BTC Sessions - Fed Regime Change, Bitcoin Cycles, AI’s Real Impact | Jeff Ross, Joe Carlasare, HODL

Episode Date: June 30, 2026

Mentor Sessions Ep. 080: Fed Removes Forward Guidance, Bitcoin Cycles Break & AI’s Real Impact | Joe Carlasare, American HODL & Dr. Jeff RossBitcoin may be bottoming right now — and Dr. Jeff Ross, American HODL, and Joe Carlasare just laid out exactly why. The Fed dropped forward guidance, MSTR has underperformed Bitcoin by 60%, and leverage is destroying portfolios. Here's the macro update you need to hear.In this episode you'll get Jeff Ross's case for why we're bumbling along a bear market bottom, Joe Carlasare's breakdown of the most impactful FOMC since the Bernanke era, and American HODL's blunt take on why leverage is not a time machine to being a Bitcoin OG. You'll also learn why Saylor's 32-BTC sale was a deliberate narrative violation, how three global currency blocs are forming around the dollar, gold-backed China, and Bitcoin, and what the rotation into hard assets means for the second half of 2026.⏱️ Timestamps:0:00 - Intro1:32 - Joe on Fed Paradigm Shift and Dropping Guidance3:49 - Jeff Ross Don't Fight Fiscal Stimulus5:27 - Dollar Strength Risk-Off Impact on Bitcoin8:01 - American HODL on Fed Shocking Markets Upside14:39 - Greenspan-Style Fed Under Kevin Warsh for Bitcoin16:17 - Iran Geopolitics and Three-Bloc Currency World23:26 - US Economy Check Manufacturing Real Estate GDP29:37 - AI Jobs and Low Actual Usage Rates44:07 - Bitcoin Cycles Debate Case For and Against47:15 - 2026 Resembles 2022 Treasury Firms vs Exchanges55:30 - Michael Saylor MSTR Underperformance Narrative Shift1:00:22 - 32 BTC Sale as Test Transaction Explained1:05:16 - Leverage Not Shortcut to Bitcoin OG Status1:10:04 - Q4 2026 Hard Assets Rotation Bitcoin Outlook🔗 Links & Resources:• Joe Carlasare on X: @JoeCarlasare• American HODL on X: @americanhodl8• Dr. Jeff Ross💡BOOK Private Sessions with Nathan, Benn and the BTC Mentor Team: Master self-custody, hardware, multisig, Lightning, privacy, and more. 👉 Visit btcmentor.io • Sovereign Sessions — AI, Privacy, and Bitcoin education: http://youtube.com/@SovereignSessions?sub_confirmation=1📌 Previous Episodes: Doomberg & James Lavish → https://youtu.be/uCQStzvsnEUSimon Dixon → https://youtu.be/Aza4GAjQffw⚡ POWERED by Abundant Mines: Fully managed Bitcoin mining. Learn more at https://qrco.de/bgYKPB🔒 Lockdown your Bitcoin with the BEST gear on the market from Coinkite. Get the 5% Off the COLDCARD visit: https://qrco.de/bfiDBVFollow Us on X:• BTC Sessions: @BTCsessions• Nathan: @theBTCmentor#Bitcoin #BTC #BTCSessions #BitcoinMacro #AmericanHODL #JeffRoss #JoeCarlasare #BitcoinBottom #FedPolicy #HardAssets #BitcoinCycles #MichaelSaylor #MSTR #GeopoliticsAndBitcoin #FiscalDominance #StackSats #Fed #ForwardGuidance #AI #RiskOff #BitcoinAnalysis

People think leverage is a time machine to being an OG and it's not. From November of 2024, when Trump was elected, MSDR has underperformed Bitcoin by 60%. We've gone from Don't Fight the Fed. I think that's no longer the case. It's now don't fight the fiscal stimulus or don't fight the federal government. I would argue it's probably the most impactful FOMC that we've had really since, I don't know. I mean, you have to go back to the Bernanke era. The world is going to coalesce into three dominant currency groups. The U.S. dollar, the China ecosystem backed by gold. And then third, I can, I still think Bitcoin is the dark horse. Shit sucks out here. I'm half as rich as I used to be. Things are painful.

This feels like a bottom to me. Right. This is classic bare market bottom stuff. We're going to see, I think, a major rotation going forward as we head into the summer. Joe Carlosari, American Hoddle, and Dr. Jeff Ross are back with the macro update that you not only want to, you need to hear. We break down regime change at the Fed, what's actually driving Bitcoin, geopolitics, and even where AI is taking us next. All right, gentlemen, very excited to have this conversation. In preparation, actually went back and looked at that episode with Preston Pitch that you guys did at the beginning of the year. And so much has shifted since then. Venezuela was the big topic.

And honestly, I've almost completely forgotten about it at this point. So we got lots to get into Bitcoin markets, AI, geopolitics. But I want to start with a bit of the bigger picture. So, Joe, starting with you, what's your current kind of? 30,000 foot view of the situation. What has your attention and where do you think we're going? Well, the first and foremost, I'm really focused on this new sort of, I will call it paradigm shift at the Federal Reserve. I followed very closely the last FOMC. I would argue it's probably the most impactful FOMC that we've had really since, I don't know, I mean, you have to go back

to the Bernanke era. I think it was probably more impactful. than anything to happen at Nepal. This idea that we're going to remove from the marketplace, or at least at this point, to telegraph they're going to remove from the marketplace, any forward guidance. And we're going to talk less and just act in a very limited fashion, you know, completely rewriting the statement,

completely rewriting sort of the normal expectations that we have from the Federal Reserve. That's massive. What I always think about in that situation is, you know, they give forward guidance. They always try to move and, jaw-boned the market for a purpose. The purpose is because in certain circumstances where, you know, either inflation was trickling up or economic growth was going down, they wanted to sort

of get ahead of it and telegraph. There's a famous quote that the Fed's most powerful policy tool is to talk, right, the ability to jaw-bone. So if you're going to say, well, we're not going to jaw-bone anymore. We're not going to give forward guidance. We're just going to let the market figure it out. there are a lot of situations in circumstances in history where what the market has done is it's thrown a tantrum. And it's like a baby crying. Are you just going to leave the baby there to cry and not go deal with the market? Because if you do do that, bad things can happen. They can happen really quickly.

So anyway, that's what's got my attention right now. But I'm sure you want to talk about Bitcoin. As we're recording this, I'm just looking at a whole lot of red on my screen. Oh, yeah. Bitcoin's down 5%. After being down 3% yesterday, then NASDAX down another 1%. And it looks pretty ugly. And gold, our favorite yellow metal is now back below $4,000.

