Global Liquidity Just Bottomed — Mel Mattison Says Bitcoin Will Rip Next

What you're telling me is that music is about to stop and we're going to be left holding the biggest bag of odorous excrement ever assembled in the history of 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. Hey, OK, I say when we sell. All right, we got an electric episode for you today with Mel Madison. This is going to be one of the most bullish conversations you hear of this year, especially headed into 2026. Sentiment online is very poor right now, but Mel, I promise delivered. You've probably heard him on other podcast, but you're going to get fresh perspectives from him today, especially everything happening in markets right now. Mel makes the case that we're in one of the best buying windows for Bitcoin since April, with Bitcoin sitting at the bottom of multi year channel that has historically preceded major upside moves. He breaks down why liquidity is about to flip from one of the tightest stretches in years to a full surge as QT NS government reopens and fiscal flows turn back on. We also get into the parallels to the 1950s, a decade that delivered the strongest S returns in modern U.S. history and the rare fiscal surplus liquidity squeeze we just lived through. And Mel lays out and under the radar structural window around 2027 where AI, entitlement funding and political liquidity collide, and why this still leaves a full year at least above side before any of those risks start to matter. So if you're looking for a podcast to bull you up, fire you up, Mel delivered. Hope you enjoy this one. All right, we're back. It's the last trade. We got an electric episode for you this week. Not just saying that as well. We got Mel Madison on the last trade. Mel's also wearing green. He we did not coordinate this, but I, I can't help but notice all of us are got some green on for today's episode of the last trade. Mel is a writer, investor, founder and fintech executive. And maybe you've come across some on accident. If you haven't already, you should definitely follow him there and check out his book. Kwas Brian was a just fawning over this genre that Mel. Published The untapped genre of crypto finance, sci-fi, dystopia. There's there's a lot there. Yeah, so next episode we already we already decided Mel's going to come back on the show some point next year. We'll talk about the book. But Mel, great to see you. How are you doing today? I'm doing great and I really appreciate you guys having me and looking forward to our conversation. I think it's a interesting time to be on some things are at some critical points at as we speak. Yeah, you've you've had some prescient calls this past year, Mel, but maybe before I was a little late to the pre pre start. This genre is new to me. Can you can somebody just fill me in on the type of genre? Do we do we save that for the end of the episode? Hey, Brian, you could add to it, but if if I was going to talk about the genre of Quas, it's a financial thriller and it's just kind of like, you know, this future world is where it's set, where the markets are kind of being run by algorithms and the merger of AI and quantum computing. And behind the scenes there's essentially nefarious central bankers who are working to put into place a more neutral reserve asset backed system around gold and silver through the blockchain. So it's basically a little bit of a prescient thing because we're seeing a lot of what I kind of talked about when I started writing this in 2022 and it got published a year or so ago come to fruition. And you know, I talked about like, Oh well, gold probably needs to go to 25,000 in the book to start to back things and, and different stuff. And, and I think we're seeing that stuff start to take place. And that was the reason I wanted to write it. I wanted to create an interesting thriller, but I also wanted to talk about, in a fictional way, what I saw happening in the real world. And so that's what I attempted to do with Quads. I love it. It sounds like manuals meet sci-fi, which is the piece Manuals is missing anything related to technology, at least as far as I've gotten. So that's very cool. Excited to take a look. Well, Mel, you know what? People are bearish these days. You know sentiment, at least what I see on my algo on X. You're one of the few people who are still have a bullish outlook. And so I was excited for this episode because a you've been very highly requested as a guest and I've been following your work for the better part of this year and I've enjoyed it and gotten a lot of value out of it. And to Michael's point, you've been right about a lot of things. And I know the bears are also worried that we're having this conversation. They the people who are bearish in our comments didn't didn't want you to come on the show. So we're going to have to give them hell. And I would love to just start. You know, one thing I think of is, and you've talked about this before, is over the past five years post COVID, we've seen so much liquidity enter the system. There's just been the coordination of fiscal and monetary policy. And I can't help but notice how many people have been bearish over the past five years and have called for all sorts of market crashes and corrections. Yet things continue to RIP higher. We're still setting new all time highs across the board in all sorts of asset class. And so why the disconnect? Why is that happening? Yeah, well, you know, when when Shakespeare wrote his plays like Romeo and Juliet, like it actually starts off with a couple paragraphs where he basically tells the whole story and then the story develops. So I just, I just want to say right off the bat, I literally think as we're recording on Thursday at 1:00 PM Eastern Time, like this is one of the best times to buy Bitcoin, probably the best time since April. We're right now hovering below 100,000. And I totally anticipate a 50% plus move in the next four to six months. Like I, I think that is going to happen. Do I think it necessarily happens next week? Do I think that we could not bump along for another 2-3, four weeks and then all of a sudden take off like a rocket ship? Absolutely. But I just want to just set the base right from the beginning. Like this is my view. And I think the time when everybody is on X telling you buy .1 Bitcoin and you're going to retire in luxury, that's when you sell. The time when everyone on an X is telling you this is the worst thing. Bitcoin is over. The story is done. This is when you buy and, and, and, and if you go back and you look at a multi year chart of Bitcoin, it basically is right at the bottom of a key channel and it's just bouncing along there and it's hit this channel like 3-4 times in the last two or three years. Two of those three times, basically what it did was it hit the channel, it bounced up. A couple weeks later it came back, it hit the channel again and it took almost a month to really start to move up. And I think we hit the bottom of this channel like a week or two ago, which means we have another week or two to go where we could just be bouncing around what I would call between 95 and 105, you know, one or two weeks. And then I think it could, it could really go. And I think a lot of times people are looking at this and they're thinking, Oh my gosh, you know, we are literally going to hit December in a couple of weeks. Last December, we were around 100,000. And, and if we don't change from here, it's going to be 1 full year and the 12 month return on Bitcoin is going to be 0. That's going to be like back up the truck time, right? Right. I mean, if you've literally got a year where Bitcoin does nothing, like that's when you want to buy. You don't want to buy when it's up 25% in the last two months. And so many people, whether you look at Google searches or whatever and they're like into crypto and financial advisors, they're thinking, oh, the time to get into Bitcoin is like, oh, this, this is all these tailwinds and this is going great and everything. So I just wanted to set that stage of where my mindset is, is that we're in a through period. And the last time we had one of these was in April and it was an excellent time. And we've had other ones in the last few years. And I just think, yeah, do I, are we going to be at 1:40 next month? Maybe. But what I do feel confident is, is that we're going to be between 1:25 and 1:50 within the next three to four months. And So what I would say is have me back on in three months, let's call it February. And if Bitcoin's not between 1:25 and 1:50, which is a 25 to 50% up move from here, then, you know, call me wrong. So let me get back to your question. You know, I think a lot of the, the markets right now, what they're doing is they're really digesting a lot of liquidity dislocation, if you want to call it that. So a lot of people have been talking about the standard repo facility SRF sofa rates spiking. I like to be more simple. I like to keep things simple and I had just posted something on X at Mel Madison. One like keep it simple. Like in September we had a monthly treasury statement and it showed $180 billion or so government surplus, meaning we actually took in, in September a bunch more money than we put out now. This is an accounting identity. Fiscal surpluses equal private sector deficits, Fiscal deficits equal private sector surpluses. So if we're running a fiscal sector surplus, we're going to have a private sector deficit. And what I believe Bitcoin is the best asset in the world at is sniffing out liquidity. And we had huge liquidity. Not only did we run a, a surplus, A fiscal surplus in September, but then we shut the government down in October. So what, what my point was on an an axe is this is the driest period I have seen in years for fiscal liquidity into the system. And that had we not established the SRF, the, the, the, the facility to essentially, you know, backstop the repo market post Silicon Valley is, is that we would have probably had a crisis, but but the Federal Reserve was able to come in, provide liquidity, backstop a crisis. And we're bumping along and in one or two weeks, I think because it does take a little time for things to move to the system. Once all the government checks start going out, once everything comes back in, we're going to have a flush of liquidity, and that's going to move financial assets up. And the best asset for that is Bitcoin. So that's basically my fundamental thesis of where bitcoin's at. It's been struggling in