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Bitcoin 109k. The look of love
Recorded: July 6, 2025 Duration: 5:48:00Space Recording
Full Transcription
I'm saying
It takes a lot to love you
You know it's true
I mean that it's one thing
It's one thing to do
It's like a blue
It's the look
It's the look
It's the look It's the look to
dreams from the heart of the sea A reason for your things, a reason for your things
Don't ask me what it is
So I don't know the answer to that question
If I knew what I'd say
First look, give me your information
If there's one thing,'m thinking it's going through
The second one is the first one
The second one is the first one
The second one is the first one
The second one is the first one
The second one is the first one
The second one is the first one
The second one is the first one The second one is the first one Oh
Oh oh When you catch a look by the lover, you'll soon recover.
We are both the one next to another.
It's just my first one.
It's in my life maybe one year time true love.
It's only maybe a nice four three shots with one scene. One scene. so many people wish to one save
so incredibly
so all right guys we are almost at 109.
You know, every time Bitcoin dips like it just did, it comes right back. So those who sold on the last dip are not going to get in for the next rally.
are not going to get in for the next rally.
It's very simple.
It's very simple.
Like once you sell, you can't bear to possibly buy at a higher price.
So that's the psychology of Bitcoin.
I put a couple of things, tweets together over the last couple of days.
One is a table of average net worth by age,
which immediately a lot of Bitcoiners copied.
It was pretty funny.
Swam Bitcoin put it into Bitcoin terms.
But whatever, you can put it into Bitcoin, you can put it into gold terms, whatever you want.
The thing is, it's pretty hard to go from 50% to 90% generally.
You kind of got to do it before 50.
After 50, you're going to kind of stall out.
Your net worth tends to go down after 50.
And I think the one thing that'll kind of get you from 50 to 75 to 90 to 99 to 99.9 is going to be owning Bitcoin I think that's gonna be
the the one thing that's gonna get you hey dog how's it going what's up Fred
hey so you really like talking about Bitcoin huh I enjoy talking about
Bitcoin it is the love of my wife well I'd have to say my wife and my dog and my son are the absolute best.
But Bitcoin is a close second.
I've got to prioritize things.
I always go online and I search,
all right, where are the Bitcoiners running a Bitcoin space?
And it's either you, Dark know and a few of you guys
well they're all my friends they're all we're all friends yeah yeah we we just take turns you know
like we have different we have different sticks like uh dark is kind of his stick kind of is
we're about to have this melt up and uh you know we're going to uh we're going to uh run out of bitcoin in the next couple years
and the financial system will break now i i kind of don't think that's gonna happen but you know
hey it might you know we might have a 2008 again where the entire Bitcoin financial system gets wrecked. So that's that angle.
I'm kind of more of a power law guy.
I kind of tend to agree with people like Giovanni or Steven Perrinode or Matthew Mazinskis.
I feel like it's going to take quite a while.
But I do think that Bitcoin is going to do very well over the next 10 years.
That's kind of my base case.
What do you think?
Yeah, I agree with you.
And I had a party yesterday at my mom's house.
And I was trying to orange pill my cousins.
And they kept saying, no, man, I missed the boat.
And I'm like, dude, you're just not getting it, man.
But everybody's been saying literally i mean
i can remember since 2013 people saying that you know it it really it's unbelievable how the the
narrative never changes you know it's unbelievable i mean i remember at bitcoin 200 thinking i bought
some at 200 and i was like this thing is i late, man. It's like I missed the entire, I could have bought it at double digits.
Now I didn't.
I bought it at $200,000.
But then, of course, being a complete and utter idiot, I sold it like at $400,000.
So there you go.
Yeah.
It's, you know, I kept saying to them yesterday, you know, there is no free ride in bitcoin right and what
i was trying to um uh you know insinuate with that is that like you know you okay let's say
you muster the courage and okay fine now you get your feet wet and you buy some right and it's
almost as if like every time you buy it goes down like it just it goes down and then uh and then
you start second guessing yourself and then let's say it goes down even it just it goes down and then uh and then you start second guessing yourself
and then let's say it goes down even more than maybe what you thought then all of a sudden you
cash out and then it goes back up again and you're like oh shit uh uh i shouldn't have done that you
know what i mean and so that was kind of my justification that there's just no free ride in
bitcoin there's no free ride but it's also it make the, it will outthink you all the time.
Like if you're absolutely convinced
that you know it's going up and it won't go up.
You know, it is the most impossible thing to predict.
It goes up, I mean, statistically it goes up,
does all its movement 10 days a year.
That's the stats.
And, you know, I cannot for the life of me figure out what those 10 days are i have no idea you know what i mean like i go back
and i've you know i've owned this thing for a long time but i can never figure out what others 10
days are it's going to go berserk yeah no i agree with you and And, you know, I mean, I keep buying as much as I could when I could. I bought I bought the other day at 110. And, you know, I told my cousins, I said, hey, I just bought at 110. And they were like, yeah, but it's at 107. Now I'm like, dude, you know, the Bitcoin, you know, the low percentile to the 99 percentile.
Yeah.
Let me tell you, man, there is a huge gap between like 75 percent and the top 1 percent.
And I'm just like, you know, it's very difficult to at least for me to fathom, you know, going from like, you know, nine or eight Bitcoin to like 75.
It's like, man, you have to really either have a successful business
and you exit and basically you put it all in Bitcoin.
But, you know.
Well, I can tell you nine Bitcoin, nine Bitcoin in 10 years
is going to be a lot of money.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, 9 Bitcoin is actually not a lot of money right now.
You know what I mean? It's fine, but 9 Bitcoin is not buying you a house in L.A. right now, today.
Yeah.
You know, you're not, there are no houses available for 9 Bitcoin.
It does not exist.
You know?
Yeah, and you know, the thing is,
is that like if you got a good job, let's say, right,
and you know, you're earning 250K, 300K a year,
you know, I mean, after you subtract your taxes,
your lifestyle, and if you got a family and all of that,
you're not going to have that.
Not much left. That's what I'm saying.
Like for you to really like double down and triple down and, you know, get to like north of 10 Bitcoin.
I mean, it's really, you know, it's really far fetched.
And that's kind of why, you know, that chart could be a bit deceiving.
But, you know, I think like the long and short of it is just, you know, just keep working and just stack away, you know, a thousand here, two thousand there.
And just let time do its time. Because if you're trying to get to the 99 i'll tell you one of the things
one of the things i've noticed though you know these people are like fred how did you become
so successful like you know and it wasn't bitcoin right i i made my money before bitcoin but uh
yeah i gotta tell you like i think most people do not have as a goal
to make money. They like, literally, that's not their goal, right? Their goal is to enjoy life
experiences, you know, to have a, you know, to go visit a lot of places, etc. And, you know,
I think from my perspective, I think after kind of being a poor graduate student at Stanford for a while, I was just really tired of being poor.
You know, like, I was just like, I really, I need to make some money now.
I got to really seriously make money.
And so, like, at that time, it's like, I just literally sort of optimized my life.
Okay, how am I going to make a lot of money?
And, you know, I was 22 years old.
And I was like, okay, where can I make a lot of money?
Wall Street.
That was like my, literally my analysis.
Like, not like I want to go to work on Wall Street.
It was like, I think I can make a lot of money on Wall Street.
And I think right now you have to go, okay, how am I going to make,
you have to have like a long-term plan.
Like how am I going to make a lot of money over the next 10 years?
I would say long-term plans, save every penny that you have in Bitcoin.
That would be a pretty good start.
Try to make as much money as you can and save every
single penny in Bitcoin. I think you have a chance. I think you're probably going to get
into that top 1% if you just do that. That would be my... Sort of like, get a good job,
get a high-paying job, and save every penny you can and put it in Bitcoin. 10 years from now,
you're going to be in the 1%. Why?
Because most people don't do that.
That's kind of my feeling.
Most people, they're not optimized for that.
But I think it's doable.
Most people are kind of lazy.
You know, Fred, I really appreciate you sharing that because
like um you know and it's not necessarily me being greedy right it's just it's just the fact
of the matter that you know i want to live uh a wealthy life for my family for my children you
know i i want to be in that top one percent well look it's sort of like i made a joke i said like
you know there's all these people looking for these experiences
I want to go to this concert
because so and so
I'm going to go pay all this money at Coachella
for this experience
and I made the joke
why don't you try to get the experience of being rich
I think that's a really great experience
to have in life
because it's not just an experience you'll have for one night
watching some band that that is rich play I mean that's so stupid to
me the people would be like trying to rack up those experiences like I think
you know they should optimize their life so that they can have you know enjoy
some material things that I don't know that that's what I think.
But I'm not I'm not trying to brag or anything.
I'm just like this seems to make sense to me.
I don't know.
Hey, so, Fred, you know, looking back, you've done very well financially.
And if you define wealth as the financial aspect, if you define wealth as time, how much time do you have?
And then let's add health into that, right?
So health is the most important thing, I would say.
So people in our generational cohort, right?
The goal was get into the workplace, start a business, do whatever you can, do what you said,
make as much money. And it ultimately became trading time for money. And we all have our
stories from our 30s and 40s where we put business ahead of life. It could be ahead of your family or relationships.
And as you look back on your life and you say,
was that a good trade-off?
And many times I would say more people regret the algebra
that they had around the way they traded time for money
on their journey up.
Now, what's interesting is I just think that Bitcoin offers a shift in the algebra.
It's less about trading time for money in the moment. I can now trade my time for Bitcoin
and have a compound in a way that is very different than classically it has
been. And so I just think it's time and people, my encouragement to younger people is, yeah, go
stack it up, do well so you can have that wealthy experience when you get older, but not at the
expense of making the mistakes that many of us made where we missed out on opportunities relationship-wise
and with our family because we traded time for money towards the pursuit of business.
Well, I think you isolated it. You've identified another thing.
It was, look, taking overworking is not great, right? Working smart is great.
not great right working smart is great but I think that what you've said there
about the health that resonated because I got very unhealthy about 20 years ago
right 20 years ago I was very unhealthy I'm not saying I'm a paragon of health
right now but at least you know I'm my body mass is normal.
I'm in reasonably good shape for a guy my age, right?
But I think a lot of people neglect their health.
And that's, that's like a really stupid thing to do, I think.
For anything.
Because like you can't, you know, if you, if you are massively overweight or if you get really addicted to drugs or alcohol, that'll ruin your life no matter what, no matter how much Bitcoin you have, right?
So I feel like, you know, having a little bit of stability in your life is also pretty, that's a good thing, right? Like having stability, having a reasonable diet, not being completely overweight,
and just living life a little bit in moderation seems good.
And it seems like that's the value of the Bitcoiner right now, right?
They're sort of into clean living, no excess.
I feel like that's kind of the new ethos of bitcoiners and i've said before
i feel like the old ethos was lambos right and kind of miami chicks and all this stuff
i'm kind of glad that it's shifted to be honest i think that narrative is is is empty i mean uh
yeah it would be cool i mean if you really want to go rent one for the day and
get it out of your system but it's an cruise ships they had a bitcoin cruise ships like
with all these guys like roger ver was on these cruise ships thomas you're supposed to get the
chicks with the lambo though so you can't rent it you gotta buy it so you can attract the hot
miami chicks right that's you're attracting the wrong chicks. Those are actually
dudes anyways.
What'd you say? I have a smoking hot chick.
I don't need any more. You can never have
too many, Thomas. Wait, you're not
supposed to be stacking mistresses as
a leadership advice guy.
I feel like it's, I'm really enjoying
the conversation. I feel like it's like obviously'm really enjoying the conversation. I feel like it's like, obviously we're measuring metrics with Bitcoin,
but ultimately I think we all have like the same four metrics.
We have our family, we have our job, we have our personal pursuits,
and we have like our spirituality.
And so we can play Tetris in any way we want with those,
but ultimately those are kind of like the, I guess, the distilling of what we have with our time and what we choose to spend our time with, right?
Yeah, simple. I would just say, I would like your perspective because we haven't talked before. I would just like to know, you know, this idea of trading time for money.
I blame Frederick Taylor in system engineering and Cero in chicago with the conveyor belts
thomas the idea of trading time for money is i just think is is change and what was interesting
i noticed in my consulting business is uh the when covid hit um it was like a wake up call to a lot of people. People were saying, holy shit, I'm
spending two hours a day on the road commuting, going to a job where I can, for the most part,
do my job at home and work remote. And so when companies tried to bring it back, their
workforce said, I'm not interested. I'm not going to do that because I'd rather take a
pay cut or do something else than waste my time driving to an office and sitting in a cube.
And so that's changed.
And I think it's changed permanently at this point.
Now, the issue is where does it go from here as the generations, Gen Z and millennials start to take center stage and boomers and some of the older Gen Xers exit stage right?
take center stage and boomers and some of the older Gen Xers exit stage right. I just think
you're going to see a change in the attitudes towards wealth accumulation versus the way we
spend time. Yeah, Thomas, but you know what, though, in all fairness, that can actually be
a negative because, you know, if you're going to take a pay cut, you know, to live, you know,
to live your life a little bit more free, you know, at this day and age. And, you know, you're in your late 20s, it's like, hey, man, you deserve to be
stressing a little bit more right now. You deserve to be going out there, you know, and getting your
ass kicking the real world. Because if you're trying to have that like free living, you know,
freedom, and you're not focusing on hustling and building wealth, that's going to – it's to your detriment because then when you're in your 40s,
when you see maybe your peers that were hustling further than you are
and they're in a better stage in life that now you're in,
so it's kind of a double-edged sword.
It's a trade-off.
So, Thomas, I guess to add on to what you were saying as well,
is there's going to be like one of the biggest wealth transfers in the history of like at least our country,
maybe in the world, you know, just with, you know, boomers kind of, you know,
turning the leaf and then that's going down to the younger, their younger offspring, right? So that's going to be another factor to play when all of this, we're talking
about like wealth and stuff like that happens. And yeah, that's, that's, that's something there.
But also I think that everyone wants to be like an influence or work from home or like not do not not put in the sweat
equity and like the the time necessary to be able to have anything meaningful in their life
and so they like it's like bubble gum everything's like bubble gum right and it's okay because that's
people that are chasing bubble gum are chasing the the hype like they're here today gone tomorrow but um yeah i don't know i
mean that's and these are i mean what am i saying um i look i'm not suggesting i have all the
answers i'm just making some observations about shifts and attitudes towards a lot of things
right and what i what I haven't thought through,
although I do think it's an issue,
is if everyone wants to work from home,
how does it affect supply-side economics?
And by that, I mean, you know,
we talk a lot about the Fed
and things around monetary policy
and things like that to do to stimulate the demand side
around lowering interest rates and that sort of thing. But
there is a supply side component to pricing and economic well-being. And basically, it means
someone's got to make the shit and do the services. And we can import to an extent,
we've imported a lot, probably too much in my opinion. But if everyone wants to, again, kick back, work from
home and not lean in as was suggested, it does start to affect supply side economics.
What about Elon's robots?
Yeah. What do you mean, Thomas? In 10 years, we're going to have an army of robots building
everything. I don't really think we even necessarily need someone to be interested.
I don't really think we even necessarily need someone to be physically.
Who owns the robots?
Who owns the robots?
Factories.
Tesla will manufacture them.
Figure I might manufacture some.
And they'll lease them to companies to build things in a factory.
I'm sure Apple will have some.
I'm sure these bigger companies will have some.
I agree with you.
Big tech will own them, Thomas.
Yeah, big tech will own them thomas yeah big tech will own them you have to but you have to be exposed
to big tech so you can benefit from the uh the earnings that's the issue or bitcoin yeah i i
don't doubt i don't doubt that you know i would just say first of all you got to think about how
i'll use this term pejoratively the useless useless eaters afford to pay for these advanced robots.
But again, it gets to this issue of supply side.
Let's just say that robot is $100.
Everybody can afford it.
And it does everything for you.
It cooks, cleans, mows the lawn, folds your laundry.
Let's even say it becomes a companion and does adult things for you.
All of a sudden, you have an economy
that shrinks as a result of people being introverted
and not out in society,
exchanging goods and services for each other.
Isn't that kind of happening right now, though?
I don't know.
I guess I'm just... It's happening.
Yeah, just, I mean, it's so...
Like, look at, we're exchanging information
over a medium right now.
And there's like...
And then you throw in TikTok and just this...
And I'm talking to my buddy from Asia
and he's just...
He told me he bought a pair of boots for like 20 cents.
He took pictures of them and then he's now making like money from these boots when they sell for like $10.
And it's like, how does that even make sense, right?
But the ability and like the rapidness to be able to transact, which I think, you know,
I think Fred actually said this a while back was just,
you know, this future is going to be
the microtransaction economy.
And so like, how do we throw that in the mix of all this?
Well, I think you make a good point there.
You know, it's if you're taking initiative, right?
And you're taking advantage and you're creating a product, which in other words, it's the same as hustling, right?
You're not being lazy or, you know, just kind of standing still.
You're actually being productive in the marketplace and you're monetizing on that.
Then, you know, that's not I don't think that's what we're talking about.
That's what we're talking about. It's probably like those that just that rather kind of just live free and, you know, not, you know, not not not lean into the workforce to build wealth.
Right. And I'll give you an example. I'll give you an example that happened, you know, in in the party I was in yesterday talking to my cousin.
Right. I got a big deal in my pipeline. Right. And and I was saying that if the deal comes through, I was going to put like 95% of the earnings of that deal into Bitcoin.
And he turned around and said, yeah, but how about your family?
Why don't you take them out to go travel?
And I said, well, my kids are eight and four.
I really can't go anywhere without them being just rambunctious and going out everywhere.
So I'd rather put it into Bitcoin, wait a couple more years until my, you know, my five-year-old turns like eight.
And then now all of a sudden I can have a more extravagant vacation.
And also I could have a lot more, you know, money because I put 95% of that money into Bitcoin.
And so that's the kind of thing that I'm trying to that.
Like I see a bit of a disparity where those that have and those that have not the way they're thinking about their life and their future.
There's a really big disconnect.
And I feel like us being in these spaces, we're on the side of stay focused, earn money, put it into Bitcoin, and just have a low time preference.
Because if you're trying to enjoy your life right now to the maximum because you're seeing your peers do it, you're probably better off just like holding off a few more years.
And let the price appreciation of Bitcoin do the work for
you well you know it's in normal response right why don't you take your
family over vacation not save it it's so funny it's so like NPC I think I think
it's also like this this idea of value right and like because the market the
market will decide or you know anyone can can create value you know from from
nothing essentially if you're doing goods and services. So I don't know, I guess an example here is, you know, I played
hockey for, for a long time. And, um, when I, uh, when I stopped playing, I, you know, I would,
I would obviously get into coaching and things like that. And I would, um, I don't know, I would
just kind of, uh, you know, ask some of the other coaches that I'm like, what do you guys, what's
your guys rate per hour? You know, one of them of them was like you know 125 an hour and i'm
and i'm sitting here like just kind of getting fresh into the coaching and i was charging like
80 and i was like i was looking i'm like this guy didn't even fucking excuse my french this guy
didn't even fucking play like how is this guy charging you know that much in comparison to me
and i was having a conversation this is this is in comparison to me and I was having a conversation
this is this is you know years ago but I was having a conversation my other buddies is like
well you know he's he's offering a service I was like ah okay well like the the price and the value
like I I knew that I had more uh you know uh value and knowledge in the game but the price didn't like that's that's the interesting
part about value right it's like it's it's perception right and um that's i guess over
time and all of those different psychological constructs in there but then the day i realized
oh shit i can raise my value um just by changing that price and then obviously delivering but um
yeah that's that's up for the market to
decide i had a couple uh a couple comments in in here first of all somebody said they wanted to be
in the one percent just to give you a chat gpt what does that actually mean today and in fiat
terms it's 10 to 14 million in wealth so bitcoin that's probably
like 90 to 120 or so bitcoin today what what you're talking about the age of charge that fred
reference i think though you're very hard to hear asteroid just fyi uh so that was just one point
another which i thought was interesting was thomas Thomas saying that people's trade-offs between work and time off and leisure time, we would say, in economics, there's a name for this. like they're called indifference curves in econ. And at any point on a line is basically your
equilibrium point between I'm willing to work or have leisure. And it feels like we've definitely
shifted those lines. And somebody else made another point that I think is really important,
which is your indifference curves should be heavily skewed towards work
versus leisure when you're younger. And I feel like that's gotten lost because when you're young,
you don't have as many commitments. You don't have as many expenses. You can do things. You
can take risks in ways that you can't when you're older. And those that are like, no, man, I want
to live the good. I want to enjoy my twenties. I want to, i want to live the good i want to enjoy my 20s i want to
i want to live the good life like that's stupid you are literally frittering away your best
opportunity to accumulate some little bit of wealth that you can throw into bitcoin or whatever
and start and start building upon that it's harder to invest 80, 90, 100-hour work weeks when you've got a wife, a kid,
multiple kids, a home, you know, like all these other things. So there is an interesting,
there is some interesting societal and sociological shifts that are occurring.
societal and sociological shifts that are occurring. And I definitely, I'm witnessing this.
I would say that there are still entrepreneurs that are hungry, but I also see a flavor of
entrepreneur that isn't as hungry. They want more of a work-life balance. And I'm not saying don't
sleep and don't eat and all those things, but there's, you can't work 40-hour work weeks and be
an entrepreneur you just can't those are antithetical
yeah i think there's something like this idea of like a discipline
but i think what beats discipline is obsession
and that's exactly why when i invest in founders at the earliest stages, I know Fred and Thomas have heard this.
Well, actually, the number four of four criteria that I look for is what I call problem founder fit.
And this is an obsession, or as I like to call it, a deep hate for a problem that they're trying to solve.
Because then it's driven inside of them.
And when you really hate something, you want to go at it hard.
So I agree with that.
I think having an obsession for solving a problem is a very, very strong motivator.
Because it's not about, I'm obsessed to make a million dollars or a billion dollars or something
monetary. That's fleeting. If things don't seem like they're going in the right direction,
which they never do as you're an entrepreneur, you're going to pull the ejection handle and
leave. But if it's something that you hate that you have to solve, you're both agnostic to how
you solve it. And you also will get through those, those dips. You're not going
to be, you're not going to be scared off by, Oh man, like we were not, we're like, maybe not going
to make payroll this week. I can't tell you how many times I hear founders say we almost missed
payroll or we did miss payroll. I had to pull out credit card debt or whatever that is. And you will
do that. If you hate the problem enough, you won't do do that if you just want to make a billion dollars hey hey uh christopher uh so you're in chicago yeah i am in chicago cool cool um that's that's
where i was uh i was born and um just alumni of de paul there you ever go to 1871
yes i'm very very very close with 1871 and bexie and everybody that runs it but it's not it's no
longer in the mark they're they're in the, of again, because of COVID they're right sizing.
They used to have 140,000 square feet of space that cost a bazillion dollars and nobody was
there. So about three months ago, they, or two months ago, they moved out and they're, they're
moving it. They're, they're in the process of finding what the permanent home is. And they're
in another home, right? Yeah. I was, I was part of the Coleman entrepreneurship center there um with the paul and them so that was it was cool to do that
and then also yes and i i know bruce leach pretty well and i've spoken to coleman many times and
coleman is one of our partners so that's all this is a legend yeah um and then also yeah i know
steven out of uh um cameo there he works with a good buddy of mine, a hockey guy. Oh, yeah. Tell Steven I say hi.
We'll do. We'll do.
No, I just saw your profile there. It was the first time hearing you talk.
I was like, oh, Chicago guy. Cool.
But, yeah, I think that's one of the big things.
If people are really about what they're about,
then they're going to be doing it regardless of the dollars and senses. Like obviously the dollars and senses are what
attract the, you know, um, like the desire, I think at a certain level. Right. And then also
like, I disagree. That's, that's not true for a lot of people. You know, like if you look at
Mike Evans, Mike Evans did not do it because he wanted to be a bill. Oh, you probably Mike Evans
is the founder of Grubhub. Uh, and he did not start Grubhub because he wanted to be a billionaire. Mike Evans is the founder of Grubhub.
And he did not start Grubhub because he wanted to be a billionaire.
He actually was like, I would just love to pay off my student.
Like literally his goal was just to make enough to pay off his student loans.
But he wanted to make it easier for him to order pizza.
Like that's not a joke.
That's real.
I recommend the book Hangry. And this is true of the best entrepreneurs.
The money will come.
It's not about the money.
If you solve the problem,
people will appreciate that problem
and they will pay you for it.
So really you don't want it to be about entrepreneurs
that are just money grubbing
because that will create all,
that's why my number one criteria is giver.
So it's less about the money.
It's more about let's solve this problem together.
Yeah, and the passion for the problem – yeah, like you're saying,
the passion to solve that problem, like they'll do whatever it takes
to get that problem fixed right like
well you you got a good one right below us donish you should come up donish is is a an awesome
founder and he is solving a huge problem in health care um he could he could maybe i'm wrong donish
you could tell me if if i'm wrong about that is are you are you a money-grubbing capitalistic pig
that just wants to make a bunch of money? Which, that's fine, too.
Or is this really about the problem?
Yeah, I mean, maybe Donish will cruise up, but I mean, even applying it to Bitcoin, it's like, and I kind of feel a little bit of, it's just weird because, you know, you look at all the Bitcoiners that were, you know, they were back in the day or whatever are still here now.
And they were, you know, the whole system that what, like the whole Bitcoin thing was to go against, you know, the dollar printing and all this inflation and um
you know kind of have some sound money some hard money um and then now the wall street's able to
buy in it's now it's just it's just different now you know hey fred um don is just trying to
request up are you there no fred let me up he just did oh. Oh, he did. Oh, there you go. Can you guys hear me?
Yeah, Donish, so correct me.
I think it's
interesting. I mean,
it just depends. I mean, I think about people that
build, like, five-minute delivery startups,
like, why would they get obsessed
over that problem, right? And so
I think there's missionaries and mercenaries,
and there's room for both.
And I don't know.
I think that, so for us, it was a very specific problem.
I wanted to solve the problem for businesses and how much money they were spending on healthcare. But I wanted to do it while fixing an underlying problem with healthcare,
which is that it is very much delivered based on zip code.
So for most people that don't realize,
your zip code determines more of your health outcomes than actually even your behaviors,
which is a crazy thing to think about.
And so we wanted to make healthcare location agnostic,
which means that you have to do telehealth,
but then telehealth kind of sucks
because you can pretty much only do sniffles.
So it got us to the point where I was like,
oh, you got to examine patients.
You got to get labs on them, do imaging.
And so I was like, oh, we can just build clinics
where people come in
and we can examine them over the internet.
And that was like sort of like
the beginning of the solution.
There's actually a really good book on this
written by one of our investors, Jim McKelvey.
He was the founder of Square.
And it's one of my favorite books.
It's called The Innovation Stack.
If you guys haven't read it, it's a really,
it's about his story about how Square,
Square, Squared off.
Well, you know, Amazon tried to build a Square competitor
and Square as a
tiny startup beat them and they did that because all this like you have to have a moat stuff is
complete crap half the time and what the moat is that conversation around problems so chris's
point around you have to solve a really big problem um yeah you have to say really big problem i just said really important problem for the founder um uh the i actually will say that
that's actually the wrong framing from a founder perspective i think you have to solve a problem
that everybody agrees you have to solve the perfect problem and what i mean by that is there
are three criteria for the perfect problem the founder somehow has founder market fit. Like they just have this unique insight about a problem that most people don't. So like I'm a robotic surgeon
and by training. And for me, I had seen how you can do things remotely over the internet
and been involved with a few projects where we were doing remote surgeries and trying to.
And so I was like, oh, you can do remote robotics, telerobotics.
And I had this unique insight
that you could do that to examine patients over one another.
Now, hilariously, in the end,
our robotics technology was too early to market.
Patients weren't really open to it.
Then we essentially use humans
to handle the doctor remotely,
but it would have never happened
had I not had that unique insight.
So there was some founder market fit.
So that's one part of it.
And I'm just like giving you the TLDR of the book.
You should still go and get the book.
But, cause it's a really good book.
But the second big thing is it has to be a problem
that everybody agrees exists, right?
Like everybody thinks that healthcare access is a big issue.
And so it was a very obvious, like everybody has to agree
if you solve healthcare access,
it's a trillion dollar business. And then number three, there has to be an actual solution. So
like everybody agrees. A lot of people have, founders have connections to cancer, maybe
mom had it or dad had it. A lot of founders agree that cancer is a really big problem,
but there's no solution right now. Right. And so it's not the perfect problem to go chase,
unless you know, and have a unique insight
that like there is some solution that you know about right and so that's like why the perfect
problem has like those three criteria uh from a founder perspective and as long as you have that
perfect problem then you should solve that problem as you solve that problem you're actually going to
create 10 new problems and you solve those 10 problems you can create 100 new problems and as
you solve all these interconnected solutions that that's actually your moat.
That is his basic premise around how he built Square and how he advised Jack Dorsey, who
actually he talks about in the book.
He actually discovered Jack Dorsey, both from St. Louis, which is super random.
But actually, Sam Altman is also from St. Louis, kind of a weird St. Louis mafia or so.
But yeah, so that is the base of that book. So I agree that there has to be, the problem really matters. I'm just not
as convinced that everybody has to be a missionary. Like, I think you have to have some,
so like- Wait, Don, just to be clear, that's what I look for. I'm not saying, you're right.
There certainly can be mercenaries, as you said.
I just don't think that they have as high a success rate.
It's just the complete opposite.
The data actually says the other way around.
Really?
Yeah, yeah.
Missionaries usually fail.
Because ultimately you have to...
Well, not in my experience, but maybe it's just a Chicago thing.
Yeah, I mean, like in Chicago, very few people succeed to begin with.
So just kidding.
That's why I'm in California now.
No, no, they succeed, but then their exits are tiny because, you know, the VCs in Chicago, not the Angels, but the VCs in Chicago give crazy discounts.
VCs in Chicago, not the Angels, but the VCs in Chicago give crazy discounts.
Sorry.
There is a Chicago discount.
That guy was in Minnesota, dude.
Hey, that land of lakes.
We like it there.
We like it there.
10,000 lakes.
All right, I'm going to drop off.
I'll be back in a little bit.
Sorry.
So I think what's interesting, though, if we bring it, because I think Dinesh brings up great points, but I think he's obviously talking about traditional business, as I think you are as well, Christopher.
But what about DeFi?
What about decentralization?
Do these same principles apply?
Everyone has to agree that it exists and actual solutions.
I didn't catch the first one that he was saying.
catch the first one that he was saying um he was he was he said it's basically tam uh is it which
which by the way all those criteria i'm looking at those are just not how i judge the founder
that's do i even talk to the founder it's is there a big enough uh uh market and do i believe this is
a real problem and like is there a solution to that like is the hypothesis that they're uh going with
what i believe could be a solution
to the problem.
But those aren't, those are like checkboxes for me.
Those are not like the biggest part, because when you're in the beginning at an idea, you
don't have too much to evaluate from.
So those are more binary.
The four criteria I look for in the founder is really what I'm making decisions on.
Well, I get you.
And I totally hear where you're coming from.
I guess one of the things that like comes up in my mind and just like this journey of,
you know, crypto and Bitcoin and what decentralization is and what it means.
Yeah, I've kind of been in this community for, you know, the past several years.
And it's kind of opening my eyes to what is decentralization.
And it's such a weird thing because there's so many different vantage points on what decentralization is and what it means.
And then, so I guess it becomes hard for that, to everyone to agree that there is an actual problem that majority of these
networks that claim they're decentralized, they're actually, they're, they're very centralized.
Um, just, just kind of using the buzzword of decentralization, but it's, yeah. Um, and,
and so, you know, we've, we've, you know, the Zen community that I'm part of, we've stress
tested 13 different chains. We've actually seen, we've been censored from a few of those chains um by chains that actually
were claiming decentralization but yet they couldn't handle you know a community that had
no marketing or no founders or anything like that just organic growth um but i guess it's it's just interesting because, yeah, I guess, is it necessary for everyone to agree the problem does exist in order to have like, you know, like fart coin or some of these other speculative assets that are just brought into existence out of thin air. Right. Um, I think it's such a weird, it's a weird, uh,
I guess, mirror to, to hold up when you, when you're talking about it, uh, against traditional
business. Yeah, that, that I'll let other people answer this, but, but that feels, that's not what
I do. That's, that's like, that's just creating like gambling instruments. It's like pure speculation is not really.
