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Reality is inflation has been persistent since 1971. It's accelerated since O 8, and then it's gone parabolic since 2020. Like full stop, across anything that exists in any conversation that says otherwise is absolutely false. And ultimately this feels very much like COVID in the sense that the system broke in September 2019 with the repo market. There was a lot of things already going on. Inflation was ripping, and COVID was an excuse for inflation to increase or persist. We obviously know a lot of capital came in. It's the same angle here. I don't think that inflation was ever handled, but the core idea here is that money is broken. And so this feels like a very convenient way to say inflation is persisting because you have these now bottlenecks that are increasing. 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 extra ever assembled in the history. Of Doctors, 1970. 4. 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, OK. I say when we sell. I always love it when Jackson smiles. We are back, ladies and gentlemen. Let me get the first word. I'll never let the ladies actually listen to the podcast. I know there's a lot of gentlemen that listen to the podcast. If you're one of the few ladies that listen to the podcast, let us know in the comments. We we definitely want that support and leave us a like subscribe before we get into it today. Gentlemen, what's going on? I know we have another tight one. I'll be running a very tight ship. Michael, keep your comments brief. What's going on? How are you? Guys doing, I mean, if anybody's ever wondering who runs the business, it's obviously Jackson. I can't speak first on the pod. I'm not allowed to interrupted how we set this up. So yeah, I mean, I'm doing great for working for Jackson, figuring that out, but outside of that, it's going pretty good. What about Mr. Cabela's? We're good, man. We're good. You know, Week 4 of war with Iran, that's where we're at. Are we I I actually didn't know that. Sorry, it's a conflict. It's a, it's an operation. My bad operation. Well, yeah, why don't we start? There. Why don't we start there? So there's a lot happening, of course, and let's let's paint a picture of the macro backdrop. Want to get into a few other topics to set the stage here. But on the macro side, all rattle off essentially what I think is happening and across asset classes. You guys tell me where I may be wrong, where I may be right. So essentially what the obvious part is there's a massive disruption happening specifically as relates to energy. And so inflation expectations are moving back up because there's been a shock to energy production and shipping, just logistics and there's a shortage. And so that impacts of course, food inputs for agriculture, manufacturing, energy prices obviously. And now what we kind of expected going in 2026 was inflation would continue to come down. When we say inflation, we obviously talk about the doctored metrics, which must be taken with a grain of salt. But inflation expectations were coming down to start this year. People expected there to be lower rates, which would end up juicing asset prices, juice the economy. But now that this war has broken out over the past couple of weeks here, inflation expectations are are creeping back up. And so Brian, I think you spoke to it in the newsletter last week, we kind of ended the show last week. But essentially of central banks, specifically the Fed in a in a tight position here because they obviously can't raise rates that much because of the fiscal situation yet. That is kind of their mandate is when inflation is going higher, they can raise rates. And so markets went from expecting rate cuts soon to now expecting maybe higher for longer. You see the US 10 year and 30 year long duration assets are creeping back up. Mortgage rates are going up and you have weaker demand at U.S. Treasury auctions. At the same time you have gold falling, right. So gold's falling because maybe a few different things that I could discern. First would be really yields are rising and then you have the capital flows into U.S. dollar, which some people may be a little bit confusing because on one hand you have the US Treasuries which are selling off, but those are the long term assets. On the short term, you have a flee into dollars, a flee into U.S. Treasury bills, so you're kind of seeing a divergent there. And then you have Bitcoin and Bitcoins been holding up surprisingly well the past couple of weeks. We are going to talk about some of the notable developments in the ETFs and here just a second. But gentlemen, what do you guys think? Like what's going on in the world, what's happening in asset prices? Is that an accurate summary? Did I miss the mark on some important aspects? Do you disagree? Agree. Let me know. I just want to call out one key thing is we get trapped in the Fed speak or, or just the, the, the nature of every quarter these new prints come out, whether it's CPI, whether it's employment or inflation via there's all these different metrics that measure different levels of inflation. The reality is inflation has been persistent since 1971. It's accelerated since O 8 and then it's gone parabolic since 2020. Like full stop, across anything that exists in any conversation that says otherwise is absolutely false. And ultimately the this feels very much like COVID in the sense that the system broke in September 2019 with the repo market. There was a lot of things already going on. Inflation was ripping and COVID was an excuse for inflation to increase or persist. We obviously know a lot of capital came in. It's the same angle here. I don't think that inflation was ever handled. I don't think everybody knows whether it's their home insurance, car insurance, I guess houses, depending on what you look at it, because it obviously interest rates went up. So there's a form of inflation there. But the core idea here is that inflation in the money is broken. And so this feels like a very convenient way to say inflation is persisting because you have these now bottlenecks that are increasing. The last thing I'll say is you mentioned everything's whipsawing, right? You have Treasury yield spiking, which have different interpretations based on what the market's demanding, but also potentially with inflation ripping. You have that, but then you have the other side of it, people dumping bonds. And so the money is effectively broken. And so we can come up with different ways to rationally explain what's happened. But the reality is there isn't really any formal safe haven, safe haven in a short term time horizon. On the long term, we understand gold and Bitcoin being money, but you have to also be prepared for the volatility with that because the money again is broken and then also be able to be liquid enough to not get squeezed out of a position, don't use leverage, etcetera, etcetera. So that's effectively how I look at what's going on. Yeah, I I agree with all that. I think the point you made around like this is a nice convenient excuse to basically, you know, quote UN quote tolerate more inflation, even though to your point, like inflation has been persistent and rising for a long time. It is similar to this in the sense that I think you had best end of the last week come out and say like 50 days of higher prices for 50 years of no nukes for Iran, which is just like, you know, a wild