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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 extremists ever assembled in the history of darkness. 1974. 198792972000 and whatever we want to call this, it's all just the same thing over and over. We can't help ourselves. I say when we. Sell. Hey, I say when we sell. Thank you for joining us for this week's episode of The Last Trade, a podcast from on Ramp Media. On today's show, we're joined by Mark Connors on Ramp's Head of Global Macro Strategy. The conversation covers various topics, including the aimlessness of the broader crypto space, micro strategies, Bitcoin strategy, the potential of AI and the hype around NVIDIA. The discussion highlights the tendency in the crypto space to create narratives as opposed to substance, and the importance of understanding the economic reality of Bitcoin. The conversation also touches on the challenges of AI adoption, the potential bubble in the stock market, and the need for caution and scepticism when evaluating companies like NVIDIA. We also explore the massive debt problem in the United States, with interest expense on the federal debt surpassing National Defense spending. The discussion touches on the challenges of traditional investing and the appeal of Bitcoin as an alternative asset class, as well as a solution to the broken monetary system. We also discussed Bitcoin's potential impact on the upcoming US election and the positive economic effects of broader Bitcoin adoption. And now, time for the show. And we're back a little bit of a weird start today. We got Marty with some technical difficulties, so he's coming in. But we got Mark Connors here officially ahead of Global Macro at on ramp. We he was on the pod two weeks ago or last week with Mark. Oh, there we go with Mark Valley from Incrementum, but it's official now and he went out with a bang, starting on the Schwab network with some very large price claims that we're excited to chat about today. We we thank you. We could just redo with Marty now if we want to. We don't have. To we got 30 seconds then. Your intro sounded great. I'm sorry I'm I'm on a a remote island where the Wi-Fi isn't isn't perfect down here so I've been troubleshooting. Sorry for. All good. No, it's all good. I'm happy to go either direction. I think we just jump into it, Mark. I mean, I saw you on the Charles Schwab network. You and one other gentleman. Yeah. And you were forced to talk about Ethereum for a little bit, I think. Yeah. So when I was at Credit Suisse, we did some media training and we call that touch and go. You don't avoid it. You say yes, Ethereum does exist. Back to Bitcoin. We. We all need a answer to. That. The BAS does love Ethereum. They're going to put all the system on it later on. And then, yeah, and then there's Bitcoin. We can go back to that. At On Ramp, we believe that Bitcoin will be the most important asset to own in the 21st century. Our Multi institution custody solution is the safest and most secure way to ensure that your Bitcoin remains in your in your family's possession for decades to come. Multi institution custody maximizes security and minimizes counterparty risk. Leveraging Bitcoin's native properties to eliminate single points of failure of historically complicated Bitcoin ownership on ramp provides Peace of Mind for your Bitcoin journey. For more information, check us out at on rampbitcoin.com. Ethereum seems like a project that is a bit aimless right now, which is good there. Did you guys see that thread? Maybe we can start with this. I'm sorry for completely bombarding this and coming in with my own thoughts, but did you see the thread of the gentleman? He's some crypto bro. He wrote like a long, I think it was like a thirty tweet thread basically explaining the big problem in crypto and why prices aren't pumping, which is the fact that everybody keeps releasing new coins and then unlocking supply of pre-existing coins. So the amount of supply coming on to the market is such that it's hard to drive up prices. And he was acting like there's an existential crisis that nobody understood before. But this is something that Bitcoin has been opining about for well over a decade. A breakthrough insight there. Marty, it's too I I did read that and I was looking through for him to say, and folks, This is why we can't get out of our own way. Let's change it. Let's he's like, no, he's like, no, I found the reason why it's like it's going to happen again, son. Follow my newsletter and I'll tell you the coins that are are going to avoid this problem. It's essentially the solution he came up with. Oh, that's right. It's truly amazing, like with the amount of, you know, clown world, amount of liquidity gets pumped in a system that the nuttier, the, the narrative gets like Marty, that, that tweet I sent you and we can name the coins or we don't. But the, about the like 2 infighting with the crypto Bros where the, like, there are certain guys that are, you know, the like 2020-2021 camp. And now it's gotten crazy where you have mean coins. And so the guys go and like partner with like actresses and people and then they launch these coins. And so then the people from 2021 have the fundamentals. So those are the ones with the right coins, but the mean coins are the ones that don't have the right fundamentals. And they're the the the like, you know, yeah, shit corners in their world. And it's just this interesting like dynamic where they had understood that they're both basically had no fundamentals. There's no value tied either one. No, I mean, this is a tale as old as Bitcoin, which is all the old coins come and say we've got a better Bitcoin. We, we had, we figured out, we solved all the problems and they deride Bitcoin call Bitcoiners stupid Maxis and that they're, they're the Myspace and our coin solved it. And then one cycle later there's a coin that comes out and it's like, no, we actually solved this coin's problems. And then they find themselves positions that bitcoiners have been in perennially for, for 15 years now, which is like, no, like people, if they have access to the button that's going to create more supply, create a new flashy altcoin. They're going to hit the button and they're going to drive narrative around it and people are going to jump from your altcoin to the other. That's why if you're listening to this, it's not about the tech. I mean the tech is an enabling force within this. It's about the monetary properties. All these altcoins, all these crypto currencies compete on monetary properties, and none of them can compete with Bitcoin's monetary properties. Meme coins are fun. I mean they I, I hear, I think someone had their they trade at least in May. They were trading 18 billion a day more than the S&P. You know, more than any kind of so there's there's there's engagement. And so, you know, have at it. But as you said about monetary properties and you know, I call it being fit for purpose. Remember once when I got my boys out and my dad wanted to take us on the water and I had never I'd take a boat out once awhile in high school, but I'm like, I'm ready, let's go. We go to the place. Guy behind the counter says great. They're just three words you need to tell me before you take the boat out. So you know, it's like, be back early. He's like, Nope, that's not it. And went through it. My dad shuffled his feet kind of all right, dad, what is it? He said read, write, return keys came over the counter. And when it comes to tokens if and tokenomics and Bitcoin versus others, you have to look at three things, degree, decentralization, degree of security and degree of utility or scale. And once you put that down, the first two that have to be nailed down are decentralization and security. And if you don't enter the game, you know, again, you know, I was at a broader firm, we looked at a lot of different tokens. And that's, you know, one reason why I came here is because I thought the alpha was in the beta. You know, if you want to look at the market, the market is Bitcoin. Everything else is obviously marginalized on the decentralization side, like what you were talking about, Marty, or if you brought up that the guy talking about, jeez, all these unlocks, you know, when do they come? How much are they? And it really does hurt price. It's like, yes, why? Because there's a switch and someone can pull it. We did take the boat out. I just wasn't behind the helm that day. Just to close the loop there on that one. Now you can see there's there's people, you can't see it because of the glare on the window, but there's a babe right behind me and there's people doing red right return right now. Properly in a harbor. Never heard this phrase. Yeah, he's kind. Of thing, huh? Yeah. You have red and green, I guess you call them buoys, and they sort of dictate where the trapped, where the traffic flows in the water, in the back base. We got a lot to talk about. There's a lot going on in the incumbent financial world, but we'll ease into it with the intersection of the equities markets and Bitcoin, which is MicroStrategy. They announced I believe last week or the week before that they were going to raise a $500 million convertible note. I believe it was a convertible note. And they announced this morning that that was oversubscribed by 60% and they ultimately raised $800 million. And I don't think they've bought the Bitcoin yet, but they plan to use those proceeds. Bitcoin. I believe they did it this morning. Did yeah, 11,900 Bitcoin. So yeah, it's almost 12,000 Bitcoin which gets them. If they had, were they already at 1% of the total supply? OK. So it's 1.07% now of the total. 