I'm trying to help founders solve problems
and ultimately hopefully make the world better.
And creating another fart coin isn't making the world better.
It's not moving the needle to make people's lives better
in some kind of way.
And it's not to say that everything that I invest in is 100% geared around making the
world better, like in a real kind of purist sense or even like a social impact kind of
sense.
I would say that that's probably the main thrust.
But really, I just I enjoy working with founders that have the four criteria that I look for.
And that's a big part.
So to bring it back and I feel like I've been talking a lot.
So I'd rather hear Thomas or Fred or somebody else chime in here.
The thing that worries me about Bitcoin is that it is a very like it could be very easy to just buy and hoard Bitcoin
and not do any of what I'm talking about,
which is trying to support innovators.
Because innovators don't have capital, typically,
to just go out, especially first-time founders,
to go and build the things they need.
Now, the good news is it's costing less and less.
The friction is radically lower now than it is over 25 years
ago when we were building our first businesses that I was involved with. But it's still not zero.
You still have living costs. There's still other things that cost money. So you do just to some
degree need some kind of starter capital. And if people that are like me or the people that I'm
trying to, I really try to evangelize angel investing. I try to create more angels because
we need more of them to support people like Donish. And like, I don't look for mercenaries,
but there's nothing wrong with that. They're, you know, mercenaries could be solving problems
that are important. And even if they don't solve any important problem, even if they create more wealth,
they're creating wealth for themselves,
their families, for their employees.
Maybe they become angel investors as well.
Like there is a flywheel effect.
It's just like the good news about capitalism.
So it's important that we have more of these people
that want to help invest
in the next generation of entrepreneurs.
And like if you took Bitcoin adoption to the extreme,
and those Bitcoin adopters did nothing but save their money in Bitcoin
and didn't take capital and invest in those innovators,
then to some degree we stagnate.
We're not going to have the next googles or the next anthropics or
the next you know whatever those things are so i think that's an extreme case i don't think that
that's but if everybody was if i was just like fuck it i'm not going to invest anymore i'm just
going to keep all my my capital i'm not going to invest in founders anymore at the early stage i'm
just going to hoard everything i have in bitcoin that's that's i think that's a net negative for
society yeah and and just to and just to be clear,
I don't believe Fartcoin is the savior
or anything that's being created similar to Fartcoin.
I don't think that's a net positive for society,
but also people can have fun, entertainment, all of the above, right?
But like you were saying, they're kind of gambling instruments in a way,
but I'd say the networks that are being built
and the network that Fartcoin exists on,
I think is definitely important.
And I think building those networks,
I think are definitely important as well.
But I digress.
Pride comments, you guys there
i lulled them to sleep yeah yeah i can talk a little bit about uh like the problem and
having like you know people having an awareness of the problem because i think that's really
a huge part of where we're at in like the current evolution of the space. Right.
So for any market or any like founder for any purpose, you know, bring something to the market. People do have to have like some sort of awareness or like a pain point that you can be the problem solver for.
You know, like right now with the current World Wide Web, it's, you know, it's a very centralized, surveilled, like, vertical of attack even for the Bitcoin blockchain and other networks.
It's like potentially one of the biggest markets for disruption.
But because it works so well for so many people, like they don't actually experience a pain point with it.
Right. So it's like it's a tough market to disrupt whenever so many people get so much value out of the current system,
right? Like that's where they're getting their problems solved. So I think like whenever you're
building things that are, you know, before people are experiencing the problem, it does take people
like that kind of missionary that like sees the problem in advance and is willing to like continue to invest like
time over time year over year in that vision knowing that one day like you know other people
will migrate as well um and as we're all like you know accumulating this asset that's part of this
like you know ecosystem bitcoin that a lot of us do, you know, try and hold dear and accumulate and
stack up and, and, you know, you know, build up your wealth as much as possible. I think that
it's a really good point to, you know, to remember to leverage that value to actualize that value to
contribute to the ecosystem. And to even just enjoy your own life, like, it's, it's, it's like,
I think it like, it's OK to spend Bitcoin.
Like there's definitely a big stigma against using it.
But I actually like I'm a huge like proponent of like spending it, man.
Like you don't know that you're going to be alive in 10 years, you know, like obviously stack some, but use it like spend some like actualize it whenever you have like big gains or you're up
like in the market like it's okay to take a small portion of it and like do something nice for
yourself or enjoy enjoy life or buy it like a cool asset or something that you're going to enjoy to
use like um because at the end of the day like you know you only get one life like so hoarding all
your bitcoin and like trying to get a thousand 10,000 Bitcoin stocked away that is going to be for the next, next, next is a bit silly in my opinion.
I wanted to ask maybe Thomas or Fred.
They might know more about this.
about this, but does anyone know about like that? I did see that, uh, like those 80,000 plus Bitcoin
But does anyone know about that?
were like transferred, like, uh, um, like, and I think like eight or nine transfers, um, the other
day, does anyone have any speculation on what that was or what that, what that means? And, um,
yeah, I don't know. I guess for me, I, I was just like, is this, is this really, uh,
as safe as, as we think it is. And then I also like, just kind of answered John, John McAfee,
um, cause John and obviously John McAfee, he's, I mean, he was really out there, but, um, he was
very adamant, um, publicly like saying like, Hey, Bitcoin is not that thing you want, and it could go down a lot.
But also, John McAfee, RIP, he was an outlier for sure. sure but i i mean just given those that whale movement it just seems kind of um a little bit
like ruffling uh ruffling the waters ruffling the feathers hey chris i had to step away for a bit i
did i and i couldn't find a mute button before but what you were talking before around you know
hoarding your money versus investing it and And I would abstract the concept to this.
If you think the game is to accumulate the most amount of wealth
and then just live off that pile like a rat who found a big piece of cheese,
then that's fine.
But if you think that your life will be defined as how you contribute to your family, to your ecosystem, to everyone around you, then if you're young, you can contribute by actually doing something, building a company, starting a business or solving a problem like the Grubhub guy, or when Reed Hastings started Netflix, he didn't want to pay late fees and
turned into a huge media conglomerate after he did that. There's lots of new stories like that.
If you're older and you have a lot of wealth, you're probably past the age where you can
probably have the energy to start that, but you have the capital to help those who don't. So your capital is an ingredient in the successful contributions of, it's not going to be personalized, it's going to be teams that
are going to do this stuff. So you want to be part of that team. I think you get a lot of
satisfaction if you put the time in to figure out how to help others who are capital light,
figure out how to help others who are capital light, but idea and hard work rich.
And you bring that all together and do some things that are good for society.
I think you'll enjoy your wealth a lot more if you put it to use that way.
And if you're successful, you not only put your wealth to work, but you get more wealth back.
Well said, Thomas. I can't agree with that more.
And I wasn't saying, by the way,
that I think that's going to happen. I just said there is a non-zero risk of that. If you took it
like a limit, like if everybody just decided there is this thing Bitcoin now and for the next 20 years
until it's or 30 years or however long it takes to get to where there's no CAGR because it's fully adopted, it's fully saturated.
Everybody just decided I'm gonna sit on my Bitcoin
and not invest anything in capital.
Maybe they invest time, but no capital.
I was trying to say that's where I see,
like that's what I see as like a risk,
but I agree with you.
And I try as hard as I can to evangelize that point i think
you said it incredibly well i think that there's so much i don't want to call alt i mean i guess
there's an ingredient of altruism but but there's also like it's okay to be selfish in in um in in
the feeling that you get when you help other people.
Like it feels good.
And I don't know that everybody has had that opportunity to
just altruistically help people.
And still at the same time, do that with aligned interests.
So writing a check into a founder and also trying to make some introductions.
You could use this across, different analogs, right?
You could, it could be like, I'm in, I'm investing my time in a nonprofit and writing a check
to support that nonprofit.
And when you see these things, like the fruits of your labor, the fruits of the capital that
you invest, you see those things grow and improve.
It feels good and that's okay.
Like that's a good thing. That's a reward that our
minds and our bodies give us that enables us to want to continue doing that. So I think it's very
addictive to become a giver. And the more that we can help people just get little tastes of that,
I think we can actually spread more of a giving culture. And I think you said that really well, Thomas.
Let me tell another story.
It's kind of a variation of this theme
of trying to do something beyond just compounding your wealth.
I used to do a lot of consulting in Europe,
you know, and I was in the telecom industry anyway.
I was friendly with a few of the CEOs,
but one CEO of one of the large telecom companies in the telecom industry anyway, I was friendly with a few of the CEOs, but one CEO
of one of the large telecom companies in the UK, I got to be pretty good friends with.
And, you know, I mean, I'm friends in a business sense, right?
So we would do things together.
And when I would travel to the UK or he would come to New York, we would not have any, we
would just the two of us would go out and hang out.
And what I think, you know, turned our thing is I never really talked about business as much as I talked about other things.
And it was just fun because it was a release valve for him.
Everybody was always chewing his ear to get something going on.
So anyway, long story.
So we talked about wealth, right?
And his view of it.
And the thing that he did, because he was the classic, typical CEO of a very large company.
And he probably spent too much time at work and to some extent neglected his family.
And his family just did their own thing
and he was a little detached from their lives what he was able to do was he peeled off i forget what
the the number was several hundred thousand dollars and uh which was it's a lot of money
to a lot of people but for him it was it was that much. But let's just say he pulls a couple hundred thousand, and he created an angel fund for his family.
And they would have, he set up a whole charter around,
everyone gets a vote, we're going to go to visits to companies,
and we're going to then vote on which companies we're going to invest in.
and we're going to then vote on which companies we're going to invest in.
And for him, it wasn't about making money as much as it was spending time with his family.
He had a couple of kids and they had spouses and they turned it into a thing.
And that's how his family socialized.
And they did great trips.
And he spoke like this was the greatest thing ever
uh and he could lose every single penny he invested in he ended up probably breaking even
but uh that wasn't the point and he was uh so there there are some um i would say some selfish
i would say that's at some level selfish in terms of it was a
self-indulgent approach. You do make an impact if you're smart about it, but the benefits that he
got out of it had nothing to do with wealth or making a big and a great investment. It had
everything to do with building a relationship with the people you're doing it with.
That is such an awesome, you should write a little blog post or something. I would share that to tons of people. This is like kind of the starting, this is like the seeds that are planted that turn into family offices.
where you use capital to bring a family together,
to enable the family to learn together.
Hopefully it's also a wealth building exercise.
I mean, if it's a family office and that really is the goal,
but there are all these other positive externalities
that come out of that.
And there's one that you didn't even mention.
So let's say you completely broke even.
If you add on top of that,
you built this incredible, these bonds and all this stuff
with your family, the dollars that you invested in those startups are actually funding people's
jobs. They're actually creating new jobs. They're enabling people to hire other people, which leads
to feeding. So there is a trickle down effect across this whole thing.
Now, let's be clear. I don't invest, and I hope most angels don't invest just for that. But even
if I just returned my capital, that's not the end of the world. I'm not 100% doing this because I'm
trying to maximize my return. Because as we've said now now the benchmark that i need to measure my annual return is like
what's the annual return of of uh bitcoin and and that's why i said like the the risk is if like
everybody just went 100 into that which isn't going to happen but even if we get like some
higher percentage that goes into it there's like that's reducing the capital pool but there are
there's so many positive externalities that come out of that, in my opinion. So that's a fantastic story. You should really share that, Thomas,
like write it or something. I might do that. I would tell you, Chris,
the other thing I would say is, and this is a political point of view that I have,
I believe that politics, global politics is going to shift to more collectivism and probably left of center.
And I think that people with wealth today should think about that. And what could emerge in that
trend is wealth taxation. Now, wealth taxation will come,'s it's kind of corny but i would say
that line from the old superman movie where uh i forget that the the old guy um
i think he was he right before he got killed he told the spider-man guy in a car
much as you know a lot of responsibility for those who are given much.
I forget what the exact words were.
But I believe that under a leftist collectivist political regime, if you have wealth and you're not using that wealth towards the betterment of society, you run the risk of heavy confiscatory taxation.
Right? People say you don't need that if you're not using it. But if you're using it to the
betterment of society, people are going to leave you alone. At least you're not going to be the
first target, in my opinion. With great power comes great responsibility. And I don't know if
Uncle whatever, Spider-Man's uncle who said that was the first person to say it or not but that's kind
of like if you don't believe that i don't mean you i just mean like people in general to some
like intrinsic level then i don't know i don't really want to be around those people i want to
be around the people that actually realize okay i have been i've been granted certain power certain
um like i for better or worse like i have i have um i have. And you can wield that for good, or you can wield that for
bad, or somewhere in the middle. And this is where you guys have heard me talk about this
ad infinitum, and I won't go into more of it here, but the book Give and Take really talks
about this. And this is, again, why I say it is incumbent upon us as capital allocators to invest
in the founders who are building the future that we all want to live in.
And I choose to invest in givers.
And that is my first criteria because they are going to they have to some degree that compass.
And I think it's important.
I think we should be thoughtful about how we wield the power that we do, whether it's something very small or something very big.
And and those that actually at least keep that as a conscious lens and something they're thinking about, I think is important. So Chris, when you invest, are you part of a consortium? Do you do
it yourself? If I were to say you're investing chips, you have several of them. How big are the
chips? So you have to make a minimum 25 100 what's the yeah it's a good question um
i am trying i'm i say i'm not looking for new investments right now and i really haven't been
for i'd say like the past two or three years what i am doing is when things slip in i'm writing at
my minimum uh which is 10k but when i when write checks, I do 10 to 100,000.
And that's personal.
And then that's hopefully as early as possible.
So like literally I shoot for first check with a founder.
I do have something I created a couple of years ago
called a syndicate, which enables me to drive
follow-on capital to existing portfolio companies.
And that I will, if people don't know what a syndicate is,
if maybe you've heard of a special purpose vehicle or SPV, it's basically a function that enables you to spin up
SPVs very easily and you don't have to manage all the taxes and like backend, you know, like garbage
back office stuff. So, so I do those selectively and then I'll give access to other people in those. And there's like terms and stuff around that that are a little bit mirror VC, but I don't take any front end fees.
If something happens on the back end, I'll get some standard carry stuff.
But that's not my big focus.
My bigger focus is today is just really working with 180 founders that I've helped.
Because that's fun.
When you take 180 givers that all are brilliant and scrappy and hate problems,
it's just fun.
I love to help them and build sandboxes with them.
I mean, I worked a lot in private equity,
and I found that my client was the private equity group.
When we would go out to the satellite organizations that they were funding, they were polite to us, but they didn't, they just viewed us as spies from corporate.
They weren't interested in any help other than, I mean, again, they weren't never rude or anything like that, but we could never engage with them because they didn't want us in their sandbox. Would you characterize that when, I mean, the people you've funded, they're polite
and nice, but they don't let you get in and substantially affect their operations?
No. So when you talk about private equity, like if you think about a continuum of
private, like technically anything that's not public markets is private equity, but there is a connotation around private equity that that's typically like either past growth, like where a company stagnating or maybe they're on a growth trajectory or maybe pre IPO or maybe it's even post IPO and they take a company private.
even post IPO and they take a company private. So if you're talking about like, like true private
equity, the connotated private equity PE, that's a totally different animal. I'm investing when
it's like a founder and an idea on a napkin, or maybe they've got a prototype. In some cases,
they've actually created a product that has some customers and some revenue, but that's probably
about as far as it gets. And they may have like a small team.
So when I'm investing, they typically need a lot of help.
And they're pretty open.
Like they're coming, somehow they came to me, especially right now, because I'm not looking.
So something like you made an intro or like Fred made an intro, or I see Joe is up now.
If Joe made an intro and you're like,
this kid is brilliant, you have to talk to her, she's amazing. Then I will look at that. And if
I can, if I think it's, you know, it's a fit, then I maybe will throw in a 10k check, which really
doesn't move the needle for that person. But what it does do is start to create a relationship where
I will make other introductions for other co investors. And I'm like trying to grow more angels. So I introduced
to other angels and all that. But they want like, so the answer is like, depending on the time
and the kind of entity or person entity that's investing, there's a lot of variables there.
And when you're much later, yeah, it's like just a capital source for the most part. Or sometimes you're like, if it's Tiger or something, they're going to get some
kind of expertise or maybe it opens some doors. But it's also there are risks and threats with
that because along with that comes control. I have no control. I mean, if I'm getting one or
2% of the company, that's a ton. There's only been a handful of times where I've made an investment
and had more than like 2% of the company when I invested and that gets diluted over time. So it's a, it's a very different,
there's no adversarial, like they are coming to lofty and me because they, they want, you know,
they want that support. They want that ecosystem. They want that community.
Hey, Joe, welcome to the stage. How's your Sunday going?
It's going great. Uh uh not much has changed since we
talked 30 minutes ago but uh it's good it's good yeah joe and i were talking are you still in the
pool i came inside you know i'm having comms problem out by the pool so comms man you're
turning you're hanging out with too many of these veterans on here like they're yeah i can't get my
wi-fi toFi to hold.
Just go four clicks to your north, and then it'll start the signal pickup.
Yeah, so part of it is when I go out of the pool, I like to relax and read.
Anyway, so I came inside for a while.
I get too much sun, and my Irish tan turns into an Irish burn,
so I don't want to do that.
Do you have a heated pool, Thomas?
I do, but I get my pool.
I heat it in April.
I turn on the heater, jazz it up, and then I get a lot of sun on my pool.
So it'll stay between 80 degrees and 90 degrees all summer.
And then I'll have to turn the heater back on in
September. I'll keep it open to pull up until about October, but typically you can extend the
pool. But what I found over the many years, none of nobody wants to go in the pool and in late
September or October, they just don't want to. Yeah. That's hot tub. That's like hot tub time.
Yeah. So, uh, but I have, I do have a heater and it's uh uh it's nice it's nice to have a pool
it's expensive it's an expensive thing um you know i so i i like it when people in my family and
friend cohort will that will uh come and enjoy it uh but for me the best time for the pool is sunrise. This is about past sunrise, 7 a.m. to about 10, 1030.
And I'm out there, and it's just nice.
I love that morning sun, sitting out there with coffee and reading.
When it gets to the hot sun, like, you know, 1 to 3, we got high UVI,
and that's when you can get burned pretty bad.
I never wear sunscreen so
uh i just regulate the amount of time i get in any given shot and i monitor the uvi pretty quickly
pretty pretty strong so i don't i rarely get burned uh but it's uh anyway i love it it's a
great it's a great thing it's but it is an expensive little uh thing that attached to your
your house yeah i you know in the mid here, we get maybe two to three months.
So it doesn't really justify a pool.
And I have access to the country club, which I'm like a couple minutes away from.
And they have an Olympic-sized pool.
So it gives me everything I need.
But I would love to have a pool at my house.
But maybe if I lived in a different climate.
In the Midwest, it's tough. It's tough.
It's just not worth it. And all the hassle and everything for like such a small period,
I'll just jump over to the country club and we'll be good.
It's better, better to get a house on a lake that you can,
like we go up to Lake Geneva and you don't have to clean the lake.
The lake cleans itself. You got to clean a pool. You got to heat a pool.
It's a lot of, you can't put a boat
on a pool i've just finished watching uh with my son the great outdoors you ever seen that
oh my god yeah classic 85 yeah classic a fantastic movie if you haven't seen it get some younger
people in the audience i see check out the great outdoors john candy dan akroyd classic
so joe and i were talking before when i was at it we were talking on the phone uh earlier today
just about um some of our observations and interacting with people uh around narratives
that will draw new people specifically probably people with some amount of wealth i mean uh
because that's really where we're going to see uh probably moving the needle but what what's the
you know people call it orange peeling but what is the way to get people thinking about this in a way
that is digestible to them well it's like can we talk about just just lay the groundwork because
i really love to get chris's and michael's and fred's and even bitcoin team if he comes up here
so um the here's the thing we were talking about a couple obstacles impediments to you know wealthy
people buying bitcoin and i've outlined really in my head five um the first one is that wealthy people, number one, have access to high quality assets, right?
Like they're investing in mega cap tech stocks and index funds.
Some of them, as Chris knows, are in private equity.
Others have real estate holdings that are substantial.
And as much as they may complain about, well, that's number one.
They have hedges for inflation.
So the inflation argument, yes, you could say, oh, it's underperforming Bitcoin.
But I think most people would realistically say the Nasdaq's vastly outpacing inflation if you're along the Nasdaq.
Number two, from a risk-adjusted reward standpoint, they generally have a lot of wealth.
They're not willing to go through significant drawdowns in it.
Maybe the drawdowns are over in the modern era of Bitcoin, but I don't know.
That remains to be seen.
But from their standpoint, it's like, listen, all I need to do is basically get my stock returns, my 10%, 15% annually.
That's going to get me where I need to go. So it's like from a like from a risk adjusted reward standpoint, they're just saying it's not really worth it. Number three, like the self custody argument, I don't think
is really pervasive to persuasive to them. Thomas, we were talking about that, like they're not
really, what did your friends say? Like if BlackRock is the counterparty and they're not paying up, I'm not really,
you know, I got bigger problems. I'm paraphrasing. But you basically said, like, that's not a
legitimate concern, the self-custody. They're not, number four, it's like they're not really
persuaded by the collapse of the fiat system narrative. That's not really compelling for them.
A lot of these people have done very well under a fiat standard. So that is not really a
good argument for them. And the last one, I think, is just like, to your point, like, Thomas,
like, as you get older, right, you downsize your spending. And you were telling me about this,
how, you know, that's partially your hedge against, you know, debasement, inflation,
whatever you're saying. You just, you because you have fewer things to pay for,
downsizing, you spending on experiences,
but you're not acquiring as many material possessions.
You're not driving as much consumption.
You're not buying the fifth type of stroller you need to buy,
that type of thing.
So anything I missed there, Thomas?
I got two.
Go ahead.
I think that's right, Joe.
That's a fair summary.
But it really just gets – I'd like to hear what other people have to say about – I'll call it Main Street evangelism of Bitcoin. I think the sovereign arguments around self custody,
dislocations of nation state governments,
all that kind of stuff.
I understand people say that and believe that,
but most people, and I'll call it normie land,
will tune out if you start talking about that
so there's a huge opportunity to really create a great narrative around something that is appealing
to uh mainstream mainstream wealth if you will uh to make sure that they get an allocation of two
five eight percent you pick a number they're not going to go 50 to 70 they're
not going to apply the kelly criterion and all that they're going to uh but but but it's it
shouldn't be you know 70 allocation or zero you know it's because as soon as they get into it for
five or six or seven percent and we see some performance then the the problem will take care
of itself in terms of expansion.
The two that I think were missed, first of all, agree with all that, Thomas. That was a very good list, Joe. I'm less of an expert on this stuff than you guys are, but I have tried
Orange Pill My Dad. It's not easy. The two things that come up, it's antithetical to what financial advisors tell him. And a lot of people that are older that have decent wealth are not managing it themselves. They work with a boutique investment firm or a Morgan Stanley or a Goldman or whatever. And I'm unaware of the majority of those advising that they should
put some in at this point. And two, it's not easy. It's a little bit touches on what Thomas said,
but it's not easy to do this, especially if you're talking about like all the self-custody and
all that. The exception to that is like just going by IBIT. And maybe that is the like dip your toe kind of thing.
The problem though is you go, well, you got to have it.
You know, yes, there are going to be ups and downs.
There are going to be dips.
But if you have a four-year investment horizon, then you'll be fine.
And my dad's 85.
You know, like why does he give a shit, you know, on a four-year investment?
So really you need –
Even a 10-year.
Even if you're 70 years old,
you're seven years old.
It's like,
why?
Right.
It's like,
why?
Right.
so there's like sort of an age cutoff to some degree.
The exception for that though,
is if they're really thinking,
I don't think my dad gives a shit.
Like he's not like,
I want to,
you know,
create more wealth for myself.
Like that's not his,
his MO.
Like I am trying to create more wealth for
my son. Cause I know that he will be programmed in such a way that from internally and externally,
that he is going to want to make an impact. And I want to give him more tools than I had
to be able to make an impact in his life, you know, throughout the world in his life.
So I am thinking that way, but, but if my dad was really thinking that way,
then he'd probably say, okay, well, I'll allocate half a point, 1% of my total
worth into IBIC, you know, or something that got exposure into Bitcoin, if he really was thinking.
So I think that there's about the majority of like really
well-off folks having someone manage their money is spot on i mean that that's that's the key thing
and and to be clear like if you're targeting people, if you're targeting folks to buy Bitcoin, if you're trying to see what is the ideal audience, it's not lower, middle class, moderate
income households.
I don't believe that because I think it's just not where the money's at.
If you're really trying to drive the Bitcoin price higher, it's high net worth individuals,
moderate, upper middle class.
That's the target demographic.
And I don't know.
I think it's like really the investing class you got to win over.
You got to win over those FAs to really get that money.
I have a very simple answer.
I have a very simple answer.
Go ahead.
Number one, I would use IBIT.
I would not self-custody at all.
I grow to hate self-custody more and more every single day. I hate self-custody. I think it's bullshit.
It's only useful for – and you may not like that, but it's factually true. It's only useful for money that you might need if you need to go somewhere else. By the way, self-custody. You know, self-custody is massively disadvantageous.
Number one, we will never leave a credit system.
You may not like that, but it's never going to happen.
Did I lose Tina, or did anybody else lose Tina?
Yeah, he disappeared.
Ah, shit, he died.
Oh, no, is he?
Tina?
Still there?
I'll bring him back up.
I just brought him back up.
It was just getting good, too.
Yeah, we got you.
I've had more problems with this app. Number one, we're never going
to leave the credit system. That's never going to happen. Not forever, because there's a reason
we're in a credit system. And so anybody can talk about fiat all they want, but it's just a
bullshit story. And here's the reason. The average business person does not want to part with all their equity in order to finance
their business. They want loans and banks will make loans. So it's never going away. So you can
just disabuse yourself of that notion. It's never going away. We're here for a reason that's never
going to change. However, it is a very useful asset for diversification purposes.
And that is incredibly useful.
Further, you can sell calls against it.
Oh, hell no.
Tina.
Tina.
Yeah, he's having similar comms problems that i've had over the last couple days um i had to move to a hard line uh the wi-fi isn't for me something something's going on i
got to reboot all my stuff but i i understand where he's coming from is that cold storage has the advantages of the sovereign individual
arguments. But if that doesn't apply to you or interest you, you are foregoing all of the
opportunities that owning iBit as a proxy or having your Bitcoin held in collateral and taking
loans against that you lose all of that. So
I'm guessing that's what Bitcoin Tina is going to say. I'm going to see if I can bring it back
up again. Okay. I have a question. And this is more like, and this is not financial advice,
but it's financial advice, if you know what I mean. My model, which I've talked about is,
Um, my model, which I've talked about is, and I'll shut up once, once he comes back up, um, is use Schwab, like, like investable market assets, uh, for, um, smoothing out my lumpy, like, isn't, uh, private, let's say private equity.
I, you know, when I get exits, I get a big pile of cash and, and then like, that's very lumpy.
get exits, I get a big pile of cash and then like, that's very lumpy. So I put that back into Schwab,
pay off margin and live off, you know, like go back into margin and live off of that.
So I haven't done that since I got like more, I haven't had a big exit since I got more bullish,
or I should say educated on Bitcoin. I bought my Bitcoin when it was the big dip in COVID in March or May or whatever it was of 2020.
But it was just sitting there.
Now, I think I need to, when I get big exits, maybe I'll put some of it into actual Bitcoin.
But I still need to continue to build back up my Schwab.
I wonder if i should put a
very large chunk of that into ibit in schwab or if that's just potentially too volatile because i also
can't let that go down too far because then i could get a margin call so i'm curious like anybody's
thoughts i'm not i'm not a good trader i understand understand the concepts of people monetizing their stack through selling of calls.
You can institutionalize it through MISTI, YieldMax products.
That's done well.
Whether it continues to do well, probably a debatable point but it pays an outrageous dividend
uh largely due to the volatility of mstr over the past 12 months but invite bitcoin tina back
he's texting me okay let me just try let's see i don't see him in the list show he has to request
i gotta see him i see him he's he's i don't see him in the audience. Oh, there he is. I'll invite.
Yeah, I haven't seen Twitter spaces glitch as much over the past, like this holiday weekend,
than like in a long time. I've been on stages and just get booted for no reason.
And then it can't come back in. It's been messy.
It's not just your comms, Thomas.
Okay, Tina might not be coming back.
You asked a great question, Joe,
and we got a little bit sidetracked
with the losses of Tina's.
Oh, there he is.
Tina, are you back?
Okay, let's wait for him.
But I'd love to hear more.
You were saying about the barriers.
Do we have any more comments about that?
I think it was an interesting, the friction points of how to orange pill.
Thomas was leading the pack, so Thomas should take us away, I think.
Yeah, go for it.
Yeah, so we all know the argument around the self-custody and the sovereign arguments that it is portable money.
You can hold it. there's no counterparty other
than yourself and pilot error and screwing it up, but you can traverse borders and all of that.
And, you know, and plays against a narrative where, hey, the system implodes. That appeals to
a certain set of the market. I would suggest that that appeals to a small percentage of the market.
The larger normie side would probably be turned off by that argument. And I think the argument
that for them is really, you know, like if you go to a financial advisor, like pick somebody, Wells Fargo or Merrill Lynch or something, and you say, Hey, should we go do this?
So then they'll say, no, I think this, I think that.
And then you ask them in a sober way, if you had a point of view that differed from the talking points from Wells Fargo or Merrill Lynch, would you be allowed to advise your clients in that way?
And they say, no, we kind of have to stick to the strip. So then I'd say, well, then what you're saying is
when you say, I think, you're saying, let me repeat what I'm being told to say, which is not
the same thing as what you think, right? So all they're doing is they're front men for large
end for large organizations who have a certain investment thesis for whatever reason they have it
organizations who have a certain investment thesis for whatever reason they have it.
now i do think that cohort the people are in that ecosystem and there's a lot of them
would benefit from a simple argument that says bitcoin could be the next nvidia in the sense
that it could go up 10x and a three percent allocation turns into a 30 of your portfolio
if it explodes up and that's it
and just get them in and get it in their portfolio and then your ability to do things like bitcoin
tina was saying around monetizing it through selling calls or borrowing against self uh
custodial custody those are all great things so bitcoin is back up let's see what you have to say
yeah i i'm having tons of issues with this app. I don't know why.
It's not your fault.
The app is totally fucked this weekend.
Just go ahead.
Go ahead.
I have these.
I have them all the time.
I don't.
I've rebooted the phone.
I rebooted my Wi-Fi.
So I'm hoping it works.
Basically, I think that, number one, if you're in a situation where you want to accumulate wealth, if you have your Bitcoin – people don't ask themselves this question.
What if Bitcoin goes up only 20% compounded annually?
I know a lot of people think it's going to go up 40 or 50 or 60% compounded annually.
What if it doesn't do that?
What if it gets to a million dollars over the course of 20 percent compounding annually?
That's fantastic.
The answer is it's fantastic.
I agree.
I'll take either.
But it will disappoint many people.
So the point is, in that scenario, you can sell calls against your Bitcoin and pull in more than 20%.
You might pull in an additional 5% to 10% annually, which is a lot of money.
Number two, it is a useful diversifying asset.
And that's actually a good enough reason.
A lot of people like to berate and disparage things like finance
and corporate finance, but there are things we can actually learn from corporate finance.
There's actually some useful lessons. There's something called the efficient frontier.
And back then when they talked about it, the efficient frontier is having a blend of bonds
and stocks and how you could reduce your risk and increase your overall return with reduced risk.
Well, you can do the same thing by owning an asset like gold or Bitcoin.
Personally, I think Bitcoin is better.
But you wind up having a situation where you reduce your overall volatility risk and increase
your return.
And so it is a very useful asset from that perspective. That one thing for someone
reasonably knowledgeable on investing in finance is enough of a reason to have an allocation.
What should the allocation be? That's debatable. And I'm not going to say what that should be.
2%. 2% is probably not enough. It probably needs to be in the range of 5% to 10%, but it's incredibly useful.
