Multipolar Investing: Geopolitics, Risk, and the End of the 60/40 Portfolio

Let's be clear, Bitcoin is an international asset. We are spending like drunken sailors. Bitcoin is the only economic entity. Where the supply is unaffected by the demand. If you want to preserve your wealth, you have to convert. That. Currency into an asset that's scarce, desirable, portable, durable, and maintainable. Michael and I sat down with Rob Laerty, chief investment Officer, and Jacob Shapiro, director of research at Bespoke Group. They explained why the unipolar era is fading, how regional power blocks are reshaping global trade, and what it means when U.S. Treasuries are no longer risk free. In a world where trust in sovereign debt is eroding, scarce and liquid assets like gold and Bitcoin move to the front of the line. But the conversation was not only about what to own, it was about how and where to own it. If you hold Bitcoin, securing it for the long haul is mission critical. But how do you do that? 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I'm joined by my Co host, Michael Tanguma, and our guests of honor this week are Jacob Shapiro, Director of Research, and Rob Larity, Chief Investment Officer at the Spoke Group. Rob and Jacob, great to just meet you before we hit record here. Thanks for joining us. How are the two of you doing? Very good. It's. Another Tuesday in paradise here, but not all of us are in Paris like Rob, putting our feet up and eating croissants every day, so I think it's better for him. Does sound like a nice way to start the day, huh Rob? Yeah, I try to have at least three kilos of cheese before lunch, so it works pretty well. Nice. I'm, I'm on just black coffee to to kick things off here. So we're going to bring a lot of energy into this podcast. Really excited about sitting down with the two of you. Jacob, we discussed briefly before we hit record, but both Michael and I came across your podcast that you did a couple weeks back when you interviewed Matt Pines, kind of in preparation of having a conversation with Matt on our show. So really excited to speak with the two of you. You both have produced excellent research at Bespoke Group. But before getting into the details of any of that and discussing, you know, what's going on more broadly from a political, geopolitical policy perspective, could you just share your background, high level kind of what led you to Bespoke and what you're focusing on for the firm? I'll let you go first bro. Sure. So my role at Bespoke, so I'm Chief Investment Officer, which means really taking a charge. All of the direct investing that we do at the firm. We're a little bit unique in that sense in that we do a lot of our asset management in a vertically integrated way. So, you know, not only are we working with families at the very high level to do sort of strategic planning and, and everything around their needs, but all the way down to we're doing work on the individual companies that we're investing them in and doing that in house in a very deep and throw away. So that's my side of the house and and that's, you know, where Jacob and I work together. Obviously my background real quick, you know, I come from the buy side investment industry. I spent most of my career focused on the short side. So kind of interesting when you think about the kinds of families that we're helping, we like to think that it's, it's nice to have a, a cynical view of things to go in and kind of hammer them and make sure that they don't break. Because when you're dealing with generational wealth, you know, the first thing is to protect and then to focus on growth and gains. So you know, kind of that background has has put me in good stead for this sort of work. But yeah, I mean all of my career has been in macro and individual like very deep bottom up stocks and the confluence between those two things. And, and As for me, it's, it's funny you bring up Matt Pines. I find that it's actually a very small world, like the number of people who are actually doing deep research or deep insight around these topics. Like we all sort of know each other. And when you see others that are out there, like pretending like they do it, you can kind of separate people that way. My career is, is starts as a geopolitical strategist. So I've been doing geopolitical analysis for over 15 years now. When I started my career, nobody cared about geopolitics. I like to joke, I was in Austin, TX working at a company called Stratford. My grandmother thought, why, why, why don't you go to law school? Like, what is this job that you're doing? It wasn't interesting to anybody at the bar that I try to talk to. Like nobody wanted to talk about these things. And slowly over the course of my career, geopolitics has become more and more and more important. And my career has taken me from sort of direct consulting with multinational corporations, so companies that have international supply chains and are dealing with questions like, is China going to invade Taiwan? Is the US going to raise tariffs against Vietnam? Should I worry about drug cartels in Mexico if I'm establishing a factory there? Like that was sort of the sorts of questions that started my career. And about 10 years in Rob and I actually met at a different company that Rob started cognitive investments, and I started trying to tie my geopolitical research directly to matters that were related to investment. And we never really looked back from there. And I think one of the things that separates me from the small number of geopolitical analysts that are out there, and I've worked with most of them. I haven't worked with the in Bremer, but you go down the list like George Friedman, Peter Zion, Marco Pat, like we all worked together at different points in our career. It's a fairly small group, but for me, like it's all about applying the research in a way that actually has real tangible impact. So we're actually making decisions based on not just geopolitical risks, but on geopolitical opportunities because I think we are living, as we'll probably talk about in a huge international shift. We're in a huge technological shift, we're in an energy shift. And that means there's going to be creative destruction for entire industries and for nation states. It also means there's going to be incredible opportunity on the other side. So most of my job is to make sure that that geopolitical insight is embedded in the DNA of everything we do, from the where to own, from the how to own, the what to own. You need issues of geography and political risk and all those things embedded in those things. And then for particularly internationally minded clients, I'm usually their interface because, you know, sometimes people just want to talk about whatever's in the headlines and I'm a good person to shoot the shit with so. It's it's so fascinating. I'm really excited for this conversation because I didn't realize that about your side and like Peter Zahan and a lot of these groups coming from a, you know, having overlapping backgrounds, I think it's worth noting and we talked about it before recording Mcclintock and some of the group at Bespoke they're doing, they have been doing world class work for over half a decade now. And to see them kind of grow and take on the stance and have a more global presence makes complete sense. But then also I think I'm curious, like on your side, Jacob, when you referenced, you can kind of tell who knows what they're they're talking about and not like, I think one of the things that at least on the Austrians bottoms up side that maybe has a little difference of opinion or maybe the macro economist could get a bad rap is when they go to like high level or top level and put everyone into like lumps versus understanding emergence and decision making. And just like, you know, you talked about the interconnected interconnectedness of markets, but I think sometimes it gets to like, I don't wanna say top down, but just to like not like concrete in understanding of how independent actors, I guess human action at its core, right praxeology and that we're all independent actors and make independent decisions and that he ends up being too ephemeral and abstract and then you lose the interconnectedness and the actual give and take of human action. And so I don't know if you have any thoughts there, but I think that's probably one of the bigger things that like Luke, Roman and Zahan have picked up on where others maybe haven't made it through this great filter of who has signal and who's more of noise. Well, yeah, and I'm appreciative of everyone who's in the environment because I think they all serve a purpose. You know, I for me, one of the books that is like one of my Bibles is, is Philip Tetlock's work and his division of the world into thinkers, into foxes versus hedgehogs. I don't know if you guys are familiar with this, but for the listeners, Tetlock was doing analysis of people who were making political predictions. And he found that the only thing that was statistically there, statistically relevant for people who are making political, the forecast was, were they a fox or were they a hedgehog? And a hedgehog is somebody who knows one thing really, really well and bangs that square peg into the round hole over and over and over again. And the juxtaposition is the fox is somebody who will change his mind even while you're in conversation with him because he'll be open to new data. He'll be open to new ideas. And the crux of what Tetlock found was that it's the hedgehogs that get all of the media play time. Because it's really hard to change your mind constantly and engage with complex ideas and have people listen to a 2 minute sound bite. So the people that constantly get fed to you, the media diet that we get is all of the hedgehogs, no matter how wrong they are. And it was the foxes that were statistically better at predicting things than the hedgehogs. So I'm a fox in this space, and I think there is utility for hedgehogs. Like Peter was the one who said, yeah, Russia's probably going to invade Ukraine. I'll raise my hand right here and say I didn't think that was going to happen. Geopolitically, it didn't make sense to me. Now, the 10 things that happened after that Peter didn't get right because he was stillwell, you know, this is what's going to happen. It's the hedgehog thing. I had to really pivot very quickly and decide, OK, like I got this thing wrong. Let's get out of our Russian assets. Let's think about all the different ways that this is going to change the world. And I'm proud of the sort of track record since then. And I think, you know, sort of what you talked about that there's two things that I would say. The first is I reject the notion that there's a big crystal ball out there. Like my analysis is never deterministic. I will always overweight to the role of individuals because all economics and demographics and all of these highfalutin studies, it's all just trying to figure out what large groups of humans are going to do. I think sometimes we lose sight of the fact that, yeah, like you have to understand deeply what the individual is going to do and you have to have a fair degree of humility in understanding that. Like, let's take demographics is a great example. How are we supposed to know how many children the individual family is going to want to have 5-10 years from now? The hubris in predicting outwards demographic trends just based on a population pyramid, like blows my mind because you have to really get in the minds of families and what they want to do if you actually want to try and predict that. And then the second thing, you know, I talked about it being a small group of analysts