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And why would you be all in a micro strategy instead of Bitcoin? Surely for greed purposes or you think that you're like an exceptional investor. I mean that that's OK if you if you are, but most people are not. Most people are chasing the thing that they think promises them rich is a lot of the people in this space talk about retiring on 0.1 Bitcoin. We all heard the predictions in 20212025 even where people just throwing out with again, no, no consequences. People just threw out the most outlandish price targets. If you're just like sitting on your hands waiting for Bitcoin to to moon, you're just kind of shit out of luck. So what you could do is you could actually just have agency and you could start building and you could either join a company or you could start one or you could do something. I'll take the other side. I actually do think we could see some like crazy numbers because the world's so crazy. But independent of that, it's still the prudent thing to do, saying that like a, it's a tool, it's just a store value and you should go figure out a serve others deliver value and then saving it. And that's really all it should be. What you're telling me is that music is about to stop and we're going to be left holding the biggest bag of odorous excrement ever assembled in the history of that person. 1974198792 months 72000 and whatever we want to call this, it's all just the same thing over and over. We can't help ourselves. I say when we sell. I say when we sell. We are back. We are back, We are back. Let's go. Are we fired up for this week? Yeah, we're back. We're fired up. You don't want to hear what Michael just said before we hit record. That may be for the first or maybe not the first, but the next, last trade happy hour. It's going to be at the Poly Market bar. Brian's going to the opening event on Friday, you guys. Are the Situation Room where you you monitor the situation? Yeah, not that was Polly Market. I'll give them credit. They've got some good, they've got some good marketing juices over there. They did the the free grocery store in New York to sort of quasi troll Mandani a few months back. And now they're doing the The Situation Room in DC, which is pretty funny. Well, that's why I get all my groceries. I don't know if you guys know that. I just take the train up to the Manhattan, get my groceries and come back. I guess marketing is just all subjective because the way I would interpret the grocery store is like you got rugged so much on polymarket and D Gen. that you have to go like that. That's the least they could do is give you some like grocery, you know, grocery money. The the tinfoil theory on that was that because they're not taxed as a gambling entity in New York, it was like just to try to cozy out to Mandani so that they didn't change the the tax rate on them and and view them as a full on casino, which it is prediction markets are gambling but. Look, we got a lot to cover. We got a tight call here this week, going to jump right into it. So first thing on the docket was Andre Carpathy, who's one of the founding team members at Open Eye AI, former director of AI at Tesla. He had a project that he wanted to share with the world earlier this week. So I'm going to go ahead and pull that up real quick. And the gist of it for those who didn't catch it, was let me make this a little bit bigger. So Andre released a project scoring every job in America on how likely AI would replace it from zero to 10. So essentially scraped listings on the Bureau of Labor's website, he fed them to an LLM and then built pretty much an interactive tree map here that you can click through and and find online. And the gist of it was across 342 occupations, again, listings that he was scraping roughly a 5.3 out of 10, which is kind of leaning in favor of AI disruption. A few other things that will be helpful just to put the context here is our friends at TFTC also had a take here. So we got mapped out all the jobs or just about every job in the US economy that has some sort of AI ranking it for AI exposure. And some of the takeaways here were 42% of all U.S. jobs score 7 or higher for AI exposure. That's almost 60 million jobs, 3.7 trillion in annual wages. And so if you were to actually look at like what actually is most likely to be disrupted, you have software development, you have financial analysts, transcriptions, management consultants and so on. So it's a lot of white collar work. We're seeing this in real time here at On Ramp as well. I'm probably next on the chopping block, so just don't get used to me hosting the show too much more. But anyways, point being guys, I'm curious what you guys make of all this data. It's pretty interesting. I think it validates a lot of what we've seen first hand building the business and what we're hearing from peers. So I wasn't all that surprised by it, but I still think a lot of people don't fully appreciate just the level of disruption that we're about to see. So what do you guys think of it? And then I can give my take as well. I think, I think the biggest one is we're figuring all of this out in real time. These are new industries, new levels of disruption. We talked a little bit about it early in the week and the, the all in guys had a really good take in the sense of you get a good lens of there's personal philosophy and how you market these tools. And then also almost like naivete around not fully understanding the level of the level of station and discourse you're actually incepting in the market. So example is open AI and ChatGPT and Sam Altman going at a different angle saying, look, it's not going to be that bad. And explaining that these layoffs, right, like block are not because of AI, they're because of everything else that happened in Azerb world. And then you have Dario on the other side of that effectively saying, like, this thing's going to kill every, everything. I think this is where the Carpathy notion came from. I think it ends up in the middle. There's a lot of anecdotes recently have come out with like Travis Kalanick is an example building and meat space, referencing that like his words were humans are the the long pole in the tent of like innovation, meaning you still need humans across the board. And then when you start thinking about just like precedent around innovation cycles, when you think about a horse and a carrier and then a car, like you also end up with a bunch of other jobs and things that needed to exist. And you take out the like manual redundant tasks that we incur when civilization is like coming from a, you know, a darker age. I and so I'm starting to really lean into like human ingenuity and thinking that yes, we're going to, there's going to be displacement, it's going to be disruptive, but ultimately humans are adaptable and they're going to end up with different skills, different jobs. And it's not going to be as like bleak as everyone's making it out or especially like this examples make it out to be. I think that's fair in the sense of I typically always would try to take that vent of like it's somewhere in the middle. It's not either extreme necessarily. But I do think that a lot of the discourse to your point like is kind of semantics in terms of like the timeline of these things. Like we know we know the direction of travel effectively. So like whether it's this study looking at which specific roles and, and professions are more susceptible, or if, if you even just look at the on the past several months of prehistoric layoffs, I think, you know, to start this year, it's over 90,000. I just saw this morning that Dell