Finally, and this is really important, I am of the opinion that we are going to be for a pretty long time in an inexorable inflation.
And you just need to come to terms with that.
And so you need to hold a basket of assets, equities, Bitcoin.
What do you mean by that?
What do you mean inexorable inflation?
Please define that.
Going out for a nice dinner.
Today, going out for a nice dinner is probably anywhere between $100 and $200.
In five years, it's probably going to be double that.
And that's what I mean by inexorable inflation.
Double.
Explain the math there.
How do you get to double in five years?
I made up the number i pulled it
out of my ass i i don't know the number he's just saying it's it's going to keep going up in it
and it potentially keep going up it's yeah yeah but at a higher click right but but but this is
so if you have asked look wages climb faster than cpi so if you're a laborer if you're someone who
works for a living your wages will tend to go up faster. They always have and they will continue to do so. But for someone who has investable assets,
you need to do better. And so you need to be invested in things which have long run growth
characteristics. And again, the function of Bitcoin in a portfolio, in a portfolio, just to say stocks, stocks and Bitcoin. It will be a
diversifying asset, which will reduce your overall volatility. Bitcoin itself might or might not be
more volatile. But I believe, and this is something that a lot of people have a hard time with, you
have many people who keep saying that Bitcoin is leveraged NASDAQ. And although it may have been that in the last five, six, seven years,
that's not its fundamental nature.
Its fundamental nature is much more like gold, which is both good and bad,
but it will become a diversifying asset in your portfolio over a long period of time.
And finally, if you hold assets for long periods of time,
you want to try to minimize the taxes you pay. And holding assets, which can grow without your
selling them and having to pay taxes, is highly beneficial, because that's important in terms of
wealth accumulation. The highest tax rate, and we're assuming wealthier people, you're talking about paying that 37% rate for short-term rates and 20 plus Obamacare, which brings you to 24%.
That is its own significant little bear market.
So you want to ideally try to hold assets for appreciation over the course of 5, 10, 15, 20 years.
And so there are things you can do which minimize your tax hit,
and you can build your wealth doing these things.
And so it is one more tool in your arsenal of wealth building.
And so that's the argument that you make to people who are older who have wealth.
You're adding a quiver to your weapons to grow your wealth and to secure your
wealth. And that's, in my opinion, that's actually a very good argument for why you would own Bitcoin.
And you don't have to make all these other arguments which are easily put to rest because
they really fall into the realm of fantasy and they fall into the realm of
being hyperbolic. You don't have to be hyperbolic to make a very good case for why someone who has
5, 10, 15, 20, $50 million and more to have some percentage of their wealth in Bitcoin.
Okay, Tina, I think that was a great... So while you were talking, I was daydreaming a little bit
about we should have a conference, like an unconference conference for people that we
care about, just to Bitcoin, just to orange pill them. And I realized we actually have that.
coin just to orange orange pill them and i realized we actually have that i'm gonna try to get my dad
to come with me to fred's conference i think that would be incredibly eye-opening and could be a way
to get him to go oh it i'm gonna buy one percent in ibid wait i have a story i have a story for
your father please please here's a story i heard heard this years ago. But save it. Come to Fred's conference and you can orange.
I'm not going.
I'm not going.
I don't go to conferences.
I'm so sad.
But here's a story.
This is a useful story.
I heard this in the early 2000s.
This was a story about a man who was a stockbroker at what was then Bear Stearns.
And he was in his 90s.
He had escaped from Germany in the 30s and had been there since the 30s.
And when they were interviewing him from CNBC,
they looked at his portfolio and said,
it appears you have almost all tech stocks
and growth stocks in your portfolio.
And this man's like 92, 95 years old.
He says, why is that?
He says, I'm investing for the next 20 years.
So when you think in terms of your portfolio, it is important to remember that these assets are long-duration assets, and you need to be thinking in terms of long periods of time.
Now, bear in mind, for older people, many older people actually do care about the money they leave because it'll go to their spouse and go to their children.
And just because you die does not mean those assets get sold.
And that is a reality of life for many people.
And they don't necessarily want to sell them.
They get step up in basis.
And those assets go on and provide things which improve their standard of living for
the people they care about.
So these things do matter to many, many people.
You may think they don't matter, and they might not matter to the person who is very
old and may see their life expectancy, you know, being not that many years, but they
leave behind people they care about.
And Tina, they say it's like Patek Philippe.
They say you never really own a Bitcoin.
You just pass it on to the next generation.
It's true for all investment assets.
You know, people don't work hard and try to grow their capital to give it all away to the government.
They would really like to see the people they care about benefit.
I think the one thing I have an issue with, Tina,
is that you say it's one arrow in the quiver.
And I think everybody here kind of feels like it's the,
it's the bow, the arrow, and the,
and everything else is kind of.
I know how they see it.
I know how they see it, Fred.
I know.
I'm just saying, you know, you're like, it's one arrow.
You know, I understand.
I understand how they see it.
I mean, I got to tell you, there was,
we had a Rob Claussen here yesterday. And he was uh there was this young young guy worked in support at palo alto
networks and uh he's like you know i i need to get orange filled can somebody orange fill me
and then rob was like yeah hey uh i'll orange fill you uh then uh he goes really okay yeah what
he goes best performing asset last year last, last three years, last five years, last 10 years.
Do you have any other questions?
Yeah, I heard that.
I love that.
There are other assets that are better performing, and it's a nonsensical story.
I don't agree with that as a story.
I don't think it's good advice.
And I think that, I think that as a story. I don't think it's good advice. And I think that,
I think Bitcoin is a trade. It may be a trade for another 10 years, but it's a trade.
It is not, it does not produce wealth. It is not a wealth producing asset that comes from businesses and companies. And I think it's useful. And I think it is more than useful enough as a diversifying
asset in a portfolio.
And you're talking about trying to get people who have no interest in owning it to own it.
I would suggest to you that my argument is far more persuasive than trying to convince them that they need to think like somebody who thinks that they should only own Bitcoin. But that's not my
problem. I actually just don't care. I don't need to orange pill anyone. I just don't care.
Joe Thomas, what do you guys think about Bitcoins,
Tina's approach?
I think for me, like, you know, like I was,
again, Joe and I were talking about this earlier today.
It's just, you know, I went to a couple of events
over the weekend and
a lot of wealthy people at these meetings or these parties. And, you know, I had, you know,
I didn't really talk about this too much other than it was brushed casually. But I know these
people. And if I made the sovereign argument around, you got to self custody, you got to take one step out of
the sandbox and extricate yourself from the financial system and all of that, they would
just think I was a crank. And I understand all the arguments that people make there.
But for, I'll just call it the boomerer class with a lot of money they don't give a
shit about that uh and but they do have a lot of money and they and and many of them are just
under allocated here or have zero allocation and it seems to me that this isn't an either or it's a the argument you make to that cohort is to say you
need to have this in your bag it's too big of an asset right now has too much potential for you to
ignore it this is like investing in ai well this is the sister investment investing in bitcoin
as part of your portfolio you decide how much it is but it shouldn't be zero
just just to be really quick on this i think it's a terrible argument to suggest that the only reason people should buy bitcoin is because over one two three years it is the best performing
asset because the the old adage goes in you know past performance does not indicate future results
there's i mean mstrs outperformed Bitcoin in the last three years.
There's plenty of assets that have outperformed Bitcoin.
And then you're going to say, well, those are individual stocks.
Those are idiosyncratic risks.
I mean, you could look at, like, some of the altcoin, Bitcoin casino, the Solana's outperformed Bitcoin.
If you're going to make a use case for something, it has to be based on some of the fundamentals.
It can't just be based on short-term performance because as time goes by and Bitcoin gets bigger,
we know it's very likely that the kicker will decline and there'll be more assets that outperform
Bitcoin. What Bitcoin Tina is making is a far more convincing case for how it has a role in a
diversified portfolio. So that is more appealing, I think, to people than just setting yourself up for an argument
that, well, the only reason to buy Bitcoin is because it's the best performing asset.
If that someday no longer becomes the case, does that mean you should abandon your Bitcoin
because it's no longer performing as well as it did 10 years ago?
Which by the way, it isn't performing like it did 10 years ago when it was basically
a science project and very few adoption uh very little adoption so you
know i think we should abandon that that argument it's not it's not convincing it's performing i
would say it's performing very much according to the power law now that's better argument that's
a better argument i'm just saying the best performing very very i mean that power law is to
me is the that is the best argument for holding Bitcoin.
We have a relationship which was discovered in 2013 and which was written about in 2018.
And we're still on this power law network curve very precisely with an R squared of 96%.
96%. I don't know. To me, that is, that is number go up and mathematically number go up
I don't know.
from 10 cents to a hundred thousand. I think it's pretty convincing.
Fred, I actually don't find it convincing at all. I personally, I personally strongly oppose the
power law, the power law argument. I think no offense to you because I've argued it,
but I completely abandoned it. i think it's pure and
utter nonsense and fiction and i stick with the notion if you want people who have money
maybe not you and maybe not me previously why you you said you abandon it and you think it's
nonsense i abandoned the argument because the argument yeah because the argument is fiction. Because Bitcoin is exactly like gold, except it's electronic.
The power law is a statistical method.
I don't care.
It's a fiction that you're applying.
The power law is not applicable to Bitcoin because no one has to own it.
You see, this whole notion that someone has to own Bitcoin is a complete fiction.
And that's just straight up wrong.
No one has to own it.
It is a useful asset with some useful qualities,
but you don't have to own it.
So this notion that everybody has to own it,
that's false.
Maybe you can explain to me in the power law
where it says there's a notion that people have to own it
because I'm pretty familiar with the power law,
but it's not in the power law.
Well, you're making an assumption
that there will be endless demand.
And I would argue that, no, I actually don't agree that there'll be endless demand.
I think there is endless demand for human wants.
And human wants is about production.
Humans have endless wants.
And businesses and companies produce goods and services which humans need to live.
That is what there is endless demand for.
But as far as Bitcoin or gold, there's not an endless demand for that.
That's a fiction.
That's something you choose to believe, but there is zero evidence for that.
And price is not evidence for what you're stating.
Wow, I haven't heard something so stupid in a very long time.
You can think that all you want, and I actually don't care,
but I'm telling you, promoting the notion of the power law
is pure and utter fiction.
I totally disagree with it.
You can do and say whatever you choose,
and I don't really care one or the other.
But what I am telling you is if you want people who have money, who are in our age cohort, the notion of the efficient frontier and reducing volatility, so having a higher return with reduced volatility, is for many people the most persuasive argument anyone can make if you want those people to add
bitcoin to their portfolio and a lot of other things that people say are conjecture and
assumptions which i think are lovely little conjecture assumptions but they are far from
provable and just because they happened over some short period of time does not prove a damn thing. It is conjecture.
Tina, you said you used to, I think you said or alluded to that you used to subscribe to this
and you used to share it as what you believe. What was the shift? What made you think that
in the first place, and then what made you decide away from that?
It was wishful thinking on my part in the first place.
Wishful, hopeful thinking.
And it's a recognition that I think that many of the things
that Bitcoiners think about Bitcoin are simply straight-up false.
Did you come to this conclusion right after selling all your Bitcoin at $20,000?
I didn't sell all my Bitcoin, Fred.
So you can say all you want, but I didn't sell all of it.
I sold a substantial portion of it.
And yes, I wish I bought GBTC because I think GBTC was a great asset at a 45% discount.
But I didn't sell all of it.
I still have probably more Bitcoin than most other people have.
But that's not the point.
The point is that in terms of an asset,
Bitcoin, like gold, is a dead asset. It does nothing. It does not produce wealth.
I'm sorry you don't understand Bitcoin.
I understand it better than 99.999% of people, including you, Fred. I understand Bitcoin better than you understand it.
I'd be saying such nonsense if you did.
I refuse to look at Bitcoin with a religious fervor.
And that's how most Bitcoiners want to look at it.
Now, it is a useful tool.
A very useful tool.
And it is a useful quiver in your arsenal.
And if you want to convince people who have money to hold it, I would suggest adopting
my argumentation of the efficient frontier, that it reduces a person's risk and will,
on a relative basis, increase their return relative to their risk.
But you can do whatever you want.
You can tell them the power law and that God is going to come swimming down
and rescue you.
I'm done with Bitcoin Tina on my space.
He's not a Bitcoiner.
I don't know.
He sort of is a Bitcoiner, but like I't take this kind of anti-Bitcoin, Bitcoin does nothing kind of crap on a Bitcoin space.
It makes no sense. I'm sorry.
Sorry for booting him, but this is too much.
I can't tell you how much it hurts my brain to hear someone calling themselves Bitcoin.
There is no alternative and
just completely dog it as a dead asset. I mean, the whole point of Bitcoin is it's the world's
purest asset. It's the only 100% deflationary asset. I mean, gold is inflationary. Miners mine
more of it. If you've watched any of Saylor's interviews, the half life of investment in gold is between 30, 35 years.
And, you know, Bitcoin's utility goes beyond just being a store value. It's easily securitized.
It's easily verifiable, traceable. Gold is not. It's an asset tuned for the next 5,000 years.
Gold is tuned for the last 5,000 years. And if your argument is that
Bitcoin doesn't produce any wealth, I mean, have you not seen micro strategy?
Well, just look at the, I mean, Bitcoin was at 10 cents. It was, I bought it first at $200.
It went to a thousand and then dropped and came back to a thousand and went to 10 20 000 went
back to 4 000 3 3 500 now it's at 109 000 i mean come on i don't know there's some there's some
kind of like saying that price doesn't matter and this is like it i don't know this is this is what we're dealing with with trad fi they're they cling to their fallacious arguments of like efficient frontier but they're
you're missing the most uh efficient the the most biggest change the elephant in the room i mean
this is the bitcoin is the elephant in the room in finance. I'm like, it's, it's amazing to me. This is, it's just amazing to me. I can't. And plus
also, I think he doesn't understand. He doesn't understand that Bitcoin is a form of money. And
you know, look, Matthew Mazinskis really said it. Well, he said, look, we started with things like,
or no, it was Matthew. I'm actually not 100% sure who said this, well he said look we started with things like or no it was matthew i'm actually
not 100 sure who said this but he said uh look we started with things like arrowheads right because
stone the stone age in the stone age people actually gathered arrowheads and uh and use
those as money and then we went to you know like silver, and then from that to gold, and then from
that to, you know, certificates of gold, and then from that to fiat, and then now from that to
Bitcoin. I mean, there's an arc there that's very clear that Bitcoin is going to become
the next money. Now, it's going to take 20 or 30 years to
get there, but that's clearly where we are. And what it is, it's money. It's money. And we need
gold. We've needed a form of money to do things and to keep track of things. And money itself
does not produce anything. So I don't know. I just think he's very misinformed.
You know, I think that price is a good advertisement for Bitcoin, but I don't
necessarily look to the price as an indicator of what Bitcoin is. And if you understand Bitcoin, you can see why. There's a very high chance that it can be
the monetary denominator for all assets. Now, is it going to take a long time to get there?
Sure. But I mean, compare it to investing in the S&P.
You have counterparty risk.
You don't really necessarily know how the economy is going to be a black hole that's just going to suck up where all of the cash flow, all investable assets are going to eventually orbit around is it's literally the
only truly deflationary asset. And I think people really engage in a lot of mental gymnastics and to say why it can do or
won't do something i mean it's it's the perfect asset it's the only one that doesn't inflate
people's money away it's i i see bitcoin as eventually becoming the measuring stick
upon which profligate government spending is going to be measured against. 100%, Mitch, you are 100% right.
And will it happen in the next 10 years?
Probably not.
Like, you know, look, there's all kinds of reasons
why just, you know, the organization of our economies
and stuff can't handle that kind of rapid change.
But could it happen in 20 or 30 years?
Very, very, very, very well will happen, right?
So, you know, we are going to adopt this new currency worldwide. It will be worldwide the measure of things,
a measure of value in the world in the next 20 to 30 years. And, you know, either you,
you can realize this and it's not going to be a straight line, you know, so if you, there, there,
there can be some arguments as to selling a little bit at the tops and buying back a little bit when
it dips. I think there are very strong arguments for not trading this thing.
But, you know, just sort of Kelly criterion type rebalancing.
I think that makes a lot of sense.
But I think that the ultimate destination of Bitcoin is intense.
I mean, this is going to completely and utterly change
all of finance as we know it.
And all of economics as we know it and the and all of economics as we know it
and uh and i just don't think tina understands that i think he thinks it's sort of just this
useful little random thing to put in your portfolio and you may kind of hold it for five years and
then sell it out and for some other random thing and And I think that's where a lot of traditional fiat is at. You know, that's where they think
of this stuff. They think of it as sort of this anonymous thing. You know, it's not really,
it's not really a special thing at all. It's just one arrow in your quiver. And I don't know,
to me, that's a bad way
to think about it. So Fred, I posted in the nest, I often post this chart, this is a live chart
on the performance of Bitcoin on a CAGR basis, the last 14 years compared to gold and compared
to the S&P 500. And the genesis, a lot of the conversation earlier today was,
you know, Joe had called me and we were just talking about different things
and it had to do with how do you orange pill the wealthy,
the average person who's not well-versed in Bitcoin
and they are not amenable to a sovereign argument.
It's hard to argue with this chart relative to your portfolio allocation.
If I'm looking at this chart and I'm sitting down with a financial advisor,
how can I say I want 0% allocation on the left-hand column of Bitcoin
that is in every year superior to gold and S&P 500.
If I added, if there was a column here for bonds, it'd be even better. So
how should I, you know, great, get to the 70% on the Kelly criterion at some point,
but your first step in the water needs to be a two, five, eight, ten percent allocation just to get going because you don't want to look
somebody commented on uh on this on on our spaces feed or or is my feed and he said if you have less
than 10 you're short and i kind of feel that like what what business do you have looking at this
chart and saying i want to have five percent allegation. I don't know. I mean, I'm just seriously, like you consider yourself to be a financial analyst. You're supposed to like
allocate people's money based on returns of asset classes. You look at this chart and you say,
nah, 3%, that that's my number. Well, Fred, you know, like, look,
you talk to financial advisors and it's an interesting thought exercise to go through this.
And because if you talk to them, they say, well, I think it should be this or I don't think you should be doing this.
It's too risky. We're going to do 60, 40, whatever.
Let's say they work for Wells Fargo or Credit Suisse or, you know, Morgan, you know, Merrill Lynch.
you know, Merrill Lynch, and then you test them and say, as a financial advisor for, say, Merrill Lynch, are you, and you had a view that was divergent from what the corporate sheets tell you, are you free to advise your clients that?
And they answer, and I'll just tell you, because I've had this conversation, they'll say, no, I'm not free to do that.
They'll say, no, I'm not free to do that.
I have to stay on the playbook.
I have to stay on the playbook.
So, and then it turns out all they are is front men for a corporate assessment of where
you should put your money.
It's not like I talked to my financial advisor.
No, I went to my financial advisor and he told me what Merrill Lynch said, which I could
have looked up myself.
You can pretty much automate the entire aspect of a financial advisor minus the personal touch and the handshake.
Look, my mother, who's 85 years old, has got one of these.
My mother's a high net worth.
She inherited a bunch of money, right?
And, you know, she has one of these financial advisors at Morgan Stanley, right?
And I'm in on these calls.
And every single time, the guy spends, first of all, about half the call talking about her cat and, you know, various other things like that, just completely unrelated to the thing. And then she's talking
about where she wants to be buried and things like that. And then he'll just kind of rattle off
the Morgan Stanley thing. And then he'll say, I like this particular stock. We're taking a 1.2%
allocation of this or that. I don't know. To me, it's almost like uh paid companionship rather than there's any
science at all to it zero yeah i i totally agree i mean in that sense that they're they're they're
effective salesmen for uh a financial uh institution but it's a it's a it's an extremely
expensive companionship i mean because i mean what are they hitting you for a point,
a hundred basis points? Uh, you know, I don't even know. I have actually no idea. Like,
I just don't want to even get involved because I don't want to have my mother say, well, Fred,
you recommended this or that, you know? Yeah. So she did finally get some Bitcoin, you know,
because after pestering her for, know seven years i finally she finally
got some bitcoin she's happy with it but then she's like why didn't i get the bitcoin fred and
i go you did you got the uh ibit and she's like i want the real thing fred i want the bitcoin i go
no no no no mom you cannot handle quartz cold storage and she goes why not and i'm like well
because you can't remember things. You're
very bad at remembering things, mom. And she's like, I want real Bitcoin. I don't want some
fake Bitcoin. And I'm like, look, this is the real thing for you. We have this conversation
once a month. And then she keeps on forgetting it. She's like, do I have the Bitcoin or do I
not have the Bitcoin? I go, you have the Bitcoin. She goes, but I thought I didn't have the real
Bitcoin. I just have this fake one. go, you have the Bitcoin. She goes, but I thought I didn't have the real Bitcoin.
I just have this fake one.
And every month I go through the same thing.
Do you, did she listen to the spaces at all?
Not at all.
Of course not.
Zero.
Does she have a Twitter account?
That would be crazy if she did.
No, she doesn't have a Twitter account.
My mom does, but she doesn't have Twitter spaces.
Wow.
Yeah, but she spouts off about Trumpism and stuff,
and so we block each other.
Yeah.
You can't, you know, it's interesting,
because, like, let's assume your mother's got,
pick a number, $10 million with them.
Yeah.
She's paying 1%.
That's 100 grand a year.
Four calls, you know, it's once a quarter.
Yeah.
You're paying $25, the to talk to some guy
who's got a screen from saying talk to her about her cats and ask about the burial plot
and uh yeah you know he's got like and he's like looking and he goes i remember last time we talked
about your cat you know might need this you, like these, these things are all in
her sales, the guy's sales force, you know? And she's like, oh, well, thanks for remembering about
my cat. Wow. It's like, yeah, let me tell you, the cat is, uh, I just can't believe it. I'm just
like, it's, it's, it's amazing to me that that's where you end up, but you know, that's where you
end up. Yeah. But Fred, you know, oh, go. She's funding, uh, you know that's where you end up yeah but fred you know
oh go sorry she's funding uh you know uh a week in the hamptons for this guy
yeah i i uh i used to think of finance much more of a black box until about covid where i started
like dipping my toe and trying to understand more. A friend of mine was hosting Zooms for like his friends just on what's going on in public markets, what's going
on in semi-private markets, et cetera. And that really like started to peel back the curtain,
you know, like it's not, it's not the Oz it's, you know, or Oz or whatever the wizard of Oz.
it's not the Oz it's you know or Oz or whatever the Wizard of Oz it's it's just some old dude
as you said like looking at their Salesforce prompts and I am definitely not gonna have
financial advisors like my parents have I have I am taking you talk about uh taking custody um
I'm gonna take custody of of my finances in a way that um my parents never did because they just wanted to effectively grant that
to somebody else. Like, don't lose my money. And there's a lot of distance between don't lose my
money and just kind of blowing it in opportunity cost. So I feel much more empowered since I went
down that path in COVID, but even more so over the past i don't
know eight months or so that i've been getting to know you guys fred and thomas and all the others
um and that was all this path to bit understanding bitcoin more was really just the path to trying
to understand finance more like my personal finance you know how should i again like i said
i just learned about margin yeah you know it it reminds me of like, you know, in the Middle Ages, you had these kind of astrologers, you know, who were like there to, you know, advise the king.
It's now a good time for war.
And then the astrologers go, Sire, you know, the moon is in Mercury as ascendant Sire he goes wait are you saying
it's not I feel like going well if you
feel like doing it Sire absolutely
please attack
Germania right now you know
this is the kind of stuff that we're
dealing with it's a modern version of it
yeah it is
it is totally such a great analog
and I totally agree and I'm not I'm not
falling into that trap so I still have a lot more analog, and I totally agree. And I'm not falling into that trap.
So I still have a lot more to learn.
And I think I forgot who else was going to come out. But I was chatting about this maybe on Friday with Joe and Dark, or not Dark, with Asteroid, because they both live in Chicago.
I'm going to buy them lunch at some point late summer and they're going to just like give me a boot camp.
Here's all the resources.
Here's all the things that I need to like really deep dive in because I don't want to
have to rely on an astrologer for the rest of my life.
And I feel like I'm in stage two or three of probably like a 10 stage like complete
decoupling from that
mitch you got your hand up i don't know yeah uh i i kind of wanted to bring conversation back to bitcoin a little bit because uh you know the the bitcoin tina discussion obviously I don't agree with his characterization, but I do think it's an interesting topic to discuss.
I mean, clearly we're still in the first inning on the adoption phase for Bitcoin, which I think is going to continue to yield an average 40% CAGR.
But I do think at some point adoption will get saturated.
So my question is, you know, what characteristics of it do you think?
Well, I guess the first part of that question is, do you think it will continue to?
Yeah. So, Mitch, I want to I want to just i would like to quote the the study of matthew mazinkas because he did
a really great uh you know you should look at his videos i love his videos but one of his things is
he sort of looked at okay you have money printing right now okay is the central bank money printing is growing at about 12, 13% per year, right? The M2 is growing
at about 7% a year. So doubling every sort of on this power curve down, so 42%,
but it doesn't get to where stocks are. It'll take another 40 years for it to do. It will exceed
stock rate of returns for the next 40 years,
which is pretty remarkable. So pretty much for most of our lives, except for the younger ones
here, you know, Bitcoin will outperform stocks. It's a slow decreasing CAGR. So that's what it is.
Well, I'm more so curious what the characteristics are for Bitcoin to keep that outperformance once you get to saturation. the only truly 100% deflationary asset that is designed to be instantly tradable, securitizable
in cyberspace, and has literally the best scarcity and supply dynamics of any asset
ever. I fail to see how that doesn't outperform stocks. i'm just curious where everyone else's head is at
with this because i'm still sort of in the stream of consciousness phase and trying to sharpen this
kind of future vision i have in my head for bitcoin so that that's really the the thrust of
what i'm trying to get at here so for me bro like i think bitcoin like you know we're talking all about the price and how it's
going to outperform all of these things is like largely like irrelevant you know what i mean like
kind of similar to the u.s dollar like the united states doesn't really care too much the strength of the dollar relative to other currencies
um but the the economy the ecosystem that is like available within the bitcoin world is like
is just better than the fiat one for so many reasons and i think for a lot of people, you have to kind of experience it, you know, like people
can tell you about it and, and share how they've experienced it. But until you've like, touched it
and felt it and like had some skin in the game, it's hard to really appreciate what it is and,
and, and what's available to you is kind of like what we were talking about before about,
you know, solving a problem. And if you don't know that there's a problem because what you've been doing for so long is
like working for you that you don't realize that there's, you know, a better alternative, right?
But if you've never had, you know, an online payment for merchandise frozen by PayPal or
Stripe or some merchant, then you don't know that that happens a lot, that people will get
tens, hundreds of thousands of dollars just stuck for their business. Or if you've never tried to
make a payment to another country or tried to get money to someone overseas, then you don't realize
how difficult it is and how many exchanges you may have to go through and how long it could take
to just get money to another person who maybe really needs it or has done a service for you.
And then someone else mentioned something before about arbitrage, right? Like someone who had found
in his country, he could get a product for 20 cents and then go and resell it on a global market
for an exponential market margin, like $10 for that 20 cent product, right?
Just based on being able to bring it to a global market.
So I think these are the like true values of Bitcoin that are like largely overlooked.
And a lot of times, like, especially in these like Twitter spaces, it's all about like the investment and how much money you can make year over year.
If you get in now and like you dog foot the network and blah blah blah blah but really it's about making that ecosystem
accessible to more and more people and then as the the volume grows and as like the the
transactions are growing within the ecosystem it makes that asset more and more valuable more
valuable than just getting whales to buy in and
hold it is like actually having utility and velocity within the ecosystem. And people are
always like comparing it to stocks in the S&P 500. But it's not really the same thing, right? Like
our S&P 500 right now for Bitcoin is like, is like magic Eden, you know, we've got like fucking
taproot wizards and puppets and some random like
defy projects they're spinning up but there's not really like a user interface for bitcoin that's
clean simple efficient that any person anywhere in the world can just tap into and connect and
exchange and it's as simple as the fiat ecosystem so i think like that's really like more important right now than
this speculating on the price of bitcoin right like who cares what the price of bitcoin is right
it's like how can we use it i care you say who cares i think a lot of people here care what the
price of bitcoin is i mean if there's more people using Bitcoin, inherently the price will be increasing.
So if getting more people to actually be able to use it is like, I mean, the biggest thing that everyone celebrates in Bitcoin is Bitcoin Pizza Day,
which celebrates the first time someone used Bitcoin to buy something like he's not he's not like showing he's holding it
on the ledger he took the Bitcoin and he used it to get his kids pizza like they were hungry he
didn't have any cash like he bought pizza for his family you know I'm saying like that's what
Bitcoin is about it's about like it's about being able to freely exchange your goods and services
and be able to participate in a global marketplace without having anyone be
able to infringe on that ability or come in and stop your money and ask where this is going or
that's going or whatever the case may be. And just by simply inviting more people to participate in
that ecosystem and also making it easier for them, the price will continue to go up. Like,
that's almost for sure.
Like, you know, but I think right now, like what we need to do rather than like try an
orange pill like whales is just like really figure out like the ways that we can make
it easier for people to just simply transact and use it and have some so that they can
see the days of like owning $200 Bitcoin and it going to 100,000 will
never happen for anyone else ever again, period. It's over. You know what I mean? No one will ever
experience that level of like euphoria and like, and like, and be able to have so much confidence
in the network because that's over, you know? So now it has to be about the fundamentals of the
network, right? Like it has to be about like the true value of the ecosystem and like really, you know,
creating more value in this new ecosystem where there's less intermediaries and individuals
are more freely able to go direct to market and just exchange their goods and services.
And what that creates is the actual, actual like it's a much greater value
it's like it's it's i don't know how to explain it in words but the okay but buddy i i i think we
i think we got the picture there um but i think we understand next but hold on but the good news is
is that it can be whatever you want it to be for yourself and that's like you know i'm not one of
these bitcoin maxis.
I am, I wouldn't,
I don't know that I'd call myself a Bitcoin
or I own Bitcoin.
I'm trying to learn about it.
But I think the great news is like,
if your goal is just to hold it
and reap the Kager in it,
then that's what it is for you.
And if you want to go on a different mission,
like that's the cool thing about this
is that it's all one big choose your own adventure. Asteroid, you wanted to say
something, I think here. I mean, if I may jump in again, I kind of want to sharpen this point
again a little bit. I think what Bodhi said in terms of just being able to freely send money,
that that's kind of more of like
a stable coin argument what I'm really trying to get at is what are the dynamics dynamics of Bitcoin
that are going to keep propelling it at the head of the pack post the adoption curve and to me but
why do we care if the adoption curve is like 40 years out like why is that even a relevant
conversation right now well because no one really knows how long the adoption curve is like 40 years out like why is that even a relevant conversation right now well because no
one really knows how long the adoption curve is going to truly be it might be 40 years it might
be shorter i just think it's well it's definitely not shorter than 10 years right i mean because
when we talk about the penetration so i mean i guess you can i i guess but yeah i don't get it
either so i don't really understand it because if you start to see that the CAGR goes down from 25, because
it goes much faster than you expect,
swap it out for a new asset.
I don't really
care. Why do we want to speculate?
I don't know. We don't know.
No one knows. It's really impossible to tell.
We'll see if it starts to
decline and look for AI.
I'm just more curious why you want to go there, Mitch.
Mitchapalooza.
Well, because I honestly think it gets to the core of the point of why Bitcoin is getting the network effect it has to begin with.
I mean, I think those innate characteristics are what's driving it up the adoption curve.
Yeah, I agree.
But we don't know.
We just really don't know the rate.
Like, I assume the power laws are cold.
I mean, it might not.
Like, I don't know.
If it starts to slow, you know, you could.
I don't know.
This is just speculation of the future so far away.
I just don't. I don't get what's is just speculation of the future so far away. I just don't.
I don't get what's so confusing about the question. I mean, my thesis is that it all relates back to the fact that money is just flowing into this black hole of this truly deflationary asset.
truly deflationary asset.
And then the question is, well,
why would it even outperform stocks to begin with?
I mean, my answer to that would be,
you know, unlike stocks that dilute
with new shares and inflation,
Bitcoin's value just holds it
because you can't print any more of it.