Silver went below $60, I think, today in ounce as well, too. Everything, all the sound money camp was just getting hit hard. Before I have Dr. Jeff and Hoddle jump into, though, Joe, I do want to just cookie tag on to that. Yeah. Do you have any suspicions or guesses as to why they're dropping forward guidance at the Fed? I think one of the reasons is just a different view of what the Fed's role should be. I think the, you know, it's interesting.

In Bitcoin Circles, we talk a lot about Lynn Alden's sort of phrase the fiscal dominance, right? But the implication behind fiscal dominance that the Treasury spending is really the primary influence on our economy. What's behind that is really saying the monetary authorities, the Fed, that's sort of like in an indominent role. That's a less impactful role. That's really you're going to say, we want Treasury to have more of the ability in the executive branch. We want sort of a Fed that has a diminished role in analyzing all these things. So to me, that's really interesting. Like the idea of, I think of follow through, which the administration seems to think, listen, you guys take a back seat, we'll lead things over here with Treasury and will you guys follow our lead on whatever we're trying to put forward.

That seems to be the cause of all this. It's sort of a reimagination of what it is. And, you know, there are people out there ringing their hands about Fed independence being lost. And, you know, there's plenty of times in American history. I think the Fed is, the central bank as a whole, has been less, quote, unquote, independent. I think it's never really purely independent. So I think that a little bit of that sky falling sort of rhetoric is probably not called for. But the curious thing to me is, like, again, it's very easy to say you're not going to get four guidance.

You're not going to calm down the markets when everything's going well. It's much harder to do that when things are getting really ugly. That's generally where they have to talk. or they at least have talked in the past. I love it. Dr. Jeff? Yeah, I would agree with everything Joe just said. And I think the tell for everything has been the price action of the dollar since the war started speaking.

I think when he started, it was below 100 sitting at like 99, 60 something. Now it's up to the Dixie is up to 101.63 as we record. That's a big move for the dollar. Like currencies rarely move like that, especially the dollar. So the markets are taking seriously what's going on. This is a typical risk off day where all risk assets are, you know, they reach a correlation of one, as we like to say. This only happens in these kind of deflationary bust. Now, this is just a one-day sample.

I'm not saying we're starting a massive deflationary bust. But this is what happens. People crowd into the dollar and they sell everything. They sell their stocks. They sell their Bitcoin. They sell their gold. They sell their silver. they sell everything else. And so we're seeing a lot of that happen right now. So that's very interesting. So I agree with Joe. I'm very much looking forward to seeing how the world changes here. And it's always interesting. Every day there's some new interesting news piece. I also agree that, you know, we've gone from the saying that was popular after the GFC was don't fight the Fed. I think that's no longer the case. It's now don't fight the fiscal stimulus or don't fight the federal government. And that's just how it is. People are like, well, why isn't Bitcoin going up?

why are, you know, AI stocks going up and Bitcoin's going down, blah, blah, blah. It's because there's a limited amount of dollars, right? And those dollars are being shunted in very specific places. They're being shunted into AI and into energy and into rare earth type things. And there, which means that there's a posity of capital for these other things like Bitcoin. And so Bitcoin's just, you know, kind of left on the sidelines right now. All of the promises of the Trump administration that he's pro Bitcoin and that we're going and get the strategic Bitcoin reserve, all that stuff.

Where'd that go, right? I mean, I'm still waiting for that. I've been holding my breath for two years, I think now. And it's getting tougher to hold my breath. But I'm still holding my breath for that to happen. So Joe, you're- We got it. We got a strategic Bitcoin Reserve, established by executive order.

Yes, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, yes. They did confiscate Bitcoin from people and took their other people's Bitcoin and bragging about taking Iran's Bitcoin as well. So shout out to the U.S. for our strategic Bitcoin Reserve. And a digital asset stockpile. We got a digital asset stockpile too. I don't know why they don't dump that.

They should dump it right now. Yeah. I get snarky talking about it, so I'll stop talking about that. Hoddle, what do you think? Well, on the digital asset stockpile, that is one of the plans, is to dump it for Bitcoin, you know, and hopefully they do do that. I think, you know, these guys, Joe's given a very ivory tower. What's the Fed doing?

I'll give you a perspective from the ground with the normal people. Shit sucks out here. I'm half as rich as I used to be. Things are painful. Tripoli suddenly seems expensive to me. I used to think it was cheap. It's very expensive now. The other day,

they charged me $37 for a burrito bowl. So I'm dying out here. I might have to start eating cat food. The burrito bowl was $37 because I got six meats on it. That's why. It's my own behavior. Problem. I can admit that.

I'm brave enough to admit that. No, one thing I'm curious to ask Joe about is the jawboning, or I think a word, the Bitcoin audience is more familiar with his sciopping has been extremely useful for the market. And if there is no forward guidance, how does the market begin to price things in? And if there is, you know, these sort of these shocks to the market coming from the Fed just acting rather than telegraphing is sort of the theory that you can shock the market upwards

because when I first hear it at first blush, it sounds like, oh, no, they're going to shock it to the downside because the market, you know, it's been so high for so long. Like, how could it be anything other than a shock to the downside at this point? So you're asking now if you think that they could use it to shock the market up? I mean, we seem playing. What's the rationale here? Is that part of the thinking? I'm just thinking out loud because I can't understand.

Well, even quickly, Joe, before I jump in there, too. To Hoddle's point, if they all of a sudden completely unexpected came out with a cut, I imagine the market might respond really, really bullish, but because it's odd. You're right. Can you shock it to the upside? Well, sure. I mean, like, so shocking it to the upside, the most notable example. is during COVID, right? When the Fed came out and said it was going to buy, you know, various

junk bonds, okay, and ETFs, like that was the bottom. Before they had purchased anything, like they just said, this is the plan and then, you know, off to the races. That was, I think, March, I don't know, Jeff may remember March 15th or whatever it was in 2020. That was like the telegraph. So like when they announced something, that that's the, that's the, that's the, impetus binds. It's not actually the change of policy, the Powell pivot, right? That came without actually a change in policy. The policy was then coming in the subsequent meetings. And the same is true here. You know, when, when, you know, Jerome Powell said there was a long way to go before we were talking about rate hikes and rolling off the balance sheet in these things.