1.07% wow I I wish I wish my entire stack was just a fraction of what micro strategies DCA stacks seem to be. I. Can't imagine. I can't imagine Sailor sleeps good at night with that much grade point like at this current custody because like it's just sitting on these exchanges and he knows like, you know, it's sitting on a bunch of exchanges, which is a problem. Not got it. Yeah, I didn't. I didn't know. Yeah. So you're talking, you're looking through price 'cause I was like, I think he's OK with the price part. You're talking to finality. You're talking to. Because 'cause you wake up one day and it's like, hey, we just lost the 4th of your stack. I'm sorry. Like that's a possibility. It's not, it's not a likely one, but it's just, it's just a hard pill to swallow that exists. I think everybody here probably has a different model that exists that that can't happen to them. And you sleep a little bit better than that. And imagine holding one a little over 1% of the supply and knowing that somebody can call it and do that. It's just just anyway, it's just something I think about, like with power comes responsibility and a lot of responsibility there. We're going right to the core of the topic today, aren't we? Right? No. I was just thinking that was just the first thing that no always top. Of mind yeah, better custody is always top of mind huh. I I think about it's, it's funny that I, I don't worry so much for micro strategy, but like we probably should, I think about like the O GS there's that story of the guy who, who hacked the Silk Road guy went by the pseudonym loaded loaded. Yeah. And so he, he stole from Silk Road. So, you know, legal, moral, ethical Gray area there to start with. But he had a, what was it Marty, like 50,000 Bitcoin that he got from that and he put for the last decade he had stashed away in a popcorn tin buried in his basement in his home in Georgia. And then he made some sort of slip up that got the FBI on his tail. That was probably 3-4 years ago. And and then they caught them and recovered this, this computer, this, this motherboard, I think out of a popcorn tin buried in this guy's basement that had a few billion dollars of Bitcoin on it just sitting on a, on an exposed computer. Piece of hardware. OK, it was a Raspberry Pi, just a fragile piece of hardware. And that was how this guy had determined to to store this insane amount of Bitcoin. And to me, that story is first of all, a crazy, wild, absurd story on on in his own right. But it also sort of speaks to what are the other O GS doing? You know what, what sort of practices did they adopt in 2011 that they've been too afraid to update in terms of how they're storing their Bitcoin? There's probably quite a few Raspberry Pi's out there with 10,000 Bitcoin on them or, or, you know, similar sort of story of some dedicated computer just with an encrypted file sitting on it with 10,000 Bitcoin in it. And if I was, if I were, was in their shoes, I'd be extremely fearful of, of bit rot or a flood or, you know, a fire in my house. And I wonder how many people are in that position. It's, it's, it's not, it's not a, you know, a single digit number. It's, it's probably 100 people who or more who have that sort of situation. And I would not sleep well in their shoes. Yeah, I I wonder if they take the the idea of the Lindy effect which worked well for their stack on the on the price front and have applied it to their tech stack, which may not be the right. Yeah. Right. I don't know what kind of morphine, but that probably doesn't translate well to technology which moves a little bit faster on the deflationary front, right? You always get more for less. So, yeah, I, I don't know the number, but you know, the I, I see it in different ways with just comfort. People won't make changes. I mean, we got, you know, I play golf periodically, not a lot anymore, but I remember going out like every fifth round, you'll see a guy who still has his driver that's made of wood. He has a three wood that he calls a spoon because it's cute. He got it in high school or something and he still likes it, stays with it even though he gives up, you know, 30 to 50 yards, doesn't care, just loves having it. So I think, you know, that sentimentality or that familiarity costs you and some people don't care until it's too late. You lost around and have have to pay money. Mark, I feel bad we're we're going to the markets and getting excited and kind of like dovetailed it into Sailor and his custody set up. But I know you're ready to to go. I'm curious your thoughts on, you know, Sailor and just the strategy and what's the what's the play the next 18 months with other publicly traded firms? So what he's what he has been doing. People say, oh, he's just swapping Fiat for Bitcoin. He's he's not. What he has done is he has, it's not hacked, but he has figured out what Wall Street loves. Wall Street loves volatility and arbitrage. And what he's been able to do is to say, well, Bitcoin's volatile and let me monetize it. So let me, let me take a step back. I was in the convert market in the early 90s and actually had ran a cap structure ARB fund that used convertibles and it worked very well because a company was courted by all the banks to say, hey, listen, you're a high, you're, you're a high Vol company. Your, your credit spreads are like 12% and your volatility is 60. You know, you're just your cost of capital is too big. But let me do something, let me turn it on its head and let me sell a bond with equity embedded. You're not selling your equity today because no tech person even in the 90s wanted to sell their tech cheap. We're going to sell it 50% higher, maybe 60%. So we're going to sell a bond with a low coupon, give them some love on the income. And they're also getting a call on this very volatile stock. And that worked very well. Merrill Lynch made a load of money and they even sold these things called Liquid yield Option Notes Lions. You know, they made a name for it, 0 coupon convertibles, which you know, had imputed interest over time. They didn't even pay out cash. It worked very well because companies could sell their stock higher. So the my, my point is this game's been played for decades. And what seller's doing is he's inserting not a tech company, but he's inserting Bitcoin into it, which we know has a higher ball, although decreasing and Wall Street loves it and it's a way to monetize it. And he also is able to put out his liabilities for what, five to seven years on the term structure of the bond. It's absolutely brilliant. It'll keep coming. And as we saw with our friend Dylan Leclair, there are more companies that are doing this type of transaction. And there will be more, I bet. I'll bet you know a couple SAT's that we'll see dozens of companies in the next 12 months with market caps, you know, definitely north of a billion and the order of probably a couple 100 billion doing this type of trade. Wow, how, how big is the the untapped reservoir for demand for this kind of product? I mean, how much capital can can be used deployed into this kind of strategy? The convert market, you know, would be one animal that would go into it and if memory serves, it's a couple 100 billion. I believe I'll have, I'll have friends ping me on Bloomberg to tell me I'm I'm off by a not an order of magnitude, but a little bit, but I think that's about right. And then, you know, the high yield market is, you know, one plus trillion. So it's a big market, Jesse, it's a big untapped market. And you also have equity people who will get involved as well. And we know that markets you know US equities are 47 trillion, let alone the derivative market is multiples more than that. So it's big. We are in we're in earlier innings in this trade than we are in Bitcoin adoption by a multiples. That's how big this opportunity is. That's a good way to think about that, that it's sort of, we're in the, it's an adoption curve for that strategy in the same way that adopt adopting Bitcoin as a, as a treasury asset is, is, is an adoption curve in its own right. And yeah, I still don't fully understand what micro strategy is doing or how they're specifically how they're able to keep doing it and, and why there's so much demand for what they're doing. That's the the part that's still kind of mystifies me. Well, you have to speaks to how early we are in that, in that trade. I. Mean he's able to do it because nobody else has really joined them in size like he has. And then from what I understand building what you just said, Mark, there's a lot of pent up demand for yield out there and these convertible notes have proven to provide good yield. I mean they, they convert pretty quickly as the price of micro strategy reacts to more Bitcoin