I don't know if I agree with that, though.
I think there's going to be a lot of stocks
that vastly outperform it,
but it's not going to be indices like you can spy.
But I think there's a good chance there.
Look, I think there's going to be cryptos that outperform Bitcoin, right?
That's not the here or there.
If you pick the right AI stocks, I think you're going to outperform.
But the problem is, what are those, right?
It's a much riskier, harder thing to figure out. That like the problem is is what are those right like that's it's it's a much riskier harder thing to figure out that's the best problem so i don't i i don't know i'll be like i
i think the best to me is for me is to have an allocation but you know you have to do what you so uh fred can i pop in here hop in hey um i appreciate everything uh you guys do and fred
i really appreciate um you highlighting the power law i got my first bitcoin back in 2014 i can
honestly say i don't think i really understood Bitcoin until maybe three or four years ago. But I want to go back to the custody conversation.
You know, I have a disabled child and I think a lot about how to transmit some of my economic
energy into the future because he's going to need lifetime care.
And I've kind of found that our discussions tend to be just around self-custody and then like Bitcoin and Ibit or something like that. And it's sort of the self-custody or like a
taxable account. But I also wonder why we don't talk more about leveraging various IRAs like a Roth
or rollover IRAs. When I talk to some of these younger guys, I kind of say, hey, if you've got
an old 401k or an IRA, you can go and put that into an ETF. You don't have to self-custody. And then when the time is right, you can go and convert that to a Roth.
And the pushback is usually like, well, I want the money now.
And I'm kind of like, yeah, but you're also going to need money when you're 60.
So what are your thoughts on that? can you repeat the question a little bit i i'm not 100 sure we understood it
yeah it's it's more like you know we we talk about hey don't trade your bitcoin don't you
know that kind of thing you're going to pay taxes on it.
And I'm kind of like, if you're looking at Kelly Criterion
and you have assets distributed across toll storage,
taxable account, rollover IRA, Roth IRA,
you have lots of options with kind of rebalancing
without creating a taxable event.
And potentially kind of, you know,
getting this asymmetric asset in a custody situation where you're really not
going to pay tax on it, at least for a very long time.
Maybe your heirs will.
Yeah. I still,
I'm not sure that you're going to gain much by trading it any more than once
a year. I mean, rebalancing more than once a year with the Kelly criteria.
Yeah, and that's sort of what I'm getting at.
It's sort of like a periodic rebalance, maybe annually, or if you have-
Well, if you're doing annually rebalancing, it's kind of also kind of the most tax efficient period, right?
You don't ever want to be paying ordinary income
on anything, right?
Right.
But look, I do think the Kelly criteria makes sense.
And for those kind of new to this thing,
I'll just kind of go over the math a little bit.
I have actually a lecture that I found
I did about a year ago
and I sort of proved it out and worked out the math on
a blackboard uh so basically how it works is it was created by this guy kelly at bell labs kind of
where uh you know i think thomas you were at bell labs right um or you were at at&t but i was gonna
i'm not sure if you were at bell labs or not. But basically Kelly was at Bell Labs and he basically studied the following problem.
Let's suppose I flip a coin and the coin has, you know, some probability of heads
and some probability, you know, one minus that probability of tails.
And in the probability of heads, you make an amount A times your money.
And in the event of tails,
you lose another number B, you know?
So now you have these things and you say,
I want to maximize the long-term rate of revenue of this,
how much should I allocate of my net worth to this game?
Assuming the game has a positive expected value,
you're going to be allocating something.
Well, you don't want to bet at all on the first roll
because you could lose it.
So it's pretty clear that it should be some percentage of your net worth.
And then you can work it out. It's pretty clear that it should be some percentage of your net worth. And then you can work it out.
It's pretty simple.
You just compute the expected value at the end, at some time in.
And then you basically take the logarithm of that,
and you differentiate and set to zero.
And then you work it out.
And basically it says you should have a number
which is a constant percentage of your net worth
that is dependent on the expected return of the asset, right?
And you can kind of work out what that means for Bitcoin.
And usually the number ends up being somewhere between 50 and 70%.
Now, some people say that's too aggressive.
Now, some people say that's too aggressive.
You should take less than the full Kelly for your thing.
So people come up with this really arbitrary number called the half Kelly.
And so somebody says, I'm going to only do 35% because it's a half Kelly.
There's no math in half Kellys.
There's only a math in Kelly.
But basically, thelly criterion really it you
know it makes sense because what you're sort of saying is if i'm not fully invested right um then
if if i never if i'm always fully invested i can't take advantage of dips
right so you know the the kelly criteria
said well you know if you if you start and you get over 70 so you get to 90 well then you sell
down to 70 and then if it's then dips down uh so now your allocation is 60 well. You then buy back up to 70%. And you can kind of sort of prove that this thing
has a generally better risk asset profile. On the other hand, it is dependent on the
rebalancing thing. So you can kind of say, I rebalanced never. And you will see that actually
with respect to Bitcoin, rebalancing never historically would have beat the Kelly criterion.
But I think the Kelly criterion is a very sensible way to allocate Bitcoin. And you don't get that
much worse by having 70% of your money in Bitcoin
than by having 100% of your money. So 70% with rebalancing with the Kelly, and you can do like
some Google Sheets and try different scenarios. You'll see, you get pretty close. It's a pretty
good thing. And you get less volatility. And as Matthew Mazinska says, you get less of the Maalox moment because you're just
automatically rebalancing every year. So I think in addition to the mathematical properties of the
Kelly, I think there's some very good psychological properties. And I think if you're planning on
holding Bitcoin for, look, nobody on this planet has held Bitcoin for 20 years, right?
There's nobody who's done that.
So I think the only thing we can say is if we're planning on holding Bitcoin for the next 20 years, we better have a plan as to how we're going to do it.
Because without a plan, we have no shot of kind of implementing that. So I would say I really like the idea of
having a plan and having a percentage network of your net worth being in Bitcoin every year.
I think that'll probably serve everybody well. And then everybody has to decide what percentage
that is, but I would sort of pick a percentage and stick with it um and that's not just me talking but like
steven perron same thing you know he's older than me but he's like yeah i'm using 70 you know i'm
like okay good you know uh but anyway i i love the kelly i'm gonna i'm gonna start i'm going to
start employing that next year uh especially after we do it okay yeah i mean you
can just pick your rebalancing metric you know like i'm gonna do it on i'm gonna do it like
mid-year i think what do you think about that that's fine like mid-year like i'll just you know
june 1st of 2026 i'm gonna sell down to 70 or buy up to 70 right right? Like that would be a, I think that's a really great thing.
You know, I just think
these passive investment strategies
tend to do really well.
That's one thing that the finance world
has figured out, right?
Is that massively active trading
is generally a bad idea.
You just get zapped by fees.
And so the whole investment world's kind of gone to passive.
And the thing about it is that the financial advisors
don't add much value in the passive thing.
They put you in a 60-40 portfolio
and then they call you and talk to you about your cap.
That's kind of what their business is, right?
They don't really do much.
They just kind of invite you to their business is, right? Uh, they don't really do much. They just
kind of invite you to parties. They listen to you. They listen to you rail about your health problems.
And then they take your, you know, 50 to a hundred basis points. Uh, that's kind of Morgan
Stanley's, you know, Merrill Lynch's business model. Uh, it's kind of, uh, as a guy who started,
that wasn't the way it used to be. You know,
when I was in the financial business, it was much more gunslinging, right? You know,
like they've gotten rid of all guys like me.
Hey, you guys, can you hear me?
Yeah, I just want to make a point on something that Chris brought up a long time ago.
It's like, hey, if everybody invests in Bitcoin, then we won't have any new inventions in companies, right?
Because no money will go towards angel investing.
I think the one thing to think about, Chris, is a lot of us who are putting the majority of wealth in Bitcoin,
someday we're going to have a gigantic pile
of money. And then we will probably feel comfortable with kind of just writing these flyer checks,
right? The stuff that made me. But a lot of us are-
I think you're right, Astrid. Look, I think that Bitcoiners are pretty bad angel investors,
right? Because we're so convinced of the superiority of Bitcoin as an asset.
And I don't know anything, but if we have, you know,
a super amount of wealth and we'll be like, oh, whatever,
a couple of hundred grand, you don't mean anything, right?
Look, I feel like once you've discovered Bitcoin,
you tend to wean off the angel investor.
I did a lot of angel investing a long time ago,
not as much as Christopher, you know but i did a bunch i probably invented 20 angel deals you know
which is by the way a lot that is like anything over one is a lot because there aren't that many
angels so thank you for your i mean you know in in the tech world it's not you know i don't know
there's you know if you're in silicon valley you go to a bunch
of parties and there's some guys starting a company yeah but there's like there's like 10
of those people but but anyway yeah that was just to say thank you for your service yeah well but
you know i think i and i look i i think angel investing is cool uh i do think that right now, I think Asteroid makes a really good point, though, that a lot of
us just feel like the next 10 years are going to be exceptionally good for Bitcoin. And if we do
get this 10x in the price of Bitcoin, then I think a lot of us would be like...
Yeah, have more capital. Because once you get above a certain amount
of wealth, it's like, well, I mean, how many yachts do you need? How many concerts from Beyonce
do you need for your daughter? You know, like it, it becomes sort of like, I've got also people
tend to, you know, people tend to invest in the same field that they started, you know, like, so I started this ad tech company in 2006, right?
And then, you know, it was very successful.
And, you know, then I started,
everybody asked me to invest in other ad tech companies, right?
Because they're like, okay,
you're the godfather of ad tech, you know?
So I started putting money in, i got a you know there was it
was sort of just matched with my experience right like but you know like uh i think i think people
who are made their money in bitcoin but just by holding bitcoin right they're gonna put their
money in bitcoin related things in a few years you know what i mean just because we're all kind
of like in the
Bitcoin world. I'm a little bit doing a little bit more of that right now, but like, you know,
I'm not angel investing compared to what I'm- Yes. And I-
I'm not worth it. I'm Bitcoin.
There are already guys that are doing it. Like the guy, Brad Mills, who was on either
today or yesterday on a space. Yeah, no, I know Brad.
I mean, I've never met him, but I just, I was like going, you know, I went on his profile
and I went to, and I said, oh, he's got
I'm sorry, who else?
Who'd you say yesterday?
Simon has done a lot of business.
Oh, yes, yes, yes, absolutely.
Simon has done a ton.
Absolutely, absolutely. And by the way,
I'm not saying, wait, wait, hold on. This is important.
This is important. I'm not saying everybody
should angel invest. I am definitely not
saying that. In fact, most people shouldn't. The amount of people that should be
angel investors is probably less than 1% of the global population. It's probably much smaller
than that. But right now we're at like 0.000. There's just way, way, way more demand than there
There is supply for angel investors, people that are willing to write first checks into
is supply for angel investors, people that are willing to write first checks into founders.
founders.
And this is like not a realistic worry, but it is also a non-zero worry because if I,
as a huge angel evangelist, am saying, I now have to be even more careful with writing
checks, not just because I'm trying to be careful about the investments that I make.
Like that's a good thing.
You want to be choosy because you don't want to invest in things that are just going to
absolutely go to zero because that's not good. We want to have positive incentives for people.
Like you don't want to invest in entrepreneurs. You want to invest in entrepreneurs. Take a line
from Mark Cuban on Shark Tank. So that's a good thing to have a strong benchmark. But what you
don't want to do is be like, it's a great company, but I think I can still make more money off of the
return on Bitcoin. And that is where I think you could get into a great company, but I think I can still make more money off of the return on Bitcoin.
And that is where I think you could get into a point
where if we had all of our existing angels
and no new angels, then we get to stagnation.
And I think that that's a low risk,
but it's a non-zero risk.
But Chris-
I want to do a little plug for uh the uh bitcoin alpha conference uh so i haven't done
it yet in this conference i just like selling this conference so it's a non-profit conference
that you can go find out about it at bitcoinalpha.org we just sold four more tickets over the
last uh over the last two days so we're now there's 30 i'll tell you i'm
looking at real time we have 30 posted in the night spread yeah yeah yeah so we have 32 tickets left
uh at the limited edition price uh how do i look at one second so yeah so basically what did what
this conference says we did one of these before.
It was called Bitcoin First then.
And what it is, is it's an unconference.
So, there's no speakers.
Nobody gets free tickets.
We're all just, it's just organized by Bitcoiners, for Bitcoiners.
Thomas and Asteroid both came to the previous one.
And, you know, I'd love to have you guys there. Thomas and Asteroid both came to the previous one.
And, you know, I'd love to have you guys there.
I know Christopher already got a ticket.
Mitch, I'd love to have you.
But we're basically kind of creating our own conference, and we have four simultaneous tracks in this kind of nice, really five-star hotel setting.
And, you know, we're doing a preview of this Lauren Biederman's movie,
Unbankable, the previous night.
And it's just a way for all of us to get together
and enjoy a really high-end dinner.
It is expensive.
It's not because we're making money,
but it costs a lot of money to put on something like this.
It's kind of like a whale pass type thing.
And that's it.
And if we have any money left over, we'll give it to some quantum research fund or whatever.
That's the plan right now.
But that's the idea.
And so it's October 17th.
If you can make it, we'd love to have you.
I guarantee you'll love it we'd love to have you i guarantee 11.
it's awesome yeah it would i can tell you we had a a blast last time it was an absolute blast and uh
you know we're gonna make this one even better so i'm gonna try to get everybody i wanted to
everybody to be like this is gonna be the best bitcoin event you ever went to and and really
not just because you sat in the front row and,
you know, Jack Maulers was on stage, but, you know, hopefully you get to meet Jack Maulers,
you know, and we were all going to sit around and just talk. So that's the goal is to,
is to share information and to share our perspective in real life. And this is a non, um, non-recorded, no cameras, uh, Chatham house rules. Anything said
there does not get recorded or put on spaces. So it's a little, a little different because,
you know, you can, you can say stuff that won't be immediately retweeted. So, uh, well, if you
know, if you, if you want to join, just kind of ping us and we'll, we'll try to get you in.
And it's a good way to build some relationships with people that you've just heard their voices or.
Yeah, I mean, that's a really good thing.
Look, I think we're all getting, we're all on these spaces and everything.
We have this kind of shared bet, right?
That Bitcoin is going to be the thing.
And look, we will have a bear market, right?
For sure. We're going to have another bear market. And we're we will have a bear market, right? For sure.
We're going to have another bear market.
And we're going to have to live through that.
And hopefully not sell all our Bitcoin like Bitcoin Tina.
Mappy bought it back into a little bit of the Bitcoin.
But look, I'm pretty much sure he sold all his Bitcoin at the low.
So I think a lot of this is,
I look at it as, this is like building your conviction.
I think we're all pretty convinced this asset's gonna
do great over the next 10 years.
But I think we, you know, like we need to kind of
rebuild our conviction all the time.
And that's why I think these spaces are good.
And I think that's why these kind these spaces are good and i think that's why
these kind of in-person events can be good i i go to all these events like bitcoin vegas and everything nashville they're all good but the problem is with bitcoin vegas you just you know
like like i didn't see thomas in bitcoin vegas so i don't think we saw you in big oh yeah
think we saw you in big oh yeah i don't know yeah they're like i can't remember because it's it's
you're just walking in so many of those uh hotel room lobbies and stuff you know but look i played
darts with carlos it was fun i loved it yeah so it was you and joe carlos sorry and ben and i
played darts yeah okay cool and then and then we had the uh the breakfast at the venetian that one morning
and then uh we went to dinner at dark side dark side yeah yeah that great dinner
yeah so look i think these things are great and look you know there's you know we can't really
get everybody from you know chicago and and there's people people coming from all over the place like
you know uh latvia london you know, we're going to have people from everywhere.
So hopefully you can make it and hopefully we can, you know, it'll be worthwhile.
I think it will.
Yeah.
I'm going to try to use this as a, I'm going to try to use this.
I missed it, but I had a ticket last time.
I couldn't make it because of an emergency, but I got one early this year.
So I'm really looking forward to it.
Okay, great, JWH.
You got a witness.
You got a convert here.
Yeah, I'm going to try to bring my father to it.
I just had that realization where we were talking earlier that this would be the best way.
Because he can hear it 10 different ways from me.
But if he's there with a whole group of people
that are real experts,
and I love that Fred is a mathematician,
you know, he actually went to Stanford
and got a PhD in math.
Well, yeah, Giovanni last time.
Yeah, right.
Giovanni was like,
he was like,
I discovered the power a lot.
He was like,
he may come again. Look, wait, wait wait wait you know he's a little bit he's an acquired taste let me put it that way he he is he is absolutely as impassioned about the power law as we are with
bitcoin but uh you know it's great it's it's it is you know if you want to get convinced about the math of Bitcoin, he's a pretty good person.
But look, Matthew Mazinskis would be equally great, I think.
Cena would be great too.
I don't know if Cena can make it.
But Plan C.
We know everybody.
So now the question is, can we get them all in one spot together to
really kind of make it this amazing thing egg ready there you know she's
gonna be great I love to see Mike Alford come out right yeah Mike Alfred
we've reached out to Mike he's good we had Bob Burnett on the mining side last
time he was fantastic.
Yeah, so, yeah, that's my pitch deck.
Fred, don't forget about our nice talk.
The poker room.
We're going to do the poker room with Joe if he comes.
We'll do the poker room.
Joe didn't even buy a ticket yet.
Get your ticket, Joe.
Fred, why did you boot Bitcoin Tina?
What happened?
All hell broke loose when I leave the stage.
I got like six text messages about it.
What happened?
He just went on a ramp.
I don't know.
Somebody else tell him.
So par for the course, right?
Par for the course. No, he was saying, I think he got in Fred's craw because he was saying,
Bitcoin is not the end-all be-all.
It is not the perfect asset is the part of your
portfolio allocation he made an argument that yeah i get it why he's wrong he's wrong okay well
what's with these people blocking and booting people they don't like like i don't understand
i know but here's the thing it's really soft yeah look it's fine As someone frequently booted and blocked, it's soft, guys. Grow up.
Okay, but his – let me tell you, Joe, his attitude towards the room was sort of screeching at the room.
I mean, he was just sort of like –
Again, par for the course.
Fred, I actually enjoyed it.
I liked it for a bit.
I liked it for a bit.
I liked Tima.
He's funny.
Yeah, me.
I agree. I'm a Tima. He's funny. Yeah, me. I agree.
I'm a Tima fan. He makes me laugh every time.
It's hilarious.
Guys, it's like a...
Totally.
100%. It's a wind-up toy.
You can't get mad when you wind up the toy
and he starts going nuts.
Why are you mad about that?
Maybe you could put a timer on it
and just say, okay, we're going to move on.
But booting somebody?
Well, that is sort of what Fred did because once you wind once you wind it up there's no way you just got to let
the it's like what is that that Pixar cartoon where the the the little ball of flame gets angry you
gotta just let it burn it out yeah and then it'll come back I don't know people were like emailing me saying that tina is a destroyer of spaces
and blah blah blah that's that's why you bring it up i'm just trying to be a model people are so
guys but people are like uh everybody always says that about everybody i feel like i've heard that
about joe 35 times in the morning and joe's one of my favorite parts of the show when he does come on.
I just think it's like silly.
People block over dumb shit all the time.
I just realized that I had
Asteroid blocked so I just unblocked it.
I just
unblocked you. I didn't say anything
racist. I just
disagreed with one of your posts. I never said anything racist.
No racism. We can't have racism.
No racism.
That's right.
Unless I deserve it.
And then you can be racist.
I'm just kidding.
No, no racism, period.
That's not to be fooled with.
It's so funny.
Every time I've pushed back on something that is clearly racist, I'm the asshole.
Which I think is like, oh, wow.
Like that one guy who came up on stage and said, like, you're the first black person I've ever.
Yes, right.
Exactly.
And then everybody like ganged up on me.
They're like, it's freedom of speech.
I was like, of course, it's I'm not putting him in jail.
It's also fucking wrong.
OK, let's move on.
More important subjects.
Fred, I need to know your view view is, it sounds like you've, maybe I'm
wrong in this, but from piecing together your comments over the last couple months,
it seems like you've moved towards being a turtle market adoptee. Is that true? Do you think we're
just going to grind higher for the rest of the year? Are you still expecting some-
I don't know about the rest of the year. Look, here's the thing. What I think is unlikely is I think it's very unlikely that we have Wall Street, quote unquote, breaks in the next two years or two to four years.
I just don't I don't see the system, quote unquote, breaking in two to four years.
I don't.
Fred, did you see the news?
I'm sorry.
I messaged you to you earlier.
We're doing another pause till august 1st so yeah the grind up hypothesis remains alive sorry just
like in terms of like the world falling apart they are literally moving the tariff deadline to august
1st what are they doing they're moving the tariff. If you think about the big events that could really slow down the progress of the market right now,
it's a real tariff policy, which we don't have right now, which is good.
It's actually a good thing for the markets, right?
The markets will continue to grind higher.
And a continuous delay in two things.
We keep thinking tariffs are coming, but they're not coming. We keep thinking interest thinking paris are coming but they're not coming
we keep thinking interest rate cuts are coming but they're not coming both of those are amazing
for the markets both of those are amazing for the markets and that's what we're going to see this
one sorry fred i just wanted to give you that listen i agree look i the only thing is i don't
know where bitcoin's going to do or the market's going to do over the next six months.
I do think they're probably going to go higher, both the stock market and Bitcoin.
But the thing I don't think is likely is a break.
I think we could go quite a bit higher, but I don't think it's going to break the system.
You know, I really don't.
What's your end of your target, Fred?
What's the end of your target?
Fred?
He's calculating it.
Oh, is he really?
Oh, sorry, Fred.
No, he's just asking to chat GPT.
Joe, what's your end of your target?
I think we get it between 130 and 140 by the end of the year.
God, I hope not.
Why?
I want it way, way lower.
Because I think by the end of the year, I'm going to have a couple exits. And I'd really like to buy in the dip.
I mean, I guess I'll just sit on cash.
What I don't want to do is put my cash into something else.
And then I got to sell that and pay cap gains because I see or worse, normal income tax.
Because then I see a dip later.
Why don't you just buy some call options right now?
Why don't you just do that?
I can't do it right now.
I'm totally illiquid.
I'm saying when I get exits, which I think are going to be more towards the end of the year.
But then maybe I'll do that then.
That's why I said, Joe, I need to suck your brain.
I need to understand much more in finance.
That sounds like a weird conversation.
It's totally weird.
You're not sucking my brain.
This is an alien.
Donish would go there, wouldn Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish.
Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish.
Donnish. Donnish. Donnish.
Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Donnish. Don I need a number from you, Fred. Come on, man. He's like afraid. Wait, are you saying that Fred hates you?
No, I just say whenever I try to examine Fred,
unlike Dr. Donish, who actually does give me good takes and predictions,
Fred won't answer the question because he knows he's recorded
and he knows it will come back to haunt him.
You talking about Boomer Danish or are you talking about Dr. Danish?
Dr. Donish. Danish? Dr. Danish.
Yeah.
Boomer Buster Danny.
What's up, Jay?
Oh, my God.
It's so funny.
I got to say, you said to bring Infra.
I was like, if I brought Infra, I don't know if I'd be able to talk.
Oh, Harry. He's probably thinking the same thing what's that buddy o'hare gave a target he's in the audience um he said that end of the year we're going to 50
five zero 50 000 no no five zero yeah yeah yeah well okay i don't want it to go that way.
That's what O'Hare's Tupperware stock did.
By the way, look up.
He has a bunch of stuff around Tupperware.
His Tupperware stock was about $50.
I thought we did a, I don't know, like some kind of an accord where we all agreed
that we weren't going to bring up Tupperware anymore.
Yeah, that's a rule.
It hurts his feelings.
I know. It's not nice, dude.
It was funny.
Yeah, but that's our code for remembering who we're talking about.
I promised him I would never bring that up again, so I won't.
Yeah, I won't either.
Fine, sorry.
Sorry, O'Hare.
Sorry that you don't understand the basics of Bitcoin, but yes.
I think $130,000 or $140,000 very quite probable um i don't know why people are
that joe my number is 185 50. okay that's great um that would be awesome i think we hit that
130 140 that was joe's gary that was joe's number yeah yeah that's my number i think we hit the
number you're talking about next year i think it comes we hit it yeah, Joe, look, you're well known in all circles for factoring.
So it's not like you're going to put your best number out there anyway.
Correct.
Could at least add 15 grand to that number.
So you're at 150, really.
Well, you always want to under-promise and over-deliver.
So that's just smart in services.
But in this time of transparency, we want to be just, you know,
we don't want to factor people.
So, you know, the...
Just to be right.
Your number, Joe, this is end of year number?
130?
Yeah.
130 to 140.
Did you ever watch Star Trek, Fred?
But you just agreed there's 15 grand of mush in there.
Yeah.
Do you ever watch Star Trek, Fred?
Is he still there?
I can't hear him very well.
I'm here.
Yeah, yeah, I'm here.
Okay, so you know how Mr. Scott is always like in the engineer
and he's trying to fix the ship.
And, you know, whenever Kirk says something like,
Mr. Scott, we need to do this right now, immediately,
what he revealed in a later episode was that whatever the timetable he gives,
he says, I need 10 minutes.
He actually only needs like five.
So then everybody thinks you're a miracle worker when you get it done in five.
Because he always says, like, oh, I need to restart every single thing under the sun.
So you should, you know, if you're giving out.
I'm giving it all she's got, Counton.
Yeah, he's not really giving it all she's got.
He's got a little bit more in the tank.
But people think you're a miracle worker when you make it work and you set expectations low.
So you shouldn't tell people, you know, like, oh, we're going to go to $600,000 or some crazy number.
You should always tell them, I think Biggling can go up 30%, 40%.
So then when you crush it, you look like a genius.
And nobody's going to hold it against you when you miss to the upside, right?
They're going to hold it against you when you promise a million and 90 days like Balaji, and they'll never forget that.
They will never forget that.
I agree.
Hey, Joe, did you hear that the XRP team just hired Scotty, the engineer?
They think they're going to need him.
Scotty Pippen? No,ty the uh the star trek guy james dohan's dead i think i think no you're not getting my point though
garlinghouse has decided he needs somebody like that that's always able to you know fix
re-steer the ship oh anyway joke went bad joke went bad no i i just really know star trek pretty
well i'm a star trek fan so i i was wondering how he got back from the grave i really like Anyway, joke went bad. Joke went bad. No, I just really know Star Trek pretty well.
I'm a Star Trek fan, so I was wondering how he got back from the grave.
I really like James Doohan.
You know Shatner's coming back to reprise his role as Captain Kirk?
He's like 90.
He's like, you know.
He was inspired from his trip on Bezos' spaceship.
Was he really?
That's incredible.
Well, I mean, I'm kind of joking. I don't know.
But he, like,
if you haven't watched his reaction from his trip on the spaceship,
he got, like, really emotional and cried.
You ever watch Boston Legal?
He was incredible in that show.
It's a great show. You know, I have a little
humble brag. I know
William Shatner a little bit.
You do? Like your pals pals bring him to the conference.
No, I, well, I, here's the thing. I knew him from my ex-wife, right.
And, uh, my ex-wife was into horses. He's into horses. He's a horse guy.
And he, he actually, he actually rides. Well, I don't know now,
but even in his like at 80, rode kind of competitively you know so he
he is like these western horses and stuff so i'd see him at all these horse events and uh you know
i've had dinner with him many times and uh he's a he's a he's he's an interesting guy he's a he's a
he's a piece of work and uh i'll tell you a funny story about this thing.
So I was involved in this top-level domain space, right?
And which means like, you know, .com, .org.
These are extensions that are granted by ICANN, right?
And so ICANN is the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.
And it's a kind of multinational thing. So basically, we went to apply for all these
domains and it cost $185,000 just to apply for a name. And I was the third largest applicant.
So I applied for 72 names. And my buddy was your partner.
Your brother? No, no. I said my buddy. your partner your brother no no i said my buddy you remember which buddy
who was your partner on it anthony vancouver you don't know i don't know we talked about this like
i'm totally blanking on his name i'll remember who it is okay he lives down in nashville now
what's his name again young guy he was an angel investor too okay Okay. Maybe I'm blanking too, but we did talk. Anyways.
So one of the names that I, I, I, so I had dinner with Shatner and I was like, uh, William, I said that bill, I said, you know, uh, uh, what do you think of the dot,
the domain name dot horse? And he goes, I love it. I love it. I love dot horse. It's amazing.
Everybody should own a dot horse.
And then he goes, but can you really do this? Isn't it like selling real estate on the moon?
And I remember thinking, wow, that was a really funny story. But anyways, we bought dot horse.
We did own, we, we owned dot horse. We sold the company to GoDaddy eventually, but.
Clark Landry. Sorry. I don't know why I couldn't remember.
Clark Landry was in love. Yeah. He he's the guy because we brought this up and i said god i have a friend who did something very similar before we pivoted
to this this thing but we we started out with sort of something else before but yeah so we we
ended up with dot horse and uh and uh shatner was shatner like dot horse he was kind of the
dot horse spokesman at the very beginning, but then, of course,
then I got divorced.
That's one good way
to reduce your net worth
in those calculations.
So, Fred, I always thought
that Shatner was a very funny guy.
Very witty, man.
That guy is really witty.
He's like, in person,
really witty, too.
Fred, what's the target?
Just tell me the target.
I need to know.
A number?
The number.
200K.
Finally.
200K on the nose by the end of the year?
I think we'll hit 200K by the end of the year.
So the Bitcoin price is going to double by the end of the year.
Roughly double. A little less than double. Yeah. so the Bitcoin price is going to double by the end of the year, roughly double,
a little less than double.
Yeah.
We're going to have a very good Q4.
Wow.
That's my view.
Joe,
I can hear him very well.
Maybe your speakers are broken.
I hear him.
I think that would be awesome.
That'd be fantastic.
Look,
I feel like,
look,
I feel like we are about to hit the,
what Raul Powell calls the banana zone.
I feel like we have a lot of stuff that is aligning, right?
I think towards the end of the year, I'm kind of with you, Joe.
I don't think that we're going to get rid of Powell.
But I think the end of Powell will seem very clear kind of in Q4.
You know, like we're going to be able to look forward to, you know, further interest.
We'll probably get September.
It's clear right now.
He's not getting re-evented.
No, I get it.
But I mean, I'd say the future of a Powell-less fed, you know, I think I'm more positive than
you that he will replace him with an
complete dove and uh and they will go they will go aggressive low rates that's what i think he'll
go to term though he won't go to term i agree i agree christopher and look the betting markets
say he's going to term too right betting markets say it's a like a% chance that they get rid of them this year, right?
Oh, I didn't realize that. There was a whole space about this Dark had the other day,
and the consensus was, oh yeah, he will be out way before term. Why would you even waste your
time? It's less than a year out. Right. But I just think that, I think we're going to have,
You know, I just think that, I think we're going to have, you know, Q4 is generally a very good, generally very good for Bitcoin.
I think, you know, we're going to have, you know, we're going to have the stablecoin bill.
I think we might even get maybe some form of the U.S. government buying some Bitcoin.
And maybe in just, maybe it's a symbolic number,
but I think we could get to see some number bought. I'm very bullish. So I'm very bullish
for Q4. I'm bullish for institutional adoption. You know, I think, I think, I think, you know,
all these Bitcoin treasury companies are going to be buying Bitcoin. That's what they do.
They can't not buy Bitcoin. So I think, I think Q4 is going to be buying Bitcoin. That's what they do. They can't not buy Bitcoin.
So I think,
I think Q4 is going to be great.
And I think,
you know,
I think even the summer is going to be great.
So I think we get to 200 K pretty easily.
Actually.
I don't think,
I think one 30 is like sandbagging it personally.
Let's hear what British says.
I think we,
we, we could look at a two to three x when the institutional
fomo kicks in um and that will start when we start to see rapid now how fast that manifests
is it by the end of the year maybe is it next year i think it's going to be in it in the next
12 to 18 months for sure but that we haven't really haven't seen that
institutional fomo where people are scrambling for supply and buying at scale i think it's going
to be hard the issue will be the people who are holding you know because that's the real supply
in the future uh at what point are people going to like you know i think look if it goes to 200
by the end of the year or if it goes to 150 i don't see a ton of selling at
150 you know i think i don't think a lot i think we're the danger is if we just do a meteor meteor
meteoric rise to say three or four hundred then i think there'll be a lot of dumping
i think the dumping is probably highly correlated to the rate of the rise meaning right now we're in this consolidation phase in the.
