Transcript+
Let's be clear, Bitcoin is an international asset. We are spending like drunken sailors. Bitcoin is the only economic entity where the supply is unaffected by the demand. If you want to preserve. Your wealth. You have to convert that currency into an asset that's scarce. Desirable, portable. Durable. And. Maintainable. All right, welcome back to Scarce Assets. We are kicking off a new format for the show. So we're really excited to use this first episode as a framework to give you the audience a better understanding of how we're thinking about Scarce Assets, which is part of the On Ramp Media umbrella, how we'll think about this podcast and the value that we'll bring to you going forward. You see here if you're following on the screen today that we have a a new lineup of hosts. We have myself, Jackson Michaelic and I'm joined by my Co host Glenn Cameron and Tim Kotzman. We're going to get into some introductions here shortly, but just to tee things off because we will be taking a new strategy with the show scarce assets. What we'll be doing here is a bi weekly podcast. And So what this podcast will be dedicated to is exploring the investment landscape shaped by the paradigm of scarcity as the ultimate driver of value. So there's certainly a recognition in the investment community and capital allocation world that traditional investments are struggling to provide real returns and Fiat currencies are losing their appeal and have been losing their appeal due to debasement. And so our show provides a forward-looking lens on how investors can preserve and grow their wealth in the 21st century. So the podcast will feature insights from industry leaders in traditional finance and alternative investments, really with the goal of providing practical strategies for building future proof portfolios. So that gives you a high level overview. Really what we want to dive into one of these eternal questions and themes for the show will be understanding why scarcity drives value. So this is really more important than ever because we have reached a tipping point in the debt based monetary system or debt levels really all across the world for sovereign nations and corporations for that matter. And the cost of servicing that debt have really reached unsustainable levels. And so at the sovereign level, what we've been living through is really the only feasible path at this point, which is the debasement of the money. And so that really undermines the traditional unit of account, which is the money itself. And so that money, whether it's dollars or pounds or EUR or yen, historically those have provided individuals with the ability to store as a store hold of value over time. But what we've seen over the past several years and certainly over the decades too, but it's accelerated now, is that this debasement due to the structural issues of debt is causing these currencies to lose purchasing power at a more rapid rate. So naturally investors are looking for scarce assets to preserve and grow their wealth over time. So that's what we'll be bringing to the table. You may have noticed I, I didn't mention the word Bitcoin once in that overview and that was intentional because we will be talking about Bitcoin as part of the show, but it won't be the show's focus. This will be a show that's focused on the overarching investable landscape. And so we'll be covering traditional assets and alternative investments. And so for those that don't sit in the finance world, typically the way you can think about this is in traditional finance, traditional investments are typically public equities and private fixed or public fixed income. And then kind of cash equivalents and then alternative investments has been a umbrella term to categorize everything that's not that. So at this point, it's become, it's become a, a wide range, it's a large bucket of investable opportunities, but includes real assets, digital assets, commodities, private assets as well. So there's a lot that we'll be diving into in the show. So hopefully that'll give you a better sense of the theme and the strategy for scarce assets. And with that, I would like to introduce my Co hosts, Glenn and Tim. Glenn, maybe we could start with you if you just want to give a quick overview into your background and ultimately why you're excited about this show. Maybe if there's an anecdote you could share about kind of how you think about scarcity or one that clicked for you as part of your personal investment thesis. Yeah, sure. So I've worked in various parts of the institutional investment management world for about 28 years now. I'm a chartered financial analyst, I've worked as a portfolio manager and an institutional investment consultant. I've worked with most types of institutions in various capacities. And I think the first time that I started to think about scarcity or it was more for me, it was about like what is going on with the money was in the GFC. It kind of felt like, you know, investing for me, the fascination, the intellectual simulation of it is kind of figuring it all out. Like what is the relationship between things? What's undervalued, what's overvalued? How do you control risk, all of this kind of thing. But in the GFC, it sort of felt like all of a sudden the rules of the game were just being broken. It would be sort of like, you know, the simple analogy that I've often said is it's like playing Monopoly, right? The, the thing that makes the game, the board game interesting is that their rules and you have to follow the rules and you have to try and beat the other players by following those rules. But what I felt like in the GFC was that what was happening is with