Those were comments made well in advance of the actual policy change. So, you know, the market is always forward looking. So that's why, you know, generally what they do is they, they, everybody knows that it's going to be a cod or a, you know, a, you know, a, uh, a, uh, a, uh, a, uh, a, uh, a, uh, a, uh, a, uh, pause or a hike. It's very rare that you get a surprise, right? But what they always look at is the forward guidance that's given in the economic projections, the summary of economic projections, which Warsh did not sign, right? He did not join in the actual summary. That's a big deal. He's telling you, I don't really put a whole lot of stock in this. And he's got all these committees to rewrite the guidance they're going to use and rewrite what they're going to rely on for economic

data, which, again, to me, the only reason you do that is because you want to change the inflation framework. You want to have a basis to say, don't look over here with this past data. that's all noise. We want to look forward. So we're looking at these new indicators that show it's props more interesting, more helpful to cut, right? The most key part of the entire presser was when he had this discussion on the transcript where he said, you know, how can you justify whether things are slow here, whether the policies are restrictive? He said, I think it's somewhat restrictive on balance. You can look at things like real estate to show that it's restrictive, But then when he said, beyond that, he said, look, when you talk about a 2% target, which we will maintain that 2% target,

he said, I focus on the left of the decimal point rather than the right of the decimal point, right? And then he said, the left of the decimal point is the number two. And to the right of the decimal point, that's the number zero, right? So when he's saying he's focusing less on the right versus the left, what I view that is, is him basically telling you, I'm going to be perfectly comfortable with 2.8 or 2.7. or 2.9% you know, in inflation. That is entirely consistent with my mandate, and I'm not going to be too freaked out

the fact that it's 28 versus 2-2-2-2-2-3. He's opening the door to do what the administration was pounding the table on for the whole last year, which is lower rates. And you see a little bit of evidence of that today. Look, I see the 10 years down pretty big. It's down almost 10 bibs. It's a strong move.

Hoddle, I'd be curious your response to that before going to Dr. Jeff. And I also want to throw in there, because I'm curious, you know, from the boots on the ground view, You and I were talking a little bit about playing with AI before hitting record here. And I'm curious your thoughts on SpaceX kind of round-tripping the IPO launch there and going back to where they started. I think that was expected. I mean, I personally didn't trade the SpaceX IPO launch. I think if you've been looking at the way IPO has been moving for the last, I don't know, six, seven, eight, nine, ten years is that these valuations are so high that you can't, it's hard to view it as anything other than a liquidity event for insiders.

And so, you know, if your smart money either is saying, hey, I want to trade it on the way up and then bail, or I want to wait and let the market sifted over the course of like a year. I think the lockups on SpaceX were about a year long. So maybe there's still room to wait before you take a position in SpaceX if you're interested in it. This is even, by the way, this is just the financial dynamics before you even get into the business model of like, you know, is, is our space data centers the real deal? Is Elon squatting the elliptical orbits for the government? Is that, you know, it's like all this stuff. Are we going to do heavy mining in space in the future? Like we're going to start mining the moon or something.

It's like, I don't fucking know. A lot of it seems kind of retarded if I'm being straight up honest about it. I personally wouldn't invest. I personally would not invest in SpaceX. I am a little bum that Elon beat Satoshi to the trillion dollar club. I thought Satoshi was their first, you know, because at a million dollars of Bitcoin, Satoshi is a trillioner. Yeah, I think like looking at all.

And by the way, back to Joe's point, I think I take everything that Joe said. It sounds accurate to me. I am interested because we have been living in this era of jawboning for so long. I'm interested to see how it plays out when we don't happen any longer. Very interesting. Very interesting. Dr. Jeff, I'm going to be curious to your thoughts and also tagging on there in the previous conversation you guys have with pressing. You're talking a lot about the geopolitical moves.

I'm wondering how much of what's going on with Iran is still factoring into what we're seeing in the markets and your projections on where that might be going. Okay, that's pretty loaded. I'll say for Joe, first of all, you guys are all too young to remember Alan Greenspan, because this is way back in the 90s when you guys were probably still in the cradle back then. But the Kevin Warsh policy is very similar to Greenspan, right? Like he was very secretive. He did not like to give his playbook out to the general public,

and they love to surprise the markets. And it seems to me they're just going back to that old school style of doing it, which I actually kind of like personally. And I also think that they're going to take this. opportunity to update the way they do data. They've always been backwards looking. That's been a huge issue with the Fed since as long as I've been an investor. And I think they'll become a little bit more forward looking because of this.

I'm actually optimistic they'll increase their data sets and improve their data sets a little bit. Hold on. I want to read what you're saying here. Sorry. I have a quote. I just put a quote. It's right in part of the way. Yeah.

That's what I was thinking about. Yeah. Alan Greenspan, November 4th, 2025. If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said, speaking to the Senate committee. I love, like, literally, like, my goal is to obfuscate and not answer. That gives up the whole game on the Fed chairman, you know, it's like, yep. That's awesome. I think that's pretty fantastic.

To move on, Nathan, so Iran, right? So, I think it's, man, it's just super interesting, everything that was going on. So I'd love to talk to you guys Like conspiracy theories and why are we really there? And is this like are we really there for regime shift? Are we really there to stop their nuclear weapons program? Are we there to usher in the petro dollar system with Iran? Are we acknowledging that it's a multipolar world now?

And so we're I thought a very interesting headline. I think I saw two days ago was that the U.S. is now allowing Iran to sell. oil to the U.S. $4 for the first time in decades. I thought, well, that's really interesting. That's kind of what we did with Saudi Arabia in the 70s. We allowed them to sell for dollars and to place their proceeds and treasuries. And so I've long thought, and it's very interesting watching this play out in real time. So I'm curious if you guys agree with this.

But I've been saying for probably five years that I think as we move into the towards the 2030s and beyond, the world is going to coalesce into three dominant currency groups. the U.S. dollar with its treasury and petro dollar system is still going to maintain a lot of power and prestige and still be highly functional and useful. But there's going to be a growing movement of basically the China ecosystem backed by gold essentially and kind of the Luke Groman philosophy. And I tend to agree with that. And then third, I still think Bitcoin is the dark horse. And even though it's having a tough year, I still think that's kind of the third contingency, right, is the decentralized contingency. and I think that's growing faster than the other two,

it will be more prominent in the 2030s. It's probably a wash for the 2020s. But that's how I look at it. And I just think we might be seeing that actually play out in real time. And that's probably what a lot had to do with why we were in the Persian Gulf in the first place. Donald, I'll be curious your response first there. Why were we in Iran in the first place? So, you know, I only concern myself with serious geopolitics, not like these two clowns.

So I've been focusing a lot on the reflecting pool, which I think that's where all the action. Of course. What's the liner like? Is there algae? No, I'm just kidding. Listen, it should be obvious to you that we won Iran 137 times. Okay. We came out.