is laying off like 11,000 people. So I think those numbers are still just scratching the surface of what we might see. And while I think you're right, Michael, on that, it's not like full doom and gloom and there will be new job creation like with any technological revolution that there, there's naturally some positive externalities in terms of the labor market that occur. I do think it's pretty clear over the medium to long term that like this is going to be super disruptive and it's going to be at least a on net like negative weight on the labor market generally. And I think we're just seeing the initial signs of that. And and we'll probably talk about this later in the show, but like we're full on in like stagflation mode at this point with inflation rising, PPI came in hot this morning, which is from February. So it doesn't even reflect what's going on with oil just yet while you're having a lot of this labor softness. And so I think that's kind of the direction of travel in my mind. But I would agree with you. It's not like it's not full doom or gloom, but it's it's probably somewhere in the middle there. Yeah, the counter to the study was that we actually just saw. So there's been a narrative particularly around software, right, and a ton of layoffs happening there because AAI can now code as well as your average software developer and probably as good as some of the best or close to it. That said, on the counter side to the doom and gloom narrative was the fact that software engineering job posts just hit a new six month high on Indeed. So it's up 11% year over year. And really what I think is the main take away here is there's different types of jobs that are being posted versus the jobs that were laid off in the past few years here. But I want to just call this out because look at there's still an incredible opportunity for people and you probably have more time than the serfdom takes on X would lead you to believe. But you can see here the daily AI usage at work is still under 40%. Companies are experimenting and not replacing just yet. And I've talked to some friends that are at larger companies and just for compliance reasons, they're forced to use copilot in many cases, and they all just say it's awful. And I don't think that most people actually appreciate or understand what can be done outside of these really janky LLMS. And so point being is, yeah, there's going to be a lot of disruption. But Michael, I agree with your point. You still need like what we're seeing here, even though there's so many tools that we can use it on ramp to do a number of different things at the business, we still need people who understand the business. We still need people who are able to think creatively, think outside of the box, and a lot of that is not just going to be replaced overnight. So totally agree there. Oh yeah, go ahead. Yeah. I mean, and just to like add to that, I think this reminds me very much of like deleveraging and the notion of you need to like restructure this whole, this whole idea that we can't default companies don't default 08 was the prime example. But every time the market wants to effectively like wash out any of the inefficiencies, we can't allow it to. And so we continue to paper over that. I think of like the job loss is going to have much closer alignment there in the sense that we've been papering over and deserved world the amount of employees needed at these companies and that will drive the majority of these layoffs, not the level of innovation companies using these tools. And then the other side of that is I would say that more structurally, because I was thinking about, I was tweeted the other day about like there is a reality that you you have 18 to 24 months before you're like forever and surf them. But it's not necessarily because the AI, it's because the dollar's cooked. Like most people are just struggling and not getting ahead, even if they stay at their current jobs because inflation is just running independent of what anybody says and their wages aren't keeping par. So I think like that's the more insidious and more pervasive and prevalent thing people should like pay attention to is just effectively how do they like they keep up with inflation, whether that's stacking into Bitcoin or getting side gigs using AI, are becoming very proficient AI so they can make more money. I think that's a lot more relevant than somebody worried about AI to kill their job. Their job is probably going to get killed because of the incompetence you have. Like the system we're in, not necessarily AI. I think that's I think that's right. But I guess where I would worry is like the average person is not going to perceive it as it's a money problem. They're going to perceive it as like a is taking everyone's jobs. And I think we already see that in some data from various studies that look at like people's perception of AI today. It's like pretty, pretty negative generally speaking. And part of that has to do with like, kind of to your point, Jackson around like the people being forced to use copilot, not engaging with the tools in in the deepest way and just sort of like being like, oh, these, these things actually stink. They, you know, they still hallucinate all the, all those things. Like if you're not deeply using, testing out various tools, then you then you're more likely to have that type of perception. But I think you're right, Michael, that it is obviously more of a money problem. I guess I just worry about the average person actually grokking that as opposed to just like blaming AI going forward. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, if you're someone who's listening to the show and you have a fake white collar job, the best opportunity right now would just be to start using these things while you have the free time. And look, even reach out to businesses like ours. That's what we're looking for at the company, just people who are really leading the charge on the frontier of this stuff. So don't be shy. If you're like building stuff on the side, reach out to us. That's what we want to see. If the Bitcoin price double tomorrow, would you feel good about how it's being secured right now? Most people have not really pressure tested that and I get it. I have talked to people who have self custody for over a decade and others who stayed on exchanges because they could never get comfortable managing their own keys. Both camps have real concerns. That is why we built on ramp multi institution custody so no single company can lose it, move it or use it. Lloyd's of London Insurance inheritance planning built in and a team that can walk you through the entire setup. Get started in 15 minutes. Book a free consultation at on rampbitcoin.com on ramp secured by three controlled by me. Shifting gears here a little bit on the Middle East. So let me pull up a few things. So Brian, I'm I'm curious to hear your thoughts. I could tee it up, but we had some back and forth over slack. In the last trade channel, you said that I made a point where I hear a lot of the same narratives that we heard back in 2022. We're talking about fertilizer prices. We're talking about oil, natural gas. All these commodities are going through the roof. I remember hearing a ton about this as well when Russia and Ukraine broke out in 2022. And you made a case that this is at a much larger scale. And so I'd love to hear kind of how you're thinking about it because what you have here on the screen is Luke Roman. He provided some information here. Someone from kind of like high up in the Iranian ranks was talking about that essentially what's going on with the Strait of