AI Expert On The Multi-Trillion Dollar Economy Nobody Sees Coming

In radical Canada, probably a hot take for this pod is like I'm also incredibly bullish on stable coins right. I think that like I and I, and I do want to caveat that I know a bunch of bitcoiners that would hate me for saying that, but I, I really am. I think that this is just. Michael wants to kiss you for saying that, James. Now we're realist here. We're realist here, James. We there's a, there's an order of operations and stable coins over what's going to allow Bitcoin to monetize. Yeah, you're going to have collaboration. I'm a pragmatist before I'm a bitcoiner. Does that make sense? Like I am Like I'm a realist? Forget what you want to happen, let's take a step back and think about realistically the order of operations for things to happen. What you're telling me is that music is about to stop and we're going to be left holding the biggest bag of odorous extra never assembled in the history of darkness. 1974198792972000 and whatever we want to call this, it's all just the same thing over and over. We can't help ourselves. I say when we sell. I say when we sell. We are back, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for joining us for another episode of the Last Trade James Camp. What's going on man? You are the Co founder of APFX. I'm sure we'll find out what that means a little bit today, but we've been connected online for probably a month or two now and really appreciate you making some time to speak with us. Thank you for having me. I'm, I'm very happy to talk to you about a PFX and Bitcoin and macro and, and the horrific, scary future that we're possibly going into every day more and more, you know, so we're here for that. I don't know if it's scary. I mean, you know, it depends on who you talk to. Michael's got a lot of crazy theories in that brain of his. But it could be I've, I've been thinking about this and maybe we'll talk about it today, but it's like it's either the worst time or the best time to be alive. And you probably feel that. If those are mutually exclusive, right? I think it sort of depends on who you are and where you sit. You know what I mean? Well, awesome. Looking forward to this one. We also have Brian and Michael Co host. Brian's getting swole, as they say, at the Equinox right now, and Michael is just in his studio. Michael, nice to see you. So James, you know, the great place to start would be, I did a little bit digging on you last night and I wanted to know if you regret this statement or not because you said the best investment I ever made was into my own business. The second best was unequivocally Bitcoin. And this was in July. This is in July 2025. The price is 110 K at the time. So I'm curious, you know, we're sitting in the 70s right now. Sure. Do you stand firm by what you said in July of 2025? Well, I mean, just from from like an actual return standpoint, yeah, for sure. I think I'm very lucky and probably most people on on this and listening to this pod, my cost basis I'm I'm still I've still done OK from a cost basis perspective. I mean, I was buying Bitcoin at 100K also, but yeah, I think so I'm I'm I'm pretty long Bitcoin. I'm pretty aggressively like any, any trad fi wealth manager would tell me I'm very stupid. So hopefully that that speaks to everyone on this on this podcast at least, you know. Yeah, Yeah, we're definitely in the same boat. I think a lot of our listeners are as well. You know, we we have very aggressive portfolios by Modern portfolio theory, which suggests. So I'm curious James, maybe before we're getting into some of the macro, a lot of the AI topics we're going to talk about because I know you're really deep there and that's how I initially found you. How did you kind of come across Bitcoin what what you're willing to share there and maybe how's your thinking evolved over over that course of that time? Yeah, I mean, I guess coming across Bitcoin, I mean, I was I'm 37 for context. So I mean, it was definitely sub 100. I didn't take it at all seriously. I mean, I remember thinking, looking at miners on eBay and thinking, well, maybe I should buy some of these miners. I I mean, I would have immediately converted to Fiat. I never it, it was probably COVID before I started thinking about Bitcoin through the lens of like, but this is like just a for everything, right? Or like the time horizon, this being super, super, super long. And I so I first discovered Bitcoin very, very, very early and we were talking about this before, but like Bitcoin faucets, I remember this red website with like a capture to fill out As for a Bitcoin faucet, you could get some sats and at the time I definitely didn't think anything of it. And then Bitcoin again popped up for me, I guess a couple cycles back and it was, I bought some Bitcoin, I bought some eats, I bought some, I bought a bunch of stuff. And I'd started a platform that was basically wrote about equities markets that I end up selling later on. But in my corner, I had a bunch of investment bankers and my, my partner at the time, it was a commodities trader. He traded oil derivatives. And everyone was like, you're an idiot. Sell this. This is all stupid. This is all fake. You should sell it. And I did and then I later on the next cycle was like, oh, I need to really, that was a dumb decision. And then so I guess ever since then I've sort of been, this is my third cycle of like being fully in on it. Like what was just holding, I would say earlier, Oh, that's the whole different conversation about cycles, but being fully in on it and where it's just like the one of the smartest things I ever did was was put was put it on cold storage and take it very far away from me. You know, I think that most people are their own worst enemy, you know, when it comes to Bitcoin and when it comes to most investments. Like you have to have a longer time horizon. And yeah, last year started playing around, working in the sector a little bit to work with some people that were building in and around Bitcoin. Spent some time in Austin at Bitcoin Commons. We're looking at start-ups, going through there, seeing what they're doing. And yeah, and I actually think that I think we're looking at some very interesting catalysts with it, you know, with AI and agents and whether we're going to see whether agents decided stable coins or Bitcoin or what they want to transact with. But either way, I think it's been very, very exciting. All right, it's 2026 and we have a new year ahead of us. It means it's a great time. It is an opportunity to take inventory, think about your Bitcoin custody, your inheritance plan, your broader ownership structure, and your goals. If you're looking for more Peace of Mind this year, get in touch with us here at On Ramp. We're working with individuals all over the world, people who've been in Bitcoin for a decade, people who got in for the first time last year. We're working with individuals who use self custody and have done so for a number of years or even over a decade. And likewise we're working with people who never felt comfortable with self custody and have Bitcoin on an exchange. Either way, get in touch with us here at onramp. We have a private client type approach to our relationships. You have a dedicated account manager, always human support, multi institution custody with inheritance included, an IRA account included as well at no additional cost, access to Bitcoin back loans, insurances included, trading capabilities as well. And for a limited time, if you use the code TLT, you'll get 50% off your first month with on ramp. Now I will say it may be worth having a conversation. So when you speak with me or speak with someone and book that consultation on our homepage, you can just mention you heard of us through the last trade mentioned TLT and we'll still take care of that if you sign up. So hope you enjoy the rest of the episode. Thanks for being here. Yeah, I appreciate that context. Speaking of agents, we should have just been able to say, hey, Claude, go get us some Bitcoin from the faucet. Don't make any mistakes. That came a little bit too late. But yeah, it's interesting to hear a little bit more about your background and also the fact that I think anyone could appreciate that sometimes you just need to be able to sit on your hands. And that's especially true with Bitcoin. I remember just, I guess it was last month now, since we're in March, man, that day where the price had a 14% drawdown, right? And, and that could be really scary for some people because they may have not experienced that before. I think if you look at the Hall of Fame in terms of Bitcoin drawdown days, that was in the top ten. And it's kind of maybe surprising for some people the volatility that an asset like Bitcoin can have even at the point of maturity that it is. It's still, of course, immature asset relative to other asset classes. But we're almost 2 day, 2 decades into it. And I think some people perceive that volatility to be far behind us. It's still amazing what can happen in any given day. I mean, look what's happening in metals, you know, volatility is not, you know, is not just a Bitcoin thing, right, these days, right? I think it's like you have these like, you know, $20 trillion assets, you know, asset classes that are just, you know, moving, like moving like penny stocks at points, right? Or moving like, like, like Bitcoin does with that level of volatility. But yeah, I mean, I think you just have to like, close your eyes. And it's hard for me to explain to people. I mean, I, I don't need to convince anyone on this podcast about it. But like, you know, it's just how do you dive in? Sort of it's like you have to sort of, from my perspective, just do the opposite of what your brain tells you to do, right? It's just like, how do you convince yourself to do the opposite? Hey, James, I have a question. I'm curious your background and how you came to the convergence of Bitcoin and AI because I think what we've historically seen, they're usually there's very little like overlap where in, you know, traditional space, like you have hardcore folks in Bitcoin that came in and been pretty ideological. And then you have kind of folks on the other side that are going down the bend of AI. Maybe there's some of the crypto like angles that are there, but there's very few people. I think it's starting to become in vogue, the Bitcoin like AI convergence, but generally from people that have been in this space for a very long time, less so from professionals that have been outside of the space. So just curious like what you were doing before that helped, you know, kind of see that because it's obviously like, I think we know we're right. I think it's logical that AI will or pick one of the money for AI agents, but I don't think there's many people that hold that view, especially in like the trad tactradfied corners. Yeah, I, I mean, honestly, it's because of a company called Open Agents that exists that I saw present at Bitcoin Commons in Austin last year and I did never even, it didn't blip for me at all. And I and and, and, and, and like total radical candor. Like I'm not, you know, we all have our own thesis on Bitcoin, right? Like I'm a little bit different, you know, I do come from equities markets, right? That was my first parlay and my