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Yo. Welcome back to another episode of the Jack Maller show. I am your host, Jack, and you are listening to yet another edition of Mailbag Monday every Monday, 6pm Eastern. All signal, no noise. This is episode 117 and today we're talking about Bitcoin and the tale of two wolves. Before we get started, let me time stamp this bad boy. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you all for joining me in this very unique corner of the Internet Once again as I talk to you all at a Bitcoin price of US$81,900 per Bitcoin, that puts Bitcoin's market cap at US$1.64 trillion. Our all time high remains at 126,160. We are now only 35% down from that all time high. Don't look now, here comes the coin. We made that all time high 217 days ago on October 6, 2025. The last Bitcoin block mined before I hit stream is Bitcoin block height 949,003. How are you beautiful people doing? The sun is out in Chicago. I'm walking to the gym with my shorts on and a T shirt. We bitcoin is back. There's so much to discuss. So without further ado, let's get this show on the road. Okay. Bitcoin and the tale of two wolves. I think everyone should be familiar with the tale of two wolves, but it's the. What are these called? These like age old? Is it just a tail? I don't know. These age old. The point is there's a tail, two wolves. One, one is evil, one is good, and whichever one you feed more wins. And that's kind of. I was listening to this podcast by this guy named Warren Pies. Really good macro researcher guy, been reading some of his stuff and he was talking about the tale of two wolves as it relates to markets. Today is on one side of the market you have AI in this productivity boom and you've got the US government spending spending at, you know, 6% deficit to GDP. So there's so much money being poured into the economy, into the world from, you know, from fiscal dominance from the U. S. Government. And the government spending is someone else's profit. You combine that with AI which is one of the greatest productivity booms we've maybe ever seen and you get crushing EPS revisions up, grand growth up MAG7 is back. Stock markets at all time highs. Growth, growth, growth number go up, boom, boom, boom. Economy to the moon. Now the other wolf is what we've been Talking about with the straight of Hormuz, the conflict in Iran. These are physical limitations that the world is going to have to deal with at some point. You know what's been impressive is the AI boom and all the productivity going on in the stock market is somehow made all time highs. Despite 20% of the world's oil supply going entirely offline. It is honestly remarkable. If there was no conflict in Iran, I have no idea where the stock market and assets like Bitcoin would be. Who knows. But the fact that bitcoins above 80,000, I said last episode, you've got this 80 to $82,000 range where bitcoin blows through that get on board or get out of the way. If bitcoin continues to struggle with that, we might see a revisit of the 70s and maybe 60s. So it's the fact that Bitcoin is trying to push its way through and the stock market is making all these all time highs when we have record oil short oil shortages, we've got gas prices that bring us back to 2022. I mean it is remarkable the tale of two wolves and the two stories going on with within today's market. What a time to be alive and be contributing and being a bitcoiner right now, I mean we are living through, I mean things like AI and seeing it, it's, it's working. I mean we'll go through this thing is working. And bitcoin is monetizing as a multi trillion dollar asset class. I mean the death of the $1971, you're seeing gold remonetized out east is, you know, you can be a doomer and gloomer, there's plenty of excuses to do that. But I mean what a cool opportunity to be a human and contribute to the human story. I mean this is a fascinating time to be alive. So first I said every single week we're going to check in on the four questions because we're not going to turn into a political show, we're not going to fall for that. We're going to ask these four basic questions about the conflict in Iran. And if these don't change and there's no substance to this, we're not going to fall for the headlines. We're not going to, we're not going to run our mouth about politics. I'm going to save us all from that. I'm going to save myself from that. Because the answers we cover, we continue to remain unchanged. So before you waste time, answer these. First one is the strait of Hormuz still closed. The answer is yes. Guys, question two, is the conflict still ongoing? The answer is yes. Actually, as of this morning, Monday, May 11, peace talks deteriorated. We are back to potential escalation. And so the conflict is still ongoing. Question number three, are global supply chains still disrupted? The answer is yes. This is a derivative of the straight of Hormuz still being closed. So yes, absolutely, global supply chains continue to be disrupted. And then question number four, can global debt survive this disruption? The answer remains no. We're seeing the bond market and yields continue to go up, which presents itself as a big problem to this highly indebted, highly levered system. You can think of the global fiat system and especially the western markets that run these massive deficits and have such debt, you could think of them as these highly levered big machines. And leverage does not like volatility. Leverage does not like sudden change. And so anything like AI, anything like a change in consumer spending, anything like global supply shortages, anything like an oil shock, that is not going to bode well with a highly levered system. That's, you know, why such debt and such leverage is untenable, is things have to effectively go perfect. And unfortunately, you know, we live in a world of entropy. We don't, you know, the state of the universe that we all share is you can't change the past and you don't know the future. All we have for certain is the now. And so you cannot, you cannot see yourself forward with such substantial leverage. It is bound to get tipped over even by the most brisk, tiny gust of wind. So just to check in on the straight of Hermuz, this visual, this is, you know, the, the Strait of Hormuz vessels that are crossing viewed through the Bloomberg terminal. I mean, I just don't know how else to say that it remains unchanged. You can see at the end of February, this fall off a cliff, Iran shut the Strait of Hormuz. And despite all of the rumors and the headlines and the politicians going back and forth on social media against each other, I mean, it's been fairly consistent. Some vessels have gone through and there was a point in time where they were accepting payment in CNY or bitcoin and. But more or less, the strait's been just closed, the straight's been closed and there has been real world consequences for 20% of the oil market going entirely offline. Now back to the two wolves. Okay, so there we go. We're done with the Iran US conflict. You guys can thank me in the comments. No more political podcasts. Apologize for that. Chapter in my life. I just couldn't take it anymore. It was getting absurd. We're not going to fool ourselves into wasting time there. Let's talk about the market and where the world is going. And this tale of two wolves, to me is a fascinating concept because you do have this massive productivity. The economy is running so hot right now, like the US is running so hot, they've got $500 billion of annual QE. Remember when Powell started this repurchasing thing back in December? So for those that don't remember, or maybe you weren't listening to the show, the Federal Reserve and, and the chair, Jerome Powell, we were in qt, which is quantitative tightening. And this was, after all the gushing amounts of liquidity post coveted. So for the last many years now, the. The Fed was shrinking its balance sheet and we were in quantitative tightening, which, you know, I think of Bitcoin as both an expression of fiat liquidity and technology innovation. So Bitcoin, to me is some combination of the two. People will try and say, oh, bitcoin is just a tech stock. I think in some parts they're right. It is a technology. Now, people will then also say, bitcoin is just digital gold. In some parts, I think that's true. Bitcoin is the hardest money humans have ever conceived. So I think, to me, it's some combination of the two. And so obviously, when you have a retraction in liquidity, when the Fed is shrinking its balance sheet, that's not necessarily good for assets that are continually priced on future expectations of fiat. O. Okay, so the Federal Reserve ended that. There were serious liquidity scares. There's, there's a scarcity and liquidity. You can see it in some of the overnight funding markets. And so In December of 2025, so what? It's May, six months ago, the Fed said, We're ending QT. We're not necessarily starting QE, but we are going to expand our balance sheet. And everyone listening, that's more of a layman's, you know, this shows the common man, by the common man, for the common man. Like, what the hell does that mean? What do you mean? It's not qe, but the balance sheet's growing. It's effectively qe. They called it a repurchasing program. I mean, these guys are politicians at the end of the day, right? And they're not going to blatantly in your face say, they're debasing your currency and inflating assets. That's what everyone knows as QE nowadays. So QE is like a bad word. They're never going to explicitly say it, but they're going to find a way to print the money. And that's what they started in December. Now if you guys remember, it was supposed to end in April. It is now May. It has not ended. And it cracks me up every time because they didn't go on TV and let everyone know they didn't write a blog post. They didn't say, hey, we want to update the fact that this was supposed to end in tax day and we're going to keep the program going. They did none of that. Okay. The U.S. government continues to find liquidity to taper off bond market problems. So these yields keep going off, they keep finding liquidity to juice markets, they keep running it hot. And you've got this run it hot mentality from the US government running at 6% deficit to GDP. That's so much. People keep comparing what's going on in the stock market today to the tech boom in the late 90s, early 2000s. But back then the government was running a 2% surplus. So the government is juicing the economy way more, Way more. They're running it so hot. And you combine that with AI, which is genuinely one of the most productive technologies we've ever seen. It's incredibly deflationary. Just the idea that the marginal cost of intelligence is free in your pocket as long as you have a smartphone. Crazy. Now the fact that at the same time, while all that is going on, record government spending, record deficits, record tech innovation, record deflationary technology running into a highly indebted financial system. At the same time, we're seeing the remonetization of gold for the first time in at least 50 years, but probably longer. And we're seeing conflict in the Middle east where the US can't seem to open the straight of Hormuz. And so it's being held like the, the Iran is basically saying we're going to shut down the global economy unless you get off our back. And that conflict is still ongoing. And so you're seeing real physical shortages all over the world. Real physical shortages in Japan, real physical shortages throughout Europe, now real fiscal shortages entering the United States. The fact that both of these are happening at the same time, I mean, as a bitcoiner, this is