some players had a few other boards, you know, stashed away with their money in it and they were just stealing the the money out of the other boards and kind of flooding our game with all of that money. And so just sort of took a lot of the interest and passion in the game of investing and money management. It started to make me question a lot of things. I mean, up until late 2008, I'd never heard the term quantities of easing, although it had been done in Japan before. But it just wasn't kind of on my radar throughout my education and my early career. You know, I didn't realize that we were kind of playing a manipulated game. And I think where scarcity really became, you know, the idea of scarcity being a key driver value came onto my radar was when I discovered Bitcoin, right? But like you said, you know, the plenty of places where scarcity drives value, you know, the, you know, Ferrari GT250 sold for £42 million at Sotheby's in 2023, right? And that's because there are only a handful of them. You know, you see it with vintage wine, obviously gold, etcetera. And in a world where, you know, money is kind of the money supply of almost every country in the world is being inflated, The, the, the one thing that is not scarce is the unit of account, right? So you're trying to get out of the money into some kind of asset to kind of protect yourself. And so, yeah, it's taken me a while to figure out that you're not just trying to create more dollars or bonds. You got to do that at a rate that kind of beats the rate of, you know, which the the supply of those things is being increased. Yeah. And that could be a challenging game because unless you're paying attention to this as core focus of your day-to-day, you may not actually understand just the insidious nature of this, right? Because if you're a everyday person, even a lot of individuals within Wall Street, they don't fundamentally think through these from a first principles basis, right? And so I remember the past couple of years living through COVID and, and the fiscal and monetary stimulation that we saw. And the result of that was higher prices. But if you went to Wall Street Journal or the Times or New York Post, you had all sorts of conflating and conflicting opinions about what was causing the higher prices. So it does become, and you see this too in, in the professional investment community, if you, there's almost like a disconnect between the unit of account increasing and the price of things going up, where there's all this like noise in the middle where people try to pinpoint different reasons as to why the prices are going up. And they may play a part, You know, maybe corporations are increasing their prices, but is corporate price gouging the reason why prices are going up? No, it's, it's not right. And is that the reason why equity valuations are increasing? No, it's not. And so I think that's a really astute observation. And Tim want to hand it over to you as well, just to share more about your background and you know, why you're excited about this show. And then I'll I'll be happy to do the same before moving, moving on here. Yeah. So my background is in the land side of oil and gas for the past 15 or so years. And I don't think I really was clued into shrink flation until 2020 and 2021 when there was a lot of conversation around a pack of Oreos being like, there's just less cookies in the jar, so to speak. Prior to that, I was just kind of running as hard as I could, trying to work hard and work smart and put together either, you know, consulting deals or small businesses. And when I was introduced to Bitcoin in the beginning of 2021, it seemed pretty clear to me from the beginning that the 21 million hard cap of Bitcoin was a scarce asset as opposed to what I kind of term is like perceived scarcity. If someone's just marketing that there's only one hotel room left tonight, but you're like, I don't know, Travelocity, if you're telling me the truth or not, Maybe it's just marketing. So yeah, it's just definitely been a journey. Yeah. No, I was on a similar timeline as both of you, it sounds like because for me it was in 2020 and I was working in New York, Tim, I was in this a similar office to where you're sitting today, right across from Bryant Park. And my background was in alternative investments and at that time I was doing fund manager research and so our desk covered private markets, which would be private equity, credit, real estate venture and then covered public markets as well, but on the alternative side. So that would be hedge funds and long only limited partnerships. And it became apparent to me in the spring of 2020 with the coordination of fiscal and monitor monetary authorities with trillions of new dollars and trillions of liquidity across the board and all sorts of currencies entering the market and robust measures taken by central banks to ease liquidity and financial conditions by lowering interest rates to 0 and in some cases negative interest rates, which was tough to wrap my mind around at the time. And so I was speaking with fund managers and in my role, I was doing initial investment due diligence. So we would vet hedge fund managers and private assets. We would vet their strategies to see if we would want to have them on our platform for our ultra high net worth and high net worth accredited clients to allocate to if they so choose. It was part of if that was a match with their, you know, personal investment strategy, philosophy, financial planning, etcetera. And so we would vet these managers and then if they were on the platform, we would have quarterly calls with them to review their performance and their attribution against