thing to say in general. And like largely bullshit. Because it's like if if you're saying we're going to tolerate higher prices for 50 days, like that's not how like price mechanisms work. Like if we're going to have accelerated inflation because of this accelerating energy crisis. And then ultimately on the back end of it, if that starts to break things, then we're going to have to print a fuck ton of money. And then that's even more sort of monetary inflation on top of like supply chain inflation that's not going to go away in 50 days. Like it that is going to remain and persist into the future. And so I, I agree with you, Michael, that it is we do sometimes get trapped in like thinking, you know, or talking in these ways that are just not based or grounded in actual reality. And they're more they're talking points for a government that is insolvent. And so agree with all of that. The other thing that's interesting around gold is, you know, with its sort of decline over the past week or so, I think part of that could be related to a lot of, you know, large gold hold holders are sovereigns in the Middle East who because of what's happening, basically need liquidity for various things because they are either having energy shortages, their infrastructure is getting blown up. So they need basically to liquidate some amount of capital. And so if they have a ton of gold, maybe that's part of the recent price declines. But you're totally right in that like medium to long term, we know the trajectory here. Dollars broken. You want to own card assets, sound money, gold and Bitcoin. And yeah, the, the, the only other thing I'll say is like, it kind of doesn't matter what hat like going back to the, the Fed conversation, it's, it's sort of irrelevant. But what, what is relevant is that even though we know the numbers are bullshit, like it does put them in a tough place because what they were planning to do was cut rates. And if, if now we know, you know, the actual reported inflation is not going, not going to go come down at all. And it's actually probably going to go higher. Now they're pricing in rate hikes for 2026. That's a tough place for Rick risk assets. So that's why you're seeing a lot of volatility in the stock market and risk assets in general. And then the other thing I'll mention, which maybe we'll get into this, but like there is something going on with just like what the administration, particularly Trump is saying and trying to basically quell or manipulate markets. Like we're doing the war fighting on the weekends outside of mark market hours. We're doing the escalation on literally like Friday evening over the weekend and then saying everything's good on Monday morning to cool markets. And so like, that's like kind of blatantly obvious at this point. It's been happening for the, for really the entire onset of this conflict where we, we escalate things on the weekend. We then have a, you know, a five day reprieve in the demands he was making over the weekend. It's like, oh, why was it 5 days? It's like, well, maybe it's because those are the market days that are, you know, for this week. So you can't really look at any price signals in the market with any kind of conviction. It is wild to me, though, that like, the market is still reacting to these things as if like what he's saying is at all true. Like, it's like he's clearly just trying to keep oil relatively low and and give people any ounce of optimism that, hey, like, maybe this war isn't going to persist and go on longer than we all expect. Well, I mean, it's a video game at this point. That's why I get a little frustrated whenever we hold any credence, like to any of it similar to like, you know, we looked at Trump's portfolio, the amount of capital, the money they made, whatever's going on with Lutnick and Tether. Like the reality, I mean, the great example is the SAS stock market in the overvalued multiples. And then you insert like one app getting launched and it completely kills the stock. It's not because of the business and the underlying fundamentals are broken. It's because everything that values them is broken. Of course they're going to like craft or draft on to whatever said because you have algos that are waiting for whatever the tape is going to read and then they're just playing against each other. Again, it's a video game. It's not the underlying fundamentals. I also think that there's two main points to like, not conflate. There's just inflation in general and then inflation that's happening because of what's going on. We don't have to go through this chart. It's something else I was working on. But it's just realistically from technology, anything that we want, whether it's energy, if you have to go put gas, any kind of technology from a supply chain, food, obviously we all need, and then anything that relates to policy and then consumer inflation. So there's the angle of like inflation just absolutely have never been put back in the bottle. And then there's the other angle, which is whatever's going on here holding the lens in your brain, like not your brothers in general, that it's possible that this was all intended to happen this way. Like it's, it's, it's the same lens of how people will go different, but similar in that Elon Musk never understood Bitcoin. It's like, doesn't make any sense to me. It's the smartest person on planet Earth worth close to like a trillion dollars or whatever. It doesn't understand consensus. And we figured out like that never hold weight, didn't hold weight in the same way it doesn't hold weight that we have one of the largest, most powerful countries in the world, the United States. And with intelligence agencies and all these things that we didn't understand by doing 1 action, they were going to go close this down. And then we're going to end up in this situation like, And so it's like, what is the angle end game? I don't know, but I just don't like hold the weight of like, what does the market say? And what's being touted on there is fundamentally different than what's happening. And that's our job here, to be able to talk about these things. We're not constrained by like large firm, you know, public television to be able to talk about this stuff because that's what everyone else is being is hearing. It's like, how do we get to the other dimensions to figure it out? So anyway. Yeah, I like that. I like the point you make just about how the the markets are are really not markets at this point. They're all based on the the control over the interest rates and control over the money and effectively then it distorts everything else. And a great example of this is some of the recent developments on the private credit side. We can pull up that interview where we're actually talking about about it's either 10 to $13 trillion of private assets that are just are valued internally, right? So that's one example. And then you talk about the private markets for at least a decade, probably since 2008 and all the all the QE and all this stimulus that's entered the market, people have been talking about, Oh well, how public markets are so disconnected from where they should be historically, from a fundamental perspective, it's because they're not really markets at this point. They just serve another purpose. So I know, Michael, you wanted to take a look at this interview. I think it's a great place for us to jump into next because it really just goes