We kicked their ass. You know, they just did no chance. No, it's interesting because I think maybe I'm less of a conspiracy theorist than Jeff potentially. Because I think the tale of the tape here on Iran is effectively what you saw, which is the Israelis fed the Trump administration bad intel. They got them to go in an effort to do regime change. The Trump admin was pretty high on the Maduro raid, and they overestimated Iran and bit off more than they could chew. And it bit him in the ass.

And then, you know, America did have the ability to kick Iran's ass. Obviously, we sunk the whole Navy and blah, blah, blah. But we weren't prepared. We didn't have the political will for the long entrenched conflict, and the IRGC did. And so it was always going to come down to a question of political will, the American people. And we basically balked at that. And I think, you know, primarily, I think the Israeli relationship was the most damage because, you know, they're now stuck in this quagmire

with Lebanon. I think a lot of Americans viewed them as acting capricious during the conflict, defeating us bad intel. And I think that's the big story on Iran. So there's a, there's definitely a realignment happening here. And I do think it's interesting in that, you know, Trump wants to win bigly that's like his core operating principle and any you know what he does in my view geopolitically is he sort of spins the washing machine and gets the chaos going and then picks out any sort of outcome that's acceptable to him and you know the outcomes we're seeing now we're like you know there's some trade happening between Iran we're opening the straight which was always open we've reopened the straight it was never was right um I think that you know these are all wins that

Trump can say we damaged Iran, we did this, we did that, and then, you know, we're out because we didn't have the political will to continue the fight. Can I real quick, can I piggyback on that, Hald? So do you think, I'm sure you've heard that I think it was Luke Groman also who first kind of coined this is, is this going to be the U.S.'s Suez moment, like where Great Britain in 1956, I think. So do you think this is a similar situation? Do you think we kind of are going home with our tails between our leg kind of thing?

The implication there is that this is the moment you start. to see that the emperor had no clothes and that the American Empire was crumbling. And I actually think that that is an open question to be debated. Whether America is in a bid for empire, whether this is the collapse of the American Republic or the beginning of the American Empire or the collapse of the American Empire, we don't really know. History is going to say what's what, but it's very unclear to me. I can't look at it and say the American Empire is actually ending because if you look at like America's military might, It's still, you know, it's the largest military force the world has ever known.

Now, the thing is, though, there's only so many things you can do with the military. The military is sort of a scalpel. And like, the military can come in and kick your ass, but that's about all it can do. It can blow up targets, but that's about all it can do. You got to have some plans beyond just, hey, we're going to blow you up, you know? Yep. Joe, your thoughts? Well, unlike boast on X, I am not an expert on Iran or the Middle East.

I'm not. So I, so I, I, I will just tell you that from a regular person's optical view, I don't understand what the objective was. I don't understand what the, uh, end goal was. Uh, I don't think I understand fully why we're just seeing. It seems like, you know, sometimes the administration has these little things where they throw out things and then they talk about it for a while and then they kind of just abandoned it and pivot, whether it was, we need to take Greenland. let's just let's talk about that for a while then I don't know what happened we need to pick a fight with Canada let's talk about that for a while and I don't know what happened then then the discussion of you know we're going to remake global trade policy until the Supreme Court strikes it down then

we're in a table that issue and then now we look at the calendar the midterms are approaching so we need to pivot away from whatever's going on in the Middle East it seems sort of haphazard I think that you know from my standpoint the poll numbers for the president would be through the roof, if it would have just stayed focused on the economy, because I think there are plenty of indications that the economy, regardless of asset prices, is doing very well. And it's only going to get stronger with some of the recent efforts by the administration at deregulation and the tax bill that got through. That's all going to be forward investment alongside the AI boom, which is driving trillions of dollars

of capex over the next 10 years. So to me, that's the big story. I think all these things are sort of the news of the week or the news of the month. I frankly think that it's sort of not, we're not going to be talking about it, much like we aren't talking about Venezuela. Like we were talking about back in January, I think six, seven months for now, we're not going to be talking about Iran. That's just my view.

Interesting. I do want to double tap on that. First and foremost, one, if you guys like Canada, particularly Alberta, would welcome some freedom. So if you want to focus the attention there, not a problem. Welcome me in, open arms. And then, too, Joe, what indicators for the economy were you specifically referring to that are looking so good.

Well, I mean, look, you can look at the jobs data. We've had some of that trending up month over month now for three months. Atlanta Fed, GDP now give you the most recent revision on that. We're looking at printing, let's see here, 3%. Now, okay, that may not seem like a huge number, but most of the CBO, the budget office data, most of the Fed's own projections, they say that, For a developed economy, like the United States, baseline growth is roughly around 2%. So the difference between 2% to 3% growth is a big deal.

You know, we just saw a little bit of slowing in the latter part last year, early part of this year, completely reversing course. So to me, I think that's all very optimistic. I think the economy is in a good place. Asset prices, you know, regardless of where the economies are that, they can go up or down. We all know that. I think sometimes we get confused that, you know, if there's a bear market and assets, that that means there's a bare market in the overall economy, and that's not necessarily true. I would agree with what, you know, Chair Warsh said, which is like it seems uneven, right,

there are clearly sectors and areas that for years now, you know, manufacturing, for example, have been languishing, but there's some green shoots there. I mean, I'd be curious what Jeff thinks about that, but overall, right, if you talk about an aggregate number, which is what the whole economic growth picture is supposed to be, and as a whole, I think the economy remains relatively strong. When I first got into Bitcoin, I was overwhelmed. The jargon, the security risks, the fear that one mistake could cost everything. I remember staring at my screen and wondering, are my keys safe?

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So I built BTC mentor. I recruited the best Bitcoin educators on the planet to work with you one-on-one. Real experts, real answers, personalized hands-on guidance tailored to your exact situation. Whether you're brand new or building a complex setup, we meet you where you're at and walk with you step by step. By the end, you don't just hope your Bitcoin is safe. You know it is. If you're ready for that level confidence, then head to btcmentor.io and book a call with us today. Jeff, before you jump in, I kind of want to add to, I'm curious your thoughts on the overall health of the U.S. economy right now.

And I want to add that like, well, I agree with everything that Joe said, but then I look at things like new home sales was now in 60K, I think I saw it today too. And it looks to me like real estate market is kind of freezing out, which makes sense. Like if you refinance during the lows there with yields this high, you're kind of stuck with your 30-year mortgage. Can't port that you're not going elsewhere. But maybe that's just purely reflection of the move that treasuries are made. Is there anything that would maybe suggest that the economy is not doing so well, or do you agree with Joe's outlook? I agree with Joe's outlook that like, so first of all, there are two different things, right? So the markets, the financial markets are different from the economy itself. And so

the economy itself is actually doing pretty well right now. Manufacturing is robust. In fact, I was just checking out earlier, new orders that came in for the last month. They were at 56.8. So that's, that's very strong and accelerating. So that's good. So I think the manufacturing sector in the U.S. good. That's like generally good for like blue collar main street America. That's what you want to see. And it's distinct though from the financial market. So I think we need to see more of that. We've had so much financialization in this country over the last basically since the GFC. It's just been all financialization. You could argue before that too with the whole housing bubble. And then before that with the dot com bubble, it was just financialization, financialization, financialization.