the benchmarks. And so it's kind of business as usual until you get to the spring of 2020 and you have this surge of liquidity that starts to distort markets in all sorts of ways. And what I came to realize at that point was because of this unit of account, Glenn, that you mentioned, because the unit of account was growing so dramatically and so rapidly, the prices of all other asset classes for the most part besides bonds were, were increasing in tremendous amount of value or at least that was the perception, right. But then you recognize that a lot of this is being driven by the growth in the money supply. And so a lot of managers did really well in 2020 and 2021 because there was so much money sloshing around and that was creating more or higher valuations and more stretched valuations. But at the end of the day, what I noticed was for me, Bitcoin caught my attention because it was really the fastest horse in the race at the time because it was the most scarce asset in the context of abundant liquidity and abundant Fiat currencies. But that could also be applied to investors that were allocating capital to high quality equity companies too. There's, there's, we were talking about this last week a little bit where there's still scarcity in equities. Maybe not so much in the sense that a company can issue more equity, but their scarcity may be the fact that they have, they're the only company in the world that does what they do right? Or they have some sort of competitive advantage or Moat that makes them scarce as an investable opportunity. So I went down that path and, and things started to make a lot more sense when you think about the abundance of money that exists today. And all investors are in the same position now where they need to figure out how to allocate capital to scarce assets to preserve and grow that wealth, because now the money that in theory should help them to just save over the long term doesn't serve that purpose anymore. Yeah, Yeah. I mean, I think it's fascinating to think about the fact that so the modern dollar, you know, as we think of it today, kind of was created in 1913. And between 1913 and 2020, you know, a certain amount of dollars were created. And then since 2020, that total supply of dollars has increased by more than 40%, right? So 40% of all of the dollars in existence were created in the last five years, right? That you know that that's got to make people sit up and think, hang on a second, you know what? Why is it that 40% of all the dollars that were created over 111 years were created in the last five times? And you know, I think there's a reason why there's certain things that have gone up in value a lot over the last five years. And those are, if you think about it, they're the most kind of the things that people prioritize most. So you know, if you look here in in London, a sort of a paint toss apartment in Chelsea or Mayfair, the kind of two most desirable kind of areas in the City of London to live in with a very wealthy owned property. Or you think of Manhattan or you you think of various places in the US particularly kind of sea front property or whatever. You've seen the price of those kinds of assets go up, you know, kind of add rates reflecting that increase in the money supply. You also see it like with the Ivy League kind of university tuition fees. You see it in kind of high end healthcare, all of these kinds of things where it's like people have taken all of that excess money supply and they've tried to apply it or invest it in places where they've where they kind of know there is inherent scarcity and value, right? It's either in the form of I'm going to get a big payback, it's good, I'm going to get a very good return on investment, yeah, or I'm going to plow it into something that I know is always going to be valuable and scarce, right? And that's why when investors measure their the real return they're getting on investments against CPI, which is measuring the price increase of, you know, I don't know, toilet paper or, you know, all of these kind of consumer products, right? It's like, well, is that really a measure of the real return you're making on your wealth? You know, do you store your wealth in those type of consumer products? No, you don't. So if you've gotten a 12 or 13% return on average over the last four years, have you actually increased your wealth? No, not really. Because if you sell those assets and you want to buy other assets that where people store their wealth, those things have also gone up by 12 or 13%, right? So all of that money supply has created asset price inflation, right? So you, so you, you all you've really done in monetary terms is protect your wealth, but you haven't really grown your wealth. You haven't become any wealthier. Yeah. And one of the really challenging parts of this is that most people's earnings don't grow with the rate of the money supply, right? So Glenn, to your point, if the money supply, I forget the exact numbers, but if it's compounded at a certain rate over the past couple of years, most people aren't growing their wages that fast as well. People who work in white collar businesses, unless they get a promotion that year, they typically see some sort of increase in their wage kind of commensurate with what inflation has been historically. So maybe a 2 or 3% bump. And then when you get promoted to the next level, you get some sort of increase in your salary, whether it's 10% or 15 or 20%. But that doesn't happen every year. So the issue then is you have this increase in the money supply, which by the way, it does have been flow, right? And so in 2020 and 2021, Glenn, you highlighted how enormous that