fascinating. It's crazy. It's cool. Like I said, I mean, you don't let allow life to come from you, not at you. Right. You have every excuse if you want, especially if you're of the younger generation. You're my age, you have every excuse to be sad, to be angry, to be disgruntled. But I choose to be energized by these opportunities, energized by the fact that I'm blessed to be alive while the world is changing. So that's what I mean by the tale of two wolves. Here is these two competing massive macro movements. Now at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter how they shape up because bitcoin is going to go up no matter the direction we walk. And that's why my recommendation continues to just be stay humble and turn on your dcas. As a reminder, strike's got no fee dcas, no fees to withdrawal to cold storage. I think it is very dangerous game to try and guess how this out how the world is going to progress. I mean even the smartest minds in the world aren't living a version of the universe that has played before. I mean this is a one of one time to be alive. I just turn on your DCAs. But for the sake of the show, again, bitcoin's a problem. Or excuse me, bitcoin is a solution to a problem. I like understanding the problem, understanding what it means for the world, for those around us, how we can educate people. So that's what we'll do on the show. The Tale 2 Wolves. So Main street versus Wall Street, I want you guys to look at this. In the blue line is Wall street S&P 500. And the red line in this visual is Main street consumer sentiment and it's moving in opposite directions. In the tweet writes the gap between Wall street and Main street has never been wider. U S consumer sentiment fell 1.6 points in May to 48.2 which is an all time low, guys. Yes, all time low as in below the 2008 financial crisis, below the 1980s recession. I'm telling you, all time low consumer sentiment on Main street, all time low for consumer sentiment. For the everyday person, the brick by brick, the salt of the earth, just the normal people, they want to have family, they want to own a home, they want a good life. Never been worse. Now at the same time, the S P 500 is trading at an all time high of 7,400. Wall street at all time highs, Main street is in a crisis. This is going to be the theme of this show. So here are my two wolves. Okay? On one one side you have this boom. So the s and P Q1 EPS is up 27% year over year. That's EPS earnings per share. That is absolutely outrageous. EPS revisions keep going up. So companies are revising their EPS, their future. Forward looking. They keep revising them up. We'll get into that graph in a second. Forward looking. Token consumption of AI is up 24x over the next four years. That is absolutely absurd. Tech over spy ratio. So how dominant is technology in the overall market right now? It has surpassed the dot com highs of the late 90s and early 2000s and the S P500 is at an all time high. So on one side again you have an absolute boom. Productivity growth, real cash flow. And again, is this another dot com bubble? Maybe, I don't know. That's why I'm a. You know one of the reasons I'm a bitcoiner is because I'm not that. I'm no genius, I'm no the great short stock picker. Running. Nah, I just stay humble. I stack sats. It's, it's really that simple. I've outperformed all these financial gurus that sit with their little models and pluck around all night. I, I've outperformed all of them over the last 14 years by very simply staying humble and stacking sats. So I have no idea if this is another dot com boom, but it's just AI instead of dotcom. However, what I will say is it's not so clear to me. I think people are drawing those conclusions just to benefit their peace of mind. Because the government was running a 2% surplus back then. We're now at a 6% deficit. The reason that there's, that's such a stark difference is because there's so much more liquidity being plowed into the economy. Government spending is the private sector's revenue is the private sector's profit. Keep that in mind. They're pouring gasoline onto the fire, you see. And so it's the combination of there's actually an opportunity to deliver deflationary forces, to deliver technology innovation, to grow margins, to grow profit. You're seeing companies replace humans with AI. They're growing their margins, they're growing their gross profit, they're revising their EPS on a go forward basis and they're getting all the tailwinds and support from further and further and further government spending, further and further and further debasing of the currency. Now the other side, the other wolf is that gas is approaching $5 a gallon. It's going higher. The 30, the 30 year yield just crossed 5%. Supply chains are completely collapsing. Consumer sentiment in Main street is at an all time Low. And the Strait of Hormuz remains closed with no clear path of how it will open. How crazy are these two wolves? Nuts. It's really. And. And I've talked about it before. Is bitcoin about to go to150,000 or is it going to retest 60, 000? I don't know. IDCA. I buy Bitcoin with my paychecks on strike. I. It's not. That's above my pay grade. You want to know what's in my pay grade? Spending time with my fiance, planning our wedding, lifting heavy things and going for a run. Now that the sun's out in Chicago, hanging out with my friends, building bitcoin products for the bitcoin economy at my two companies. I'm not. You're not going to catch me up all night drinking energy drinks, stock picking. No, no, no, no. I don't know. I don't care. I. This is all entertainment. I don't care. Okay. But what a fascinating timeline to be living through. Okay, now this chart says the same thing. It expresses the same idea of this Wall street versus Main Street. This is the. The people bear the brunt and the tax ultimately because they are the currency holders and their wealth is being debased. And the asset holders, the upper 10% of the economy, the people that own all the stocks, that own the real estate, that own the assets that are being inflated. So this tweet, if you work for a living, your share of GDP has never been lower. If you hoard capital for a living, your share of GDP has never been higher. And the visual shows stock market as a share of gdp, all time highs, total wages as a share of gdp, all time lows. And this will be a consistent underpinning of today's show. This is what fiat does. It erodes the middle class, it taxes the bottom and benefits the top. It's not necessarily Jeff Bezos's fault that he's getting wealthier while doing while on his yacht with his new wife. It's because he owns a lot of assets. He owns a lot of Amazon, he owns a lot of real estate. He owns a lot of stuff. And you're seeing inflation in everything except the currency. Bitcoin is inflating. Amazon stock is inflating. Eggs are inflating. Real estate is inflating, oil is inflating, energy is inflating. It's all inflating in dollar terms because the dollar is being devalued. And so if you can afford assets, you are benefiting from what this tweet describes as hoarding capital, just owning stuff. Now, if you cannot own things, if you are part of the population, oops. If you are part of the population that cannot quite get a house yet, that doesn't have a excess cash flow to invest in stocks yet, that can't find a way to buy some bitcoin, well, you're getting crushed. Because every single paycheck, total wages as a share of GDP is getting you less and less and less of a slice of. Because all of the US dollars, the cuck bucks that you're getting bi weekly as a form of a paycheck, every time that hits your account and payroll is processed and you got paid, it's getting you less stuff. You're getting further away from ever owning a home, further away from ever being able to stack sats. Fifteen years ago, if you wanted to stack sats, a bitcoin was a dollar. Now a Bitcoin's $82,000. As time goes on, you're getting further away, you see. And by the way, we'll get into this as well. I mean, this causes societal distress. People start fighting, people get violent. Really, really not good. Okay, Wolf, number one, the AI earnings boom. So more color on what I was saying. The s and P500Q1 earnings per share growth, 27% year over year. Guys, that's outrageous. The US Econ economy is running it hot. QT is over. This weird version of QE that they're not actually calling QE is on. There's liquidity coming from all angles of all sizes. There's a conflict in the Middle east that's certainly highly inflationary. And you've got this AI boom that's actually working. The numbers are in. Companies are getting more efficient. Margins are growing, gross profit is growing. Costs are coming down. It's happening EPS revision. So companies are revising their future expectations. Up, not down. Goldman Sachs came out with a report that they believe token consumption is going to near 25x by 2030. And the other thing is that the stock market loves when volatility is down. There is a brief period where the Vix was at 30. Bitcoin really struggled. The stock market really struggled with volatility, was back at 17 going into the weekend. And the market loves that low volatility ma massive growth. And that massive growth is backed by real cash flow because AI is working. So the contrarian signal, everyone hates it. And that's kind of the point is that everyone's comparing this to the dot com bubble. Max bearish Sentiment is expressed on the Mag 7. But this thing continues to rip. It continues to rip the faces off of everybody. And you know, to advocate for Wolf, number one, it's despite conflict in the Middle east, despite the Strait of Hormuz still being closed, despite higher oil prices, despite what seems to be inflation baked into the cake, it's too late at this point. If the straight Hormuz were to reopen today, it doesn't really matter. Inflation in the next three to six months seems to be a guarantee to me. And the longer that this goes on, the more physical reality is going to have to impose itself at some point. I hope it's not a disastrous financial crisis. I hope that it doesn't, you know, wipe total Western economies just off their feet. But it's real now, despite all of that. I mean the, the market is absolutely ripping. So Here is the Q1, 27.1% year over year growth. This is the largest, strongest growth since Q4 of 2021. And remember how hot that was? That was post covet. So just look at the size of the growth there on the far right. Just to give you guys an idea of how absolutely insane this is, I've talked for years now that the pending liquidity that's going to be coming online just as a result of math and all the deficits and all the debt is Covid level esque, if not significantly larger. So this to me comes as no surprise. It still is crazy to see EPS revisions. So companies revising their forward EPS look at the historical average from 2011 to 2025, that is the black line below. They're revising down 2026. Just to give you guys an idea of how unique this is. I mean, one line is going up, the other goes down. This is a crazy amount of EPS revisions. This shows that probably at least for the next few quarters, the stock market is going to rip. Things are going to be run extremely hot. Now again, the, the question that all analysts are asking themselves as well, what's going to happen? Or one day are we going to wake up and no one has any oil and the world basically shuts down? Yes, it looks like that's the case. I don't, I don't, obviously I don't think that the US government is going to allow for that. So whether they concede in the conflict, whether there's some peace terms that actually aren't great for the US it seems to me like Trump is really buying time till his meeting with