Everybody who is smart went in to become a hedge fund manager or work in finance or go work for Goldman, you know, we're finally getting back to a rotation now where it's cool, right, to work with your hands again and to actually build something. That's great for America. So I actually applaud what the Trump administration is doing in that arena. I think it's just not necessarily good or bad for the financial markets. So I just think it's going to be kind of a blah year going forward. Everything has been, there's been this fire hose, as I talked about at the very beginning, fire hose into all things AI, energy, rare earths, those sorts of things. I think that you're going to continue with that, but as Joe said, markets are forward-looking. So they've already seen what's

coming and they've priced that in accordingly. I think going forward into the second half of this year, it's unlikely that that will continue. So that's why I think we're going to start seeing this sort of rotation from these just semiconductors, which are just off the charts and, you know, these AI companies, which these, just these freaky evaluations. And for good reason, revenues are off the charts as well. But that's not, you can't, you can't continue moving exponentially for too long. At some point, you got a hockey stick back down. And then I think we get a rotation back into kind of the industrial sector. We continue to see those sorts of things into, you know, base metals. Who has cared about base metals for the last 10 years? Nobody. So like things like steel factories and aluminum,

titanium, a copper, those sorts of things. Those are, those are going to get sexy again, I think, for the next five years. And so that, that excites me as an investor. I love to see that rotation, it's actually got real 70s, 1970s vibes again, where hard assets outperform financial assets. So looking forward to that and I'm looking forward to even just the second half of this year to see how this progresses. Love it. Haudel, I love to get your thoughts and I want to tag on there, too, just speaking of AI. I know that you've been vibe coding like a madman on the ground there. I'm curious if you think it's going to have a major impact on jobs or productivity one way or the other. Is it hype? Is it going to hurt the economy or are we good to go? Yeah, personally, I think if you look at,

everybody seems to be under the impression that AI is coming for all the jobs, right? And this was the same thing that people thought in the Industrial Revolution, that, you know, industrialization was coming for all the jobs, right? And there was a lot of creative destruction during the Industrial Revolution. Obviously, we got new jobs, but, you know, more people were. And basically the concept is Jevin's paradox, right? Where, like, you have an invention, a discovery, a technology that's supposed to create efficiencies, but because of the efficiencies, you get more usage, that more usage creates more jobs.

I think that's what we're going to see. And if you look at like sort of the high line data on like, you know, computer engineers, that's like an area where you would think you would see the most displacement if there was any in terms of job loss. And when we look at that data, we see there's effectively none. And in fact, like there are many new computer engineers being hired because what you discover when you vibe code up a project is, oh, it's hilariously insecure. Like cybersecurity has been set back to 1998. And you, the person who vibe coded it, you know, Claude was just like, do you want to do this shit? And you're like, yeah, of course, Claude.

Boop-to-boop. Make it happen for us. And then you're like, you don't know what design decisions you've made. You don't know where your secrets are being kept. You know, I mean, and people who know what they're doing can just look at your vibe-coded shit slop website and just hack right into it because you probably stored your, you know, environment variables and your secrets like in the cloud, like in a way that's like easily accessible. because you don't know what you're doing. So when you have that situation happen, what do you got to do? You got to hire a software engineer.

You got to have somebody come in and clean up all the spaghetti code or rebuild the website from scratch in a way that makes sense. And so that's more jobs. Like more things are going to be created. And so there are going to be more jobs on the back of it. So yeah, I'm not buying the story about AI coming for everybody's jobs. And in fact, most of the people I know aren't even using AI. I mean, it's like it's still stuck at the early adopter phase where like, yeah,

because Bitcoin is full of early adopters, we have kind of a meopic view where we're like, everyone, everyone's doing vibe coding. Everyone's on Claude. Everyone's on code. Everyone's on codex. Everybody's doing this. Not true at all.

Talk to your friends like at the barbecue for Fourth of July, your friends and family. They will not know shit about this. Maybe they will have used Gemini to send an email. Oh, yeah, work with something in. We used co-pilot, blah, blah, blah. But most of them have no clue what's happening. Love it.

Joe, your thoughts. I'm curious if it's made its way into the, legal profession yet if you're starting to see it used across the board or not really seeing it used all the time i'm happy to say i think i'm like i don't know 40 and oh against pro se gpt drafted complaints to getting them dismissed uh it's it's an epidemic uh definitely causing a lot more capacity issues for people filing lawsuits and then people having to defend the lawsuits so good time to be part of the defense bar um you know here's the thing The technology, I think, makes, it's a leveling, okay, it's a leveling.

There were, there were comparative advantages, I think, with bigger law firms and different entities that were able to basically leverage manpower to then bring about great results for people. So you go to a firm that has 30 associates ready, willing, and able to draft a complaint. And again, the initial draft of the associates was never really solid. it was not really ready for prime time filing. You need to get a partner's blessing for it. That initial sort of grunt work, right? That's sort of being taken care of a lot by some of these tools.

That being said, I have yet to see a tool in application in a particular circumstance where it was perfect, where I said, that's ready for filing. I've never seen that. So what does that mean? That means that the need for those entry-level positions, those entry-level analysts or lawyers or accountants, a lot of that need is sort of mitigated against, but it also increases the need for the higher levels. Okay, it increases the highest level of specialty and it increases their output. So it puts a lot more of a demand for the season litigators. And I think it actually

makes it harder for some of the people working out, which again is going to be something I see in a political sense that fosters this sort of generational divide. We've already kind of seen it. the beginnings of, you know, the zoomers and millennials having angst against the older folks, but I think it's going to exacerbate. And then you have to package it in. This may seem unrelated, but I think it really is related with all of the advancements we're seeing in medicine that are going to extend the lifespan of the boomers and Gen Xers, I think far beyond what anybody ever anticipated.

I think the amount of medical innovation that's coming down, I was reading a book about this recently, it's going to be unprecedented in the next 10 years, supplemented by the discoveries from large language models and AI and analysis. So what do you do with all that? What do you do with all that is you have to like almost restructure your society. You have to go back to the social contract because, you know, before when Social Security's put in place, you had like one guy out of five that lived the B-65 and draw on it. Now you're going to have everybody, right?