on the balance sheet and people just piling into the stock, it converts and you've got good yield on, on that trade. You know that's a proven trade over the last 2-3 years at least so. And you've got a growing depth of option markets on this growing market cap. So it is a flywheel and what we think Bitcoin is, you know, as far as expanding footprint of market value like think could be a beast and it has grown. It has surprised the upside. So he's taken what we know about Bitcoin and solving problems. And then he said, well, let me go to Tradfi and let me leverage some of the arbitrage and outright strategies that love volatility, especially if there's more upside than downside Vol, which is the best kept secret of Bitcoin and he's tapped it. You're going to see more people doing this. And again, I mentioned Dylan because that guy can sniff it out like nobody. And he was picked up to to help advance this strategy with a firm or two. I love that you said the best kept secret in Bitcoin because it's like everybody talks about volatility. It's like if it's in your favor, what's the concern? What's the problem? It's only problem if it's if it's not in your favor. No, I agree. I think there will be more whether it's via the convert market. My gosh, saw you share in early riders piece of material yesterday. I mean you just look at Apple, Microsoft, all these giant Fortune 500 companies sitting on literally trillions of dollars of cash and they're just buying back stock. They could diversify that strategy and and just buy Bitcoin and put it on the balance sheet as well. Yeah, I mean, I think about, I, I was texting you last week. I didn't share it. I don't know. I don't think I shared it publicly. But in like the span of like 2 hours, there's three random things that happened just kind of breaking down where money's breaking down. There was a picket in South for Southwest Airlines in in Dallas for 17% increase. So that ruined the whole day of whoever was flying through those routes stopped by a coffee shop that was smaller, new, was closed down after six months. And then I heard from another person anecdotally that their other their flight was supposed to go to Tahiti for the honeymoon. They deboarded and onboarded three times. They sat on the tarmac in Miami for eight hours. And then they ultimately their luggage ended up there. And you just had that that was just in like a couple hours on the last Friday morning. And I was just thinking about this whole notion of the money's broken. So then coordinating economic activity and what people need to actually feed themselves and the picket, and then the the degradation of services, it all starts to tie in. And the way you offset it is by holding a better form of money. Because if you hold a better form of money, you don't actually, you don't necessarily have to increase your prices because increasing your prices effectively or theoretically should lower margins and reduce the amount of people that can purchase, which is a is a negative feedback loop. And to the point you just made, Marty, is if margins are compressing and inflation's running and you hold a better form of money now that helps offset that. So there's like the arbitrage play that I think is on the financial side, but then there's the natural like self preservation play that I don't think most have woken up to. And it's almost existential at this point because I think everybody here agrees that inflation's probably 10 to 20% annualized since COVID with the amount of money printed. And so it just feels like businesses have to adopt it or just going backwards until they kind of have to close it up. Yeah. Now we've seen this within our portfolio 1031 over the last couple of years where it's been really hard to raise capital just not for Bitcoin companies, but for any company that doesn't have AI attached to their business plan due to where interest rates are and liquidity or lack of liquidity in venture markets specifically. But because all of our portfolio companies at 1031 have the the drive to build as much Bitcoin on their balance sheet as possible. Like despite the fact that capital markets were pretty restrictive over the last two years, luckily the price of Bitcoin went up. So we've actually seen a lot of company runways extend just by having that, that Bitcoin treasury cushion so prevents them from having to go to the market to try to raise more capital. It's an incredible tool for for businesses, whether you're a startup or a publicly traded company. And and that's something that I know Michael's touched on with the cost of capital, which I love you guys to go into if we had a time. But back to Marty, what you were saying on raising money in AI is I have one of my two of my boys are in a startup and they're looking to raise capital. And the, and the feedback has been that people want to have a quick to, they want to make money quicker and, and they're in the sustainability business. And, you know, it's probably got a, you know, a normal runway, not an, not an accelerated runway. So when you say AI, are people saying that because they want productivity gains or they think it's going to be an, an NVIDIA hot take and they'll be able to turn around, you know, 612 months and make a return? Well, I think the hope is that the end product of an AI company will lead to better productivity for companies and individuals more broadly. But I think we're in a hype cycle and the relative nascents of consumer ready AI is such that venture capitalists, whether it's rightly or wrongly is, is to be debated, but believe that there's high asymmetric returns to be to be wrought by allocating AI at this particular stage of its nacency. That's what I would say. Michael, do you have any thoughts on this? I know we've talked about this quite a lot. Well, I mean, I think it goes back to the notion of like people buying BlackRock ETF aren't buying BlackRock, they're buying a mean stock. It just happens to be Bitcoin labeled or IB, whatever the high bit or whatever the the ticker is. It's the same with AI. It's like last cycle, it was, you know, crypto in 2021 and now it's it's no different in my mind than like the Iggy Azalea coin or whatever. It's like you're just like picking up momentum on different areas of the market graph to what somebody's like selling. And then you have the narrative or the overhang to like go into that market because I think it's like over 50% some crazy number amount of venture that's gone into AI and all the way and up and down the stack is like, you can't from your LP get in trouble for allocating there because to Marty's point, it's the next thing And, and everything that goes along with it, the companies are raising larger rounds. There's all this infinite liquidity to to chase. And then if it's only going to AI companies, it gets bit up. So it just reminds me of a similar thing. It's just in a different liquidity pool, different sophistic quote, UN quote, sophisticated area of the market that says, oh, we're on the ventures side and you know, we're going to allocate for the next Amazon or we're looking for the next Amazon. But obviously like that's just capital destruction. We've seen it for for decades. It's just going to I think it happens at an accelerated pace because of just how far along we are in the same way it's happened at accelerated pace today in the mean coin thing, because that was the point earlier, Marty, when you referenced we've seen it with like the next better Bitcoin or the the idea that it can be done. At least people were faking trying that they were trying to make a better Bitcoin. Like it's not even a fake. Like nobody's saying that this is like a cryptocurrency is a better or doing anything compared to Bitcoin or even like these other tokens that are supposed to do other stuff. They're literally just saying it's a mimetic token. That is you're trying to pick up steam like some of the the Trump coin that launched. They're just, it's a there's no, they're not even going to pretend there's fundamentals. It's not. It has no utility other than the mimetic nature of it. Yeah, And Joe, Joe Wiesenthal, he actually wrote in his newsletter this morning. He sent a tweet out, tweet out earlier this week, but it looks like you followed up with the newsletter. But he had this great tweet. The big change in crypto culture in today's market newsletter, I wrote about how crypto libertarianism went from building systems that were robust against outside interference to influencing politics in order to protect the right to gamble on mean meme coins. So to your point, Michael, like I remember in 2017 to 2021 when Ethereum was proclaiming that they were going to flip in Bitcoin and they were talking about all this esoteric governance in the world, computer virtual machines and is really focused on like tech innovation and changing meet space governance interactions with a virtual machine. And it's completely just evolved or devolved, I would argue. And two, let's attach a name to this coin and see how high it can pump. It sure feels like in the sideways times for crypto, for Bitcoin specifically and crypto in general, people create narratives, they try, they're trying to find