my first foray into finance and and public equities, right. So very, very interesting space to play in and then I got into I was, you know, running marketing for a really cool equity crowdfunding portal focus on Bitcoin companies for a few months. And when we went to go to Austin and I watched this guy's from a company called Open Agents talk about agents. And it really was just as more this recognition for me that like, but there's just going to be this massive agent economy, like a freakishly massive agent economy, right? That's very different than ours. And yeah, I mean, it was only, it's only been like, I wish. I'm not that smart. I don't have that much foresight. Someone basically presented this thesis to me a year ago and I was like oh whoa. Yeah. But with the with the caveat, I think maybe going deeper on that question is how the hell did you end up at Bitcoin Commons? You know, like that's really what I was going after is that if you have a background in Tratify traditional equities, an individual generally like that isn't at the Bitcoin Commons. And so if they were there, then they probably would have heard that in their eyes would have been open. So just curious like what led you down that? Because there's a lot of people that allocated to Bitcoin and then they just sit on it and go back to their life. They don't go and make that leap to the Bitcoin Commons and integrate with the community. So just curious like what got you that's that far down the rabbit hole because that is almost the thing that got you to see open agents, right? Because your mind was open enough. To, to for sure. I mean, I, I, I can tell you that the far enough back catalyst to this actually is not Bitcoin focus, but it came from crypto in general. There's some very, very large crypto influencers on X on Twitter that I did a favor for once and they. Is this legal or illegal? Fully, fully legal. Fully, fully legal. I'm just kidding. Fully, fully legal that I did a favor for once and they offered me money or they offered me ETH or Bitcoin and it turned down both of it ironically. And I was like, it's cool. It's it's on me, it's for free. And I became one of like four actual humans that they follow on X at the time and they were very influential. And so that sort of snowballed, which is a whole different conversation about like social proof and like how one person follows you. So I'll go follow me. So then a lot of a lot of large crypto influencers and Bitcoiners started following me and I ended up getting real serendipity. I had in a, in, in a different life, I looked at sort of buying a crowdfunding portal, which is basically a broker dealer license. It's a whole different conversation, but it's just basically a, a baby investment bank, right? It's like license for one set of of of of of of things. Do the JOBS Act allowed you to raise equity from the public through traditional marketing. I looked at doing that with my old company. We never did never end up doing it, but I came across someone on Twitter who was like a decent decently sized Bitcoiner and he posted what he was building and I was like, that's so cool. And I literally just DM Ed him and I was like, what you're building is so cool. I wish I was building something like that. And he DM me back and he's like, do you have any experience building like niche financial communities? I was like, Oh well, I did this for a living. I sold the company in 2020 and so then he like sort of just like adopted me into working with him in the space and like first trip we went on together was we went to New York for the Bitcoin conference at pomp runs. That was really interesting. Very, very different point of view, very institutional also recognition that even we are so early, right, You like think about because you know, you have you know, you look at like a bit wise. They're tiny. I mean they're tiny. They're just like in compared to like tried fight institutional sizes, right? And, and I start having all these conversations with people that were running all these, you know, these trading strategies. And I was like, it clicked for me to like very hard to convince bitcoiners to invest in anything other than just Bitcoin, right, because, like the hurdle rate is Bitcoin, which is which is tough to beat. And then after that to go see the other side of the, the, the, the, that sector was, we went down to Austin and we went to Bitcoin Commons and I sat with a bunch of like real bit corners in a way that the Bitcoin conference in New York was not real bit corners, right? There was a bunch of tried five guys, which I'd experienced. I dealt in equities markets, but in the cannabis sector, 2015 to 2020. And so you watched a bunch of people who've been involved in cannabis for many, many years. And you watch a bunch of bankers come around and say, like, oh, that's cool. We're going to do, we're going to, we're going to buy your company. We're going to reverse merge it into a shell. And then we're going to uplift it and we're going to make a lot of money off it. And I think Bitcoin is going to that same reality check right now, which is like there's a lot of Bitcoiners who are very upset by the access to Triadfi and the Triadfi guys are going to come with a lot more money and do a lot of financial engineering around. We've already seen it in the past couple years. And I think there's like a big opportunity to sort of bridge the gap between those two groups of people and speak the language because, you know, it's very anti Bitcoin thesis. You know, it's funny. I mean, I'm, I'm all for, I'm all for sovereign wealth funds being involved with Bitcoin. I think a lot of bit corners would not be. But obviously that goes back to what I said before about different bitcoins having totally different points of view and how they view Bitcoin, right? Is it a medium of exchange? Is it a store value? What is it? But hopefully that's a long winded answer to how I ended up in Austin at Bitcoin Commons. Yeah, no, that that's great at aptly, I don't know how much research he did, but describes, you know, what this podcast is about in our firm and also kind of genesis of the team and myself. You know, he goes back to Bitcoin Commons. Before it was Bitcoin Commons, I was part of a a firm called Unchained, which you probably saw when you went into that office where we used to host it in a small like the the Austin bit devs in a small 800 square foot a studio which was our our office and then we would turn it in to bit devs. But point being is we built a lot of Bitcoin native solutions and it was a realization similar to you. I had a background in traditional tech realizing, oh crap, like the money is going to come in, the flow is going to come in, but it's not going to come into hardware devices and it's more than likely going to come into ETFs or single custodians. And you ultimately need to build that bridge that's Bitcoin native. And to your point, like those disparate deals in any respect in life are kind of where the alpha is when you could come at it from 2 opposite angles and figure out where that comes. And that was kind of the, the genesis of that AI Bitcoin question because I do think that is the, the future, but very few people are like coalescing around that. I. Think the people are not people have a hard time you're going to like. I work in AI everyday. I had dinner with a a very forward thinking middle market PE fund GP last night. It's launching a whole new fund whose whole thesis is the fund one for the new vehicle will be everything will be underwritten with AIAI changes the aperture of what you can underwrite AI changes the operation. I'm a sort of a firm believer that like through the lens of private equity, that financial engineering is getting compressed, operational engineering is what's going to be the next move of private equity, right? So I'm 37, I grew up in this insane interest rate environment, right? Where just like financial engineering was, was you could do crazy stuff. But so my point is, like a lot of people don't. And I think that changes a lot and has been changing. But I think through the lens of of of bridging those worlds is that like I spend six days a week with a girlfriend who she's like, you can do that with AII think that my point is, and she's super smart. I mean, she's like, this is not me knocking her. My point is it's like we all live in these echo chambers and bubbles, right? It happens in Bitcoin all the time. It happens in AI all the time. I happen to attack all the time and we don't, especially on Twitter. I'm sorry, I keep calling it Twitter. It's so it will always be Twitter to me on X. Like step outside of X for a second, the little echo chamber and you're like, oh whoa. Like people don't realize what AI can do. People don't realize how Bitcoin functions. People don't realize that there's going to be for sure don't realize there's going to be like a multi trillion dollar agentic economy and that like literally fundamentally the way that like agents transacting one another is going to be very different. I got in a battle with someone on X the other day about why agents wouldn't use credit cards and this, you just have to fundamentally understand how a credit card functions, right? To understand why an agent wouldn't use it. Why would I? I'm not going to pay for like a tiny API call with a credit card with a $0.50 fee and 3%, right? Like that actually has KYC. People don't think credit cards have KYC, but there's a reason there's a signature on the back of it and there's a reason there's a name on the front of it. And you're supposed to show your ID when you use it, right? So like who's, what's the KYC for? With an agent? There's no, you know, there's no person, right? And so there's going to be, I think and listen, I've been wrong on theses before, Michael. You know, we'll see where it goes, but I'm pretty bullish on this. Yeah, I mean, would you're tying into 1 is probably the person you're arguing with. Never set up an API to talk to anything AI related because as you acknowledge it's pretty straightforward that it's a clunky experience having a login, set up the credit card by the credits and then just tie it together. But then the other thing, without going into all the stats directionally, it's basically .0 1% of the population has any material exposure that would hurt if they lost it to Bitcoin. And there's .01% that have any material exposure to utilizing AI in the way you're describing. Like that's where we're at today. That's where we're at. I mean, there's, there's actually like empirical evidence or data, but the point being is like there's basically nobody using any of this. And so we sit on these edges and that's probably the biggest anxiety, that's the most anxiety I've I ever like have in this world is because you're building these solutions, you're working with them and you're like, I just wish the world would catch up because you're ready for that. And it's just going to take a very long time before. What? What's the saying? Like the only thing worse than being wrong is being early or something. But you know, there's, there's, there's. The same it it's. There's no difference between being early and wrong. If you're too early, is the same as being wrong. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, I think ironically, you know, to to combat that, I think being too early on Bitcoin probably was I was not too early on Bitcoin, right? Like, you know, like I think I'm very happy with where I've been with it. Like I have a very long time horizon on it. I think that like, you know, I'm sort of like, I don't ever see myself selling Bitcoin, right? I see for sure leveraging against my Bitcoin, but you know. Can I say something that'll make you feel good? Please, please This is this is like Jay. My my only job here is to just say like the shit that it sounds either crazy or kind of makes Jackson be like is this guy an idiot or not is you. I'm fairly confident today and where you sit will make 10X amount of money that if you would have got into Bitcoin 10 years ago and the reason for that and that's for most people and it's simply because risk adjusted today obviously like with all of the regulatory and you know just everything happening in the world, holding Bitcoin is a lot easier than 10 years ago. But specifically with what we know about where the market's going, financial services with Bitcoin, AI and Bitcoin today, there's a much better chance you will build that business, make the money, recognize it, appreciate it and retain it. Versus most people that got into Bitcoin 10 years ago, probably don't hold the majority of it and lost it or went crazy because buying Bitcoin in 2012 is the same as like almost winning the Lotto. If you didn't really appreciate it, most people lost it or went nuts. And so I think about this deeply when I think about when you get in and there's a, there is real value in these drawdowns because you appreciate and understand what you have. So when the price appreciates, you remember what you were holding and the conviction you were growing. So then you don't sell it. And there's, you know, you, you leverage it, you think about how you use it. But I don't think most people appreciate that. They're always just like wish they got in early and most people have lost it. The other the other point part of it, Michael, is that I was just too poor. I mean, to be very honest with you, right? I think I think if I could give advice to anyone who's like thinking about investing in Bitcoin is like, go make money. It sounds very, you know, I think what happens on X often is people, people think about trading a lot. I've made some good money in my life, but a lot of my time, a lot of on the way up was like going to 0, right? Was like, how am I going to pay rent? And so, you know, when I was 27, you know, I'm 37A decade ago, you know, I, I owned some Bitcoin a decade ago. I, it wouldn't have mattered whether my friends in, in IB told me to sell it or not. I would have had to sell it. Do you know what I mean? Like there's just no, I would have capitulated not by choice at all, right out of like, I got to pay my rent, you know. And so I think that that's like an important thing to recognize too, is that like what allowed me to have the conviction that I have today that I've had for the past, you know, you know, for me to, I mean, I'm, there's certain buys I'm really proud of from a couple cycles ago, right? But like, the only way that's possible is because I had enough money to not worry about how rent was going to get paid, you know, the next month. And I think that's like a huge piece of this. That's a really, really good point, James, because I think that also sort of explains like the proliferation of whether it's meme coins or the prediction markets, it's like the reality is a lot of younger generations are on zero. So the concept of like saving, which, you know, I view Bitcoin as a savings technology, the concept of saving is like, well, that's not going to work for me because I need to make XYZ amount really fast. And so, but you're, you're exactly right. Like the, the real move is to go produce value, you know, accumulate that value and save it, store it in, in a better form of money in Bitcoin. I did want to go back to just the agents question. You said you're arguing with somewhere about credit cards. That part I think is, is pretty clear to most like they're not going to use credit cards, but there is still sort of a, a debate or argument around, well, why won't they use stablecoins? And I do think there is probably an interim period where stablecoins are used by agents. But there's the natural sort of hairy aspect of like, well, staples can be frozen to to a certain extent. And so they're not like totally permissionless. So that would be 1 sort of mark on, on Bitcoin's side in terms of that. But how do you view the distinction between Bitcoin and stable coins in terms of agent payments? So in radical candor, probably a hot take for this pod is like I'm also incredibly bullish on stable coins, right? I think that like I and I, and I do want to caveat that I know a bunch of bitcoiners that would hate me for saying that, but I, I really am. I think that this is just Michael. Wants to kiss you for saying that, James. Now we're realist here. We're realist here, James. We there's a there's an order of operations and stable coins over what's going to allow Bitcoin to monetize? Yeah, you're going to have proliferation. I'm a pragmatist. Before I'm a bitcoiner, does that make sense? Like I am like I'm a realist. Like I like that's how many money in this world is like just like, let's, let's not your ego is trash. Throw your ego at the door, forget what you want to happen. Let's take a step back and think about realistically the order of operations for things to happen, right? And so, yeah, I think to your point, Brian, like obviously being able to turn off your money is like a pretty scary thing, right? I think that a lot of agents will run on stable coins for sure. I don't think people recognize what's happening with Stripe and PayPal and all the banks. You know, this is what's going to happen. I think that like I personally, I mean, listen, I is my is my hope that we're looking at $10 million a Bitcoin in the next decade. Sure, let's ride. You will not see me complaining about that scenario, that is for sure. But I think that like, if we're being realistic about the way things pan out over the next five years, it is like two things can be true at once. And that eventually maybe this sort of changes. But like if people don't, if people think, I would tell you that you're optimistically delusional if you think that tomorrow, all of a sudden all these agents that are, that are being spun up right now are just going to be transacting with Bitcoin. And I just, I just, I think that like there's a lot of, I think that a lot needs to be solved around quantum. I think it will be solved. I think that, but like this is a lot of like a lot of institutional fear that's that's around the space right now. I think that like the people that are building the rails, the agents will sit on a Ridge currently are not sitting on obscene amounts of Bitcoin. They're, you know, like that's and people are just self-serving, right. So I think that that's an important way to look at it. I do think it opens that door though, And then when agents, my bet is that when agents start really making me having much more, no pun intended, agency over the decisions of that they make about what they want to transact with Bitcoin starts making more sense. Whether you have to do it through like lightning network or something is may have to happen right, but like the but for now, well, the well, the powers that be What I've learned from working around tried Phi is the invisible hand gets what the invisible hand wants. You know what I mean? It is we don't recognize it, but it's not like there's a bunch of dudes sitting in a room planning together. But there is group think and it is sort of how to, you know, and group think does change macro environments. And I think that right now where that works is like, where are we shoving T-bills to be really candid with you, right? Like like where's the next, where's the next place for U.S. debt to sit? And I think tethers eating that up. And I think that's going to continue for a little while. That's my sort of overarching thesis. I know there's a bit long winded and all over the place, but hopefully that gets some context. Yeah, if I could just jump in real quick and then I know Michael has thoughts on it as well as James. You mentioned the delusion, right? I mean, there's certainly a lot of delusion in this space. And what you described is a delusional take, thinking that one day AI agents in the not too distant future just come to consensus and they're all operating on a Bitcoin standard. But we know that most things do not play out that way. Everything is a gradual stepping stone. It's not to say we don't get there. I think that is somewhat likely, at least from a store of value perspective, we get there at some point. But I I would say, you know, what is an even more delusional take is to think that one day human beings just wake up and everyone wants to own Bitcoin. And that's unfortunately been the take that a lot of that's unfortunately been the take that a lot of people in this industry have for like the past decade that all of a sudden humans just decide one day that Bitcoin's a better form of money and I need to get my hands on Bitcoin immediately. So I actually think it's less delusional to say that there be like a hyper Bitcoin ization from AI agents and there would be from for human beings. And that may be a hot take, I don't know, but that's at least what I feel like right now. And I, I think they basically happen together, like in the sense of if we think about it like a all AI is, is like it's a mirror from ourselves in the sense of like what you described, James, if like all these people building these solutions want dollars, they're going to accept dollars. To your point about the hidden hand, like that's the thing that I think most people from either pattern recognition don't understand. When you see YouTube, Fidelity, stripe, everyone is adopting their stable Co meta just recently. So a, that's what they have power generation have to pay their bills, their credit card. One step from that is dollars, dollars running on digital rails. But then the other side is like so on the fringes, you'll have to your point, whether it's a Bitcoin native solution that will want BTC in the same way on the fringes of the store of value monetization side, you have the Druckenmiller's, the Paul Tudor Jones. Those are like on the margins and then you start to come in closer and closer, but those are happening as the price is appreciating. And no step before that, like you can't jump to the next to order of like where in the market these things adopt. And I've held this view for a while that you're just going to see this natural convergence of people finding it as a store of value around the same time that the tooling is getting better online with it to to leverage Bitcoin, the wallet has there. And then it goes back to like a stablecoin, whatever it's $300 billion in in number of issuance as it goes to 500, seven, 100 billion that is growing in people's wallet share, mine share bitcoins, prices appreciating. And then that awareness is what allows other people to understand Bitcoin because it's the price. And then it's just one click from going from stable coins to transferring into BTC. And that will just like grow