Hormuz right now means that the entire global economy will collapse. These are his words, right? So we can, you know, we could take it with a grain of salt, but the entire global economy will collapse. And if the global economy collapses, will the world continue to allow Trump to continue his warmongering? So this is something that Luke Roman's talking about because the US policy makers in the West are kind of talking about all these like different tactical, these strategy things that are happening. But he's making the case here that most people are missing the, you know, hat tip to his research, but the forest for the trees where most people are missing the bigger picture and what the implications are of this actually happening. And then if I were just to jump over this other tweet from Luke here real quick. So I guess we're someone responded. So the entire global economy is about to collapse. And Luke Roman says keep Hormuz Hormuz close long enough. And it's a mathematical and logical certainty. The only debate is how long is long enough to make that happen. So I'm sure you guys have plenty of takes. Brian, you have any context on what I share? Just like people comparing or my or my head initially went back to 2022 compared to today. Yeah, for sure. And, and I, and it's not to say that there aren't similarities, but my point was basically some of the dynamics and the scale are just larger and more impactful. So just on the scale front, like the Russia, Ukraine sort of conflicts when that kicked off, that was basically putting like 3,000,000 barrels a day at risk of not basically getting to where they would have otherwise gotten. The Hormuz being closed is more like 20 million barrels a day. So like 7X more and it happened much more quickly, whereas like there was some basically foreshadowing what of what's going to happen with the Russia, Ukraine. So there was a little bit more time for people to prepare where this has happened very quickly. And then just a few other sort of differences like Russia like kept producing oil, they just found alternative buyers effectively. Whereas like this is fully just a logistical halt for for many. And like most of the world, like 20% of oil goes through there. But it's also, it's not just oil, it's other commodities that are used throughout the supply chain of oil and energy. So Petro chemicals, fertilizers, manufactured goods. And then the US strategic reserve of oil is also in a worse place than it was in 2022. It's about 30% less than it was in 2022. And there was efforts to basically build that up post 20/22/23 and into where we are today. But they just did a record release, I think it was earlier this week or late last week of 400 million barrels. And that only covers like 20 days of form of normal flow through the hormone. So I mean, we're already at day 18 or 19 of this conflict. And so, you know, it's been almost 3 weeks and there's real, no one knows how long is this going to last effectively. And so it's not only adding just general uncertainty to markets, but these are real structural logistical challenges for not just the US, but really the entire globe. And so I, I don't think what Luke is saying is hyperbole. I I sort of agree with what he's getting out there. Yeah, I mean, Luke has a pretty good track record of calling and calling shots. Yeah, without, you know, pontificating and becoming or even pretending to understand, you know, geopolitics or oil production. I think when you look at what Jackson shared, like it's fair that there was a lot, I mean, completely forgot because just think about how many things have happened since the Ukraine, Russia conflict and now that that was a big deal with like the pipeline and what was going to happen. I think we've been hearing this for five years around climate lockdowns, around energy production. I also think that it's kind of mistaken when you think about the Trump admin doing what they're doing and not being able to forecast that this would be a second and third effect. And so the question is, well, what's the angle? I don't necessarily know. But I will say that gold was that Canary in the coal mine for all this and potentially Bitcoin. The Bitcoin crashes, like we can park that independently of this. But the gold moving up to 5000 + a Troy oz was that signal around oil production slowing down, the cost going up and then ultimately, if you're holding a harder form of money, you're not feeling that pain for. And then also the net settlement around with the Strait of Hormuz allowing for tankers to move that are net settling in yuan. Now. There's no shortage of other anecdotes whether it's in the United States, I think it's about $0.92 a gallon that's gone up in the last month to Sri Lanka's closed down from movement to I think South Korea is like doing work from home for at least one to a few days, different gas stations, people lining up like there is a a eerie feeling of pre COVID right now happening around. If this persists and oil goes to one $5200 a barrel, which a lot of people are saying that is very likely. If this continues, which I think as far as recent as yesterday, Trump was saying that this is probably going to persist longer. We're going to go take the straight back, whatever that means. That I do think this is something that we should pay attention to and a lot of people aren't necessarily paying attention to and this has real implications just from an individual and how they move when you think about like gas production or gas prices and how that slows down an economy. So I think that there's there's a lot happening here that independent of if this is the example that has been set up around higher energy prices, inflation and lack of or increasing lack of mobility from flying on the plane literally to driving around in a car. Yeah, the only other component I think worth adding and, and likewise to, to you, Michael, like not a not a geopolitical expert here, but attempting to put on that hat like the sort of incentives and dynamics at play are a little bit different again, relative to, to Russia Ukraine in that in the Russia Ukraine conflict, you know, the primary sort of military goal there was like more of a territorial dispute where I was like, what's happening now is like Iran is basically like fighting for its life against multiple global superpowers. And they are using the Strait of Hormuz as their main leverage point. Like it's, they know that this is structurally impairing the global economy and that's why they're doing this. So it's a little bit different because like the, you know, part of the, the lack of oil flow in Russia and Ukraine was like sort of a, a Side Story to like the actual ground conflict that was already underway. Whereas like there hasn't been a ground invasion of Iran yet. But like they're basically playing this game of chicken with the straight being closed being like, we're just going to do this until either you guys relent and say like, you know, there's some sort of trace or truce or of temporary peace deal. I don't think any sort of truce would be like super long lasting at this point because it seems like US Israel wants regime, regime change in some manner. So I guess that's just the only other difference is like I ran from a strategic milk like strategic perspective like nose and this is their biggest point of leverage and they are now exerting as much force on it as they can. Yeah, great recap. I don't really have much to add there. And Michael, if you want to chime in, feel free. Otherwise, to move on to a few other things. Yeah, I just wanted to pull this up. We can add we should add it to the show notes. I wouldn't