some way to like push adoption to the next level. And and then these things get get a head of steam of like, OK, well, we can do this and we can, we can lobby and we can, you know, try to get Trump to talk about NFTS, whatever. And, and then you create a whole culture, a whole movement around some red herring, some, some aspect of this technology that doesn't matter. But people are pushing it to as a, as a way to try to drive adoption, to try to make something matter. And at the end of the day, all you have to do is just wait for the economic reality of Bitcoin to play out. But we're so impatient, we can't help ourselves. We're trying to, you know, people end up trying to latch on to something that's going to move the needle. And in in the process, we create the next wave of noise. And it's, it's, it's against human nature to do the hard thing of just sit and wait and let Bitcoins supply schedule play out. But you know, it's funny that, that we have all the, this problem of, of the constant cycles of what's the next wave of bullshit in crypto. But it's because crypto people are so impatient that they create the next wave of bullshit as it as it starts off as maybe a good idea and then and snowballs into something that is a true distraction and an impediment to Bitcoin adoption and for the next slice of the adoption curve. It's actually a great point. Like it's kind of fundamentally shocking. We we know like how much money has come into crypto and all the things. But Mark, to your point about AI, it kind of sounds very cynical to say like most people to have no idea what they're doing or talking about specifically in venture or AI. But then when you go back and breakdown all the capital that's come into crypto over the course of the past three to five years, looking for the narratives, like they genuinely believe it. Like they didn't. I was joking to say it's like they read the forward to the Bitcoin standard and then or they opened the book and they never like even read the forward. They just like closed it. Or or worse or or or worse, Michael, some of these folks cut out the forward for the Bitcoin paper and put it on their deck and then had all the other garbage behind it. Yeah, I mean, it's exactly right. Because like, to Marty's point earlier, like somebody's mad about whatever they're doing, and then the Ethereum people are mad at salon and the salon and people are mad at the next one. And it's like all this money and all the sophisticated people that couldn't understand that you there's only finite scarcity once. You can't be behind it. And so if they can't do that, then what? Those are the same people running the AI people. They're no better. It's like it's all the same allocation strategy. It's all the same first principle thinking. So the whole the whole thing is like how is mucked in loss of signal and then the tokens are just the fastest to go up and down. So you just get to see it quicker. So like, Bitcoin's the ultimate Canary in the coal mine in global markets because it's just like the first thing people are going to run with and the first thing people are going to sell off. Yeah. I mean, to this point, we can transition to the topic we have on the list, which is the fact that NVIDIA not really transition, but continue this conversation with NVIDIA at the center of it. Logan, pull up the tweet. I had James check, also known as check Matey on TFTC earlier this week and just in passing during our conversation brought up NVIDIA and I hadn't looked at the chart in a while. And I just sent this tweet out yesterday because we we basically went we we admitted on the show like we had we have no idea what's going on. NVIDIA is legit. Is this price appreciation is their actual behind it? So I tweeted this out. It's genuinely looking for people's opinions. This look like a healthy chart and as you can see it's completely parabolic. It's up 339,500% since since 2000 and most of those returns within the last eight years. And the response to this tweet, it was mixed. It was a bunch of people like put it on log scale, like it looks good, AI is the future. And a bunch of others like this is late stage melt up behaviour. And it begs the question, like going back to the discussion about AI and all the venture capital that's been allocated to it, like can NVIDIA hold up this performance? I'm a bit sceptical especially if you consider I believe they're training at like 48 A48X multiple on the revenue which is the revenue certainly increasing by a lot. But Even so the multiple they're trading at is pretty high at 48XI believe if I did my math correctly the other day. And then on top of that, yes, all this venture capital has been allocated putting money in the pockets of these start-ups which are able then go out and buy the chips that NVIDIA produces. But unless a lot of these cunt companies find product market fit and are able to monetize, it's very expensive to buy these computers or by hosting by compute from from hosting providers. And So what do you guys think about NVIDIA? Is there juice behind this? Is should we put this on log scale? Is this the step function improvement on the price of the company because AI is truly here and is going to change the world, or is this dot com bubble era activity that we're witnessing right now? I, I think that's the question is it.com era, you know, is this the, is this today's Cisco? And I think it's, I would say I'm going to split it and be the median, you know, for the middle child I am and say that I, I think it's somewhere between a.com and A and A and a mid 2000s Amazon. So, so invidious stock price. I mean, their, their numbers were crazy good. Beat everybody. But instead of what you see with maybe emerging companies where they get the low, not low hanging fruit, but they get the smaller companies to buy in and then they get the larger companies over time that are resistant. This was flipped invidious sold to the large caps. You know, let's look at the top five companies or 30% of market cap. If they have to make the next sale, it's going to be an incrementally lower ticket. So they have to spend more time and more efforts to get, I think incremental sales from the non Googles, the non Microsofts, etcetera. So I do think it tamps down a bit, but it's but it's not going away. I mean, anyone who has friends who are lawyers, God bless them. You know, the old model was to have your, your junior lawyers bill out at, you know, 300 bucks an hour and then you'd bill out at 5, you know, at 700,000 if you're in New York. But technology took out that layer and, and clients would no longer allow that. So their margins got compressed because of technology. So AI is, is an advancement of what the Internet provided by just making things more productive. It's going to rip out margin. Companies are going to continue to adopt AI. But like what you said, Marty, the product market fit, we're all still figuring how to use it. So they'll be a bit of a hiccup, you know, soon enough. Yeah, I love the Cisco comparison. I don't know enough about AI in general and and certainly not Nvidia's business model and balance sheet and forecast, but but it sure does remind me of like what kind of hardware company really ever has like the the killer lasting like dominant position the way that a Google or an Amazon has had, I guess you could say Apple, but that's because of the network effects of, of people using that hardware. And if it's a commodity hardware like GPU's are, then I have such trouble seeing it remaining the the largest company in the world. And you know, I, it feels like the mimetic investing has crept into the stock market in a big way on on a bigger and bigger scale over the last decade. It's. You know what makes you say that, Jesse? Yeah, right. It's not new to to crypto people, but you know, the sort of mimetic investing that we saw in 2017 turned into Zoom and Peloton booming in the the narrative environment we were thrust into during COVID. And now the narrative environment is AI is going to change the world. And you know, so here's here's two prior examples. The the COVID climate and then also the.com climate of overhype causing, you know, particular companies to be parabolic the way that NVIDIA currently is. And it's just not sustainable once the narrative shifts after enough time has passed. I feel like we're in that sort of pattern here, even though, you know, it's, it's the Gartner hype cycle where AI will change the world, but perhaps not as much as people currently think it will. And perhaps 10 years from now rather than next year. Yeah, I can't say anything that the guys haven't chaired except for my favorite part about NVIDIA is the tweet from this past week that you still like. The main tweet was. The boomers got the gains of NVIDIA, or like the gains of Bitcoin without having to suffer from all the volatility and sleepless nights. And then below that was they can't keep getting away with this. Yeah, and I think I'm going to throw my hat in the ring here too. Is is it? Genuinely don't know how is it going to play out? I do have my leanings it it does seem a bit hypey to me but could be wrong. There could be massive product market fit. I mean I use AI everyday at TFTC is that the killer app is going to lead to insane revenues for the companies leveraging Nvidia's GPUs is yet to be determined. This is a very capital intensive businesses and can these companies produce the revenues and cash flows necessary to to pay for everything. But generally speaking, like I'm just outside of product market fit headwinds, I think you have to look at energy supply headwinds as well. You have to plug these GPUs in and that's a big trend and theme this year is the highlighted lack of energy infrastructure that exists today to actually supply this market. So could that put put a bit of a damper on this run potentially? Then obviously you have the key man risk of TSMC and Saber rattling beginning to to heat up around that small island in the Asian Pacific. And yeah, I don't I don't know the there's cautiously optimistic. I mean, I would like to see AI increase productivity. Of course there will be some externalities that come with that, but I think overall in the long run it'll be good for humanity. But whether or not that is happening right now is is questionable, I would say at the very least. 