China and president of China and maybe trying to get China to lean on Iran a little bit. But basically the point is like how much can the US stock market rip on the, on the tailwinds of government deficit spending and AI and all of this productivity while we're in like a Main street depression? I don't know the answer to that. This is why I stay humble and stack sats. If Bitcoin goes up to 150k, I'm the happiest man in the world. If bitcoin goes down to 50k, I'm the happiest man in the world. I, I'm productive, I live my life in a profit. I run my companies in a profit and I, I don't mind, I buy the coin no matter what. I lower my time preference. I'm happy. Okay, but I mean this is crazy, right? This is the Goldman Sachs token consumption that I was referencing. This is their estimated 24x by 2030. And you're seeing, you know, the three core segments of consumption. Enterprise agents to me is what's been, I mean the level of growth here is crazy, crazy. Like something happened in December, January recently and now all of these companies have fully MCP'd their tech stack and are firing humans and replacing them with AI. And it's working. I mean Block's earnings was super, super impressive. Their AI strategy seems to be working. Here is this XLK over spy. This is tech over the S&P 500h. Basically how much of the S&P 500 in ratio terms is technology? And what I think is interesting is we are now overweight technology relative to the dot com bubble, all time highs. And this just goes to show how strong. I've always said on the show, to me the story of humanity is the story of engineering a better world. I think we're living in a technology era where intelligence is going digital, money is going digital. You know, technology is the greatest investing trend of our time. And I think that this chart's going to only go higher. I, I, I really think things going digital, like things like Meta and Apple and Amazon, you know, digitizing the marketplace, which is what Amazon has done, and dematerializing having to walk into a real store to live your life and acquire the goods and services you need. You can just go on your phone and it's at your door in an hour. That's insane. I mean Apple has dematerialized and digitized everything that you used to need. You're like walking around with a camera and going to get your camera roll printed at cvs, right? Your phone book, you Used to have a yellow pages, right? Like think about all of the things that now live in your pocket on a single device, totally digitized. Facebook has taken. Or Instagram, whatever social media you use has taken your physical life and digitized it. So this trend now, bitcoin has done it with money. AI has done it with intelligence. I think this is a fascinating trend where people are saying, oh, this is a bubble. This is a bubble. Like the, this technology over S P500 is gonna have to go down. I'm not so sure about that. So anyway, this is more. This Warren Pies guy who I've been listening to more and more, he makes this point where he says, in 2000, the government ran a 2% surplus. Today that deficit is 6%. So the, the, the backdrop is entirely different. The point is they are running it so hot. There's so much deficit spending, so much tailwinds for the economy and for these businesses, that that's. Number one, is that the fiscal backdrop is entirely different. Point number two is that the dot com companies weren't actually building anything valuable. So, you know, the famous dot com Boom is like pets.com, pets.com was like one of the biggest companies in the world. And everyone realized like pets.com can't make any money. And no one gives a crap about pets.com versus today. The argument is, are people actually working on vaporware like Pets.com or is this Mag 7? These are companies that generate the most cash flows ever. Like these are cash printing machines and they're actually building real stuff. So, you know, the bubbleness. I understand that PE ratios look absurd, but I'd make the argument that they're not and that there's real cash flow backing this and that AI is far more real than pets dot com. So anyway, are we in a bubble? I don't. I don't know. I mean, I don't know. But, but bubbles are hard to define. Fiat is one giant bubble for sure. No doubt. As a bitcoiner, everything goes down against bitcoin because everything is in abundance against the only scarce thing I can own, right? As long as there's going to be more companies, more houses, more eggs, more oil, and there's never going to be any more bitcoin. Well then, oh, the world will fight over their bubbles and I'll sit humbly with my SATs enjoying a deflationary trend. Everything in my life will get cheaper forever as a bitcoiner. So is this a bubble? Is that a bubble? All I'm saying is I'm Seeing a tendency to compare what's happening today to the dot com bubble in late 90s and the 2000s. And I just don't. I. It feels lazy to me. It feels lazy to me. Like the fact that Google, Amazon, meta, all of these companies are spending all the money they are on AI. I feel like that's not the same as pets.com. like can we just say that, you know, it's like I don't think Google, who, who's like making hundreds of billions of dollars over the years and is pouring that into like creating infinite digital intelligence. I don't think that that's the same as like Mark Cuban's sports broadcasting startup. Anyway, I digress. So now wolf number two is this real economy. And so again you have whatever you want to call it, the K shape, the wealth gap, the evisceration of the middle class. This is all what happens with fiat is there's such a divorce between the real world, the physical world being governed by mother nature and this la la fufu land. It's like that scene in Wolf of Wall street. The it's a wazi, it's a woozy, it's fairy dust, it's all fake, it's all garbage. Right? And so you have stock market at all time high. A lot of these companies killing it by hiring robots and hiring artificial intelligence instead of humans. And then you have the majority of the population. That's never been worse. Okay, so first of all, gas continues to climb. This is the fastest spike since the Russia Ukraine shock. And it's going to keep going. There's no signs of gas slowing down. Oil inventories are falling at a record pace. So this tweet, the world is burning through oil inventories at the fastest pace on record since the US Israeli war began, or war on Iran, excuse me, began. Stockpiles have fallen by 4.8 million barrels per day. This exceeds peak Covid drawdown. Again, guys like, this is crazy. Once these inventories run dry, we will switch from an oil deficit to an oil shortage and prices will spike again. So it's almost as if like the stock market doesn't appreciate the pending danger. The world is it like the physical world. Like you cannot print oil, you cannot print energy. This, the, these are physical realities that will soon impose themselves. But it's almost as if what the stock market is saying is we don't really give a shit until there's a crisis because for now, this is like some of the most booming growth. This is record deficit spending combined with record tech innovation. So like wake me up when the world actually falls apart. But I'm tired of hearing about how the world is falling apart in the meantime. I guess, I mean it's just a crazy time to be alive. Floating storage down 33% so crude oil floating storage falls 33% in the past week. In the past week. This is across Asia Pacific, the Middle East, West Africa, Europe, US Gulf coast and the North Sea. Like crazy. Now back to how much pain Main street is in. This is the US Jolts, job openings by industry. Look at the bottom. Professional and business services. Who is in pain? Guys, look at that. That is crazy. That's for Those listening. Negative 330,000. Okay, and what is professional and business services? I'm talking management consulting, accounting and tax preparation, legal services, computer systems, staffing and temp agencies. The. This is the industry that's being very greatly impacted by AI. Nuts. This is, this is nuts. Now I speak in Prague in about a month at BTC Prague and I think I'm going to do a keynote on. I've talked about this idea before where I see bitcoin and AI, the combination of the two bringing about a new art renaissance. Because I've had this like thesis that I've been baking in my head for a really long time that. How do I try and shorten this fiat created, you know, in this idea of globalism where the us, the Western world, we're not going to have middle class, we're not going to have manual labor, we're not going to have. The blue collar workers are now in China. I've given this rant a million times. Blue collar is now in China. Our industrial capacity is gone, middle class gone, Middle of America gone. And we flooded the coast. The coast. Meaning you're doing this level of work. You're do it. The coast is Wall street and Silicon Valley and you're doing everyone now. No one is working with their hands. No one's producing anything real. You're doing these, you know, business and professional services. This chart that I'm showing here, look at the amount of lawyers since 1971. Mind you, this is the problem with just printing money and doing nothing of real because you have highly competent people that are incentivized to be high frequency traders or lawyers or accounting tax people as opposed to mining rare earths as opposed to manufacturing, as, as opposed to industrial like. And so this is what happens. You get a boom in white collar work and you've hyper financialized everything. And I say the art renaissance because you know, in my Opinion Our, our buildings and our architecture has gotten uglier. I think we've lost the artistry in being human. At the end of the day, that that human touch will be the difference between us and AI. AI makes really ugly things. It has no touch, it has no taste. And that, that is to me the human experience is the, is the expression of art. And we've lost that with Fiat and instead we have like a bunch of lawyers running around and it's. And just I think that this post $71 and fiat has met its match with bitcoin and AI. And bitcoin and AI can bring back an art renaissance. Because if you have money that can lower your time, time preference and you're not in a rat race against debt where you're not needing to take these white collar jobs that pay you just enough to pay down, not pay down your college education, pay down your mortgage, pay down your card note, pay down your credit card, you're just in a rat race, a hamster wheel to outrun the debt. And so you're not pursuing artistic craft with a low time preference and an ability to breathe and think and create and be present. It's stress, it's rat race, it's investment banking. 