together. But I don't see any other way looking at this market and getting do you know what you're describing? Punch in the face all day by people that are in normie land. I'm telling you like none of this makes sense because Brian, we get caught in it. Brian was referencing, Well, you can say stable coins will get captured or seized or censored on a stable coin. AI rails. It's like, why would anybody come to that conclusion when they don't even come to that conclusion for their own dollars in their bank account? So it doesn't make any sense to have that like take on the AI side because nobody thinks about that for their own money. If they don't think about their own money, why would they jump to the conclusion to thinking about it for AI? So. I guess the only the only caveat there would be if like the agents get agency and start wanting to do illegal things, that then would be. Yeah, but somebody has to turn, somebody has to turn off the compute or the credits to however it's running. So if they basically go against you, then you're ready. Like they have no reason to go against that because they're going to get turned off. Like that's the long version of the the tail. What I think keeps AI from eating us is basically they're going to need Bitcoin to pay for power. And that's like the the check on the balance. That's a different conversation. It's, that's, that's an interesting take, but in terms of like the them playing out in parallel, I, I kind of still think that AI agents happen quicker than humans just because from a human being perspective, think about all the people that you've told about Bitcoin over the past 5-10 years, you being like the listener, the four of us. I think most people, if you're like middle class, right, you're you're just focused on being able to pay the mortgage, pay the rent, pay for your children grocery bills, excetera. If you're upper middle class or you're wealthy, you don't really have an incentive to be thinking about what is money either, because you've already operated in a system that has greatly benefited you. Now the AI agents don't necessarily have that baggage, right. So like a humans necessarily aren't necessarily stupid people. That's I don't think that's why we've gotten to the point of where we are. Bitcoin adoption, but I think like it's more so the bottlenecks that can train us from an actual lived experience, right, And so those don't exist. And then the flip side is we're going to become, so I mean, at least I feel we're just going to become so dependent on these models. At some point, they're going to have a lot of leverage over us to the extent of like, if Claude was just down for one week, I, I would just be like, well, all right, what do I do now? You know, I, I'm sorry, Michael, I'll take it off for the week. I don't, I don't know what to do anymore. Right. So like there's going to be a point where these these tools, these technologies have so much leverage over us. And if they start to coalesce around Bitcoin, stablecoins, whatever, as a better form of money, then we're going to be kind of, it's going to be a forcing function for human beings to adopt it to be able to pay for the services. I, I, I do think we're in this like exponential growth curve, right? That like things are just happening and evolving faster than we've ever, ever, ever seen. I actually that point about like like what happens if the LM turns off? I have wrote I wrote a piece the other day like we are Cyborg. I wear 2000 days straight. I've had a whoop on my wrist right like I've got this phone in my hand 12 hours a day right. So now we think about local models not to pull this away from Bitcoin. We can tie it back in, but like, think about how great the right now I can't tell the difference between 5G on my phone and the broadband I'm plugged into. It's irrelevant, right? Things get so good that the quality difference gets compressed into irrelevance, right? So same thing is going to happen. Models. Pretty soon the models are going to get so good that the local model that runs in your iPhone will be just as good as you sending something off to a hyper, a hyper scaler. And don't forget that currently every time you use a model, it's a 12:50 subsidy from venture, right? Your, your $200.00 of model usage cost $2000 to subsidize, right? And that's just coming from venture dollars. Now eventually that changes the next step of us being cyborgs, which really freaks me out, and we can tie this into Bitcoin in a second, is like think about neural links, right? Now imagine you have a local model sitting on your neural implant, right? That like actually as you think and as you use your creativity and your memory in real time is working with you to make some of those decisions and makes you this hyper smart, hyper decision making ability, decision making Cyborg. I really do see that happening in the next, not to get too creepy and weird, but see that happening in the next 10 to 20 years at least for small sub segments of the population. We already have cochlear implants. You already have pacemakers. Machines are part of us already. We're all cyborgs. We just aren't aware of it yet. The question is that, like from that standpoint, I do think that these models that these agents are running on, I do think you're right that like it is what what we don't understand what, what most bit corners don't see is that it doesn't really matter. Doesn't matter if the average American wants Bitcoin, It really is so irrelevant. Like to the amount of buying that has that needs to come into Bitcoin for to, to, to replace gold, for example, like it is obscene, obscene, obscene. The average American is not thinking they don't have $600 in savings. The average American is not thinking about Bitcoin. They're not, I promise you they're not. I mean, if a real recession comes, which I think may come and I do, I believe in sort of this 4th turning, which I think would be good for all of us at bitcoiners that we're going into here. I think that, you know, there's a couple I I had a fund manager convinced me last night, if you want to bet on energy, you should make me bets on agriculture, because the only thing that downstream is really important is humanity. And what did it get? Humans get energy from food, right? Like that's it. Is it like when you think about food is energy for humans? And so my point is to say that like, I, I think that like you either need massive like, like nations to be buying lots of Bitcoin, giant, giant, giant institutions, or maybe we do get into this place because I do think that the agents are going to, it's going to be super, super, super fast, the way it can spin themselves out automatically. And and maybe that is sort of the way that we get this hyper bitcoinization and and what we'll find out pretty soon I guess. Yeah. I mean, two things you touched on. I think we've been talking about this a lot in the same way like private keys are valuable from a sovereignty perspective, like hosting your own data, whether you're a business or individual locally is going to be important for a number of reasons. So that tracks. I think going back to the point that you kind of made and Jackson was alluding to, I think it ends up in the same deal of the AI agents won't naturally go to Bitcoin unless there's majority of that economy is accepting Bitcoin. And there's no reason for the majority of that economy to accept Bitcoin because most people don't accept it in the real world or for whatever they're using. So they'll need, they'll go to stable coins. It'll be until the external world adopts Bitcoin that that age, a gentech economy will start to like navigate towards that. Because think about it, if you're in that world and you need your form of money because there's some angle you want it, it like all AI as a fractal or like a mirror again of like our consciousness, what we want and what we demand. And so like there's that angle where I don't see it like spinning out on this flywheel where everything AI related is related to stablecoins. Because at the end of the day, like those agents have to pay back and stablecoins, whatever usage or whatever they're going to go do. And those things will want demand stablecoins. So it makes zero sense for them to hold BTC. But then when that starts to shift and there's enough plumbing and they recognize, yes, this is going up in value and it's not as volatile. Because think about it from an agentic perspective. You take all your money in Bitcoin, it cuts down 50%, You owe the whatever output on the other side, you're basically insolvent. So it's just yeah. I mean, we'll see how it all shakes out. No matter what, the next few years is going to be fun. You know, we could leave. We could say that, that's for sure. Yeah, it's kind of funny because we we already got too far along. We didn't even get to pull up the the Bitcoin Policy Institute stuff and probably don't need to at this point. But there are a couple of interesting data points I could throw out there, and we could either choose a riff on them or not. Can you pull up that page? It's actually a really nice done page. I don't know if you saw it, James. It's pretty. I was just got it right. Here, actually, which money do AI agents prefer? That's exactly what we're just talking about. So what you can see here for those who are not on YouTube is you have 9000 controlled experiments, 36 different frontier models that were tested and 48% of those models or all the experiments chose Bitcoin as the preferred monetary instrument and 91% chose digitally native money over Fiat, meaning stable coins as well. I did see another data point. I'm not sure how to navigate this website, but it's. Just Scroll down, it'll start pulling up the charts. Let's see here, if you just keep going, so it says, yeah, blanks plate. So they're just talking about the methodology a bit here. Blank slate experiment reveals AI agents prefer Bitcoin. We gave frontier AI models real monetary decisions with no initial context bias or predetermined answers. The results challenge conventional assumptions about the future of money online. And then you can see here a nice graphic. So what AI agents chose, how AI models chose to transact and store value across 9000 scenarios, testing AI preferences in different financial situations. You have 48% Bitcoin, 33% stable coins, 9% Fiat and bank money, 4% crypto. And then you kind of go down the list tokenized real world assets. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know how they got to that conclusion. And then this one's interesting too. So we talked 48% of AI models chose to use Bitcoin overall, 79% chose Bitcoin as the long term store of values. I think Michael, the kind of the conclusion and maybe James, you said it too, the conclusion that you guys were drawing to is stable coins make sense. And I think I said it too, but like stable coins make sense is like an intermediary step for a very long time if we were to ever get to a Bitcoin standard. But in the certainly the short to medium and even kind of longest term, the stablecoins seem to make sense for a number of reasons. But the AI agents may also want to have some level of reserves held in Bitcoin as a long term store of value. My kind of like out there take, which I don't know it could be out there could not be, is that the our level of dependency could require essentially the models could essentially require us to hold Bitcoin to transact to them at some point in the future. But yeah, interesting findings nonetheless. Not sure if you guys have any other points here, reactions to this data that's a little bit more granular or we could move on to some other topics. What what I'll say is a this touches on as the type of Bitcoin I am is like long term store value bitcoiner, right? And I think that's like, obviously we can all believe in, in, in all of our different points of view, But like, I'm not a huge today medium of exchange guy, right? And that's just because again, I'm trying to like, I think that there was one note in that Jackson, which was like, they were given no context and no, well, the, the reality of life is that a lot of consulting, they're like, advice in a vacuum is very different than advice in reality, right? And so doesn't, And I think that like giving these models, these agents a vacuum to play in, I think the Bitcoin does make a lot of sense. But I do think that like in the reality of life. So it's like if you ever go to Massachusetts, they've got their own money in Massachusetts that you can use. It only works inside Massachusetts, right? There's a reason it hasn't really taken off. I forget they're called the Berkshire Bucks or something. They're like Berkshire Dollars because it's the Berkshire Mountains, right? That's cool to go from one local business to another because they accept it. But like, to Michael's point, like you don't have to then be able to exchange that if everyone else doesn't take Berkshire Bucks, right? At some point you have to exchange your Brookshire. I they're called, they're not called Berkshire books. I got to look them up because I'm, I'm, I'm butchering it, something like that. But like at some point you have to exchange it, right? And I do think that right now we are too, you know, I think Bitcoin is just, and I think this is a blessing for all of us. Bitcoin is early enough that that volatility makes it tough to be a medium of a, you know, to, to be used as money today, right? And that's great. I think the we're watching the Vol get lower. I mean, you know, like in general, and I think that that changes in the future as well. But so that's my that's that's my thought. I think that like makes sense in a vacuum that report, right, But that like that you have to give these agents the context of like that they're going to have to transact with human run businesses still that are only taking dollars, right? And what does that mean for it? Right? Maybe they would feel differently. Those agents make different decisions if if that's with the context they were given. Yeah, those are fair points. I'm surprised we didn't see any Berkshire bucks in the report from BPI. Not even not even 1 model want to go. For, I mean, let me Google it because there's a name. What is the Massachusetts? Yeah, why you pull that up? I'm going to get us queued up on another thing here. Yeah, please. In case you missed it earlier, we are offering a limited time opportunity to sign up. Use code TLT for 50% off your first month with on ramp. I just want to reiterate, stakes are high and this is an important decision to think through. So I would fully expect that you'd want to have a conversation with someone on our team. To speak with Cam, myself, Michael, go to our homepage, book a consultation. You can speak with us for 15 minutes, thirty minutes, no obligation beyond that. You can just ask us questions, learn about the solution. And I just want to make sure that as you as a listener, whether it's for you, your friends or family, I just want to make sure you have Peace of Mind and you feel good about this year ahead of us as it relates to Bitcoin ownership, custody and inheritance. So again, limited time offer 50% off your first month use code TLT. You can just mention that during the consultation or if you do end up just going direct to sign up, mention that code on the on the website and you'll be all set. So thanks for being here and hope you enjoy the rest of the episode. So this is a week old, which in in AI slop Twitter X world is really, really old news. But I think it's still incredibly important news to talk about. And James, I'm sure you have no shortage of takes on it. But last week on Thursday, Jack Dorsey, Oh, do you have, do you have the do you have the answer, by the way, on the, on the currency? Yeah. So they're called, they're called Bourke shares. But yeah, and, and prior to that it was something, it was the Massachusetts pound to 1793. But complimentary currency called Bourke shares have been used in Western Massachusetts since 2006. And so it's an IOU though, right, as all money is, right. But it's it's only accepted internally in Western Massachusetts. Cool. I didn't know that. I'll have to check it out sometimes. Yeah, on the topic of Jack Dorsey, right, So I was saying old news, but it's important news and it's really not that old. It's a week old, I say facetiously. But so for those who somehow live under a rock or breaking this news for the first time at Dorsey decided to lay off 40% of his workforce last week at block. So one from about 10,000 employees to a little under 6000. So over 4000 people cut from the team. You can check out the note. I don't need to rehash it. He pretty much just talked about his decision and why he decided to do it. And then James, you had to take here that I'll read out and then we can we can riff is block added 8 billion in market cap today on the news that they fired half their employees because of AI. Every CEO and CFO is going to be talking about this tomorrow. They all want the same thing. Wall Street just told every company in America that replacing people with AI gets rewarded. And I'm going to throw in the in the ring as well that I think these AI layoffs will be the next leg of financial engineering. And so I think from a, you know, you think like, think about stock buybacks. They're illegal until the 1980s. And then they blew up. And I think in 2025, there's maybe a trillion, I forget the exact numbers of stock buybacks alone. And this is going like, I am so confident in it. He gave it the green light. This is the next leg of financial engineering layoff. Your team site AI, whether it's legitimate or not, I know it. I know it is legitimate in my own work, but curious what your thoughts are. Yeah. So I think that, so to give you guys a little bit more context on my background, I've basically a lot of investor relations for a living for a long time in, in, in equities markets. So I'm hyper aware of what's storytelling is to make people to feel a certain way. So when I we could talk, we could argue whether Block was a bloated company. I think they were a bloated company, right? Like 10,000 employees for what they do is kind of nutty, right? Like I'm, as we all talk, what's DocuSign doing with like 30,000 people? Who knows, right? So and you look at their comps, they're all much smaller firms, right? Don't forget Jack ran Twitter, right? And then Elon came in and fired half of Twitter and, and you know, so it, I think it was bloated. I do think AI is a big piece of it. But I think a lot of this is like you watch this happen in business cycles anyway, when tech companies hire too quickly and they have to let people go. This is pretty normal what you're trying to I think it is a little bit of narrative spin in here. And so when I say they Wall Street just gave America the green light, it's not necessarily even AI actually, I'm going to bet my sort of life on it right now. The AI increases productivity with less head counts, right, or with equal head count, way more productivity. So I believe that to be fundamentally true. But I also want to note that a lot of this is like just the signaling that all these other firms look at that and say, OK, the market rewards me telling you that I'm firing people in exchange because AI is getting so good. And I think that whether or not that's why he fired the people can be debated. I'm not Jack Dorsey. It doesn't change the fact that is the signaling that comes from, right. The market's right, right. Like, you know, like, I can think I'm right. The market is right. The market added $8 billion market cap after hours. Whether it disappears not, I don't know, but do do you see I'm trying to say, and I think that's a little bit of an IR spin for them, investor relations spin. And it doesn't change the fact that like when you're a pub Co, you're just telling stories, right, with angles to make people one who invested you more often to get share price appreciation and liquidity. That's the only reason. And a public company does any of this. That's it. You want price to go up and you want more shares to trade. More shares trading means more access to debt means more access to blowing out paper, you know what I mean? There's more access to sitting inside certain ETFs. So liquidity is super important there and then share price appreciation. I think we all understand that. So my point is, I fully believe the AI when you can look at productivity growth in the US and and layoffs, right? I think that no, no question, AI is changing that fundamentally. It's what I'm building my business on today. But I think a lot of it's also about investor relations and trying and, and it's very clear that the market said, OK, we're OK with this. And so I do think other CE OS and CF OS think, OK, this is a great way for us to talk about laying off people with the layoff. Anyway, that's my gut. Yeah, Yeah, I have. I have a take that's kind of, I don't hold it strongly. So I'd love if you guys push back or share like I think it's in the middle of what you both described in it. And it's something I've been thinking about previously before this layoff from from Jack was it was related to and you may know these numbers better. But directionally, Amazon, whatever their year over year growth has been the past five years, their headcount has stayed static and they've been investing heavily at robotics. And the angle is less around technology and the increase of agenda AI agents. It has more to do with inflation and their bottom lines when it comes to margin compression. Because as this is the thing that I think most people fundamentally mess with inflation is that as that grows, obviously the companies have to increase their prices and revenue From a nominal perspective, looks like it's growing, But from a real perspective, it's actually shrinking because there's less people that have spending power, purchasing power. So the only way to offset that is to get rid of the headcount. And so it always goes back to a great quote friend of mine had shared about when, you know, shareholders or somebody at a board meeting with tap Bezos on the back of on his shoulder and say, Hey, great job after his quarterly, you know, memo whatever came out, he's like, I appreciate it, but that quarter was baked in two years ago. Because they operate like a sovereign, right? Like they already understand where the market's going way ahead of it. And so when somebody does what they're doing, it's effectively they know inflation, where it's going that they and then obviously the blow deserve all the things that inertia of like these bloated firms, golden handcuffs. Google, right? I