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That we have a debt problem here, gentlemen have a massive debt. The big, another big headline of this week is the interest expense on the US federal debt has officially surpassed the annual National Defense spending well over a trillion dollars annualized. And so as of right now, that makes the interest that we're paying on the debt the 4th largest expenditure behind Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. So we've got 4. An image of that from the daily shot in the in the chat. Yeah, we've got, we've got 4 overt ponzies leading, leading the top of the chart for for expenses here in the United States. What are the first two I guess? Social Security, Medicare. Medicaid. OK. And then and then interest expense. Yeah, on the debt that's never going to be paid back, so. That's quite a roster. There's your 4 horsemen right there. Mark, it's, it's interesting time what Marty was referencing with NVIDIA to the debt and just money being broken. I remember when we first met her when you were, you came on probably 6 plus months ago on your LinkedIn, you had a Credit Suisse was like it was your title, which you're working on. But it, the end was, and it stuck with me managing alpha decay. And it's like this notion of you're looking at the markets and, and you recognize that monetary policy and all the things associated with it, we're just making it harder and harder to return capital. And then now you're and then you're focused all your time on Bitcoin because it's the thing. It's just it was just something that hit me like, I don't know if you have thoughts on that, on how like everything against whether it's the debt coupled with, you know, this late stage exactly Fiat melt up, how you know you basically dedicated the rest of your career to like this asset class because because of everything you've learned. Yeah, it's like, you know, know thyself. I was working at Credit Swiss where we we all knew what the stock was not going to do, which is go up for for reasons that became evident. And I was working with hedge funds, very bright people, tremendous information resources and they couldn't beat the S&P and even risk adjusted, they weren't that great except for maybe four or five of them. So I knew the problem of inability to make money on the, on the hedge fund side. I was at a hedge fund. We did close it because we did underperform and, and I, I missed something which was a move higher and the Fed overtaking the market, you know, off the O2 bottom. I'll still fundamentally bearish. So I stepped back and started to look at things kind of like not to the degree maybe that Luke Roman does, but from a market standpoint, referencing that slide that you just put up there. And it became evident that there was a centralization of liquidity and, and what hedge funds love is accessing liquidity. And the banks were no longer a warehousing of risk. They were like, it was like poop through a goose. They no longer had the balance sheet to absorb any shock. It was all at the mothership of the Fed and we do have a slide in one of our, you know, if you call up or hit us on our website, we'll, we'll share it with you on the terminal or one of our sales reps the Fed and money supply. So we all know the money supply has gone up. We printed, you know, we, we talked about the debt issue, but it's like, well, where's it coming from? The Treasury? Yes, but it's also coming from the Fed. The Fed has stepped in the shoes of the banks. They accounted for something like 10 to 12% of M2 prior to the O 8 crisis. They would get open market operations, they would buy bonds, flood the market or you know and then give cash back through a simply book entry back to the banks and the banks would either lend it or buttress their their cap ratios. However they want to deal with the cash 1012%. But since then, it's been as high as 40%. There's basically instead of the Fed being the lender of last resort, they are now the lender of only resort. They are providing almost 40% of all the money supply in the US. We are centralized. And when that happens, not everyone has a has a line into the Fed to get cash and capital. So that's why back to like alpha decay when you were talking about it, maybe hedge funds, you know, shouldn't be around, maybe they should be, but I'll tell you right now, they're going to be fewer of them because liquidity is dear and not every hedge fund has access. And yes, I saw Bitcoin as being outside the system, a term that, you know, people have used, but we can talk about what that means. And back to trying to nail it back to AI and and not AI, but NVIDIA and it's it's loop higher. What's great about Bitcoin is Bitcoin knows it can't go to the moon in a day. It has four year cycles where almost by design, not almost by design circles up like a Zamboni across the ice and it covers up its tracks and works its way up in a spiral like it's really magnificent the structure of this in order to play the long game of growth, adoption and service. So hopefully I landed that plane on on on Alpha Decay, where it came from and what's going to win coming out of it. Oh yeah. I mean, we have more slides to show, but let's keep talking. Well, that's a, that's a good one, Marty. I think you'll appreciate we've been talking with a lot of pensions and some are positive and then some are a lot of emails about, you know, naturally aversion to it. And Mark put together with Jackson a really nice slide on one, I think one either two or three and five year returns. And basically just like a nice cordial response of maybe Mark, if you curious, like walking through this. But then also just your peer group with your transition and this is quasi your peer group, much more your peer group that are sitting on the other side to these emails than us curious like what's going through their mind and how they're having to navigate this because they see SWIB coming in, but they're still apprehensive. They're still thinking we need to see more. If you could just walk through, walk us through some of the the thoughts there. Yeah, it it is biased and familiarity and you know, back to what Jesse was talking about with the O GS, you know, are there 10? Are there 100 people that are still storing their hundreds and maybe billions dollars worth of corn on a on a Raspberry Pi and A and a popcorn can maybe. And why aren't they changing it? Because it's worked investing in tech stocks has worked for many people. So we showed that slide to say, yeah, it has worked. But within the, you know, SFINT that that sub segment that's done pretty well and definitely outpaced the S&P. There are only a few names doing it. So you are buying an index just to get along one or two names. We Bitcoin is a single name that consistently 531 year has outperformed what you have hung your hat on. And we're thinking that the problems that are with the the federal government and with monetary policy now governing everything really or dominating the scene, that maybe there could be even risk to some of the economic benefits or tailwinds that have benefited these companies. So you're right, Michael. They, they basically still say, all right, I know why you're shoving this in my puss. I'm like, I'm not shoving your puss. I'm just showing you that that this animal is not a Ponzi. It is not a Tulip. The Tulip craze was three years. This is 15 years and really 45 years in the making because of the technological innovations that underpin it. And so then they say, OK, and it basically doesn't change them, but it gets a second meeting to unders to have, you know, to have the discussion advanced. So yeah, that slide has helped because at the end of the day, people know that capital is permanent at these endowments, but employment is not. So they need to deliver. And, you know, a lot of them are underfunded. And and so Mark, what I feel like, you know, putting and putting my, my hat on from before I was a Bitcoiner, I would a common defense, I think, or like a justification for it all. An explanation would