increase was. But then we did see a contraction of liquidity and money supply, I believe in 2022. So it's not a straight line, but over time, what happens is up and to the right that money supply, money supply grows. And so the really insidious thing at play here is that most individuals are not able to actually grow their wealth at a rate faster than that because they usually rely on some somewhere, some sort of income. They're working at an employer. And so that's a big disconnect, right? Because if you're everything that you desire in life, whether you want to purchase a home or you want to take your family on a vacation or you just want to be able to afford quality groceries at the store, things have increased probably 4050 sixty percent, depending on what that is in the past five years, Most people are sitting on maybe a 510 or 15% increase in their salary. So it's becoming harder now to the treadmill. You're running faster against it, right? And it's becoming harder and harder to grow that wealth. And that's one dynamic at play. Yeah. And I mean, that's affecting not only individuals, it's also affecting businesses, you know, you know, I've, I've, you know, working with pension schemes and stuff like that. Pension schemes are usually attached, well, they either attached to one company or several companies. And so you end up working both with the pension trustees, but also the board of directors of the companies to a certain extent as well because they're kind of supporting those pension schemes. And so you come to understand a lot of different businesses and what you find out is that they're finding the same thing, particularly those who work in competitive industry. So this goes to your point about, you know, scarcity and equities, meaning companies that have something that makes them unique, some kind of, you know, economic modes or competitive advantage that gives them sort of almost monopolistic kind of power. Those kinds of companies have pricing power. So as the price of things, you know, as the money supply gets inflated, they can raise their prices kind of at a rate that's quite similar to that rate and increase in money supply. But if you're AI don't know a manufacturer of some kind of good and you're the parts that you're creating are kind of generic, right? And that you've got 30 competitors, right? You can't just raise your prices because there's very big competitive pressures, but you do tend to see at least over the short term, all your inputs kind of go up at that, you know, fast clip of 10 or 15% if you're using steel or copper or commodities. I mean, if you go and look at commodity prices and see what happened over that period where they were just kind of creating trillions of dollars, right? I mean the price of natural. Gas, kind of. You know, it was blamed on supply chain bottlenecks and whatever, right? But the reality is, OK, that's a reality. There can be supply chain issues, right, because of wars or pandemics or stuff like that. But then you would expect that after those issues kind of go away, the prices should come all the way back down to where they were, right? But what you find out is that isn't the case, right? You know, natural gas prices, for example, are 6070% higher now than they were in 2020, right? Copper prices are about 5060% higher than when they were then, right? So, you know, if you're a business and you using these things as inputs to, you know, generate their lease electricity that you're buying or as raw materials that go into your manufacturing process or whatever, and you can't pass those goods on because of competitive pressures, well then you make far less profit and you've got far less free cash flow. So when you value that business, it's not as valuable anymore, right? And it's not going to keep up with the pace of monetary debasement. So and and that goes to that whole thing. It's kind of a cliche by now. But you know, if you look at the S and B500 and you look at it with the Magnificent 7, which are all these kind of monopolistic ballistic type companies, right, you've gotten a 12 or 15% return per year over the last five years. But if you strip those out, you basically even in nominal terms, it's been pretty flat, right? And then when you take into account inflation as measured by CPI, or more realistically, the increase in the money supply, you've gotten a lot poorer. Yeah. And so how does this tie in then to the changing landscape for capital allocation? Because when I think about this, I take a very macro view to capital allocation in terms of demographics and generations. And things change over time, right? There's not necessarily a standard way to allocate capital over the course of a decade or let alone 20 years a generation, etcetera. I always anchor back to the way my own family has done this. And I grew up in like a upper middle class family in the Northeast part of the United States. Didn't have a ton of money but was fortunate to be comfortable. My dad was very savvy with how he managed his finances. And so he always taught me from a young age things that I should be paying attention to. And then over time I've learned that things change, right. So when my dad has told me, he used to speak to my grandfather years ago about things are changing, You might want to invest a portion of the little retirement money you have into equities. But my grandfather lived through the Great Depression and wanted nothing to do with equities, right? Because he anchored back to this period in time where he was, he lived through people losing effectively all of their money, right? And So what he anchored to as an investor of very modest means was as my grandfather, he