the last two months because of the sucking sound of fiscal surpluses, government shutdowns. That's going to flip and we're going to start to see the reverse happen. Well said. I was just going to put a maybe a finer point on a couple things and and I want to get your thoughts on the other variables in my mind because I think there's a few things going on. The 1st is a lot of market participants, people who already on Bitcoin are still anchoring to the four year cycle thinking. And I would say that that's just ill advised given the onset of ETFs and a different market structure, a different cohort of people bidding Bitcoin effectively, a whole new cohorts of demand that I think people aren't recognizing that, you know, for on one hand, you know, the having just has less of an impact over time, but two, it's, it's really an artifact of just people's cyclical thinking that, you know, what was true is going to continue to be true in the future. And then the other component too, is everything you just described from a liquidity perspective, I think is spot on. But if we're, if we zoom out like the liquidity picture is very different than other sort of ends of cycles, if you will. So like historically Bitcoin for your cycles have lined up somewhat with liquidity cycles, the business cycle. And I think this is the first time where those things are actually moving in opposite directions, IE the last sort of Bitcoin top four years ago we were entering the fastest tightening cycle on record and now we're cutting rates. And as you mentioned, liquidity is, is heading the other direction. So how do you square those two factors the the anchoring bias to these four year cycles and then just a different liquidity picture in the context of that that timing? Yeah, I mean, the liquidity picture is totally different. In fact, the PBOC, the People's Bank of China now has a larger balance sheet than the Federal Reserve. So like wrap that around your head, right? Like, hey, like we've done so much QT. It's ridiculous the fact that Bitcoin and the markets have done what they have done. So post COVID, we approach $9 trillion on Federal Reserve balance sheet. We're now at around 6:00. That's a $3 trillion reduction in the balance sheet. People have talked about, oh, China's going to sell their treasuries, That's going to collapse. You know, China has never owned much more and they own a lot less than a trillion dollars right now. Like what has happened in the last year or two is greater than if China and Japan together decided to sell all of their treasuries in the market by the Federal Reserve. And guess what they announced last meeting. They're done. Not only are they done, they're going to start buying. So this is huge. This is the bottom of the liquidity cycle right now. Like today, like with the government, like shutdown ending last night. And when Trump signed the bill at 10:00 PM, and then we have literally the Federal Reserve saying December 1st or ending QT, then they've also admitted that they want to keep up with expansion of the balance sheet more or less in line with nominal GDP growth. We have gone from like a massive decline. And then you also have the PBOC, the People's Bank of China continuing to increase their balance sheet and they are now slightly above the Federal Reserve as far as assets. So we've got central banks that are just sucking up bonds, gold, dollars, everything. And, and, and this, this is actually what has to happen because of the situation that the world is in, which is essentially A sovereign debt crisis. And this is the backstop. This is the story, this is the big narrative between gold and Bitcoin. And, and things can fluctuate and everything else can change. And there can be high points and low points, but the big story that's not changing is that sovereign governments are in over their heads. They're, they're, they're simply in over their heads. And there's no way to get out of it other than for the central banks to begin to absorb this. Then what do you do? OK, what is inflation? Milton Friedman said inflation is always an everywhere, a monetary phenomenon, more or less defined. Inflation is when you have the same amount of money chasing a greater amount of goods. How do you alleviate inflation other than, you know, balance sheet triage? I'll give you an example of how you alleviate inflation. You give money a place to go that doesn't impact the real economy. Where can money go that doesn't impact the real economy? Gold and Bitcoin, that is that that these are the advantage. This is what gold and Bitcoin are. They're sponges. They're sponges for the monetary liquidity that has to be injected into the system over the coming years in order to keep the sovereign balance sheets from collapsing. And the only way you do that is you put into the stock market, you put into housing, you put into Bitcoin, you put into gold. We've got housing in a trouble market. They're going to declare housing emergency next year. They're talking about 50 or mortgages. They're going to do a bunch of stuff. We've got the stock market. Valuations are getting very high, but where can you put liquidity that has no cap? It's golden Bitcoin and that's where I think it's going to continue to go. Even though in the short term it might look like that narrative falls apart, I think that's actually just fluctuations. And I honestly believe that the, the, the, the fact that we ran in almost $200 billion surplus last month, then we closed the government, that put a huge strain on things and that the liquidity gates are starting to get open. And that's going to send, you know, Bitcoin off to the races. And I think gold's been sniffing it out too. And that's why it's going up a couple 100 bucks in the last two days. It's really well put, Mel. Maybe to go just a little bit further on that in the sense of what you articulated, Luke Roman does very well as well when it comes to oil trading pairs with gold and how different economies naturally need that to offset any kind of dollar inflation because a lot of these countries are holding, you know, Fiats or treasuries. How do you see Bitcoin playing into that in the United States in particular? Because I think it's well understood that at least in the East, gold is playing a big role strategically from individuals all the way to the sovereigns. Do you see on the horizon where the US government is thinking about Bitcoin, that lens as a potential like wild card or is it still too early in your mind? Well, I think it's in a way it's a little bit of the enemy of the enemy, as my friend. And I think that what China has been doing is been absorbing gold in my book Claws. Actually the beginning of it is it's kind of ridiculous because China declares like they have 2900 tons of gold, which is ridiculous. So the United States is according to official figures, the largest holder of gold in the world over 8000 metric tons, which more equates more or less equates to 260 million oz. OK, so if you look at like Germany has high amounts, did different things, I mentioned these things in the in the beginning of clause, China supposedly has like 2300 metric tons of gold. It's absolutely ridiculous. Number one, I point out in the beginning of clause that China has actually overtaken South Africa as the world's largest producer of gold. They do not allow gold to be exported. And then they had the Shanghai exchange, which just funnels gold into the system and that a lot of people that are kind of like gold bug conspiracy theory guys, they think that China actually holds over 30,000 tons of gold compared to our 8000. OK. And then if you actually look at India, which is part of the BRICS consortium, although the Indian government I don't think has a huge, huge amount, they have a large amount. India, the main way of preserving wealth on the subcontinent has been gold and silver for centuries. And if you add the personal holdings of gold and silver in India, you also get close to 30,000 metric tons. So China and India hold gold and silver. So wouldn't it make sense for them to want gold and silver to be the basis of a system? And a lot of people say, well, no, why would they want it to be the basis of a system? Because the United States has 8000 metric tons and we're the biggest holder. No, we're not. China and India have much more gold as nations than we do in the United States. That's why they want gold to be the new basis of the system. So they're working to create gold as the basis of the system. Bitcoin offers a counterbalance to say, yes, gold does offer that. It's a neutral reserve asset. This is what Keynes talked about in 1944 when Brenton Wood started off and he created and talked about what he called the bank core, which was we need to figure out a way for nations to trade. Luke Roman at who you mentioned, he talks about, you want to even out China's trade surplus with the rest of the world, Just make gold $25,000 an ounce. Bam, it's it's it's Even so their gold. This is the thing that a lot of people like me who have been holders of gold and silver for decades have always realized that this 1971 post Bretton Woods Fiat world was always destined to be a flash in the pan. It was never going to work because you cannot have just one nation say, oh, we can print money and everybody takes it and we're going to do it. Like eventually people are going to wise up. It worked for a while. It worked during the unipolar moment. It it made sense it, you know, it had its time, but it was it, it will be looked at in economic history as a flash in the pan of like, wow, there was actually like a 4050 year period where money wasn't backed by anything real. And people are going to come back and say money has to be backed by something real. Because if it's not, then politicians can just decide Willy nilly whatever money is worth. They can devalue, they can do whatever. And that's not going to work in an international system which is ruthless cutthroat. As John Mearsheidner says, it's an, you know, a it, it, it's, it's an Arctic there, there, there's nobody in control. Like you need to have something physical, something limited to control it. And Bitcoin being digital limited or gold being physically limited, they can serve that function. And eventually they're going to come back to the center of the system and it's going to be a gold Bitcoin based monetary system because a Fiat based system is like on its face doom for failure. It just simply is and and we're seeing it play out. Yeah, thanks for running