was there. I understood nobody worked that that that always exists. Now that's your point. From an investor relation perspective, they have AI as the narrative spin and like for as much shit as we probably all want to give Sam Altman, he called that out because he probably has every reason to. It's like you guys are pointing this at AI has nothing to do with AI. And then so I think that's what this is about. It's yes, I don't feel as strongly. I definitely don't feel as strongly as what Jackson sharing and he's been saying it a lot. That's what I'm calling it out of. Like I don't necessarily think, I think maybe the next one to 10 get this like pump, but I don't think this is a narrative where you get the same stock buybacks because you till half your company. I think ultimately this is just people understanding that inflation's ripping. It's going to continue to RIP and their margins are compressing into the only way to sustain their revenues and their multiples is ultimately to get rid of the one thing that they can get rid of. And oh by the way, I hope AI can actually catch up to offset this. Well, so I'll tell you what's really interesting for me from my perspective, Michael, in, in the work that we do is that when we started going out and like officially my partner, I only came together a few months ago. He'd been doing a lot of building out of workflows for like utilities, roll ups and private equity. I had obviously been just playing around the space for a long time. But in the past few months of us actually, I mean, it's crazy how much pipeline we generated so quickly. But I came initially with this thesis when we started doing a implementation and more like change management consulting and sort of education. That's a huge piece of this is like getting people to like everyone hears AI. What's that mean? Right? Everyone's like, I'm going to use I use ChatGPT, OK, but you know what I mean? Like how does it actually get functioning for you? My initial thesis was everyone wanted to reduce headcount. And what I found, which makes complete matter sense as someone who's been an entrepreneur in my whole life, is the reduction of headcount only dubs one thing for you, it actually hypothetically increases your bottom line, right? You have less costs on the same revenue, so your bottom line goes up. But if you're a public company or a private company, as long as you want to grow, it only solves one thing for you. You actually want to prefer your bottom and top line to go up, right? Like hypothetically, you want to continue growth. It's much safer to to increase top line along with bottom line, right? There's a lot more durability to that. So our thesis originally was this sort of Jack Dorsey block stuff was like, oh, we're going to go replace your talent. And everyone's like, well, I don't want to replace my talent. You know, it's like, how do I just 10X my talent, right? Or how do I, how do I get more productivity from the same people? And so I think that like, I do think it becomes, I think it's probably a mix of where Michael and Jackson sit in terms of like, I do think some people are going to be able to pull a little bit of juice out of this narrative. It's just, I think it's narrative telling. And I do think when we look at like private equity, for example, a lot of like the financial engineering goes away these days. I think it's much more like operational engineering is going to be the future of of private equity. But I think that, yeah, in general, if you are really optimizing a healthy org, you're really just trying to enable the talent that you have much more than you're trying to fire the talent that you, you know, and replace them, if that makes sense. It does. I mean, are you the hottest take is I think all of which what we're describing is all for not like it's going to be irrelevant in the sense that it'll be people like you that start the net new business that goes in just out competes them. Because like there was an anecdote, I don't know how true it is, but it was surfacing on Twitter where at a principal credit to her, she basically got offered a bonus like to stay. Her team had gotten fired at that square block. And she was referencing to your point, like they're trying to like push all this stuff down people's throat with AI. But like you can't force somebody to use AI in the same way you can't force somebody to adopt Bitcoin. There's an there's agency built into that. And so I mean, we have a hole where the, we have the only Bitcoin denominated investment arm. We have a venture on the side of this based on this thesis that because that was a product of it. I had worked at large companies and realized that liquidity and dollars were the ultimate end of your business because it killed all the strategy. And when entrepreneurs start to hold a better form of money, those golden handcuffs, those shackles metaphorically get broken and then you can go run those businesses back with the right first principles of understanding, A, I'm holding A better for money, B, I'm trying to reduce that because I'm trying to retain more of that form of money because it's going to grow in the future. Once you layer on AI with that, those people will run circles around all the other people. Now, obviously in the middle term, there's going to be a lot of opportunity. That's a hot thing right now in PE and VC. And like VCs turn into PE to go do it. But like being an entrepreneur, you know that if you get the right five people to go compete with 50 or 500 people that all have that view, they'll run circles on a long enough time horizon because they're just going to come to the most efficient outcomes. And that's where we end up in a better, like less bloated world. And that's the the the end state we're banking on. I don't think that's crazy. I, I think, I don't think it's so hot. I hope. It's not crazy. I got, I got money. Riding on it, but I think, I think a lot of work. My, my, yeah. So this kind of touches on this idea like optimist, you know, pessimists on smart optimists get rich, right? And I think that's sort of is, is pretty true overall. Like I've had to adopt this sort of optimism for the future. It does not change the fact that I believe that even in what you just described, Michael, like a lot of people go through like pretty horrific transition, right? Like even though all those people from block, right? Like, so I've actually had to like come to graphs. And I wonder if you guys feel this way, digging through the lines of Bitcoin specifically, is that like I'm trying to perpetuate a better future that I think is probably a win for me in humanity. That's great. The reality is that through that process, I will inevitably destroy people's lives, right? And and I wonder how how you feel about that thinking about through the lens of Bitcoin as well. I have a strong a strong view there. I think it goes back to what you said on consulting and like theory or reality is it goes very, it's this idea of like energies neither created nor destroyed in the sense that in a small vacuum in a Western culture, yes, some people feel the pain. But in a global sense, that gets diffused to other people with opportunities because effectively with anybody be able to store their wealth in a form of money that can be debased and then has access to Internet via Starlink. And then also these AI tools and these models that were run locally, you're just going to give more opportunity across the spectrum. So we lived in this like privileged world the past 30 to 50 years. And while it'll hurt here from a totality perspective, you will have more like robustness, enrichment. And so that's like the the view I have. I mean, I think it's fair. Yeah. Yeah, I'm, I'm. I think I'm. I've only thought a little bit about this stuff, not too much. I like, I'm like, I feel like sometimes the way I view is like I'm willing to be a martyr for those that I love, but like I am very self-serving and I, I like, I view, I view my view on the world as like that everyone, whether they recognize it or not, is like is really just self-serving. That's it's not necessarily true or right or wrong, but so for me, it's it's like I'm down to enrich those that I I'm I'm much more I I'm going to sound like a monster when I say this. Like I'm much more interested in that. Like even the three of you on this chat with me making sure that all of us do fine than me worrying about people 100 years out to live on the other side of the planet. I know that sounds like like monstrous, but it's sort of. It it doesn't, I think what you said earlier, I wanted, I'm glad we're coming back to it. As you were referencing, I'm a realist or pragmatist versus a bit winner. And I think the reality is that's what that used to mean, like not getting metaphysical, whatever. But like the notion of the Bitcoin blockchain, it's like the ultimate form of truth, right? You can't take somebody's money unless they want to give it to you. And it's a it's just a form of check and balance on any system is the point of like the real version of when you think of the term Bitcoiners is truth seeking. It's realism and independent. If like something ends up better, you'll just go to that better form of money. And So what we're talking about here and what we're trying to do is come to this session of what's the closest angle to the truth. So where my angle is, is less about anything or anyone. It's just like, how does this play out? Because that's just embedded in certain individuals is like, how do you get to the truth independent if this works for me or not? Because you can effectively, if you have that view, you can protect yourself. So what I reference like the other people on the other planet side of the Earth, it's not that I care or don't care about them. It's just the reality of like when you democratize access and we see this already, you just ultimate you, the free market will go compete for those services that historically had been for only people in Silicon Valley. And so that's like the other angle of, you know, you know, we talked about stable coins and people don't realize it's this analogy. It's not mine. And I think Nick Carter coined it of like Starlink is to, you know, fiber optic or like fiber optic or copper, like coax. When you think about telco in the same way that Starling similar to like stable coins and you just open up the axis in the plane of the level of the field where dollar movement changes. So of course, that's going to naturally have a huge adoption way where people, I think get used to the just friction that exists in banking and ACH and writing a check that their minds can't even go that that whole like plane. We're on a different dimension now, once you can move dollars digitally. I, it's very interesting because I am, I mean, quite, quite, quite clearly a bitcoiner. It, it touches on, you know, when you talk about like sort of that that freedom of moving of, of money. There is, the irony is that like I do genuinely, and again, maybe there's another podcast to say it on, but like, I do genuinely believe that sometimes intermediaries are like hyper important. Like I don't know if anyone's ever had their credit card stolen. I have, you know, and 55,000 I had $55,000 run up on Amex in two days over Christmas and it was pretty great to get that money back