would have a little bit of precious metals, not a significant amount by any means. He would have some certificate of deposits, you know, government bonds. And these were effectively ways that he wanted to preserve the wealth that he had over time. And then my father, he's on the younger side of the baby boomers. And so he grew up in a time in the United States at least where equities became the de facto savings technology, right? People indexing became popular or first service mutual funds. And then indexing became popular, I think in the late 90s or so, early 2000s. And it's only grown. And now passive investing is really the way that everyone does it. And so you've gone from where fixed income, the rate of the basement wasn't as significant as it was today back then. So you could actually hold fixed income and some precious metals and likely be OK over a long enough time scale. And then naturally as that rate increases, you have 1971 the the breaking of the dollar to the gold peg. And so that was a crisis in and of itself. And then equities became a more crucial role for growing people's wealth over time, but they still had that component of fixed income. And so now what I I think is worth discussing is we've been in a environment now for a couple years for that portion of the portfolio, the fixed income, which was a crucial part of people's portfolios 50 years ago. And, and even more recently it's been touted as four. It should be 40% of someone's portfolio and then give or take depending on their age and risk tolerance. But now that's a portion of the portfolio that doesn't really generate any real returns. It loses money over time. It may play a role, particularly for older people to have current income, right, to generate some income for potential obligations they have in a given year, but it's not actually helping them to secure their retirement or work toward their long term goals. So I think that's the crucial thing that really will be diving into a lot on the show is like, how do investors take the framework that used to work and tailor it to a framework that's going to work for the next 5 years, the rest of this decade and beyond, right? So what are your thoughts on that Tim or or Glenn, how do you guys think about portfolio construction at a personal level or how are your thoughts changed on this topic over time do? You want to go ahead, Tim or? Yeah. I mean, being exposed to alternative assets through the work in the minerals, you know, natural gas and oil, minerals and royalty space, and then being introduced to digital assets has really, you know, had had me thinking a little bit differently, along with some of the guys that I talked to on a regular basis that really, unless it's a top performing equity. To your point from earlier, Jackson, right, a few decades ago, it was kind of the transition from all bonds to a little bit of exposure to equities. And I feel like now it's you're seeing it again, but from equities to hopefully the top performing equities and then also to digital assets like Bitcoin. So I'm, I'm really intrigued and excited to hear from the guests that we bring on. Like what are their actual allocations to the extent that they can share and, and why it's, you know, one thing to say what your allocation is, but but what's their position and, and what is it about their background and what has influenced them that's really gotten them to that conclusion and, and what would change their mind? You know, hopefully we're all on a journey and learning. So yeah, I think that'll be really telling and and yeah, should make for a great discovery and and a great conversation. Yeah, I'll, I'll add this. So I mean it's, you know, so you can have a really great company that's, you know, got a great business. It's got a huge competitive advantage. It's got a big sort of Moat around its business model and everything. And that'd be a really bad investment, right? And why is that? It's simply because the price that you have to pay to have a share in the ownership of that business is too high, regardless of how good the business is. And if you kind of generalize that right now, equities have only been more expensive. I'm talking about US equities, which are kind of 60% of global equities. Yeah. So that chart there shows the what's known as the cyclically adjusted price to earnings ratio, right in the blue line. The red line is long term interest rates. So the way to think about this is so you got your normal PE ratios right, but they're very noisy because like for example, earnings only come out once every 12 months, right for each company and prices are changing day-to-day. So like for example in if you were using normal PE ratios, backward looking PE ratios during 2020 when equities fell by 40%, right, PE ratios went up by 40% because the price is the numerator in the PE ratio. And that's nonsense because you know, equities were actually a lot cheaper after falling 40%. So what this matrix does is it takes earnings over the last 10 years, right? But it adjusts each earnings by inflation, right, and then averages the earnings over the last 10 years and uses that as the denominator and then measures that against price. So it's a far more accurate and less noisy way of measuring equity valuations over time. And you can see there that the Cape ratio cyclically adjusted to price to earnings ratio currently is about 37, right? And it's only been higher than that two times in history. And that was during the craziness in 2022 when, you know, specs and GameStop and all of that were going through the roof and there was a lot of insanity, right? And the other time was at the height of the.com bubble, right? So