through that. And I think that's honestly probably the most fascinating for me and I'm sure you feel it. I know we as a group that this is a structural change and most of Trav by most of Wall Street and most of mainstream finance believes that this is just a trade and they can't fundamentally see that the existing system can no longer is no longer sustainable. And so I think more as this narrative goes about, it's interesting to see how it'll play out, but it's just very still early innings and the market being educated that the this is a fundamentally unsustainable. And it's happening and you're seeing it happen. I mean, it's not like it's, you know, Oh, well, we're theorizing about this and maybe it happens. I mean, I mean, gold was $2000 an ounce to 2 1/2 years ago and, and it's over 4000 today. I'm actually shocked of the rebound we've had just off of 4000. I thought it might go down to 3800 or something. It's not even taking a break and it, and it, it could still break down. I, I, I mean, it's tough to call like weekly moves on things, but what we're seeing is that the market participants are recognizing this. And so it was a year, two years ago, you know, I, I, when I first started talking on podcasts, I was talking about all the same stuff. Never would hear even a whisper about it. I was listening to Bloomberg Surveillance this morning and the guy was basically talking about, you know, debasement trades that I like. Like this is now becoming the accepted convention, which actually worries me a little bit. But basically a lot of people in the Bitcoin community, the gold community saw this happening years and years ago. And now it's really blossoming and now it's being embraced by the Morgan Stanley's of the world is that and, and, and Growman does a great job of this explaining why we can't have recessions, why the stock market backs the treasury market, why if asset prices go down, you cut down receipts and then that creates a depression slash recession scenario, which then requires more transfer payments from SNAP benefits and everything else. And it and, and so that you get into this situation where the only out is inflation, The only, the only game in town is to continue to debase. And the only hope that this doesn't completely blow up is that you can somehow grow nominal GDP at a high extent. And so that's what Besson is hanging his hat on. That's what that's what these guys are all in. And Besson was on the new shows this last week. He's like, look, we've had inflation meeting out. We're going to have real wages. But then you throw an AI and you just, you just create this whole hot mess that is absolutely crazy. And so it doesn't surprise me that markets are trying to wrap their heads around all of this, whether it's the AI narrative, you know, Bitcoin debasement narrative, all of this stuff is very confusing. But I think at the end of the day, once the market sorts it out at their core, it is a debasement trade and assets will go up in dollar value, stock market will be up in USD, it will be down compared to gold or Bitcoin. And why since I first started coming on XA year or two ago, I said, look, the cores of My Portfolio are gold and Bitcoin. I also plan the stock market because things rotate there. There are different opportunities out there, but gold and Bitcoin are the cores and bitcoins. You know, like I said, I think in a consolidation period OG selling, there's a bunch of stuff going on we could get into on the details of Bitcoin. But I mean like medium to long term, 6 to 2, three-year term, like I think Bitcoin's great. What is going to do in the next week or two? You know, we'll see. Yeah, no, it makes a ton of sense. And you hit on some of the things I wanted to ask you about because the the topic du jour are just overpriced SAS companies and AI. It's a bubble feels a lot like where we were in the spring with just all of the fear around the tariffs and how quickly things reverse there. And so and and one thing to another signpost notice was Michael Bury tossing in the towel on the fund as well. And so why do you think, Mel, so many people are still so many notable investors, and I mean, not even notable investors, I'd say so much of the financial media still is having trouble understanding why asset prices continue to climb, right? Like I've noticed over the past several years, people are always calling for a crash, but it seems like the crashes to the upside, right? There's a melt up happening in the crashes, more so in the value of the underlying currency. Why? Why do you think this is such a hard concept for people to wrap their heads around? Well, I think they fundamentally misunderstand the role that stock markets and Bitcoin and gold play in the world today. I, I, I mean, I think they're still living in some delusional world where it's supposed to correspond to price to earnings ratios. Give me a break like that. That's not what the stock market does. The stock market is a Ponzi retirement scheme for the United States that's also a monetary escape valve for inflation. I mean, that's what it does. And it also provides receipts, you know, tax receipts on capital gains. That's the role that the stock market plays. That is what it is. If you're sitting there and you're trying to say, should the stock market be trading at 25 times and I'm looking at the Cape ratio and I'm trying to figure this out, I honestly think you're in a different world. Like you don't understand what happened. OK. When I was a child, my father worked for AT&T. It was called Western Electric back then. He worked at the Hawthorne plant in Cicero. I was born in Chicago. Hawthorne plant in Cicero had over 100,000 people at it. It had its own hospital. We were, in 1975 when I was born, a manufacturing juggernaut. The United States was China, right? We were like post World War 2. We're 50% of world of, of world GDP, 50%. OK, that was in 1945. Thirty years later, you know, I was born. I don't think we were 50%, but we're still 3040% world GDP. We, we manufactured everything and we, we did everything and, and, and you know what people did? They got jobs. They work for companies like my dad who worked 37 years for AT&T. It became Western Electric. Eventually it turned in actually Lucent Technologies duringthe.com boom. But basically 37 years. And you know what he got after that? He got healthcare, he got pension, he got everything. What happened since then? Nobody gets any of that anymore. Nothing. What do people get? They get government benefits, entitlements. We have $38 trillion in entitlements. How do you pay for those entitlements? You know, I saw an AARP ad, it said fight for your Social Security benefits. We earned it. Bullshit. They didn't earn it. OK, I'm sorry. Boomers did not earn their Social Security benefits. They did not earn their Medicare benefits. They earned a little bit of their Social Security benefits a little bit, but actually in the beginning of Social Security, the Social Security payout rate was like 1 1/2 percent. They put in like a tiny little bit amount of money. And the expected death was like the actuarial tables were like these people were going to retire at 65, they'll be dead at 78. Now they're like 98. Like they've been collecting benefits for 30 years. Then you look at and it, and this is my father. He was 86 years old, actually just had a heart surgery. And he he was visiting me for my birthday. We went out to dinner and I and I asked him about the heart surgery. How did you doing? And I said, how did the surgery go? And, and then, you know, OK, how much did it cost? He said, Mel, you're not going to believe this. It was $435,000. And I said, Dad, how much did you pay out of pocket? And he said $212.00, OK, this is where all of our money is going. This is where all tax receipts are going, OK, It's going to pay for heart surgeries for 86 year old men and they deserve it. I'm not saying that they should take that away from my dad and that shouldn't happen. But what I'm saying is we've gotten ourselves into this position, OK? We've gotten ourselves into this position. And it, This is why one sector I've never recommended all year, even though it's been doing well lately, is healthcare. Because I, I, I think if the government really wants to attack this problem, they have to attack the healthcare industry. And so regardless of what happens on the charts, I'm not going to buy into healthcare because that is where most of the receipts and all of the the government spending is going. And if they're ever going to attack it, you know, they've got to go there. But this is just the way that it works. And So what the stock market does is it provides this opportunity to provide wealth. The wealth gets multiplied, the wealth gets dispersed. Boomers can give money to their children to buy homes. And this creates AK shaped economy. It's very bifurcated. I'm not arguing against that. I'm saying that is what it does, but it perpetuates the system. If you collapse the stock market, you collapse tax receipts, you collapse essentially the world's pension system like the the world collapses. And that's why we haven't had a prolonged and sustained downturn in stocks. And that's why everybody right now is of the opinion buy the dips. 