there until they started shadow banning us. Then we just gave it up. But like that is really destructive where it's just like the constant, there's never a break between scrolling and visual stimuli and it is just, it is learning. Like they're getting so good at learning about you and figuring out exactly what makes you tick and exactly what pisses you off. And that's the key. It's the rage bait that really gets, gets you to stay engaged. Right. Like you, you generally, you're not going to be engaged as long with like, with happy, you know, happy stuff. Like maybe for a little while. But the rage bait, that's what gets you, you know.
- [88:41]
A
Yes.
- [88:41]
B
Head getting closer to the screen and you're getting angry, getting ready to, to send that snappy reply. Like that's what gets people and then, but it's just like it's super destructive to people's, to people's health like both mental and physical. And like I really, I worry too about this. You know, I didn't grow up with smartphones. Like I was, you know, I was not a pure digital native. Like I, you know, remember, you know, dial up and DSL and all of that stuff. Like that was my upbringing. I don't think I had a cell phone even until I was maybe like 16. But kids now, it's like they've got a supercomputer from before they're 10. Like that is with access to, to the Internet and social media and like what a great tool for some things. Of course, like, like anything, this laptop, this phone, they're great tools but they are really destructive if used inappropriately as well and like that. I just, I don't think we have any idea what the long term effects of that are going to be like. We're starting to maybe, but like it's going to accelerate. It's going to get worse. Like that's why people sit around and watch, you know, some influencer eat their breakfast, lunch and dinner because it's like they haven't learned how to actually make friends with people in the real world. Like it's sad.
- [89:54]
A
Yeah.
- [89:55]
B
But I don't know.
- [89:56]
A
Yeah.
- [89:56]
B
And I exist because it is a different vibe.
- [89:59]
A
It is a totally different vibe. You don't feel like you're being programmed by the algorithm, which is, which is fantastic. So I'm very thankful. So I think, you know, as far as social media goes, if you're going to use it like that should be number one on your list. And I would recommend to most people making it your only thing on your list, especially if you don't have anything to promote. That's the best way to hang out with people. But I would say taking it the next step, just get off social media altogether. I'm not convinced that it's helpful in general for most people and get back out to real life, touch grass, go meet people, go have real life conversations. The only time I ever meet psychopathic people for real personality disorders are online. Even on noster like just crazy, angry, weird people. And I'm like, you don't say the things you do in normal life. Even if you disagree with someone, you still smile and you still try to, you shake their hand and you still like try to be cordial. Like there just isn't any of that on social media. And that's just not healthy for people I don't think.
- [90:56]
B
No. Cool. The problem is because on social media you can't get punched in the face. Like that's the big reason why people will not say like, will not say shit in person. It's because like, well if I say this then there's a, you know, x percent chance I'm getting punched right in the face. And most people don't want to get punched in in the face. It's generally something that humans try to avoid. But like on social media there is no physical threat of repercussion. I mean unless you like, you know, you swat somebody or whatever. But like then you probably end up in jail too. So like, you know, that's a different story. But I digress. Dr. Jeff, I do want to, you know, I rarely if ever ask anyone for bitcoin price predictions but because multiple people on Nostradamus asked about it with reference to your previous predictions, I, I, I still don't want to ask you for a specific one nor will I hold you to an actual date. I'm just curious like what ballpark are you in for the short term? And then I'm more curious, what's your long term like so short term, let's say you know, in the next year. But then long term, like do you, do you agree with like sailors 21 year forecast of like the bear case of 3 million, base case of 13 million, bull case of 49 million. Where do you fall on that short term and long term scale?
- [92:17]
A
Yeah, so my favorite prediction is I think that by 2035 you'll be able to get a good New York strip steak for 2,500 sats per pound.
- [92:31]
B
Okay.
- [92:32]
A
That's my main prediction. People usually want price Predictions, but I think that you will actually be able to buy steak with SA at a regular store. And I think It'll be about 20, which today would be about 3 bucks per pound. But I think that that's, that's where I think it's going. So that, that's good. So life will get cheaper and quality will improve. I want to publicly say that I'm going to be wrong about the clickbait that I have all over it. Like every single popular show I do says, Dr. Ross, says, $475,000 Bitcoin. And I'm like, I won't do that to you.
- [93:05]
B
Just so you know. Danny Knowles. Danny Knowles.