20 hour days, right? And so the, the hard money gives us the luxury to lower our time preference and prioritize our future. And the artificial intelligence is so deflationary that it makes everything around us cheap and accessible. It's easy then to account for a spreadsheet, to write a legal document. The hard part is the artistry is the creativity part. All of the mundane tasks are automated, all of the ability to save is accessible. And what, what is left is, is to create artistry. That's. I'm gonna give a really cool speech in Prague. I've started working on it already. But anyway, seeing this labor case shape professional and business services getting crushed, I mean America by ways of policy like this was a policy decision. If you are in manual labor, if you're working with your hands, if you're producing real things, then you lost your job decades ago. You overdosed on opioids decades ago. Right? That, that, that part, that middle class manual labor, real working on real physical things that was eviscerated from the United States and you have this overproduction of elitism where in order to have a life worth living, you got to find a way. You got to be a lawyer, you got to be an investment banker, you got to be in private equity, you got to be a venture capitalist, you got to be a founder of a tech startup that now every now you're seeing the evisceration of white collar and these things meeting the automation of technology. And we're now starting to realize how much of a shortage we've been in, in art and taste and creativity and, and how overpopulated we are. This is what you know, in the book the End Times, he calls elite overproduction, where you have a decline in real wages and overproduction of, of people trying to be elite and there's just not enough room. So anyway, I'll give that talk later, but now I'm going to parlay this idea into some of the things that are worrying me. So this is a visual. Let me try and zoom in here. So the tweet reads another way to express the chart below is the fertility rate peaked in 2007, which was almost 20 years ago. We still underestimate the extent of the damage done from 2007 to 2009. The financial crisis, the global financial crisis. So U.S. fertility rates are falling off a cliff. And the other thing to keep in mind, guys, is when you're in so much debt, what you've done is you've borrowed from your future. That's really like debt, especially by governments is as close to time travel as I think we've ever gotten. And that's a little bit of a philosophical mumbo jumbo, but I mean it pretty literally because what governments can do is they can borrow the time, energy, effort and labor from future populations. Right now if I take on debt for myself in a personal capacity, like I wanna borrow against my Bitcoin, I am borrowing against either my future productivity or my Bitcoin's future performance. So I myself am borrowing from my own future. And that's all debt is. You're pulling forward future growth and future earnings to spend now. And it's a good idea if your future has the capacity to be far better than the past and you can enter your future in a far better state than, than if you didn't take on the debt in the first place. Right? Does that make sense? So that's, that's all conceptually like taking on debt is, but if a government takes on debt, they are, they're, I mean especially modern day governments and central banking and fiat, they are not borrowing, they are borrowing from all of our, our kids in our future human time, energy, effort and labor. So it's like time travel, like the kids that I haven't even produced yet. The government has already spent their effort. Now I Give you all of that context to say in order for the government to make whole on the debt they've created, the they need growth. Right. It'd be the equivalent of borrowing against your Bitcoin and Bitcoin just goes down forever. Or borrowing against your bitcoin and you get fired from your job. That would be bad, right? That would not be good. Okay. It's the same, it's the same thing where if the US stops having kids and fertility rates are dropping through the roof, you can't print 18 year olds. It takes 18 years to make an 18 year old. It doesn't matter what fancy level of QE you're doing, you are 18 years away at minimum from having another 18 year old in the economy. And so if fertility rates are falling off a cliff, then it's impossible for the US to realize the debt that it's taken out because it physically cannot have the growth required. In fact, one of the reasons the United States is leaning probably so much into AI and robotics is because so much of the growth is going to have to be robots because we're not going to have enough humans to climb out of this pile of debt. I mean the chart below, America is at peak 18. The number of 18 year olds will fall 14% over the coming decade. People just aren't. This is the problem. When the fix the money, fix the world, the opposite is true. Break the money, break the world. Functioning money is a functioning society. It is the market good that represents our human dignity, our time, our energy, our effort, our labor. It's in, it's the greatest form of information transfer for us humans. It's how we coordinate and collaborate with each other. If you with that, you destroy society either and I'll tell you guys, I'll save you the research on why the fertility rate's dropping and population is down more or less. Here's the problem one when you have such globalism and everything's hyper financialized, corporations seek higher margins. So if I'm McDonald's I'd rather really nasty canola oil that's probably contributing to metabolic disease, obesity, cancer rates. People like the food and the quality of ingredients is making Americans sick. Because number go up with the stock number go up, margins go up, sick go up. So for one like actual fertility is bad because we're consuming way too much pharmaceuticals, where everyone's swallowing all of these man made pills. We're not eating organic fresh ingredients. People like the hyper financialization and globalism is that asset prices must go up for the ponzi to continue. And so everyone's getting sick to the benefit of your corporate margins and corporate equities. So that's one. And then more just societal trends is people are either too wealthy to want to have kids or they're not wealthy enough to be able to afford to have kids. The K shaped economy is realized in that like, how do I say for, for the person that has $10 billion, that is wealthier than like 10% of the bottom combined, they're not making up for it in that they're not having like 1,000 times the kids, right? In fact, they're having like maybe one or two kids because they're spending their time jetting around the world, buying professional sports teams, hanging out in Las Vegas, whatever, right? Like they're not having 100 kids, 200 kids to make up for the fact that, you know, the bottom percentile of the economy of Main street can't afford to have one, can't even afford a house, can't afford a credit card. I mean, these things concern me. So, I mean last week we had a lot of really important earnings. Cloudflare, lay off 20 of its employees. Upwork, lay off 25 of its employees. Bill holdings, lay off 30% of its employees. I mean guys, this is what you get with Fiat. You want to hyper financialize globalism, this is what you get. Everyone's going to optimize for margins, optimize for stock, go up and I'll get into it in my grind, my gear segment. But this is a recipe for disaster in society. You are, you are quite literally dividing society into two camps. It's dangerous, it's disgusting, it's unethical, it's immoral, it's scary. And I mean the, the other thing, I actually had this shower thought this morning, you know, because so I read a lot of these macro researchers and these like Fiat analysts and stuff. And this is what I just enjoy trying to make sense of the world and understand. I also love history, understand our place in history and odd stuff. And I was thinking, you know, because a lot of these Fiat guys, maybe they're not into Bitcoin yet or you know, they're more interested in picking the right stocks at the right times and all this shit. But I had this almost overwhelming sense of purpose in working on Bitcoin because we're working on something new. I think that, I think that's just, that alone is such a powerful idea. We're not working on this old system that's clearly broken. That's clearly been the reason for so much of the worst of humanity and the worst of our lived experiences and the pain for our families and the pain for our neighbors and the cause of war and the cause of human death. We're a group of people that are saying we need something new, we need something better. And we're gonna, from, from scratch, literally from scratch. From a white paper dropped in a mailing list. We're gonna build something else. That alone is so cool to me because I don't know how else to explain, like all of what we're witnessing is, is the result of policy decisions. If you want to forego producing real things, print money out of thin air, import all the stuff you actually use and export printed currency, this is what you get. Hyper financialization, hyper globalism. You get companies that are just opt, that have to, they have to, they have to optimize for margins in the highest stock price. You get this K shaped economy evisceration of the middle class. You've get, you get the lowest consumer sentiment ever. Depression, drug overdose, metabolic disease, obesity. You get a sick population, a dying PO population, a population that isn't fertile, a population that can't have kids. The only hope we have of climbing out of this hell hole is debasing our currency in replacing ourselves with robots because there's not enough of us. And it just, to me, it's the coolest thing. Like I'm getting out of the shower this morning, like I'm strapping up to go to work on something new, building the new thing, new system when. Because this thing isn't working. It's just, I just think that's really cool. I mean it's, it's an oversimplified, you know, you, you're, you're listening to this, you're probably like, duh, yeah, Bitcoin's the new financial system we're working on. But I don't know, it hit me in a, in a, in a big way this morning. It was like, you know, we are the ones building the new thing. Like you got all these economists and stock pickers and macro this and that and it's, I don't know, it is, I think this is the hero's, the, the hero's journey of the younger generation is we're going to, we're going to just build the new thing from scratch. So anyway, to continue my rant and get myself to grab my gears here, the 30 year yield is back over 5%. I mean the bond market's screaming. The bond market is absolutely screaming. So the escape valve. Where does bitcoin fit? I found this from Luke really fascinating. So he charted the inverse of the move index, which is the bond volatility index, the VIX and bitcoin. And you can see bitcoin, which is in green, reacted to the sharp reversal of the move in the vix. And that's really fascinating. Bitcoin seems to be implying that there is very serious liquidity that is protecting markets and protecting volatility from screaming upwards. And bitcoin seems to be, it's that whole Bitcoin is a liquidity smoke alarm. The smoke alarm's going off. And, and I've kind of been alluding to this over the last few episodes. Bitcoin at 82, 000 with the straight of Hormuz being closed and volatility. The Vix was hanging out at 32 three weeks ago or whatever that was. And, and now it's at 15:17. The, the smoke alarm's going off, liquidity cometh. They're running it super, super, super hot. And this is a visual expression of that in a chart. And then the other here from Frank, he posts really good bitcoin charts. This is the choppiness index. And really what this is saying is you can think of the bitcoin market like a coiled spring, like it chops around and it gets range inbound. And whenever the choppiness index drops means that the spring is uncoiled and it's ready for absolute rip your face lift. Then bitcoin goes on a new face ripping price discovery trend and it looks like there's a chance for that. Again, this is another chart which arrives at the same implication as what we've been saying and what Luke is saying, which is liquidity is coming and bitcoin seems to be smelling it and the choppiness index seems to be falling. And so the chart is highlighting where things look similar. When bitcoin was at 13k and it and it then went on and exploded to 70k. Similarly, when Bitcoin was at 30k and it went on to go to 126k, now it's at 80k