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And there's so many directions we could go in and, and go back to one of the original points you made just right there about the price earnings ratios. What one way I think about it too, is that people are just going to be willing to pay more for a stock because the currency is being devalued at a more rapid rate. And I think that's just a fundamental thing that people are having to move further out in the risk curve, right. You see that with institutional investors who still many of those pension schemes are still quite underfunded despite having to go into private equity, having to have exposure to real assets because what has worked 30 or 40 years ago no longer works today. And I mean, to your point as well, we're seeing, you know, we're seeing this in the housing market, which I don't know. I mean, my opinion is everything goes up. I don't know, at least where I live in the Philadelphia area, there hasn't been any sort of slow down at all in housing prices despite things being so stretched. And I'd be curious just to get your thoughts on, you know, in the, in terms of outlook, how do things continue to rally from here, just like from a liquidity perspective, from the fiscal and monetary things lining up to your point, like QT ending? And how does that work out in terms of just like the younger generations, I think of like people younger than me, Gen. Z, Gen. Alpha, the other, they're entering a workforce that is, well, you know, funny enough, the, the job numbers for October just miraculously gone, despite October being the most amount of layoffs since 2003. Just, oh, we don't have those numbers anymore, but that that's convenient. So what do you think just in terms of your financial background, what kind of advice do you have for younger investors or younger professionals to try to get in the head, get ahead in a world where the labor market is fundamentally changing, where homes are unaffordable for most, where they're buying into equity prices that are just incredibly high? What are your, what are your thoughts there? Yeah, I mean, and, and I don't know, I don't know what's going to happen. I mean, we had the government shutdown and the markets aren't doing well today. I mean, like, could we go down 5%? I mean, literally we had a all time record high on the Dow yesterday at 48,000. We we got within 1% of a new all time high in the SBA. Like if we go down 4%, like there will be people flipping out. They'll be like, Oh my God, the S&P is down 300 points. It's like, well, we're up like 3000 in the last, you know, since April. Like it I, I wrote it on the Expo site. I had something like talking, I said patience, grasshopper like, and I think Bitcoiners need to understand this too, like this whole idea. And I used to see tweets a few months ago. I don't see them much anymore of own .1 Bitcoin and you'll retire in luxury. Like people need to recognize like what the reality of the situation is. Like eight 910% annual returns are great. There are certain times where you get 1520% returns. I'm working on a little article kind of comparing the 1950s to the to to the current situation. A lot of people don't recognize that the 1990s and 1920s were not anywhere close to what happened in the 1950s. OK. We had over 20% average annualized total return on the S&P 500 during the entire decade in the 1950s. So you also get a lot of people out there who are like, oh, people are getting used to 20% returns. That can't happen for a prolonged period. Bullshit. It happened from 1950 to 1959, every single year. Now there was like an up 45% year, there was a down year. But if you look at the entire decade of the 1950s, there was a 10 year period where for the average of that entire 10 year period, the S&P went up over 20%, OK. So it is possible to have the S&P go up 20% every year over a 10 year period when you smooth it all out. I also think that the 1950s are very familiar to what we're going through right now. So in the beginning of the 1950s, there's massive inflation. At one point there was over 21% annualized inflation. This happened because of massive spending. The the, the World War 2 price controls came off. We were still massively spending to fight the Korean War 5052. And in 1951 we hit 21% annualized inflation, much higher than the 1980s, much higher than we just hit. So let's, let's recenter here, OK, you can have a decade that has high inflation. And then let's look at what else was going on in the 1950s. Massive government spending on infrastructure build out, right? That was when we built the Eisenhower US Interstate system. We, we spent a lot of money on that because we needed it. We also built airports, we built roads. We, we, we basically had the government very involved because what the government recognized was that between 40 and 45 and then 50 and 52, which is the Korean War, we were plowing so much money into foreign activities that if we didn't, the government didn't plow money into the economy, it was going to collapse. And so we plowed it in in the 50s and we had an amazing decade. Another thing about the 1950s that I think people completely misunderstand is they think it was a time of like economic equality or things were good. What people don't realize it was like double K shape bifurcation of what we have now. The poverty line as it is established by the US Census Bureau was not in effect during the 1950s. There is an economist, his name is Gordon Fisher. He went back and he looked where how many Americans live below the poverty line. During the 1950s it was 25% it Right now it's 10.2. OK, so in the 1950s a quarter of Americans were basically living in poverty. Why don't you hear about it? Because they were black, because they were Hispanic, because we were living in a racially segregated society. So we had a permanent underclass. But it was an extremely bifurcated K shaped economy during the 1950s. Everybody wants to look at happy days. Oh wow, everybody's doing great. Yeah, all the white people were doing great. But guess what? 25% of the American population was not. So we're we're actually less bifurcated now. Not only that, Eisenhower instigated a huge. Guess what mass deportation program because after the wars there were too many immigrants and I apologize for saying this but this was the name of the program Operation Wetback. This was even people can look it up on on Wikipedia. This was the 1950s massive multi million person mass deportation program during the 1950s called Operation Wetback where they basically went out and any foreigners they took out of the country. OK, so guess what did the, what did the S&P do? Best decade ever over 20%. OK, so people that want to say we got a bifurcated economy, we've got mass deportations, all this stuff, guess what, we had all of that in 1950s and it was the best decade ever. So I'm not saying like let's go back and Operation Wetback was a good idea. What I'm saying is that there are a lot of people that are on a very far left political persuasion, whether it's on Bloomberg or different channels. They're looking at this market. They keep wanting it to fail. They keep wanting to say this is going to collapse and here's why. Tariffs are going to explode. Cutting down on illegal immigration is going to collapse growth. They they want to keep putting those points out, but history just doesn't say that. That's right. It says actually the opposite. It says if you look at the most, what I would say best analog period to the 20 twenties is the 1950s. Huge infrastructure builds, mass deportations, you know, basically there were yield Kirk control was still going on in the 1950s, price controls. I mean, all that stuff is going on and the S&P went up 20 plus percent on average every single year. I appreciate you sharing that because I never had that contextualized, but it makes sense based on what you said. Like everything is relative and I kind of tend to think of like societies and and you know, like these hundred year periods is, isn't fractals like expanding out when we think about like power influence in the sense of like, you know, 500 to 1000 years ago, what was the debasement level versus it was 500 years or the amount of information or ability, like all the things that we have today. So relative to the past 10 years, specifically in the West, in the US, it looks there's this like pessimistic, pessimistic view. But when you look back at history, the the K shape was double what it was today. No, it it is. And I've looked at that, I've looked at what was medieval Europe like wealth dispersion. I've done like AI searches and research on and we're tons ahead of it. We're tons ahead of where we were in the 50s. This is actually one of the least K shaped economies we've ever had. We just had a little bit of an aberrational period in the 1980s and 90s where it wasn't this K shaped, but relative to most of human history, we're in the least K shaped economy we have ever had. Yeah, exactly right. And this is something that I've instinctually been like noodling on because we had zoo be on a few weeks ago. And we're talking about like relative to the US, this is actually a pretty prosperous time for a lot of different countries and individuals because you're ultimately taking the Internet coupled with AI coupled with you can buy a sliver of Bitcoin, maybe gold in the future, but definitely Bitcoin from a, from a smartphone and get access to money that can, that cannot be the base. That was never the case in human history, especially a bank account. And so the other angle is what you're saying about the fiscal dominance of the US. Well, we can still parlay that into growth to your point. And I think this is something that Grumman also talks about is that we will have a manufacturing boom. The bond holders will get shaken out of their their real wealth or real value savings with that's just what has to happen. But we can play that into basically basic basically a growth trend in US moving forward. And I don't think that theme is discussed even on the right side or the people on Twitter. It's all doom and gloom versus there is a real opportunity to get out of this. And relative to previous time periods, we're in pretty good shape. Yeah, I, I think it's all bullshit, doom and gloom, to be honest with you. Like, there's this whole thing about China. OK, This is one of my biggest. I love Luke Chrome. He is one of the best analyzers of like major macro trends there is out there. But he leans, in my opinion, too much towards China. Like he he kind of thinks like, oh, well, look, he's got a great point, OK, China did create a stranglehold on rare earth. OK, we're going to address that. We're going to address that. We also have ways to pinch China in the meantime. And people don't want to admit that. Like, like, let me tell you something about China, like that whole economy, everything is built upon exports. And you know what happens when the US exports get closed? They start flooding other economies and you know what happens if you flood Europe? Like all of a sudden that shuts down the German economy and China's going to be shut off. And guess what happens if the whole world says guess what, China, we don't want all your cheap exports. Then all of a sudden these people get put out of jobs saying guess what happens? XI Jinping's power gets threatened. So people that want to think that China just has us behind the 8 ball and there's nothing we can do about it. And they're just the masters of the universe. They've got this 40 chess, you know, you know, laser focus and, and you know, no, it's not like that. And, and you know what, people that also want to think the United States is the best rah rah United States we can ever defeat it. Guess what, they're wrong too. We are in a massive adversarial competition, just as we were in the 1950s and 1960s with the Soviet Union. This is another comparison to the 1950s. A lot of people said, oh, DeepSeek was a Sputnik moment. Well, guess when that happened. 