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Yo. Welcome back to another episode of the Jack Mallers show. Guess what my name is. If you guess, Jack, you're a genius. You are listening to yet another edition of Mailbag Monday, Episode 124 for the loyal, for the Faithful. You'll notice I am not in my empty closet this week and this show is not live this week. However, I apologize for that. Those that listen to my BTC Prague keynote may have a little bit of hint or a clue. I am touring wedding venues with my fiance. I said during my Prague keynote, when I get home, take a look at some wedding venues. I was confessing my love, as I always do, for my fiance, my excitement about family. So we're taking a look at some venues and hopefully picking a spot where we are going to start our family, which is very, very exciting. But. But unfortunately this week conflicted with when I usually do the live stream. So you guys know me, proof of work over everything. If I tell you I'm going to show up, I show up. Man, the people, they say you said it, not me. Just kidding. I wish you guys said it more. I'm usually the guy that says it. But anyway, we'll be back to regular scheduled programming next week. Sorry about the pre recording. It is Monday. Call it about 4pm Eastern. I would never record this on a day that isn't Monday. Let the markets open on Monday. No show is going to be stale. I'm going to show up every single week, battered, bruised, whatever it is. But I do apologize for not being live. Being live is always my preference. Having fun in the chat, doing live Q and A. So bit of a shorter episode will still be really fun. We'll do some market updates, take a look at the strength of the dollar, how that's impacting assets. I have some fun insights for you guys. So we'll take a look at macro and markets and then on my flight here, I actually I couldn't sleep. So I started an essay. I call it Bitcoin, the last honest market left. And I've been in this industry for almost 14 years now, so I rock a baby face. But I've got a lot of experience and this bear market to me solidifies a lot of learnings that I've had in my career in bitcoin and I wanted to write them down. So I spent the flight almost finishing an essay. I'll preview that essay a little bit. I'll give you guys some strike updates and then I gotta get in the shower and I gotta get out of here. Okay, so with that Being said, let's timestamp this bad boy and get this show on the road. I am talking to you all at a bitcoin price of $60,440. And again, it is Monday, June 29, 4:04pm Eastern. A few hours before when I would typically hit live. That puts bitcoin's market cap at US$1.21 trillion. Okay, all time high obviously hasn't changed. All time high remains at $126,160. We are 52.1% down from that all time high that we made on October 6, 2025. It's been 266 days now, almost a full trip around the sun since bitcoin made an all time high. Hi, last but not least, let's timestamp this bad boy in bitcoin time, which is block time. The last block, mind since I hit record not stream was block height 955. 955,000. Excuse me, 971. Okay, without further ado, let's go. As I mentioned, I'm titling this over what I think will be the title of my essay and I hope to publish it this week. We will see Huge week strike has two massive product announcements, which I'll get to at the tail end of the episode. So if I can get it out this week, that'd be dandy. If it doesn't get out this week, it means I'm just way too busy. But it'll go out next week and I call it Bitcoin, the last honest market. Before I wax philosophical in your ears. The four questions we start every week with, and we kick off a little bit of macro market updates. What are the four questions? Loyal listeners, you guys will know it off the top of your head. Question one, is the Strait of Harmony still closed? Question two, is the conflict still ongoing? Question three, are global supply chains still being disrupted? And question four, can global debt survive this level of disruption? Unfortunately for us that don't love war, don't love human suffering, don't love human death at the behest of government, it looks to be as if the conflict is still going. And so we're not gonna spend time on this show chasing political headlines, chasing mainstream media interviews. We're not even gonna waste our time. If the questions are. Excuse me. The answers to these questions remain the same. This headline was this morning, Monday morning, June 29, from Axios, saying that U.S. and Iran agreed to pause strikes and plan talks this week. Is it Deja vu, guys. I've been saying the same thing for months now you're going to be told that the conflict is just about to end. Trust us. Somehow they keep agreeing to agree to agree to agree to, talk about agreeing to, planning on agreeing to, pausing to only yet agree an actual agreement, but the actual agreement has not cometh. Is this deja vu? Honestly, who knows or cares politics or are a shitcoin. But it's a new week. Same updates. US and Iran are agreeing to agree to an end of the conflict and it is no coincidence this was again announced on Sunday night as at least from the US side. I can't speak to the Iran side. I'm not as familiar with local politics and messaging and the Iranian stock market or the state of that. But Trump obviously plans his media engagement around market open, market close, futures open. And so Sunday night seems to be the time when we get new promises and an agreement for an agreement, and an agreement that sits on top of an agreement that will later upon be agreed to is announced. So is the strait still closed? Relatively, yes. Is the conflict still ongoing? Seemingly yes. Are global supply chains disrupted? Yes. And can US and more broadly Western debt markets survive this level of disruption? My prediction is no. Oil has come down significantly. We've attributed that primarily to the depletion of the reserves across the West. U.S. oil reserves are at its lowest point since the early 80s. I do not think that oil is this low because the sweet, sweet oil nectar is flowing. I think we're depleting emergency reserves. But we'll talk about that next week if we get any material updates. But yeah, I'm not chasing politicians around. Screw that. So let's get into market updates. Chapter one what is Moving and why? I felt like continuing my theme here of looking at the dollar. I think all that matters right now is taking a look at the strength of the world reserve currency Last episode. If you haven't seen it, I check it out for reference because I will reference it this episode, but just to try and keep this one short. The dollar is the world reserve currency. We all know that. That means a lot of Almost all of the world's debt is denominated in dollars. When the dollar strengthens, that makes it harder for those that borrow in dollar denomination to service said debt. So imagine you owe money and we know on this show, and I'll make it clear in a bit, money is time, energy, human effort, human labor, human dignity in an abstracted form. And so if the money goes up that you owe, then you owe more human effort, more human energy, more human Time, right? More human labor. Imagine if you owed someone. Let's say when I got into bitcoin 14 years ago, I pledged to owe someone 1000 bitcoin, which back in my day, that was like a reasonable, that was, you know, thousand bitcoin. I told you guys I had casually spent six Bitcoin on a painting. I think that was in 2015. So, okay, fine, let's do six Bitcoin. Let's say I told the artist, hey, I'll owe you the six Bitcoin in 15 years. Well, obviously the money that I owed has strengthened, which now is a lot more human effort, time, energy and labor than back in the day. That was like a couple hundred bucks. Now let's see. What is 6 Bitcoin? 6 Bitcoin is $362,000. So I guess at home I'm sitting on a $362,000 painting, technically. So the point is, if the money that you owe strengthens, well, servicing that debt becomes harder. So what do we typically see when the dxy, the dollar index strengthens? Well, we see a sell off in assets because it's not that easy to become materially more productive as a person, as a company, as a government. It's hard to be like, oh, the dollar strengthening? Well, I'll just invent an incredible business or I'll just find unbelievably valuable natural resources under our soil. Typically, what happens is you dig into your savings, you dig into your assets, you dig into your war chest. And so you start to see, to service these debts and to respond to a strengthening dollar. A sell off in stocks, a sell off in bonds, a sell off in bitcoin, a sell off in gold. And so bitcoin, as it always does, it has been leading the market. So it's usually first to fall and also first to rise because it is the only true fair market and free market we have left. But everything seems to be following. Gold is off its highs tremendously. Silver is actually down more year to date, I believe, than bitcoin and is further from its highs than bitcoin. I think silver is at this point approaching 60% off of its highs. Bitcoin, as we just went over in the intro, is 52%. And so that's what we are seeing. And on the image here, you can see the