So like, so you can't continue to have this push and pull where you have younger generations really taking it on the teeth and older generations are. accruing all the benefits because they happen to be born in the right calendar year. That's not helpful. And that's why, like, I've always said, I think that one area disagreement I have with a lot of, you know, some of the more macro-dumist is that I think that ultimately the revolution is not going to come from an economic issue. It's going to come from a political issue.

I think the politics are going to drive everything over the next 10, 15 years. I think you have to look at what's brewing, particularly what's brewing on the far left. in the United States. You know, I just saw yesterday New York primaries, many of Mondami's back candidates all like one. They trunch some establishment candidates.

I'm really looking, I mean, to me, and people aren't going to like this, but I think, honestly, you get to January, the Trump administration is effectively old news. You're going to have candidates announcing for presidency in January and February, Q1 of 2027. So then all eyes,

all attention, you know, yeah, you could say whatever was going on, Donald, keep tweeting. But they're going to be like, okay, is it going to be Rubio or is it going to be Vance? Is it going to be an AOC or a Newsom? I mean, that starts guys in like six months, which is nothing. I mean, they'll be here before you know it. We'll be sitting on this program drinking Christmas cocktails and we'll be talking about who's next present going to be and why Hoddle's backing J.D. Vance for all, I can't figure

it out why. But, you know. I like Rubio. We're on to Rubio now. I'm going for AOC. I'm going for the entertainment value. I think that would be just way too much fun. Jeff, I want to get your response to that.

But I also want to tag in, like Joe, you got an interesting observation that I, in terms of almost like going back to the social contract aspect, is that I agree that like AI is empowering more senior mid-level kind of people in every field to just they don't need the entry level positions anymore. But how do you possibly get on like the career ladder coming out of university if there's no need for entry to begin?

Yeah, it's a paradox, right? Like, like, you know, we were blessed. I always say like I really enjoy the fact that like I came up in an era where I had a ton of like experience of like drafting a crappy brief, right, doing bad work and realizing why it is bad. Now the, I swear there's, I'm having substantive conversations with folks that are younger attorneys and it's very difficult to get them to flex those muscles because they have delegated and deferred to LLMs. And it.

They did it during their education process now. You know, I have a buddy. He tells me at university he's become a full-time plagiarism detector. Like he's getting these essays that are beautifully written and they're fantastic. But then he'll ask them, you know, okay, you read the sound and the fury, who is the main protagonist? And the guy won't be able to name the main protagonist. Like literally, that's the only way to vet this out.

So you have a lot of pretending going on. You see this in art. We see this in whole aspects of society. and to me, like the pretenders will be exposed. Now, you may say it doesn't matter if you're pretender because we can just shut off her brains and let the machines do it. I would caution you that I don't think that's going to come to fruition. I think those who are pretending will be exposed, and it's going to be very hard for them in this economy to do really well. I think I want to push back a little bit here and say that I think it's going to be like

post-08, you know, if you were a millennial who was coming out of college, post-08, post-grade financial crisis, it was fucking difficult to get a job, like really difficult. And nobody was hiring and nobody wanted to hire you. And so a lot of millennials ended up doing very millennial type jobs, which were social media manager, social media marketing, you know, things of this nature. And I think that, you know, the same story is going to be true for the Zoomers and AI. It's like AI change agent, you know, AI nativist. Like, that's a job in and of itself. So like you should just take the new. I think the worst thing that Zoomers are doing for themselves is, you know, booing,

like when they booed, you know, what's his face from Google? Eric, it's like, listen, the technology's here. It exists. There's nothing you can fucking do about it. And I get it. It sucks if you're coming out of college. And the, you know, the billionaire character is telling you like, well, it's a great opportunity, you know, we're going to displace all of you and like, fuck yourself, right?

That sucks to hear. But it is true. We heard the same thing back in 08, boomers, by the way, it's always, the boomers. The boomers are always doing this. Nobody likes to eat their young more than the boomers. Will the boomers always be the villain? Like, will they ever like set sail? I don't know.

The seniors fucking destroyed this country, Joe. So yes. Yes, they will always be the villain. There's going to be a bunch of boomer in comments. Not all boomers. Not me. Not me. Every time.

Yes. It was you. It was fucking you. You did it. Okay. Jeff? I don't know which part of that to talk about. I want you're coming on boomers.

Coming on boomers. Boomers first and foremost. Do you dislike boomers as much as Hottle? I like boomers because they take all the crap and I'm just a Gen Xer that gets no love, no hate. I'm just some dude in the middle. Nobody cares. And so I don't expect anything from anybody. Nobody gives me anything.

I don't care. What does that generation again? I never heard of that one. Yeah. Something in between the millennials and the boomers. I think the Gen Xers are going to be rising with like Rubio. I think it's finally, I think there's a bit of a pushback in terms of because because boomers maintain those positions of power and authority for so long,

but they're kind of, like you've pushed it pretty far. They're starting to have to rotate out or they're kind of getting taken out. That I think over the next five years, you're going to see a major shift in terms of Gen X in positions of power, and I have no idea the implications of it, but I find it interesting. Well, you know, I'm a, sorry, go ahead.

Go ahead. I was going to push back on what Joe said that the boomers are going to live to 100 or whatever. That shit is just straight up not fucking true. The bell curve has already started and the boomers are dying off. And these medical advancements ain't coming. It's bullshit. Like what they're going to be able to do is they're going to be able to help you before problems arise.

Fair enough. Jeff, your thoughts are. You froze for a little bit of that huddle, but I think we caught it. You get the gist. Yeah, yeah. Well, speaking of that, I'll just piggyback onto that. Like aliens, I will believe longevity and eternal life when I see it.

So I'm kind of like hoddle. Like I don't yet believe that taking some pill or some medicine is going to allow us to live 20 years longer. So we'll see. I mean, even everybody is so, you know, awestruck by the gLP ones, which basically helps people to get sick when they eat carbs. So they have a low carb diet. And now they're losing all this weight and they're having less joint replacements and they're having less complications related to obesity and they have less diabetes and they have less infections and they have less high blood pressure. And that's like, yeah, that's what happens when you eat less carbs. And so like it's not that it's necessarily a miracle drug, even though it's really going to help America because we have

this chronic carb toxicity culture that we've had since the early 80s, basically. And so now we're just seeing the effects of this is what happens to a culture when you don't have chronic massive carb toxicity. So that's what I have to say about that. So I'm skeptical. Count me as a skeptical that we're going to live forever and the boomers are going to live forever once, you know. We're not going to live forever. We're not going to live forever. But life expects to see hit a record high this year. And it will trickle up. And if you do the basic regression of how we've advanced life expectancy over the last five years, you're going to be getting a lot more people who live in to be 90.