to show how messy things are about to get here. So let me know make make sure this audio is coming through here. Yeah, I mean, it's pretty long and lengthy, and to be honest, I didn't listen to the full thing because we've covered, but I think like at the 32nd mark, yeah, it was perfect to hear like what he wrote. A 3.5 trillion in private credit. The largest pool of self. Marked capital in the history of global finance. I am nobody. I have no institutional backing, no fun, no lobbyist. I'm recovering alcoholic who spent years learning to be part of society rather than apart from it. I rebuilt myself from nothing. Then I broke into the game with no credentials, no pedigree and no permission. I have no subpoena power. I have no regulatory authority. I have a few computers, a parser and the SE CS own documents. Every institution in this chain already knows what I'm about to tell you. They built it. It was not always built this way. They know how it works, they do not know how it ends. So yeah, this interview is one that ponted recently, I think it released a couple days ago, with this individual, Nick Nemo. I haven't heard him before, but I think there's a few interesting things to call out. The 1st is the fact that you could tie it into the AI narrative, right? Like Michael, you were just showing what I assume was a dashboard you've been building to track price changes and different things happening across the economy. This individual, Nick, was able to take all this publicly available information and then actually get on a massive platform like Anthony Pomplianos to talk about about $10 trillion of of capital that is severely compromised. And then you can kind of back into everything as it relates to the cascading effects into the banking system in the public markets. Curious what you guys think of of all this. We are seeing in real time more and more funds that are just locking up capital. And some investors forget that that is part of the mandate right there. They have to manage the liquidity. But then once one, once a good amount of people want to get out of the fund, it, it starts that chain of others wanting to redeem. And then before you know it, all these funds are forced into having to sell illiquid assets, add valuations that don't make any sense. And it becomes a problem quite quickly. And that's what we're starting to see play out now. Yeah, there was continued sort of you know as as this has played out over the past several weeks. I think the most the most recent ones from during this morning and yesterday were Aries and Apollo massive private credit funds that are doing very similar things whether it's gating withdrawals or capping how much people can pull out. And to your point, Jackson, like that is just a mechanic of these vehicles that is in the documents. It's not like anything they're doing is like necessarily illegal, but it is a sign of of sort of distress in these assets. And the other thing I want to call out is that all of this is like intertwined and related with the AI stuff in the sense that a lot of these private credit funds, one of the main sort of segments or industries that they were lending to were software businesses. Because sort of over the past decade, 10 to 15 years, like those revenue streams were perceived to be very low risk, right? Like software was kind of like the darling of the past two decades. And those sort of recurring revenues were seen as very sticky, very stable. And so a lot of these loans in sort of the mid market that were, you know, anywhere from three to seven, three to seven-year loans and duration were given to these companies and and they were originated at much lower interest rates. So now that debt is rolling over at much higher interest rates and those cash flows are much less resilient than they were 10 years ago in terms of perception in the market and sort of AI disruption and, and search software proverbially going to 0 in some sense. So that's part of the reason why if like you're asking yourself, well, why is this all like happening right now? It's because it's intertwined with the AI stuff in the sense that a lot of these loans and these private credit funds were focused on software businesses. And so as that stuff is unraveling, there's a lot of sort of distress in these on these loan books effectively and investors in them are seeing the writing on the wall and unfortunately, you know, over the past, call it two to five years, the sort of cohorts of investors in these things. So that you know, Jackson, as we I think we talked about last week or the week before, like these were the darlings of institutional allocators for a while, but then they did sort of start to move out the curve more towards retail investors. And so I don't know the exact splits. I think there's still a lot of like pension funds that are investing in these things, but increasingly it's a lot of retail. And so like, you know, as people are trying to pull money out of these things, it's sort of a classic story of like retail gets left holding the bag in some sense. And so yeah, I don't really see an end insight to this stuff. I think it's only going to get worse before it gets any better because the AI sort of software disruption risk is not going away and these funds are super over levered and and interest rates aren't going back down basically. So that that hurts it as well. Yeah. I mean, I think this is what truly makes you hear it often. But this viscerally gets to the asymmetry of Bitcoin because you ultimately have all these air pockets and different portfolios and they they've existed forever. Like we've talked about this before, but it gets real hard to tangibly feel the gaps from the amount of credit left to the the gap that won't be filled. But we talked about it with like the restaurant as an example, getting a credit facility via bank or even somebody privately. And then growth has stalled. Like growth across the economy has stalled. That's effectively where a lot of these layoffs are coming from. It's not necessarily AI, it's that they understand growth is stalled. Where do you cut? So the point being is, yes, AI does accelerate that. Inflation also accelerates that because growth stalls around. That's the interesting part. In the same way we talk about real versus nominal and returns, I don't think a lot of people go and look at for like business revenue and look at it from like nominal versus real because obviously like that maybe top line maybe going up from a dollar perspective. But what is that like compared to pre inflationary times or periods? So to Brian's last point, you had like, this is only going to continue to get worse, especially as the momentum picks up with the recognition that this is happening, the run on the bank. But then ultimately as hey, I just proliferate, it's like it's only going in it. It's only going to increase from here. It's a really precarious time. I don't know what to make of it outside of I just can't help but feel that the price of Bitcoin and a lot of the things happening right now are pegged because there's a things that need to be taken in place before gold and Bitcoin, specifically Bitcoin really are allowed to RIP. And this is like coming on a convergence path because when what Brian was alluding to really catches a bid and people are freaking out, you start to look at like, well, what actually has the properties of an asset where that I can protect myself