1950s. Look, we have been here before, which is the West is in a position where there's essentially half of the world that is saying, look, we don't necessarily want to play along to your rules and all this stuff. We've been there before. We were there for most of my life. Like I said in the earlier show, I was born in 1975. It wasn't until 1990 when we finally, like, you know, threw off the Soviet Union. I mean, this is what happens. Like, this is the way it works. What the United States needs to do is like just get its act together. And then these politicians are not helping themselves. To be honest with you, Sir, but but I, but I do think at the end of the day, the foreignness, the foreign establishment, the BLOB, whatever, they're starting to coalesce around a single view. And This is why I've said this before. I don't think it matters if AOC or Vance gets elected in 2028. I think the same things are going to happen. What's going to happen is the United States needs to become more sovereign. We we need to create our own rare earth minerals. We need to fabricate our own ships. These things that are being put in place right now by the Tupper administration, just like the Trump tariffs in 2018 were not, you know, thrown away with by Biden. These things are not going away. Like, like, again, Gromit says it great. He says in 2010, China basically weaponized rare earths against Japan. Like anybody in the US should have recognized we could be weaponized rare earths and magnets and all this stuff. We either we didn't recognize it or we thought they wouldn't do it. I think at this point we're recognizing we need independence and we're going, we're going to get it. In the meantime, could things be choppy? China's got some leverage over us. Oh, for certain, for certain. But at the end of the day, like if the world broke into two systems, a brick system, any, any United States Western LED system, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. I grew up in a world where there were two systems, USSR and a Soviet system and, and a western. And guess what? Everybody did OK. Like, like we don't need the world to operate under one global system for everybody to do OK. We could have a Western European US, Japan, South Korea, Australia system and China can go ahead and have, you know, Africa and Brazil and India and they can go do their own thing. I mean, that's fine. I mean, we for decades that happened and there's there's no problem. So all these people that are worried about bricks and there's going to be a separate system. I would just say, why do you think a separate system is necessarily bad? Because at the end of the day, the United States, its allies have all the natural resources and everything necessary to create an abundant economy. And if we just say South Korea, Australia, United States, Western Europe, we're going to create an abundant economy and whatever Brazil and China and India want to do, great. That doesn't mean there's going to be a collapse of Western civilization. Here's what keeps bitcoiners awake. You're still securing millions of dollars the same way you secured thousands. That hardware wallet in your drawer. Your family's entire future depends on you not losing it for getting the PIN or something happening to you on ramps. Multi institution custody removes that burden. Three independent institutions hold your keys. No single point of failure. No seed phrases to protect, no explaining complex recovery processes to your spouse. And now we're offering flat tier pricing. One predictable monthly fee starting at $250. Other Bitcoin is at 100K or 500K plus with on rate buyer raise. You get the same institutional security with tax advantage growth. This is how smart investors protect generational wealth. Without the weight on their shoulders, there's strength in many. Learn more at on rampbitcoin.com. On that same thing, do you think energy production in in China's leading growth there is overblown? Because I think ultimately the thing, everything you're saying makes sense. The thing that kind of is still opaque. And maybe there's, there's nobody has a Clearview, but curious all around. It feels like this is all oscillating around 3 core tenets. It's energy production. Humans like human capital and then currency. And what I mean by that is it feels like there's a chase for energy production to grow that for AI and just natural energy production for for everything that's needed to run a, a sovereign. Then you have human component, which there's a race because of inflation, where you have like we're seeing this with the layoffs, whether it's margin compression because of inflation or automation in the future, there's going to be an excess amount of humans. I think I would agree from their current roles, we're not going to be able to retrain everyone. And then the last part is the currency aspect, which you're mentioning East versus West that everyone's vying for that kind of like not senior, senior age, but like soft power until like who's using what currency? How do you see that flywheel plane? Because I think that's the one part that is a little bit and not only concerning, but it's up for grabs. Yeah, No, no, I mean, I don't, I don't want to be a Pollyanna saying everything's great. I mean, look, the one of the biggest things you've just brought up is I think the AI impact on labor. So we haven't gotten into that so far. I do think that's a big deal. So, so, so to me, like I'm not really worried about repos or China, right? Like, like I'm like, what happens if AI actually does what everybody thinks it can do, right. And if it can do everything that everybody thinks it can do, we just had some big CEOs on CNBC and different stuff talking about how, hey, I can basically get rid of five interns or 10 interns and, and have AI agents do the same thing for $37 a month subscription payment. If that's really going to happen, that's a big deal, right? So I do think like these are threats and, and what I think is that, and this is a little bit based out of, you know, personal history is these types of things take a little bit more time than people think they do. So I think that could be a potential problem. I don't think it's a problem in the next 6 to 9 months for markets. So I think that companies are beginning to understand the power of AI, what it can do. It is very powerful, but they're not yet at a point where they're like, oh, we don't need to hire anymore. Like they might be lowering hiring, but they're not at a point where they're like, oh, we don't need to hire. And in fact, we need to start laying off people because AI can. That could happen in a year or two. And one of my first podcasts I ever did was in March, I think in last year and I talked about potential market collapse in 2027 and there is still something about 2027 and I don't know what it is. A part of why I focused on 2027 in that podcast was we're going to start to become to the end of like Social Security, the Social Security entitlement fund is going to run out. OK. So a lot of people misunderstand what happens when the Social Security entitlement fund runs out. And I, and I think this is very important because a lot of people think when Social Security entitlement funds run out, all of a sudden the government's going to have to, you know, borrow a bunch of money that it doesn't already borrow. But that's actually not the case every dollar because the Social Security, every month more money is paid out in Social Security and is actually in the system. How does the government handle that? What they do is they go into the Social Security trust fund, which, and this is like my financial plumbing analysis, which I love to do. They go into the Social Security trust fund and they pull out the special treasury bonds that are only issued to the Social Security Administration and they cash those in. And then in order to pay the money, they have to go out into the bond market and raise money because they don't have the money. So there's actually not going to be any. Even when everybody's going to talk about, oh, that the Social Security entitlement fund is going to run out, guess what? It's not going to create $1.00 more in new public debt. Because what happens is there's just this accounting entry in the Social Security fund that says we have a billion dollars here. When the government needs a billion dollars, they go in, they take out that billion, then they say OK, we need to raise a billion and they go into the public markets and they raise a billion dollars in debt. But I don't know if stock markets are going to be that sophisticated to understand all of this. And this is going to start to come to a head around 20/27/2028. So I do think like this doesn't necessarily need to go on forever. And in fact, I'd be priced stupid if I thought we were just going to be in a bull market forever. What I do think is we still got another year to go at least. And and that's my main premises that we're not there yet. The AI story is still good. There's still a bunch of liquidity entering the system. We're going to have, you know, politicians on the right flooding the markets next year in order to juice the economy ahead of midterms. All this stuff for me bodes well for equity Bitcoin markets over the next, let's say, 6 to 12 months. You guys want to have me back on here a year from now. I might be saying, you know what? I'm getting worried about stuff. But right now I still feel very good. So what you're saying is maybe people could retire on .1 Bitcoin six months from now. They just have to time their exit. Exactly. They just need .1 Bitcoin and they're going to be fine. I mean, it's not going to be a problem. I mean, it's going to be worth $23 million. Don't you know now? Yeah, So a couple. There's a couple of other things I hope we can get your thoughts on before we wrap up here. I heard you on another podcast talk about pretty much the powers that be will do anything they can to keep asset prices inflated. And I think we touched on quite a bit of that already as to why that needs to happen from an economy perspective, also just from incentives, right? I mean, boomers still have a lot of power and influence in this country and they have majority of the assets. So it's in their favor to