even pretend pretend announces or pronounce his last name and Oz all all Haji. I guess I did. He's been on Marty's pod before. Like deep industry energy expert. He's effectively breaking down in this tweet. Very similar to like treasuries and oil in the sense that once something like this happens, you can't put it back in the bottle where we see sanctioned Russia's treasuries. From a geopolitical perspective, the energy markets start to look like China keeping things insular. The problem is that all the other countries don't necessarily have the same level of production and that what the result is in the future is higher costs, lower innovation in some areas, fragmented markets and reduced overall efficiency for western style economies, all in the name of security. So I think this is something to pay close attention to because this doesn't feel necessarily like the most organic like we bomb Iran, they do this energy halts like this feels like it was, I don't want to say plan, but it was forecasted and gold is that like again Canary to showcase that. Well, yeah, that's great. So climate lockdowns, higher energy prices, AI taking your job, what's not to love about that? Speaking of gold though, there was there are a few other things kind of on this topic, but we have a tight RIP today, so we'll move along. So I want to talk about gold because we're going to get into the signal and the noise here segment here. The first piece is I'll pull up this Wall Street Journal article. It's actually front page of WSJ yesterday. So I thought that was interesting. And I think this is a signal. So inside an old newspaper building, Wyoming is dashing 2300 ounces of gold. And so actually friend of the last trade is cited in this article here, Josh Fair, who runs Wyoming Reserve. We don't need to read through the article, but I'll summarize a few key points. And I'm sure Michael in particular probably is really fired up about this one. He loves gold as he can't, as you can tell. But look, so I don't think people realize back in, in 2025, Wyoming actually passed legislation to mandate that physical precious metals be allocated as part of their state treasury reserve. So they started accumulating physical gold, maybe silver, but definitely gold back in December of 2025. Where Josh Fair comes into this is he runs Wyoming Reserve and actually the state's gold is vaulted at Wyoming Reserve. So they're managing the assets on behalf of the state of Wyoming. There's a couple interesting quotes in this piece. So Senator I'd in Wyoming, he was talking about how he can't put a timeline on it, but there's going to be a sovereign debt crisis. And he talks about how gold is the lie detector, it's the bullshit meter and says it's really the only money that can't be debased. Well, he doesn't know about Bitcoin yet, but that's OK. His point still stands, right? So you actually have people in positions of power within the state that are incredibly concerned about the sovereign debt levels of the United States, about inflation, about geopolitics, counterparty risk, etcetera. And what you're seeing in Wyoming is they're actually taking action. They're allocating part of their reserves to physical gold. And this article also mentions a few other notable states. So back in 2011, Utah, actually, it was the first state to reaffirm gold and silver as legal tender. So over a decade ago. And then in 2024, passed another law to authorize the state to purchase up to 140 million, which is up to 10% of the rainy day funds in physical gold and silver stored in Brink vaults in, in Salt Lake City. And then there's other states like West Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, that are exploring legislation, legislation as well to allow or even mandate owning physical precious metals within state borders. So I think this is a signal because ultimately where this ties back to kind of Michael, one of your points is in the COVID era, we saw a lot of disparate outcomes in states within the US depending on how they approach the COVID situation. I was living in Manhattan at the time, probably the worst place to be during COVID, but you are down in Texas and probably the best place to be during COVID. And so I think states that are really starting to build up sovereign reserves, think about the risks ahead from a financial perspective, but then also tying back in energy instability more broadly are going to come out way ahead. I'm based in Pennsylvania. So I don't know, I think I think I'm somewhere in the middle of the pack, maybe maybe a little bit worse off than some other states here. But I'm curious what you guys think of this piece, just broadly speaking as well. Is this a signal or is this a noise? I don't think it's signal. It's sad. Pennsylvania, I don't necessarily know where they're at in oil production, but I believe the first oil drilling was, I don't, it wasn't, I mean, Jackson, you know, it's not, is it Yorksville or Titusville? I always, I always forget the name, but I yeah, like the fracking stuff. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think at the highest level this goes back to the movement from a unipolar world to multipolar world. Like we think about it, we lived in a world where the dollar was the reserve currency. We all got along, everything net settled there. We had the, the it's escaping me now, but we had what is the oil dollar, we had the Petro dollar that existed. And that's all effectively changed and it's changed in ways that we don't even fully comprehend and understand. We obviously can cite what happened with Russia and their treasuries. We can cite what's happening right now around oil production delivery. But this happens across, we're seeing this in rare earths when it comes to different manufacturing needed. And what does it look like in onshoring some of that? And this is another example of states exerting their rights to understand that like The Dirty secret is nobody says is that gold never stopped being money. It's the reserve currency that the states that settle on. It's the thing that they accumulate, something that they don't even tell people how much they're accumulating. And so it's a logical progression whether you're a sovereign state or an individual that you not only want to hold. Again, in that article, they professionally describe that gold is not an investment, it's a store of value. It's something you're using to preserve your wealth. And so the extension from once you get to that level, which most people aren't, is then will counterparty risk starts to change again, Counterparty risk in the unipolar world is kind of papered over because everyone's getting along. That's getting papered over dollars. I mean, everything's being denominated in dollars. Everyone's playing is friendly, but in a multi polar world, everyone's looking out for themselves. They're looking out for their sovereign, they're looking out for themselves individually or as a sovereign. And how do you custody? How do you, we just talked about the vertical integration of energy. And so it makes sense. Wyoming's passing this stuff. I mean, back in, I want to say this is 2015. Kyle Bass had brought the Utemco. I think he was leading Utemco, which at the time were today is the largest endowment in the country and they had X billions. He's either hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. It might be hundreds of millions of dollars sitting in New York City. And he brought in an armored trucks down to Texas and they established one of the old lean North American bullion depositories that sits within Texas borders. And so I just think that this is going to increasingly