and not have this counterparty risk. And there's very few on the planet earth that have the profile of Bitcoin. And then we see mimetics and we see trades and we see the momentum when assets catch that. And that's what I've always expected of like where Bitcoin really takes off and all the numbers that we like to joke about and and moon math actually happened because they're just ends up a place where to Brian's the the OTC desk go bone dry. I don't think we'll ever see that. But you get the point that like this will reach a converging point with the Bitcoin trade in the background and a lot of the work is just being laid right now. Funny you you mentioned OT CS bow dry. Just funny anecdote from a a buddy of mine, friend of the firm, which I'll, I'll mention to you guys off there who it is. But like he was telling me that he's done some, some sort of negotiations around OTC deals for friends of his. And there are, it does seem like there are not a lot of large sellers of Bitcoin. There are willing buyers that want to buy large amounts of TC, but there aren't many large sellers at this point. Which was interesting to me in the sense that the past sort of narrative for the past year and a half is that there were a lot of large sort of either long term holders or just, you know, extremely large holders who wanted to either sell OTC or move it into the ETF to borrow against it, etcetera. And so I do think that that that may be drying up in some sense and that there aren't a lot sellers out there trying to move a ton of Bitcoin. If something happened to you tomorrow, could your family access your Bitcoin? Not, Probably not. They would figure it out with certainty. I thought about this a lot. You may feel confident managing your own keys. What are your loved ones? Billions of Bitcoin have been lost already because someone died without a plan. With On Ramp, inheritance planning is built in directly into your custody setup. Your Bitcoin stays segregated and in your control, insured through Lloyd's of London and accessible to the people you choose when they need it. Get started in 15 minutes. Book a free consultation at on rampbitcoin.com On ramp secured by three, controlled by me. I got a couple of things here I'm going to run through quickly because we have a tight show, but I want to talk about I'm going to make this up right now. The things are breaking segment. It probably doesn't need to be every week, but there's a few couple. There's a couple of things here I want to call out. So this is actually on the front page of the Wall Street Journal today. The title of the article is they're rich but not famous and they're suddenly everywhere and we don't need to go through it all, but I want to call out a few things that really caught my attention. And so this this data point in particular, even adjusted for inflation, the wealth of the top 0.1% of households has grown more than 13 fold over the past 50 years. And then you can actually take a look at this chart in in the meanwhile, the bottom 50% have long struggled to build any wealth at all. And pretty much you can actually look at the the chart for the bottom 50% and they've been negative wealth. Their their wealth has been negative pretty much until the COVID stimulus of 2020. Meanwhile on this chart here you can see the top 0 zero 1% / 3000% gain in their household wealth since 1976. Zero .01% / 2000%. You get the the point. This is a symptom of the broken system, and it's incredibly frustrating as someone who has figured this out and hasn't been the smartest person to figure it out. But it's incredibly frustrating that more people do not understand why this is happening. Because this directly ties into everything that we're starting to hear now, from wealth tax to universal basic income, to just the growing stress that exists, the growing tension that exists between the bottom of this country and the very top of this country. And I still can't figure out why more people are not able to come to the conclusion that we are. And this is a great article for anyone who wants to check it out and you don't have Wall Street Journal, reach out and I can share with you. Or if you do, definitely check it out because it's a great one to share friends and with friends and family in the context of explaining why is this actually happening. Because more people need to understand before things get really wonky. And if we were to talk about a few more things to wrap it in and then we'll get your reaction to any, any of these topics you want to discuss, things are breaking. So Dow Chemical just doubled their polyethylene price from $0.15 per pound to $0.30 per pound. This is just an input for all sorts of things, water bottles, grocery bags, different manufacturing. So again, tying back into Michael's point earlier, inflation is going to be ripping higher as it has been for a while. I only call out the CPI and all that stuff because a lot of decisions that are made are related to those data points. But I agree with the fact that it those are just really not great data to begin with. So this is another data point. Things are going higher again, directly related to the war that's currently going on. And then this one, this one's great. We're going to see a lot more of this, I suppose Walmart rolling out digital price tags to every store in America. So they're certainly not going to be using this to update the prices lower every day there. You know, there's a reason why they're doing this. And I think we all saw in COVID, after the big money printing that happened, you would start to go to restaurants or you go out, go out to different places and you can see places that were taping over the old price and just kind of writing by hand. So obviously a much more effective way if you, if you have the bankroll to do it, you just roll out digital price tags. So in real time, you can always update prices higher. And again, this will just tie into amnesia that people have about inflation. It's going to be hard. You can imagine this playing out over the next couple years. It'll be even harder to remember what things even cost if everything is always changing and fluctuating. You got one other one here as it relates to the Philippines becoming the first country in the world to declare a national urgent energy emergency over the Iran war. They only have 45 days of fuel left. I don't know if you guys caught up the last week there was, I might have been Reuters or BBC, someone published about the about 90% of the production from that went through the Strait of Hormuz last year went to Asia. So you're starting to see a lot of you're starting to see a lot of pressure, particularly in Asian markets. And I think it was last last week, maybe Vietnam, I forget which country, you started to see countries actually curtail going to work a number of days a week to save on fuel. So certainly things are getting pretty ugly out there and curious what you guys make of just all this chaos. Yeah, working backwards, you have to become a fertilizer expert for the show, and I would encourage anybody who wants to listen to learn about fertilizer. The Monetary Matters podcast had the, I think it's like titles like head of fertilizer at this, like commodity shop. Just really fascinating because there's the first order and 2nd order effects of the petroleum situation, but then the food situation as well. Now the US probably ends up OK just with high inflation, but