- [93:09]
A
Yeah, Danny.
- [93:09]
B
I'm just kidding.
- [93:10]
A
Danny Turkey. So, and, and, and why did we not get this? So I'm, I will be wrong. I'm going to claim that I was wrong. I don't think there's any chance we'll get that. Like, it's like a 1% chance at this point. If the economy just rips from here, starting like today, here in, in, in August, mid August, it just rips. Rips into September, October. Bitcoin could possibly rip that high, but that's almost impossible now at this point. The reason why this isn't happening is because this economy has been stuck and this is getting a little long, so I won't keep going. But we've been stuck in this weird sideways economy since basically 2022. Services have been doing okay. Manufacturing has been in contraction. If they start to rip into the first half of 2026, Bitcoin could go parabolic again. We could see another huge spike higher. At that point. It could get to these levels I was talking about before. We could be like in the half a million range possibly. But if we do that and this is like, everybody gets all excited about how high could it go. I always, at that point, as a fund manager, like, it could fall so far so fast. You guys have to be so careful. And so I always tell people, please don't take on debt during a bull market. That's when people start levering up and levering up and they're like, oh my gosh, I just doubled my money in like a week. I gotta go 10x now. And they lever up. And those are the people that just ru their lives financially. Like, bull markets are for paying off debt. If you have debt, I'm like begging you as a, as a guy who understands how money works, please pay off your debt in a bull market. Don't take on new debt in a bull Market. Bear markets are for taking on new debt. And we're not in a bear market right now. So I'm, I think sailor, so. And then your final question, sailors, longer term projections. So by like the year 2045, I think Bitcoin at that point will probably be like, like in the 10 million range. Ish. Which would be what, like a. Is that a thousand X from here? So no. So we go, we're at a hundred right now. I think we get to like a million X in about 10 years. In about 10 million X. 10 million. So yeah, 100X from here in about 20 years. That's kind of my. My vibe. And I think that it's going to do a lot of this along the way. But I think for people who are just stacking, that's what I tell people. They're like, should I buy now or should wait for a dip? I'm like, I think it's going to be easily a million dollars in 2035 and probably 10 million in 2045. Like, do you think you'll care if you bought it at 115 or 112 or 108 or 150? Like just, just stack sats, man. Like, quit thinking about it coming full circle and probably a good ending to this. Just stack sats and go about your life. Go hug your wife, go, you know, have kids, enjoy your family and go do something productive. Create value for people and. And the price will take care of itself over the long run.
- [96:03]
B
That. That is a heck of a note to end on. Dr. Jeff, thank you so much for your time. I know you don't. You said you don't have anything.
- [96:08]
A
You're.
- [96:09]
B
You're promoting. Do you want to send people anywhere? I'll link your Noster in the, in the show notes, but yeah, you got, you got nothing. You got nothing to sell. You know, I got nothing.
- [96:17]
A
Yeah, I just am some dude now. So. Yeah, they should, they should all follow you for sure and buy any products.
- [96:24]
B
That you're selling so far. Just, you know, the only thing I'm selling is a good time or listen to the show.
- [96:31]
A
Yeah, they should subscribe to your station. That's what people should do.
- [96:34]
B
There we go. And check out Nostr because if you're listening to this on anywhere else but Nostr, you didn't get to see it live. And this was live for Nostr only. So thank you to all the people who joined on Noster and who zapped some sats because how cool you're able to send magic Internet money to a podcaster you've never met who is not yet an AI. Like, what a time to be alive, you know?
- [96:58]
A
Yes, I love it.
- [97:00]
B
All right, well, hey, thanks so much Jeff. Appreciate your time.
- [97:02]
A
Thanks Walker. Thanks for having me on.
- [97:11]
B
And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin Talk episode of the Bitcoin Podcast. Remember to subscribe to this podcast wherever you're watching or listening listening and share it with your friends, family and strangers on the Internet. Find me on noster@primal.net walker and this podcast@primal.netcoin on X, YouTube and Rumble. Just search at Walker America and find this podcast on X and Instagram at Titcoin Podcast. Head to the Show Notes to grab sponsor links. Head to substack.comwalkeramerica to get episodes emailed to you. And head to bitcoin podcast.net for everything else. Bitcoin is scarce, but podcasts are abundant. So thank you for spending your scarce time listening to the Bitcoin podcast. Until next time, stay free.