who are out there in this space. You might have seen that JP Morgan is the latest to do this. They announced, they announced this new Center for geopolitics that they're building. And all of the big firms are doing this in the same way that they're, you know, being converted to Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. They're also being converted to geopolitics and rolling out these huge centers. But the way that they're rolling out these centers, and I'm not trying to throw shade at the people that they're hiring there, but they're getting people with impressive credentials who are high up in government or defense or intelligence, slapping them into their special center of geopolitics and saying, OK, now we do geopolitics. And The thing is, my form of analysis, it's not about what I've done. It's about how I think it's a discipline, It's a practice for how you think about the world. And just because you were assistant deputy to so and so at the department of yada, yada, yada, OK, it's a really nice title. Even if it's a five star general like that doesn't mean you actually know how to look at a piece of information and say, OK, I'm going to analyze it this way. It's going to mean this for this investment portfolio. It's going to mean this for this particular family based on their geography. Like that's a very, very different skill set than setting up a center and sort of having some names there. So that's that's what I mean when I say that it's it's out there and that there's a small group of us who actually do the work versus everybody knows they want geopolitics now and it's a fairly scarce commodity. And so they're trying to find all these different ways they can say they do geopolitics without actually doing the hard analytical work. I love that Jacob there. There's a lot that we can pull on there, But I think just as a foundational part of the conversation, I would really love to hear how you define geopolitics because it was in the report and it's now a buzzword to your point. When you started your career, nobody really paid attention to geopolitics. It was more a niche thing. But now you're making the case over the past couple of years and going forward, geopolitics is really a primary pillar and focus of capital allocation. So I'm hoping you could define geopolitics and then in addition to that, you know, what are the some of the core things that you're paying attention to today? And then Rob would love to get you looped into the kind of the back half of this segment or question to talk about how these themes that Jacob's speaking to from a geopolitical perspective are converging into the investment landscape and how you think about that? Yeah, it's a it's a devilishly hard word to define. And I reached a sort of crisis in my career 10 years in where it sort of a la Don Draper. I like wrote this piece to myself. That was why I'm quitting geopolitics because I hated the word and I really had to come to terms with it. I think there's 2 levels at which we can define geopolitics. The first is just the method and the discipline that I talked about around the time we're talking about late 19th century. So 18, seventies, 1880s, eighteen 90s. This is the same time that we're getting concepts of social Darwinism, of evolutionary biology. All these things are starting to come in and you get this class of social scientists largely based in Germany. There are some in the UK. Mckinder is the famous one that most people know, but it was actually a Swede who was the one who coined the word who start thinking about the nation state in an organic sense. I should also say you're going at this period from multi ethnic empires and monarchies to actual nation states defined by ethnicity and, and things like that. And so they start a theory of international politics basically that treats the nation state like it's an Organism. So what that means is the nation state has needs, it needs to eat, it needs to expand and have room to grow. It also has constraints. There are things which no matter what it wants to do, it absolutely cannot do. And so you have to assess all of these different needs and imperatives of. And when you do that, you will get some sense of how the world is going to work. This was a pretty attractive discipline in a popular discipline into the early 1900s. And it got a bad rap because the Nazis, as you can imagine, loved it. They could use a lot of these different geopolitical justifications to say, oh, the Germans need living space and the Slavs are lesser people than us and the Jews are lesser people than us. So let's just take the living space and expand. And this is all geopolitically justified because the science of geopolitics tells us that, you know, the Third Reich, blah blah blah blah blah. And so for decades after World War 2, geopolitics really goes into disrepute because nobody wants to be tied to something that the Nazis took off the shelf and then applied in their own way to to really bastardize in their way to justify some of the policies that they were doing. It started to make a comeback in the United States, ironically, from German intellectuals and scholars who brought it here, you know, folks that had left the Nazi regime early on. Hans Morgenthau was one of the the real godfathers of it. And in the US intelligence community in, you know, the, the thinkers that were thinking about the Cold War, they revive the initial practice of geopolitics to think about the relations between the Soviet Union and the United States and to try and model what relations are going to look like in a bipolar world. And, you know, basically ever since then, you get these updates to geopolitical practice and discipline as a result of that. So I say that because there's this discipline and practice thing, which is in a certain sense, geopolitics didn't exist for roughly 1880. Like it wasn't a thing. Now there's a second order level of geopolitics, which is to say the things that geopolitics is trying to understand, which is the relations between nations or between empires or different groups of people that has been going on for literally thousands of years. So you can go back in time and apply a geopolitical analysis to Sparta and Athens or to the Davidic monarchies in, in you know, in Israel and things like that. You get lots of scholars that start to do that. But I do think you start to go off the rails and get into crystal ball. And if you say, ah, like geopolitics has been there for thousands of years, like, no, it's a, it's a lens and a discipline for how to understand the world. I think it is ideally suited for understanding the world today because I think we're going back to a world like the 1890s. I think you're getting that level of volatility. I think you're getting changes in the international political system that are pitting States and nations and even non state actors against each other in the way that geopolitics was designed to understand. I think geopolitics was particularly boring from roughly 1990 to 2015 because geopolitics was easy. It was the United States is the top dog. The buck stops with the United States, you know, invest in the United States and its allies, go to lunch and play golf, and don't look at your portfolio too much. Like that would have been the geopolitically responsible thing to do. But now I think we're going back to this world where it's relevant again. And in terms of the core things I look at, honestly, it depends what the question is. It depends what the time horizon is. It depends who the client is. I mean, it really veers all over the place. I will tell you, I often joke that if you left me on a desert island and I had one statistical indicator that I could use to understand what was going on in the rest of the world, give me food prices. Because every single time food prices rise, you basically are guaranteed a major war or a major revolution or something like that. But it's really, really hard to just say, you know, here are the things that you have to watch for some clients who are exposed in certain geographies. You have to focus on those things. I can tell you that some of the things that we are particularly interested in and that I think we have contrarian viewpoints on and, and Rob might add some color here is, you know, we think that the future of China over the next 5-10 years is going to be critically important. That's maybe the biggest question you have to get right on a macro level because if China is going to collapse or if, you know, demographic decline is going to lead to breaks in the Communist Party's authority, well, that's one decision tree. And it will affect both investments in China and also the world globally versus, well, is China going to survive and thrive? They are the global manufacturing capital of the world. They are having huge advantages in innovation and technology, things that we were assured were not possible because there's no way that communists can be innovative, right? Well, you start to look under the hood, they're looking pretty innovative, more innovative in some ways than the United States. So we're constantly thinking about that. We've been bullish about the European Union and its prospects for as a sort of pole in the multi polar order for years now. And that's one that we're constantly checking in on at to Rob's point, sort of cynically asking ourselves, is this actually happened? Is Europe actually becoming something more than the sum of its sum of its parts? Or are Hungary and Poland and Germany going to keep arguing about stupid things so they're until they're blue in the face and the world has left them behind? And then, of course, thinking about the role of the United States, the mismatch between imperial US foreign policy in a multipolar world and how that affects emerging markets and then other things. But, you know, sometimes it's as down in the weeds. As you know, Rob and I have done projects before that required me to get really specific about Turkish. Gold legislation and and rules about mining rights inside of Turkey because we were looking at a particular particular investment opportunity around that. So it can be very, very high level with the crystal ball thing. It can also be very granular and like, OK, what is this law going to do to this investment in this geography and this time horizon, things like that, so. Just to take the baton a little bit and talk about how that gets implemented in terms of capital allocation. Just I would preface that by saying, you know, Jacob spoke about foxes and hedgehogs. And that's a really important thing to take away because as someone who comes from the investing side, who's worked with Jacob as a geopolitical analyst side by side and actually implementing for a number of years now, I can tell you it's very different from what most people are used to. Because most people who do what Jacob do, they're in the business of selling ideas or selling consulting. And that's all about storytelling and narratives. And a great macro investor once said that when it comes to investing, storytelling is 10% of it and 90% is implementation and flexibility. So if you were to see the actual, you know, the way the sausage gets made in terms of research process and how we're taking some of the things that Jacob is talking about and actually kicking the tires on them, it would be very boring and grey and probabilistic. And, you know, here are our theses and where's the new information? And is this disproving anything? What do we have to to check up on? And that doesn't make for good storytelling, but it makes for good investing. So I would preface it with that. And in terms of specifics, you know, I think, you know, the way that we're