a lot of the rest of the world probably doesn't. It's not good. So that's just calling out that. I think when you referenced inflation in the conversation that's come up, it reminded me of that. There's like the Tele 2 tapes of you had the chart that was showing the 1%. And I think that's where I get like a little animated when we talk about Fed speak because everyone knows that inflation is at 3% and the cancel on effect is real. And there's a reality that there's AK shaped economy and a bunch of people are getting squeezed. And you see this every day when you go to your restaurants that are either closing or the cost. And ultimately you have the tale of two tapes where people feel in the real world. And then the Fed speak is like, oh, it's tempered, it's tapered. And now we're in this like shift where inflation is going to run even hotter in the real world. And then the Fed speaks and be like, oh, we're at 3 to 5%, which should scare the shit out of everyone, right? Because if they're already moving the goal posts to Brian's point where the cent was saying, it's like, you know, what is it 2 weeks to to stop the spread? It's like 50 days to stop the inflation. It's just it's setting us up for a really terrifying kind of future when it comes to the cost. And then, and then Jackson pulled up those those Weimar style price deals. And yeah, I mean, like that's how better to algorithmically just change your prices based on the inputs being broken. And now you have to create a better solution for how you do that versus having to go re sticker things. It's it's not looking good. Yeah, taking all of the, I like this new segment, Everything's breaking. It's true. And it does kind of feel like COVID vibes in the sense that there's sort of a calm before the storm where like a lot of this stuff is happening in real time. And we're not going to really feel and see the effects for, you know, another few months and those sort of signals of whether it's the Philippines or other countries that are either, you know, doing some sort of like energy lockdown touch stuff. Like I think you're going to see more of that, unfortunately. And in places that can't handle it and basically allow it to just manifest in in price inflation, you're going to see like people die because of this stuff. And so I think this gets a lot worse and things break a lot harder before it gets any better. But going back to something you said earlier, Michael, it's like, it almost feels like, you know, this is kind of the natural excuse to print a shit ton of money because we've always known that like, OK, mathematically speaking, the Fiat system, they need to ultimately print more money because the debt isn't sustainable. We're at 39 trillion now in terms of natural debt, but we had been in this period where like they were sort of tightening a little bit in terms of monetary policy. And it's like, well, how do you get back to like really the spigots fully turning on? Well, you kind of need an excuse. And like the private credit stuff is not big enough to be a huge excuse to print a fuck ton of money, But like global catastrophe and war and energy lockdowns is. And so that to me kind of does feel like the natural sort of lead into, you know, as Larry Laparde frames it in in his most in his recent book, that that is when the big print really comes. And that's when to your point, Michael, like you do start to see a real flight to an asset like Bitcoin because, you know, frankly, that's that's what Bitcoin has been over its history. Is it? It's there's a pretty tight correlation to literally just M2 and and liquidity. And we've kind of been in this interesting period, anomalous period almost over the past few years where things have been a little bit tighter, rates have been higher than they were for 20 years. But we are rapidly moving out of that and sort of reverting back to a place where there's going to be a ton more liquidity, liquidity that needs to get injected into the system where things literally collapse. So that's kind of that's kind of where I think. We're yes, specifically the bond market. Yeah. Yeah, I mean it, it kind of has to go in that direction to like the big print needs to happen for the reasons that you said, Brian, but it also needs to happen because the the generational divide, the wealth divide is only getting worse for all the reasons that we discuss every single week. And there's just going to be so much social unrest, you know, put aside what happens in the rest of the world because I feel like I'm not qualified to talk about that. I don't know enough information to make calls there. But at least in this country, there's going to be a ton of social unrest because things are just incredibly broken. And so I don't really know how this ends outside of like a massive financial reset. I don't know when that happens, but the reset probably involves printing a lot of money. And I don't know what the other side looks like it, but I feel really good about holding Bitcoin in that environment and I think you guys do as well. The other thing I wanted to catch up on before we pivot over to Signal versus noise is our buddy Eric Balchunis actually supported Brian. Brian supports your call out last week of this being Signal. I, I said it was noise, but we're rounding out the month of March here. And I'll make this a little bit bigger. But Eric Balchunis is talking about the Bitcoin ETF complex now accounting for 2 1/2 billion dollars of monthly inflows. And one good day away from digging out of the year to date whole of outflows. Brian, you were right. This is signal we're continuing to see accumulation of the ETF product. And then this is actually incredibly important as well. Morgan Stanley's Bitcoin ETF launch is imminent. This is really the first major launch of a Bitcoin financial product since the initial launch of the ETFs in January of 2024. And for those who are not aware of Morgan Stanley is the world's largest wealth management firm. And so this will be really interesting to watch. It's going to be supportive of more and more inflows into Bitcoin, which obviously means over time higher prices. And at the end of the day, it's about incentives like we saw we saw BlackRock and particularly Larry Fink, who every time I'll bring him up, I, I don't like him, I just want to be clear about that. But we saw how the incentives for him switched quite quickly once they once they filed for the ETFs and then once they launch, right, suddenly he was the biggest fanboy of Bitcoin and he wanted to talk about all the merits of it because it was printing money for the firm. And now you have Morgan Stanley again, world's largest wealth management firm that is not only launching the ETF, but also getting different what like a bank trust and also launching direct spot custody trading for the asset too. So there's a lot of firms that are really starting to step in. And this is an interesting time because you have the Bitcoin price suppressed. At the same time, you have so much going on behind the scenes that will ultimately be supportive of more and more capital flowing into the asset class. And you're going to see on a dime these firms start be being advocates for Bitcoin because they're going to be able to benefit from the appreciation of it. Yeah, I think, I think the Mortgage Stanley ETF is, is a huge deal and it's, you know, people are talking about it like like Eric is, but probably hasn't made