be, oh, well, there's going to be reversion to the mean. So you got lucky so far with Bitcoin. You, you got the good stuff. And now there's, there's bound to be some reversion to the mean and it's going to underperform and then you'll end up kind of in line with other assets. What are your thoughts on that or how do you, how do you, you know, respond to that kind of natural objection? Well, Jackson's already responded. He said now there are two questions that come up when we when we show this slide of 1/3 and five year, you know what about longer. So actually three questions and we say we don't show A7 or 10 year because it just would blow up. It would look like an NVIDIA chart because the base would be the basis is so low. If we look at any four year rolling period, the worst return is I think in the order of 28% compounded the worst four year return. So it does have a reversion to a mean, but the mean does lift over a four year period. The mean can be low in a one year. We saw that last year. So if you're trying to fund liabilities out of five and 10 years, then this is how you look at things with that long range view. The other question is. I was just trying to rephrase that as so. So in your mind, the mean for Bitcoin is skewed to the right there. There is a sort of a mean, but it's already like highly positive Kager territory and and because of the inherent structure or properties of Bitcoin and where we are in adoption. Yes, because of the problem in traditional finance and people, you know, looking over their shoulder. Let's let's talk about behavior. Economics is really about behavior. Study behavior. And you know, how it impacts wealth creation, storage and transfer. And people's behavior is changing. For the first time in, you know, in, you know, suburban Chicago, New York, LA, parents are saying, oh, you got into UCLA. Yeah. You know, 68, seventy, $5000 a year. And, and, and you don't get to go to graduation. You also got into University of South Carolina and you got some money. Guess where you're going? Honey, I know no one in our community knows about USC, South Carolina, not Southern California. You're going there because it's half the price and it's a smaller school and we think it delivers the value. So people are making everyone knows that that wages aren't going to grow into the moon, but costs are going higher and they're going to value they're not going to what has worked for people. So I think I mentioned that because people are open to the idea that the way their parents made money and had stores of wealth, that may not be the case. And when you talk about education and people making changes to maybe going to a City College for a few years or to a non name school, even though they have the money or high, you know, a better known school. I, I think Jesse, that's why the four year mean has persisted because Bitcoin survives based on its decentralization and security. And it's been rewarded by having people wake up and realize that it is a a better store of value than what they've looked at otherwise. And then lastly the the question that Jackson put out to the team or to to the endowments was the next question we get is will it persist? And then we said, give us a call, we'll go over the reasons why we think it will persist. This is what has me super excited about 6 figure Bitcoin because what I hear Jesse say, reversion doesn't mean I think of what, what, what would cause it or why wouldn't it still go to zero. And when I think of 6 figure Bitcoin, I think it's flipped from wait, can it go to zero to wait? Where can this go? Where is the ceiling? And then that changes the whole dynamic of obviously price. And I think that's the real IPO moment or the quote UN quote IPO. That's like the change in step function of weight. This thing isn't going away. And now Apple and these firms can step in because there's 1,000,000 in the top. Is it 10 million? Like is there? Is there no top? I think it's still in the realm of like this thing can go backwards and that's the reversion. The true reversion mean is 0. It's such a good point that like the the general mainstream market probably views like the the ceiling of what's possible as 100,000 for Bitcoin. And then suddenly, you know, when you get to 131 fifty, then then all that sort of prior assumption of like, oh, this thing could only ever possibly go to 100,000 gets thrown out. And then Wall Street finance and general is forced to think how, how big could this thing get? And, and only then will we start getting the, you know, people outside of Bitcoin making comparisons to, to gold or, you know, something like that. And, and saying, oh, actually to get to parity with gold, this thing would have to be a six, seven, $800,000 coin asset class and actually could be higher than that. And I think you're right, Michael, that there will be a sea change there, a paradigm shift in terms of how people think about what's possible for Bitcoin once we get north of 100,000. Well, Jesse, I think you know that that by Bitcoin poster that the guy held up behind Yellen went on auction. I think your asset map will be similar to that when Bitcoin flips gold on that on that value assumption that's going to happen when you know, we kept kept have to making it from 500 million billion. Remember when you first came out, I think and had kept growing. So in the chat we can share that with with people. But back to price, you know, Marty, you showed NVIDIA. Can you can you show that? I don't know if you if you can show that again the chart going up or you know, he's probably still in our mind's eye. This is a. Weekly Weekly corner of Mark's prediction. Here we go. OK, we'll, we'll roll it out. Thanks for the key, Michael. So, so look, look at this. I was like, wait a minute, 135, are they using like what? What type of scale is this? I forgot about the stock split. So the question is, you know, when will Bitcoin be split? And that is a huge hurdle with people's heads. How can only Berkshire Hathaway can have, you know, five figures or or or something or or six figures. And once you know a regular stock does that, they bring it right back down to, you know, two or three figures so people can be more comfortable buying it. It is a perfect example about how non economic factors come in to purchase consumer behavior and they're not necessarily ones that lead to good outcomes. But Michael, go, go ahead. Kick me off in the direction that you were that you were talking about when when I came in on two wheels in the Schwab network on my first day and laid out some price predictions. Mark had a mark was very bullish on on Bitcoin post having that's that's as much as I got. That's exactly so I've been on some media outlets and one was Schwab Network with Nicole Pedelas and and people love price. So in my former firm I did it and I re up the numbers pen to paper and had a 110. 2024 low case and a 2025 high case of 450,000 for Bitcoin at the end of 2025, which I consider the end of the, you know, peak cycle. And so and so that got that got a few, a few calls from from folks, including Michael. It's like, hey, that Mark, that's great. We're, we're, you know, we're, we're glad you joined today for your first day. You know would. Love to have a heads up on the on the price target and so we went through it. But you know, talking on the call before this when, when I would speak to investors about how do you get to 110? How do you get, you know, where is it like like that and say, well, let's take a step back. Why is my mid case closer to the base case? Why is, you know, say for 2024 it was 110, I think 1, 40 and 180 something or 1:30 and 180? And why is the mid case slope closer to the base case? And it's because bitcoins, which is a question we want. It's like the hidden. It's like in Willy Wonka when you know, Charlie returns the rapper at the end and says here, here you go. You know, you show integrity, you show you've done the work. The reason why we don't have an easily distributed like most stocks are low, mid and high. That way its return distribution is skewed far to the right so that when you look at its distribution of equities and bonds, they're kind of normally distributed, you know, call a bell curve. Actually they have a slightly negative skew. Bitcoin. Bitcoin looks like one of those logarithmic, it bounces and punches far to the right like it's, I think in the last five years it's average quarterly rolling returns or or a 63 day return. It's like 23% on average. Its best quarter, I think it's like 220%. Its worst is 60, a four to one ratio. No other asset has that. You have to basically buy an options portfolio to get that kind of skew and that's why the institutions are coming. So I'm, I'm getting around trying to switch it from saying, who cares about the nominal value? Most people do 450 is a big number, you know, in 18 months, 1-10 would be welcome. That's our, you know what I put pen and paper in the low case, but it's how you get there. And that is where we get some invitations to explore that. Michael is the performance character of Bitcoin is so different that it takes a little bit of understanding about, well, why does it operate that way? How does it have that