implementing right now kind of these core theses that Jacob just talked about. You know, I, I think if you take what, what he's saying and, and you know, boil it down to two investment theses, it really comes down to, you know, that if we're entering a period, you know, that's more multi polar, you're having something like a volatility spiral. You know, this is a term we use a lot where volatility in a lot of different dimensions is going up over the last 10-15 years. That's policy volatility, it's market volatility. It is the volatility within culture, within technology itself. And obviously that has a lot of negative implications, which you know your your listeners will be familiar with. It also has a lot of really positive implications because the same kind of volatility and Oh my God, did that just happen kind of feeling also opens the door to innovative thinking, to innovative technologies. So when you think about one of the core things that we do with families is first protect and how to really think carefully about the protection side. But then also where do you harvest that volatility and all the opportunities that are springing up out of it. And that's mostly about innovation and about technological change and growth coming out of new disruptive technologies. And those are the two things that we spend most of our time thinking about. And then from a geographic standpoint, I think one of the big, big things that we're super focused on that is that is quite different is in a multipolar world, creating portfolios that are truly global portfolios and not, you know, oh, you have your S&P 500, you know, sort of approach. And then you're going to throw some ETFs on the side, like truly starting from scratch with a global view. Where are the poles of power and value creation? What is the true, you know, way to get access to them? How are they interacting? How do you control for a sort of fragmenting supply chains across of those and, and diversify while protecting those are those are big things. But really having that, that global first approach and having the ability to go and to get access to to markets and to invest in markets where, you know, most US based families are currently not thinking about and, and are currently way over exposed to the US. That's a big it's a big part of what we do as well. Yeah. I mean, this is, it's unrelated but related that I can't help but think about investing in entrepreneurship are we're always meant to be artisanal and very bespoke. It's where the name of the firms is so great because these concepts that you're referencing were 100 years ago normal and standardized, but they've kind of been bastardized with the amount of liquidity in the system. And I know you guys feel it there's because there's no shorter to people that will say they do what you do, but there's a lot of ways you're describing what you do that signals from anybody that is a builder understands deeply like the notion that you referenced in, you know, the implementation and flexibility and eerily resembles entrepreneurship and like everyone can have an idea, but the execution is all is where all the devil in the details is that 90% And part of the execution is the flexibility because anybody that's ever started something ultimately knows that like your plans are going to change very quickly. And so you have to be able to navigate that. And it goes back to Jacob. In the beginning, you referenced nobody really understands the the market. You can only get as best as you can in understanding individuals and what will like the interconnected interconnectedness and it kind of titles back to like Steve Jobs and taste. There was something that that world class entrepreneurs and I think investors both have as a taste for the market. They have a taste for how individuals react, how what's happening around corners. And it goes back to, I think Jacob, would you were referencing about like the notion of in the dirt and in the clouds of getting in the weeds in the Turkish mining firm, but also looking at it, how it interconnects at the highest level. And so there's just a lot of like these ideas and how a free market forms is around entrepreneurs and then around investors that are able to see both sides. And you have to be able to understand that. And the majority of the market just fundamentally doesn't have this because they haven't been actually kind of tied back to the fundamentals. And we'll probably talk about like loose monetary policy, you know, has created this structure, but it helps in like really paint a picture. You guys have a deep understanding of what you're doing because this is just how economies have formed. But there's a very big dislocation from fundamentals to like noise in the system. Yeah, no, I mean, absolutely. I think the hardest part of, and this is not just geopolitical analysis, the hardest part of any analysis, whether it's investment analysis or political analysis or cultural analysis, like you name it, it's that you fall in love with your own ideas and you see things that comport with your narrative. You know, my job, I think sometimes sounds sexier than it is. Like the fun part of my job is thinking about the world that are making these predictions about where I think think things are going. But to Rob's point, like I spend 90% of my time looking for things that disprove my ideas. Like that is most of what I spend my time on to see the ways that I am wrong because I am constantly worried that I didn't understand everything because there's no possible way I could understand everything. Right. Like in that sense, it's really about learning more quickly than other people are learning and having my finger on the pulse so that when something happens, I'm going to be able to pivot really quickly. When I was, when I was still doing mostly in the consulting space, for example, I was working, I can't name the companies, but I was working for several different companies and COVID in 2020 happened to everyone. It destroyed supply chains before everyone. Nobody had a solution. But I can tell you there was a huge difference in the people that I worked with, some who had disaster pandemic plans and others who had never thought of it at all. And the ones that had plans and had thought through it and had been looking at these things very closely and took it very seriously when they were like, hey, there's a weird disease in China circulating. This was December 2019. You started to pick up media reports. So I had a couple people who are like, hey, this is this seems weird. Do we need to like think about this? Do we need to start thinking about like disaster plans and things like that versus those who like, no, everything's fine. Like there's going to be no problem. the US government says everything's fine. The World Health Organization says everything's fine. We're not worrying about this. And then like they have no plan when things get taken off the shelf. So yeah, it's, it's that constant push to, to your point of the 90% implementation, anybody can have good ideas, but can you change your mind? Can you take the L and move on and keep punching because you trust your method and your discipline rather than sort of shooting your shot at one thing and then getting really insecure when that one thing goes wrong? There's a lot of different directions we can go in. I'm curious like to try to my, my aim here is to try to wrap in a couple of different things both Jacob and Rob you spoke to in the past 10 minutes or so. So we talked about kind of the investment thesis and the idea of multipolarity global capital allocation, kind of starting from a neutral base and then building out that portfolio globally. We talked about long volatility. It really does sound like a lot of the themes that both of you are focused on and helping your clients preserve and then grow wealth are a lot different than what they were 5-10 years ago. And so I know there's still a lot of traditional finance that's unwilling to let go of how portfolios have been constructed for the past, call it 30 or 40 years, short volatility, 6040, mostly public equity, public fixed income exposure, very heavy concentration in the US. So what you're proposing is kind of vastly different than what mainstream portfolio construction has looked like over the past several decades. And I want to get into that. But I think before doing so just to get a little bit deeper on some of the themes that are actually driving the shift of capital allocation. We talked about again, multi polarity geopolitics, you define it, Jacob. These are themes that are critically important to pay attention to. And maybe a decade ago, to your point, the geopolitical move was to just be long US, right? And and now that's obviously changed. And the other thing too that you mentioned, I think it's really interesting and important to hone in on is the future of China. And so understanding what you said the next five years might look like that is really going to shape a lot of not only the investment thesis, but also I guess risk management I guess is the best way I'd categorize it. So I'm curious, there's a lot of things themes that we've already discussed, but I think before going forward on some of the investment policy or investment framework capital allocation decisions and why that's so different, it might be more helpful to understand what's happening with the two world superpowers right now, the United States and China. And so if we could talk about what you've paid attention to this year, what you're looking at going forward in the United States as it relates to fiscal and monetary policy. You know, there's the big beautiful bill, there's the credit downgrade, there's DOGE, which hasn't really lived up to what expectations were six months ago. I think probably some of us saw that coming just given the fiscal situation. And then you have China as well, which you said is incredibly important to figure out what the next five years might look like. So I'm curious to distill all that thoughts on US, China and where things stand currently in this kind of power competition. And then from there, we can get more into investment frameworks. Yeah, I mean, we could spend 2 hours just talking about the things that you talked about. But I'll, I'll try to do it very succinctly and I'll let rob, I'll let the Rob lead the cavalry charge when it comes to US fiscal and and monetary, because it does relate to these things. I'll tell you that in some, in some sense, I think the damage that Doge had, some of this reckless cutting has done, the assault on American universities, which isn't to say that they didn't need, they weren't needed reform, but the assault on universities, on the assault on international students, like I think that's going to have huge impacts on US innovation and technology going forward. But I think in your question, actually, you just helped show unwittingly how hard it is to process some of these concepts because I reject the notion that there are two world superpowers. If that's true, we're in a bipolar world, then it's the United States and China, it's Cold War 2.0, and we just go back to that mental model and that is possible. That's like when I stay up at night and think, am I wrong about things? That's the scenario that I think could replace the multi polar scenario. But the true multi polar scenario is there are no world superpowers. There are just regional powers that are vying for spheres of influence and trying to make sure they have access to food or energy or the intellectual property or the capital inputs that they need in order for their economies to function. So I think, yes, the United States and China are the two