happen and be seen because at the end of the day, they could have it in Switzerland or somewhere else. But how do they get that gold and what happens to it? And so we're just going to see more and more of this plays directly into the Bitcoin thesis. The last thing I'll say is this really brings to the forefront they'll like contradictory nature and that the nonsensical nature of like an ETF or a counterparty risk in general, specifically when you have a system that's over levered. And then, you know, you think about the credit and all the stuff we're talking about with or we may talk about in seizing redemptions. And then you have your counterparties with multiple layers tied into that system holding that underlying BTC. This isn't even like a perspective or a choice When your economic reality and consequences are tied to that, people will just learn and then they will adopt if they're going to buy Bitcoin and better solutions. But again, we're just like early. But I think that all this is going to happen a lot faster than people expect. Yeah, I don't have a ton to add. I think that was a great summary, Michael, and particularly that last point. It's like if you are accumulating sovereign reserve assets, like you're totally right, like you can't have layers of counterparty risk or dependencies like you need to actually own the underlying in some shape or format. And you know there are ways to do that with cold and there are ways to do that with Bitcoin. And so I think we're going to see more of this at the state level to your point, Jackson, like there are going to be more forward thinking states who are trying to get ahead of the potential financial calamity ahead. And this is certainly one way of doing that. But it'll be interesting to see to to that latter point, Michael, like how they think through counterparty risk and how they're actually storing whether it's gold or Bitcoin, because that is the most critical thing. Like if you are protecting yourself from the basement seizure risk, all these different things that could occur in in some sort sort of Fiat collapse, then like those are those are the most critical things to get right. For sure. All right, we got to move on here. We'll see what happens when I pull this one up. Oh, big Mike, Big Michael Sailor. Look, we don't have to spend too much time here, but I think people want to hear about it. And again, this is signal or so you guys. Yeah. So you can say if it's noise that's part of the show here. But I just want to call out that this big Mike, there's a few big mics out there running strategy bought 1 1/2 billion dollars worth of Bitcoin last week. So I added 22,000 Bitcoin to the treasury sitting on 720,000 Bitcoin. Pretty crazy. A lot of people are fired up about stretch STRC. It's just a variable rate preferred share. I think a lot of the people probably know more about it than I do and so I won't pontificate on it but I understand the mechanics of it. I'm going to say it's not really signal because we know he's doing it and it's like kind of noise because I guess the concern I have is that where does this go longer term? Like some the people who are really in all in on sailor don't seem to have any concern about the just massive stockpile that he is going to have in custody. And we talked about counterparty risk a ton on the show as well. That's probably the obvious place to point as well. But look, this is interesting if you have some like kind of the grill in the room strategy, which is buying up this swath of Bitcoin week over week, accumulating a very outsized position. And then maybe like arguably the biggest player in the market still and will be for a long time in terms of the Bitcoin price. So I don't really know what to make of it, although I do know people want to talk about it. And look, it's a it's a big purchase, big MIC 22,000 Bitcoin in one week. That's a. That's a big slug. A lot. Of corn. It's a lot of corn. I'm, I'm going to say it's, it's not like purely noise. You know, I'll give some credence to the, the, the strategy Maxis out there. Like there's some interesting financial engineering going on with, with stretch and when that thing's above par, there's like interesting visualizations that I see on Twitter. If you've ever seen that, that people link to, it's like you can just watch in real time the Bitcoin that's being stacked now to to all of your points. Like, you know, there's a lot of questions and and risks with this stuff medium to long term around the custody, the centralization, all of that, that we've hit on a punch. So so I don't need to like rehash all of that, but it's certainly not signal because like, to your point, like we know this is happening. It's the biggest buyer in the market. It's good that this product hasn't like broken down and seems to be functioning at at least at current functioning properly as it's intended to. It's yeah, sound off in the comments if we're Luddites and and idiots that don't think this is massive signal. Yeah, I don't got much. Next. Next. OK, that's all right. That's all right. I mean, it's just like we can, we can continue to. We got plenty to talk about. It's. All right, no, this is, here's some signal. This is going to signal. Noise. So let's talk about signal then so. You who wants You want me to go first? Yeah, but I'll just read out what we're looking at. So what we're looking at here is flows into the Bitcoin ETFs and other shit coin products, Well, actually just Ethereum. So Bitcoin and ETF, Bitcoin and Ethereum ETF flows over the past two weeks. And what this is talking about is we got five days in a row of positive flows, close to 3/4 of billion dollars, 750 million in one go in one week. So Brian, why is the signal? Because outside of Sailor, the biggest buyer in the market has been ETFs and the sort of best five session streaks since the pre October collapse. I think it's like pretty important in the sense that these products are starting to ramp back up again. I mean, for close to two years, we saw incredible inflows to these things and then October happened, there was some uncertainty and thankfully there wasn't actually a lot of like net selling out of these things. But the flows into like the net new flows did slow down a bit sort of over the holidays and into the beginning of the year. But as we, as we pointed out with our buddy Eric Balchunas, like 90% of the capital didn't even move. So that was super encouraging. And now you're seeing the flows actually come back, which is another leg of encouraging and very positive in my mind. And again, like we, you know, as we've discussed many times, like there are better ways to on Bitcoin, but these are, these are the normie land access points at this point. And I think it's a very strong signal that perhaps we've bottoms, perhaps people are, are beginning to to wade back in, continue to build allocations. And, and you know, I think this is also just indicative of this new cohort of buyers that's buying through these things that they won, didn't really sell out. They didn't really panic sell. And now they're coming back in and, and beginning to accumulate again. So I think it's a signal. Why do you think it's noise? I think it's just momentum chasing quite frankly. Like I, I agree with like some of the fundamentals behind what you said. And I, it's a good reminder at when Eric mentioned just the steady base of ETF owners. I think at the time when we spoke with him only it was about what 6% or so of the assets actually sold. So over 90% held held strong and probably most of that still to this day. So I do think it's important signal to the extent of like market structures