100 to 110 range, the longer it stays there, the more people who are.
Who hold it are confident that that's where it's going to be.
where it's going to be. And then they wait for the upside. If it all of a sudden shot up to
And then they wait for the upside if it all of a sudden shot up to.
150 next week at some event that happened, I just think a lot of people would take profits and say,
I expect as fast as it went up, it's going to come back down and revert back to its support level at
100. So you get to the sustainability of these blow-off spikes. But the longer we're sitting
in this 100 range, the stronger the market gets at this level.
There's a lot of people now view this as strong support.
I think the main question is, when are we going to encounter the next sell wall?
Because if you look at what's going on right now, there's really a buy wall and a sell wall.
There's really a buy wall and a sell wall.
And the buy wall are some of its retail, most of its institutional entities, especially these treasury companies.
The sell wall are the OG Bitcoiners who are they've got their wives in their ear trying to finance their lives.
You know, they have hundreds or thousands of Bitcoin from being OGs.
And, you know, it's the magical 100K number.
So I think once that sell wall kind of disappears, which it will, sky's the limit.
So I think you just kind of have to question, well, what's the next major Bitcoin?
Hold on a second.
Hold on a second.
Let me just jump.
Let me just jump.
Michael, if that's the case, if the turnover of all of these coins from these OGs to newer hands,
and those OGs have a much lower cost basis, and they're taking gigantic profits on some of their Bitcoin holdings,
those Bitcoin now are moving into what I would consider weaker hands, not stronger hands.
The fact of the matter is most of these people were able to hold for years. No, that's why it's transferring from stronger. It's the people
who are buying now. What I'm saying is like, if you think about it this way, Michael, if you sell
me your coins, you are an OG holder. You have a cost basis of say like maybe like Fred or maybe
even lower or maybe a little higher, but suffice to say, you made 10x money on your money or more.
You give those coins to me. I buy them.
I'm not sure I'm the diamond-handed person that you're looking for.
In fact, if you look at the ETFs,
all of this money that's been sloshing around the ecosystem in the form of ETF, retail money.
It's not that hard, dude.
You have people who made their money, and you have a new wave of people that want to make their money.
I get it.
But what I'm saying is I'm not sure that those people, Michael, that they're buying Bitcoin now,
they have the stomach to ride down a significant downtrend.
No, you're confused with the math.
I don't think the
majority, the majority of
the supply is still
held with the OGs.
What we're talking about
is peeling people at
certain levels and they
do this in every bull
market.
The OGs peel.
They peel five, ten
percent off there and
then diversify.
And Adam Back does
this.
He says it openly.
We're making you all
times they peel.
You're you're presenting
it like all the OGs are dumping, which is not. no that's not what i'm saying i'm saying no i
i'm agreeing with michael i think there is a wall here at this at this between the price is
oscillating between say 100 and 110 uh so there's there's some activity here but the volume of
activity is really not that you know to me. So, you know, if you asked me
earlier, I was actually washing dishes for my wife because that's what a good husband does on
a weekend is wash dishes for the old lady. The price target I would throw out there since you
guys are all throwing out price targets. You know, I could see Bitcoin sometime this summer at $128,000 to $135,000.
That's in the cards.
Conversely, I could also see, you know, if we get a risk-off environment for just assets,
and you know my feeling on Bitcoin, just a manifestation of risk-taking.
If we were to see that in the equity markets, a hiccup of some kind, we could see a significant drawdown in bitcoin to uh probably
lower than 80 so uh in a hurry so like i said i mean here this is kind of no man's land so anybody
can throw out targets you know what what do you say that again yeah you're muffled i i i don't
i don't get what this is about your your big prediction is that bitcoin's going to go up
10 this summer well your big prediction is that bitcoin's going to go up 10 this summer well your
big prediction is everybody's got a big prediction you have a big prediction i guess mine's a big
prediction they're these are all predictions no one really knows you have no idea what the price
of bitcoin 130 is not 130 is not a 10 increase that's not a 10 yeah so what i'm saying is based
on kind of what i'm looking at, I think we could see the price.
Yeah, that's what I said.
I think we could see that price.
Conversely, the problem is, of course, if we have a risk-off environment over the next few weeks and into the summer, which you have summer doldrums, volumes tend to come down and people are thinking about other things. And of course, there's, you know, there's, there's a lot of geopolitical stuff going on anyway, that could set off a, you know, another fire somewhere. So if we go into a risk off environment this summer, you know, we could see a pretty significant
drawdown, you know, so who cares? Who cares? Well, I'm just saying you were you asking what
the price target you guys were talking. First of all, you're changing. Well, we're asking about
the end of the year, not the end of the year, about the end of the year not the end of the year by the end of the year at god i don't know it could
be 150 sure if look if the market's really robust uh because of uh this new uh uh plan that they
just passed uh which is going to add you know a lot more fuel to this already a big fire that
we've had going on in in risk, because there's just plenty of liquidity,
that's going to add fuel to Bitcoin and crypto at large.
So I agree with you.
So here, I'm a little bit confused.
If you think that the price target by the end of the year is $150,
why are you not telling the people that pay you to make investments to buy some Bitcoin?
Because Bitcoin is not my will.
That's not what we do right we're
equity investors we have a lot of people that ask about uh crypto lately in the last couple of years
sure and what we've done is we've we you know i don't tell people not to buy bitcoin i tell them
if they want to buy bitcoin you have to just do it on your own i'm not going to do that for you
and there are plenty of avenues for that now the problem problem with Bitcoin, in my mind, is it's just it's a highly volatile asset class.
You know, so.
You know, it could go to 140, 150.
You could you could see a 30, 40 percent run up in short order.
You could also see a 30, 40 percent drop in short order.
That's what we're dealing with here.
And a lot of the OG guys are willing to take that volatility because they believe that the price will only ratchet higher from there.
And if that's what you believe, then you're willing to hold. A good example of that is
a lot of these mean coiners and the mean stocks guys on X still waiting for the squeezes. If you
believe something is around the corner and is going to happen eventually
you're going to stick it out right whether it's going to happen or not you're you know if you
believe it will then you're just going to hang you know hang on for that to that hope um and
that's what you have with bitcoin is really just hope because there's really no under you know no
underlying fundamental uh uh use case for bitcoin at least not at this point. There's been all kinds of things that have come and gone.
The use case for Bitcoin is to put your money...
You're muffled, Mike. I can't hear you.
Can you answer him?
The whole point of...
Yeah, he's muffled.
Mitchell, can you fix your mic?
And don't worry, Mitch.
I've known O'Hare for years and still can get on the internet.
So O'Hare, I'm curious. The people that ask you about Bitcoin voluntarily on their own, what's their thesis? What angle are they coming at it from?
Well, that's a great question, David. There is no thesis. That's the answer. They ask about Bitcoin because for one reason, and that's because they see it on financial business news now. They see it in the papers.
They see it online.
They see commercials for Bitcoin.
So the ecosystem has evolved where, you know, everybody kind of knows about it.
It's on social media.
It's on Fox Business, on CNBC, Bloomberg.
So imagine being a doctor or the dentist or the business owner sitting in your office.
You have your financial television, whatever you're watching.
And every 20 minutes, there's some topic du jour on Bitcoin or related.
And so that's why they're coming.
They're not coming because they believe in Bitcoin.
They're interested because there's just a lot of talk about crypto right now,
especially after Trump got elected. In the last six months, really in earnest, there's been a lot of, you know,
topic of discussion on national news media and papers and so forth. So that's why they're coming and asking.
They're not like, you know, in other words, they're not being drawn into it because of a pure
fascination of something different to replace, you know, like the US dollar, for instance,
or something, some crazy idea like that, like, in a lot of these spaces, these spaces, you know, they're purely interested because it's just topic du jour.
You know, nothing draws a crowd like a crowd.
And right now there's a crowd.
Also, number goes up.
Yeah, and I think that's right.
I think that the whole idea of like, hey, buy this, the numbers just been going up.
And a lot of people, you know, I was just watching, I think it was Friday or no, Thursday. They had a couple of experts on Bitcoin come up and a lot of people you know i was just watching uh i think it was friday or no third
said they had a talk they had a couple of experts on bitcoin come up and talk i think it was cnbc
you know and one of the things they talked about is they were showing long-term charts and of
course nothing draws investors uh interest more than looking at a long-term chart that's gone
from lower left to upper right you know as it should as it exactly yeah because the market's
allocating capital exactly towards an asset it's allocating capital towards an asset.
It's allocating capital.
It's like somehow going up is a bad thing.
Yeah. So that's the idea.
Like O'Hare wants to live in suffering.
It's like it's like you walk by a restaurant and it's constantly packed.
Maybe there's some signal there.
Maybe the fact that that restaurant's constantly packed is it's probably good food and people really like it and gives good service. And it actually does have fundamental value.
So speaking of FAs, I'm meeting with the local Fidelity Bitcoin expert. If anybody has any
questions, you know, I'm mostly meeting just to see what he has to say. I'm curious how they
approach it as a company. But if anybody has any questions they'd
like me to ask, I'm happy to work them in and I'll DM you back. That's the thing about these FAs
that Joe brought up and David, you just brought up these financial advisors, these people that have
clients that are client facing, that represent clients and do asset allocation strategies for
clients, whether it's institutional or retail, high net worth, what have you,
you know, they're using this idea, you know, Bitcoin as a diversifier, right?
They're selling it to clients as a way to diversify the portfolio,
bring down the overall volatility of the portfolio,
and at the same time, supposedly in increased returns.
So the idea of diversification is not just to
lower volatility in a portfolio, but it's actually to lower the volatility for an incremental number
amount of risk that you're adding. Adding Bitcoin adds risk, but that risk is commensurate with a
positive upside over time, as has been demonstrated over the last, you know, five to 10 years,
well, since inception, really.
But with that upside has come a lot of volatility.
So the question is like,
how much Bitcoin do you add to a portfolio
to get that perfect sloping curve
where you get just enough risk
for just enough excess return?
You're talking about sharp ratios.
Exactly. And look at the sharp ratio. It. That's really hard. You're talking about sharp ratios. Exactly.
And look at the sharp ratio.
It's actually not very hard.
And there's been a period.
Hang on.
Hang on.
I wasn't done talking.
I know, but you never really end.
It's just a constant stream of consciousness.
So let me just get a point in for one second.
Let me just respond.
I'm going to interrupt you.
I'm going to interrupt you because it's very simple.
I can do it in 30 seconds.
You go for it.
There's been data done by multiple firms, BlackRock, Fidelity,
multiple ones that have looked at the Sharpe ratios.
They looked at a 1% to 5% allocation across the board over any time frame,
short, long, medium term.
It has improved the Sharpe ratio of the portfolio, period.
So ask your FA, David, have they looked at the Sharpe ratios and its impact when you
incorporate Bitcoin in a portfolio?
That simple.
If they haven't, fire them.
Will do.
Look, I don't know that the conversation is this difficult.
Can you hear me?
That number, yeah, I can hear you.
But that number that you're referring to is constantly changing and moving around because the risk profile, the volatility for Bitcoin has changed over time.
And so, you know, it's going to change going forward.
So, you know, you can't just apply, you know, the last seven, eight, ten years of price momentum for Bitcoin and apply that going forward and say this is what it's going to look like.
How do you come up with the algorithms that you use?
How do you come up with the algorithms you use for your
mid-cap fund?
Don't you look at previous performance
at all? Or is it just
forward-looking? Look, we're benchmark agnostic.
I have to just make it here.
I'm going to say it one last time for all the people
in the back. Not every
manager that manages money is we use a benchmark because we have to.
Okay.
Institutions want to see who you're, you know, you're in a horse race, right?
Which horse are you going after?
You got to have a benchmark.
We have a very, very, you know, how do I say this?
We have a very concentrated portfolio of very idiosyncratic names.
No, no, I totally get that, O'Hare.
I'm just asking a very basic investing question.
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, guys.
Most of what we do is very specialized.
O'Hare, do you ever look at the past performance
of any of the investments that you're making?
Do you ever look at their past performance?
Or is that irrelevant information?
What are you talking about no no like when you're about to invest in stock x
do you look at their past performance at all or you don't look at it at all not really and i'll tell you why i mean obviously obviously you do you look at uh because look we don't invest
in companies on past performance if we were to do that all of our stuff we wouldn't own any stocks that we own why because the past oh my god you don't invest in companies on past performance. If we were to do that, all of our stuff, we wouldn't own any stocks that we own.
Why?
Because the past-
Oh my God, you don't look at past performance?
Can I finish my thought?
Oh, really?
Wow.
If I were to look at past performance and just use that solely as a guide-
No, no, no, not just use it.
I was asking if you look at past performance.
Because if I did that, most of the names, in fact, all the names that we own, if you
look at past performance, it's horrific.
Yeah.
I'm not saying if you only look at past performance.
I'm just saying, like, you look at past performance as a guide for future returns.
You absolutely can't.
That's the craziest thing I've ever heard.
First of all, that's empirically wrong.
Momentum-based strategies.
Yes, momentum-based strategies.
Objects in motion tend to stay in motion.
Wait, who's running a momentum-based strategy?
Joe, you're confusing yourself.
I know, I know. I'm confusing myself talking to somebody who's apparently not trying to make
money because if you follow momentum-based strategies, you tend to outperform.
We don't have a momentum-based strategy.
There's 100 years of research on this.
Well, you're talking apples to oranges then, Joe. If we want to talk apples, let's talk apples,
not apples and oranges.
Objects in motion tend to stay in motion. Strong performance, strong winners winners the last several years we want to talk about physics now and particle physics no
it's the same it's actually a market dynamic it's a market dynamic about oh harry you should no
i'm surprised you guys are fucking retarded this morning no no i'm just surprised that you
you're disagreeing with like a very basic premise of most financial did i say anything about momentum
trading or investing no joe Joe said it, not me.
No, I'm saying how could you project any sort of momentum information in your analysis of determining what securities to buy?
That's my point.
We don't, Joe.
I'm going to buy a dog because it's been underperforming.
Why is it a dog?
You're like, no, it's just so contrary to our basic understanding of markets.
Well, you obviously don't understand how value investing works.
I know.
I do understand.
You buy underperformers and they continue to underperform because they suck.
Congratulations.
It's true.
You got it.
It's true.
Has there been a value investor that has outperformed the market?
If you look at our sector, small mid-cap value, over time,
small mid-cap value has outperformed growth investing.
It's true.
Do you own a Bitcoin OAR?
So this is the problem with having arguments.
We're arguing past each other.
I make a comment about the way I invest, the way my partner and I invest, and Joe comes in here like a raging bull saying, well, you can't do that because it's not momentum investing.
I didn't say you couldn't do it. I say, I say it's not optimal. It's not an optimal
portfolio construction. It's not. You have no idea what optimal. Yes, you do. You can measure
these things. Okay. I mean, I do this every day. This is what we do. Listen, I've been doing this
since 1997. I've been investing since 97 and we've been running our strategy since 2011.
And I would bet you've underperformed an index fund if i had to guess we have now now lately we have yes over the last maybe three years
we've had a pretty lousy three-year number although that's come back now because in 2022
as i've mentioned before 2022 uh the market was down i think nasdaq was down 30 percent
bitcoin was down uh in excess of that uh s&P 500 was down 20% full year.
And the Russell 2000, which is kind of our benchmark, was down 12.5%.
Our strategy was up net after expenses 6.5%.
Listen, you can go to any decade.
You can go to any decade.
It doesn't matter if you're asking me.
You go to the 80s.
You go to the 90s.
The vast majority, 90-plus of fund managers do not overperform the index.
If you do it, they don't.
Over the long run, small mid-cap value is really the sweet spot of investing long term.
Now, multi-decade, what I'm saying is full market cycles.
I'm not talking about cherry picking, you know, 2023, 2024, where growth stocks just went on fucking fire after a 2022 meltdown.
Okay.
Yeah.
If you're a value guy, you're probably going to underperform.
Okay.
Now, here's the thing.
Oh, here, the bet that we're making, I'm sorry.
The bet that we're making is that the things that made maybe mid-market or mid-cap value
actually interesting was...
Look, I'm not arguing.
No, no, hear me out.
I just want to give you a different perspective because it's helpful to understand the bitcoin mindset because it changed for me
i don't know if you remember but i was a major skeptic half the people on the stage had me
blocked at one point hold on hold on half the people on stage had me blocked at one point
because i i was such a skeptic of bitcoin the the truth is in the bitcoin space or are we in a
mid-cap values no no i Fred, I'm trying to teach.
I promise you, I promise you, I can help the skeptics.
Fred, this is a good combo.
It's a good combo.
Don't interrupt.
I like it.
I'm enjoying it.
One second.
Let me just give a really simple premise.
Well, the reason we got on the-
No, oh, here, I'm going to finish my sentence, my friend.
I'm going to finish my sentence and then you get to speak.
That's how conversations work.
I was going to say-
Well, yeah, but you guys have been interrupting me.
You've been talking for a while. I was going to say... Well, yeah, but you guys have been interrupting me. You've been talking for a while.
I was going to say that we got to keep it interesting.
I was going to say that the basic underlying thesis for you is that we're going to return to a time when things worked like they used to.
And the underlying thesis for the Bitcoin community is that we're going to keep printing money and things that are actually going to continue to get worse. And I think if you
understand that core premise, then you get to be on this side of the aisle. If you keep thinking
we're going to get back to the Bretton Woods system, if you keep thinking that we're going
to get back to an old world where value stops and going to outperform growth, buddy, you've
Buddy, you've been sleeping.
been sleeping. You've been losing for the last three years because of that belief.
You've been losing for the last three years because of that belief.
Brad, I hope that was actually worth it.
That was great.
I think we've got O'Hare's sleep at the wheel.
Yeah.
Well, look, I think that the way this particular discussion started was somebody was saying,
I think Joe or somebody, what is the optimum amount of Bitcoin to put into a portfolio to get an optimum amount of diversification without
taking too much risk? And that's really, that's, you know, that's, that's not an easy thing to do.
What's your answer over there? Well, look, my answer is if you, and I've, I've done a lot of,
you know, work on this myself, and we've thought about it, talked about it ad nauseum for years.
And I think the optimum based on the information we have currently the optimum if you want to put
bitcoin into a portfolio is probably about seven percent five to seven percent is probably that's
higher than i thought we'd say yeah now that's for a risk-taking portfolio that's for somebody
that's willing to enjoy earlier point i mean that's that's that's not crazy yeah that's pretty
i would say 10 gold in a portfolio is what we own right now.
We actually overweight gold in our strategy. We have been for quite a while.
I'm not saying, you know, look, I've always said, I'm not saying Bitcoin's, you know, a horrible thing.
I just think a lot of people are in Bitcoin for the wrong reasons.
Or their understanding of why they're in it or why they're buying it is you know kind of probably not exactly uh what they originally had had had come to it
then what are the right reasons you tell us well i think the right reasons i think
is what we were just talking about portfolio diversification you know i think that's that's
no no no no no no no no no no that's That's not an answer because you have to have a thesis for why Bitcoin exists and why it's gaining network effect.
No, no.
But even if you believe it's portfolio diversification, the only way you can believe it has portfolio diversification is literally what Joe was trying to explain to you, which is if you look over a long-term timeframe, it continues to outperform and it has a high sharp ratio.
That means it's an unparalleled asset.
Hold on, hold on.
You said bold, right?
So the difference here is it doesn't really act like gold.
It doesn't really act like growth.
And the Sharpe ratio is a very, very good portfolio construction metric that Joe was talking about.
So I'm very confused about your, you're like kind of speaking out of both sides of your mouth.
So let me try to clear up the fog between your ears, Danish.
When you talk about timeframes and you talk about...
It's Danish, by the way.
Danish.
No, no, it's okay, Joe.
He does it on purpose because he thinks it gives him a little bit of power because he doesn't have the cognitive abilities.
I'm having a Danish with my coffee right now.
And he knows that.
That's not cool, man.
That's not cool.
We got to call out racism.
What?
What are you talking about?
He actually ran a space recently based on that, which I liked.
Anyway, you know, when you're talking about timeframes, you can't look at the, look,
this is the problem with Bitcoin inherently in my mind.
There's been 15 years of Bitcoin.
During that 15 year timeframe, we've been all living under a regime that's completely new to all of us, including the Fed.
Money printing, quantitative easing, QE1, 2, and 3, not just in the US, but overseas.
Every central bank's been in on this game.
This is a weird environment we've been living through the last few years.
And do you think this environment ends over?
So you can't just come and say, you know what based on the no but is the
environment going away or are we seeing acceleration i think beautiful gorgeous i think i think it is
going to change dramatically so over the next few years this dynamic isn't even new jesus has been
going on since 71 exactly it's like it's like it says this o'hare has been asleep on since 71. Exactly. It's like, it's like, it says this O'Hare has been asleep at the wheel.
Like,
like we said earlier.
Look,
here,
this is a Bitcoin space.
Let's,
let's actually lay out the thesis for why.
Oh, Oh, Oh,
Oh, Oh,
Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh,
Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh,
Oh, Oh, Oh,
Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, the bitcoin space so as such i think it's important to play out the thesis for why bitcoin is getting
this network effect it's getting and why we all see it as the future financial denominator for
world's assets or at least where a lot of the world's assets are going to revolve around
so you can put your money today in stocks or bitcoin or keep it as cash bonds whatever but only one of those assets is
the only 100 truly inelastic perfectly scarce asset that has a whole host of technological
innovations that you can run on that public ledger.
Yeah, that was a mouthful.
I believe, you know, look,
that's been the ongoing theme and story line and it's changing constantly.
Literally every year it's changed
and when the one doesn't work,
you change it to another one.
Look, my basic,
you have to look at this historically, okay?
So the last 15 years, since 2010, let's say,
that's kind of the benchmark. when Bitcoin came out, GFC, massive fucking fiscal spending, you know, bailouts of major banks and institutions, insurance companies and so forth.
People were unhappy. Come come along Bitcoin, come along the crypto space, Bitcoin leading the charge there.
space, Bitcoin leading the charge there. And, you know, since then, we've had nothing but
similar activities. Bailout after bailout after bailout, more infusion of capital throughout the
world, just more money printing and so forth. I understand the love affair.
You're doing a pretty good job of telling us that 7% is completely the wrong number here.
So let me just say, let me just finish this thought, Fred.
So if you have 15 years worth of money printing and quantitative easing
and this big, great experiment that we're under,
things like Bitcoin are going to do well.
People like to take risks.
There's plenty of fucking cash floating around the system.
It's looking for a home.
Growth stocks, AI, robotics, EVs, you know, now crypto and Bitcoin.
And so what, in my mind, what really changed was last year when Trump co-opted the crypto,
the Bitcoin community, you know, based on his deregulation, all of these promises that he made to gain votes.
That's what he did.
He basically just kind of hijacked the Bitcoin community for his own personal gain.
I mean, obviously, two days before he got inaugurated, he launched his own coin.
So my point is only this.
If Trump had not won the election, if Trump had not been able to co-opt the Bitcoin community,
If Trump had not won the election, if Trump had not been able to co-opt the Bitcoin community, would Bitcoin have done what it did from November through, you know, would it have made that big move?
No, it probably wouldn't.
You've got it.
You've got it.
Yes, the answer is actually yes.
I think we're probably –
It's a completely counterfactual argument.
I think we'd be talking about a different price for Bitcoin.
You've got it completely opposite.
If that wouldn't have happened.
The crypto lobby and the folks that believe in Bitcoin,
they were the ones who had found political influence.
Yeah, look at David Sachs.
That's what I'm saying.
Look, I'm very familiar with it.
So you've got it opposite.
It's not you presented in a negative.
For their own benefit, Joe.
Well, this is why you can't have a conversation.
You just talk over people, man.
Like, I waited for your whole rant to end and took a pause.
And I tried to talk.
And then you just keep talking.
I mean, you just have it backwards.
You have it entirely backwards.
You have an asset class, an industry that's growing tremendously, that has massive growth,
massive involvement from investing class, and they have exerted political influence on
the system and thereby reinforced it.
But you're presenting it like, oh, he's co-opted these dumb Bitcoiners, and he's just manipulating
them, which I think is wrong. There's no evidence to suggest that. If anything, he's the one who's
being manipulated. Joe, look around. What do you mean there's no evidence to suggest that? Are you
out of your mind? You're drinking the Kool-Aid. You got to stop it, bro. I'm not drinking the
Kool-Aid. I'm looking at former SEC chairs who now work for Ripple as their lawyer. I'm looking
at, you know, former people in the system who work for the industry. That's my case. What are you? We're talking. You're presenting it like a politician that
is manipulating an interest group when it's the exact opposite. The massive influence of
the Bitcoin and crypto space is exerting its influence on the political system.
And that's a positive for the asset class, not a negative.
That's a positive for the asset class, not a negative.
Well, O'Hare, I have to congratulate you.
You have 93% of your assets in the wrong asset class.
But other than that, you're doing good.
He doesn't own it.
He has 100% because he's never acknowledged.
I tried to send him a Bitcoin.
He won't take it.
He won't even take it.
He will not even take a gift of Bitcoin from Joe Carlos Ali.
I tried to give him sex.
If Joe wants to send me Bitcoin, he can send me Bitcoin.
I just want to be able to clearly say you hold Bitcoin
because you've never answered the question every time I've asked you.
So, man, if you have 7%, bravo. I'm skeptical, Fred, because he've never answered the question every time I've asked you so man if you have seven percent bravo good I I'm skeptical Fred because he's never acknowledged it mentioned
seven percent no I'm not saying listen I'm saying if you are if you are inclined to own Bitcoin and
you're an individual investor say at high net worth uh so you have a you know a million dollar
portfolio if you want to put 70 grand into an asset like bitcoin i think that's fine you know
i think that's fine but i think that's in general 7% acceptable but you're not there yourself is
what you're saying yeah well i don't want to talk about me i i never talk about me it doesn't matter
what i what you know what are you talking about then what are you talking about well i'm talking
about like you know what you guys are asking like in general so so let me let me correct i know you don't want to speak publicly i know you don't but if a client
comes to you and they say hey do you do you have any exposure to this uh do you not tell them do
you just say no i'm not gonna not gonna answer that question is that your typical response to
clients that approach you because you said clients have asked about bitcoin and crypto yeah and
that's that's a great question.
Yeah, I tend not to want to go down that rabbit hole.
And I'll tell you why, because that's not what we do.
So you don't answer the question.
I don't want to talk about it.
It's very simple.
You don't answer it.
So I don't discuss it.
Yeah, I don't.
Exactly.
So Fred, if people come over here and they say.
So what I do tell people is I tell people there are resources out there where you can
educate yourself on Bitcoin.
Are you a financial provider?
So people come, if his clients come to him, he's managing money, and they say,
tell me about this Bitcoin thing, do you have any exposure to it?
O'Hare says, oh, I can't talk about that.
That's his response, what I'm hearing.
There are resources out there.
Well, yes.
Yeah, there are resources out there that you can, Yeah, it's just not something that we discussed.
You know, it's just not.
Why would you discuss the number one asset class over the last 10 years?
Exactly.
That would be a terrible thing to have.
Why would I shoot myself in the foot?
Yeah, because then they take all their money and go buy Bitcoin with it.
And there you go.
I don't want to say it, but I'm going to say it.
That's where the truth comes out.
That's what you guys want to hear, right?
No, that's what we were talking about earlier.
You missed that, O'Hare.
Look, guys, look, we've been living...
It's like, why would you buy Nike if you can buy Reba?
The real reason, O'Hare, is because if you tell your clients that you own Bitcoin,
they're all going to go buy it.
15 years of massive money printing.
I understand the love affair of an asset that's got a finite quantity. That's not true. They've driven... to go buy it. They're all going to go buy it. They're all going to go buy it. They're all going to go buy it. They're all going to go buy it. They're all going to go buy it. They're all going to go buy it. They're all going to go buy it. They're all going to go buy it. They're all going to go buy it. They're all going to go buy it. They're all going to go buy it. They're all going to go buy it. They're all going to go buy it. They're all going to go buy it. They're all going to go buy it. They're all going to go buy it. They're all going to go buy it. They're all going to go buy it.
I understand the love affair of an asset that's got a finite quantity.
That's not true.
That's not true. That's not true.
They've driven now.
Hang on a second.
Yes.
You're saying something.
Listen, this is not a normal environment by any stretch of the imagination.
Okay.
That argument used to work.
That argument used to work.
It works right now.
Look what they're doing.
The Fed has drawn down its balance sheet.
They're going to increase debt by $4 trillion again.
The Fed.
Okay. The Fed has drawn down its balance sheet by $2 trillion. It's drawn down its balance sheet. They're going to increase debt by $4 trillion again. The Fed, okay, the Fed has drawn down its balance sheet by $2 trillion.
It's drawn down its balance sheet by $2 trillion.
We're in a high interest rate environment.
Bitcoin continues to outperform.
You're just ignoring that.
And if you talk about fiscal spending.
We're going to go into a higher interest rate environment going forward, by the way.
Okay, well, Bitcoin's going to do even better.
Bitcoin's going to do even better because people are not going to want to send in their
bags of bonds.
See, I don't think so.
I don't think that's going to be the case.
Bitcoin needs interest rates to go lower. No, no.
Look at the chart, man. Look at what interest rates have done for the last three years.
And Bitcoin's continued to have adoption and liquidity sucked into it.
Come on, man. Like, I know you.
Joe, are you on, are you on, you love to cherry pick. You are a lawyer. That's what you guys do.
Look at 2022. Interest rates went up. Bitcoin fucking fucking tanked so you don't just pull your head so what so did everything so did all
your value stocks interest rates go down in 2023 right here i just hold on hold on hold on
talking about cherry picking there were listen there were portfolios like ours that did quite
well in 2022 yeah but you're notHare. Who's cherry picking?
What about 2023?
You have no idea what you're talking about.
You're cherry picking again.
But what about 2023?
That's the only question that matters, really.
What happened to 2023, O'Hare?
You cherry picking 2023 up?
Interest rates didn't change, really.
They were still high.
How did Bitcoin do?
Well, it was a risk on environment.
So in your risk off environment so you're you're small
so in your risk environment in the risk of environment your small cap value i just looked
at the fun i just i looked at the small cap value each year risk taking the small cap value etf
declined 30 all of you it declined 30 percent that it declined 30 percent oh harry your small cap
values saving the world saving saving poor African children.
I didn't say that stuff.
Don't change the subject.
All of this stuff is nonsense.
I don't change the subject.
You lost more than a...
It's just pure manifestation of risk taking.
You lost nearly a third of your money if you're sitting in small cap value in 2022.
That's all it is, Joe.
You lost a third of your money.
And by the way, you didn't have the gains.
I agree.
You didn't have the gains.
If we go to a risk-off environment, Bitcoin will tank.
Who cares?
That's true of every asset. If you go to a risk-off environment, Bitcoin will tank. Who cares? That's true of every asset.
If you go to a risk-off environment, the only asset to hold is cash.
So that's not a convincing argument.
Do you want to hold something with the risk profile of Bitcoin?
No, I want to buy it.
I want to buy it when the risk is off because the central planners will come in.
And unless you totally don't understand the system, they're going to reliquify everything. $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $250, $ everything. $250,000, chisel, living on a yacht, and buying every dip.
I do.
I do.
Hey, guys.
Guys, we've got to talk one at a time.
It's just hard to hear. I understand.
But these arguments are really weak.
Joe knows I love it.
Listen, Joe's a great...
Look, I love the debates, but let's get real here.
This is never going to win.
You are never going to win an argument with me, with Joe, with Fred, with anybody.
It's not about winning.
It's not about...
This is the problem with something like Bitcoin. It's about 1,000 people, with Fred. It's not about winning. It's not about it.
It's about a thousand people in the audience.
It's not about convincing you of anything.
It's about a thousand people who are hearing your argument and they're not being convinced.
You have to convince people.
That's the whole point.
It's amazing.
We learned in this conversation that people come to you.
They ask about Bitcoin and they ask, do you hold Bitcoin?