that gives you some sort of context for how expensive equities are at the moment. I mean, much higher than they were that at the sort of in the 1929 kind of stock market bubble that made your grandfather afraid of the equity markets, right. But then, and that's because everybody knows you don't want to be in fixed income instruments because you look at where date levels are. I'm talking about government debt levels. And I'm not just talking about the kind of explicit data. I'm also talking about the unfunded liabilities. So like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, on this side of the pond, they call it state pension and public health costs, as well as the explicit date, right? In the US, if you measure date like that, the date to GDP ratio is not 115, it's 950%, right? Here in the UK, it's like 550%, right? And it's way, way higher than it's ever been. And we know from history what happens next, right? Because it's not politically feasible to kind of, you know, say to people, you're not going to get Social Security or Medicare or Medicare, They're not going to take those things away, right? And yes, there's things like doge and stuff like that. And of course you want to make, you want to stop waste and you want to make, but that's kind of at the margins, right? The big picture is unchangeable here is the only way you get out of the situation is by debasing the money, right? And so then you look at what your options are. Well, you definitely don't want to be in fixed income because that's where the debasement is going to occur. The bondholders are going to be the bag holders, right? But and then you look at equities and you're like, well, what's the earnings yield? So the earnings yield is the reciprocal of the PE ratio. So the long term average of that Cape ratio is 16, right? So the earnings yield, the reciprocal of that is 1 / 16, it's about 6.8% earnings yield. But when it's 1 / 37, right, you're getting earnings yield of less than 2%, right, on equities. So you're like, well, equities are a good place when there's going to be monetary debasement, but it's all about the price, right? And that's price is too high. So I've got to find other places to put the money right. And that's where alternative assets come in because bonds aren't going to work, equities aren't going to work. So where are the places where I can store value, right or grow value in real, real terms? And it's not in public listed equities or public fixed income markets. And so the idea behind this show is to talk to experts in all of these areas of alternative investments and get them to make the case to us why their area of speciality is the place where people should be allocating to. Hey, Glenn, Speaking of places to put capital and the name of the show being scarce assets, a few minutes ago it was announced that President Trump signed an executive order to create a sovereign wealth fund. With your institutional background, like how do you interpret that or any color? Because it's easy to kind of jump to a conclusion depending on, you know, what your, you know, current holdings are, how you view the world, but from like an institutional lens. What does that say to you And and how could that kind of play out? So, I mean, so I've worked with a couple of sovereign wealth funds in my career as the investment consultant. You know, it's kind of funny, even in with pension schemes or sovereign wealth funds or whatever, people, I think kind of make the assumption that the people that are on the board, the investment teams or the OR the boards of trustees of these organizations must be investment experts. But you. You often find out, no, that they're not investment professionals at all. So that's why they hire investment consultants to kind of help them think through these things. And you get different types of sovereign wealth funds. You get what are called stabilization funds, which are like in countries where, you know, like there's some countries where like, you know, 70% of their GDP comes from, you know, the mining of one commodity or oil or something like that, right? And can cause distortions in the race of the economy. So a lot of them Raven you from the production of that stuff goes into the sovereign wealth fund, right? So that it kind of doesn't assault the race of the economy and it's kind of used for the common good of all of the citizens of that country over time. So a good example of that is Norway, right? The Norwegian sovereign wealth fund basically takes in the large majority of the money from the oil that Norway's got off its coast, oil and natural gas. But then you also have these ones called savings funds. And so the stabilizations funds tend to invest in like fixed income assets. They, they want everything to be kind of very stable and liquid all of the time, the savings type of sovereign wealth and they tend to actually try and grow the wealth, right? So it's kind of one time windfalls and they want to use it as kind of intergenerational equity over time, right? So they'll tend to be kind of more in the equity kind of bucket, kind of mixed with some fixed income for the shorter duration type of spending that they're planning to do. I don't know. So I guess if I had to, you know, just hazard a guess of what the Trump administration are trying to do. Well, first of all, there's droll, baby droll, right? So, you know, potentially they're thinking, OK, you know, let's, you know, really plow into the energy kind of resources we have. They've also spoken about, I mean, if you think about all these tariffs and stuff like that, I've heard President Trump talking about, you know, the lumber that's available in the US and, you