US dollar index is breaking above 100. And this chart spans all the way back to a decade ago, 2015. And you can see very rarely is the US dollar index ever able to sustain itself above 100. It's typically been below. Now if you I'll make a maybe longer form segment on a future episode about this. The problem is the world reserve currency can't ever be too strong or too weak. If it's too weak, you're going to get an abundance of credit, an abundance of dollars that's going to contribute to inflation to unsustainable levels. If it gets too strong, then you're going to force austerity, tight monetary conditions, assets are going to sell off. And this whole idea that we can have permanent debt and somehow strike the perfect balance that's centrally planned by a bunch of unelected private bankers. So you can't get too weak. You can't get too strong. And you can kind of see this in the image that I have on the screen. The dollar will get above 100 on this index and then it'll have to crash below and then it goes up and then it goes down. It kind of chops and central planners try and perfectly the environment that us humans must perfectly exist in. Now, obviously my opinion is what we really need is to be governed by mother Nature. In a free market, we don't need central planners. But why is bitcoin selling off? Why is the NASDAQ starting to struggle? Why is gold off? Why is silver off? Why are assets more broadly selling off? It's because of a strong dollar. And the dollar seems to be reacting to warsh. Ever since Warship was going to be the Fed chair, the dollar has strengthened and the dollar's responding to a guy that's claiming to be hawkish, a guy that's claiming to hike rates. I'm going to call his bluff in a second. But just keep this in mind, guys. Like, why could bitcoin go to 55k? Could it go to 50k? Absolutely. Could this be the bottom? Absolutely. My recommendation remains the same. Turn on those DCAs. We're living in this era right now where the dollar is starting to strengthen. It's reacting to the Fed's messaging, which is reacting to inflation, which is caused by a lot of credit creation, money creation and a conflict in the Middle East. So perfect time to dca. It's a perfect time to lower your time preference. It's a perfect time to build on that conviction. It's a perfect time to earn more than you spend. It's a perfect time to find a way to be more valuable and bring in more income. And a perfect time to to reduce your expenses and try and spend less. Grow that profit margin, stack those sats. Okay, so let's get into some of the details. Let me tell you guys why I think the Fed is full of shit. And you guys already know my thoughts on central planners on the Fed. I think we should abolish the Fed. But specifically why? I think their hawkish rhetoric is smoke and mirrors and I don't buy it for a second. I think the dollar is overreacting and will have to come lower at some point. Could be tomorrow, could be next week, could be next month, could be next quarter, but it definitely can't be next decade. Okay? I think the Fed is trapped. So my idea is with this slide at least is I just want to show you guys how the U.S. government, the U.S. treasury has really pivoted to financing itself on what we call the front end of the curve via bills. So you can issue debt, what is called long duration. So a 10 year, a 30 year or you can issue bills, stuff that's as good as cash, call it cash or cash equivalent. This, you know, you can issue like a three month. Okay, now the US Government, especially under the Biden administration with Janet Yellen, very slowly and then quickly, suddenly and then all at once started issuing a lot of the debt and financing itself on the front end, on the short end. So issuing a lot of bills. And you can see this if you look at the chart on the left and also the right, but both are good visuals, is the amount of short duration debt that the government is issuing. And it's funny because Scott Besant, when he wasn't part of the government was shitting all over Janet Yellen saying you're an idiot. What are you doing? You're putting us in a terrible position. You know how hard it is going to be to roll that over. And that's what the chart individual on the right is illustrating is just how hard it is to roll this debt over. For those listening, this is Financial Times treasury rollover risk now runs into the trillions privately held marketable U.S. treasury debt is maturing within one year and it succeeding 8 trillion. And what's fascinating here guys is this also tells us how confident people are in the creditworthiness of the United States. And obviously the United States can always print what they owe. So it's not that you're not going to get the actual dollars you're owed, but the question is how much are those dollars when you actually get them in hand? How much stuff are they going to get you? How much groceries, how much eggs, how much vacation, how many children can you afford to have? What sized house can you live in how much can you travel? I've talked about everything in our lives is a derivative of energy. The story of humanity is being able to commercialize energy from the big orange and yellow thing in the sky, the sun. And our life in this market is who has what right to consume what amount of energy. You want to drive a car, you want to fly a private plane, you want a big house, you want a bunch of televisions, you want the newest phone, you want a bunch of kids. All of this is a claim on energy expenditure. And so the question is, well, how good is the United States going to be at paying me back in energy terms, not in dollars, of course they can print dollars. That's nominal in energy terms. That's what any money should be good at, is protecting your right to energy consumption. If the money deteriorates against energy consumption, it's dog shit bad money. And that's what we call inflation. And so the fact that the US Government has had to pivot its issuance to the front end, meaning nobody wants a 10 year relationship with the US government, nobody wants a 30 year relationship with the US government, you'd have to be batshit insane. If I am going to lend to the US Government, I'll take three months, I want a bill, I do not want a 30 year. And so one it's showing. Scott Besson came in after talking all this shit and not only did the same thing, he's doing it more. And that tells us something very clean. The US Government doesn't have an option to issue long duration. That market's dog shit. There are no lenders to the United States over any long durated period. Anyone that is willing to have counterparty risk with the United States and face any potential inflation and debasements of the currency is only willing to in a matter of days or months or, or even really, really low numbers of years, one year, two year. And that's what this shows. And it puts both the Fed and the treasury in a really, really interesting position because the idea is higher short term rates will meaningfully accelerate the US and the rest of just the western world's global sovereign debt, bond market crash or crisis, right? The higher the dollar goes, everything else goes down. So as I just explained, stocks, assets, et cetera, until the United States is enforced to inject liquidity and cap it. So the Fed is trapped here. And obviously if they raise rates, these things pay the Fed's rate. So it is going to be a direct kick in the nomads if the Fed actually raises rates here so it's just they're relatively trapped. Another thing to keep in mind, and I've talked about this before on the show, who's buying the US Debt? In other words, who's lending the United States money? And these two visuals show very cleanly that it is not foreign official institution. So, you know, typically over the course of history, in this post World War II era, it is. We'll be the world reserve currency. I'm saying we, as an American, we'll be the world reserve currency, and we will cease to produce locally. We'll enact this idea of globalism where you guys produce stuff so that you guys can have jobs, you guys can monetize whatever valuable commodities you have on your soil. You export that to us, we import your shit and we give you dollars. And it was our way of saying, hey, let's help everyone get back on their feet. World War II decimated the whole world. The US came out as the de facto winner or the de facto strongest country, the empire. And we will not dominate global markets, produce everything, and continue to kick your ass. We will just print money out of thin air in an effort to help Bootstrap. You guys can stand on the back of the strength of America. And in return, when you guys get all these dollars that we're exporting, you can recycle it into our bonds. So you can take the money that we're giving you and lend it back to us. Now, that game seemed to have died long ago and specifically around the 2008 financial crisis, when the United States took particular advantage of being the world reserve currency, being able to print not only money, but again, human time, effort, energy, and labor out of thin air. It seems like everybody around the world, all of our trading partners and counterparts, both allies and enemies, everyone