continue to kick the can down the road. But I also heard you say something on a previous podcast, I believe, about societal problems being the biggest threat to the economy, concerned about potential civil war. I think you assigned low probabilities to this. But I'd be curious to hear kind of like your thoughts on a worst case type of scenario as well, because you'd mentioned that the bifurcation the economy today is not unusual. If, you know, there's always bifurcation economies, there's a lot of parallels to the 50s, But what do you see in terms of societal problems then? I mean, what what could you see happening that could be potentially derailing the next 12 months that are more bullish Or what do you think comes that comes after the next 12 months, aside from the Social Security thing that you just pointed out? Yeah, I mean, that that's the other big elephant in the room is a social unrest. And I think when I look back at the 1950s, I recognize that there was a very long period of time that, you know, the K shaped economy was allowed to exist. But at the end it did break. And I think that was the 1960s social movements of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, essentially people said enough is enough. Like like we can't have this massive separation and you have this massive civil unrest, cultural unrest. So I do think we're heading for that and and it's probably going to happen sooner than 2034, right? So like these decades don't match up perfectly. Like I'm not saying, OK, 19, sixty 1950s are like the twenty 20s and therefore we're in 2025. It should be like 1955. We didn't really get civil unrest until 1963. I think it's coming sooner rather than later. And, and I do think it's coming because it's just, it's just not right. I mean, people are not happy with the way the world works anymore. They're especially younger people who, despite the fact that on a relative basis to the rest of the world, live very well. I think most people want to compare themselves to their parents in the life they grew up in. And I think unfortunately, a lot of Americans are living below the standards that they grew up in. And that's not a good recipe. And that and that that is going to create issues. And so I think that's coming. And, and that's why I said I think 2026 is going to be good. Let's see what happens in 20. I don't think it's there yet. I don't think we're at a boiling point yet. I think it's beginning to show one of the things I've said in other shows and and different things. As far as when I might want to turn bearish is if post midterms we get a very clear and strong Democratic front runner for the presidential nomination, which they start to nominate basically January, February 2020, seventh. So we're talking about 14 months from now. That's socialist. And that is basically talking about we want to raise taxes, we want to regulate. Like if that happens and the stock market starts saying, oh, there's a 3040% chance we're going to have a socialist president in two years. I mean, you want to watch out. So I, I do think like I'm in, in a sense, we're playing with a little bit of fire right now where there are some things on the horizon that could really start to collapse stuff. I just don't see them there yet. But let's call it October, November 2026. And like I, like I brought up earlier is the first podcast I did was about a collapse in the markets in 2027. It was more centered around Social Security payments. But it's looking like to me that we've got maybe 12 to 14 months of a nice run here and then it might be a time to pull back and take profits because there is going to be a time to do that. And I am not a perma bull type guy that thinks it can go on forever. I just think that things tend to go on longer than people think and that a lot of people are already thinking we're at the end of the bubble. I don't think we are. I think there's probably another year or so. And then when everybody else is convinced that this is going to keep going, I'd be happy to come on and say, guess what guys? I think this is the end. Yeah, No, it makes a lot of sense. I'm curious. One thing Brian flagged ahead of hitting record today was the fact that Emory University added to their Bitcoin position and also added gold exposure as well. And so I'm curious, Mel, just given your background as well, having a career, the traditional finance space on Wall Street, what do you think about just institutional allocation to these two asset classes because they historically have been very much under owned. I don't think gold's really been an institutional asset. It's been kind of a barbell. It's been at the sovereign level and it's been at the retail level, but it's typically not owned or very under allocated in their traditional portfolios. And then Bitcoin, as we all know, really hasn't had any sort of institutional interest for a number of reasons until the past two years or so. So I'm curious just in terms of these larger pools of capital getting involved, how does that kind of play into, how does that play into just a broader thesis that you've shared in terms of your next like 12 to 24 month outlook? Yeah, I mean, I think that's what's happening. I think they're OK. So if you're an OG and somehow you had 1000 Bitcoin that you bought it like $200 a coin. I mean, how could you get rid of a lot of them before now? You couldn't, you'd collapse the market. You, you know, like this is the first opportunity and, and people are looking at that and I don't know who these guys are. I wish I would have been one of them. I, I remember driving down a bridge from my town home in Fremont neighborhood of Seattle down to downtown Seattle when I worked at Russell Investments in like 2012. And I was listening to an NPR, you know, story about Bitcoin and I went in and I tried to buy it. And this is before Coinbase. I, I couldn't figure out a way to buy it. And I was trying to like download a browser because they said you need to download this, you know, Silk Road browser and all that. I, I was doing all this stuff trying to buy Bitcoin in like 2012. I really was. And by the way, I mean, like I'm a guy and I always do this on my podcast 'cause I like to put my microphone on one of my 1000 oz bars of silver or 100 oz. It's 100 oz bar, which I paid like, I don't know, 1200 for now, it's worth like 5000. But what I say is like patience, Grasshopper, right? Like, like I paid like 1200 for that, but that was like 20 years ago. Like don't get too crazy about Bitcoin. Like I say, don't think that it's going to go to 2 million next year. It's just not. I think Bitcoin is going to be the best performing asset over the next 10 years compared to gold, the stock market, everything. But I don't think that it's going to go up 80% every year. I just don't think that's going to happen and I think people need to get that. One of the most unpopular things I've ever said on Twitter was I posted a a tweet of Sam Bakeman Freed, Bernie Sanders and Michael Saylor. Like, I don't like Monster. I don't like it. I've never liked it. When Monster peak last year, I said, you know what? It's a great trade short Monster buy Bitcoin. I don't like these treasury companies. I don't understand them, you know, call me crazy. I don't understand them. You know, Michael Saylor is a great salesman. I'm sure he's probably a good guy. He's probably done more for Bitcoin than anybody. But I'm also worried he's going to, you know, eventually tanked this whole thing because that whole monster thing is ridiculous to me. Like, how in the world does it make sense that you buy a bunch of Bitcoin and then your stock price should be worth 2X the amount of Bitcoin you hold? No, you're really going to get Michael fired up here. And before you do, I just, I was just thinking back in 2012, if you had purchased some of that Bitcoin, how many financial thrillers you would have had published by now? Yeah, there, there's a lot. I don't want to. I don't want to create trouble here, but I'm sorry, I just don't understand these treasury companies. I don't understand. I put it on your balance sheet and then somehow you should be worth more than the assets on your balance. I don't get it. Well, there's, there's a few things I was, I was looking for a few things to chat about going down your Twitter and Congrats on the the Marines 250 year anniversary because that makes a lot more sense to a former Marine. You have common sense because that's what's lacking in Most people fundamentally think that these treasury companies have some value above 1 and and they just never have which. So you agree, Michael, You're not. Oh. Of course. No, no, we've been yelling at the. Market, you're going to come at me for saying this? We've been, we've been talking about this for for what seems like over a year now. Being generally it's a scam. He's a Barnum and Bailey salesman. He's a joke. I didn't realize that you I never heard it called monster so I was confused when you start mentioning but that's a great. Whatever they call it, I don't know. MSTR but is your computer on 100 oz gold bar is the first thing I was just wondering. No, but I do have another like 10 oz Australian coin and other coins and it like look, I've been look before Bitcoin ever existed. I recognize as is other guys, including Peter Schiff, who is a complete joke in as well with his debasement of Bitcoin doesn't understand it. But look, I understand Peter Schiff because I was I was one of these guys like 20 years ago. I'm like this Fiat thing is a joke. This is ridiculous. How in the world can the world just live off of money printed by the United States? It's like this is crazy. It's never going to last. You got to own something and and what have people owned? They've owned gold, they've owned silver. So I started buying gold and silver in 2520 years ago and I tried to buy Bitcoin and then I and then what happened is I got sucked into the trad 5 bullshit. I was a Duke NBAI ran a broker dealer. I ran 3 broker dealers as CEO FINRA. I, I was like, I, I'm not going to buy this shit at 2000, forget about it. And then it would go to 4000 and then 5000. I'd be like, Oh my gosh, this is crazy. I finally buy my first Bitcoin at 11,000. So I wasn't that late, like right, you know, but it took me time. I should have bought my first Bitcoin at 200, but it took me to 11,000 and then I finally bought my first Bitcoin and I've hold on to it and I've held on and I've bought more and, and everything. And I also have gold and I have silver and