largest economies, and in some ways they are the most important. But I don't think either one of them is at that dominant level of that world superpower level. And I think one of the reasons you see such volatility with U.S. policy is this Trump administration doesn't get that. They think the United States is still the top dog and they think they're making America even greater, that all the things that they're doing are just making America even more powerful and that everyone will bend the knee just because President Trump says so. And I think they're going to be in this short term bias where people will bend the knee in the short term because in the short term, yes, it would be very painful to pick a fight with the Trump administration, with the United States. But many, many countries, even US allies are looking in the mirror and saying this country is not dependable anymore. We're going to need to make 510 year plans for a multi polar world where we can't rely on the US security guarantee or where the US might attack on tariffs to us next because we're starting to run afoul of something for policy there. I'm a good example of what I'm talking about. For me, the so far far this year, the two most important things that have happened in the world. Number one is the break between the United States and Europe. I think when historians look back at 2025, we won't necessarily be talking and we still have six months to go in the year. But if we just had these six months, you know, it would be all the things that the Trump administration did to break the transatlantic partnership, which has basically been in place since the end of World War 2. In 1945, if you had a German election and a chancellor appointed who has literally said we cannot trust the United States anymore, Germany must rearm itself. You have German auto companies that are selling facilities or, you know, signing contracts to produce weapons and tanks and artillery shells. Again, this always makes me nervous like, you know, you get some people in the United States say no, Germany should spend their fair share on defense. I don't know. I saw the movie where they spent a lot on defense. Do do we really want to relive that movie? Anyway, I'm I'm a little I'm rambling there a little. But the point being like, I think that's a huge thing. Also, I mean, I've been obsessed with this since over the weekend, as Rob can attest, what Ukraine did to Russia over the weekend. That might be the biggest thing that happens this decade. For all I know. It used to be that long stern, the ability to strike at an enemy target over long distances. That was a commodity only owned by great powers. And over the weekend, Ukraine with roughly 100 drones costing $600 a pop roughly. You could go buy the drones yourself if you want to, took out 1/3 of Russia's strategic bomber fleet, strategic bombers that cost $100 million per bomber. And when you start to put that in context, I think about some of the things that have happened geopolitically in the last 12 to 18 months. You've got a ragtag group of non state Houthi militants in Yemen firing off missiles and rockets in the Persian Gulf such that entire supply chains avoid the Persian Gulf. Now everybody's going around Africa and the United States under both Biden and Trump haven't been able to stop them. They've bombed them, they've warmed them, they've threatened them. The Houthis are still sitting there and shipping is still going around Africa. Not a very unipolar power. Think about what Israel did to Hezbollah with the pagers, where they hijacked international supply chains, input some explosives and some devices that they knew were going to this militia inside of Lebanon and decapitated them all. Cool if you don't like jihadist militias, but not so cool if you are an important human being or somebody that might be targeted for different things. And can somebody hijack a supply chain and put something into a device or something to spy on you or to hurt you or to hurt your different country? Like all these things are sort of in our face about that. So I think that's another thing to think about. And it gets to this, the intersection of technology and how that relates to governments and how things are working together. So we can delve into that too. And then the last one, I would just say, you know, sort of ask the things that I'm talking about. I don't want to Pooh Pooh China. But for me, the thing that keeps me up about China is not necessarily the economy. And I know that, I mean, Rob doesn't have any more hair to burn off of his head based on me saying that, but I'm sure inside he's like, stop it, Jacob. But at least geopolitically, the most important thing for me is the health of Xi Jinping, because as long as Xi Jinping is calling the shots, China's fairly predictable to me. It's fairly clear what they're trying to do, and I don't have a lot of doubt about what they're trying to do. The problem with China is the political structure, at least to the extent that we can analyze it, looks extremely brittle. If this guy has a heart attack or if he, you know, slips on a banana peel and has a stroke or something like that, there is no successor. That's by design. He got rid of all the successors. He's purged all of the rivals. And so if you get to a situation situation where Xi Jinping is not calling the shots and he's getting up there in age, then political stability in China starts to look very different. I think China has shown market resilience over the past couple of years, dealing with lots of structural economic problems. And I think that resilience will continue. And I think they have a lot of leverage in the multi polar world and in the trade war that the Trump administration is I think mistakenly picking with China. But the thing that keeps me up at night is, well, is Xi Jinping going to be around to follow through on some of these things? Because I don't see that that the system itself. And maybe I'm wrong about this, but it looks to me like the system is brittle. I'm in that very narrow sense. So those are the three things that I would say I'm looking at this year. And maybe Rob wants to weigh in on on some of the others that you talk about. Yeah, I can, I can run with that. And then ultimately take take us all the way back to 6040 and how we get to finance theory and and all the highfalutin stuff. I think, you know, in in a lot of different themes, what Jacob was describing as sort of the asymmetry of power is changing and, you know, whether it's military or economic or what have you. And that's sort of the recurring theme. And that is multipolarity, of course, in finance terms and how, you know, we think about that. I think the events of the last two months have really been a strong confirmation of our thesis. And what I mean is like, if you grow up, you know, being trained in finance, you get used to thinking of the US as the top dog just in theory terms, like the US Treasury bond is literally the risk free asset. That's what it's called, the risk free asset. We don't have a risk free asset anymore. And the realization of that is quite shocking. And it up ends a lot of the traditional models of how people allocate to assets and how they allocate internationally. And everyone's sort of familiar with what's going on and, and, and why that is. So I won't elaborate on that point, but that's the biggest earthquake of of the last 40 years in terms of how to think about investing, how to think about capital allocation is that pre pre eminent US position is, is, you know, wounded and it doesn't look like it's coming back. So that would be, you know, sort of the the very high level take away in terms of, you know, what we're actually doing in terms of implementation. And specifically with regard to China, I think as Jacob explains, we're quite bullish, but also quite cognizant that there are risks there geopolitically. And what we try to do, without getting too into the details is identify those areas of China that are extremely attractive from a growth standpoint to find these champions essentially. That are trading at tiny fractions of the multiples that you know similar companies in the US trade at. Just just to put some meat on the bone of that. If you were to look at the beginning of this year, BYD which has the same revenue as Tesla, they both at the at the end of last year did 100 billion of revenue. Byd's market valuation was $100 million a $100 billion. Excuse me, Tesla's market valuation was $900 billion. So very similar businesses, same exact financials, 1 trades at 9 times the valuation as another. And obviously that's a little extreme example, but that's not an isolated case. When you look at sort of Chinese assets and how they've been basically left abandoned by people who are thinking emotionally and, and, and all, you know, the things that we know. So just seizing those opportunities itself is a is a big part of what we do along specific areas of technology, in particular where China is developing, you know, clear superiority and an ability to go into export markets and really drive growth in addition to domestic markets. So trying to hedge some of those risks that Jacob talked about politically and and sort of those tail risks of a Xi Jinping banana peel event. So so yeah, I mean, we can, we can get into specific areas if you if you guys want. But how this ties into, you know, the investment industry and conventional wisdom, so to speak. The one point I would make on that is we're a boutique and our job is to work for the families that we work with and to take care of them. That's very different from what most of the investment industry is. The investment industry is there to sell you products. And the term that I would use is institutional inertia, because most investment institutions emerge to fight the last war. They emerge to capture what is working and then sell that in whatever number of iterations over and over and stuff the goose full of product. And now we're sitting in a position where we just had a 40 year period where the big things were. Up until recently, stocks and bonds moved in opposite directions. So you could create everything around the notion that that's going to always be the case. That's number one. Number two, the US is going to outperform everybody. And, and that's all you really need to think about. And #3 private markets are, you know, the bee's knees, and that's superior to public equities. So the more private equity, the more venture capital you can do, the better. Everyone wants to be like David Swenson to the point where about a decade ago, the liquidity premium went negative. In other words, people were paying extra just to lock up their money. So the whole industry has grown up around those themes where it's US focused, you know, selling you private products and, and everything has revolved around that and around these asset allocation models that assume the 6040 framework where bonds are a hedge until they're not. And I only bring that up to say, you know, it's going to be very difficult to transition out of those institutions because all of these institutions have grown up around those ideas. And you don't change your stripes overnight. Whereas A boutique, you just do what works and you move. We're not selling products, we're just implementing solutions and figuring out what is happening and how do you respond. And that I think is our, that's our approach and why it's a nice place to work cuz you have that flexibility. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot there that really resonates. I know we have a core focus around Bitcoin and you guys have a component of that, but there's a lot of themes there. I love the institutional inertia component because it's something we talk about a lot when we reference these corporate treasuries adopting Bitcoin. It's like the it's the undefinition of alpha if everyone's doing it. And there there's, you know, it's that same framework that you're thinking about in the 6040 layered into this new asset class. And so it ultimately is discounting a lot of the counterparty risk and execution risk that nobody talks about. And I think to like summarize, at least in my mind, how I've always thought about because I didn't come from the traditional finance background. I came from the traditional tech world and then started to understand what money is. And then you start to just discern, well, if you're thinking at a micro ultimate boutique, right, the individual, it's like, well, I want the thing that has the properties that are going to reduce volatility, reduce counterparty risk, reduce the basement. Like these are natural things that the market has been short counterparty risk. And where we're going to, based on a lot of stuff Jacob and you shared is we're going to be long counter in our party risking long volatility over the next 10 to 20 years. And if you're in those positions, you have to start re underwriting all these assets. And so like anecdotes like the Russian Treasuries, debasement of bonds and just the currency and generally over multiple inflated equity multiples or private placement illiquidity. It's kind of how SUNY and I started chatting about this was just how crazy it is on the private placement side and people trying to get out of those positions at 50% discounts or whatever they are just so they can get back into liquid assets. That's kind of the core of like what we focus on. Why we see this like Bitcoin gold trade is so paramount is because you can start to really like chop at a lot of these things that exist in the market that historically people haven't really indexed as a problem. And they're going to wake up to a rude awakening and realizing, Oh my God, like I'm really long potential insolvency across the board. And that's a scary proposition. Yeah, well, you said it right there. And the term liquidity is unfortunately for many people, they are locked into the trend of the last war because they don't have liquidity. And that's, you know, the theme du jour, which you're seeing right now as all these vultures are raising, you know, fifteen $25 billion secondaries funds is, you know, it's the first step of trying to, you know, get your get your foot out of the trap. But that's not going to be an easy or a short process. And, you know, if, if you're listening to this and you're getting told by someone, hey, that you should really get into private assets, just be aware the way that they usually get out of these as they dump them on, you know, unsuspecting people. So be skeptical of of that pitch. Yeah, we talked about it. I mean Jackson had a background involved in when you think about like ALTS, like the notion of Alts alternative investments, right or private credit. Like when I hear that, it just sounds like further and further on the risk curve and speculative because people couldn't hit the hurdle rate of inflation or what the S&P. So they naturally had to be sold to go to these other products that are, you know, underperform when you look at it in aggregate. And it's pretty wild to know you guys have to feel this of like the market sentiments doesn't explain any of this or tell anybody that there's other viable solutions that provide more optionality, less alpha or just decay in general around the asset and they can maintain a liquid profile. And again, they don't have to have a boutique firm explain it. It's just not out there in the lexicon. And it, and I think that's part of like the the changing world is this information. If you can seek it out, can find podcasts like this and others and realize that they're you don't actually need to pay somebody 1% to just protect or or store your wealth. Just a quick break. I really like the framework that the Bespoke Group uses for evaluating investments. It's not only about what do you invest in, but it is how and where do you invest. And with Bitcoin, the question is how do you secure your Bitcoin for the long term? And that is why we started on ramp, because as the price moves from 1000 to 10,000 to 100,000 to 1,000,000, the landscape for risk and threat vectors is quite frankly changing. People are concerned about physical threats. They're concerned about exchange collapses. They're concerned about mismanaging their keys or their children not being able to access their Bitcoin inheritance. These are all things that need to be fleshed out sooner than later. And so at Onramp, that is exactly what we help our clients with. If you want to learn more about how we can work with you, head to onrampbitcoin.com. You can book a consultation. You can also shoot me a note directly jackson@onrampbitcoin.com. Be happy to have a conversation. Hope you enjoy the rest of the episode. Yeah, I mean, I would love to chat on. There's always so much you can cover in a podcast and especially when you have Rob and Jacob on, there's probably hours that we can go into. One thing that I think would be interesting and and impactful for the audience is just to Rob, maybe dig more into the statement that you made that may seem obvious to you. And it's probably somewhat obvious to a lot of our listeners given it is more of a, let's say, sound money focused capital allocation framework that they use personally or as a firm. But the US Treasury market is, to your point, the underpinning of the global financial system or was once the underpinning of the global financial system. But the US has been very fiscally irresponsible over the past several decades, continuing to run I think deficits 45 out of 50 years. And so it's both sides of the aisle, right. The basement deficit spending is just kind of baked into the system. And so I think it was last week or maybe the week prior with 30 year bond yields hitting 5.1%, highest since 2007. That is alarming to me from the standpoint of how much debt there's actually been accumulated in the financial system because in 2007, I don't have the number off the top of my head, but it was a fraction of what the federal debt was today. And I think private debt has grown pretty dramatically as well. And so I'm curious just like digging more into just the RE underwriting of the US Treasury and how that ultimately impacts these capital allocation decisions that we're speaking about. We could also if you want, want to go there or feel the need to tie it in any way. Japan is interesting too, just JGB market and volatility there. So I'm curious just how you guys think it could be either for one of you, how you're thinking about the RE underwriting of the US Treasury and just volatility and bond yields there, just structural debasement baked into that? Yeah, I'll start with the treasuries and then maybe we can talk about Japan and and Jacob can get into the geopolitics of Japan too, because that's really relevant in that case. Jacob used the word constraints earlier, and I think that is really key. It's one thing to sit around and look at what's happened in the last few months and say, oh, you know, wow, if only I'd seen that coming. I think really what we try to focus on doing is anticipating and anticipating based on those constraints. And if you looked at where the United States was even six or seven years ago, I mean, in short, tax receipts have gone down as a percentage of GDP and spending has irrevocably gone up for reasons that politically are very, very, very difficult to change. Like those are. That's the Cliffs Notes version of the constraints. So unless you see some powerful force that's going to come in and change that and you know, there's all sorts of Speaking of probabilistic, you know, scenario analysis, like we don't even want to go down that, but you really have to just start with that is that that is the set up and that's what's playing out over time. And it's going to continue to play out over time. And you're monitoring for what are the signposts of how they're going to react and what are they going to do given those constraints that they have? What are the tools in their toolkit? Is it pegging yields? Well, that has implications. Is it, you know, is it actual, you know, a move toward physical consolidation that has major implications. So, you know, without going down all the rabbit holes of the different scenarios, I think really starting with that assumption and, and assuming that that's going to continue is where you have to begin. And there's no, there's no easy way out of that problem and it's going to be a major problem. So we, you know, we have not been involved in any sort of credit with our clients or, or duration risk quite, you know, deliberately. And that's, that is something that we that's is going to be part of the playbook unless something big changes and getting to some of the stuff that we shared, you know, on the resilient portfolio paper and, and Switzerland and Singapore. You know, a lot of what we do, like when you look at the constraints and sort of politically in the USA, lot of what we do for clients is identify, OK, where are the special places where those constraints are different? Where are the incentives different? And finding geographies that are unique in that sense that have a strong incentive not to debase, not to run deficits, not to peg yields, but to run, you know, policies that protect wealth and protect capital because their survival depends on doing that. You know, Singapore being a a very prominent example. And we do a lot in Singapore. That's a big part of it too. So, you know, that's kind of the, the big picture thing. Japan is is an interesting one in particular. And again, you have to look at each of these individually and have this sort of deep nuanced understanding that kind of geopolitical analysis plus macro and just history and all that stuff put together gives you the thing that's different about Japan. I mean, virtually everything is different between the Japan situation in the US, but one big thing I would highlight is that the net investment position of Japan is very different. Japan has a ton of debt, but they also have a ton of foreign held assets because they've been running a current account surplus, you know, since the the Second World War basically. And that is a very different situation when you're thinking about sustainability of that debt, what are their options that they have to get out of it? And we don't have to go through all the details of that. But Japan, I think, is, I don't want to say fundamentally healthier the United States, just to be clear, we're very positive on many aspects of the United States. But this is 1 aspect that's a particular problem. Japan has many problems of its own, but that's an aspect where I think they have more flexibility than maybe people assume who are taking the US, you know, context and trying to apply it to the Japan situation. Yeah, I'll chime in and say, you know, we were talking about rewriting value of assets and things like that. In some sense you have to re rate like what US power looks like. And I think this is actually a really difficult thing to do analytically because you have to say two things at the same time. You have to say the United States is not going to collapse. It's not like, you know, we're not headed towards civil War 2 point O and like run for the hills and everything's going to be terrible. All I'm saying with the with the multipolar world is that relative US power to other countries in the world is declining. So whereas 40 years ago when Iran itself was