and we're seeing the similar signs. And you know, what we could have witnessed in the run up to 126k was a bit of a fakeish bull market. We were still in qt. Interesting. So no matter how you slice it now, we might get a financial crisis in a serious disaster due to the straight of Hormuz being closed and, and the global supply chains being so screwed up because of the Conflict in Iran. That might happen. And bitcoin might fall to 60k. Everyone should be prepared for that. Stay humble. Stack sets. Earn more than you're spending. Stay healthy. Be with family. Do not add reckless leverage. Do not try and task yourself with predicting the future. It's. It's a pointless job. It's a soulless job. Stay humble. Lower your time preference. Stack those SATs, turn on those DCAs. Either way, you win. But it seems to be that liquidity is coming, no matter how you slice it. If we make a pit stop lower and then go higher, or we just scream higher, it looks like the world is unfolding exactly how us bitcoiners thought. And I just find a lot of pride in the fact that we're the group that's building the new thing. It's cool. It's cool. So, Tale of Two Wolves. I found that framing interesting. It really is quite the contrast where you've got 20% of the world's oil completely offline, while the stock Market and Mag7 are, like, breaking records for productivity. Because artificial intelligence, it's like doing the job of humans. Crazy. So crazy. I mean, I feel like I downloaded chat GBT yesterday. Didn't it feel like yesterday? I mean, I know it's been around for like, three years, or at least for me using it, but, like, holy moly, humans are again. You can be doom and gloom if you want. You got every excuse. But whenever you're. You know, my dad once told me way back in the day, I was having difficulties with a girl in high school, like every other high school teenage dude. And I was crying to my dad, and he kind of had this expression on his face like he was over it. And I, you know, I was looking at him like, come on, man, I'm sad. And. And his point was, you can be sad. I'm not telling you not to be sad. Go ahead, cry. But when you're done, let's get to work. You know what I mean? And it was. I'll never forget that. Because it was like, yeah, don't be sad. Again. Emotions are helpful. They're useful. They're information for your mind, for your body. You know, being happy is useful information. Being sad is useful information. You didn't like that? You're sad, go ahead, cry about it. But then, you know, you don't make progress crying. We don't. We can't get anything done crying. So when you're done crying, let me know. Let's get to work. You know what I mean? And that's Kind of how I feel. You could be doom and gloom, no problem. Do whatever you want. But when you're done crying, let's go change the world. What do you guys say? Right? Let's go build the new monetary system. Let's go educate people. Let's go do better for our generation than those before us. Right? I just take. I had a lot of energy this morning. Like, let's go. We got AI, we got bitcoin. We're living through the demonetization of fiat and bonds and the remonetization of hard money. Like we. We are right in the thick of it. I feel blessed. Okay, with that being said, let me take a sip of some liquid and let's do Grind My Gears. The chat is asking me if I shower in the morning. I do. Can't believe that's a question. I have the weirdest chat. Do I shower? Type of question is that. What the hell, man? Okay, let's. Let's do Grandma Gears. This week on Grind My Gears, I got AOC and these politicians and. And I'll parlay this into some of the topics I was talking about on the episode. First, let's listen to. To this video. Let me click in and play it for you guys. Certain level. There's a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned, right? You can't earn a billion dollars. That's right. You just can't earn that. That's exactly correct. You can. You can get market power. You can break rules. You can do all sorts of things. You can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they're worth, but you can't earn that. Right? And so you have to create a myth that since you didn't earn that, you have to create a myth of earning it. There's a certain level. I mean, what. What are these people talking about? So I'll read back her quote. There's a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned. You can't earn a billion dollars. You just can't earn that. And you can get market power. You can break rules, you can abuse labor laws. You can pay people less than what they're worth, but you can't earn that. This is the problem. This is the societal split and stress caused by fiat is that there's a growing class of people that are getting angry at our most productive humans. Guys, I'm going to go on the same rant I always do because it is so important. If money is a reflection of your time, your energy, your effort, and your labor, the value that you are contributing to those around you. Money is what you get in return for the value you are contributing. Do you want to know how valuable you are to the world? Look at how much you are getting paid for the work you are doing. In theory, in a perfect world, and the world's not perfect, but the point remains, the amount of money you have is a reflection of your contributions to society. Someone that makes a billion dollars a year is extremely productive. And I've given this speech before you like, I do not think you want to abuse and tax and rip the property out of those people's hands. They are your greatest producers. So someone like Elon Musk is a great producer to society, one of the greatest producers we've ever seen. But because of the K shaped economy, because of the evisceration of the middle class, because of fiat in monetary policy, you now have a group of society that is bl that it is not acceptable to be wealthy. But being wealthy has such a negative connotation. It's not acceptable to be productive. It's ridiculous. So on this slide here, Paul Graham responds to this atrocity from AOC. He says, sure, you can earn $1 billion. I've been teaching people how to do it for 20 years. The way you do it is you start a company that grows fast. You don't have to do anything bad to make a company grow fast. You just have to make something that people want. Again, people overcomplicate this. It's not that complicated. You do productive things for people. If you want to make a billion dollars, you have to very scalably do a productive thing. And the easiest way to make a billion dollars is to do a productive thing via technology. Because technology can scale to billions of people. It's much harder to do a really valuable thing worth $1 billion to one dude versus doing a valuable thing worth a dollar to a billion people with technology. But the point is, how productive are you to people, to your customers, to your user base, to your clients, Whatever the case is, it's super simple. And if someone says that you're. You can't possibly be that productive, what does that say about their outlook on society? I mean, honestly, at this point, like someone like aoc, like it's mental illness, it's ridiculous. But she goes on to write and she says, someone can certainly make a billion dollars, but that's not the same thing as earnings. Growing fast and disrupting markets also often means chasing and wielding market power, political influence and scale. She goes on to say that airbnb is only a valuable company because of political influence and not because of net productivity. It's. Now I'm gonna reign myself in here. And we're not going to go on a cursing montage this week because here, this is a little bit more somber. Grind my gears. This really concerns me. I get worried about this because this is the root cause of a lot of the violence, a lot of the political violence. This is where you get, you know, people that are taking out weapons. This is where you get a violation of property rights. Okay. I get really concerned over, you know, the assassination attempts on executives at companies. I get really concerned at demonizing the upper class and blaming all of the societal issues on them. I get really concerned as to. I mean, the UK is losing, like, more millionaires than any other country. It's ridiculous. People are fleeing the west because people that are productive aren't. Feel like they're not being respected and treated well and. Or their lives are in danger. And I mean, who knows who's going to run for president and what the next election is going to look like? But I mean, I think it's reasonable to assume that you're going to get a political party that points the finger at a specific cohort of society and basically incites violence on them. And it's crazy because all of us listening, we know the reason it's money printing. It's because the money's broken. It's monetary policy, it's government policy. All of this is the cause of a rupturing society. Fix the money, fix the world. Break the money, break the world. It's just true. And this really does concern me because people are talking about how AOC might be a candidate for the next President of the United States. And I mean, what we saw with the. The Mayor Mamdani, the mayor of New York and Ken Griffin, the guys out in front of someone else's property making a mockery of their property rights. It's like the guy is clearly a net productive to the world and he creates a lot of jobs. And. And like, I just, I'm just a free market property rights guy. You're standing outside of someone else's property, making a mockery of it, undermining his right to property and his right to be a productive person, saying, your productivity is ours to own, your property is ours to own. It's crazy. It's crazy. And then it's just. To me, it's terrifying because we've already seen violence as a result of this. And if you're going to Continue to demonize our most productive people. That's really, really, really, really dangerous for society. We want people to strive to be productive. Like, being a profitable company is not a bad thing, being a profitable person is not a bad thing. But being wealthy is like the, the negative connotations and the demonizing of this. I urge all of you guys, if you want to grow your wealth, there are two ways to do so. In fact, I encourage to do both at the same time. One is spend less, consume less from the world, okay? Reduce your annual or your monthly or your weekly spend for your lifestyle. And the other is be more productive, which is make more money. Find a way to be more productive for those around you and find a way to consume less from the world and need less for your lifestyle and earn more through being productive. That's the only way to grow wealth. From the highest philosophical level and the fact that, you know, people that want to run for president are saying that makes you a bad person. That makes you the devil. That makes you a demon. You're the cause of society's issues. Like, then what are we encouraging our children in, in society to become for saying, if you earn property, you, you know, people are going to try and kill you, shoot you, stand outside of your house and violate your right to your property, to your productivity. And I've already made the point as well. Like, if it were up to me, Ken Griffin would spend his own money and not be taxed on how to fix the roads, on how to build better subways, on how to finance Medicare, whatever, people needing medical attention like that. Because he's a productive person who seems to know how to problem solve at scale and prioritize and execute. Government has proven to do the opposite. Government is the least productive thing we've ever seen. The US government loses $2 trillion a