anybody that follows me on Twitter on X and Mel Madison one, they'll know. I say there are two anchors to My Portfolio, gold and Bitcoin. Then what I do is I have a satellite portfolio of stocks because there are opportunities in equity markets. So there are things like a Robin Hood or a sofa or different things that can go up 45X in a 2-3 year period. And so I look to those to be basically juice. But to me, the core of anybody's portfolio should be gold, Bitcoin, silver. That because everything else I think is going to go down and then you try to pick stocks that are going to do better than the market. Well, credit to you for changing your mind because most money managers that miss Bitcoin at 200 just continue to double down on why it can't work. There's famous ones that won't call out that are out there, but that leads me to a question that I think you're probably one of the the few individuals that would be tempered enough to answer this in an objective ways. How do you effectively see over the next, call it 2 to 10? And I know this is a full errand, but I'm going to ask you to play it either way. Is gold and Bitcoin playing alongside themselves? Because as you start going further and further understanding what you're describing, we work in this industry, you start to realize how individuals all the way institutions navigate this. And there is there's a notion on Twitter and in the Bitcoin camp that Bitcoin is obviously, I want to say obviously, but is a, a more perfected version of gold in the sense that it's finite and you can really transfer it, transport it where gold, you know, has these flaws, but there's still reality of inertia, DNA built into humans and sovereigns. How do you see gold and Bitcoin playing out as they try these different bricks, currencies and these different things? And ultimately somebody gets 1000 bar or whatever it is ship that's tungsten and they realize they could have just shipped this, you know, digital bearer asset. Like how do you see this playing out as both of these monetary units go up in dollar purchasing power? They, they both are, they're positives and negatives. I mean, if you don't see that, then you're just a fool, basically. Like if anybody's like, oh, gold has no positives over Bitcoin. I mean, OK, let's say that I'm China and I want to send a billion dollars to Russia and I don't want it to be traced. I don't want it to be on a Ledger. I want Russia to be able to melt it down. I want them to have no clue that I just sent a billion dollars. How do you do that with Bitcoin? So there are things that gold has that Bitcoin doesn't have. There are things that Bitcoin has that gold. Is it if I'm Russia and China and I want to send a, a billion dollars to Russia instantaneously with no cost, how can you do that with the gold? You can't. So there are positives and negatives of Bitcoin and gold. And I, I do this all the time. Like people are like, well, Bitcoins just a superior gold. I'm you don't understand, gold has certain properties that Bitcoin doesn't. OK, number one among them is anonymity. Like you can't completely destroy any connection of where gold came from. You cannot do that with Bitcoin, right? It's a public Ledger. You're going to know what those keys are, where that address is, where it came from. You cannot do that with with gold. You can do it with Bitcoin. Now we go another thing, gold is a physical element, right? And and this to me, this is the biggest threat to Bitcoin long term. I've said this before in podcast. I don't think Quantum or anything like that is the biggest threat to Bitcoin long term. I think the biggest true threat to Bitcoin long term is 2/3 generations down the road, people start to say, you know what our great grandfathers had Bitcoin, we're going to create Bitcoin 2.0 and this is now what we want to be the monetary base. And how do you stop that from happening? So I, I look, but then again, I can go back and I can talk about all the advantages that Bitcoin has to go Bitcoin and gold. I think there's this thing in the market sometimes like people are like bitcoins just completely superior in every way. I just don't believe it's true. I, I think there are benefits to Bitcoin and benefits to gold, and that's why both of them should be embraced together by everyone who truly believes in this Fiat, the basement scenario. And that if it this whole argument between Bitcoin and gold, I honestly, I, I don't understand it. I don't think it makes sense. I think that it's misplaced, and I think that both of them have their own elements that are positive and negative. Gold has certain things it can do, Bitcoin can't do, and vice versa. Well, no. You also have to understand that a lot of people in the Bitcoin space think that all asset classes just go to like their utility value and everyone just only holds Bitcoin. So there's a lot of pretty delusional. Well, that's an important point, Jackson. I I would like to bring that up because I did think about this ahead of time, OK, because there's been a lot of talk on the Internet and last year about the hurdle rate of new hurdle rate is Bitcoin OK, if we go two or three weeks and Bitcoin still works. So I guess what the hurdle rate is for the last year, zero. OK, so here's my point. Bitcoiners need to grow up, OK? Bitcoin is not. You're not going to retire off of .1 Bitcoin. Bitcoin's not going to 23 million. Don't tell me that. Come on. Bitcoin's not going to go to 20 million in the next two years. What I do believe, and this is the honest to God truth, in the next 10 years as far as major assets, the best performing of all of them will be Bitcoin. But you have to ratchet back these expectations. I think Bitcoin is off of the four year cycle. Bitcoin has been appropriated by the financial establishment. As much as people that love and venerate Satoshi will hate that. This is the truth and you just need to grow up and accept this is what's happened. Bitcoin is now a financial asset within the financial system. There's I bit, there's futures, there's options, there's everything else. And guess what's going to happen? It's going to appreciate more than any other asset because what it's going to do is it's going to re represent this debasement trade. But people that think it's going to do what it did in 2010 are nuts. It's not going to do what it didn't do that it's it's now in a new area. It's the best asset to own out of every major asset. But what you should expect is a 15 to 35% annual return. And if you want to retire off of .1 Bitcoin, it's, it's going to be tough. And I, I, I think that's just what happened. I mean, that's my opinion. I know that these are all horrible things and I, I big sale it. I I got to just call the balls and strikes the way I see it and that's the way I see it. Yeah, I know. I appreciate you calling that out because it's spot on. And it's, I mean, it's fundamentally why the equity market, the Robin Hood vacation and then crypto exists because everyone's trying to get rich. And so I've been making this case that post 2020 in the amount of monetary units being inserted, that Bitcoin just keeps keeping pace with effective inflation, maybe a little bit above that. So point being is you get an asset, you can store your wealth, you can store your hard earned time, it can appreciate that par maybe a little bit greater than inflation, but that's what it's doing. And that should be enough. And then you have to go back and produce value in the world and we forgot how to deliver. Yeah, liquidity sponge. But the notion of This is why the dats exist because ultimately people forgot how to deliver value. So we have to financialize these assets and there's certain people that are getting enriched with the dats and then they're basically selling that I'm giving you better Bitcoin. It's going to run harder and faster than Bitcoin. So by my dats, are the the monsters to buy my they're just, they're just a manifestation, yeah. And then the cryptos too, you know, and it's like, and this is the thing with Solana and ETH and all of them, which I will say because I do have firm views about being very pro Bitcoin. Like I'm, I'm not like necessarily what what would be considered a maxi, but I do believe there's only one Bitcoin and I believe Bitcoin is crypto gold and I believe everything else that people talk about the reason why it has value, whether it's ether soul, it's because it's serving some sort of operational purpose which can be displaced and therefore ETH soul can be be displaced. Bitcoin, I believe cannot be displaced, at least not easily. It would take an entire multi generational effort to to do that. And so I think there is Bitcoin and then there's everything else. I think that's clearly the case. I don't think, I think Bitcoin dominance is, is just growing, right? I mean, like, I mean, you, you, you look back at like crypto, like all these other things, like they're utilitarian tokens. I mean, that's what they're there for. Like I own some ARB or something like that. That's the L2 Etherium token that Robin Hood's running. It's, you know, private market equities on like like because I'm owning it or I own what do I have? What's it called it it it There are a couple other cryptos that I own. OK, My point is I own them just as trades because they're just operational tokens, you know, a virtuals, virtuals, that's what it is, which which which is an AI agent token, you know, and it it's gone from 80 since I bought it to 180. Like I'm up like 80%. Then I sell that like so I do play a little bit in the crypto space, but very little, very little. But then Bitcoin is in a level by itself and people have to recognize that. And financial advisors in like Morgan Stanley's and everybody else recognizes that. There's Bitcoin, there's everything else. They're going to start moving people in. And here's what's going to happen at the end of the year, especially with Bitcoin around 100,000. All these financial advisors at Morgan Stanley are going to go to conferences and like San Francisco and everywhere else, they're going to get big steak dinners. And there's actually going to be somebody from Morgan Stanley who understands Bitcoin and he's going to say, guess what? This is the time to put your clients in it. Don't put your clients in Bitcoin when it's at 150. Put it in and now, you know, rebalance at the start of the new year. Do this and these are the buyers. The Ogs are selling and here's your buyers. This is, this is grandma and grandpa, 78 years old, their Morgan Stanley