change, you have patient capital, you have long term capital, you have different types of buyers in the market now. But I just attribute the flows just to Bitcoin making a little bit of a rally out of the 60s and people buy momentum. But I would say it's signal if maybe we see another week or two of of increased positive flows. Yeah. I mean, I think I would go neutral if I'm allowed to just stay in the middle in this sense. That's. Loud. I think like the the signal, the signal is that the market structure is fundamentally changed. Like I don't think, I think we're in uncharted territory, whether it's geopolitically MicroStrategy and their accumulation or ETF flows. And it's probably a confluence of those that when you think about like the number of advisors and allocations to the ETF, it's still an insanely small amount and the thesis is still insanely the exact same thing, right? And so if advisors are going to increasingly, which I bet they are going to be talking to their clients about commodity like assets in an inflationary environment, especially gold, it's a very similar concept that Bitcoin is where you'll see those conversations happening. You're going to end up in this agnostic price accumulation, like you're just going to see an independent of it's bearable wherever it sits, people are going to be adopting it based on these things being turned on from the advisor level to the education level. And, and then the other side of that is the, I don't want to call it a rotation because I still think it's early, but just the notion of gold doing what it's done since the war has happened. And then we're ETFs and and Bitcoin and then ETF inflows that I think we're just going to see a steady growth period of ETF inflows. And it's really comes down to the pent up demand before the ETFs launched, right? Like we had amount of flow that came in from people that never wanted to leave their brokerage and accumulated. And I think it would be crazy to believe like that just stops. It just takes time, whether it's from the advisors turn it on or or client education. So I think that just persists for the next decade. You add that with everything else and you just end up in a persistent bid for Bitcoin in these products. Fair, I don't like the neutral stance but that's fine Overall. This one Michael brought. Dish it over to Michael. 1st signal or noise? SEC and CFTC unveil new crypto guidance declaring most digital assets are not securities. What do you make of this? I mean I think it's it's noise and signal. Dude can't. Keep doing that. No, I actually agree. I actually agree on that. It it's kind of. Both, yeah, I mean, and maybe we'll move, we'll align. I'll be I'll share my thoughts and hear if Brian's aligned there. If he has a different angle. Is I think it's noise in the sense that you're just going to have this proliferation of craziness that's going to exist. Like think about whatever happened when Trump was came in the office and Milan a coin and all the craziness that happens, it's going to happen like 10 to 100 X based on this and this. So, but that's the noise. The signal part is we've been talking about it here where the price has been a little bit paying to these this area. It's felt a little inorganic. My stance has been, has been that there's a lot of plumbing and infrastructure that's getting in place before Bitcoin will really run. And this is one of those like kind of stool legs that need to get kicked out. You needed the market structure in place. You needed the ability for a bunch of, you know, of the market to go and drop a bunch of these tokens and feel like that there's a Direct Line into like what is allowed, what's not. I mean, the net of it where it comes back to noises like ripples, I believe now like a commodity, which is insane, right? But so that's where I think the signal comes in that it is bullish for the price, it's bearish for humanity and the amount of losses that will incur. Is that a ripple buy signal? I would encourage anybody not to buy the Ripple. Yeah, that's, that was good. That was basically where I was going to head with it in the sense that like it's noise in the sense of like it's wrong. Like these things are, they look like securities, They look talk, feel like securities, but it's signal in the sense that like we're off to the races now. Like this is if they're going to say, if they're going to come out and say this, then I think I haven't looked at polymarket, but I would put AI. I'm more confident that like Clary act passes sooner rather than later. If like they're coming out and saying these types of things, which to your point is like, even if it's not like super aligned with how we feel about Bitcoin from a philosophical perspective, like this is good for Bitcoin in the sense that there's a ton of capital that is still waiting for the literal clarity from the clarity act being passed. And so that that component of is it, it is signal in that sense, but it's noise. And that like, yeah, we're, we're going to have to deal with the the cryptos, all these other cryptos, you know, being very happy that they've been ruled to not be securities, which is going to just be, that's going to be a lot of noise in the market. Well, look, yeah, I mean, it's going to get really noisy. Go back to the start of the show. Polymarket is opening a bar where you just, like, gamble and just get a waste. I mean, it sounds kind of, I would do it a couple times probably, maybe once just to experience it. But yeah, I mean, it's going to get very degenerate. It already has been. But I think that's a symptom of just the Fiat despair, right? I mean, people are looking for a way out. They want to gamble whether it's in the next shit coin, whether it's Polymarket or Kalshi. Yeah, I mean, look, that's that's just where we're at. I guess what we could pay attention to longer term though, and see if it is signal or not is what big what the Bitcoin dominance does. I know there's that debate we got Michael and Brian. They've been bumping heads for years about Bitcoin dominance. We don't have time to get into it today, but that's probably where to pay attention to. Let's see what happens with all this regulatory stuff happening over the next year and we'll see. Are we still at 60% dominance or will we not be? Yeah. I mean, the one thing I think is important to keep in mind, at least as my frame of reference and where we're going is that everyone that has any form of powers incentivize for people not to actually park or from a directional majority park all their wealth and gold or Bitcoin. Because if you think about it, from a velocity of money to extracting value from all these other assets that have historically had value in the market is propped up on. So if you take that, then the 2nd and 3rd order are you're going to have private markets open to consumers, You're going to have tokens that will become securities. People are going to feel nominally that they're getting richer. Well, in real terms are getting poorer. That will go. And then people will say that gold and Bitcoin are these like Luddite things. And while the price will still appreciate steadily, but people won't map that. Those are the the real savings accounts keeping pace with inflation. And that's just like the next decade and just come to peace with that. That's just how you'll have to build and manage and, and educate the market and play the long game around reputation. And it also goes back to what like talking about stretch and all these other things, It's like they're just not money. They're not savings and their benchmark, what I was going to say when you asked, it was like that 11%, it's