was like, fuck this. They're going to debase our time, our energy, our effort, our labor to bail out their banks, to bail out Wall Street. They're not necessarily enforcing the ideals of property rights, the ideals of free markets. This is a scam. This is garbage. And you can visually see that in the chart on the left. So in the blue is the growth of federal debt. And you can see it takes on a whole new growth trajectory post 2008 financial crisis. In the red is the rest of the world, particularly securities held by foreign official institutions, so sovereigns. And you can see that when people say, oh, China stopped buying U.S. debt recently. No, not recently. They stopped buying it like a decade ago. China's been. And not only China, but they're obviously, they run the biggest trade surplus. They're the world's factory. So they're the most relevant when I talk about these things. China's been building towards a neutral monetary standard, a hard money standard for quite some time now. Gold is the money that they've elected to build around again. Bitcoin either wasn't invented yet, wasn't known yet, or still now, to this day, probably isn't quite big enough yet. Trump definitely has been mining bitcoin and has bitcoin to be clear, but they've been rotating out of US Treasuries for quite some time. And you can see that in the red line that post 2008 that number has been flat. Everyone was like, oh cool, fuck this. Well then the question is, if the US keeps issuing this debt, so the blue line keeps going up but the red line remains flat, who's buying this dog shit? And you go to the right and you see since 2016, the private sector. So what you're looking at on the right is foreign Portfolio holdings of U.S. long Term treasury securities of non official foreign. So these are not, this is not nation states and sovereigns, this is the private sector. So the private sector has clearly taken over lending to the United States or in said another way, or buying US debt. So as the US continues to issue these debt notes, it's the private sector who is buying it. So if I go to the next slide, what does that mean, Jack, who's buying this dog shit? It seems to be leverage from hedge funds and from the domestic banking system. So this screenshot says 37% of net issuance of notes and bonds since January 2022 has been absorbed by Cayman island hedge funds. Scaring. So just to be clear, or something called the carry trade. It's effectively an arbitrage trade and you can make a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny amount of money running this trade. Like let's say the difference between asset A and asset B is a penny. And so I can buy asset A for one penny cheaper than I can sell it as asset B. And I make one penny every time I do that. Now why leverage and how does this scale? Why would Wall Streets be in Wall street hedge funds be interested in this? Well, I guess they're technically domiciled in the Cayman Islands. What's interesting about this, well, if you can use leverage, then you can scale one penny. One penny times a billion every day turns out to be a lot of money. And so what these hedge funds are doing is they're taking advantage of what's called the carry Trade. And they're making a tiny amount of money, but scaling it to a massive size with leverage. Now let me continue to read my slide. Scaring capital out of stocks into US Treasuries will not and cannot work. Stocks declining will drive a fleeting bid in the 10 year US treasury and then 10 year US yields will get aggressively or 10 year US Treasuries will get aggressively sold alongside US equities, sending the 10 year US treasury yields higher as equities decline. And this is a pattern we've seen multiple times. So let me just break that down quickly. The point is these guys are all levered and they're levered against a capital base. Call it a portfolio of stocks. If the stock market sells off. So if the dollar continues to strengthen and the dollar strengthening because war is coming out and saying I don't like inflation, I'm not opposed to hiking rates, I'm not opposed to tightening monetary policy, putting pressure on assets, well then the assets start to get weaker. As we've seen gold, silver, Bitcoin, the nasdaq. When the assets get weaker, these guys de lever leverage and volatility don't like each other. They don't mix well. Okay, if you know, as a bitcoiner, if you've survived a few cycles, you know exactly that. And so as markets get more volatile, in particular more weak, then these guys delever. And if they delever, it's as clear as day from these charts. There's nobody buying U.S. debt. And so the U.S. will either have to seize spending any money and the empire collapses overnight, or they have to print the money to make everybody whole. But make no mistake, people can look at the amount of debt the US has issued and be like, wow, there must be a lot of demand around the world for this debt. And that's bullshit. You just pull on that thread a little bit and you realize there's zero demand for the debt. Not only is there zero demand, it's all leverage Hedge funds that are now only willing to buy the front end the bill the three month. Nobody wants a 10 year, nobody wants a 30 year, nobody wants counterparty risk against a debasing dollar, debasing fiat printed pieces of paper. Nobody wants that. And the data backs this unequivocally. So back to why I'm calling bullshit on the Fed. There's zero percent chance these guys. Well, I don't want to speak in such absolutes. I'll get blasted someday if I'm wrong. I have no idea what the future is. Guys, this show is Fun for me, my strong intuition is that the Fed has no chance at remaining hawkish at actually hiking rates and actually giving material strength to the dollar and crashing the stock market, crashing asset prices, delevering these hedge funds and removing what is the only bid left in the US Debt market. There's no way, I mean, the Fed would quite literally be destroying and killing Pax Americana as we know it. My better guess is that the Fed is establishing themselves as someone truly independent, which obviously the Trump Warsh is just Trump's puppet. The Fed is establishing themselves as truly independent, giving themselves some idea of credibility. And what they're going to do is re. Enable the banking system to contribute to buying this debt. And the way that they can do that is allow the banking system to expand their balance sheet with leverage. And the banking system can do what the hedge funds are doing and start buying a ton of U.S. debt. And that will, that's obviously highly inflationary, A lot of credit creation, a lot of cheap capital, and that'll send Bitcoin to the moon. But until then, war is not going to come out and just start cutting rates into inflation. Right now, since the Iran war, Trump is as unfavorable as he's ever been as a politician. Going into midterms, he's. His popularity has never been lower. And a lot of that is because the Iran war, because this, I mean, this conflict is, is an affront to every single campaign promise he made. We were going to get the Epstein files, we were going to stop all wars around the world, we're going to reshore. And all of a sudden everyone got a ton of inflation. A conflict in the Middle East. We never saw the Epstein files. And he can't seem to end this thing now. I'm not, I've said before, I'm not left, I'm not right. I'm not blue, I'm not red, I'm orange. I'm neutral. I'm free market. I'm less government. But in my opinion, the reason Warsh is doing what he's doing is because Trump needs some credibility. Or not. Not Trump. I'm not gonna. People are just so, you know, religious about this stuff. The US Government right now and the administration that's currently in office is seeking some credibility. The Fed should establish itself as independent. The Fed should acknowledge inflation, tell the people that there will be an attempt to fight it. They're not just going to cut rates in your face because that will again discredit everybody in office. Discredit wash immediately. It would be such A violent foul. Now that inflation is back and impacting people materially, everyone's going to the gas pump and their heart is dropping in their stomach. And while they deregulate the banks and enable more buying and more credit creation and more ways to finance all this AI stuff. So I'm fading all this hawkish, I'm fading a permanently stronger dollar or some arrow where the dollar, the DXY is going to remain above 100 for any sustained period. But that's why assets are falling, markets are trying to understand what's going on, where the credit's going to come from. But this is not sustainable unless they want to send the world into austerity and crash Pax Americana, which is also fine. I mean, bitcoin will still win. It'll just be a much more interesting journey to get there. But my bet is that politicians are liars, they're glorified marketers, and they're highly manipulative to the people. In an effort to ultimately socialize losses, debase our time and effort, inflate everything around us to win elections. That's always going to be my guess. Now, on the back of this idea of the stock market assets selling off, I just wanted to highlight