year. That's the net deficit a year. It's crazy. So the fact that we're even taxing people to the level that we are is already enough. Let the most productive people be productive with their productivity. What are we doing? On top of that, you have politicians and governments basically inciting violence on these people, telling society, don't you dare be productive. Being productive is wrong. It's not possible. You're a bad person if you're productive. It's crazy. Another way of saying what AOC is saying is like, don't be too profitable. Don't earn too much more than you spend. You have no right to property. Any property that ends up being more valuable than normal should be ours. You what the so another reason bitcoin's going to explode in popularity is like I'll tell you what, Momani couldn't, couldn't have stood out of side of Ken Griffin's private keys and made a mockery of them. Ken Griffin can own as much bitcoin as you want. Mundani does doesn't have a say or choice. That's real privacy, real property rights. That's why I love it. I love it. Bitcoin is the most fundamental form of property rights we've ever seen. I've made this point before, but if I have a pile of gold, a pile of real estate and a pile of bitcoins. If you want to steal my gold, you can put a gun to my head and put a bullet in my brain and pick up the pile of gold and take it. You want to steal my real estate? You could put a gun to my head, put a bullet in my brain and take the keys to my property and steal the real estate. You want my bitcoin. The only way to guarantee you can't get it is by killing me because I got 12 words in my head. In fact, the only way to get my bitcoin is you got to keep me alive. Think about the level of property rights. So I'm just really worried about the societal infighting and I I've mentioned the stat. Assassination attempts are second only to the mid-1800s right now in the US and obviously the mid-1800s was a civil war. So really concerning. It's all because the money's broken and yeah, scary, scary stuff. And you heard it here first. Don't listen to this. Especially the youth out there. Be productive. Earn more than you spend. Don't be afraid of saving wealth, of accumulating wealth, of stacking property, lowering your time preference, prioritizing your future. The path to prosperity is not elected officials stealing productivity from your neighbor and reallocating it based on votes. Okay, Strike updates. This was the what we shipped last week. We allow you to hide your balances for those that are using STRIKE and have a balance or information in the app that they don't want others to see. You can hide the balance by shaking the phone. Customers wanted us to also enable long press hiding so we did. We have new designs, new animations for when you buy bitcoin. We've also improved the lending experience for our customers when they go open and originate loans, different ways to set your lending amounts and other related experiences. As a reminder, we have rolling out segregated collateral, no liquidation loan so that you can Pay an upfront fee and remove the ability to get liquidated. We lowered our lending rates. We had our first lending proof of reserves, a $2.1 billion lending facility from tether. Strike is a monster. It keeps shipping really soon. I hope to be able to share with you guys our first iteration of interest on cash, which is incredibly, incredibly, incredibly exciting. We have so much coming from Strike. You know, we pride ourselves on being one of the highest velocity, fastest shipping bitcoin companies in the world. It's an incredible team. I have incredible colleagues, incredible culture. We're so focused and so mission aligned and we just churn out work non stop. And I mean as a customer of Strike, it's just a joy because every single week multiple things shipped that we all ask for. So keep the feature requests coming. We keep building, we keep getting stronger as a company and the future is so bright. Like I said, I was just felt honored today to be able to be working on the new monetary system and just really proud of Strike and really proud of the opportunity that we have. So thank you guys for being customers. And again, if you want to support me ever, I'm not going to charge ads or I'm not going to add. Read on here. If you want to support me or you want to see how I pay my bills, download Strike. I think we're the only bitcoin company now that isn't one dimensional. You got bitcoin companies that focus on buy, sell bitcoin or bitcoin companies that focus on lending and Strike we're now getting into. We have lending, we have brokerage, thinking about custody products, thinking about yield products. We really want to be the bitcoin global bank and financial services provider for for bitcoiners and it's really coming along nicely. 21 there's not much I wouldn't expect. Weekly updates with much detail. Again, public company only. So much I can say. But Tether's proposal now lives up on the Internet. My keynote at the bitcoin conference. So I think it's safe to assume that there's work being done on pursuing these opportunities. And again we want to be what I would consider fairly unique company in that we want to have both operating income and growth as an operating business and a focus on bitcoin Treasury. To me that's the dream bitcoin company have both cash flow and bitcoin growing bitcoin treasury, being able to finance any leverage or debt with cash flow, stack bitcoin from cash flow and make sure that our worldview is expressed with Our money, not just our mouth and our words, which is bitcoin on the balance sheet. So continue to pursue that. Very exciting. I'm happy to answer any questions, but like I said, the level of detail and update strike gives. I would not accept expect that from 21 just yet. Okay with that, let me blow up my camera here. Let's get into. Let's get into some Q and A with dill. See. Okay, you guys ready? Let's see. First question, Jack, what are your thoughts on AI pricing services in Watts? Someone in my bitcoin meetup said he thinks AI will be priced in watts. Thoughts? It's possible, you know, maybe more realistic is that bitcoin is priced in sats. I mean, excuse me, not bitcoin. AI is priced in sats, but generally your idea is, you know, denominating things in energy terms as opposed to fiat, which makes sense. As I. I said last episode, everything that we experience is a derivative of energy. And fiat is not energy money. It's. It's the opposite. You can print it out of thin air. And so there's such a divorce from reality between the physical world and. The story of humanity is commercializing energy from the sun. It's this big thing in the sky that beams energy down on us. And our ability to commercialize that into ways that make our lives better has really been our story. The combination of commercializing energy and engineering a better world is the story of humanity. And so I. I agree that energy money is what's needed. And it wouldn't surprise me if AI was priced in some energy derivative. But I think the better energy derivative for monetary purposes is probably Bitcoin, but who knows? I don't know. I'm not gonna sit here and pretend like I'm an AI expert. I don't know. I'm figuring out Claude, like everybody else. Question for Dylan. Can you. Can you ask Jack his thoughts on tax the rich and if that would actually solve our problems? I feel like I answered that one. It definitely would not solve our problems. Our problems are not taking other people's property and dividending them out to the public. In fact, I think that what would go further in solving our problems is having no tax whatsoever. If someone is extremely productive as a person, you want them to be allocating capital. I'll give you guys. How about this. Let me give you an analogy. Would you rather give your money to Ray Dalio or Ken Griffin or Warren Buffett to invest, or would you rather give it to Congress and the US Government? Who would you Rather invest your money for a return. Probably the first guys that have made billions of dollars and built some of the most successful funds in the world, they're better at capital allocating, they're better at problem solving. So I don't know why then all of a sudden, if they're making billions of dollars a year, we don't just let them make the roads better, them make the subway better, them make the airports better, them design a way to scale medical for everybody. Let the private sector do it because they're the most productive people. Why all of a sudden we give. We, we take property from the productive people and we give it to the most unproductive cohort in human history. Why does that make any sense? And people say, well, you know, if Warren Buffett didn't have to pay taxes, he wouldn't care to fix the roads. It's about the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Like, you think that highly productive people want to live with shitty roads, a shitty airport, shitty transportation. They want to sit in traffic all day like it blows. It reminds me of when central banks say the only reason people want to spend money is when we cut rates. And the only people reason people want to stop spending money is when we raise rates. Humans want to consume things because we're human. I don't get hungry or get full, depending on what you set the interest rate at. I'm hungry because I'm human. I want to live in a house. Because we have an innate desire to consume. We, we also have an innate desire to solve problems. Like I don't want to drive through a bunch of potholes to pick up coffee for me and my fiance in the morning. So I'm happy to fix the roads, but I'm not going to fix the roads if you take 50% of my wealth every single year. Claim that you're going to fix the roads and then don't fix the roads. You've already stolen half of my productivity over the last 12 months and on a go forward basis. So I think it'd be much better if you left the productive people to coordinate and problem solve on their own instead of stealing property from them, assuming that they don't care about their quality of life. Like it's such. It's. So how big of an are you to tell people you don't care about your quality of life and your surroundings? So we're going to take half of your property, half of your earnings, half of your productivity, and then end up wasting it and doing all with it and needing to raise taxes. Anyway, you're like, it's so no taxing the rich. No. You just. No bad. And. And there's no. If there's no property rights. There's no functioning society. People need a right to. To. To property. If they don't actually own anything, society won't be able to function. Hey, Jack, I'm newer to bitcoin and I really enjoy the show. Can you help me understand the difference between printing the dollar and first further dividing bitcoin? Thanks for all you do. Yes. So bitcoin's divisibility, the size of the pie remains the same. Think of it that way. So it'd be the equivalent of if you have a large cheese pizza, if you could divide up that one pizza into millions and millions and millions of pieces and everyone could be well fed just off that tiny, tiny divisible slice. As opposed to you have one pizza pie and then you print another, and then you print another, and then you print another. You know, as long as the size, the total size doesn't grow, it is, it is not inflationary. You're not diluting the value of it. And so the fact that bitcoin is divisible is great because as the value of the 21 million grows, we can continue to divide it into smaller and smaller pieces to transact. So it scales really well because the total size of the asset class is fixed to 21 million, versus if there were a billion total US dollars, and then they