distribution difference? Yeah, yeah. Did I cover myself pretty well? Did I? Did I cover my? No, you just got me excited. I just feel grateful. Over. It's really grateful, like we get to build all this stuff knowing that it comes there. I think Marty's seen the most cycles, but everybody's not talking about it. And you just get to, like, focus on the thing, and then the market takes off and it's like Christmas, and you knew it was coming and you put yourself in a good position and then it does the rest. Yeah. Well, and tying this back to what? We were talking about earlier in terms of the national interest expense surpassing defense spending. Logan, if you pull up the TFTC article that I wrote this morning, again, I think I've wrote it at the end of the news. Like it's gonna like. We're gonna get to the point where people have to be aware of this, but go back up to the Luke Roman tweet. I think we're, we're talking about this of we were talking about it not flippantly, but just in passing, like interest expense is now bigger than the defense budget. But if you look at historically over the course of millennias, anytime this has happened to any large empire throughout history, it is marked the end of the empire. So like, once you have the amount that you're paying to cover the interest on your debts or passing defense, spending like that is a critical moment. And I think most famously in ancient Rome, when they debased the currency, the Daenerys, to such a point where the military began to recognize that it wasn't worth anything. They stopped defending Rome. And the Barbarians were able to come and sack the city. And it had a very slow and painful decline into the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages. And we've reached that point in America. And Logan, if you pull up the article again and and there are sort of soft metrics, metrics of despair. Luke Roman was citing Nile Ferguson. It's his index or his his law that he coined after writing many books on the subjects. And you can see that despite what many people in DC would lead you to believe in terms of the strength of the American economy or America at large, things are not going as well. We're the 6th, We have the 6th largest incarceration rate per capita in the world. Again, this next chart is interest expense going over the debt spending keep going down, but you, you just go down the the the last China's far surpassing the amount of naval ships they're building compared to the US. If you look at the average age of a politician in the US compared to the median age of the population, we are a large outlier and basically says that our politicians are extremely old and out of touch. Keep going down. Confidence in these institutions is at all time lows over the course of the last five decades, their percentage of high school girls who are experiencing persistent fields of sadness, hopelessness, thinking about attempting suicide or even attempted suicide. These numbers are going up. The we keep going It's it's I don't want to get too depressing here, but like statistics of the spare are melted alongside the debts and the debt expense going up. And it's because we've completely corrupted the pricing mechanism of the global economy, which is money. And all these problems, I strongly believe stem from this inherent corruption of the most important pricing mechanism in the world, which is money. And until we fix that, none of these problems are are going to abate. They're going to continue to get worse. And as it pertains to the debt situation and tying this back to why I went on this long ran is all these allocators, individuals, businesses, endowments, institutions, state governments, federal governments, they're going to have to wake up to the fact that the money's broken. They're going to need a solution to that problem. The Bitcoin is going to be there. And so whether it's the psychological effect of Bitcoin going over 100,000 or the psychological effect of people coming to grips with the fact that the dollar and the debt system is fundamentally broken, it's going to be a reality that people are going to have to confront sooner or later. And the sooner the better, and the later is going to lead to more pain for people. Yeah, Marty, I. Jumped in with it with a little quip, but I also and I fully agree with you. The one reason in in O8I was very negative on the markets and Gower and the part I like about Bitcoin is that it actually is a way it's a remedy for all the things you talked about and you know, I agree with you the mental health issues that are going on in this country. Jonathan Height excellent resource in case anyone has ever not doesn't know him. He he does wonderful work. He was part of coddling the American mind. He's a social scientist out of UVA now NYU. He talks a lot about what you brought up Marty, empirical support, no agenda and we don't either. We're just pointing out the facts. We're making the tie to the fact that money height doesn't do this. He basically he says it's parenting among other socio economic dynamics going on or parenting as he calls it. I think it I agree with you and that's hard to find. I think people in this call. Maybe who don't. That, you know, unsound money, you know, drives it and and I'll, I'll end with this one point. People say, when was the moment that you got involved in Bitcoin? It was a few things, but one that was latent and I'm not the smartest, you know, sharpest pencil in the box. I sometimes take time to to come around in O seven. I brought my family, my wife and I, and our four boys, oldest, it was maybe 12, 11 to the Met. And there was an exhibit called Glitter and Doom, and it was the artwork of the Weimar Republic. And it was kind of behind these stalls had a sign no one under age of 14 should should enter. I'm like, it's art. Forget it, guys, let's go in. I took one turn, saw a few paintings and whipped the boys back out. It was the most disturbing artwork that came out of that era because hope was lost. And I know that sounds hyperbolic. It may not, you know, I'm not a prude, but I'll tell you, you had to be experiencing some things that we haven't experienced in quite a while to draw that artwork. And a lot's been written about it. So Marty, I fully echo, we don't talk a lot about it, but we're living it. There's something going on. Wow, Glitter and Doom. Was that the name of the? The exhibit that is fascinating. It was and obviously I it. Really hit me and then it when Bitcoin started to come up and I started to see the alpha decay. You know that that Michael was talking about that I messaged and saw things breakdown in the markets and then listening to height and then witnessing myself about mental health breakdowns. I'm like I've seen this before and it really was an impactful and you can't really tell as much in the you can Google it and look it up online man seen it live. It is eerie, yeah. And. Again, and on some optimistic positive notes, that's the beauty. One of the beauties of Bitcoin too is I think for the first time in human history, we have a viable off ramp way to manufacture a soft landing outside the purview of the government and central banks, which has never existed before. And obviously individuals like us and many others around the world who are building the infrastructure to make it easier for individuals, companies, whoever wants to onboard the Bitcoin are creating the conditions where we can opt out of that system of despair into in a creative system that sort of raises everybody's boat because you have better money and we can work our way out of the problem. And I think what we're doing right now is perfectly evident of that. We're communicating from 4 different parts of the country over the Internet to get this message out there. And so on the communication side, the message is getting out there. People are waking up to the fact. If anybody's listening, I would go read the Gold Money annual investor letter that came out this week. Royce Bogg, his friend of mine used to sit on a board with him. That annual letter had a really good section on the change in discourse around economics. And he asserted, and I would agree, that the Keynesians have certainly lost the stronghold on economic thought. And the the Austrians are are rising up in terms of really asserting themselves on the battlefield of economic debate and I think convincing individuals winning hearts and minds to steward us towards a a more sane global monetary order. Marty, before we wrap just. Curious on that same. Note of like Trump, the election and the, the populist side of this plane and like, how does that tie in? Because I, I hadn't heard Bailey talk about this stuff. And I, I heard this week he, he went on one of the pods and you could see an angle of like there's a lot of people competing for his attention and we've gotten loud enough that if you can put some dollars up and get in the eared. So he, it's kind of a dance. He says one thing, you show up. So he he referenced it to like dating I kind of for the first time, I'm not still. Very. Skeptical but first time seeing like how that it would benefit him and then he could these concepts we're talking about actually like