And you don't answer the question because you don't want capital to flow out of your fund i mean come on man like oh my god yes that's right that's right you just
said that you just said you said people come to you kidding joe i'm kidding look i don't talk no
no he he was joe he was kidding but but that actually is true but i mean come on like the
people come to you and you say there are resources out there.
I can't really talk to you about that.
We don't talk about Fight Club.
Listen, listen, listen.
If you're a cardiologist and you have somebody that comes to you that's got a liver ailment,
as a cardiologist, you're going to give them advice on their liver?
No, you're going to send them to a specialist, okay?
I mean, let's think about this for a second.
Okay, so the reason you don't talk about Bitcoin is because you're not a specialist in Bitcoin.
Is that right?
Even though you sit on a Bitcoin basis 24-7 and then want to come up and contact.
You are a specialist in Bitcoin.
All of your panelists are specialists in Bitcoin.
That's why you can apply what you know to preach Bitcoin to others to get them to buy it.
I'm not a specialist in Bitcoin.
I don't preach Bitcoin to others.
I don't do that.
I'm not going to be spreading the gospel of Bitcoin to my clients.
I don't say you should spread the gospel of Bitcoin to my clients. I don't say you should
spread the gospel of Bitcoin. I say you should look
at the data. I will say something, which I think is
important. O'Hare, you know, you were talking
about trying to convince you.
No one has been more convincing to
the listeners of this show
about buying Bitcoin than
you. You are like the
Peter Schiff of this. The Kramer, is this
the Kramer trade? Yeah, it's literally, you are the Peter Schiff.iff of the creamer is this the creamer trade yeah it's it's literally
you are the peter most people are not enjoying this conversation so smug everybody's so smug
in the crypto bitcoin community especially specifically bitcoin believe me i have a lot
of friends that own a lot of bitcoin some of them own bitcoin more than probably fred okay
some of these guys own a lot of bitcoin here in the city so i'm just telling you guys this right
now you have no idea what the price is going to do tomorrow, next month, six years from now.
Zero idea.
The same guys that have owned it for 10 years, they had no fucking idea it was going to be where it is today.
They just happened to be lucky enough to hold it all the way along and didn't sell very much.
Or they bought enough.
The same is true of any security.
You can't promise your investors where the securities are going.
So you're not adding anything.
I could absolutely model where one of my portfolio companies would be.
I can model where Bitcoin is going to go.
I can't tell them with certainty based on adoption curves.
Fred will talk about the power law.
There's a million variables to model Bitcoin.
Hold on.
Hold on.
There's a good point that just came out of this that I feel like I'm not an expert.
I'm going to let other people answer this, but it seems like there is a different dynamic.
And again, I'm not against Bitcoin. Don't pick me against Bitcoin.
I know you're not. Just hold on. I think this is an important point that came out of what was just said.
I don't think that holders of Bitcoin or to the point, HODLers, the old school, original people, they're true believers.
Are there really?
I mean, like maybe an Apple, maybe Tesla, but most people that buy stocks are not true
believers.
They're buying because they're trying to see like the real old G's with Bitcoin have
been true believers.
Are they just what?
And some of them did, you know, like Bitcoin sold earlier and like whoever sold earlier.
But for the most part, there is something different between somebody
who's who's holding bitcoin over the long term i'd love to hear if other people think that that
actually that that does make a difference right is there a space like this for mid-cap uh stocks
that uh o'hare could join right now it might be good i'm sure there's one with a thousand people in it
talking about how they hodled midcap stocks and over the last 10 years fred fred fred fred fred
you guys asked me about midcap i didn't bring that up so don't put that on me this is a bitcoin
nobody brings that up you know who brings that up fa is trying to shove it down the
throats of investors that's who brings it up there you go i did oh play nice joe oh here's
a good guy. Come on.
It's true, guys.
They're trying to sell a bunch of junk.
Mostly it's junk.
The vast majority of these securities do nothing.
They sit around and hover in the same range for 10 years.
I've watched every chart.
I've read every book. Hold on.
Just to be fair,
you mean like NVIDIA did for 13 years?
You mean like NVIDIA did for 13 years
and then went like 10x?
I mean, come on.
Let's get real here.
Things change.
It's dynamic.
We live in a dynamic world.
Yeah, and you know the best way to absorb that?
Something can sit dormant for a long time.
Yes, the best way to absorb that is a market cap weighted index.
Because if you buy a market cap weighted index, whatever capital is flowing to on a momentum-based strategy.
There's a million things you can do.
Yes.
There's a million things you can do.
We're talking about the optimum mix of Bitcoin to assets you guys were talking about.
That's how we got on this conversation.
Oh, here, let me ask you a couple of questions.
So when you're talking with your investors, do you target them to very specific things?
Or do you ever put them into a broad asset category, like an S&P 500 index?
Look, we have a specialized portfolio that we run, okay?
Small mid-cap value, okay?
Special situations, 20 stocks minimum, 30 stocks maximum.
Currently, we have 26 stocks.
These are well-researched companies, US-based,
that for one reason or another are not on the radar
of most investors currently at the moment.
That's what we do. You're doing a proprietary 20 to 30 stock basket that's based on your research.
And then that that portfolio is what you're selling. That's that's what we manage. Yes.
20 to 30 stock portfolio. Yes.
Very concentrated portfolio.
I get it.
I understand.
Yeah.
So, okay, you get it.
Good.
Yeah, so you're basically, and I don't mean this in a pejorative way at all, but you're basically doing, you're a stock picker and you sell your portfolio to clients and say,
hey, this is what we think is going to do well.
Just like Fidelity does, just like Goldman Sachs does, Morgan Stanley does, you know, a million other investors.
Yes. We're all competing on the same page.
The Magellan. Correct.
Yeah.
Right. Well, the question, here's the question I would have and a lot of Bitcoiners would have with that because, you know, that strategy has been a strategy, you know,
it's defined, say, 40 or 50 years. And what's come, I would say, probably in the Bitcoin community,
let's call it the last two or three years, there's this issue that the asset class of Bitcoin is now
starting to have demonstrated performance now at scale, that changes the bar for your ability to pick stocks and outperform it.
So the question I would have is,
has your 20 to 30 stocks been outperforming sort of the Bitcoin CAGR?
Because I have it posted in the nest.
It's the first post in the nest.
The CAGR on Bitcoin has been-
But that's the thing.
So when you look at compounded annual growth rate
and you impute that that's going to continue forever
because you're looking at a chart from 2011, 2010,
2011, 2012 of Bitcoin
or the price action from inception to now
and you're applying that Kager over time.
I mean, yeah, you could do that.
We have no idea if that's going to be the Kager going forward.
We could have a five-year period where Bitcoin just does nothing but go down, which changes the risk parameters drastically.
That's my point.
So you're selling a CAGR to people like Joe's just accusing me of, like, selling performance.
That's what you do.
You guys do the same thing.
People get into Bitcoin because of that.
They get into Bitcoin because of the CAGR.
Look at the CAGR.
Look at the compounded idea of World Trade.
That's what I want.
The CAGR chart that's in the nest is recalculated every year,
so it doesn't go back to inception.
It goes back one year, then it goes back two years.
You're independent calculations.
And so then it's a fair point.
You say the past performance, you can't go sell that
because you're selling the future performance.
And this is where most of the Bitcoin conversations go. You say the past performance, you can't go sell that because you're selling the future performance.
And this is where most of the Bitcoin conversations go.
They go to, do we think there's a thesis for it to continue? We're sitting at almost 109, and we're sitting here saying, can it double from here?
You could make a case for it to go up forever, like many of you have.
I can make that case too very easily, right?
It's a finite asset that presumably will just continue to gain interest on the part of investors.
And more people come in, fewer Bitcoins available, price go up.
It's very simple.
I get it.
It's not hard to understand this.
My point is that I'm not sure that it's deep.
Let me just finish this thought.
What I'm saying is I'm not sure that we could apply that going forward forever.
I think that's risky.
I think something else can come along tomorrow.
That's lazy as hell.
You haven't even taken a goddamn look at the real thing.
This has been painful to listen to.
Okay?
You think the entire thing comes out of a price chart.
You're so off base base it's just unreal
okay what so off base you you love saying oh it has no it has no purpose it has no
use case it has no value bitcoin has bitcoin has a six-figure value at the moment which is
by the way completely underpriced because of exactly what it can do tell me how to move a billion dollars sir
how do i move a billion dollars with no permission to any country no to any individual on the planet
without permission how do you do that sir do you have a billion dollars that you need to move how
many people fuck off and answer the question okay see listen this is the point it's like arguing
with my how do you move a billion dollars in today's world
with no permission to anyone else?
How?
Do you have a billion dollars that you need to move?
Yes or no?
That is an asinine response to a very, very simple question.
Hold on, guys.
Calm down.
Hold on.
One at a time.
Hey, guys.
One at a time.
I take offense to how much my head hurts listening to this guy.
Guys, just one at a time.
Guys. I'd like him to answer the question. It hurts listening to this guy. Guys, just one at a time. Guys, one at a time.
I'd like him to answer the question.
It's a very simple question.
That's fine.
No, no, it's totally fine.
I'm just saying everybody just one at a time because people can't hear.
So go ahead.
One at a time.
How do you move a billion?
Hello, did it go quiet yeah I think somebody got muted and then O'Hare gave up all right let's try this how do you move a million dollars with no permission is that okay can you answer
that one to walk over with a big suit of cash and you could hand it to somebody O'Hare what is the
value of being able to move any sum of money anywhere in the world? I have no interest in debating somebody like you. It's like talking to my dog. I have no interest why because it's too logical and simple
You're an idiot. That's why
the one thing
The one thing I want to point out here is you you are right about some of those gross stocks
Stagnanting stagnanting for years and years and years.
But there's a big difference between a growth stock like a Tesla or NVIDIA stagnating for four or five years and a value stock.
Because if NVIDIA comes out with a new chip that accelerates AI by 10% or 10x, the stock's going to 100x, right?
Like, same with Tesla.
They call it Optimus 5.
Well, I just used NVIDIA as an example.
But it's been most effective.
If you look at Microsoft.
Look at Oracle. Take a look at Oracle. Take a's been most important. If you look at Microsoft, look at Oracle.
Take a look at Oracle.
Take a look at Oracle today.
Take a look at Microsoft.
Same kind of application can be applied here.
Same thing.
That's what I'm talking about.
Hey, I think, O'Hare, there's a, so it's not just about moving a billion dollars across
borders, across space and time without erosion.
I'm sure you know this.
Like, it's everything together.
Apparently it is, because the gentleman that was just up here was yelling at me.
I'm still here, and I'm still waiting for an answer.
Guys, I don't think that he was approaching it.
So it's multifaceted, right?
It's not just the weightlessness.
It's the scarcity. It's decentralization. Security is the divisibility. I mean, there's so many different things that go into Bitcoin that make it make it have value.
It's the scarcity.
It's decentralization.
It's security.
It's the divisibility.
So I think I I agree. You made an earlier point. You said that would Bitcoin be at the price that it's currently at had it not been for the pro Bitcoin Trump administration?
I actually agree with you. I don't I don't know if we'd be looking at one hundred nine K Bitcoin today had it not been. For sure. I actually agree with you. I don't know if we'd be looking at 109k Bitcoin
today had it not been. For sure. I totally agree. I just think that, like, I don't know what to
value Bitcoin at right now. I think it's at 109k. It seems kind of high for me. I've never.
I'm going to help you out here. Just listen. I'm going to help you out.
But like, don't be facetious. You don't know how to value it right now. Listen,
you're never going to be able to value it.'s period just throw the throw the whole idea of the concept of valuing bitcoin out the window because you're not going to be
able to do it sure so how do you how do we so the same thing can go for gold then right
he's not intellectually honest he doesn't actually want to understand these things and
it's fairly simple it's fairly simple.
It's fairly simple.
Because, Noah, you're talking about actual properties of something that can be verified.
You're talking about the actual functionality and behavior of something in the real world.
This is not speculation.
It's not hyperbole.
There's real ways to value these things.
And that's why I asked the question.
Well, put a value on it.
That's the way, because I say it's much higher
because I don't know how to move a billion dollars worth of value
permissionlessly to anyone in the world other than with Bitcoin.
It's literally the only way that you can do that.
So you tell me what's the value of being able to actually use money
and move it without anyone's permission. The value of Bitcoin is what someone else is willing to pay you for Bitcoin. Period. Full stop. That's what it is. That's the value of being able to actually use money and move it without anyone's permission.
For Bitcoin, period.
Full stop.
That's what it is.
That's the value.
There is no intrinsic value in Bitcoin.
You got to throw that up.
Get that out of your head.
Okay?
Because you're literally going to die thinking there's intrinsic value.
I would ask you to define what that means, but I know you won't give me an answer.
Well, you define what it means.
You're telling me there's a value to Bitcoin you can apply
based on some kind of rudimentary...
Dude, the intrinsic value of a Mona Lisa painting
is a bunch of oil paint in a canvas.
What are you talking about?
Yeah, listen, man.
This is something new.
I just want to have a back and forth with O'Hare.
Please.
So you're saying that gold,
you can with gold, but you can't with Bitcoin.
Can you just explain to me why you think that's the truth or why do you think that is?
Well, I'll tell you why I think it is, and you can disagree with me.
We can't create more gold.
Gold is gold.
Gold is created by nature, not by man.
Bitcoin is created by man.
There's vast quantities of different types of Bitcoin.
Now, one thing about Bitcoin that's different than every other crypto is it's been around the longest.
So the chain is bigger. OK, that's it. I mean, it's just been around
longer. Okay. That's not it. Hold on. Hold on. Can I respond? Everyone else has been talking.
Can I respond? You're asking about gold. I'll tell you, there is no way we can create gold
from nothing. We have to find it, mine it, refine it. Okay. Period. And it exists in the real world.
It has real world
applications it's been money for thousands of years it will continue to be money for thousands
of years more supply do we invite your ship to this show because it feels so so and i don't agree
with a lot of things either look i i know you guys like to pick you know look i'm not i'm not
saying ship is 100 right either okay because you know, look, I'm not, I'm not saying ship is a hundred percent right either. Okay.
Cause ship is completely against Bitcoin.
I'm not against Bitcoin.
Okay.
That's not, I'm not against Bitcoin.
I'm just telling you guys, you have to look at it.
Most people in a lot of these spaces, they preach Bitcoin like a fucking religion, which is kind of what it is.
But then they want to apply all these real world scenarios that gives it intrinsic value, like moving a billion dollars if I'm in China or if I'm in fucking North Korea trying to get the fuck out of Dodge.
No, but what about what about the world application? Sure. But they don't. There's not that many folks that fit into that criteria.
I would say there's billions of people that fit into that criteria. There's billions of people on planet earth that want to move money without permission you're saying there's no you hold on guys you got to slow down one at a time
it's not about the billion dollars it's about the fact that there's billions of people on planet
earth that have to ask permission to use their own money and the value of being able to move
your money without permission is astronomical it's ridiculously underpriced at 108 today.
So is Bitcoin money or is it an asset or a commodity?
Yes.
Which is it?
All of them, sir.
You need to start learning.
You need to start actually researching it and use your brain.
I need to read the white paper for a hundred times.
You're just literally regurgitating the same FUD that's been happening for fucking 15 years.
Arguing with you is like arguing with my dog, dude.
You make us all stupider listening to you, sir.
All right. I've, uh...
Hold on. You can't get any dumber. I'm not going to make you any dumber than you already are, okay?
I might actually enlighten you a little bit.
Guys, let's just... Hold on.
Enough of insulting each other. Let's just get back to having a good conversation.
Wait, so... insulting each other. Let's just get back to having a good conversation. This is...
Oh, Harry, you said that
more Bitcoin... You implied that more Bitcoin
can be created?
He's saying other Bitcoins
that are basically the same.
No, what you're saying,
let me just say, I've barely
talked at all.
You're saying
that there are other things that are just as good as Bitcoin
that can be created and that will be competing with Bitcoin.
Is that correct?
Correct.
That's correct.
Now, that's your first problem, right?
That's really your first problem.
You don't understand.
There have been thousands of copies and knockoffs of Bitcoin and
no, and Bitcoin is
open source, so it's free to copy.
You can copy. Fred, didn't you just make a new one? Didn't you
just make Q Fred the other day?
Yeah, I mean, you can make coins
all the time, man.
You can make a meme coin, it takes you
three seconds, I'm pumped up on.
Okay?
It's not quote unquote so here's
the way fred here's the way i here's the way i think it might happen okay let me just entertain
this for you for a second right now you're right if you create some other bitcoin there are knock
offs all over the place there's hundreds of them okay but for one reason or another and mainly it's
because it's the granddaddy people have you know the money coins are not a knockoff on bitcoin
they're not even in the same universe i'm not talking about mean coins you're talking about
mean i said nothing about mean coins you just brought that up so don't put that in my mouth
the point is there's really nothing remotely close to my point is this if we have a dislocation in
the financial system okay and bitcoin were to drop significantly from here and that's in the cards that could happen okay that could happen
there's a high likelihood of that happening in my mind if that happens this is my point if that
happens you could have something rise from those ashes that's different than bitcoin that everybody
adopts that's my point like right now everybody's like what what could rise just like we hold on
just like we didn't know bitcoin in 2009. That's my point.
I think if anything was going to replace Bitcoin, it would be Monero because it's better for privacy.
But I'm not saying that.
I'm just like, I don't understand.
Sorry, this is just wrong.
Look, look.
Just because something is aphoric, it doesn't mean that those Bitcoin cast tokens are the same thing. The distinguishing factor between everything else that's in the space,
everything else in the space and Bitcoin is proof of work
and a tether to the real world.
That's what distinguishes Bitcoin.
So if you think in the heat of a collapse,
you could do that with a million other versions of Bitcoin.
If you think in the heat of a collapse,
there's going to be some other massive infrastructure.
There's nothing unique about that in Bitcoin, Joe.
You could create that a hundred times over.
No, there's not.
The other systems are moving to proof of change.
They're moving to centralization.
They're not adopting the proof of work mechanism.
They're not.
There's like a couple niche ones that have almost no traction.
So there's nothing of comparison to Bitcoin.
There's nothing that has the infrastructure out there that is remotely close to the real world use case of Bitcoin.
It can't be recreated because you cannot recreate the environment in which Bitcoin was created.
You can't bootstrap something from nothing with nobody having a preconception about this whole crypto phenomenon and what happens with all these pump and dumps.
Bitcoin actually had a chance to organically grow
into a decentralized network,
and that will never be repeated again, period.
The key thing is Bitcoin is the network of value,
and it is assuming that role increasingly as time goes on.
It is increasingly becoming the network of value
for planet Earth.
Now, if you're just saying, I don't want to buy Bitcoin
because there's some possibility that some new coin
that's not even been identified yet, right?
If you sort of said, okay, it's going to be Ethereum.
Now, I could at least say, well, you're wrong,
and we have 10 different reasons why you're wrong.
But to say some new coin could get birthed out of some finance,
like, honestly, you would be, you're missing the point
because like you're missing an opportunity
to make a lot of money, a lot of money.
Fred, what he's missing is that he continues
to view Bitcoin as static.
And if there was some, let's just hypothetically say
there's some massive technological innovation.
There's some huge innovation that we all agree on is far superior bitcoin could theoretically adopt that there's no
reason it can't and the market participants who are already invested with their you know timer
and value and hardware yeah the network effects are pretty strong they would they would adopt it
every there would be if there was truly an improvement something we really wanted to
pursue without compromising the decentralization and other aspects of Bitcoin. That could be incorporated.
An example of that might be quantum resistance, right?
Perfect. Yeah.
You could argue to me, you could make the argument that if Bitcoin was not made quantum
resistant and that some other version of it was and that there was a massive hack in five or 10 years to Bitcoin and
all the addresses started becoming worthless, that maybe some new quantum version of Bitcoin
might get rebirthed out of it. Now, I don't think that'll happen because I think that Bitcoin is
going to adopt quantum resistance. And Bitcoin is not about features. It's not about this.
It needs this feature or it, you know, it really is the simple, you know, it has been
said before.
I, I'm not the person who said that it's really the simplest form of money that you can kind
of imagine in the digital world.
It's perfect money.
And that's really the narrative that I think every one of us Bitcoiners, we understand that this thing is actually unstoppable and it's fulfilling exactly the need.
It doesn't need to be changed at all, really.
Maybe a little bit around the edges to, like, make it more quantum resistant or make it faster or make it with deal with lightning better.
These have been some of the changes that have been needed to be made even then.
But it really hasn't changed much since the since the since the origin.
And without changing much, without a CEO, this this asset has hit a trillion dollars faster than any other asset on planet Earth.
I don't know. like you're not into
looking at the past but you look at the past and every single thing but fred you can't i know
fred but you can't look at it in a vacuum what is the reason that happened and the reason that
happened is because not of the qualities that bitcoin has but because of the massive
liquidity that's been pumped globally. You're missing it.
Did you not hear that in the ECB they're rolling out a CBDC in October?
Have you not heard Christine Lagarde?
Hey, listen, have you not heard them talking about how they're going to use people's savings
and they're just going to take them and spend them on what the government wants to spend them on?
The actual base use case of Bitcoin is amplifying in the world. So consider that actually people need this thing. And that is
one of the reasons that it's growing, not the other way around. Okay. It's actually fulfills
a solution to one of the biggest problems that more and more people on planet earth are facing.
You, sir sir are so
lazy intellectually that you haven't stopped and gotten over your talking points from five years
ago that you're not taking enough of a look to understand that this is actually resonating with
the people on planet earth because of the difficulties they're all going through i would
argue that poor people and rich people alike benefit from this. Governments benefit from it.
Corporations benefit from it.
It's not about number go up.
It's about what it is and what it does.
You can think whatever you want.
You can paint any fairy tale story that you want.
It ain't fairy tale, sir.
It's called honesty and truth.
And you, sir, are not honest or truthful.
And that's why you're not interested in it,
because you want to keep lying to yourself. Let me just ask you a question over here.
You would agree with me, right, that even in a pro liquidity environment where you're pumping
out massive amounts of stimulus, all assets do not rise equally. There are a bunch of junky
stocks that have never moved despite massive injections of liquidity. So the market is telling
you, it's saying we're going to allocate to high growth. We're going to allocate NVIDIA.
We're going to allocate to Bitcoin.
It goes back to the caterer.
We're going to allocate money to where money has been made in the past.
And the story for Bitcoin is the caterer.
That's it, people.
Listen, let me just explain something to you.
Just listen to this, okay?
The cost basis for people today is vastly different than that of 10 years ago.
So the experience, those people buying Bitcoin today- The risk factor was also very different.
The risk was very different.
So you can't compare them.
They're not comparable.
Okay.
The risk is very-
I'm not sure the risk is all that much different.
It's completely different.
It's completely different.
Like, it's-
I'm not sure that's the case, but-
Oh, really?
Once we pass the tipping point,
yeah, we've already got the network effect.
You're contradicting your own self.
You just said that the Trump administration-
The Trump administration- Yes, they cooperate. Is one of the reasons why the price is here, which is, by the way, mitigating a risk.
That's mitigating the regulatory and government risk.
In the early days of Bitcoin, there was a legitimate concern about people trying to ban it and make it illegal and not allow exchanges to operate.
Before January 11th of 2024, there wasn't even an ETF.
You had to hold Bitcoin in Coinbase yes i know and the etfs
are another avenue they're another buyer of bitcoin what yeah it's the etfs are just another
buyer they're a sponge for well yeah but you just said that the risk is the same how could you
possibly say the risk is the same now it was well 10 years ago let me tell you how the risk is the
same let me tell you how that can bitcoin the same. Let me tell you how the, can Bitcoin go to zero? Is there anything, any reason why Bitcoin
couldn't literally just go to zero?
No, because I will buy all the Bitcoin.
Yes, there actually is.
Adam Back has a,
Adam Back has a limit order
for all the supply at two cents.
If you buy all the Bitcoin,
what is it worth?
Hey, hey, there is something
stopping it from going to zero.
Adam Back's a limit order.
The problem with your strategy,
you guys, seriously.
You base your strategy
up to all this stuff
that has an extremely low.
Well, you asked the question, I actually gave you an answer, unlike you. That's the problem with your strategy you guys seriously you base your strategy off all this stuff that has where you ask the question i actually gave you an answer unlike you
you base your strategy off everything of things that have a low probability of occurring extremely
low probability of occurring it's a weird way to go about things it's like oh they might have
this magical coin that pops out of a financial crisis that's just you know you know what's
really funny is what people said about the internet in the early 2000s after the dot-com bust.
And tons of people thought the internet itself was not going to be anything of import.
Famously, this is actually why you're not getting it.
Because we're talking about a technological innovation we're not
talking about a scam we're talking about genuine bona fide verifiable technological innovation
and that's why you don't see it and that's why all the other people that don't see it don't see it
a lot without saying anything.
Oh, here. Just hold on.
Oh, here. Just hold on for a second.
What he's saying is actually really important.
And like the internet, the web, like early adoption,
that's something that I have a lot of experience with.
I'm sure a lot of people here do as well.
We were building an e-commerce platform back in 1998.
So that's like the early days of e-commerce.
And this is very similar.
The similarity, not with e-commerce, but with the internet, is that this is a protocol that has network effects now.
You didn't have network effects in the early days of the internet.
You had just a bunch of people that were true believers that said, wow, including myself.
First time I saw the web was in fall of 1994.
I was on the internet before that, but first time I saw the web, it was on Mosaic.
And I said, Chris, stop right there. Let me just ask you a question.
Hold on. Just hold on. Just hold on. I'm landing the plane. I said, wow. And I became a true
believer. And that's a very similar thing. When you see this for the first time, especially those
that were early, it's a protocol that has now achieved network effects. So that is the hedge. That is
what has reduced the risk. I'm done. Yeah. Okay. It goes a little bit deeper than that.
If you go back to the early 2000s and you look about the state of connectivity of the digital world,
everything from media, newspapers, to banking, finances, and literally every other facet of
human life. And you look at where we went to in the subsequent 20 years, as far as this kind of
protocol-driven technology connecting people and facilitating an absolute next generation of
almost every single industry on planet Earth. Okay. And the only thing that was not actually
brought to fruition in that original push of internet technology was monetary solutions,
money solutions. We had the communication down. We had the ability to shoot data of all sorts around but nobody solved the money problem because of the challenges of using money in a digital sense
there is no money problem there is a money problem and bitcoin solved it oh no this was
no no he's right this was an early problem that we had micro payments because you couldn't buy
you couldn't buy things cheap enough for credit card like This was an early problem that we had with e-commerce.
But Bitcoin doesn't solve that either. Sure it does. Why doesn't it solve it?
Intellectually lazy, period. That's you, O'Hare. You're the lazy one.
Micropayments was something that there were lots of these little things popping up and
nobody really solved it. It was all these proprietary... I didn't really research it
a lot because nothing really worked,
but micro payments was a thing. Maybe if Frank, Frank,
maybe if Fred is still on, he would remember some of this stuff too.
Cause he's a.com dinosaur. Like I am, that was a thing.
I just want to put,
I'm putting a poll as to whether we should boot O'Hare or not in the nest.
Oh, no, wait, wait, wait.
I'm not going to put a poll up. I'll just take off. Dude, you guys have a nice Sunday. No, no, wait, wait. No, do not throw it. It's not food. I'm not going to play. No booting. You don't have to put a poll up.
I'll just take off, dude.
You guys have a nice Sunday.
No, no, no, no.
No, wait, wait.
Mike Alfred.
See you.
Peace.
Hey, Mike Alfred is coming to finish him up.
Just wait.
Give it a few minutes.
Oh, my God.
Come on here.
If you're still there.
You know, you mentioned.
He ran.
Well, I mean, look.
You know, that hour of my life, I'm never getting it back.
That's the only reason I joined, Fred.
I lost too many brain cells in the 15 minutes I was listening, and I had to jump up and say a few things.
I mean, what the hell?
Who invited O'Hare?
Was that Joe?
No, that was me.
Oh, man.
Okay.
I was really hoping to get a chance to talk to O'Hare because, look, I have an easy one for him that he can't refute, and that's a controllable load resource.
There is no other thing that can do controllable load as a service.
I mean, it just doesn't exist.
Not one that's meaningful in any way, at least.
meaningful in any way at least.
You guys also had your fingers on the actual soft point there when you pointed out about
him not wanting to even talk about it with his own clients.
This is another aspect of Bitcoin that has caused a lot of people to miss it, which is
they are, whether they are consciously aware of it or only subconsciously aware of it, they are threatened by it because it actually does threaten the traditional financial advisors industry.
Why do you need a financial advisor if you've identified the asset that you can hold long term and outcompete just about everything, if not everything?
TC, I think that's a great point.
Even Fidelity and BlackRock have governors.
They have rules.
Like Larry Fink can go on CNBC,
but a BlackRock advisor has to wait for somebody to come talk to them,
and they have to meet specific criteria.
So they can't just sell the entire middle market, Bitcoin.
Even BlackRock and Fidelity have controls.
You guys do realize that you're talking to a guy who told me four days ago that he's
expecting the bitcoin supply to be double to 42 million within the next two years right
well see this is this is what people say when they have a vested interest in funding it because
they they refuse to actually engage on
the actual topic they're not interested in actually learning how this thing works or what
it's for he knows he knows he's full of shit he has to put forth that opinion because he's protecting
himself i mean i think the uh the nature of the conversation could have been better but
it was a great education there's great points raised by everyone speaking that everyone heard.
So I think we just got to see these opportunities to teach not only him but the audience.
And if he wants to get all emotional and flabbergasted, let him.
Guys, you know –
First of all, I agree that there is value in having differing opinions.
And I invited O'Hare up. I like O'Hare. I'm friends with O'Hare. But, yes, I agree. I agree that there is value in having differing opinions. And I invited O'Hare up. I like O'Hare. I'm friends with O'Hare. But yes, I agree. There's some cognitive dissidence. And frankly, like, I don't like when we shit on people. So I think as much as we can, just like keep things civil. That's really important. And Fred, I think you talked about this earlier about conviction and how spaces are important for people to discuss and continue to deepen their conviction.
The realities of the volatility of Bitcoin means that anyone who's not actually really understanding what they're holding is going to part ways with it at some point.
understanding what they're holding is going to part ways with it at some point. There will be
bear markets again. There will be significant volatility again. And the only thing that
actually keeps you holding on, other than I think a small minority of people who just don't know
better, is learning more about it and understanding it on a deeper level. Because when you start
understanding it on a deeper level, when you start understanding it on a
deeper level a lot a lot of these criticisms and a lot of these points of view melt away we were
just lucky we were just no no but look that's the point though that's the that's the point nobody's
being honest in that conversation if you just go back if you just go back five years if you look
at a five-year chart bitcoin has tacked on a zero at the end.
It's over a thousand percent higher than five years ago.
And that is transcending a double top bull market and a nasty bear market where we went down 70, 75 percent.
Now, if you're somebody who's relying on a price chart to get your conviction you got screwed
any number of ways there if you're somebody who understands what you're holding and you actually
are there and able to accumulate even more in those downturns and still hold on to what you
had originally and not have a trading mentality you actually are sitting pretty you didn't incur
any capital gains you are holding all of your bitcoin and it's all gone up 10x in five years.
Okay.
The point of this is you don't get conviction from price charts.
You don't get convictions just from talking about it.
You have to dig in with your brain.
You have to start understanding Bitcoin.
You have to start answering questions.
How does it have a fixed supply? How is it permissionless? How is it decentralized?
Those are the questions that when you actually ask them in an intellectually honest way,
and you start learning how Bitcoin actually does these things, it's game over because there is
nothing else that is anything like this. Everybody left knows this.
You guys are so easily triggered by O'Hare.
O'Hare knows that he hasn't put in the work.
We know that O'Hare hasn't put in the work.
O'Hare knows that we know that O'Hare hasn't put in the work.
And when you tell him something or you get into the weeds with O'Hare,
he's not listening.
He does not care.
So who gives a crap?
And by the way, I always like
to ask these guys who run these funds, hey, if you don't meet your benchmark, do you not collect
fees? And do you give people their money back? Or how does that work? No, no, no. So it's a joke,
man. Nobody's lining up to get into O'Hare's fund. Nobody.