I agree with that. Totally agree with that. Yeah. Oh. The boomers are elderly and the millennials are middle age. Stop coping. Okay. I swear to God, I talk to millennials who are like, I'm not middle age.

Like, dude, you're 40. Yeah, you're middle of the middle. Right. I'll tell you, as a former doctor, 40 is when you hit 40. that's when stuff starts happening. You start growing hair in weird places. You start getting weird diseases. Your bottles don't.

You go, you got to wear glasses. You start talking about poop with your friends and how you don't sleep while at night, all that kind of stuff. And then wait until you hit 50. It's just unbelievable. Okay, quickly,

just want to make a side note because it's just something that drives me insane. I don't know if you guys have seen. I think it's Brian Johnson, like the longevity guy on X. I don't know why my brain hates him. He just looks and seems so unbelievably weird to me that I just don't want to be associated.

It's the paleness of his skin. Is that what it is? Yeah, it seems unnaturally pale because he avoids sunlight like a vampire. I mean, that's basically it. I really think that's a big deal. It's also because we all know that he's going to die at like 82, like a normal age, and some French grandmother who drinks Dr. Pepper and smokes cigarettes is going to live to be 112, you know, and it's like, what was the point, man?

What was the point? My wife's side of the family. They're all diabetic and they smoke all the time, but for some reason they just never die. They're just fine. They're French. They'll just last forever. It doesn't particularly matter. You're dead on, right. Hoddle. Okay. The other thing that we have not spoken about at all really so much during this conversation is the good and old and fun and Bitcoin. Hodel, on the last conversation you had with Preston, you said that the cycles were dead. And the cycle is still dead? I still believe that. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of people who are like, this is a cycle. It looks like a

cycle. Feels like one. I don't know. I think that we're now in an era where, um, you know, Listen, there's always a reflexive phenomenon with if there's a lot of early Bitcoin holders because of the speed of the supply issuance curve that Satoshi put in, there's a lot of early Bitcoin OGs that have a lot of Bitcoin. So if they have a lot of Bitcoin and they believe in cycles and they start selling their Bitcoin, it can have a reflexive phenomenon where it sort of causes an air quotes cycle, right? But if you think to yourself about like how Bitcoin is going to go forward from here, it kind of makes no sense for there to be cycles because then it's not an asset.

that you can hold. It's just an asset to trade. And if it's just an asset to trade, it has no, it has no reason to exist and it will just go out of existence. That's my view. So that's why I'm sort of anti-cycle. And also, if you look at it from a cycle perspective, well, okay, this is, you know, yeah, the price went up and then the price went down. And nominally, it was a lot of money because it's tens of thousands of dollars, but like this is nothing like what 2017 felt like. That was, that was a cycle, you know, I mean, it was like, bam, and then all the way back down to earth. This feels like the bull market fell gradual. The bear market feels gradual.

I don't know. Maybe that's all just diminished returns and the cycles are, you know, there's all this like stupid cycle talk where we're just like, well, yeah, but I mean, I think the cycles are, you know, they're lengthening, they're shortening. They're getting big. They're getting small. You know what I mean? Like, it's like all, like, we're trying to like fit this.

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for 100% Year 1 bonus depreciation. Learn more at abundantmines.com slash sessions. Okay, I got something. Okay, go for it, Jeff. Yeah, let me jump in here. So two things. One, I think we're all bitter because we didn't get the exponential move higher in the fourth quarter of 2025. So we're all still bitter, right? And so I was also saying, I think the four-year cycles dead. But it's pretty uncanny how it did end in October like it should have. And it looks like it might not start again until October 2026. I'll just throw that out there because I keep saying the four-year cycle's dead also. And then I keep being proven wrong. And it really bothers me because that doesn't make any sense to me. And then, but second, Joe and Honnold, you guys, I don't know Nathan how long you've been around, but like, isn't this just like both 2018 and 2022? So, no, hold on. Hold on, Joe. Don't shake your head. Hold on. Remember 2018 when we were just getting beaten down in the ICO, all these companies that were super popular in 2017. And they just kept getting beat down, getting beat down. And that kept indirectly hammering Bitcoin. And it just couldn't, it was like it just kept getting punched while it was trying to get up. And then in 2022, when we had all that bare market nonsense.

and everything was terrible. And then all these centralized exchanges just got getting, just getting, you know, going bankrupt. And they all had to sell their Bitcoin and it just kept beating down the price, beaten down the price. And you're like, what is going on? This is insane. And now we got the Bitcoin treasury companies doing stupid stuff and over extending themselves.

And it's just beating down the price again. And it feels to me actually very similar. I just think this. And we all talked about this, I think, on Preston's show quarters ago, that we think that, you know, the Bitcoin treasury companies are going to be the focal point of the bare market and some of them are going to go bust or get crushed or lose a lot of Bitcoin because of stupid financial decisions they made during the bull market. So I think it feels a lot like 2022 when the centralized exchanges were getting hammered

and now the Bitcoin treasury companies are getting hammered. I'll hear your guys' thoughts on that. I'll let Joe go first. Okay. So first off, if anybody's lived through those cycles, okay? And I had a tweet about this the other day. Bitcoin's sell-off was relentless. It was relentless, particularly 2018, right?

2018, you had this massive drawdown, and then you had us coasting for part of the year around 6K, and then when the SBB, BSV, whatever it was called, when that thing broke, that's where you broke 6K and had the capitulatory bottom. We are at the same level we were back in February, okay? Back in February. Now, what I want to point out for people is that during the core,

unquote bull year of the cycle. Bitcoin went last year. They forget this. It went to $75,000, okay? Which again, like in terms of decline on a volatile asset like Bitcoin, that's like a 20% decline from where we're at right now. Okay. So like to me, like I think categorically that it's moving very differently. You don't have the blow off top. You had an all time high before you even had the having, right, which is, which is an interesting sort of dynamic. You had these up and down range moves in the high 100s, you know, for a long time. And then you had basically a bottom, I think, you know, if not here, close to here, right? So to me, like what I see, when I see the Bitcoin price, I mean, I just, well, I'm talking here, we were under 59K and we recovered 60,000

while we've been on the podcast. So you're all welcome for putting in the bottom yet again. But my point is that like, like, I think you see all these indications that Bitcoin is trading in a less volatile range. It's trading. It's trading. differently than past cycles. That's, again, to Hoddle's point, maybe that means we're not going to see the high-flying, you know, two, three-xes in short periods. But we also might not see a much more significant drawdown.