the waves that it deserves in the sense that Morgan Stanley's not a large ETF shop or provider. They don't do this often in terms of putting their name on a product like this. But the real, the real take away here is like we've talked about on the on the pod in the past that, you know, when I bit launched Blackrock's ETF, you know, it had tremendous inflows, like fastest growing ETF of all time. All these all these data points that you can point to, but by and large, it, you know, Michael, you made this point many times. Like a lot of that demand was like latent, like in the sense that people who wanted to allocate to Bitcoin didn't have a vehicle that they could or felt comfortable doing so or didn't just have the sort of frictionless sort of brokerage environment to do it. So I think a lot of that, you know, whatever is in I but today I forget the number because it fluctuates. Yeah, 60 billion, let's call it. A lot of that was like latent demand. I think what's going to be really fascinating to watch is this Morgan Stanley ETF, like the only reason they're doing this is to compete with IBIT in some sense. And so they have to attempt to catch up to that 6070 billion, whatever Ibit's AT right now. And it's not going to be from late demand because the late demands like largely already in these, these other products that have existed for like 2 years now. And So what that tells me is that they're actually going to be soliciting around this thing and really trying to sell it not only to their internal clients, but just externally to actually try to compete with I bet. Because otherwise you wouldn't, you wouldn't be doing this, you wouldn't put your name on this product if you weren't trying to go head to head with I bet, which has been the most successful PTF of all time. And in order to do that, they're going to have to actually like sell the shit out of it because there's there's not as much late in demand today as there was two years ago. Yeah, fully agree. I think this will tie into some of the signal noise stuff. So I won't, you know, go too far. But just the end state is if the economy's broken and the money's broken and the underlying equities are broken, you need to increase the velocity. And so that that's what you're seeing across stable coins, tokenized assets, the ETFs coming online. So yeah, it fully tracks. So like, there's an understanding of where this plays in all of these large institutions have not taken their foot off the gas on the implementations, even though the price of Bitcoin is cut, you know, 40 or 50%. Boom. We'll call that signal even though we were not officially in the segment, we'll say it was signal. But now for the first, first part of the segment. So I don't think anyone's actually read it yet because it just fresh off the press is here, but Fidelity Digital Assets. I read it. I read. It. Oh, what? I thought you had to work. Read it. OK, No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I mean, that's why Brian, he brings so much value because he has such a big brain and he's able to actually stay up to date, whereas I am not able to stay up to date. And that's why my take suck. But yeah, this is this is fresh off the presses. I'm just going to go out there and say, Chris, I know you're listening to the show. So I think it's signal. Just so you know, I know you published great research, but Brian, I'll hand it over to you. You read it. So this is getting off 0 Evaluating Bitcoin in 2026 Fidelity Digital Assets Chris Kuyper Chris and the team there have been producing excellent research for years and years at this point. So if you're not paying attention to the long form research that Fidelity drops, you should be paying attention and definitely check out this report after the show. But Brian, what do you make of this? Yeah, very high signal. Shout out to Chris, friend of the show, friend of the firm for putting this together. I mean, it's just a very nice encapsulation of really the, the investment case for Bitcoin at this point. There's a lot of great data and charts in there that show correlations between Bitcoin and other assets, sort of portfolio analysis, impact of various percent allocations within a 6040 and what it does to different portfolio metrics. A lot of this stuff is, you know, has been known for some time, but he does a really good job of putting it all pretty concisely into, into one place and talking about the M2 growth there as well, which which we just referenced earlier. And the, you know, the I really, I really appreciate sort of the overarching framework of the piece, which is like, you can't be on zero and not have a good reason for it at this point as like a professional allocator full stop. Like you can't just say, I haven't looked into it. That's no longer an acceptable sort of framework to have. So if you are on zero, you, you better have like a really good reason for it because for most people who are on 0, the the reality is, is they just haven't looked at a lot of the data that Chris outlines in this piece. And if they were to look at it, they really have no excuse to, to be a fully on 0 because there's, you know, a, a huge data supported justification for at least having some, some allocation, even if it's point 1.5%. It's sort of insane to, to not have that as a, as a fiduciary generally like, and the other thing I'll call out, which was very important in this piece was like he does sort of a scenario analysis or analysis or looking at like the optimal allocation. And interestingly, but not surprisingly, like the sort of taking a 6040 and augmenting it. It's a, it basically goes to like 90% stocks, 10% Bitcoin and 0% bonds. Like you should not have like if you were being realistic about both sort of the 10 year look back and like a, a go forward look in terms of what bonds are going to do in a portfolio. Like it's actually insane to have any allocation of bonds at this point in time. And so the the data supports that and outlines that really well. Yeah, I think two things to just add and E1 was if you pull it back up Jackson, one is there there are people that deeply care about Bitcoin at these large firms. Chris is one of them. So kudos to him to to put this together. A lot of these organizations have natural friction when it comes to being very heavy in the traditional 6040 and obviously this goes a little bit against that. It takes some courage to be able to deliver stuff like this. The other part is the overarching sentiment, which is important at this point. Jackson was talking about it early. Like, what is it going to take to get people to, to get off 0 and recognize? And it takes firms like Fidelity to not only have courage, but to really punch somebody in the mouth and say like, hey, if you don't have a, a thesis and a view on why you're not exposed, you, you are going to be held liable in some respect, whether it's your credibility from a fiduciary, whatever it is. And I'd like that over urgent sentiment because we're way past like, is this a real asset? The other thing that to call out if you Scroll down is the whole notion of real versus nominal, because we don't talk about that enough. And you know, I'd like to think Chris listens and maybe got a little bit, but we'll we'll find out from the show. But right here, I mean, this is the thing that I don't think is just discussed in general regarding regardless of its bonds or equities or whatever else you're allocated to, what