shooting missiles and rockets into the Persian Gulf and the US government said, that's enough of that, we're going to bomb you into the middle of the 14th century. If you keep doing that and they stopped versus to today where the Houthis are like, yeah, take your best shot. We're going to keep firing off the Rockets. There's like a there's a, a disparity that has opened up between what the United States can say and what other countries are going to do. But that doesn't mean that there aren't pockets of innovation. That doesn't mean that the United States is not still like one of the most powerful and richest countries in the world. It also is not to say that the US dollar is going to lose its status as a global reserve currency. Go look back at the history of reserve currencies. It took not just one but two world wars for the pound sterling to lose its status to the US dollar. So most people are not going to incur the costs to make major shifts like that unless you get a truly cataclysmic event. And I don't see that cataclysmic event necessarily on the horizon now. What I do think, though, has happened, and this goes back to our conversation about are you thinking about the individual person or are you thinking about economics and demographics, things like this? Even when it comes to Treasury yields, when you think about the yield rising or the value of the dollar falling, what you're really talking about there is a lack of confidence in the United States. And that's what's happened around the world. The policies of not just this Trump administration, but the Biden administration, the hairpin turn from the first Trump administration, the presence of populist in the system. You know, whether it's a Bernie Sanders or an AOC, like you start to look at the entire political environment. If you realize there's only populist here, there's no fiscal conservative anymore. There's nobody who wants to defend the international LED, you know, global order. It's all make America first, just disagreeing about which policies are going to make America first and make America great again. And so if you're a foreign country and you're looking at that, you're thinking, I don't have confidence in the United States anymore. And I think you're seeing that all over the world. One thing I think that is particularly interesting about the the Trump administration this time around, one of my favorite podcast is David McWilliams. He's a former central banker from the Bank of Ireland. He was, he made his name because he was a head on the 2008 financial crisis. He was sitting there in Ireland, a banging on the table that something bad was coming. Nobody listened to him. And then turned out that he kind of got it right. But I was listening to a podcast of his about six months ago, and he talked about how, you know, as a central banker or as a political official, your job, you're not going to avert the crisis. Like, eventually the bug is going to hit the windshield. Like, eventually debt is going to go beyond the capacity of the US government to pay for it. That's what a loss of confidence means. But the job of the politician or the central banker or the bureaucrat is to kick the can as far down the road as possible. You're trying to buy yourself as much time as possible on the hope that something can save you, whether it's growth or technology or some change in the system, and at least let it be the next persons problem so you don't get blamed for it. I think the one thing we can say about this Trump administration is they're doing the opposite. They look like they're accelerating the crisis. So the trends that Rob just talked about, they've been going on for 10 years. They were going to happen for another 20. I think the most interesting thing about what's happened in the first six months here is that by doing what they've done, and I think because they have a mistaken sort of framework for how to think about the world, they're bringing the crisis forward. We don't even have a phrase for what is the opposite of kicking the can. They're like going fishing for the can and trying to bring the can as close as they possibly can as quickly as possible. And that's causing that lack of confidence in general. And the reason a country like Japan is so interesting to me is Japan is arguably the country in the world that is most dependent on the United States. the United States literally conquered Japan in World War 2 and remade and refashioned Japan in its image. And all of the economic growth and all of the things that happened in Japan were a result of the United States basically using Japan in that context, to the point that Japan doesn't even have really a military that is allowed to take offensive action to protect Japanese interests. That's something that, you know, hawkish Japanese politicians have been trying to change, but they can't do it. And one of the most interesting things that happened that has happened so far this year, right after Liberation Day and after all the tariffs, Japan, not China, not Turkey, not not Japan came out and said, we're not doing anything until the Trump administration takes tariffs back to where they were before. We're not, we're not going to disassociate from China. We're not going to, we're not going to like, no, terrorists need to go back to where they were before. We're not listening. And if even if you've lost, even Japan with all of the exposure that they have and all of the vulnerabilities that they have, like that really is a crisis of confidence in US leadership over time. We're talking about Japan. There's a election in South Korea today. It looks like the the left progressive candidate won. He's probably going to take South Korea in a direction that is away from alliance with the United States and is more engaging with ASEAN or with China, better relations with North Korea, trying to position South Korea in that way. I think you'll see the same thing with Japan. And one of the reasons Japan becomes a really interesting investment position, I mean, has been for a couple years, is because if you look at Japanese history, Japan is one of these countries that it can be. It can have a lot of infighting and a lot of bickering and things can be static, you know, for a long period of time. But when Japan wakes up and when it decides to make a change, it makes change with a level of political will and cohesion that very, very few countries can summon. And if you're Japan and you're seeing all these threats emerge around you, you know, you can say, yes, we could talk about Japanese debt. We can talk about the yield and Japanese government bonds, all these other things. The other thing to talk about with Japan is, OK, but are we getting to the point where the Japanese public is realizing there's a problem and they're going to do one of those hairpin turns like the Meiji Restoration or like the creation of the Japanese Empire in the 1930s? Not necessarily that they're going to do it, but history suggests that when Japan reaches this kind of inflection point, it's going to respond in a meaningful way. And fight against those constraints as much as possible. So I think ultimately, to boil down what I'm saying here, you know, when you think about Treasury yields, when you think about the value of the US dollar, for me it's about the world is re rating their confidence interval in the United States being a protector of the values, the international rules and standards that it's upheld for a period of 50 to 70 years. And most countries in the world are reaching a sort of two-part conclusion #1 we can't afford to buck the United States today. We're just too exposed and we're too dependent. But damned if we're not going to fix that situation in the next 5 to 10 years. And here are the things that we need to do, even if it causes pain in the medium term, in order to get away from that dependence on the United States. And that is going to affect the United States like it's nice to say America first and make America great again. Let's see what happens 10 years from now when, OK, America's first and America's great again, but you don't have this global alliance network that was literally working to make your products cheaper and to grease the wheels of your economy. It's going to be a rude awaiting. Yeah, I have maybe a difficult proposition or ask and if you if you can't answer it, no worries, but I feel like you'll you'll accept or enjoy it is without having being transparent the knowledge and depth that you do. Maybe this is America first century question I'm asking, but also because we live here is if the bug was going to hit the windshield no matter what, And what would be like the opposite stance or the the angle where the Trump administration is accelerating that? Like what would be the reason for it or the positive outcome to accelerate it? Because I think we'd all agree they're not like they have some idea or some thesis or some strategy. I don't know if it's really apparent to anybody here, but we can only pontificate or theorize. But just curious, like what would be the other side of that token of they've accelerated for a particular reason that would be in America's best interest? Well, let me take the easy part of that first and then we'll we'll do the hard part and I accept your challenge. So this is fun and I'm sure Rob will want to weigh in as well. There's no 5th dimensional chest that's happening here. There is no grand strategy that one person is authoring and is pushing through this Trump administration. In this sense, look a bit looks very much like the first one, which is instead of a bureaucratic or executive presidency, it's a courtly presidency. Everybody must come and kiss the ring. And President Trump must decide what's going to happen and he'll decide or he won't decide. In addition to that, he has surrounded himself with people who disagree with each other. And if you read, like, you know, HR Mcmaster's book, you read the interviews of James and their experience of dealing with Trump in the first administration, they said things about him, like, first of all, he's a natural contrarian, which I relate to. I'm also a natural contrarian. But that means in a meeting, he'll just take the opposite point of view sometimes because he thinks that that makes him look smart. And sometimes the person who has his ear last is the one that gets him to push policy through. You saw this around the tariffs because, I mean, I'm sure you saw that Wall Street Journal reporting where Navarro was on the other end of the White House. And so Besson and Lutnick got in there and said, hey, like, you've caught too far. Do you see what Treasury yields are doing? You see what the dollar is doing? We're really in trouble. You need to walk back some of these things. Don't listen to Peter Navarro so much. And he walked it back. I think if you're looking though, for the positive outcome or why the Trump administration want might want to do this, the strategy, man, the man with the plan is Scott Besson. And I think Scott Besson was thinking, OK, we can use the threat of tariffs and we can maybe drive down interest rates and we can monetize the balance sheet of, you know, US physical assets and things like that. And together we can make the debts. And also, you know, they're also has to be fiscal conservatism as part of that. So get Elon in here. Let's remake the government. Let's make it more efficient. Again, if you put all of those pieces together, yes, you can make a compelling case that's out-of-the-box thinking that combines the best of Wall Street with the best of Silicon Valley with a politician who doesn't give a damn about his future or doesn't care about, you know, the conventions