Great points, Poncher. Hey, TC, I just make one minor correction on what you said i really
don't think bitcoin's volatile i think it's absolutely predictable completely i think the
dollar is extremely volatile right i think the government is volatile i think the price move
that you talked about was a government creation all part of of ChokePoint 2.0, from FTX to Celsius to Muzinski to the entire kind of government-connected attack on Bitcoin, which failed.
Bitcoin as this consistent thing that on average every 10 minutes, thanks to your website that I
stare at way too often because it makes me smile and it makes me happy. Bitcoin is absolutely the
most predictable financial asset. And one more point I want to make. Look, Bitcoin has no metrics.
Unlike O'Hare's portfolio, which is filled with stocks that have PEs, that have price to sales, price to book, have all kinds of different metrics attached to them, Bitcoin has none.
Right?
So nobody can put a price on Bitcoin.
If it was a million dollars tomorrow, nobody could say it was overpriced.
Nobody could say it was cheap.
You can't model it because it has absolutely no metrics. It is a currency that is predictable and scarce in a world of currencies that are completely unpredictable and infinite.
made a website that displays data for Bitcoin. I can't agree with the thing that Bitcoin doesn't
have metrics. There's a ton of data and there's a ton of really interesting information.
No, no, no, but actually, actually, you know, there's some very interesting metrics there
that show you things like how many transactions have been immutably made and never to be undone
and, and, you know, how, how much value is moving around um this is i think
actually where some of the more really interesting perspectives come out of because again you start
understanding really what this thing is on a deeper level you gain more conviction now you
don't even look it's it's the it's the sort of way that Bitcoiners are tormented. When number goes up, everyone's loving it, except that you realize it's going to cost you more to stack your next stack. And when number goes down, you might feel some emotion, but you get excited because you know you can stack even more.
that experience, especially once you get past a couple cycles, and now you've been through a
couple bear markets, you've been through a couple bull markets, and you see that there's a reason
that the meme emerged green, green, green, red. And we have not done anything to remove that
pattern. And if we peak out in November, December this year, and then go down next year, it has been
been absolutely remained intact, perfect rhythm.
So that's my baseline case because until that breaks, it's, it's secular. It's got a,
it's got a halving cycle and you just watch. TC, can you share about your site? Cause this
is the first time I've, I've heard about it. I'd love to know what you built. Oh, uh, time chain calendar.com. Uh, you can visit it on your phone,
on your desktop.
It's a data dashboard with a very unique visualization of circles that show
you the entire supply of issuance of Bitcoin.
And then inside of that, the four year cycle of the having,
and then inside of that, the two-year cycle of the halving. And then inside of that, the two-week cycle of the difficulty adjustment.
And then inside of that, a rolling 24-hour visualization of the blocks that have been mined.
And then...
It's a very good-looking site, TC.
Oh, thank you.
Completely unimpressive.
Where's my watch?
Where's my watch?
Patience.
Yeah, I have a TV in my office that does nothing but display time chain data from TC's site.
It's just, it's fantastic.
You can see it as the next block is mine.
The name is Time Chain Calendar, Dark, for a reason.
It's Time Chain Calendar for a reason.
Because what do you do with a calendar?
You glance at it every day.
And you see where you are.
Oh, I'm on this day of the week.
I'm in this week in the month. I'm in this month in the year. Why did you make it circular in just
the right shape for the watch? Why did you make it so beautiful like a watch? Let me answer one
second. This is important. If you actually glance at it on a daily basis, you see yourself moving
through these cycles that are baked into Bitcoin's
protocol. So it is actually a time chain calendar. Okay. That's how it's meant to be used. So
super cool. Thank you to me. I've never, I don't know how I've heard you so many times and never
heard about this planet. You're going to watch, he's going to launch this watch face and it's
going to change the world. His he's calling it a calendar. He doesn't know it's it's it's a watch face. It's the best watch face ever
Well, it's absolutely amazing and you know
I I just get so much pleasure out of watching blocks get mined in 42 minutes and then 12 minutes and then you look down and he's got
The average block time since
inception and i think it's something like 9 49 9 35 right now is uh the time yeah it's amazing
right like just mind-blowingly accurate uh satoshi was an absolute genius and um yeah i think we we
need to replace the fed with the difficulty adjustment.
It's brilliant.
Did you program this yourself, TC?
Yeah, that's on me.
You know what?
I retweeted it too.
Share a little bit of your background.
I know nothing about you.
It's really cool.
I'm a web developer. I did websites and web applications for the last 15 years.
And as of two years ago, I am unemployable and i'm building my
own shit now i'd love to learn more about what you're building tc you're an absolute legend man
thank you so much for coming into this space it was unlistenable i asked about 45 minutes ago
i had to turn it off um But yeah, you rescued it.
And look, for those out there, it is about conviction.
You need to listen to TC.
He's dropping truth bombs.
I got into this in 2013 and stayed in it until today because of conviction.
And my conviction didn't start in Bitcoin.
My conviction started in the fact that I knew the dollar was going down the tubes. I understood the basement. I understood inflation. I understood the Fed. I understood the monetary system. I understood fiat. I understood Wall Street at a very deep level. I understood how crooked the entire system was.
level, I understood how crooked the entire system was. So when we platform O'Hare and you platform
Joe and you platform all these people that'll come up here and cite the bullshit, cite the party line,
just know that they're not your friend, man. TC's your friend. TC's going to tell you the truth,
right? It's not about all that bullshit. It's about, you know, a, a better way, a better system.
And Bitcoin.
The problem though with what you're saying is that if you don't platform
differing opinions, then you're just all circle jerking.
So whether you agree with any,
you or me or puncher or Fred or whoever,
it's good to hear differing opinions. So that's fine.
I will never apologize for having differing opinions.
That's fine.
Differing opinions on Bitcoin are fine.
Yeah.
All day at some point, like we want to get the deeper things,
not some guy who's obstinate about just information.
I got a question.
As a time chain calendar builder,
have you thought about a block as a unit of attention?
Unit of attention, not specifically, but I'll give you my thoughts about what a block is.
A block is a consensus moment in time.
moment in time. There's a timestamp on that block. And every block has the hashed header
There's a timestamp on that block.
of the previous block before it, hashed inside of it. And this is where we get the chain. The
chain is a link of cryptographic veracity, one block to the next. And that goes all the way back
to Genesis block. And that's why you can say things like those transactions are immutable.
And that's why you can say things like those transactions are immutable. That's why you can, you know, look at what's already in the chain and rely on it being that way into the future. As long as those blocks continue on that same chain of cryptographic hashes, you have something very, very special. Now, what each block does is it confirms transactions, but it also
issues the supply. So the entire supply of Bitcoin that's out there was all issued through block
rewards. There's a special transaction in every block called a Coinbase transaction. That's where
that shitcoin casino got its name. But there's a special Coinbase transaction in every block that awards the winning miner
with subsidy of the newly issued supply of Bitcoin plus the transaction fees from the
transactions they included. And so these two things, confirming transactions and issuing new
supply are the engine of Bitcoin. It's literally what Bitcoin actually is. It's what these blocks
actually are. And what's really cool, if you're on my website, I made a little slider at the bottom,
grab that slider on the right and slide it backwards. And you can watch the entire chain
wind back to the beginning. It'll show you in real time the supply. Winding back, you'll see the subsidy
amount changing at the halvings. That's what gets cut in half at the halvings is the amount of
subsidy per block. Started with 50 Bitcoin per block. Back in the day, you could mine Bitcoin
with the CPU. You can get 50 Bitcoin if you hit a block. It got cut at the first halving to 25,
then cut again to 12.5, then cut to 6.25.
And then the last having that we had last year in April, cut it to 3.125.
The next having a little bit less than three years from now, we'll cut it to less than two per block.
So this is the actual mechanism that gets us a fixed supply ultimately.
And when people say ridiculous things like the supply is going to double in the next couple years
or when people question the fixed supply,
you can rest comfortable knowing that this halving mechanism,
which just cannot be stopped,
is going to ensure that this thing will eventually have a fixed supply.
Eventually that subsidy gets cut down to one Satoshi
and you can't divide any further.
And so the halving after the one Satoshi era, there's no more subsidy and that's it. Supply's
done. So this is an incredible thing when you start understanding it. That's one of the reasons
I made that site is to actually create a visual of some of these concepts and you can use it to
orange pill other people. You can use it just to further wrap your own head around it build your mental model that as an op as as a user of your
site i had an observation that my work units of attention were very similar to bitcoin blocks and
the the idea really sank in because I was using Pomodoro
technique I don't know if you guys know what that is it's like a 40 minute
clock you said it you do you say I'm going to do 40 minute blocks of work
but having done that for quite a while and then turning on your your website I
just kind of noticed that I was honing in on about 10 minute blocks of work where I was really effective before I needed to either block.
And it might be just me, my ADHD, but it just something that I noticed.
I would definitely, I would like to say, TC, I think this thing is artistically really amazing and i would definitely pay to have a box like this which which nothing
different but just this as the sort of a standalone box that i could put on my yeah you know i'm not
going to be doing hardware i am software focused but what you can do is what what dark side
mentioned you just get a display get yourself a cheap extra display and frame it on the wall.
And then just wire it up to a computer that's set to this website.
And you have a beautiful wall display.
It's actually cool.
About a year and a half ago, I found out that this woman who's in the German parliamentary body
has a time chain calendar up on her wall in her office.
There's a congressperson in Germany who's a Bitcoiner, and they have it up on their wall.
I saw this post of them from their office, and it had time chain calendar on the wall in the background.
It was cool.
But yeah, no, that's the best solution is just put it up put it on an external display you brought up a good idea that would be a killer kickstarter take his website
just make uh like you could get this very cheap in china just get depending on terrorists uh put
it on a little box like a cool looking cube box that has a little screen all those for like a relatively
like that'd be the best orange pilling yeah no listen i'm happy to do this thing at no cost you
know at no profit like i would i definitely think this thing would appeal to a lot of people to have
this you know on there well that that's great to hear i've been working for the last year on a new
app which is
going to be launched very shortly so please guys just hold that thought and stay tuned like i'm
gonna have a new form factor of time chain calendar out very soon uh and i will let everybody know
about it so i appreciate i appreciate the input tc i mean just sort of like you're not kind of when
we did this big bitcoin book i don't know if you've seen it, but if you haven't, I'll send you one.
You might like it.
It's, you know, we spent an enormous amount of time on design and graphics.
It's like a coffee table book on the history of Bitcoin.
And, you know, I think people like these things as objects, you know, and yes, you can do,
you can put it on your wall.
Sure.
You can get the same information, but a lot of us in particular, I can see Christopher going a hundred percent because we collect art and we collect, you know, we collect, this could be, I would like to see this.
It's perfect.
I want people to say, what is that, that you know that you have on your coffee table it's a better version of like because everybody see don't take offense at this fred
but a version for orange pilling than your book because people see books all the time this they
would notice because they'd be like what's this what's this thing so like setting that next to
your book would be incredible tc i wanted to dm you but can you DM me, TC, so I can write you back?
I can't DM you. Yeah, I think the thing is fantastic. I just love the design of it.
And I love the information that's in here. I've never seen it. I mean, I've seen some of this
fractal encrypt stuff, which, you know, while very interesting, does not communicate the information to me the way
this thing does this thing is very the very great just a great way of looking at it just like
and i you know i have a bitcoin machine here you know i've you know i've got some of these things
but nothing that's like visually this interesting right if, if you keep it on to, uh, per, for any length of time,
you're going to see this sort of like rippling animation.
Every time it hits a block, there's also a thing in the settings.
There's a little settings link at the top of the screen. Uh,
if you go in there and you find the little sounds tab,
you can turn on a sound that gets, uh, omitted every time a block hits.
Um, so you can, so Why do you keep using me so?
You can set this thing up to be just a little bit more experiential.
I like the little water drop sound
and I have that on
and while I'm working in the background,
I just hear the little gentle water drop sound
and I know another block hit.
It's a really interesting way
to kind of start connecting more
with Bitcoin in some ways. You know, you mentioned it,
was that BitPetro, you mentioned it as an attention thing. I think there's really something
powerful there as far as just having Bitcoin's chain operating, touching your consciousness in
that way. Just even if you see it out of the corner of your eye, oh, a new block happened,
or if you hear a little sound, a new block happened or if you hear a
little sound a new block happened there's something makes it more tangible about that
yeah it's more real this is this is a really uh trippy aspect and then i gotta go after this but
um you know humans on planet earth we experience things unfortunately in uh phases because of time zones. So New Year's Eve, for instance, goes off in 24 segments around the world or whatever
it is, you know, everyone at their various time zone, they celebrate this moment.
But Bitcoin blocks are shared globally in a moment at the same time.
So when having happens, people all over the world are experiencing that moment.
And to me, one thing I'm looking at with my project is working more on connecting people
to that information so that it's in their awareness. Because to me, I find this interesting
concept of like, you're out and about in public, and you see a group of people and imagine everyone just
feels a little buzz or feels here's a little sound or they they get that feedback that a block has
occurred and i think that's something in the future that we're gonna watch is the way the watch is the
way yeah okay so anyways the point is I'm, I'm working on that.
I'm working on all of this kind of stuff. So it's, it's just an interesting aspect of how Bitcoin could actually even be more significant
in human society because, you know, you see how we have clocks everywhere or you have
calendars everywhere.
I just think that having Bitcoin visible or detectable by one of your senses is a powerfully
important thing. So we'll see how that goes. I'm a huge fan of TC's. We've actually met
and like hung out and look, he is super, super talented and super, super humble. I can't stress
to you guys enough. If you can check out his website and support his work
because really he is uh he's a rare gem um i i don't all right this is about the time i'm gonna
like slide out i don't i i get uncomfortable stop talking about me um it's been nice to to chat guys
uh to be continued okay and hey if anything follow follow the account of the actual project because i have that in my
bio if you see time chain cow that's the uh twitter handle of the actual project itself you should
follow that that's where i'm going to be making all my announcements about the the project going
forward so follow that one hey thanks tc all right guys cheers TC. Yeah, I just want to echo what he was saying, because like I said, I have it on a TV screen in my office.
And I just find it so soothing because I spend a lot of time when I'm thinking, I'm just staring at the website and watching the next block and watching times.
It's so much more relaxing than watching uh a trading view screen with a million
different things blinking it's just soothing um that's all i can say i'm a huge fan dark you can't
change the colors beyond the uh yellow and red right i've never tried i don't think so
the the visual settings are pretty tight.
It's just how much information you're putting in and out of the screen that you can kind of filter through.
Yeah, just an idea.
I think it'd be cool if you can kind of build your own theme, but still, you know, had enough contrast that conveyed the information.
It's ridiculous.
I tell you what I'd love to see is a apple watch screen with uh with totally
that's what i kept bugging him about is like hey you need to get the watch out you need to get the
and he's he's can you make a custom watch face or does apple have to do all the watch faces
the issue is how much work you have to do to individually code for the
different um apple like watches and then the different samsung watches and so it's a big
process to get the watch os stuff sorted out it's not as simple as like a web app yeah i'm sure it's
not but anyway look he sees a legend i had the chance to spend time and talk with him in Vegas.
Just absolutely rock solid, right?
So when you think about platforming O'Hara and Joe, think about platforming TC because there's a few- I also invited TC, Dark.
Good, man.
Good.
Everybody can talk.
Yeah.
No, look, absolutely everybody can talk.
But when you're hosting a Bitcoin space and you're going on about mid cap stocks and sharp
ratings and shit, nobody can give two shits about, you just lose people's attention.
And then when three people are talking over each other, trying to prove that they're the
smartest guy in the room, it just gets even that much worse.
I had to turn it off, man.
It was really kind of a bummer.
But look, you know, this is what it's about.
It's about it's about
big pointers coming together trying to share their knowledge their experience strength and hope
what what gives them you know hope for the future what gives them conviction talking about this
debasement talking about what's wrong with with you know currency current dollar look i'll say this
both o'hara and joe live in Chicago, right? And so do you,
Chris. I think we're up to now 80 people have been shot this weekend, 16 dead, right? And I would
suggest to you that a lot of that has to do with the money. A lot of that has to do with broken
money, broken incentives, bad government, all coming from money, right? And look, if that doesn't
bother you, then there's something wrong with you. It bothers the shit out of me, right? Like,
how in the world can you talk about restaurants being crowded, right? When people are getting
popped, you know, right in broad daylight, just walking down the street, right? Like, that's what
we need to be talking about. Those are the issues of the day.
Society is being broken down at the seams by broken money.
Look, I'll argue this point until the day is long, man.
It didn't used to be this way, and it doesn't have to be this way.
We live in a land of incredible abundance.
More food is probably thrown away at the restaurants
those guys kind of hang out at than, you know,
it's just ridiculous how much abundance we have in this country.
And at the same time, we have kids going to bed hungry, starving, right?
Because the parents can't put food on the table.
That's what we should be talking about.
Dark, that latest mass shooting, at least, there could have been another one last night, but I guess it was Friday or whatever.
That was in the high rent district.
So be interesting to see, you know, if that raises any more attention.
There's there's always gunshots down in that area.
But, you know, this mass shooting might get some more attention.
I'm sorry, where's the shooting? Which shooting? There was one,
18 people shot four dead, four blocks from my house. And that was on Friday. So yeah,
I'm in the middle of this stuff. Yeah. That's the one I'm referring to. I live down in River
North. Oh, in Chicago? Yeah. I used to live there. Yeah. Yeah. That was four blocks from my house.
And I talked to, I know a lieutenant that's in the tech
side and he said it will get solved it's going to take a little bit of time uh but they believe it
was two shooters in a car it was a drive-by and they believe there were two pulling full auto
shooting full auto it was pretty bad um yeah pretty bad yeah again the this these are the
subjects man like this is the stuff that that i, and of course, people will despair. I just don't believe,
and again, I understand people will argue with me, but I don't believe that in a world of abundance,
in a world where people share and give, that you would have these problems. I think these
problems are a direct result of broken money, broken incentives, broken politics, right?
But it all comes back to the money, right?
So good question on this.
How do you fix, like, let's say you've got a magic wand, you snap your fingers, you can
fix this tomorrow.
What do you do?
What is your 10-step plan?
Well, again, you can't undo, you know, 60 years of bad policy with a snap of the finger.
But I will say this, that the incentives that are built around the welfare system, around the breaking down of the family unit, around the breaking down of, you know, mom and dad homes, I think that's where I would start, right?
I would change the incentive structure entirely so that the government incentivized parents to stay together, right?
Marriage and wedlock, religion and schools, right?
Like all of the things that are really – that have been destroyed, especially in the blue cities like Chicago, right?
Right. I would I would look to to the policies. Right. Because, look, I know this and I've read about it, that if you go back to the 60s, right, the black family was one of the stronger family units.
I would look to the policies, right?
Right. They had one of the stronger, you know, when you look at the ratios of children out of wedlock, parents that stayed together. Right. They had one of the stronger family units. Well,
that's been destroyed. And I would argue with you, it's been destroyed by, you know,
incentives, right? The incentives aren't to stay married. The incentives aren't to keep the family
together. It's just, look, it all comes down to money, right? What are you buying? What are you paying for? You pay, look, you get
what you pay for, right? And why it is we're paying to have these types of scenarios, because
I think we'll all agree that, you know, children that grow up in single family homes, children that
grow up in poverty, children that grow up without a father, right, are more likely to get in trouble
than those that don't. I mean, I know that's not
popular, but that's true. So why are we incentivizing all of these things that are bad for our society?
And I would argue it has to do with broken money. Okay, but the question that I have that it doesn't,
that I'm not understanding is, unless you say we're going to have some kind
of ubi with bitcoin i don't understand how that fixes these people that are not going to be
adopting bitcoin it's still going to be the has and have nots because the people that are getting
it are certainly not the people that are doing those drive-bys and so unless we say we're
distributing x amount of bitcoin to everybody then how does that like
i get it fixes the money but you still have first of all we already have ubi right and as much as
people that you know are in the bottom 50 percent are pretty much on between snap and ebs and all
the different programs right are basically living on the government dole.
But if you look at how they're incentivized, what pays the most, right,
it's having children out of wedlock, single mothers.
That's ridiculous, right?
Like in Hungary right now, Orban is, and in Poland and throughout parts of Eastern Europe, they're instituting programs that are pro-family.
You know, if you stay married and you have two kids, the price of a home drops substantially,
right? If you have three kids, it drops even further, right? Like those are pro-family policies.
Again, look, you're not going to undo 60 years of bullshit with one group of of policies it's going to take time and you have
to focus on the younger generations you have to make it safe now as far as how bitcoin works look
in a bitcoin world there's there's not going to be this urge to get into politics because it's
not going to pay well right like that's what you have to realize. Right now, the political class is so close to the money
printer. If you take away the money printer, politics becomes a less than profitable business.
But today, politics is the most profitable business because they're the closest to the
money printer. Chris, you have to also look look at if you were to look at the safest
countries in the world they're either fighting crime through social cohesion fighting inequalities
through prevention rather than punishment or in the case of and I'm talking about me mainly Scandinavian countries for example and
then you could look at the in the Middle East for example the United Arab Emirates they're
fighting it through one very simple thing which is a strong rule of law and here at home it seems
like we have none right now and there is a reason why I think that 90% of the most dangerous cities in the U.S. are blue cities.
If you, I don't know much about Chicago, but I live here in D.C., and if you were to talk to any police officer here in D.C., they'll tell you.
D.C. is the best city to be a criminal.
Just because every time you commit a crime, they put their life on the line.
They go on to investigate crimes, they arrest the suspects, they take them to jail, and then they get released the very next day.
Yeah, that's a big problem.
So we actually – let me speak directly to that because this is something I worked on here in Chicago, very specifically in the past year.
Our state's attorney for the prior eight years had national in fame, infamous Fox.
I'm sure everybody remembers the Jesse Smollett debacle and how that guy said he was attacked by MAGA.
And like that was an absolute nightmare.
And Fox let him walk.
So we got rid of Fox.
And she knew she was going to get out.
So we got rid of her.
And I helped get elected.
Eileen O'Neill-Burke, who's a Cook County State's attorney.
I really focused on that.
And we are turning around our public safety here.
So I hear you with the long goal of Bitcoin.
But we need to do
both we need to have long goals that fix the the systemic and we also need to be fixing the
immediate which is like literally drive-by shootings four blocks from my house in downtown
chicago three nights ago bro about two three months ago we had here in downtown D.C., we had a group of 16-year-olds.
They were going around U Street, which is a very short corridor.
They could have stopped them pretty easily.
And so they were armed.
They had guns.
And they were going literally business by business.
And they were robbing them.
And they got caught. they were released the next
day and then the district attorney came out and when he was questioned about it why were they
released guess what he said kids are going to be kids come on man you know and we see that every
day and it's hurting businesses you know like people are scared to go out um and it's just
destroying the local economy and we see it in you know many many
cities across across the united states and unfortunately once again they all have one
thing in common they're blue cities you know so it it's it's an issue and it's a it's a major one
i don't know how they're gonna fight it because everything is politicized now so
and that's it omar right? It is the politics.
And the politics are driven by the money.
Don't kid yourself.
If you take the money out of politics,
the only people that will show up to do it
are people that are trying to make the place better.
As long as the money drives politics,
you're going to get the criminal class
and the political class diving into the space, and they're there to make money.
They're there to enrich themselves and their families, whether it's the Pelosi slash trading scandal, and it's not just her.
I mean, you can –
It's Trump too.
Let's definitely not forget Trump.
I just said it's not just her.
Okay, I'm sorry.
I'm getting a haircut too.
I'm hearing every other word.
By the way, she's by far the best trader, I think.
But look, it's the entire political class.
Wait, isn't there an ETF?
Didn't somebody say there was a Pelosi ETF?
Something that tracks her.
There's a tracker. There's not an ETF.
And I don't think you can invest in it.
But look, in the end, I agree with you, right? This isn't a Democrat versus US politics. If we were on a Bitcoin standard,
the government wouldn't be surveilling us. We would be surveilling our government.
We would see where our money's going. We could watch it on chain and we could demand accountability.
These are the reasons why, I mean, this is what i want to talk about in bitcoin spaces
not about mid-cap stocks and not about who's right and who's wrong about sharp ratios and momentum
who gives a shit right like these are the issues that bitcoin can change the world
certainly change our world and that's why i think it's so important that like we really do
get down to the nuts and bolts of of what's the problem and what are the solutions.
Dark, I think from the well, I would hope that from the bottom up, you know, people would be incentivized to find a mission and a purpose in life, probably through a job, you know, where they would have a positive vision for their future.
I think right now a lot of people are just like, well, what's the point?
You know, like I can't get ahead no matter what.
Like I can't save even if I do save, you know, it's being debased.
So I would hope that if we do accomplish these reforms, you know,
notwithstanding any corruption that gets resolved,
people would just feel like they have a positive future worth working for.
There is a concept of learned helplessness.
If those in the room haven't heard of it,
there was research done by Dr. Seligman at University of Pennsylvania.
And you get to a point where you are so impoverished and you have so little hope that you're going to do things like drive-by shootings because you're going to join a gang because that's where you find your family.
And that's where you find people that give you support.
And that's a problem.
So I hear like fix the money and stuff, but there are like there are other problems we have to do in parallel.
And that is that is real. That is here in downtown Chicago or not downtown Chicago, like South Side, West Side, et cetera.
That's true in pretty much every major city you're going to have learned helplessness.
And we need to fix those problems. And a big way that we do that is everybody that
is in society that can, needs to see how they can help somebody else. I'm not saying like go and
volunteer on the South side of Chicago. I'm saying if you see somebody who needs help, help them.
If you have the ability and the interest and the time, it can be literally helping an old lady across the street.
Like that's just such a, like an, an old, uh, like kind of meme story,
but it's true. We all need to pay it forward. And if we all do that, we can,
we can really make a big difference in this world.
Well, I think that's true, but I think you're, you're look,
I think this is the time when we go to punch her and we ask him to tell us
about the El Salvador miracle.
Because when you – the concept that you're presenting that we can't fix the problem, like they had a problem infinitely worse.
Did you say me?
I said that we can't fix the problem?
Did I say that?
No, I didn't say that.
I just said –
Oh, I'm sorry.
I thought – I misheard that.
No, no, no.
If I said that, I'm sorry. What I'm i'm saying is that look the problem seems insurmountable
but then we look at what happened in el salvador i think it puncher what's what's the the main
city san salvador why don't why don't you kind of yeah why don't you kind of share like two years
ago what it would have been like to walk through that main square that you were showing me and what it's like today and how did they do it like what what did it take to get it
done well it took a minor miracle in getting a politician elected who against all odds he was
able to beat the system um but he had a message that was pretty clear and he was able to get a you know
win the win the presidency but the bold action that took place was you know first bitcoin um
and then kind of coincident with that was getting rid of the gangs which is the most dangerous
country in the world as you guys know and then they did a lot of prayer. I mean, when Bukele was interviewed by Tucker Carlson,
he said, what did you do first?
He goes, well, we prayed.
And then we prayed some more.
And one day the movie will be made about what actually happened down there.
You know, but you think about 70,000 gang members,
any one of which, if you go after them,
they're going to put a call out to just kill one person, and then they'll stop they'll stop coming after us so they had to shut
down cell phone towers and just do a coordinated attacks and there's tons of stories about how a
guy's cell phone just ran out of battery so he couldn't put out the call but minor miracles
some would say prayer led to putting you know,000 brutal, and I mean devil-worshipping evil people in here.
And you have to provide a safety first, right?
So the first order of business I would say in any U.S. city, and I'm sitting in Philadelphia, my old neighborhood,
and we're getting a teesesteak on a place I used to go. But at nighttime, you don't want to be around here. This gets rough.
And there's five to seven murders per night in Philadelphia.
It doesn't even make the news.
It's not even newsworthy anymore.
500 murders in a year in Philadelphia.
It's crazy.
So if you don't have safety, your time preference gets very short.
But anyway, back to Duke Kelly, you know, they passed.
Everybody knows the store, right?
But once you provide that safety and then you start implementing pro-business and child
money policy, things happen and turn around very quick.
The Central Historic District, which Doc was asking about, when I first went down and negotiated
lease, was a no-go zone.
My business partner, Max Neboa in El Salvador,
when I told him I was going to rent a place,
he said I was crazy.
He goes, you don't go down there.
What are you talking about?
I said, well, I think there's a plan to fix it up down there.
And I want to get ahead of it.
And that's kind of what I do.
I see things and roll the bones on what I think is going to work.
I skate to where I think the puck is going to be.
In three years, they turned that Central Historic District, which is literally like a third world
open market with bangs at the time. It now looks like Paris. It's completely renovated. And 50,000
people go there with their families that they couldn't even dream of leaving their neighborhoods
before. And they're there for all hours of the night night it's a country i could walk as a as
an american anywhere alone at night and feel safe it's a miracle um but it took bold action it took
bold action and people who don't who don't say things like that's just the way it is we can
never fix it um i think trump has a lot of that i'm not you know i criticize trump all the time
but you can't say that the guy, you know,
isn't somewhat anti-fragile at this point
and willing to take some bold initiatives,
right, longer, and different.
But it can happen, and El Salvador is the evidence.
But the sound monies are really like a bedrock,
must-have to start moving in that direction, in my opinion.
Hunter, that story just gives me the chills, it really does because like that's what i saw as bitcoin began to progress right
that's why the government tried to destroy bitcoin is because it does threaten the very fabric of
their monopoly over the people and um yeah i look, there's so much hope that's offered
to us through Bitcoin, through hard money, through the ability, like I said, to surveil our government
rather than them surveilling us. You know, just imagine a world in which you can track your tax
dollars, whether at the community level, the county level, the city level, the state level,
and then eventually the federal level. That's a world I want to live in. And that's why I keep
coming back and keep coming to these spaces. Because that's my message, right? Like we can
live in a better world. We can make the changes. It's possible. It's not impossible.
So, Dark, do you think that the politicians that are currently toying with Bitcoin,
I mean, do you think they see these far-reaching implications,
or do you think they're just trying to co-opt votes,
or what do you think is going on with the current administration?
Yeah, I think they see it as a way to co-opt votes and to gain access to campaign funds.
Because the Bitcoin communities obviously become quite wealthy.
I don't think that there's any serious contemplation of Bitcoin as a currency. But again, I don't think these two systems
can peacefully coexist.
And I think we're getting closer and closer
to that moment when Bitcoin eats the dollar
and eats every other asset on the planet Earth.
if you had to give a timeline for that vision of hyper bitcoinization what would you say
so max max kaiser posted yesterday he think it's he thought it was four hundred thousand dollar
bitcoin i think it's higher than that but i think around a million dollar bitcoin um i i think the
the system eats uh eats the dollar and how long time like i just don't know man look you see
from my fun educational yeah no but i'm gonna say i'm gonna put it to you this way
right i don't know when the next financial crisis is. I've lived through a whole bunch of
them in my lifetime. But I'll say this, I think the next financial crisis will likely be the last
one. So, you know, 08, 09, an event like that occurring with this much indebtedness, these
many derivatives, this much counterparty risk, this global exposure to the U.S. dollar.
And mind you, it may not come from the U.S. dollar.
A lot of people think that I'm always posing that the U.S. dollar is going to collapse.
I actually think the U.S. dollar collapse will be triggered either out of Japan or Europe
because the yen cannot collapse without taking the dollar with it.
The euro can't collapse without taking the dollar with it,
meaning these banks, these global money center banks are so interconnected
that it would be like dominoes.
If one falls, I don't think they can, in the modern world,
I don't think they can stem them from all falling.
Look what happened with GameStop and what it did to Credit Suisse and how close we came.
If they didn't put their finger in the dike, if they didn't get UBS to absorb Credit Suisse,
that would have spread.
That would have spread nastily.
So if GameStop can take out Credit Suisse,
what is Bitcoin going to take out?
I just wanted to jump in here.
I don't know if you had more to say.
I just had a question, I suppose, for Fred
or any of the speakers, really.
It's been interesting to hear you guys talk about various things.
And like you were saying with Japan, I just threw in a piece that we wrote back in May.