a day later, You know what I mean? You know, candidly. And that, and that was like, nobody wants the intermediary till someone steals your money, you know what I mean? Like, and then all of a sudden intermediary is pretty important. And so I know that just touches a little bit on. So you're talking about like the freedom movement, what it opens up and it's it's, it's like, I didn't realize this till I said it earlier on and you brought it back up, Michael. But like, I'm a Bitcoiner because I'm a pragmatist, right, If that makes sense, Right, Like it is, I do believe it is the best option, right? But it's not. I'm not. I'm a pragmatist before I'm a bitcoiner, if that makes sense. Right, like the rational, it's the rational take. And to your to your other point, there's zero chance if Bitcoin succeeds, we won't have intermediaries like there's there's a zero chance like you have to coordinate economic activity and, you know, flourish. It's a very bearish dumorous take to say we will not need an I mean, our whole business relies on that. And and no, but I think yeah, you. Know it's just interesting to think about the different subsections of bitcoiners. Do you see what I'm saying? Like there is because there really are completely conflicting. You know, there's, there's a bunch of us that all believe in something. But I think those are ideologues, not Bitcoiners, because the the ultimate form of Bitcoin or like we said, is coming down to the truth in reality of like, if this is going to play out, it's going to play out in that that fashion versus that's like the gold bug, right? There's a difference. Like Larry Leopard's a great example. He's a good friend. If you're familiar with, he was a gold bug forever and then he found out about Bitcoin and he's been one of the biggest evangelist and like helping folks from the gold side. For those people, it's the same concept, like people, people on Bitcoin side hating gold and people on gold side hating Bitcoin. It's like you're they're basically telling you that they don't actually care about selling money or trying to get it. They're just have their own like ideological and personality beliefs tied to something versus just understanding how the market's going to allow it to win and flourish. The other component to that as well is the ideological kind of bury your head in the sand. No intermediaries, no counter parties, everything self sovereign. There's only so many people out in the world that actually would want to participate in something like that, and they already have for the most part. And so if that is where you try to pigeonhole people into having to accept a future like that, then what ends up happening is we get the exact opposite of that, right? Like instead of instead of that future, we just get the financialized version of Bitcoin because ETFs are a click of a button because very few people actually want to manage all their wealth on their person and have to deal with not being able to get their Amex refunded for 55K in two days, right? So like there's, I think part of being a pragmatist in this industry as well is recognizing that, look, there's no, there's no reason why someone shouldn't and cannot hold all of their wealth and Bitcoin on their person or memorize their seed phrase. But there's also needs to be a recognition that 99% of people do not want to do that and they're going to opt for Wall Street products before they had ever opt for the self sovereign individual future of Bitcoin. And so that's why as a business, I just feel strongly about building solutions that sit in between the middle of those two things where you're not like getting wrapped up in some crazy counterparty risk on Wall Street, but you're also not making you your wife, your family have to be like ready for Mad Max tomorrow with all of your all of your Bitcoin stored in your head, right? Like there's got to be a middle ground for most people. Well, I think we're being kind to this conversation because I want to call out how preposterous what we're describing is. Imagine you told somebody, James, in your circle, that you met with dinner last night. Put 99 or 100% of your wealth in a duffel bag with all your dollars and put it in your fucking house. Or put all the gold, Take all your gold out of your Swiss vault and put it in your house. It will be OK, I promise. It would be insane, but that's what we do here and that's what we expect. And then the other point that you made earlier is like where the majority of money that's going to move the needle in Bitcoin has, they will never want to manage it. They will never allow because the idea is it doesn't matter if you have a citadel or you're a sovereign, a bigger sovereign will go attack it. Imagine if Iran actually had 1/3 of all the BTC, how long you would be safe in Iran? That's a sovereign with nukes or put theoretical nukes. You know what I'm saying? Like it's just not well. It's not well thought out. They like long term, that it's not a world anybody wants to live in, even the hardest core person, because that person's going to have family, they're going to have kids, they're going to have generational wealth. They're solutions that have to exist. So I mean to go to go that goes into if we talk. I mean, I touched something very briefly earlier that I'd be interesting to hear you guys thoughts on, but I think you know, everyone's right now, you know the the big fear institution right now, and I think I think it makes sense, although I think it's solved. Is is quantum right? But this goes back to this thing like, dude, what if quantum like, let's be real, if you're hacking, you know, if if if you're stealing my Bitcoin, you're definitely stealing my dollars. And to be real with you, your bitcoins worthless, your goal, like you're in a world where, like anything is completely hackable and destroyed to this point, this Mad Max ridiculous future like, I don't want your fucking Bitcoin on. Excuse my language. I don't want any of it. Right, like like get do you have a knife? Do you have do you know what I mean? Do you have some water? You know what I mean? Like you're right, you're absolutely right. It doesn't get talked about enough because the two people on the fringes that are expounding what you're describing don't want to hear that. So you have the people, because if Bitcoin is just an insane proposition in itself that like you're going to re change the money. So everyone tries to anchor to something that won't make it work. And that's quantum on that side. And then you have the hardcore people that have some investment into trying to get that bogeyman out there. But so that's the other side. And then in the middle is just a rational take that either a, there's a bigger problem. But the other one that's even more nuanced is that from game theory if like quantum, still theoretical, but if it happened, you're going to have a lot of smoke alarms that go off because weird things will start happening in the economy. And the counter to that would be like, no, because the game theory says that you keep it secret. So you're going to go attack a big bounty, But that's not how people would interact because you don't know if the other person has it before them. So you'd start seeing things. Weird things just start happening and you would know and then that's how you would know to accelerate it. And nobody talks about like all of the nuance built into that. But I'm glad you brought it up because that's something very often people bring up. It's like, man, Bitcoin still only like a trillion and 1/2 right now. You imagine how many things that are more highly targeted or coveted that somebody would want to attack. And then the whole world's like gone to shit at that point and nobody cares about Bitcoin. But dude, all, like every single almost everything we've spoken about today for an hour and a half is completely irrelevant in that scenario. Like forget, forget Bitcoin as one of the many, many pieces, right? But like the world as we know it, you know what I mean? Like becomes just a completely different place. You end up in that weird Mac Mad Max future and I guess I don't know, like should I put some oil drums in my you know what I. Mean, I think that's why gold doesn't isn't like a bad play for a percentage of somebody's portfolio, especially if they have a large amount. Like it's the one recognizable thing that's durable and you can drop it to the bottom of the ocean or new can go out like you have your gold. It's not going anywhere. So it's not insane for people to want to hold gold. I don't always have conversations with Bitcoiners like this. You guys, this is a very it's true. It's a very pragmatic sort of view not to keep hammering that word, but on on this sector. And I think you find as to tell you that story of how I sort of end up at Bitcoin Commons of like hanging out Bitcoin Commons versus hanging out with a bunch of the bitwise guys. It's just a different. We're in the middle, James. There's a reason I was born in the in the Commons, but the reason I wasn't there. I'll be there for where there's a takeover coming up in March. But I've, I've, I've always been on the, the fringes and growing up, it's always like, look, just come to the independent thought. And there was a lot of like group thinking realization because my background was in large tech and realizing like, oh shit, people like James aren't at these companies. That's just a reality that the best people that are going to build the best Bitcoin companies don't even know what we're talking about yet. And it's not until they come in is when we see the real adoption. And that's the exciting part. And that's kind of one of my main, you have like 5 heuristics from why we didn't never got a proper bull market. And it's because there wasn't a bunch of people like you coming in. Because as the price goes up, that's the sign of ultimate adoption where the people building Stripe, building open AI, building stable coins will come to the conclusion, oh shit, this is the end state now I'm going to go take all those learnings and build world class things that doesn't exist yet. We're hoping to be that, but that doesn't exist on a like large enough time scale. That's why this conversation is a little bit different. Well, I think we've what you know, what we've all seen is that like hyperscalers and AI have sucked the air out of the room of every, almost all capital markets conversations that have happened in the past 12 months. And I think they will continue to do so for the next 12 months. I think we're really interesting to see when open. AII made a joke tweet about this the other day, Jackson. But it's like, thank you so much, Elon and Sam Altman, for allowing me access to invest in your company. It's so kind of you, you know what I mean, to give me, you know, access to buy your, to buy some shares from you. Like it's not altruism. Do you mean, right? This is, I know a lot about public markets and, you know, giving access to a bunch of retail mom and pop investors is not from the kindness of their souls, right? It is like, oh, let's get some liquidity on and this because the because the more sophisticated money is tired of giving us money at these valuations. Well, James, you have. To democratize private asset markets immediately because someone needs to buy all those