are you actual, what are your actual returns as they relate to your purchasing power year over year? And then the other aspect, which is a little bit too much for this, but it's also where do you have a high liquid ability to take delivery or position? Because I do think that's going to be a growing case like we're a little bit ahead. The first one's real versus nominal that'll start to pick up steam on like what are the right return profiles? But the next one will be because we'll see so much counterparty risk exists in the system, it'll start to be weighted on like where the hell do you actually park this thing? Because on a weekends, you know, on a turn of a dime, you might not be able to get that money out, whether it's a physical or you know, digital asset. So I thought those are really 2 great piece or parts to call out. And then obviously everything that Brian said, it's a nice distillation, succinct way to put everything that encompasses like the thesis on Bitcoin into one document. And I think we'll plan to share with some of our institutional prospects. Unanimous signal approved. If the Bitcoin price doubled tomorrow, would you feel good about how it's being secured right now? Most people have not really pressure tested that and I get it. I have talked to people who have self custody for over a decade and others who've stayed on exchanges because they could never get comfortable managing their own keys. Both camps have real concerns that is why we built on ramp Multi institution custody so no single company can lose it, move it or use it. Lloyd's of London Insurance inheritance planning built in and a team that can walk you through the entire setup. Get started in 15 minutes. Book a free consultation at on rampbitcoin.com On ramp secured by three controlled by me Moving on here Proof of reserves. What the hell man buy bit. We this definitely got noise. I think this was important. We'll we'll keep it tight, but this popped up on my radar. I think today they came out with their proof of reserves or recently this one says 318. The core idea is by the produce proof of reserves, which sounds great at face value, but it's something we've been talking about, you know, for months now. A proof of reserves is a fallacy because you can show proof of reserves. Forget about the liability side of that. That's a whole other part of the equation. It's just a reality that you can probably say that you have reserves and then tomorrow they're completely gone for any reason. Internal strife, internal collusion, external hacking, everything under the sun. And to add weight to this is by the participator was involved in the largest theft in human history. They lost $1.2 billion last year via Etherium smart contract. They were building multi sig on top of Etherium was manipulated the I think N Koreans infiltrated the organization coupled with some other kind of, you know, tech problems between Ledger and then the smart contract. I think it was no so safe. So the key point here is that proof of reserves being a fallacy. And we really, I think we're going to put a piece together on this because for most listeners, you probably know if they don't embedded in multi institution custody is proof of reserves. Every one of our clients has a segregated on chain vault controlled by them legally, technically and ultimately every wallet has those assets sitting there. And so that's something that we further expect to see in the industry. We're just early, but this buy get report is a great version of noise that proof reserves is is not anything to really have a as a badge of on. Yeah, If I could just jump in real quick, what you just said, Michael, needs to be more widely understood because the the core point behind it is sure you can have the transparency, but that doesn't solve the fact that you have that counterparty risk. You're still relying on a single institution that could be externally compromised by the North Koreans or could have some sort of internal compromise. And so that's what people really need to understand. It's great that there's a transparency because people are concerned about re hypothecation or what is happening to my Bitcoin. But really the bigger problem is, well, what happens to that firm that has full control over the private keys? And if they're compromised in some way, you may not ever be getting that Bitcoin back and you may be sitting on a multi year period of trying to recover some sort of of that value and missing all the future appreciation of Bitcoin. So it's not really solving the core point here. I understand the transparency angle, but look that's there's still a lot of risk embedded in in proof of reserves and your point by bit being the best example of that last year. Yeah, 100% the IT is a fallacy and it's sort of it goes to what we've talked about in other contexts around like it's a false sense of security to a certain extent of like, oh, my exchange or my custodian did proof of reserves. I feel great about them. But we know it's a snapshot. Like literally on this, on this screenshot, it says date, you know, as of 3/18, this is a snapshot. Well, today is 325 S, this is a week old. So we actually don't know if if they've been compromised within the past week. And that's kind of the point. But you know, when we think about what multi institution is from an architecture perspective, what I like to call it is like proof of ownership. Like it's not proof of reserves. Like this is actually your vault. It's segregated, it's on chain, it's verifiable 24/7 to you outside of our platform. So it's actually it's a step above whatever people are referring to as proof of reserves. It's actual proof of ownership at any time if you have an MIC vault with on room. There you go. Jackson was right. Big bearing Brian, we're going to coin that that's what we need is in this piece is called proof of ownership, not proof of reserves. We're just have a big like a line through proof of reserves. Dude, Brian's always had the biggest brain. Can't believe you're just realizing this now. Whoa whoa. Is the audio coming through from this video or now I'm going to, I'm going to I'm going to re share it real quick. You don't have to play it. We can just, we can talk. About it I don't. It's, I mean, it's 30 minutes. About it because I all I see is the great gold scam from Tucker Carlson. I did not watch the video. I have no idea what it's about, so what's the deal? Yeah, to me, this was this was mostly signal, I think. So what he's talking about, you know, I caveat in my tweet here like he's coming out with the OR he already launched a, a gold company, I think it's called Battalion Metals or something to that effect. But what he's calling out in this 30 or so minute sort of expose is basically a bunch of shady gold firms out there which have existed for a long time, whether it's on the IRA specific side or just sort of selling these like commemorative coins. You probably see in like commercials late at night where you know, people are selling these commemorative gold coins. The problem is that they're basically ripping people off with these products and these services. So just as an example, like some of these commitment with coins sell at like 40 to 200% over the Spot gold that's actually in the coin. And to me, like it just stuck out to me and I, I couldn't stop thinking of the parallel to like, you know, altcoin scans where like people sell you a better