this insight. This from Forward Guidance, the podcast. Highly recommend. This was really interesting to me. So these hyperscalers, these big tech companies, you can see their capex versus their buybacks. So these companies call it, you know, let's do Meta or Amazon or Microsoft or Google or any of these big massive companies. These companies were unbelievable because they were such low cost, high margin, high, high growth. And they were taking all of this cash they were making and they were plowing it back into their stock stock buybacks. And so you get a massive multiple for that one, you know, forward cash. So forward earnings, you're going to get a multiple. These businesses are growing. They're technology companies. So their tam, their total addressable market is huge. Billions of people globally. Their costs don't scale with the business. So if they find ways to enter new markets, launch new products, monetize new people, typically the only cost they have is like rent and engineering salaries. It's not a very capitally intensive business. And so you also have to price in the fact that there's a buyer of last resort for the stock you're buying is I'll buy the stock before Meta's next earnings plow billions of dollars more purchasing power into the thing I'm buying today. Now you can see that this has drastically tailored off to zero and capex. So These businesses and like how much their company costs to run has skyrocketed. And again it's because AI changes who these businesses are fundamentally. They go from low cost technology companies that just need to pay their cloud bill. Well, they are the cloud, but pay their electricity bill, pay their engineering salaries and they just print money on money on money margins. Grow, grow, grow, grow, grow cash. Grow, grow, grow, grow, grow buybacks. Grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. All of a sudden they're getting into purchasing commodities, purchasing hardware, needing to build out power infrastructure themselves that is extremely capitally intensive. These businesses also are now picking a fight with Moore's Law, which is going to be really interesting. Moore's Law doesn't really care about how much money you have and how much money you can print. That's just physical reality. And so these cash generating businesses are turning into debt ridden balance sheets. And these companies are now raising like Google's raising money at the market via common stock. They're raising bonds, they're raising debt. And that's changing these businesses materially. You're going to get a far smaller multiple if you've gone from really high margin, really low cost, really high growth, really cash flow positive, really intense buybacks to far less low cost, like actually not low cost at all. Unclear what the growth profile looks like, unclear what the mode is, unclear if you're the winner, unclear how expensive this will be, unclear how it's going to be financed. All of a sudden you're not necessarily cash flow positive. You're tapping debt markets, you're tapping common issuance, which is dilutive. And so this changes how valuable these businesses are on a multiple basis. And this is a chart of the nasdaq. And we're starting to see weakness. I write here, don't look now, but the NASDAQ is starting to show weakness despite a strong tech narrative. If you just, you know, scroll TikTok and read mainstream media as like, oh, tech is booming, is here to stay. Elon's the most impressive person on the planet. All of that could be true. But markets, you can try and centrally plan them and control them to the best of your ability, but they don't lie. Words are easy. Thoughts are easy. People can tweet whatever they want, it costs them nothing. But that's why we have money. Money is put it, put your time, energy, effort and labor on the line. When people say put your, put your money where your mouth is, that's what that means. Put your human dignity where your beliefs are, motherfucker. And we can see that The Nasdaq's starting to struggle and the Nasdaq specifically is a reflection of tech. We're back to early May levels and it looks like, you know, I have the RSI shown at the bottom there. It looks like the market is starting to slow down from a momentum standpoint. And so again, people say, oh, bitcoin's getting killed and tech stocks are smashing highs. Yeah, be careful. Bitcoin is a leading indicator because it's the last functioning smoke alarm that we have for the truth. So bitcoin's going to be first. It doesn't mean it's going to be only. Don't mistake in bitcoin's action as unique. It's probably just ahead of its time. It's probably just first. And so I'll repeat it again with this strong dollar activity, which is on the back of war, being much more hawkish, claiming he's not afraid to hike rates to fight inflation, which is on the back of Trump and this Iran conflict and oil shock and depletion of reserves. You know, this is causing Bitcoin, gold, silver and now the Nasdaq to show weakness. And you kind of have this perfect storm where you have these massive tech companies that were able to just plow cash into buybacks. They're now getting rerated and repriced because they are capitally intense businesses to run that are fighting physical reality like Moore's Law. It's unclear how they're going to monetize what their moats are, who's going to win. These businesses are getting lesser multiples. Now if the stock market starts to show material weakness, we know that that's going to de lever the hedge funds that are just levered to their eyeballs supporting the US debt markets. You see how all of this rhymes. And so sure, the, the, the Fed can huff and puff and pound their chest. I call bullshit. There's no way that they can sustain this. And with Bitcoin at 60k, I'm actually very impressed by bitcoin. It could go to 50, it could go to 40, whatever. What am I doing? Turning on my DCA, staying humble, stacking stats, which I'll get to in a second. I'm seeing weakness across all markets. I'm not looking at bitcoin and feeling bad for myself. I'm looking at Bitcoin and appreciating the fact that bitcoin is able to so clearly tell me the truth before anybody else. But there's weakness across all assets that is going to make it very difficult for this highly indebted sovereign, the United States, to issue this much debt, which they must. So there's, there's just, this is not a sustainable option. This is a very short blip point in time in my opinion. We'll, we'll obviously see if I'm right. I'm not always right, but that's how I would really reason and logic with what you guys are seeing in the markets today. And let's take this back to Main street and the people before I move on to the next chapter. People are struggling. Okay, so on the left you have savings and investment as a percentage of gross national income. It continues to grind like to near negative numbers. So people don't have savings. Now on the right I have US credit card accounts delinquent by 90 plus days. This has jumped to 13% which is the highest level in 15 years and it's approaching the highest level ever. So people are increasingly unable to save. This is due to inflation. This is due to a debase in currency. This is also due to not a lot of opportunities to be productive in the marketplace as we know. Wealth continues to concentrate as you have the Cotillon effect, printing money. The rich get richer, the poor get increasingly poor. And when I say poor, I mean increasingly unable to afford assets and save for their future. And other ways to evidence this is that the only way to sustain a life now is through consumer debt. So you don't actually own your house, you have a mortgage, you don't actually own your car, you have a car note, you don't actually buy your groceries with cash, you're using a credit card and consumer credit delinquencies are rising. And we've talked about how consumer credit delinquencies are going to go up as a combination of a probable recession. You know, we probably are in or have been living through a recession in recent years, just not by the technical definition. They, they love changing the definition like they do CPI and all this garbage. But a weaker economy in this K shaped economy where obviously if you're Mark Zuckerberg, you're doing great and if you're a Main street employee, you're probably struggling. So in the lower of the K you've got these recessionary tendencies which is going to add towards credit delinquencies for the Main street consumer. And then you've got AI that's actively disrupting the job market. And the combination of those, if delinquencies go up too much, remind you that's what bank balance sheets are. They're writing these loans that they're giving people at par. They're valuing the loans on their balance sheet as if they're good money. But these are not collateralized loans like what strike issues. These are uncollateralized credit based on your ability to hopefully keep your job, be able to save money and pay them off on time. And bank balance sheets will blow up if delinquencies get too high. So I feel like I'm bouncing the rock around too many places. But the point is, this is a highly levered financial system that's driven by debt. And there's no