like how much counterparty risk is is built into that. It's still a dollar denominated like thought because everyone's chasing more dollars. So it's like, well, how much counterparty risk is embedded in the debasement of that 11%? How much counterparty risk is embedded in where the custody of that, where they can execute on that, where your claims are like that's the idea of the notion that where there's just so much disparity in understanding that. If something happened to you tomorrow, could your family access your Bitcoin? Not probably not. They would figure it out with certainty. I thought about this a lot. You may feel confident managing your own keys, but are your loved ones? Billions of Bitcoin have been lost already because someone died without a plan. With on ramp inheritance planning is built in directly into your custody setup. Your Bitcoin stays segregated and in your control, insured through Lloyd's of London and accessible to the people you choose when they need it. Get started in 15 minutes book a free consultation at on rampbitcoin.com on ramp secured by three controlled by me now, not the North Koreans. I can't believe what they did to us once again, but I got a double whammy for you guys and I guess we're still on signal or noise, although this is just I don't know this is just kind of news. We got this bit refill, which we'll talk about the incident in just a second. And then you got Jamis and Lop talking about the physical attacks. And so we'll start with the bit refill, start with North Korea and see what they're up to. So the gist of it is on March 1st, their bit refill was target of a cyber attack. They say likely North Korea group, the the Lazarus group, which probably a lot of you are familiar with compromise an employee laptop, got access to credentials, got access to infrastructure, drained hot wallets, you know, hot wallets being meaning connected to the Internet. And then a lot of different client information was leaked, called about 20,000 or so records exposing good amount of data, people's addresses, emails, etcetera. And so, yeah, I mean, this is just I think par for the course for this industry. There's a lot of there's a lot of these types of incidents, whether they happen intentionally in some cases, but most of the time unintentionally. And whether they happen from external forces or internal forces, they both happen. And so this is just the latest incident. And then the other piece of this double whammy special is Jameson Lop says we average a little over one Bitcoin wrench attack, which probably should stop calling them wrench attacks because it really, I think it's a little bit disrespectful, quite frankly, to to victims of this. But one physical attack per week in 2025 and then 11 weeks in a 2026 with 23 known attacks. So we're already trending higher than 25. And this is despite the price being down, right? So the potential reward is lower, but the volume is about double the pace of last year. So what do you guys make of this kind of two different threat factors that people need to be thinking about as relates to just long term ownership of the asset? I mean, I don't know, I don't want to sound bearish on humans, but like this reminds me of what we just talked about with the just the realization we're going to be in 10 years plus of having these conversations. It's similar to this in 22, we had a client that had over 500 Bitcoin on Genesis and there was smoke everywhere, right? Like smoke around block 5. And I don't remember the exact sequencing, but block 5 had may have already gone under. Point being is he got it off 2 weeks and the 500 BTC were saved before they got, you know, Genesis was insolvent. And I think the point in sharing that is when we hear about bit refill and we hear about physical attacks is there's like 3 different segments of the market and we're only really speaking to 1, right? And maybe one person listens and books a consultation or signs up. Like there's a segment of the market that's like the stretch maxi. And they have no fundamental understanding of Bitcoin. So they have no realization why they would care about any of this. And then you have people that have no allocation or understanding of any of Bitcoin or maybe very small amounts. And then you ultimately have people with material balances. Those material balances are probably like .01% if not less of the total population. And those individuals are who are like I'm speaking to and I think we're speaking to in the sense that you the risk is always around the corner. You don't feel it because maybe you weren't around during these times or you don't necessarily know that there's these situations that they can hit you over the head or you just need the right kind of quote UN quote pitch to explain the gravity of like getting ahead of these things. But this, oh, this is, this is the end state for everyone direction on the long enough time horizon, because if you hold all of your money on yourself and people find out on a long time horizon, somebody's going to come for it. And that's why banks exist. And then on the other side of it, if you have a single point of failure, IE like bit refill, managing the assets on a long enough time horizon, somebody's going to come for it because it's free money and they can get it from across the world. So that's the whole point. That's the game. And it's really just about mitigating that. And hopefully you have the right solutions in place. So when these things do happen, your assets aren't at risk. Yeah. And and when you say the one third, one third, one third, I think most of our audiences in the camp of of understanding a lot of this, the people who are stretch Maxis, I think they just listen to this show or maybe they they may not even listen. They just assume that we're talking about it at some point or not talking about. They just, they just comment in it anyway. But yeah, I mean, it's it's a pretty shitty situation and if anything it speaks to market structure and just how things need to evolve to protect against this. Did you see this stretch Maxi? We'll call him out real quick. I'm just going to pull this up because it'll be good for whoever be like. I'm pretty sure whoever tagged it listens. So did you all see this or no can? You make it a little. Bit bigger? I don't think so. Yeah, zoom in. I don't even know it was like some there was some guy on a camel that's managing a bunch of money whatever, but ghost number one, I'm assuming he listens so appreciate it. Tag us if you are actually somebody tagged an address that I was trying to send Bitcoin to. I need to I need to do that on the last comment last weeks, but ultimately this individual said Adam, can you impose on can I impose on you to address the security of Bitcoin custody by MSTR at C me Coinbase and Fidelity. I'm not one who demands posting of addresses so the security protocols of these custodians is a valid 1 of inquiry. And then he replied I don't think there's anything to address. I accept the risk profile and he's like not to disagree but multi party custody would be superior to what Coinbase and Fidelity do. Not to say I question either of their practice, only that there is a superior method and tagged us. And then the response was interesting. I imagine they will be incentivized to always secure their position with the utmost security :) I'm not concerned. And my response was like, I got tagged. So I just responded. Yeah, like $50 billion isn't enough of an incentive question mark. Doesn't sound like they care. And then, you know, Ghost came back. But the reality is like there was no response. Like there's, there's no explanation