Bitcoin. Whereas like in this sense, it's almost like worse because it is real gold, but you're actually just getting screwed on like the implementation of it, whether it's like the commemorative coin that's selling over spot and then on the back end, the problem is like those coins then become mysteriously like illiquid and not selling out those premiums when the people want to get out. So like the inner, the, the video goes through various sort of anecdotes and examples. And just to give one, one woman invested roughly like 180 grand of her retirement savings into these commemorative gold coins. And then the gold price started ripping over the past few years. So she went in into her account and looked at it and like her balance was actually down. Like she was down to like 109 grand when like, and then she went back and did the calculation of like, OK, if I just bought Spot gold, like what would I be up? And she would have been up like over 100% from that initial 180 grand allocation. And so she went and sued the the company that she had done this through. I think she ended up winning her lawsuit. And originally I think she got like a refund on her original investment and then some premium on top of it. But not everybody is successfully suing these companies because there's a ton of them and they're doing a bunch of shady shit. So I thought this was super interesting and you know, kudos to Tucker for calling it out, but he is kind of also, you know, just hyping his his gold company at the same time. It's good content marketing. I mean, it's it's, it's actually, yeah. I mean, I think Tucker's noise at this point, but there's other reasons for that. But based on what you said, I think it's actually signal from a content perspective because if they're selling Spot gold, it's raining. I got my grandfather 1020 years ago. I remember going into his room and I mean, he still has them. There's just like a whole case of all these like, quote UN quote, like there's a difference between numismatics, which are like the study and preservation and collectible of coins that have like dates from, you know, 50 to 500 years. And then there's what they tell us numismatics, but are just effectively all coins for gold. And yeah, like to be able to at least just provide a better product and give people Spot gold at a, you know, tight spread that's at least better than holding dollars or crypto. I wonder if we could hire Tucker's video team to to produce some content for us. What do you guys think? All right, so it sounds like Signal, I'm going to go to this one. I picked this one out. Australia's 105 billion host plus eyes Bitcoin investments for nearly 2 million pension members. It's kind of signal and noise. It's it's a click bait headline from Bitcoin magazine because the 105 billion fund is actually we're only talking about the self-directed piece of it, which is only 1%. So there's actually a much smaller, you know, much smaller pool of capital that may be potentially allocating to Bitcoin or having the option allocate to Bitcoin as early as next year. So it's a little bit of noise, but it's also signal because it continues to reinforce the fact that the spigots are turning on, albeit very slowly. I think we're used to how quickly things move in our industry and even at our company, things move incredibly quick. But in reality, in the traditional finance space, when you have boardrooms and you have investment committees, things just take a while. So a little bit of noise because the the number is much smaller than initially marketed at the on the piece, but it is it still supportive of everything that we've talked about throughout this conversation. There is going to be more allocation of Bitcoin. It is a generational thing too. And so you have $80 billion or $80 trillion, excuse me, of capital held by boomers. And they're in their 80s on the on the older side, in the 60s on the lower side. So there is going to be a steady flow of capital. It's already happening. And everything is in many cases down to demographics, down to preferences on how people want to preserve their capital. So Bitcoin from a very long term perspective, I know it's hard to think that way sometimes because of how noisy things are week by week, but everything is setting up very nicely for Bitcoin. Yeah, seems a little little noisy to be a little sensational with the headline. Does it say like so it's one like the self-directed is 1% of the 100 billion, but then like what is the allocation? So like is it like 1% of 1% that we're talking about here? It's self-directed so the investors can choose themselves. Oh the other piece Brian and Michael, you guys should be aware of is this is this is not coming top down. This is actually coming from investor demand. So you have like 2 million or so pensioners or self-directed investors through this platform and they're continuing to ask for Bitcoin and I guess crypto stuff as well. You can see here the younger demographic, average age of mid to late 30s and they're increasingly asking for exposure to these asset classes through their retirement funds. Nice. Well, that's good to see. Love that. Cool. Well, I guess we'll do our last take if we have two minutes, I'll go first. My last take, Michael's been a bad employee this week, not happy with his performance and I'm hoping that we'll have a stronger finish to the week here. It's Wednesday. Afternoon. It's so it's so sad when Brian can't, when Jackson can't think of anything that that is like the basically has to go, but I do have to jumps. But that's what. I do now I will. I will call out signal call coupled with last take. Really appreciate all the listeners. I've been talking with clients, folks listening. You guys know who you are. It's great to hear the positive affirmations on the value getting from the pod, the value getting from on ramp. We think we're on something big. And so it's exciting that you guys feel the same way. And so for anybody that's listening that hasn't gotten in touch, whether they're a client, they just want us to hear what the feedback, please reach out. And if you're not a client, book time. I promise I won't let Jackson take the console. I'll take it, or we'll have Cam or somebody else. You don't have to deal with Jackson unless you just put explicitly in the consultation you want to talk with him. But we have some really insanely exciting things coming across the board from people joining to products coming out, special things like true special stuff for people that sign up early to what we got coming. So just pay attention, stay close. We're actually doing a lot of beta testing with existing clients. So if you've been thinking about it and you just been haven't pulled the trigger, I would encourage you to sign up because we're going to be sending out notes to our existing clients to start trying out some of the stuff that we'll be announcing in the next few weeks later, guys. Sorry, Jackson, you're not. No. No last sake from Brian. No less sake that that's a good place to end 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 Rat Media is for informational and entertainment purposes only, and nothing should be construed as investment or legal advice. Regardless of where you are on your Bitcoin journey, we'd love to hear from you. Visit onrampbitcoin.com/contact to schedule a consultation with one of our private Client Advisors.
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