way to square this without debasing the currency and printing money, inflating this debt away so they try and make the dollar stronger. Not going to work right either. The hedge funds financing the US Debt markets are going to get delevered credit card delinquencies and just consumer credit is going to run delinquent and blow up the bank's balance sheets. There's just too much leverage, it's too much debt. There is no grow your way out. All of that is absolutely garbage. We can pay everything back, but it's going to be in dollars and those dollars are going to be debased heavily. It just has to. So furthermore, I thought this was astounding. So this is the University of Michigan. This is the same survey that does consumer sentiment, same university in America that does the consumer sentiment that I reference. This is expected change in business conditions in a year worse. So do businesses think they're going to be in a better place over the next 12 months or in a worse place and they think they're going to be way worse off. And this is, look at the data. This dates back to 1980. So we're talking about over 40 years of economic data of the survey conducted by the University of Michigan. And the expected change in businesses for the worse is skyrocketing. So businesses are not confident in their future. They're seeing less business, they're seeing less activity. And again, guys, it's pretty obvious, like if people are not able to save and are going delinquent on their credit cards, they're probably not going on as many vacations, they're probably not shopping in as many. And I could have had a lot more charts in here. I don't have the time. But a lot of the economic activity is driven heavily by, you know, the top percentile. So the wealthy are getting wealthier and spending a lot more money. And so if your business depends on a certain cohort of people, it's really, really, really struggling so we're getting aggressively more K shaped and I, I think that this chart is just crazy. It says a lot of. So anyway. Oh my. Lorem Ipsum is still here. Let's see. Bitcoin, Bitcoin. Let's take a look at bitcoin and just do, just do a little test and a little visual on where we are. So bitcoin is back to its 200 weekly moving average, which tends to be where bear markets historically kind of bottom out, as you guys can see here. I don't know. Listen, I'm not a chart guy. I'm not a line drawer. I think the point that I wanted to convey here is this is what stay humble and stack stats is all about. This is what inspired me to write the essay I'll release and that I'll preview here in a second. But I don't believe, like you have to ask yourself some fundamental questions. One, is bitcoin dead? Do you think it's going to zero? If so, I don't know why you're listening to this. Two, if not, what are you waiting for? This is exactly, this is the moment a bitcoiner dreams of you. You have to get. You know, bear markets are rite of passage. They're very painful, as I'll talk about in a second. And there's, there's real reasons as to why they're so painful, but they're excruciatingly painful. And you have to earn your rite of passage. God damn it, this thing is so annoying. You have to earn your rite of passage and then once you get over that hump, you take your ego humbling, you build humility. Then you just got turn on your DCA stack sad. Stay humble, earn more, spend less. This to me looks like bitcoin is beginning to bottom. Now I say beginning. It could go much lower. It could be the bottom already. You may have already missed the bottom. I don't know. And the point is, at least for me, I don't care. I'm not a trader. I'm not a line chart drawer. That's how I spend my time. You know, I'm going to do after this. I'm going to go check out someplace in a green hill to see if I can start my family there. That's where I'd rather spend my time. Bitcoin is cheap no matter the price. I get it. But this to me is starting to feel like a bottom. The macro math is starting to work out as to. Okay, I understand why liquidity is tight. I understand why central planners are doing what they're doing. I understand this is no longer sustainable. I understand why assets are selling off. I get it all. Bitcoin is a bargain right now. And as my dad told me, and I continually repeat to you guys, markets either try and scare you out or wear you out. And the scare you out part happens in an instant, right? Like when bitcoin went from 120k to 90k and then from 90k to 60k, that was like overnight moves and everyone's puking and on the timeline like, oh my God, is everything okay? Was there a bug found in bitcoin that scare you out? Like, you know what? I can't even tolerate this anymore. I can't sleep, I can't focus on my family now. The wear you out is just time, guys. Bitcoin's been the same price that it is now since February. And people are just getting worn out. Everyone's fighting with each other. Everyone's trying to point the finger. Whose fault is it? Everyone's wearing each other down. It's like, okay, I get it, I get it. I'm still here. My DCA is still on. You just go back up and it might take. It could take months, it could take a year. It could also take one more day. It could have already happened. And so my message is just don't get scared out. Don't get worn out. This is what has really motivated me to write this essay, is some of the things I've learned Bear markets are tremendously painful opportunities, right? If it were easy, everyone would do it. You know, when bitcoin goes up, they say you're lucky. When bitcoin goes down, they say, you're stupid. Ignore it. Turn on those DCAs. I think Bitcoin's a bargain here. You're not going to regret buying now, later on. See, I also have my alarm ipsum here. And to illustrate this further, Bitcoin is at Q6, meaning just 6% of the days are lower than this 200 week that I referenced. So you're saying, well, on a relative basis, how cheap is bitcoin? Well, saying that you're going to wait for a better price is saying bitcoin's not cheaper than its 200 week moving average on 6% of the total days of bitcoin's existence. So it's like, okay, are you that good at picking prices? Are you that good at analysis? Are you that good at being awake at 2:37 in the morning when the perfect bottom is printed? I don't know if you Are. I'm not. I'm not. I am totally okay with buying in a range when it's 6% of days. Now, don't take me as an example because I buy every day. I buy the top, I buy the bottom, I buy the this, I buy the that. What I do is I work hard, earn more than I spend and save. That's what I do. And then I focus on shit that I'm actually interested in. I'm not, I'm not interested in turning chart into an art project. That's not what I like spending my time doing. But just for reference, guys, bitcoin is the only functioning liquidity smoke alarm we have left. Don't let it scare you. Don't let it wear you down. It's just telling you the truth. I try and do this show to make sense of the rest of the markets. Here comes gold crashing down. Here comes silver crashing down. Here comes the NASDAQ crashing down. Bitcoin's not different and unique in that sense. It's just early. It's just a free market. Don't get scared. Turn on those DCAs. Stay solvent. And then the next chapter, I want to talk about just some learnings I've had from bear markets and bitcoin. Generally speaking, I'll have a much longer form essay as I mentioned, but I figured I would. I don't know this show. I like cutting you guys in on whether it's early launches of features or early ideas I have, it's good for me to bounce it off willing ears, get some feedback in the YouTube comments and also just give you guys for supporting me. Give you guys kind of early access in a way. So the title of my essay will probably be Bitcoin the Last Honest Market. And it's my learnings from my near 14 years in Bitcoin. I think I've talked about this in prior episodes. I talk about this pretty much anytime anyone's willing to listen. But my point is bitcoin is not only the last free market we have left, but it's the most honest market we have in the world. And what I write here is bitcoin is one of the only remaining places where modern people encounter unmediated reality. A truly free market, not just for an asset, but for money itself. And I've talked about this before the world and what the asset is generally about is I think modern day society is conditioned to think that things like entropy and volatility aren't natural. You know, entropy is the. How do I say, it's the natural state of the universe. Things change. I've done the lawn mower as an example in the past. And that a lawn, if left uncared for, it gets messy. A tree sprouts in an area that you didn't think, it gets uneven, it gets chaotic, it gets ugly. Entropy is the tendency of things to move from order to disorder, from smoothness to unevenness, from certainty to surprise. Like, what are some more examples? Your room, your room gets messy, your body gets older, your lawn gets wild, your machine breaks down. A forest will change, the weather will change. Life does not hold still. That's the point. And the point is that that's a flaw. That's not a flaw in the universe. The point is that is the