matter specifically from like a platform that Trump would, you know raise on. So just curious like how you think about the how this plays out over the next six months. I think Trump's going to continue. Leaning in I think. It's good for him and his campaign. What happens if and when he gets elected And 454-5450? K Bitcoin per mark will happen if I'm convinced of it if Trump's elected. I mean, I wouldn't be shocked either. But I mean, I think that's a bold prediction, 450. K Bitcoin if Trump is elected. I mean, I think the thing rips. I think there's no. I think I mean that's effective if he does even half of what he says he's going to do in the in the the way that the infrastructure, everything that's kept this like lid on all of this is basically like that. Nobody knows what's going to happen where regular regulations, all the banks, right. You basically give the green light. I would imagine that this industry is like ready to play in the US and Bitcoin here. And it would. Ensure. That it becomes like a, a partisan wedge in our Society of like, oh, you're you Bitcoin is right wing and not for everyone, which would which would be the the downside of that, but well, unless, unless Biden picks up. But unless Biden picks up the next 16 months as well, yeah, I mean, I think. I mean, I've been saying this and I had Matthew Pines on TFTCA couple of weeks ago and he echoed this. Like, I think the way Trump's positioning it makes a lot of sense and is actually the right way to position it. Like the best thing you could do if you get to the office is nothing. Maybe like he can make it legal tender and eliminate cap gain stacks. That would be something he could do that would really accelerate things. But just get out of the way. Like I was in Texas earlier this week talking with some individuals that that are in contact with the States and they were mentioning that the state has all these stranded wells, abandoned wells that they have nothing to do with. And like that is a low hanging fruit where maybe as an individual state like Texas, you don't want to take the risk of allocating treasury dollars directly into Bitcoin and making that overt investment. But there's just pick the low hanging fruit. These stranded wells, you partner with private miner, allow them access to these wells and you mine Bitcoin with them. Do a red split. Maybe that's how you accumulate Bitcoin. You you mine Bitcoin and roll it into a Bitcoin mining permanent fund that the state manages. You can apply that at the federal level too, where I mean, I don't think many Bitcoiners are going to do this. We can accept Bitcoin for taxes, accumulate Bitcoin that way. Like I think the way Trump's positioning right now is positive in my mind in terms of it seems like he's going to make a concerted effort to ensure that Bitcoin in the industry around it are feel safe in Bitcoin in in the United States, excuse me, and Bitcoiners as individuals feel safe. And I think once, as you mentioned, Michael, people get the Peace of Mind that they can operate without the fear of the federal government coming down and throwing them in a cage. Like it's just going to be gangbusters for, for what's created, whether it's in the mining industry, the custody industry, the credit system built on top of Bitcoin, using Bitcoin as super collateral. Like I think it's going to really explode in a good way. And I think that'll have positive externalities on the health city, American economy overall. It may not be clear to everybody how how that ends up in an overall positive for the American economy, but it's crystal clear to me. We just got to start pushing Bitcoin into every nook and cranny that we can. And then we'll look up one day and be like, oh, that actually provided a nice floor for the economy and and actually help people pull themselves up from their bootstraps during these dire economic times. Yeah, Jesse and Mark, if you haven't listened or anybody listening. That was probably the high, one of the highest signal pause I've heard in a very long time. Marty and Matthew Pines 'cause it broke down like the geopolitical situation, everybody vying for talent from, you know, just the sovereign nature of allocating now to go from an LP perspective and get access to the best talent where it used to be, you know, the actual government entities. It was just incredible. And I think that like it, it impacted or influence. Also listening to the Trump situation because it's a, it's a, it's an actual, it's a, it's an actual like from a like on. That pause. They were describing Mario be able to listen. They're describing like how we're behind in certain things, but then brought up like the amount of Bitcoin that's stored in the US or mine, but also the amount of Bitcoin holders is the largest in the world, in the United States. And there's natural things that we're ahead at if we want to maintain that relevance. Like we need to be able to have the right people waiting in that like angle with Trump was a big one. And Marty mentioned the infrastructure that like once people understand they can build here, it's a very large leg up on other actors that are, you know, trying to basically bring AI and other tool into their markets. Yeah, we're going to win. Things are, things are. A lot of desperation. Out there, we're not going to sugarcoat it. You have to identify and recognize the problem, admit that it exists, and then go work on solutions, which is what we're trying to do here, and you should too. That's the beauty of Bitcoin. You can work on the solution. It could be as a small act, as small of an act as buying $5 worth in something like Cash App or River. It's a vote of confidence in a system that is external to the insane system that we've all been subjected to for our whole lives and is getting out of control. Like the the newsletter I wrote this morning, I was writing in a haste. I really wish I could expand on it. But like we live in the era of exponentials. Like that's going up exponentially. All the spending, whether it's Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defence is going up exponentially. That NVIDIA chart is exponential. And it's it's, it feels like, I mean, you held up when money dies, Jesse. It feels like parts of that book where the stock market and everything was going up and everybody thought they were rich, but they didn't realize that their money was losing value extremely quickly. Glitter and doom. Yeah. Don't look at it late at night before bed. I'll do a sunny day, sort of. I've already pulled it up. It's some, really. Interesting you know it. It's exactly. As you say it's it's. Some warped and grim. There's a malaise in All in all of these self portraits in particular of like roaring 20s, but with a darkness and I kind of feel is reminiscent of where we are right now. Everything's great, but everyone's sad. Yeah, yeah, yeah. About our humanity kind of what a topic at G7 about what AI or really the money can do to our humanity, which is what Marty was going through the slides when you see it in artwork and coming from other people who maybe don't know about money. It's just manifesting in different spots worth it. Worst is in our youth. You know, he's in the kids on that on that. And that's that's why I like, I love how David Bailey's getting giving free tickets out to people to Bitcoin Nashville who will be babysitters so that parents can have time to do what they want and the kids and the kids will come and be in a different environment than where they normally are. So pretty, pretty cool option for anyone out there looking for a free ticket in Nashville on a But just tell him I told him he should still do it. Yeah, thank goodness for the bright orange future bright. Orange future in a in a time when it could otherwise be rather dark. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, all right. And it looks like the dog. Behind me is saying, all right, gentlemen, it's time to time to get to the beach party, I think. I've got. I wish I could. I've got. Another podcast, a few more calls today, but I'm going to enjoy the good weather, the good vibes, the good company. Well, you can. You can take a boat out now and you can. Yeah, maybe next week I'll get a. Next week I'll get one of those floating tiki bars. I'll record from there, get some Wi-Fi. I'll be the day. I love that. All right. Interest and expense. Debt expense is going up. The video's pumping. People are still sleeping on Bitcoin. If you're here listening, you have an edge. You're still early. Gosh. It's, I mean Michael's. Thrown out 400 and. 50K2025 price prediction. So that's the I was just quoting Mark, I'll just put. Mike. Mike put that off. No, I don't. I joke. I joke. About $1,000,000, whatever the number is, they're just, I think they're, they're mental models for people to understand that this thing there's it can go anywhere. We don't know. Yeah, when you when you don't have. Token splits. That's what happens to Price folks. Yeah, it's a beautiful thing. It's only 20. One work. Thanks everybody. Thanks for organizing. See you guys next week. Dickie, thanks for listening to this week's episode of the show. 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