of power. He just wants to get things done and make things better for America. The problem is Trump cut the legs out from underneath Besant with Liberation Day and with the tariffs. The heavy-handed way in which he pushed through the tariffs and scared away US allies and other countries that might have cooperated with the United States to do this basically makes that plan impossible. So even if we grant that there was the strategic plan and that Besant was the holder of the plan, I think the way the Trump administration rolled things out here in the first six months, which was OK, today it's Besant, then it's Navarro, then it's Lutnick's plan, then it's Trump decided this, oh, then it's Besant again, Then, oh, we're doing tariffs. We're not doing tariffs. Tariffs again. You know, it was just sort of all over the place. You've got that confidence interval declining. So even if you got rid of all the noise and said, let's go back to the master plan, let's go back to best sense master plan, Trump is going to be disciplined and support the plan and do those things in order to make these fundamentals better. I still think you're going to have the problem where Japan is going to be like, OK, but we don't trust you anymore. And China's going to say, OK, but we refine all the rare earths and we have 35% manufacturing share. So unless you want to drive up, you know, the prices for all the things that you import from us, you're going to have to do what we want. We're not going to do what you want. Europe is not turning around. Germany is not going to say, OK, JK, we'll stop making tanks. Again. You've convinced us everything is fine. Like these are not genies that you, that you put back in the bottle. But I'm, I'm curious if Rob agrees with that or if I characterize that correctly. Because I, I do think in the mind of Scott Besson, there was a plan and that he thought that he could use the best parts of Trump in order to make some major structural changes to the United States. And I think Besson found out that dealing with Trump was harder than he thought, just like Elon found out that it's actually harder to reform the bureaucracy of the US government than it is to probably send someone to Mark. Yeah. And I, I think that that captures it best in thinking that there was a plan and, and getting to what you're asking, Michael, is there a scenario where it is good to, you know, go fishing for the can and bring it forward and, and deal with something in advance? And, and I think the answer is yes, because there are structural problems like obviously this is a structural, as we said, constraints. Constraints are what are leaving the United States to this growing wedge between expenditures and and income. If you want to reduce it to that one number, right, all the issues. But the problem is, as Jacob pointed out, is there is no plan. And you know, the, the methods of the Trump administration are, are like the methods of the Joker in The Dark Knight. I am an agent of chaos. There is, it's not a, an agent of structural reform and hard decisions and careful thinking about how do we get out of this mess and do the difficult things that we need to eventually do. If that were the case, I think it would be, it would be different. I, I think Trump is sort of a byproduct of, of the, the structural problems that have got us into this mess. And as that byproduct is not someone who's coming in to necessarily fix them or address them in any cogent way. So, you know, that's not particularly a good outlook. But one thing I would just follow it up with is like you have to always discriminate between the real assets in the economy, which are people who know how to do things, which are businesses that are excellent at what they like, all of these things that we are, we're aware of. And then the financial economy and a lot of the problems are on the financial side. And that's not to say that debasement, you know, financial issues, like the issue is we have this looming financial problem and dealing with it could have very real world effects. Like right now, the real world, you know, real asset side of the US economy is really good in, in many ways in, in many places. And obviously there's, there's, there's issues and, and things that we can talk about, but a restructuring could have implications that that feed into that and hurt that. And and that's sort of one of the key questions is if that's the crisis that we're bringing on like now yields are going like this now something is sooner going to have to be done or is going to, you know, is going to happen. You know, whether we like it or not. How does that impact the real economy? How does it impact human capital in the US? How does it impact organizational capital? Because that's the stuff that longer term really matters. And that's really, you know, the interrelation between those two things is, is kind of the tricky thing to to plan for and understand, but that's, that's where we're at. Yeah. I just want to piggyback on that and say one more thing too, which is to to supply a little bit of historical context because the United States has been here before. This is not the first time the United States is going through this kind of structural reset or the need for a structural reset like this. It's one of the pitfalls of democracy that it can't get itself organized to deal with problems. Usually things have to get bad enough so that you elect leaders who will make, who will make the economy take its medicine or who will make the hard decision. It's much easier for authoritarian regimes like, say, China to say we have major structural things we have to do. And I don't have time to brook dissent. That's why Xi Jinping has become a dictator. Chinese leaders for, you know, since Deng Xiaoping, it was you get 2 terms and then you're out and your successor is appointed in your second term and it's ruled by consensus. I'm not saying it's not a dictatorship, but there was a clear establishment of how power was supposed to pass from leader to leader. Xi Jinping has gotten rid of all that, and he's gotten rid of all that because China has many of the same structural problems that we're talking about. They will part of the globalized world. They also partied like it was crazy. They have incredible wealth disparity in that country and all sorts of structural issues related to debt and local government debt that we could spend a lot of time talking about. And so Xi Jinping says, OK, I need to be able to make the real estate companies suffer because they didn't listen to me. And I have to make sure that nobody's going to come and knife me in the back when I do some of these difficult things. That's not going to happen in a democracy. And I think for the United States, I think we're still very, very early in this. The United States economy, even with the things that have happened in the last six months, is doing great. We've been doing great relative for a couple of years. the Fed has been thinking about having to raise interest rates because inflation is running too hot, because things are going so well. And I think we're at an age of decadence. I think we're arguing about things that don't actually matter, like we're having arguments about what bathroom people should go to and all these other different issues. Like most Americans are not feeling the type of pain that they felt in the 1920s, in the early 1930s, or in the stagflation era of the late 1970s. And those are historical examples of where things got so bad in the economy that you did get a reset of the US government. The Great Depression gives us Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the refounding of the Republic and the New Deal. And you can disagree with the New Deal and you can say that wasn't the New Deal that saved America, okay? It was the confidence that FDR reinjected into the system with the combo World War 2 that allowed the United States to rise out of that. Same with Jimmy Carter and stagflation. I think Jimmy Carter had the unfortunate yet unfortunate timing. He got caught holding the bag, but it was Reagan who came in and ushers in deregulation and everything that goes afterwards. So I think that you're going to eventually get a point where things are going to get so bad in the US economy where you do get politicians who have to make a hard decision. But that's not this president. And I don't think it's really ever been this president. I don't I don't think he's sort of said about that. And I think the the cautionary tale is there was a third time in U.S. history where things got this bad or where you had a bug that was going to hit a windshield. This obviously, and that was the 1850s and we saw which path the United States chose sort of in that into the 1860s. In general, I think we can avoid that. I actually think once the United States metabolizes some of this, it will probably be stronger for it. But we've gone through these periods of history and time. The question I think you asked for, especially for, you know, folks that are in the US, is what flavor of ideology is going to bring the solution because right now it's up for grabs. It could come from the right. Maybe it's sort of a real deregulation and fiscal conservatism and unleashed growth and public private partnership and monetize the balance sheet of the United States. Like that's one path. Another path is the door of the left, which is raise taxes up to 50 and 60 and 70%. Balance the budget that way. Take it from the wealthy and make sure that you're going to, you know, the wealth inequalities rise in the United States. Make the rich pay their fair share. You can hear that populist rhetoric already on the left. I think whatever the solution is going to be, it's going to be up for grabs. And a lot of it will be about timing and personality and things like that. But this administration, I don't think it's actually bringing the can forward. If they wanted to bring the can forward, they would have had to combine protectionist trade policy with massive fiscal outlays to increase the training of human beings to go work in factories and build infrastructure and factories in the United States itself, along with very, very close partnerships with close allies that could fill in some of the gaps here. And then, you know, also getting rid of some of the fluff around the budget and the deficit instead of going after things like international students at Harvard University. Like, that's not the stuff you do if your economy is really in crisis and you're dealing with a serious issue. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. I appreciate you running through that. I think we'd be remiss because I know we have about 10 minutes. I want to be conscious of time on scarce assets and hard assets and where they fit into kind of some of the portfolio theory. And also maybe piggybacking off of any of the playbook with Bescent, specifically around gold. And we saw some of the flows globally, you know, shift in the past six months and then BTC. How you guys think about either that in the toolkit and also we've seen China as a net buyer, but then also just Bitcoin and how you think about that in general in the geopolitical landscape, neutral assets? I could take that one. So the way that we think about this is sort of like a a barbell of sorts. If you want to think of it at the very high level, gold and Bitcoin are real assets, but they're also liquid. And that's a big difference from a lot of the other real assets that we're talking about, whether it's artworks or collectibles or real estate or you know, even private businesses. So they play a very special role in client portfolios as a, as a protector, A protector and debasement, A protector against inflation, which when you're dealing with the families that we work with really on that generational time frame, that's how you lose. You lose because of on the one hand, family conflict lawsuits like things like that, that are on the how to own side. When you look at the what to own side, it's it's currency debasement or it's, you know, just massive malinvestment or bad allocation that results in some huge problem. So Bitcoin and golds are sort of central port, central parts of that real asset side of the barbell, along with durable currencies, among which are things like the Singapore dollar, things like the Swiss franc. And the the common denominator among all those things is that they are liquid. And that is key because you need to retain that flexibility to, to move, to respond. So these things like we just described 8 different scenarios of key things that we don't know exactly what's going to happen, how's the US going to respond? What's going to happen in China? If you don't have liquidity to adjust and be the fox, then you're in trouble. And it doesn't matter what real assets you own, you're stuck. And it's, it's not optimal in that way. So, so yeah, Bitcoin and gold as a liquid real assets coupled with those currencies is a, a really, really big portion of what we do. And then on the other side, you know, the, the corollary is that real assets, they don't, they don't do anything. They just exist, right? Like, like why do, why is gold the precious asset? It's, it's because it's literally the only asset that won't degrade. It just, it just sits there and Bitcoin just exists. But they don't, they're not, they're not value accumulating assets. They are real assets against the backdrop of depreciating currencies. So the other side of the barbell has to be in this volatile environment, where are the opportunities being unleashed and particularly around innovation and certain areas of innovation and aligning your capital to those globally to, to organizations that have sort of that are squishy. They're resilient because they're squishy, not because they're hard, because they can flex and adapt and they're composed of people and intellectual property that can that can change and move to new markets. And but there's some resilient core to what they do that's very difficult to dislodge. So those are the two sides of in most cases, what we're building for client portfolios with, you know, certain niche things, you know, used to complement that. But really thinking in terms of that barbell, what indoors, you know, everything within the portfolio enjoys, but what is the, the real asset, the hard asset? And then on the other side, what is the innovation asset that's going to be your your offense? And I appreciate the question because it allows me to explore an idea that I'm working on that is not fully formed. So entering full Fox mode, which is that if geopolitics has many blind spots, as all disciplines and frameworks do, one of its biggest is that it over indexes on the power of the state. And that makes sense because it's literally, it was literally a tool that was created to understand how states deal with each other. That's like the geopolitical methodology from the late 1800s. But for a large part of my career, I would do that. I would over index on the power of the state. We mentioned Peter Zion earlier. You probably remember he went on Joe Rogan. And I forget what Bitcoin was at when he went on, but Rogan asked him like, all right, well, yeah. Where, where do you think, you know, it was when Bitcoin was in one of its troughs? And he asked Peter something like, you know, how far, how much more down do you think it's going to go? And Peter was like 0 and said it very flippantly. And I thought that that was very flippant. But also I think that spoke to a bias that most geopolitical analysts had a Bitcoin because there was this thing that was separate and it wasn't related to the power of the state. And of course the state was going to crush it. And I was talking actually with Matt Mcclintock about this just last week. And he, he shared with me this, this joke that everybody buys Bitcoin at the price that they deserve. And I, I sort of have to say that analytically, I've been reformulating how I think about this in just the last couple of months, in part because of that kicking the cans scenario. There was a certain level of complacency for me about the dollar in particular and about Fiat currency in general because I thought we had 20 or 30 years before the system was really going to, you know, have to reckon with itself. I thought we were going to be able to keep kicking the can. And that thinking, you know, too early about this. You were sort of ignoring what was in front of you for fears that were unwarranted about the future. And the way that things have developed really not just in the first term administration, but over the last 12 months and some of this volatility spiral that Rob has talked about has made me re evaluate that in a huge way. Because I see the crisis is accelerated and I see the debasement of currency is accelerated. And I see that populism is proliferating. And that the sort of velocity of populism and the things that are being talked about are accelerating in ways that for me are like 10 or 15 years ahead of where I thought they were going to be. So for me, like when you're thinking specifically about Bitcoin, that's one of the things that makes me sort of re evaluated it because I think you're going to get in a situation where individuals, even countries are going to think about reclaiming sovereignty for themselves and for a family. That might mean getting rid of currency risk and Bitcoin away is a way to do that. For countries, that might mean we don't want to have the dollar be our unit of currency anymore. Like think about how El Salvador has really been at the forefront here. There's a lot of nebulous, tricky moral issues when talking about the Buchele government. And are they good or are they bad? They bet big on Bitcoin apart because their economy got dollarized in the 90s and they didn't want to be exposed to the US dollar. And that looked sort of silly even five years ago. To a geopolitical analyst, it looks positively sort of genius when I'm sitting at the situation today, when you think about it. And then, you know, this is not a fully formed thought. The last thing I'll just say is as I'm thinking about this myself, watching the White House embrace Bitcoin and cryptocurrency to the extent that they have to me is also, it's sort of a cautionary tale here because you have the Trump family itself has sort of woken up to the possibility and potential of this. And I'm not sure that that affiliate, that that affinity is necessarily going to be good for Bitcoin in the long run. Because Bitcoin is supposed to be the apolitical thing. It's supposed to be the thing that gets you out of some of this political risk. And yet here is the US government saying, no, no, like the Trump administration and the Trump family is going to be running around making all sorts of deals with cryptocurrency. And this goes back to what I'm talking about with the bug with the windshield. Because I think you also can imagine scenarios where things get really bad in the US economy. And then do people remember, hey, do you remember that when they were doing tariffs and things like that, they were also cutting deals in the Gulf and making, you know, Trump coins and having dinner and talking about Bitcoin currency reserves and things like that? Is that tied into the nepotism that caused some of these problems? Like, I think there's a little, there's the shadow of some kind of political risk there with the way that Bitcoin has been mainstreamed so quickly by the White House, by the Trump family and, and by the US government. So I I don't have a fully formed thought there yet, But as you can tell it's all in flux. Two things I want to add to that because I think it'll help as you work through it. And then we'd be curious to see what the outputs are. One is it's basically the polar opposites of that. One is that is something I think about deeply and talk about. It's a contrarian take, but the deep political intersection across the globe, you hear bit bonds, you hear SBR, you hear corporate treasury. That notion will end up biting individuals that are buying these products because ultimately they're a product of leveraging the debt system to accumulate and they will be politicized and then captured. I think that's where that that ends. But the counter to that is it goes to what Mcclintock said. There's a common theme that we that that term, you know, everyone buys Bitcoin at the price they deserve. There's another one. It's it's more of a ego test, right, because people to re underwrite what they think value is. But I think that's the 2D version because that's assuming people like us. Let's go back to the 3D version, which Bitcoin is really a common sense test versus an IQ test, because if you go to a 5 year old, it would take a finite currency versus a infinite currency or currency that continue to be grown. So as individuals grow, because people grow up, well, what are they going to choose? And that's how you can understand the end state is because let's just forget about us because we won't live forever. And what are people for the past 13 years woken in or 15 years brought up into? And I think that's the thing people discount is in an age of obviously AI, but digital, you know, in a digital world, what will reign supreme? And then really from an IQ versus common sense test, what would somebody want? They're not going to have all this baggage. And that's the thing most people kind of discount when we build these mental models of the existing world. It's like, what is everyone else just going to know in the same way the Internet and e-mail and money will interact with. And that's kind of like, without saying what the end state is, that that is kind of the end state that most people aren't prepared for. Once that's understood that everything else can be underwritten in a different way. Yeah, this was fascinating. We probably have to do it again. I feel like every, you know, the way the world's moving, every three or six months there's a new view or a very drastic, like pivot point that's changing. I think since COVID it's been the case. It, it never stops. I sort of wish the world would slow down a little bit. It's it's, it's been overwhelming. Well, appreciate both of your times, Jacob and Rob, to Michael's point, maybe we'll do this again in the future. Really appreciate the insights you brought. Just a hand off. Where do you want people to find you online to get in touch, whether it's to follow your work or interested in what you're doing with Bespoke in the Family office? It's pretty simple, you know, our website is bespoke group dot IO. I'm a sadomasochist and I'm on all the social media for now. And you can find my podcast too if you want more stuff like that. Rob is lurking out there too. But we're we're not hard to find. Rob any place you want to direct people as well. No, just the bespoke site. I think that's the the best way to get in touch or to follow. Yeah, we'll try to include. I know there are PDFs, but I'm assuming they're on the website. Those two reports that we referenced in the show notes because they were really great kind of recaps or go deeper into what we talked about today. Well, thank you, gentlemen. Really appreciate the time. Cheers. 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. Regardless of where you are on your Bitcoin journey, we'd love to hear from you. 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