universe. Okay? Order exists in our world, but order is not free. Order requires energy. So someone has to clean your room, someone has to mow your lawn. Someone has to maintain the machine from breaking, Someone has to pave the road, someone has to regulate the temperature. If it's too hot outside and you want a room with air conditioning, somebody has to build that and regulate that. Someone has to irrigate the field. Someone has to repair what time keeps wearing down. Smoothness is manufactured volatility. Entropy is natural. And modern day society, I think, has been conditioned to believe the opposite. That a perfectly mowed lawn is the natural state of mother nature in the universe. And that's just not true. And things like circuit breakers in the market, markets are closed on weekends. If a stock crashes too much, the market gets turned off. If someone blows up too fast, they get a bailout. If there's too many losses. They're socialized, right? Central planners and governments, the bigger they've gotten and the more involved they've gotten, have tried to strip out the volatility and the entropy from the world. But you cannot remove what is natural. We are a function of and a product of the universe. We are not its master. And so you're masking it, you're not removing it. And so we have a world where there's a lot of pain and absorption of losses and volatility, but it's being realized in different places. Like, okay, the stock market isn't very volatile, but assassination attempts, especially politically driven, are rivaling the Civil War era. So you can't remove volatility, you just move it to be realized somewhere else. Now it's being realized in the social contract. And so the whole idea of my thesis is that Bitcoin is the only remaining place where modern day people get to encounter reality in an unmediated way. That's why it's so emotional and it can be so euphoric and so painful. And as I've said on the show before, Bitcoin is like experiencing the world truly as it is. Because every other lived experience in this centrally planned, overly governed reality that we live in is almost like there's padding for you. You're never going to get too hurt, you're never going to feel too good. You're also never going to feel too bad. You're going to kind of eat within the lines, live within the lines, earn within the lines, behave within the lines. No blade of grass is going to grow taller than any other. Every loss we're all going to share bailouts, stock market shutdowns, et cetera. So anyways, my point is, as I've said before, money is not just something that you can mark in an Excel sheet. You can try and you will fail. Money is human time, human energy, human labor, human sacrifice, human effort, human judgment. It is human dignity. It is human dignity in an abstracted form that we can trade and move across space and time. How do I move my time and energy that I've spent from A to B, from California to Illinois, from New York to Singapore? And then how do I move it through time? How do I take the time and energy and labor and sacrifice and effort I'm spending now in the year 2026 to the year 2036, not necessarily from consumer to merchant, not necessarily between trading partners, but in time? How do I carry forward the value I'm creating today for 100 years from now, right now, modern day markets that aren't bitcoin, they are centrally managed, smooth over, subsidized, interrupted, protected, and just generally sedated. Right it is. They've distorted the reality that is natural. And I make the argument in the essay that fiat suppresses volatility, which accumulates fragility. So it kicks the can. It creates an extraordinarily fragile system where all of a sudden you're seeing assassination temps rise in crime, rise in homelessness, rise in metabolic disease. People say, oh, oh, Bitcoin's more volatile. More volatile where? In its price. Yes, but what about in the social contract? Bitcoiners do not murder each other. Bitcoiners are healthy. Bitcoiners build family. So you cannot remove the entropy and volatility from the universe. We are childs of the universe. We are not the masters of the universe. And this goes into my rants about ego. To think you are smarter than the universe. To think you are the master of the universe is a failure of ego before anything else. You are not bigger than the world as it is. You need to accept the world as it is. And so bitcoin takes this opposite approach of fiat, which it exposes volatility naturally by removing any central planner, any third party, any trusted node. And that allows it to build resilience. So where fiat tries to hide volatility, it accumulates fragility. Where bitcoin allows for volatility, it actually builds resilience. And so that's why these things over time move in opposite directions. As time goes on, fiat gets more and more fragile and bitcoin gets more and more resilient. Fiat gets less and less valuable. Bitcoin gets more and more valuable. And I made this point already, but volatility is not unnatural. Volatility is reality. And I like entropy because volatility sounds like a economic markets term. And the reality is it's really all about entropy, is that entropy is a natural law of the world that we were born into. And so the lawn analogy is usually pretty good, is an engineered lawn means it's perfectly mowed, it's uniform, it's controlled, it's predictable. But that requires constant intervention to stay that way. And as I said, if you want to create controlled environments, it's not free. It costs energy. Either your energy, like you have to clean your room or you have to pay someone to clean your room. And that paying someone is still an energy expense because we talk about time. And energy in an abstracted form is money. Again, that's the whole point, guys, is that energy expenditure is how the world works. And a uniform world is not necessarily a bad thing. Like, for example, medicine is uniform to prevent from disease. Housing is uniform to prevent from temperature, right? If I didn't have housing in Chicago, I would die in the winter because it's too fucking cold. So not all uniform is bad. I am fine accumulating time, energy, effort, labor, and dignity in money, and then spending my energy either literally by doing work myself or with my capital to build and live in a house to afford medicine in case anyone I love or myself gets sick. But there's a difference between uniform, like across the board, socializing, all losses, and a selective free market ability. Does that make sense? So if I go on, obviously to remove volatility, you need control. And Bitcoin is engineered to remove any, any control of anything. No one can control shit. And so in my opinion, bitcoin chooses freedom. And now back to Bull markets and bear markets. And kind of the point of this essay is what I tell my companies internally all the time is that in bitcoin, bull markets will get better than you can ever imagine. However good you think things can get, it will get better. And this goes to show that we're not conditioned to really, truly understand the world as it is. We are preconditioned to kind of understand the world as it's been engineered by government and central planners for us to consume it. So in my experience as a bitcoiner, and by the way, I'm not speaking to you guys as like a, you know, religious, like, I'm just speaking from my own experience because we just don't know how truly good life can be. We don't. We live in a very centrally planned and crafted environment. So in bitcoin, bull markets can get better than you can ever imagine. There's no ceiling of permission, there's no committee, there's no central planner. There's no one standing between an open network and the world. So an example that I lived through, I thought the 2021 bull market was going to be good. Covid was extremely painful. Bitcoin fell from like $10,000 a coin to $3,000 a coin, like overnight. It was painful. Puking my guts out. The lady I was with at the time had cheated on me. I mean, it was an awful time. Awful time. However, as good as I thought it was going to be, I did not think that an open source monetary network would help give a country hope. Never in a million years, guys, did I think that I would help contribute to making bitcoin legal tender in El Salvador. That I would get calls from the world bank and the imf. That a country that has been through civil war, currency destruction, gang ridden violence that made it one of the most dangerous places in the world. Never in a million years did I think bitcoin would be at the core of a country reviving itself, hope, safety, freedom, Never, ever, ever. And that I would somehow be a part, be a part of that ever. So however good you think it can get, it can get better. Like, that was not in my worldview or my map of the world because I grew up in a like very tamed conditioned environment, centrally planned. Now the other reality that I tell my employees is it's the same for the downside. However bad you think things can get in a bitcoin bear market, they will get worse. Trust me. Fraud is bigger than you ever thought. Leverage is more hidden than, you know. Confidence disappears. A lot Faster than you think, the truth arrives violently. There