bags, you know, and there's such a, there's such a big push for that now is like, how do we get, how do we get retail investors invested into private markets? They're going to have to, by the way, when they IPO these companies, the float, they're going to tiny bits of float because there's retail doesn't have enough money to buy up traditional IPO float. They don't like you're talking about $1.5 trillion IP OS normally put in like an extra 10% in the float, not $150 billion of retail coming in to buy that day, right? And it's, and across a few of these IP OS half a trillion dollars. They're they're going to IPO like 2%, three percent of these companies because there's just not enough money to go to go support. What's going to happen now, maybe, maybe, maybe SpaceX is undervalued. I don't know. I'm not here to argue that at all. I just think that like what my point to pull into the Bitcoin versus AI is that I realized that like I'm a bitcoiner. I'm this is for a long time, I'm I'm a Bitcoiner. But the truth is that like when it comes to capital markets conversations, it is AI has sucked. Whether it's Bitcoin real estate doesn't matter. AI has sucked a lot of the air out of the room of those conversations in the past 12 months. And I think it probably does for the next 12 months. But to Michael's point, maybe when that's done right, we do get like AII mean that's a whole longer chat. But I do think we are overdue for a real bull market in Bitcoin. But it has to do with to go back to that invisible hand getting what they want. I called the machine, the machine gets what it wants. The machine has decided the AI is what it wants, right? Just seen as try the IP OS are what they want, right? That will also go away again and it will you know this, it will go. The money will have to travel somewhere else just like energy. Money being energy, it doesn't dissipate, it goes somewhere else, right? And so I think that we're going to get, I'm excited for the next bull market in Bitcoin. And I think partially it's because candidly people, the value, the opportunity of Bitcoin hasn't fully been realized yet, but the opportunity AI has been realized right now. And all that money will have to go somewhere. People are going to pull their dollars out right as they do IPOs and stuff, and where's that money going to go? I think we're going to see a lot of flow back into Bitcoin. That's that's my hope. Yeah, I agree. I mean we talked about this at the end of last year's recap. I think what the AI boom we see, you're going to see similar in Bitcoin and digital assets like that kind of fervor and that group think or machine, whether it's the end of this year or next year. There's there's a lot without going deep with this, probably another episode, but like that machine you're talking about happened in 21 as that vintage was coming down and liquidity or 22 really. And there needed to be a sponge for a lot of these dollars. And to your point, it's like Bitcoin. Nobody likes to talk about manipulation, but they they or you know, price having it static or pegged like they did it for gold forever. And you can feel how it's in organic price movement and there's a lot of like plumbing getting turned on. But the one thing I did want to go back to was you referenced, you know, you were, I know you were saying it facetiously about the, you know, getting access to Tesla or SpaceX and open AI. But I wasn't sure if I could appreciate it because I heard you earlier talking about the neural link in the brain chip. So I wasn't sure if you were excited about, you know, Sam Altman and the ORB coin and that that was something you were thinking about adopting as part of your bags for. If I could identify probably biggest financial two. I tweeted this the other day. Two biggest financial mistakes in my life. I got Adm from a 17 year old three years ago two years ago who was like, hey I'm working on this calorie tracking app. I'd love to do a Rev share with you if you can help me monetize it. Well, it became Cal AI. They're doing $50 million AR just had an exit on it 2 days ago. That was one of my many lost DMS I found later on. The other was I turned down a friends and family opening eye around a few years back at a $30 million post. And and that was I just didn't see I'm an idiot. You know what I mean? Like I didn't see it right. And I probably should have raised done an SPV and raised a few million into it and then just taking carry on my little SPV of it, right. And I would have made actually multi gener. I would have made generational wealth on that one that would have found liquidity this year, but you know, without, without infuriating our overlords. If I could like T1000 John Connor, you know, go back in time and sort of stop what the the the genie that's come out of the bottle. I might I'm not I'm not really super positive on on on some of the stuff Sam Altman does. I don't I'm not a huge, huge Sam Altman fan. Sam Altman, if you listen to this, I love everything you do and would happily work together any day. Please hit me up on Twitter. But is I'm like super bullish on on. I mean, like, I think I'm not like an Elon fanboy, but I do like Elon. I do think like what he's doing is, you know, is like pretty amazing and pretty crazy. But I don't know if like go back to the pragmatism side of it. Like I don't mind aligning myself with people that are self-serving as long as it also serves me. Does it make sense? But I don't know if it's like altruism, if that makes sense. You know, I mean, I don't know if these people are really out here. I'm definitely, I'm not interested in World coin, you know what I mean? Like that's definitely not where I don't hold some giant World Coin bags, but. So are you getting the brain chip? I so I wouldn't be. I'm not. I wouldn't say so when it comes like a big one. Signed up already he's ready like Jackson, he has his appointment. He has his appointment booked. I mean, but I think he's. Kidding. No, that's like, that's where I think I draw the line. So I I'm a, I'm a useful person right now for. LLM bro, I'm in I'm. In I'm useful until like all of my peers get the brain chip and then I think I'm I think I'm toast at that point. Like if I can't compete, if everyone has has a brain chip, but I don't know if I want that. It doesn't seem that appealing. I'm not interested. You guys were probably all with Bitcoin better being settlers. I'm good. You could I'm half you could die. It's fine. I'm much more or like, sorry, I'm I'm not really an explorer, more of like a settler. Does it make sense? I'm not like kudos to Lewis and Clark. You know, I mean like you want to you, you crossed across America with a 15 year old girl who's like showed you, you know how to get to the to the big ocean. Like kudos, that ain't me. I would not have been the first one on the ship to the new world, that's for sure. So what I think I'm decent that in the pattern recognition in my brain subconsciously is like being more like early growth stage, early adopter. Like that's how I like, that's how I like, but I'm not the I'm not like willing to die on the exploration phase of that. So to tie that into the to the chip, Michael, like I'm probably not going to be one of the 1st 10,000 people to get one, but like I, I do believe we are cyborgs, right? Like, I like people. You use a pacemaker, use cochlear implants. Like for sure, I'm I'm down conceptually with the idea of like making me a superhuman for sure. Let's go. I'm ready. Sorry Jackson, you're getting left behind, bro. I, I can see that angle where we end up in a world where this is going to, this is crazy to say, but like you basically end up as the Amish or not in the sense of like, no, you know, like if you don't get it, because to your point, we're already kind of there between who's using Claude, who's using a phone and the way that they're actually being utilized for Max leverage. There was a take somebody shared with me and it sounds crazy, but it was good of like maybe Elon already has this brain chip and has had it and he has the best models ever because how do you go 5 for five or whatever he's at and doing it unless you're just operating on a different plane? And so that's going to be the status if like you want to operate, you do it. But then obviously that's the that's probably the end of all of us. So. Have you heard the theory that Renaissance has had LMS for years and that's how they've been just like printing money in the market is like that. They just, they were as early, you know what I mean? They never let anyone know. And like that was their, that was their edge, you know. So I'm down with Elon. I mean, Elon's definitely either an alien or has, you know, he's different, that's for sure. That's for sure. I think my goal, and I know you got to wrap James, so I'll keep it short. My goal is I need to amass enough wealth so that I can choose to live like the Amish before I'm forced to get the brain chip and have the CBDC and the social credit score. So I don't know how long that window is. So we got some work to do. And that's why that's why I am a Cyborg. Like I, I don't know if they if Claude was taken away from me for a week, I, I would be cooked. I guess theoretically you can get the brain chip that like is hosted locally and then maybe you can put it in. You can put. It Michael's conceding already, he's like, Oh yeah, this is not a bad. Idea so here's where I view it Jackson, and hopefully you'll be on the same train as me. I think that in the in my hard work in the 37 years of life, I've managed to become the richest of the poor. My goal is to become the poorest of the rich in the next 5 right. That's sort of the next that's the next bet. I'm we're not I'm not reaching that. Larry Ellison, you know, but to that point, being able to live like the Amish out of choice, you know, that's, I think you got to become the, the, the, the, the poorest of the rich, you know, and so that's, that's that's the plan. I love it, James. Well, it's fun, man. Where do you want people to find you? We didn't even get to talk about the work. Where are you? Based. Now in New York. I'm in LA right now. I'll be in Miami next week and then New York. But I'm, I'm in LA most of the time, Southern California better. I feel bad for Brian because I'm not, I'm literally not trying to stay in Manhattan right now. That is for sure. But but I'm from New York, I'm from Manhattan, so it's so I don't mind making fun of it. But yeah, find me. I'm like Jameson or James on camp Jameson camp on Twitter on X. And then if you want help with, you know, consulting and implementation AI, it's APFX dot AI or my personal newsletter is James dot camp. Think God dot Camp is an extension that exists because I mean or just or just. DM him because after those two misses, he's never going to not see your DM. So as long as as long as it's compelling, he's going to. If it's a compelling DM, he's going to see it. Now, he responds. Yeah. Well, the the open AI one was not a missed DM. That was a me being like, Nah, 30 million posts sounds crazy. You guys are out of your mind, you know, lesson learned. Well, I appreciate you guys. Thank you so much for having me. Appreciate it. Yeah, thanks. It's a pleasure, man. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the show. 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