And I know we've been thinking big picture, at least you guys have been talking big picture,
but I was curious to get anyone's take on, you know, the administration's been pretty vocal
about the Fed and lowering interest rates. I was wondering, it seems as though the market's reaction to that
could be negative in terms of inflation expectations.
This is more of a short-run view of Bitcoin.
I mean, do you think if the administration puts someone in
that lowers rates dramatically,
do you think that would have a positive impact on Bitcoin?
I do.
I think it would.
I don't think they have a choice, by the way.
If you're trying to run these types of deficits
and you're paying as much as we are in interest,
you really need to lower interest rates
to give yourself more runway to keep printing money
and keep creating debt.
So I do think, think look the bitcoin story is one of of debasement and and printing right it's not really about um
you know all of these other ancillary subjects bitcoin is hard money in a world of fiat money
and like i said i don't think these two systems can peacefully coexist right i think
at some point bitcoin eats everything and and it probably is that next financial crisis which takes
bitcoin into stratospheric levels and what the consequences of bitcoin going north of a million
dollars would be i can't even envision but i would suggest to you this 0809 saw i think 800
billion dollars was was tarp right and then uh with the uh with the um covid print we were talking
about i think seven trillion well bitcoin at a million is is sort of an 18 trillion dollar print
right of of one sort or another right and then you would talk about where gold would be where
silver would be you would see asset inflation you know i just think at some point these numbers
just become ridiculous right like they're just the numbers are flat out too big they dark when
we talk about yeah but what about the unrealized what about the unrealized liabilities isn't that
where the numbers are already oh the numbers are insane right like what what we're seeing right now
is extend and pretend tell any lie you have to to keep the system going right like you know they'll
man i can't like we can even get started down government deceit, but it's just one gigantic Ponzi scheme.
I mean, probably better to let Simon speak to this and Gary to speak to this.
But I just I think we're at the very end, man.
We're we're we're literally lurching.
And, you know, it's crazy times.
It's absolutely crazy time.
We talk about broken money.
I would abstract it further to say we really have a broken political system.
And in that sense, the money is for that system.
And it's a system of spoils.
It's a system of government for sale, et cetera.
of government for sale, et cetera, to the extent that Bitcoin comes in from the side door
and it forces, it could force a political reset because the lack of ability to control it.
So from a monetary layer, you know, governments have started wars, they print money,
they spend other people's money for their own benefit,
all of those things that we know about. When you introduce the discipline of Bitcoin as a
sound money alternative, it undermines that power. And so when we talk about the breakdown,
there's obviously lots of debate about when that happens and how it happens. But one thing to consider is the fact that there will come a recognition, and maybe it's around the time that gold is flipped by Bitcoin in terms of size.
much of the system collapses, but that there's a controlled demolition to try to change things to
shift power sources for the people in charge. So one thing we know is that governments are not
going to just roll over and do nothing about this. Hey, Thomas, I just wanted to pose a question. So
I like joining these spaces. My background's more in macroeconomics and real estate. So I always find a lot of insight joining these spaces on crypto.
You had said that government acknowledgement, you know, it will come in time. I was wondering if there's any potential risk that obviously this administration has been really open to crypto in terms of
shedding regulation. It's uncertain whether or not future administrations will follow suit.
But in the past, if you look back maybe 150 years, there's been various points where,
you know, the Federal Reserve or the government institutes price fixing or interest rate levels
and holding them there, or in terms of exchange for currencies or for precious metals like gold
and silver, sometimes the government gets involved to protect the dollar. If the dollar does slip
and people migrate more towards crypto and
Bitcoin in particular, could you see a future administration trying to either through regulation
or certain mechanisms to prevent people from transacting?
I think it's going to be like the Catholic Church trying to stop
geocentric or trying to maintain geocentrism and, you know, they imprisoned Galileo for a while. But,
you know, eventually the truth gets out. And I just don't, I think there'll be lots of attempts.
You know, I do worry about what happens after the Trump administration, because I don't think the Republican Party has the right leadership.
I don't think it's J.D. Vance.
And whether it's a single person or not, I just don't think that the Republican Party is strong enough to carry the demographic shifts that are happening.
And my sense is we're going to end up with some form of collectivism
defining the the 2030s and and this is a case where i think as people who are most of the people
on these on the space are bitcoiners really need to think about uh the their portfolio of wealth
and how it presents to the world around us. So, you know, this is the argument
for cold storage to keep out of the system. But it's also an argument for making sure that your
worth is, that your wealth is for the betterment of society. If your wealth is viewed as hoarding in a collectivist world i think you're
gonna uh you're gonna suffer through asset taxation and other things like that so um i don't i don't
have a crystal ball but that would be my sense of things that the governments will try things but
at the end of the day you're not going to be able to you know convince people that
the the sun rotates around the earth.
I know maybe it's just a fantasy, but I do think it's interesting how a lot of people get into Bitcoin, you know, maybe through shit coins, you know, maybe trading shit coins and then they
figure out Bitcoin. You know, I hope the government does the same thing where you know it might take 50 years or it might take 20 years but you know they go
through their own journey you know they think it's just about votes but then you know they start to
see the benefit and they start to understand the way it works and the the positive impact it can
have and uh i don't know maybe they come around just like we did
simon go ahead bro hey guys um just want to go back to uh punch's conversation around um
el salvador um it was a while since i picked up the books on um uh following like the money in the El Salvador side.
But I always, before going to meet Pichelli,
I wanted to look at a couple of theories around how he managed to wipe out all of that crime
and end up arresting all the M13s.
And yeah, a few theories. And this gets back to what dark saying like if you
can if we can add more transparency to monetary flows and we go through this um you know through
ai and social media like this ultra transparency phase of finding out the real truth and the real history.
I think that's one of the ultimate gifts that could be given from our sector.
Very idealistic if we get there, but I think it's a worthy goal.
But when I was looking into the whole El Salvador thing,
obviously, if you're familiar with like operations like
Operation Gladio, it's like Western American and European. They have these funded militia groups.
You know, examples is Al-Qaeda, ISIS and M23 in Congo. And M23 is used in order to get resources via Rwanda
over to the corporations in America like Apple and various other things that are
needed in order to create laptop components and iPhones and various other
things but M13 was a gang that was created between the trade between El Salvador and L.A.
Wait, is that MS-13 or M13?
MS-13, sorry.
Between the trade between L.A. and El Salvador.
And obviously there was a lot of covert wars between El Salvador and America and the whole IMF vassalization model that the IMF has always followed.
But where I think it gets quite interesting is what we saw that followed after the arrests.
is what we saw that followed after the arrests.
So if you look at ICE, ICE is predominantly funded,
the ICE in America is predominantly funded by the private prison industry.
And so they get paid government subsidies for every incarceration and deportation.
And it's almost like a private militia within America, kind of similar to what was funded, you know, but through covert operations, but this time internal operations.
And it's almost like a private militia within America,
arrests happened um we had this whole negotiation between where i was there to try and support um
launching the bit bond in el salvador um and then the talks just stopped completely stopped
um from being very very keen to do it and then obviously there was the market manipulation that
happened in el Salvador bonds.
And then it needed the bailout from the IMF, well, not quite a bailout, but to repackage the loan.
And then the loan was accepted, but certain policies had to be dropped.
But shortly after the Trump administration, you obviously had that during the campaign.
If you remember, he was kind of like having a lot of digs at Bekele and then kind of walk them back a little bit.
And then there were those meetings.
And then now we're getting the mass deportations leading to the privatized prison industry in El Salvador. And I think that's like a model of basically profiting from incarcerations.
And I think it's quite interesting that we're getting all this ICE stuff now, and then the
mass deportations has been combined with, because America has, I think, the highest level of
incarcerations in the world, I think, last time I looked. You could fact check that.
But this whole model of privatizing these different industries and sectors.
And then in the big, beautiful bill, you've got the Palantir border technology that was beta tested in the UK and the EU that's now coming to America.
And that was beta tested in Ukraine and Palestine as well.
But I think it's really interesting when you look at these privatized security,
surveillance and various other operations,
like open borders followed by mass deportations
and then the connection with El Salvador
and then the relationship that built and a lot of the IMF stuff.
It's not a fully baked out
understanding yet but I think when you follow the money you just really start to understand how these
these different industries work and just getting more transparency around that and
you know just understanding that thesebacked militia groups that we're told are so, you know,
doing completely different things.
We're told they're terrorists
when they're just literally pillaging resources
to bring them back to the West.
But anyway, yeah, I think it's not quite a miracle
that, you know, I'd love to really understand
what actually happened to get those gangs there
because most of the drugs that get into America
are via, like, CIA and the Intelligent Network.
And that was where all these different types
of covert operations happened
in order to get, like, the different resources in.
Anyway, just adding a few things there.
I remember really trying to study it
before the whole...
Yeah.
Yeah, I don't think...
We were talking about street crime
here in the United States,
and then we started talking about El Salvador,
but I just don't think that
what El Salvador did could remotely... You know, could work here in the United States.
First of all, we have an independent justice system, which they don't have over there.
That's the most important point. And then on top of that, you have the political and racial
complexity. We have due process. Over there, when naib bukele started cleaning up the streets
he was literally rounding up gangs and throwing them in jail sometimes without even the right to to to uh
to to an attorney or to or to any sort of due process so i don't think that that's a good example no attorneys allowed omar
they have to all be killed that's yeah exactly society just just go execute them all yeah yeah yeah i mean
that's the better system right that's what we want that's it we should all go absolutely not
Yeah, I've heard Bekele in the interview.
I mean, one of the things he did, he had to go after the judges.
And I think that he even did, I think at least my interpretation from what I heard in the interview
was that he did not think that what he was doing was the a better or perfect
system he was uh in triage mode trying to fix a society that was extremely broken um the ends
justifies the means uh yeah that was oldest time that is that was that was the argument now people
don't yeah i think i think i think there have been a lot of dictators through history who have adopted the same argument.
It's gone well for people.
I mean, look at the Middle East, Joe.
That's exactly how they did it over there.
It's every despot.
Every person who...
I'm not saying he's a despot.
I'm just saying every person always says,
I need extreme measures, right?
We need to take bold action.
We need action now.
Are you saying that getting rid of 72,000 of our most hardened criminal gangs?
I literally just said I'm not saying he's a despot.
I don't know if you heard.
No, no, but that took, look, I'll be the first ones.
I mean, he's still got emergency measures in place, which I think, you know, he's getting a lot of crap for down there.
And if he runs for a third term, I'll be his biggest critic.
But you can't argue with the success to do. Machiavelli, if you ever read Machiavelli,
talked about the butcher, right? If you need to get control of places, you go in there and you
take bold action. You send a message. You do whatever is necessary to put the fear of God
into everyone. And it's pretty good at controlling people.
It's pretty good at bringing order about it.
It's not what happened.
I'm not saying it's what happened.
I'm not saying it's what happened.
I'm not.
I don't pretend to be an expert on El Salvador.
I don't know anything.
And I wouldn't represent it.
I'm just saying strong-armed leaders are very popular in situations when chaos in society is breaking down.
And that's not just isolated in emerging markets.
It's in developed countries as well.
Strong-armed leaders tend to get a lot of traction when things are breaking down and society is full of unrest.
I would say, Joe, the indication of whether or not it's a bullshit line is whether or not they roll back and voluntarily go back to a better system.
As Puncher pointed out, if Buckele says, well, the country still needs me.
I'm going to leave emergency measures in place.
I'm going to run for a third term, all that stuff.
Then you're like, well, maybe the power's gotten to him.
You know, fdr did some
things and during world war ii uh and lincoln and lincoln he suspended habeas corpus i mean
yeah lincoln what and and within the lens of what he did was a despot right he uh but and julius
caesar crossing the rubicon i mean like the army's Army's... But at least Lincoln backed off after he did it,
meaning he did it as an emergency measure in his mind.
Whether it was right or not is a debatable point.
Most people would probably line up behind Lincoln at this point.
Bukele, I think, you know, the issue that I have,
I like what he's done in El Salvador.
I'm not familiar with all the injustices in terms of the methodology that he ran.
But my concern about El Salvador would be the sustainability without him at the helm.
It's sustainable.
Thomas, the people of El Salvador, you know, they are out of the fourth
tournament. They're not going back. Not anybody alive today. So, I mean, you go to those young
girls who have children who are now, whatever, 14, 15, that were just brutally raped by guys.
I mean, it's a problem. They're being taken care of now.
But I just think the people won't
allow another...
I mean, assuming there's a democratic
vote, right? They're not going to
vote for anything that looks anything like
what they know, which was
more or less, you know, confessions
of an economic hitman type government.
And they know it and they smell it.
What is... what's going
on in term i mean i i assume he's term limit that's my understanding two terms right he is
so people have to be lining up to be the heir apparent like uh what well, he's got four brothers. He's got four brothers who I went to a meeting early on, uh, as an investor.
And I had a bunch of things that I've told the, uh, you know, the new head of economic
development down there, uh, female that we wanted to do.
And I just wanted to know what the rules were and, you know, we can bring this, we can do
that.
We want to do this.
But there was another gentleman in the room, which was Bukele's brother and kind of like, Hey, sir, am I, who am I talking to here?
He's like, well, you can talk to her, but I'm listening in that kind of thing. And, um, so he
does have an heir apparent that I'm sure he will support. Um, but there will be a fair election,
a free election.
I don't think you can say Bukele throwing his weight behind his brother.
While it's not ideal, I don't think that rises to the level of despot.
And there will be other candidates.
I mean, Bukele didn't win every, I guess, state inside of El Salvador.
He lost a few, but then he immediately reached out to the legitimate winners
who were now in Congress and said,
look, we wanna work together.
I'm not your enemy.
You won fair and square and let's work together.
And I was in some of those meetings
because I just happened to be meeting
with some people in the government.
And they were also working with the newly elected
mayors of the municipalities.
So it's not a heavy hand yet.
My thing is, I was just trying to figure out what did Baccheli need to agree to
to get the CIA and IMF to back down and allow MS-13 to actually be incarcerated
because you've got to be negotiating at the highest level
to allow the U.S. to have stability, and that comes at a cost.
I think if you asked him point blank, he'd say,
well, I don't know what you're talking about,
and I don't know that that happens.
I don't know that he needs to kiss the ring of anybody.
The theory that the U.S. controls MS-13, is that it?
Well, it does fund and weaponize, yeah.
It funds and weaponize MS-23 and MS-13.
I mean, have you read Confessions of an Economic Hitman?
Years ago.
I didn't remember.
Have a reread.
But, yeah, I mean, America has a whole…
I know the U.S. funds a lot of, you know, indirectly, directly.
I just, I asked more of a direct question.
You believe that the United States controls MS-13?
I reckon… I do not. I do not. Do you believe that the United States controls MS-13? I reckon...
I do not.
I do not.
Why not?
I don't know about control, but I...
You're...
Wait, go ahead.
I do not think these groups need funding,
and I know US does this for a lot of different groups.
Last time I looked at this, I'd have to re-look at this one,
but last time I looked at it,'d have to re-look at this one but last time i looked at it i was trying to follow the flows but um your thing i ask is you made a
comment about how he needed the cia's blessing so absolutely yeah that would be can you can you
unpack that for me i don't i'm not familiar with that well um if you if you study how most drugs get into America and the different ring...
The CIA basically has different human trafficking, weapons trafficking, and drug trafficking operations in order to get its Black Op funding.
And so it has all these different networks outside of America. And most, if you look like across Africa at the moment,
like a lot of the funding comes through these black ops operations in order to destabilize
various regions so that they can get access to various resources.
And you normally have to negotiate a deal with the IMF in order, or you have to be vassalized into to a certain extent in order to try and get
out of those deals and so the CIA uh and uh IMF are normally like two of the and then there's
competing interests as well but normally uh to try and get a deal done with the gangs you'd normally be negotiating with at the very,
very top.
And at the very, very top, there'd normally be a relationship with CIA.
Funcher, didn't you say he locked up most of the gang members?
Correct, yes.
Why would there need to be a negotiation with the CIA over taking control of his country?
I don't understand.
I don't think that can happen unless those at the very top allow those things to happen.
I know you think that, but why?
Well, look, the IMF has not been a big fan of Buchelli.
Yeah, I mean, he's stumbed his nose at the IMF before, right?
I don't understand this logic because, and I don't discount anything you're saying about
running operations and money and guns and et cetera you know it seemed like a guy took control he was you know pretty uh hard-handed and how he did it but he did it
was probably necessary right um you know but why did you think he needed to beg cia langley to to
get approval to do that it just seems i don't think that happened i've signed in my i i do not
i think dukelly thumed his nose at all and said,
it's my country I'm taking.
I'm going to do what it takes.
That's my case, Puncher.
I agree with you.
I don't see the Simon connection.
Speaking of the IMF, I don't know who can answer this.
What is his long-term goal?
I mean, we're talking about a country with, I think,
last time I checked, an 80% debt to GDP.
He's facing a billion downgrading credit ratings.
What is he trying to do?
I mean, yeah, we all support his Bitcoin strategy, but what's the plan long term?
I mean, the IMF is demolishing.
El Salvador and bonds have been up 90%.
Simon might know that.
They wouldn't have some of the best performing bonds.
I couldn't buy them as an American, but
Do you mind of
I agree, but he's he's you gonna need development loans. I mean, he might get isolated
Circular economy. Yeah, something happened from where the entire government was behind the Bitcoin bond strategy to delay, delay, delay, delay, delay.
We had all the investors lined up to delay, delay, delay, delay.
All right, bow down to the IMF and we've got to take this IMF money.
And we've got to do a couple of things in the conditions the the terms that come with that
lane something happened in that between all the investors were you involved in that time i was
yeah yeah did you not know i didn't know that yeah wow you know simon in el salvador my my
perception was that there wasn't this circular bitcoin economy in greater el salvador it was
down on the beach in el zante and maybe a handful of other places it never really took that people
didn't really didn't really get it or really didn't want to you know transact in bitcoin yet
um it's a u.s dollar economy we're gonna we're gonna raise a billion dollars and we're gonna do
and then we're gonna do a few tranches after that.
And we had it all subscribed for the billion dollars.
Well, I think that's where he did bow the knee to the IMF. But the other thing was he had to take away the mandate, I believe, for Bitcoin to be accepted in all establishments, which people weren't really doing anyway.
So it's not a mandate anymore.
And those who want to do it, do it.
And those who don't, don't.
But it's not a whole lot of concession. Why do think he bowed to the imf puncher well with regard to the bonds i i don't
simon knows more i mean i think it was hey we can get this loan we do need it versus thumb your nose
and do the bond and i think he went for whatever reason in the other direction for now but simon has
way more insight than i do yeah i didn't i didn't have i don't have the information but i but just
as a general i see the imf like a mafia so if you don't bow down there's serious consequences
yeah they even get all they even get they even get involved with your foreign policy they pressure
you to make foreign policy decisions.
They don't just lend money.
I mean, he needs them.
Those bonds are never going to be enough.
That's just the front.
I'm talking about the covert operations and the return to crime and the gangs that are sent through and all that stuff that comes when you don't bow down.
That ain't happening, I can assure you.
Wasn't the whole idea that if he raised the bitcoin bond
he wouldn't have to go to the imf wasn't that there's no way that's impossible that was the
idea and that's my skepticism around like because there was a whole if you remember in in i remember
i can't remember everything because it was so well back but there was something that came out of like
congress where they were basically saying the el salvador
strategy is a risk to national security or something along those lines and they wanted
to do a deep dive and investigation into it there's a bill there was a bill in congress proposed
yeah do you remember what it was jay yeah it was a bill proposed they wanted to study it and
say that you know they they said it it risks national security and financial and monetary issues.
So, yes, that normally leads to these types of covert ops and CIA things and IMF conversations.
And then suddenly the strategy changes and is normally around, you know.
is and is normally around you know um also remember at the time as well china was launching
the 5g network for el salvador and they were investing in a lot of the infrastructure in el
salvador uh they were launching like the the new library i think i went for the launch of that so
yeah simon but those things those things were already in play and and and kelly was like
yeah we want free trade with everyone thanks for the
library thanks for the new peer and yeah that's kind of where i guess my my theory the the gangs
went away because there was agreement for us to allow the gangs to go away and then things happen
he has permission i don't think there was any permission asked for a fuck's getting. There's no country in the world that can free themselves from IMF debt and not ask permission to the various power structures that exist.
They're going to need billions of dollars to roll over their debt.
It's impossible.
On top of that, he's going to need billions more for his infrastructure plans.
He's going to need money to fund budgets.
Those bonds are never going to be enough.
And he he's, he's never going to be able to live without the IMF.
We're talking about El Salvador.
It's not Qatar guys.
He will, the day is coming where no one's going to give a shit about the IMF.
And he just didn't want to fake the fight now because he didn't think he was in a position
to essentially win that fight and he just didn't want to fake the fight now because he was in a position to essentially win that fight.
He just didn't want the brain damage.
Yeah, it's just my theory.
Again, I don't know how to connect all the dots, but you recognize these patterns.
When drastic things like violence stops within a country after being vassalized by you
know covert operations from the US normally there's terms and conditions
that comes with being able to live in peace you know I ran into a guy who ran
the Africa desk for USAID down there in El Salvador his wife worked Central
America and I met them two and a half years ago
they've since been fired I think they stayed in the same uh condo uh was USAID funding groups in
El Salvador well I went down there prior to the last election so I probably met this guy you know
I can see an American like hey what are you doing? There's a rooftop deck that we would go and do work on.
He was there and got to talking to him.
His name is Bill.
He worked for USAID, ran the Africa desk.
And I knew right away, I knew what USAID was before everybody found out what it was.
And I just would pick the guy's brain.
What do you do?
You know, I do this.
We're advancing this and that in Africa.
His wife, who I did not meet um she worked you know
central america for usa id so you know what she did and um they were they they didn't you know
have great things to say about pugh kelly and i just would ask him questions and i got him drunk
one night he was drinking whiskey and i said look i I said, look, if a certain candidate wins, I didn't know who it was.
There's a non-zero chance that I could be considered for at the time,
ambassador to El Salvador, blah, blah, blah. And his eyes got real big. He said,
oh, obviously they didn't like Trump.
And then I never talked to the guy again.
And then one day the elevator opened and he told me he was moving and he got
fired. And I said, all right, well, good luck.
And he was gone.
That was what, three months, four months ago.
Okay.
Yeah.
So USAID is normally a dead giveaway and national endowment, a democracy.
That's like the money laundering network that U.S. normally uses in order to fund like ISIS,
Al-Qaeda, MS-23, MS-13.
That's where all the
terrorist financing comes from.
It would have been pretty obvious
for them to start importing gang members.
I don't know how...
Number one, I don't think Bukali asked permission
for anybody. He just went in and did what he thought was right
and he built a coalition amongst the police and the military, which were thoroughly corrupted.
And struck a deal and got rid of all the corruption.
And now his big thing is corruption, any corruption inside the administrative state.
Anybody gets caught taking a nickel.
You know, it is very third world-ish, particularly to open up a new business down there.
A lot of committees and paperwork and stamps
and get the, oh, you got the green stamp,
you need the red stamp and all that bullshit.
And hopefully that'll get better.
But not once did anyone say to me,
hey, you might want to put, you know,
five grand in a bag.
Nothing.
Nobody.
Everybody knows if you do that,
you will go to the same Seacott jail that
MS-13 was in. You can call that a dictatorship, but everybody, 92% of the people voted for him
again, and they're loving it. And they would never go back to the way things were because it was hell on earth.
Yeah, well, there's normally fees you have to pay America in order to get that type of protection, and normally you can't do that independently from the state where El Salvador started.
And that's why I think, you know, the building.
And that's why I think, you know, the building...
Simon, you do know that he got in front.
Simon, you do know that he got in front.
You know that he launched investigations into all the corruption and then stood in front of Congress and was giving his State of the Union speech in 2022, maybe, and said, you know, basically pulled Assad and Hussein.
We've launched investigation, but in this case, there were real investigations into real corruption, as opposed to just randomly pulling guys out of seats and executing them.
And he said, you notice this, whatever the other party was, you notice they're not clapping at
all the advances we've made here in El Salvador. He basically said, we've launched investigations.
You can stay and face a fair trial and investigation, or you can leave. And they all got
up and they got on their private jets
and they left.
And you know where they went?
They went to the United States.
And then he did the same thing to the judges.
You know, we've launched investigations.
You know what you did.
We know what you did.
You know that we know that I know.
And if you wanna stay, you can stay.
If you wanna leave, you can leave.
All the judges left.
That's how he rooted our
corruption in the congress and then he shrank the size of congress back to its constitutional size
it had gotten overblown to like crazy proportions where there were so many congressmen
it was ridiculous 400 and something congressmen in el sabato now there's 40 and they're duly
elected and you know they have fair elections and he just he just has a complete
disdain for corruption and corrupt and big government and oppressive government and i
believe in this guy and if i didn't i would have invested you know millions of dollars that i have
so far down in el salvagans i might be wrong i doubt it yeah it's not it's not necessarily corruption it's just the economic
reality of starting from being on the wrong side of the u.s covert operations to trying to build
some kind of autonomy um and and it's a journey it's just like you know singapore it started
colonized it started colonized and then you slowly build it up. It's a journey.
I get what you're saying.
I don't think Bukele gave a shit.
He didn't care about the IMF at the time anyway.
He didn't care about the CIA, although I'm sure he was aware of it.
I'm sure he was well aware of what USAID had done to his country.
He grew up around these corrupt—you know, he wasn't a child of poverty.
He grew up in a wealthy family.
These people were his friends.
He understood very well how the system worked, and he didn't like it.
And he became mayor of a small town, then he became mayor of San Salvador, and then he ran to become president in what's an amazing political journey, a very unlikely journey.
in what's an amazing political journey a very unlikely journey um so i don't think he kissed
the ring or begged permission or asked you know favor anything he just did it yeah kiss
not the right thing you have to you have to use statecraft and negotiations and you know
people like to say smart guys he's a very. Exactly. But the bit that made me a bit
skeptical as well is when I went there
and he was, like, coming out in the crowd
with no security,
with, like, crowds
and crowds and crowds of people,
like, speaking to everybody and stuff.
You know, for someone in his position,
like, you know,
where assassinations is rampant and various other things, it felt like he was very not scared of any of those types of things.
His political enemies were all gone.
That's what I was trying to say.
He's like, you can stay and face the consequences,
or you can leave. And they knew he was not to be trifled with, and they all left. And they flew
to Miami, and they're living the dream here in the United States after they extracted a shit ton
of wealth out of El Salvador with the Anheuser-Busch distribution riots and the Coca-Cola
distribution riots and the Pepsi distribution riots and whatever else, you know, how that whole mechanism worked. Those were the families. Those were the families of wealth. You want to
talk about cancel on effect? El Salvador had dirt poor and uber wealthy, and that was it.
And the uber wealthy all got up and left because they had to stick around and account for what
they had done to generations, and he was going to hold them accountable and i don't think he asked i don't think he i don't think he asked anybody's permission well as long as those
bitcoin comes in every day um you know god willing uh will able will be able to demonstrate a model
i don't think just over 6 000 bitcoin is enough to get the IMF to back down.
But if you keep sat in that Bitcoin every day, hopefully one day we'll be able to prove that there is a model that allows to build your way out.
I think it's just, I hope it happens.
What does that look like, Simon?
I think it's pretty interesting. So imagine you keep adding a Bitcoin a day
and you've got the collateral to potentially,
I don't know exactly what it looks like to be honest,
but I think it's an interesting conversation.
But you can engage in these types of Bitbonds.
Maybe you can create a stable coin,
pegs it to the dollar or something.
I'm not sure. I think we're going to see a lot
of innovation um i think like russia's doing a lot of the kind of like structured bitcoin
products at the moment i think it's going to set an interesting example of what the world could do
and if america starts doing some of the stuff as well, I think the possibilities are endless
if you can just keep building that Bitcoin position and then figure out what your monetary
system looks like once you've got that core stack.
I think the biggest mistake that McKellie made is that I think he should have made the
whole country a shareholder in Bitcoin through a forced retirement plan.
And rather than just giving everyone $20, I think he should, there was massive effort to try and make all of the Singapore population while it was decolonizing own property and have significantly better terms.
of Singapore have never, even though there's very strict rules, have never really attempted
to overthrow their government is because they all felt like shareholders in the country
through land and property ownership.
And then they all got wealthy together.
And then from there, they always felt like they were a shareholder in their country.
from there you know they always felt like they were a shareholder in their country
and i think if um if bichelli had done a similar thing with bitcoin and also try to figure out a
way before all the rich bitcoin has come and like acquire up all the land and the real estate goes
through the roof figure out some kind of favorable terms like singapore did with the locals i think
i think those two would have been two great additions
and then let the Bitcoin strategy rip.
Simon, that might be a valid criticism,
but remember,
a guy had a lot on his plate.
I mean, a lot.
Would that have been better?
Yeah, obviously.
When I employ people in El Salvador,
I have to contribute to their plan. It doesn't really work. There's no real growth in the plan. It's very cumbersome. It makes opening a business more difficult. So of course, something like that would have been awesome. But look, the founding fathers in the United States, right? They knew about slavery and were well aware of it. And, you know, during the revolutionary times, they talked about it quite a bit, actually.
it during the revolutionary times. They talked about it quite a bit, actually. And what they
arrived at was, we can't secede from England and cure this slavery thing. And it hung around for
another 60 some years until we had to fight a civil war to get rid of slavery. So you can't do
all things at once, particularly when the things you're doing are, you know, have never been tried before and are extremely dangerous and risky.
Yeah, it's very easy for me to give commentary on spaces.
It's another thing to do it.
I know that.
Yeah, but it's not invalid.
And in retrospect, he probably wishes he had done more now that he has the benefit of
the hindsight of knowing that what he did was successful.
Like, ah, you know what?
This was like me.
I should have bought more Bitcoin in 2013.
I did.
I wish I had.
Simon, do you think there's any scenario where Bitcoin continues to develop, continues to
grow, the asset rises and matures as broader adoption, and G8 countries, the G GA doesn't hold the vast majority of Bitcoin.
Interesting question. When you say GA countries, do you mean central banks, governments,
individuals? All of the above. Doesn't really matter whether it's held by institutions,
governments, et cetera. That's my view.
I'm not sure if we'll know the answer to that. I think significantly
more Bitcoin is in the Middle East
than we know.
I think there's a lot of
sovereign states accumulating Bitcoin,
a lot of wealthy people that have Bitcoin.
I think there's way more mining than
is disclosed
in the Middle East.
In general, though, I think we're entering into a...
Yeah, no.
I think I could imagine a story.
Again, it's like, what is the starting point right now?
Are we there? It's the starting point right now um are we there
the starting point right now yeah do we know who owns the reason i know about 30 is owned by
say like satoshi satoshi government strategy um and blackrock and etfs so that's about 30 percent of it um actually binance would be included in that i mean binance that none of that is us i guess or some of it if it
the binance us but anyway yeah the reason yeah the reason i ask is because you know if let's
just assume bitcoin becomes strategically important, which, you know, the United States government says is a strategically important asset to hold a reserve.
Let's assume that it continues.
From a geopolitical sense, from a geopolitical sense, realpolitik, whatever you want to call it.
I really struggle to find a scenario where emerging markets and the developed world gets to a position where they can hold more Bitcoin than the G8.
I can't envision that.
And that's why I asked.
It's not a prognostication from you.
I'm just wondering if you have.
Yeah.
Go ahead.
Yeah, I think the Middle East owns the most amount of Bitcoin,
but we just don't know the exact breakdown.
Why do you believe that?
Well, just people that I know within those various governments.
They've got strategic reserves and they've got significant mining operations
from people that I know anyway. I haven't been to visit them or anything so I believe them to be true
the so if we look at the government you've got 200 approximate thousand
doing by us a hundred thousand of which has to be returned to Bitfinex.
China's got about 200,000.
So I think China's number one after Bitfinex coins are returned.
Then if you go further down, I think we've got Ukraine,
UK, Germany sold all of its Bitcoin.
I think, I can't imagine what UK is going to do.
Then we got Kingdom of Bhutan and El Salvador
are like the lower ends.
I reckon Russia's doing a lot.
I reckon Iran's got a lot.
I think Saudi, Qatar, UAE have a lot. And I think the rest might just exist
in high net worth individuals. I'm not sure what else exists at the sovereign level. Thank you.