advisors going to say, look, do a 3% allocation to Bitcoin. We're at 100,000. It's a great point to come in. And this is going to happen and that's why Bitcoins not collapsing. And so Bitcoin is just going through all of this match or maturation. Geordi Visser did an amazing piece called the Bitcoin IPO. This is the Bitcoin going through this maturation cycle and heading into the portfolios where it's going to sit for decades. And then it's just going to start going up and up and up. And I think more than the stock market and even more than gold, here's the conversation no one wants to have. If something happened to you tomorrow, could your family access your Bitcoin? Really think about it. The seed freeze hidden in your house, the hardware wallet and the safe. That complex multi 6 setup. You understand it, but does your spouse do your children? Billions in Bitcoin are already lost forever because people did not plan for this moment. On Ramps inheritance solution is built into our multi institution custody from day one. 3 institutions, clear beneficiary designation and professional succession planning. No technical knowledge required from your heirs. And with our new flat tier pricing starting at $250 monthly, your family won't face surprise custody costs just because Bitcoin appreciated the same predictable fee. Whether Bitcoin hits 200K or 2 million, don't leave your family's future to chance. There's strength in many. Visit on rampbitcoin.com/inheritance. That is on rampbitcoin.com/inheritance. I'm really glad we're maybe ending here because I wanted you, you touched on this early about Bitcoin sitting basically flat for a year and why that is so bullish. And I know this is oversimplifying, but it it's worth saying that obviously when the price goes up, there's more buyers and sellers down, more sellers and buyers. But when it's flat doesn't mean nobody's selling or buying. It means it's transferring hands and that's effectively been happening the past year. And the other thing that's worth calling out because it's a very big deal as everything that came out the past two days from Square and blocks and a lot of the infrastructure that's coming around from like payments and things that will happen around Bitcoin. The reason why I call that out is we that's happening across the world and specifically the US. When you think about Morgan Stanley, Charles Schwab, Fidelity, like there's so much fundamentals that have been added to the network in the past 12 months that the price is flat, but there's plumbing that's happening that the market doesn't fully appreciate. And so to your point, it's just preparing us for us for what's coming next, which is just doesn't get widely discussed enough. Yeah, this is, this is stuff people don't understand. Hash, rays, plumbing, all this. People don't understand what Bitcoin has that nobody else has. So they're like, oh, well, Bitcoin's just a coin and anybody can create it. No, no, no, you, you don't understand what makes Bitcoin, Bitcoin. I mean, Bitcoin is Bitcoin because of the owners, the holders, the the people that have the, the hash machines at their bedsides, the network. I mean, this is not easily replaced, It's not easily duplicated. It's, it's, it's unique and, and that's, that's why I've been going on podcast for over a year and a half. I've never advocated one single cryptocurrency except for Bitcoin. Bitcoin is unique. Bitcoin is gold. Bitcoin is something that is just you, you can't replace it. And that's just the way that it is. And I'm, I'm never going to be convinced that, oh, it's a great idea to just sell my Bitcoin like, oh, I'm going to, I'm going to go in there because it said 95,000 and sell it. No, I'm convinced that it's going to be at 150,000 by the end of February. Come have me back in here, because I honestly think these charts are shaping up and here's what's going to drive it. We know that the federal government needs to drive fiscal stimulus ahead of the midterms. We also know that last year in January, Trump gave Besant the mandate come up with a sovereign wealth fund by the end of January. We also know the Clarity Act, which is the Bitcoin Act, OK, There's a big difference between the Clarity Act and the Genius Act. I've been following these act for years. The Genius act was a simple stable coin act. This, the clarity is going to be clarity around digital assets. All these things are going to start to happen. They're going to be narrative drivers. Could we bounce around this level for the next? Like I said, last time it happened, it happened a month, four or five weeks. By the end of December, I think Bitcoin is going to be off to the moon. I think we're heading to 13140 by January, 150 by February. I, I just see that happening. And if I'm wrong, then have me on please in February and let me explain why I think I'm wrong. But I think it's going to happen. I really do. Mel, if you're wrong, I'm going to be working at McDonald's. I won't be hosting this. It's going to happen, man. This is just a bouncing along. It's bouncing along the same lines. I'm looking at it right now. OK, 99,000, Zero 7, one man. It's, it's right at those lines. It's right at these lines. I mean, it's it's it's exactly where it's always been. You go back and you look at you look at where it's done it. I mean, basically I'm looking at April 8th. We were at 76,000. And if you go back to September 24, we were at 52, OK? So we went from 52 in September, just a little over a year ago. Then we hit a low of 78 in April. And I mean, you draw a trend line between those two levels and you basically get to 99,000 right now. And I'm telling you, could we be wrong? Sure, I could be completely wrong, but I'm looking at this and I'm telling you, you do not buy stocks. You do not buy Bitcoin when it's at 125 and it's been up 25% in the last three weeks. And that's the dumbest time to buy anything. And well, now if you believe that you can retire on 1.1 Bitcoin, then you don't care at all about your entry price. But I guess if you're a little bit more pragmatic about where it goes in the next handful of years than the entry price does matter, especially its size. Too. It wasn't, it wasn't, it wasn't that too, too, too long ago that people, people would joke about, you know, proverbility crashing to 100K. Like when I started learning about Bitcoin 1718, that was a meme. Like that was a joke. Like, you know, one day we're going to joke about crashing to 100K and it's literally happening right now and people are still freaking out. Yeah. OK. So I'm looking at OK in December, in January, we had a double top around one O 8. We then dropped down to 75 in April. If you draw the trend line from September 24 to April this year up to now, I mean you, you hit it exactly and it's it's like this is it like when do you buy? You do not buy when everybody is telling you you can retire on .1 Bitcoin. You buy when you're hitting these bottom trend lines. You buy when everybody is telling you the Bitcoin story is over. You buy when everybody is saying the four year cycle is here, we're going to crash 80. This is when you buy like this. I've been doing this a long time and I'm just telling you, you every time that something like this happens and like Bitcoin goes to like 125, I'll be out on next saying I'm selling my Bitcoin it it's it's done now I'm saying look, I was early like a week ago, I was early. But I'll be honest with you, we first hit 100,000 on November. December last year it's. Now November, it's now November 13th. OK, So we, we've got 10 days where we've been here. When I go back and I look at where have we bounced from on this channel, there have been month long bounces. So if if we started at 11:10 then we're going to December. No, excuse me if I if we started on 11, we're going much or just three. We're going to 12/3, OK, we're going to 12/3. So what I'm saying is like between now and December 3rd, could we bounce along this line and that's the next two weeks? Sure. But every single time it hits this, it then goes up and I just don't see a reason why it's not going to do that. And and so that's why I said in an expost, I just said today, next one to two weeks could be choppy. So expect chop the next one or two weeks. And then and what's going to happen is, as I said before, is fiscal surpluses are by definition private sector deficits and vice versa, meaning fiscal deficits or private sector. The the the government is going to start injecting mass liquidity into the system in the next month or two. I mean mass liquidity like probably the likes of which we've never seen because we had 180 eighty billion deficit in September. Now we got the end of the shutdown. I mean, these are just setting this whole thing up. And it's just like this is when you buy you don't don't buy when Bitcoins 126 in January of last year. I mean that's the stupidest time to buy because everybody's telling you buy .1 Bitcoin, you can retire forever. So this is when you buy when everybody's telling you bitcoins done. Love it, love it. Well, Mel, you know what, we're going to certainly have you back on the podcast whether the price is in the gutter or we're on the moon early next year, you'll be back on. We may also do the book club. I'm certainly going to check it out if I get a little time to slow down around the holidays. So I appreciate you joining the podcast. I I knew it was going to be electric. I thought it was going to be a fun one and it delivered. Where should people get in touch with you if they want to learn more? Yeah, come to Mel Madison one MELMATTISON one on Twitter or X and then melmadison.com. And I really appreciate you guys having me. I, I really didn't mean to be too electric, but I, I just think this is the perfect time. I, I honestly think that since April, literally today as we record this on 11/13, this is probably your best Bitcoin buying opportunity in six months. That's what that's what we need to hear. Well, thanks Mel, it was. Appreciated Mel. This is Paul. Thanks, Mel. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the show. If you found the information valuable, please share the episode with a friend or leave a rating on your favorite podcast app. All the links we discussed in today's show will be in the show notes inside your podcast app. Before we finish, a quick reminder that Onramp Media is for informational and entertainment purposes only, and nothing should be construed as investment or legal advice. 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