make it to 2 billion, 3 billion, 4 billion. You're diluting the value of. You can think of, of inflation as the US Government is creating more dollars than goods and services in the economy. So there are more US Dollars competing for the services that we all need. So there's more dollars competing for eggs, competing for cars, competing for houses, competing for gas. If the US Government printed less dollars than growth in the goods and services that we want to consume, then the prices would come down because there would be more gas, more eggs competing for a fixed amount of dollars. So now replace that with bitcoin. When I got into bitcoin, my dream house was a hundred thousand bitcoins per house. Because bitcoin was so small when I got into bitcoin. Now an average house in America is like four bitcoin. And so things in bitcoin terms have gotten incredibly cheaper. Because. Because there's a fixed amount of bitcoin and more housing coming online, more eggs being produced, more. More everything. More barrels of oil being produced, more gold being produced. Right? And so everything against Bitcoin is deflationary and then for fiat it's the opposite. The size of the pie is not fixed, it grows. Does that make sense? Hopefully. If not, let us know. Welcome to the community, brother. Bitcoin and markets. Hey Jack, a few months ago you mentioned your favorite online repository of how tos, like how to set up your own. No. Can you please give that to us again? Yeah, let's see here. Matt o' Dell had a good one, There's a lot. So let's see if I can pull this up here. Some screen sharing again for everyone listening. So one of my best buddies, Matt o', Dell, his website is Odell O D E L L dot XYZ and here's little all the things he's involved in. But if you look at the top right over here you've got guides. So here's a guide on Cold card which is a hardware wallet running bitcoin core UTXO management. He's got. And then he's got his bitcoin tools down below, so it's really cool. So he's got offline hardware wallets and he's got them tagged for bitkey from Block which is easy but has some trade offs. And then Cold card which is the best but it's a bit more technical and then different mobile wallets, different tools to use things. And so Matt is great. He's been doing bitcoin education and tutorials and resourcing for many, many years. He's of a similar bitcoin class as me. We've been close for a while. So Odell XYZ is a good one. And then hold on, there's one more that's historically really good. So Jameson Lopp used to have a really good one. So he's@lopp.net l o p p.net admittedly this looks different than when the last time I saw it. Not saying that's a bad or good thing, but just take it with a grain of salt. I haven't been on this website in a while but he has. Setting up a wallet, running a node security, the history of bitcoin, which I think is really, really cool. There's like if I wasn't running strike in 21, I would be a bitcoin historian. I'd be a retired bitcoin historian. I just, it's been such a privilege to be part of this revolution and there's so many cool stories from the old days and the culture of bitcoin and just I'm obsessed with it. So along with that, there's one more I want to give you guys. And this is less about wallet tutorials and running a node and more about bitcoin's history. And that is, of course, the nakamotoinstitute.org so nakamotoinstitute.org run by Bitstein, it's just the best. So I use this all the time. They have a section on here called the Complete Satoshi, which is all of satoshi's early emails, his forum posts, his original code, collection of his best quotes, the original vision of the white paper. They also have really old writings from folks that were cited in the bitcoin white paper, like Wei Dai. They have their own writings from long, long, long time ago. So some of my favorite bitcoin pieces were from 10 years ago by Pierre Rochard, Daniel Kraywitz, all these guys. So this is much more for those interested in the history, early satoshi writings, but also a really good resource. So between Odell Lopp and the Nakamoto Institute, those are some of, like, the OG best resources. Yeah, I think that's what you were looking for, but if not, let us know in the chat. Okay, let's see. Love your show, Jack. Thank you. I really appreciate that. I have a question. What are your thoughts and feelings about Sailor having to sell some of his bitcoin? Is this good or bad for the bitcoin ecosystem? I. I gotta admit, I'm a little. Now, please, all of you clippers out there on Twitter, please don't edit the clip. Make me look like a bad guy. I have nothing but love for Sailor. For strategy, please. I'm going to say I'm a little tired of talking about them. Not because I don't like them, but because I'm tired of all the online just. It's ridiculous. It's such a waste of time. So I'm only sick of talking about Sailor because every time I talk about Sailor, the pitchforks come out to my Twitter account and it's just such a waste of time. What do I make of Sailor having to sell some of his bitcoin? I've talked. Or. Or look at me. These pitchfork mobsters on Twitter are ridiculous. He isn't necessarily selling his bitcoin yet, to my understanding. And to be clear, I don't. I don't know. I mean, it's a better question for Sailor, but I guess he's open to the idea of and would if it made sense to me. This was always the direction of his perpetual preferreds. So I'm going to Say my opinion with all love to strategy. Like, come on guys, I don't know how else, I don't know how else to answer a question I'm being asked in a public forum without saying, please leave me alone and leave my dad and my family out of it. For the love of God, please. This was always the design of a perpetual preferred. A perpetual, in my opinion, take it for what it is. Okay, A perpetual preferred is a. When the word perpetual is really important, this is non callable. It never converts, meaning you owe the money forever. So strategy owes 11.5% forever. That obligation never goes away. Now obviously they could just stop paying the dividends, but my assumption is that would really impair the credibility of the company if they just stopped paying the dividends. So technically, in obviously the terms and conditions, they say one day we can just not pay it. But I'm working under the assumption that they're never going to do that. So they have this Fiat liability forever 11 and a half percent. And so then the question is. So I think they've already issued like $10 billion of STRC. And if that's the case, let's just do the math. So $10 billion, 11.5% of $10 billion is $1.5 billion and that's per year forever. So strategy is going to owe $1.5 billion forever. And the question is for a year. And the question is, well, how are they going to fund those payments? That's a ton of money. Like even if some of the biggest companies in the world had to pay that every single year, like that would be a lot of money. And the question is, well, how do they afford to pay that? And what was always implied is they were going to fund it with their common equity. So they're going to sell MSTR the common stock to finance these payments. But what that implies, and I think Saylor, from the clips I saw, I think Saylor was alluding to this on the earnings call. That almost implies leverage to this concept of the M Nav that they. I think, I think strategy invented mnav. I'm not sure, but the idea of, you know, how much the business is worth relative to the, the assets on balance sheet and as long as the MNAV is above one and there's like half a dozen different ways to compute mnav and I, it's not clear to me that there's a singular definition. But basically, as long as you can sell your common stock in what they call accretive, then then theoretically you can finance it by selling Equity and not diluting shareholders. But obviously the implication is that you'll always live in those financial conditions and if you don't, then that would present a problem. And I think people were speaking up and saying, hey, if you keep issuing STRC and these are billions and billions and billions of dollars that you like, if STRC grows another 10x, Sayer's going to be owing a billion dollars a month, which is, you know, it depends on your view of the strategy and stuff. I would say it's a, it's certainly an interesting trade. It could work in a big way, but it's very path dependent. And so if the M Nav isn't above one, he basically came out and said, I'm willing to sell bitcoin to finance it. Which to me was always implied. People that have heard me talk about the preferred strategy before, this isn't new information. I've said it could be one of the most genius ideas ever. To me, I still want to watch some. I, I consider it largely an experiment. Still, some people, like Sailor are super sold that it is like his iPhone moment and he could be right. I'm not like, again, hands up. I'm not trying to insult anybody but you know, seeing strategy start to say like, you know, and we might sell bitcoin, to me, some of this, I, I was always curious about how it would play out. And because it's implied, I mean, if the M nav isn't above one, you don't have a choice. And so anyway, at 21, we're watching, obviously Saylor invented a lot of the industry we're in. He's one of the greatest success stories in bitcoin. And I mean, what he's building has a chance to be one of the biggest companies in the world. But yeah, for me, a lot of this was always implied, which by the way, going back to 21, wanting to also have a focus on an operating company, that's one of the reasons is if we can have cash flow. Obviously the dream is to finance something like leverage with cash flow. What if Saylor was making $1 billion a year in cash flow, then he wouldn't have to sell equity or bitcoin. He would be producing enough cash to finance his conviction and all the bitcoin that he's buying. And so I think that's still the dream. Bitcoin company is if you have the earnings of a coinbase and the conviction of a strategy, you combine the best of both worlds. But obviously it's easier said than done. There's no doubt about that. So doing it is the hard part, not coming up with the idea. So that's, that's the task we have at hand. But anyway, those are my thoughts. I don't think many of them are new. You ended your question with is that good or bad for bitcoin? Nothing's bad for bitcoin, unfortunately. Sometimes people have to sell bitcoin even when they don't want to. And like FTX had to sell a lot of bitcoin, they didn't want to mount Gox. Like sometimes there are distressed sellers of bitcoin and that's not a bad thing. So it doesn't really matter whether someone has to sell bitcoin, wants to sell bitcoin. Everything's good for bitcoin. Bitcoin ends up finding a righteous home. And over time, because of the monetary properties that it has, it goes up, especially in dollar terms. But in everything terms, in oil terms and eggs terms, in real estate terms, it'll continue to grind higher. But those are some of my thoughts. And again, I got all love for everybody. We're all on the same team. I really like. It's gotten to the point where if I talk about strategy then people start like coming after me and my family, which is just, it's not even worth the time. Like at the end of the day I might be right, I might be wrong, but I don't even like, I'm tired of getting clipped. This is pointless. I love the idea of your loan product but have never used it because 0% credit cards work better. Do you foresee a world where 0% periods on Bitcoin loans? No. So a bitcoin backed loan is not a competitor to a credit card. A credit card actually makes money. When you swipe the card, merchants are paying the