for if you're managing $50 billion, like why you would take that approach. So there's nothing to really be said. But if anybody wants to tag us. Yeah. I mean, I'm we're going to transition over to the last take and it kind of ties into the one that I wanted to present. I'm sure Michael's probably going to RIP into me for this, but that's OK. But the my last take, I'll pull it up it. Might not be OK if Jackson's not around next week, you'll know that it wasn't OK, but go ahead. That's all right. Yeah, we'll manage. He's going to work for Stretch. All right, all right. You got to. You got to collect. Myself here, lock in, lock in, don't. Sell Sensor Jackson. Just be prepared. You might have to be at MSTR. No, my take is my take is not is not that bad, but it ties into it ties into what you just said because at the end of the day, why would someone be like all in on stretch or why would someone be all in on micro strategy? It's because it is because that they expected to outperform Bitcoin over time. And why would you be all in on micro strategy instead of Bitcoin sheerly for greed purposes? Or you think that you're like an exceptional investor. I mean that that's OK if you if you are, but most people are not. Most people are chasing the thing that they think promises them riches, racial riches, retirement, whatever it is. And so I posted this yesterday and it was seemingly well received, but it's in the same thread where like a lot of the people in this space talk about retiring on 0.1 Bitcoin. They talk about how Bitcoin is going to save you. It's going to appreciate we all heard the predictions in 20212025, even where people just throwing out with again, no, no consequences. People just threw out the most outlandish price targets. And maybe there's like some good to it in the sense that it initially does capture people's attention. And some percentage of those people go down the rabbit hole and they end up like being not jobs like us all in on Bitcoin. But I would argue that more people don't end up there and they buy stuff that they don't understand and they lose money that they probably cannot afford to lose because there's so many people out there just touting different narratives that are frankly just not true. So my take was, look, it's kind of unpopular, but you really should not be banking on Bitcoin to save you. Like Bitcoin in theory could go to zero. I'm not saying that that is my base case. I don't assign a high probability to it. But if you are banking, if you're just like sitting on your hands waiting for Bitcoin to to moon, you're just kind of shit out of luck. So not a good strategy. I think it ties in back into the start of the episode. What you could do is you could actually just have agency and you could start building and you could either join a company or you could start one, or you could do something where you'll at least have the ability to earn at least the ability to do things besides just kind of waiting for a Bitcoin to moon and retire on .1 BTC. Yeah, I mean it's a great take. It really speaks to AY Jackson not getting fired for not bull posting because the reality is most people will say the opposite. I'll take the other side. I actually do think we could see some like crazy numbers because the world's so crazy. But independent of that, it's still the prudent thing to do. Saying that like a, it's a tool. It's just a store value and you should go figure out a serve others deliver value and then save in it. And that's really all it should be. Maybe tying into that, because I know we're tight on time, I wanted to call out the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute and the dinner that they had this past week. It was during the Bitcoin takeover. It's it's highs into exactly what you're sharing because Bitstein Pierre others were speaking about the real gravity importance around ultimately preserving. But like building canonical versions of like where bitcoins history has come from the stories, the understanding of not only the cryptography, but like the Austrian lens of what some of these things you're talking about in that you're looking to save scarcity. One of the things they were referencing is like everyone's a scammer. Like these. These concepts year over year are getting lost and we've seen this over the course of time, whether they go back to like Roman times, biblical times, like that, history starts to change. And unless these things are preserved and they have different ways they plan to do it using cryptography and just I think they're maybe be using Auster. But the point being is that you see this happening where 232425 a lot of the individuals we've talked about in these different products, they're geared towards investments and speculation. They don't tie back to the fundamentals and they're not ideological. They're just rooted in pragmatism and prudence that we lost as society. And the point in this game, it happens to be to your benefit to understand that because then you won't get shaken out, you won't get rugged. You'll have a better base of the foundation of like how the world works. You'll just save in there and then just go back to your life. And I think that's really just like missed. And that kind of like, isn't as intertwined into everything Jackson was sharing about his post. It's, Paul said. It's a good post, Jackson. I am getting a little sick and tired of how bearish you've been lately. But now you're, you're right on in terms of like, go out, be productive, produce, produce things in the world. My my last take was little anticlimactic and I sort of alluded to it, but like the Fed is cooked. the Fed is trapped like a rat. They can't raise rates, they can't cut rates. And if they continue to just do nothing, the stagflation that I alluded to earlier is just going to get worse. And this is, you know, frankly, to me, this speaks to the value prop of Bitcoin. It's like these central planners have screwed up so magnificently again, and they have no, they have no way out of this. They have no tools left in the tool belt, so they're going to just print more money at some point when this all breaks or when there's like literally riots in the streets. But they're trapped right now. They're in a really tough spot with oil ripping, PPI and CPI going up higher than expected this morning. And that's not even factoring in what's happening with oil and everything in the Middle East. So this is only going to get worse before it gets better and they're really trapped. They can't go either direction with any real conviction. So yeah, that's the take. Buy Bitcoin. Trapped like a rat, just not, not where I'd want to be. All right. Michael, do you have one or should I give my closing remarks here? Closing remarks go. Ahead, All right, So closing remarks would be Brian mentioned right at the end there about riots in the streets. Now tie it back quickly to what Michael was talking about earlier in the show. Like and subscribe to the video and leave a comment. Michael will pick one person at random for a 30 minute free consultation on his preparedness course for what comes next. So leave a comment if you want to be considered for that 30 minutes free with Michael. He'll walk you through exactly what he's doing to prepare for the calamity ahead. And I really appreciate you joining the last trade this week. It was a fun one. Have a good rest of the day guys. 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 On Rat 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. Visit onrampbitcoin.com contact to schedule a consultation with one of our private client advisors.
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