is nobody that's going to protect you from the brutal reality that is the universe. Trust me. When they decided to raise rates and hike rates as fast as they've ever hiked them before, post the COVID inflation boom, yeah, I thought bitcoin would have a bear market, of course. Did I think that Sam Bankman Fried stole $10 billion from individuals all over the world and this guy that was parading around as the next genius was secretly funding government campaigns and all this crazy shit? No. Nobody had that on their bingo card. Nobody. However bad you think it can get, it will get worse. And again, that is because there's no padding, central planning, and carefully crafted engineering. The volatility and the entropy out of your experience, okay? And so the bull market shows you what is possible, shows you how the power of things like hope, love, connection, ambition. It shows you what's possible. Bitcoin can truly save the world. I think bitcoin can truly fix some of the world's hardest problems. Fix the money, fix the world. It can unite us all, and it can do it peacefully. I mean, something like El Salvador is just so inspiring for me, and hopefully it was for others. But the bear market, conversely, is a really tests who you are as a person. Okay, so I. I make the claim that bitcoin does not just reprice assets, it also reprices character. Like Sam Bankman Fried, for example. Now, a little story about me. If I'm going to use the 2021 bull market in El Salvador as what's possible in bull runs, I'll give you guys an example of what I learned about myself in bear markets. So in the Last Bear Market, 2022 was one of the hardest times of my life. I'll give you guys a quick story. Obviously, if you have questions, leave them in the comments. I can maybe do the live Q and A, go deeper into any of this if you want, but in the Bitcoin conference in 2022, I made an announcement that we had partnered with NCR and Blackhawk on a bunch of merchant adoption stuff. And I mean, those relationships were real. To be clear, the announcement was definitely premature and very unfortunately, I couldn't get the products to market. Long story short, the partnerships began to fade as they hiked. Rates and asset prices started to crash. Everyone's stock was down. Bitcoin was down, assets were down. Companies R and D departments got fired. Everyone's crypto departments got fired. The partnerships never saw the market, and I was trashed for it everyone's like, you are a glorified marketer. You're a kid that's cosplaying in a hoodie. You're an asshole. You're Nepo, baby. All the stuff I get today. And what was really hard for me at the time is, and by the way, Strike was like barely a year old, tiny company, and I was a kid. And so we, like, I don't even think at the time we had generated a penny of revenue. So not only were we not profitable, we were hardly a business. And I had no idea at the time, you know, I had. The El Salvador thing had happened. We had partnered with Twitter to integrate the Lightning network when Jack, the other Jack was still the CEO. And I had been surrounded by a lot of people, like Saquon Barkley became a buddy of mine, and he became a bitcoiner Diplo, the dj. So there were celebrities around me. I was surrounded by people that I don't know. In hindsight, it was what it was. You know, when things are going well, you know, bitcoin was the hottest thing in town. Everyone wanted to be around bitcoiners. And I didn't understand. I thought. I literally thought, you know, VC money was unlimited. You know, back in the day, people were saying, just focus on growth. Who cares about profits? You could always just raise money. And that bear market punched me so hard in the face. And my first reaction is, obviously, these people are wrong. How can they call me these things online? I'm not. I'm not a this, I'm not a that. And then eventually, the bear market forced me to look in the mirror. It's very devastating because, again, there's nobody there to save you. There's nobody there to bail you out. You have to face you. And that was very painful. But I wouldn't trade it for the world because I think to myself, I acquired the most valuable lessons, arguably that I've ever acquired in my life. And I asked myself frequently, if I didn't acquire them, then how expensive would it be for me to acquire them in the future? I had to learn what it meant to really build a company. I had to learn what it meant to really surround myself with good relationships and good people, who to really get advice from, who to really trust? What parts of me were valuable that I appreciated as a man, and what parts of me were childish and needed to mature. And so I'm the man I am today. And I've built the businesses I have today because of those experiences. But, boy, were they painful. And there Was no central planner or intermediary or padding to save me from every ounce of emotion that I needed to feel. And so I read on the slide what the last bear market showed me was that I confused momentum for competence. I confused the fact that the bull run brought things like El Salvador and Twitter integrating lightning as a continuous rollout of crazy, ambitious partnerships and cool ideas. I confused attention for proof of work. Thought my job was to get up on the bitcoin conference and be a visionary and be entertaining and not listen to customers. So I wrote here, I was building for applause instead of customers. These are very painful things to realize, and I was very embarrassed, very ashamed. Super difficult time for me, but like I said, necessary. And it makes me think, like, without bitcoin, I would have never learned these things by myself. What man would I be walking through the streets today if it wasn't for bitcoin? And what type of father will I, hopefully, you know, knock on wood, God willing, will I be to my child if it wasn't for bitcoin. So, yeah, just, I don't know. Hopefully this is resonating with you guys like, you really appreciate bear markets for what they are. You're getting a very raw and real relationship with the world that surrounds you, and it's invaluable. I would be so lucky to learn the same level of things about myself, this bear market, as I did the last one. Now, some parts of it can be really hard, really painful, but invaluable. There's no other way to acquire this level of knowledge in this type of experience. Because in my opinion, the rest of at least you know, where I grew up in America, it's just so centrally planned. So the bull market convinced me that I was right and convinced me that bitcoin is what I thought it was, that it is hope, that it is fix the money, fix the world, that it is resilient, that it is open source, that it is peaceful. Right? The bull market to me, convinces us that we're right. But the bear market forced me to become more of useful. It's a challenge to every single bear market. It's a challenge to my character, a challenge to my beliefs, a challenge to my ego, a challenge to how useful I can be to the world around me, to those around me, to my customers. I mean, it really forces you to look in the mirror and challenge what you know about yourself. Where was your ego bigger than you thought? Where was your. Your risk or your leverage bigger than you thought? It really hardens you. And in my Opinion bear markets are how, for this very reason, bitcoin metabolizes illusion. So any leverage, fraud, Taurus, fake yield, fake confidence, fake conviction. This is how bitcoin burns it off. And again, this is, you know, if you contrast this to fiat, Fiat doesn't have this kind of self healing mechanism. And so fiat is riddled with fraudsters, leverage, tourists, politicians, fake everything. It's a total utter and complete scam that has probably introduced one of the more devastating chapters to humanity. And so if you want to strip out volatility in markets and you don't want to let the banks fail, you don't want to let the free market deliver the consequences necessary, then you're going to get volatility in obesity rates, metabolic health, divorce rate, child per woman, assassination attempts, crime, murder, school shootings. That's where you're going to get it. And for bitcoin, I don't want you guys like I guess and hopefully my essay does a better job here because I'm running out of time. But what I've learned is to really truly appreciate what bitcoin is, which is it's built to allow for the volatility and entropy that is real and honest. That's why I call it the only honest market left, because it's even a step deeper than being a free market. Yeah, free market, you could say, okay, the US capital markets can get a little bit more free and then, you know what, are we comparing apples to apples here? No, but it's an honest market, meaning it gives you an unmediated relationship to the world and it's really, really valuable because I don't know how else I would get that as a man or woman, obviously as a person, you guys know what I mean? So fiat preserves illusion with more debt. Bitcoin clears illusion with truth. Stay humble and stack SATS is not a meme. It's a survival ethic for reality. The stay humble part means do not confuse a bull market with genius. Kill your ego, build humility. The stack