know, wanting to kind of make better use of the assets that United States has. And so if you're going to do that and you're going to be generating a lot of revenue and potentially from tariffs as well, you're going to want to you, you don't want to just be kind of wasting that money. So you, you'd want to be kind of putting it into something. And yeah, it'll be interesting to see because obviously there's been conversations about a strategic Bitcoin reserve or strategic digital assets reserve. So, I mean, I can only hazard a gay said worker. The other thing that I've, I think's going on with the US is with the US as the global reserve currency, there's Triffin's dilemma applies, right? So you've got kind of like the way to think about this, you can forget about that terminology is that because there's global demand for a reserve currency, the reserve currency tends to be overvalued, right? And what that means is for manufacturers or service providers in the country that has the global reserve currency, when they try to export their goods or services, they are expensive from the perspective of importers in other countries because they're having to pay for things in the dollar, right? And the dollars kind of, you know, overvalued, right? And So what you kind of need to do is and, and that's led to the deindustrialization that is well acknowledged in the US, right? And it's also kind of where a lot of Trump's political support comes from, you know, those areas of the United States, the Midwest and stuff like that, you have kind of been hollowed out. The automotive industry, all of this kind of thing has, you know, essentially it's because the reason why American cars don't sell well around the world, any other reasons aside, is because they're very expensive, right, compared to other cars. And part of that is to do with this currency issue. And So what you want to do and, and the reason why there's so much demand for dollars is because global trade is conducted in dollars. And because of that, people want to store the reserves in dollars. So they buy U.S. Treasuries and everything and they don't ever kind of move out of the dollar. So what you need to do is you need to create some kind of way for people to store their reserves in something else. So the obvious example there is gold. And we've seen over the last sort of three or four years historic levels of gold accumulation by central banks around the world. But I think that, you know, you need kind of a a 21st century version of that. And so the two versions are the Treasury bonds and Treasury bulls. But then obviously you're going to run into that debasement kind of issue if you're going to if that's where you're going to keep your reserve assets. So you're left with gold, which is you found really operationalized because you can't kind of send, you know, you can send dollars to another part of the world. It'll take you a couple of days, but you can get it there. But if you need to send 100 tons of gold to somewhere else, you know, as final settlement of a date, it's going to take a couple of months and it's going to cost an absolute fortune. So you kind of you need an asset. So I think maybe there's an element of that in the sovereign wealth fund is trying to like funnel capital into something else besides the dollar so that you can kind of bring down some of that overvaluation of the dollar to allow the country to reindustrialize. Yeah, very well said. I'm curious to see what happens because I do remember before Trump won in November, there were discussions, particularly with Howard Lutnick, who's the secretary of commerce, who was talking about some unconventional ways to use the resources and assets that the United States has to strengthen the position of the country. So, Tim, good call out there. I didn't see the news break, so appreciate you bringing that up. Be curious to see or see what other guests in the future have to say as this develops. Well, I think this is probably a nice place to wrap for the first episode to conclude. Just for the listener's sake, certainly encourage you to follow along with us. We'll be releasing the show every two weeks and if you want to subscribe to on Ramp Media on your YouTube account or on your podcast player, that'll be the best way to stay up to date. Our aim is to bring perspectives that are fresh and unique, so you'll be hearing from people you likely haven't been, you have not heard from before. And for those people you have heard from before, we'll be sure to ask them engaging questions that are also actionable for you as well. As Tim mentioned earlier in the show, we want this to be a way that you can leverage the collective expertise and knowledge of the guests that come on to future proof your portfolio. And so it'll be quite interesting as we have these discussions to talk about how investors are navigating this practically, how are they implementing changes into their portfolio. And we're certainly in uncharted waters as it relates to just where nations are with their sovereign debt levels, the challenges that exist in traditional assets and this kind of fraying of the unipolar world. So certainly more to come. Excited to be navigating the ship here with you, Tim and Glenn. It should be a good a good show. Great resource for folks that will be excited to follow along going forward. Yeah, awesome. Thank you, guys. Yeah. Thank you, looking forward to it. 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 Ramp 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 on rampbitcoin.com/contact to schedule a consultation with one of our private Client advisors.
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