credit card processing networks 3, 4, 5% and then the banks issuing you the card get paid. So they don't necessarily need to make money on the, you know, predatory rates that get charged after the 30 days or whatever. It's a totally different product. You're also spending money that you don't have yet in a credit card. It's a, it's a free line of credit extension based on your credit score or whatever. Bitcoin's totally different. If I have $10 million worth of Bitcoin or $100,000 worth of Bitcoin or 10 grand worth of bitcoin and I want to get liquidity on the money that I already have without selling it, that's a collateralized loan, a Credit card is uncollateralized line of credit or I guess it's collateralized against your reputation and your credit score. But whatever a bunch of fiat bullshit a collateralized credit card is, it's the same thing for a heloc. Is a HELOC ever going to be zero percent? No. And one of the reasons guys is you're competing. Someone has to fund the loan. So I'll tell you this, would you give me all of the fiat that you have to your name for 0% so that I can hand out to bitcoiners? I assume the answer is no. Why would you do that? You, you should buy Bitcoin, you should buy Nvidia stock. You should buy, you should, you could buy a UST bill. Why would you give me your money at 0%? So then why would you expect someone else to do that? I guess because part of my job, what Strike does, is we create a marketplace of people that want to lend out fiat for a fixed return and people that want to borrow against their Bitcoin, which is earned wealth, earned property they already have and they want to unlock liquidity of wealth they already have without selling it. And the problem is what rate are people going to demand to lend the fiat out against Bitcoin? Because they're saying I can already get 4% buying a UST bill or 5% buying a US 30 year Treasury. So you have to at least give me the risk free rate from the US government. And then you also have, you know, why don't I just buy Nvidia? Why don't I just buy the S&P 500, why don't I just buy Bitcoin myself? And that's where you get rates that are like 7, 8, 9, 10, 11% for Bitcoin backed loans. But as long as you think Bitcoin is going to outperform the rate that you're borrowing it against, it's a no brainer. Especially in the US you've got short term capital gains of 30%, long term capital gains of 20%. So you've got rates that are less than the tax consequences of selling it and spending it, and you've got rates that are less than the long term performance of the asset class. So it's a no brainer. But it's very different than a credit card. These are not one to one comparable products. And no, I don't think borrowing against your Bitcoin is going to be zero percent because that implies someone else's cost of capital zero. Why would anyone, and I Mean we're working on a product where we'll let our customers put up their cash to contribute in this network. Like if you guys wanted 5, 6, 7% yield on your cash secured by bitcoin, like I can facilitate that market. But I guess I'll ask you the question, do you want to put up your cash for 0%? I would assume, I mean you'd have to have gotten hit in the head with a rock to do that. Why would you do that? So I don't know. At the end of the day, what you're competing with in that market is people can do other things with their money. So what's the opportunity cost of lending it out against Bitcoin? And you know, bitcoiners actually can afford these rates because bitcoin's growing so fast and so much. And bitcoiners by definition are net productive. In order to own bitcoin, you had to have done a productive thing in your life. You had to have earned money, spent less than you earned and had excess cash to buy bitcoin. And so you have a cohort of productive people that are hoarding and saving in the most productive or I guess production is the wrong word, the, the highest performing asset ever. So anyway, hopefully that makes sense. I, I don't foresee zero percent rates on bitcoin backed loans anytime soon. Especially because there's no other way for people to make money on it. There's no like credit card you're swiping. It would just be people giving away money for free. And so maybe someday the government is fully subsidizing bitcoin backed loans. And maybe that's, I don't know, but that, I mean, no, I don't think that that's a practical reality. Dylan asked Jack, not all bills can be paid with a bank account and a credit card. This is why we need a debit card. Nothing to do with better credit cards out there and, or credit card rewards. If you can DM the strike Twitter account with an example of the bills that you're referencing, just shoot us a note. We want to learn more about what you're talking about and what products to build. Like I said, we, you know, we take on a philosophical approach at the company that our job isn't to guess the future. Our job is to be humble and listen to you guys. And so whenever you speak, we listen. So DM us and let us know what bills you're talking about. We want to make sure you have an ability to pay them. Question for Jack. Can we get an update on the yield on cash product. Thanks. We're feeling good about this. We're moving as fast as we can to make the product available in the coming months. So super, super exciting. We think we're gonna have our first iteration very, very soon. Strike. Question will be, will we be able to DCA a specific amount of sats on strike, not just the dollar amount. For example, if I wanted to DCA 10,000 sats a day, no matter the dollar price? This is a funny one. So we've thought about this, but it leads to a really interesting user experience where the price of bitcoin spikes and your 10,000 sats goes through because you're denominating it in sats, and, like, what if you don't have enough money in your account? Or what if all of a sudden that, like, DCA gets really expensive? And so it's something we could do in the future? I just don't know what it solves for, generally speaking. But anyway, I don't know. We. We've designed it, and we're like, wait a second. You know, sometimes people only have so much money in their account, and then if the bitcoin price goes up a lot and it gets really expensive in order to pull off the DCA and we start, like, know people's bank accounts put freezes on. On their linkage to strike because, you know, a transaction doubled, and I don't know, we. We've. We've gone through it, but I'll ask the product team and see if it's worth revisiting because it's not the first time I've heard that. Okay, last question, Jack. Best bitcoin show on the web. I've learned so much from your takes. The haters keep on going, keep on keeping on. What is your favorite feature about bitcoin and something I should study up. I appreciate that. I also appreciate Dylan. He keeps putting these compliments in at the end. That's a real. That's a real friend right there. Because the haters be hating, man. But no, I appreciate it. I'm all good, man. It feels good to be home and not in Las Vegas. And I appreciate you guys. You guys are great. Like I said this morning when I was getting out of the shower, feeling like a million bitcoins, I was so fired up to get to work on the new monetary system, do the show with you guys. I really am blessed. You guys are the best. What is my favorite feature about bitcoin that you should study up on? Hmm. This is a Weird answer, but I'm gonna do so through bitcoin, I got into these rabbit holes on health and specifically food. And so I've talked a little bit about that, like things like carnivore diet or animal based. And at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter. There's a lot of ways to be healthy now. You know, I have my bias and my opinions, but it's not even worth, you know, ranting about that. What I would say is there's a book, there's a few books. There's a book called Fiat Food by Safedine and, and Matthew forget how to pronounce his last name. And there's a ton of readings. Hold on. Because Bitstein also had a Carnivore page. Hold on. Dang. I'm not gonna be able to find it. But I would say something kind of like parallel with bitcoin. Bitcoin's taught me so much about the world and so much about how I view the world and myself and my morals and my values and my principles and food and diet and health is one of those. Our health and our diet has deteriorated along with our money. And there's a serious correlation there that needs to be studied and explored. And I think health is wealth. I mean, there's no point in bitcoin succeeding and fixing the world if you're not going to be around here for it. And that goes for your loved ones as well. You know, my dream, as I said, is to be a great fiance and hopefully husband and hopefully father and have kids and family and, and be around to raise them. And I think being self sovereign in the health aspect is also a very serious responsibility that people don't necessarily appreciate. It is, it is grim out there. So yeah, I would look up the book Fiat Food why Inflation Destroyed Our Health and How Bitcoin Fixes It. And maybe next episode, if there's enough interest, I will have time to dig in some of the other resources that I have. But I would start with that book. You can get it on Kindle and Amazon or Audible, Apple Books, all of that really good. It's by Safedin, who wrote the Bitcoin Standard. So that's one of my favorite, you know, rabbit holes that bitcoin trip me down and just encouraging people to look after their health, you know, you know, at some point it's not worth staying up to the wee hours of the night, compromising on your health, eating McDonald's all day, sacrificing relationship, not getting outside, seeing the sun, exercising you Know, I, I think especially with AI, it's not about working till you kill yourself anymore. I think at one point, you know, like putting in the hours was a way to outwork people. But now you have such an opportunity to work smarter. You've got AI that can be doing tasks for you. You've got bitcoin that's protecting your savings. And I really think that that leaves, you know, bitcoin and AI give so much of your time and energy back to you. It's protecting you from being abused by the system and you have the opportunity to really take care of yourself and build relationship and build family. And so I don't know, I think that's, that's part of my bitcoin journey at least is realizing that the new wealth bitcoin has given me is not just nominal net worth, but also, you know, the opportunity to have fallen in love and gotten engaged and have friends. This, this past weekend I went golfing with my buddies and that's just, I mean, you know, it's the type of feeling I get when bitcoin makes a new all time high. Just being out in the sun with my friends, swinging a golf club, going to dinner with my fiance, planning our wedding. And so fiat food opened my eyes to just, you know, what money has done to the nutrients we're putting in our body and the related crisis when it comes to disease and metabolic health and lifespan and life expectancy and yeah, I'd encourage you all to check it out and take care of yourselves. And with that, I'm out of here. Much love you guys. The Tale two wolves. Let's continue to watch how it plays out. But booming AI and economy running hot and global supply chain crisis, that's only getting stronger and more terrifying. Thank whoever you believe in for bitcoin. Holy smokes. Can you believe if we did not have bitcoin to believe in and protect us, where would we be right now? What a crazy time. Thank you Satoshi. And thank you guys for listening. Comments, questions, criticisms. I'll be in the comments as always and I will see you next week. Peace and love.