SATS part is keep doing work even when no one is clapping. Like right now, nobody's cheering on bitcoiners, everyone thinks we're stupid, The Peter Schiffs, the mainstream media, everyone's, you know, oh, look at bitcoin's cagr. Now you're better off over the last five years, blah blah blah blah blah. So stay humble is don't confuse these bull runs where life gets bigger and better than you ever thought it could with genius or self compliments. And the stack sats is do the work, like, the question at the end of the day is, what's left? Like, in my opinion, that's sort of the question. Hold on, let me pull up some of my notes. Yeah. I write in my essay here, what is left when the price is down? What is left when the tourists leave? What is left when the critics are loud? What is left when the applause disappears? What is left when your net worth is down, your reputation is questioned, your confidence is shaken, and your timeline is broken. What is left? That is the bear market. It's the mirror. And mirrors are not cruel. Mirrors are not bad. Mirrors are honest. And what hurts is seeing clearly. So I think Bitcoin is a moral environment. And I've talked about this in prior keynotes, moral code. It's not only monetary code, it's moral code. And it creates this environment where certain virtues matter, like patience matters, humility matters, low leverage matters, truth matters. Proof of work matters. Long time preference. So lowering your time preference matters. Resilience matters. The ability to endure uncertainty matters. The ability to keep building without applause matters. The ability to be wrong, learn, admit it, and then keep building matters. So it doesn't require you to be virtuous. Like, there's nothing in the protocol that judges your character, but over time, somehow it punishes the absence of virtue. You know, ego gets punished, leverage gets punished, fraud gets punished, entitlement gets humbled, impatience gets taxed, tourism gets flushed, fake conviction gets revealed. All right, I won't keep giving away my essay. I think it's going to be a banger. And I also just. I gotta hurry up and end this. But I also don't think people want to be treated like a child. So I write here, people do not want comfort as much as they want dignity. But dignity requires consequence. So people say, oh, I want to be a grown man. I want to face the reality of the universe. But then you get hit with these bear markets, and it's hard. So I don't think people want a carefully crafted version of reality, nor do I think it's good for them. But dignity requires consequence. It's the quote I say all the time. I think society, harmony in society will be restored when personal responsibility is valued again. Hold your own private keys. Put your coins in cold storage. Take care of your own health, take care of your own family. So anyway, do not ask Bitcoin to be gentle. Ask it to be honest. And then become the kind of person who can handle the truth. I know it's a little like emotional and over the top and philosophical, but you know, I think this essay will be fun. Hopefully this is valuable for you guys. Listen, the DXY is over 100. That's why Bitcoin. Selling off it. Told us this months ago. It's the last functioning smoke alarm. It's a truth machine. But there's really something here, that it gives you a relationship with the world that isn't crafted, controlled, mediated, padded. And in my experience as a bitcoiner, it's really made me a much better man. I. You know, yes, times were hard, but in hindsight, to have the business I have, you know, the customers I have, you guys. And think about the cost I paid to acquire the knowledge and the experience and the lessons that I have with me today. I paid dirt cheap for that. I still have my business. I still have my health. I still have my fiance and my family. I still have you guys. So you gotta just hang in there and, like, don't be afraid to look in that mirror. You know, it's. You know, if. If other people do wrong, call them out. You know, we're the cyber hornets. I never get mad for you guys calling me on my shit. In fact, I'm. I'm owning up to it right now. Right. It's part of being a bitcoiner, but also, you know, don't deflect. Part of bitcoin is, in a weird way, spiritual. Um, and I think it's a really unique experience, which makes it a lot more emotional, you know, a lot more euphoric when times are good and a lot more painful when times are bad. But I think it's what being free is truly about, you know, I mean. So anyway, I'll end it with some strike updates. Let's see here. Oh, wow. John Moran to the Portland Trailblazers. Would you look at that? Okay, strike real quick. This is the. What we shipped. Let me retweet this. This is what we shipped. So last week, we lowered our trading tiers, which is huge. So the lowest fee we'll ever charge for you to buy bitcoin is now 0.89%. I mean, if you're not sacking on strike at this point, I don't know why. Also, our consumer loans in both Washington and South Carolina. So we launched in Washington, South Carolina, minimums came down. New Jersey, minimums came down. We continue to just. It's just proof of work, guys. It's not the sexiest, it's not the flashiest, but license by license, feature by feature, I just don't know. A team of bitcoiners that's making their services better every single week. No excuses, proof of work, block after block, just pounding pavement. So I'm really proud of the team and then some look aheads for this week. So we got our Mika license which is very exciting. So a lot of the Europe stuff I've been hinting at was pending our Mika license. So we got Mika. We should be turning on Italy, turning on Spain any second now. I think that formal announcement will go out tomorrow. So that would be Tuesday. And then we have volatility proof loans. I think we'll let that go out on Thursday. So that is, we call them a volatility proof. That's no liquidation. So you pay a little bit extra in how much the loan cost. But we use the extra fee. So I think it's like a couple of percentage points and we use that to create the hedges necessary so that you cannot get margin called and liquidated. So obviously one of the biggest feedbacks we got is hey, I love the idea of borrowing against my savings. I never want to sell my bitcoin, but what if markets get volatile? What if there's a wick down, you know, I don't want to get liquidated. Strike's an awful company because they would in theory liquidate people's bitcoins. And so we created a product to solve for that. And I think it's the best experience in the easy. I mean this is crazy to me as a bitcoiner that's been around for a while. I mean Strike is unbelievable user experience mobile app, you can download it and now just basically click a box and say, hey, I'll take one of these bitcoin backed loans without the ability to liquidate. I mean I'm super proud of the team and we've got some big heavy hitters after this. Another really big one is the interest on cash. We think we'll have the best rates in the bitcoin banking market and they'll only go up from there. So very exciting time to be a Strike customer. Very exciting time to work at Strike. I mean just we're still having a ball in the bear market. So as these things roll out, keep us honest, give us feedback. Never be afraid to hit up customer support. We invest a lot in our ability to care for you guys. So you can DM me on Twitter, DM Strike on Twitter. Reach out to support Strike me. But we've got tons of announcements and some really big heavy hitting features landing. We're super happy to be officially, officially, officially in Europe via Mika, which will give us a lot of. Of ability to deliver more features to that region of the world. And with that, I'm out. So no Q and A this week, which means ask your questions in the comments. Dylan will maybe precede the doc I usually get because I know we missed a week. And yeah, maybe I'll upload some pictures of some of these venues I'm checking out to Noster. But much love. I appreciate you guys look out for that essay. Hopefully later this week, which I hope will be valuable as everyone tries to navigate another bear market. Hang in there. You'll be okay. You'll be okay. No dignity without consequence. But we're all tough here. We're all tough. And. Oh, and my Bitcoin Prague keynote is now on YouTube. You can probably just search Bitcoin Prague and find their channel. And find it. But it is my thesis on how AI and bitcoin will usher in a new human renaissance. I talked about that a lot on the show and I know that's now on YouTube just in case anyone's interested. And I think that's it. I got a bunch of questions on strategy. I know they announced some new stuff today. I'm gonna spare your guys ears. I'll give it one more week. If you really want me to go again. I'm never afraid. I'm happy to give my thoughts, but we'll let the market digest things. I'm not gonna go on a strategy sailor rant this week. I already told you guys I got my answers. I'm not really interested unless you guys are obviously man of the people. But I'm not answering my own questions at this point. I have my definitive thoughts. Cool. Okay, love you. All done rambling. Talk to you later. Peace and love.