If you look at any of the past bare markets, every single one, if you want to just measure a calendar, you say calendars, all that matters, we were substantially lower at a relative basis from the peak than where we are right now. Okay, I have the data on tweet. I can pull up the tweet. I just give you the exact numbers,

but I went and crunched it, right? By June, for example, in 2020, okay, in 2022, when we had the peak in November, by June, we were, let's see here, we were 72% down, 72% down. Now, to put that in context, if you're saying, oh, it's just another typical cycle from the top in October, if we were to do 72% down, guys, that would be. be effectively $35,000 Bitcoin. I can just jump in here. So in mid-2020,

people were saying, are we going to have a similar bear market? And I said back then, it depends on how high the bull market goes. It depends if we get a blow-off top, then the bear market will be much more painful. I think the reason why we're having such a non-painful drawdown is because we had such a wimpy blow-off top in Q4 of 2025. That's my take. Right. It seems like, oh, good.

No, just, I mean, I'm saying, like, this is the problem with it, right? Like, everybody can say after the fact, oh, it's so easy, just sell in Q4. Okay, but if you sold in Q4, okay, you not only have to pick when you're going to sell, but when's you're going to back buy, like, are you going to buy at 60? Are you going to wait for 40 and 30? You know, if you're buying right here and you sold back in Q4, congratulations. You nailed it, right? You guarantee that you have more Bitcoin than you did previously.

But, you know, I hear a ton of people saying, we're going to wait till Q4 of this year. Like Jeff said, that's when the bottom is going to be. What if it doesn't bottom in Q4? What if in Q4 we're in the $80,000 range? Are you going to buy back in then? To me, that's not that big, you know, it's just, it's so much more of a challenge to time both the bottom, but also time to the top, scumming, time to the top, but also the time to bottom. You have to get both. Well, the obvious answer is limit order at 58K, but Hoddle, your thoughts.

I mean, so I'm a hodler, right? Which means my behavior is unchanged by price. And I am here just for the ride of the whole thing. And I know for a fact that I'll be holding Bitcoin when it, you know, reaches its next high. And if Bitcoin has a low in Q4, I'll be holding them. Right. So like for me, this is all just sort of an emotional roller coaster ride that I'm on. And I'm on it all the time.

I've been on it for decade plus at this point. And I do have some hard one lessons along the way. And one of which is that when everybody expects Bitcoin to do something, it don't do that shit, just to put it bluntly. Right. So like I think a lot of people are expecting the Q4 drawdown. And I just, I don't see it happening because so many people are sidelined and they're not, you know, taking a position at this moment in time.

And maybe those people are smarter than I am. And, you know, we're going to 32K or something and they're going to get just the This is amazing buy. And if that happens, good for them. I'll be hoddling. So for me, it's largely unchanged. It's just sort of more for entertainment purposes. That said, I don't see any, there is no law of the universe that's dictating why Bitcoin

is going to trade this way or that way or the other way. I mean, like, so I've given up on all of those. Like, that's my big broad point. It's like, I find it kind of a waste of time to just keep talking about cycles over and over again, especially when I have no desire to trade on any of it. So it's just me sitting here being like, yeah, is you just cycle this, cycle that, whatever. Fuck it.

I've given up on all cycle discussion. No more. I don't want to hear it anymore. I love it, Joe. Yeah, I'm curious Hoddle and Jeff's take on the big orange elephant in the room, our good friend, Michael Saylor. I'm not, I go on to spaces occasionally, because I enjoy pain and I enjoy absurdist arguments.

And the most recent one of the day is that Sailor is responsible for Bitcoin's price action, that Bitcoin is depressed because of Sailor's decision to acquire a ton of Bitcoin, to tap the ATM, to engage in financial engineering, that he's destroyed. I'm just repeating these things. Don't quote me as saying these things. Okay, anybody in the comments. I'm just repeating what I've heard. I've heard he squeezed out the volatility.

No institutions want to buy it because of him. He's crushing Bitcoin as a technology. I'm curious, either of you have thoughts on this because this is the one thing I wanted to talk about. I got a question for you. Michael Saylor's mother never meets Michael Saylor's father. What is the Bitcoin price today? Michael Saylor never exists. I think it's the same.

Me too. So do I. Okay. Jeff, responding to Joe's question. Sailor's Impact, what's going on right now? What are your thoughts? I also want to point out that, by the way, sorry, just quickly.

I think we're in a bottom. I think we've definitely bottom, and I'm purely just basing that on, I can see in the YouTube analytics, I can see in the sentiment in all the infighting, the apathy seems like it hasn't been high for a long time. Nobody gives this shit and everybody hates each other. This feels like a bottom to me.

Right. This is classic bare market bottom stuff. And my point about it is I think you don't have a V-shaped bottom in a bare market. You have a bumbling along, bottom. I kind of think of it in my mind as like you're walking on the bottom of like a muddy swamp and it just kind of like sucks and it's slow going and up and down and you don't really go anywhere for months and months. So I still don't see a light at the end of the tunnel, but I think that we are in the region of the bottom. And I'm a momentum guy. One thing, and I put this out on a report lately,

any time in the past since I've been involved with Bitcoin and been watching it since about 2015, if you can buy it at or near or below the 200 week moving average, you do not regret it in general. Historically speaking, you have not regretted that decision. And I think there's no reason to think that this time is going to be different personally. So again, not individual investment advice.

Sailor, well, first of all, going back to what Hoddle said earlier too, I just saving Bitcoin. I think it's a superior form of money. I think it's the way to separate money from government. I believe that for many,

many years, I use Bitcoin like money. So when I get paid and I pay my bills and then I put the rest of it in Bitcoin, if I have leftovers, when I have to make a major purchase, I spend my Bitcoin. And when I don't, I save in Bitcoin. So like, I don't try to time it. And I, and we talk about all this stuff because people just eat this stuff up like price predictions and all this. But I don't care at all. I'm just like, I just buy it, you know, and saving it. And I don't care if it's a hundred, if it's a million dollars, I'm still going to be saving it. And if it's, you know, $5,000 per Bitcoin. I'm going to. to be saving in Bitcoin. So anyways, so that's my little digression. I think most people should do that.

Sailor, so I was a fan of what Sailor was doing initially and the Bitcoin treasury concept initially. I liked it. I like the thought of sort of milking Wall Street for their dollars to get that capital to flow into Bitcoin. I think like lots of people, they get enticed by if something is good, isn't doing a lot more of it even better. And I think that they, went too far. And I think they encouraged other people and other companies to go too far and to basically be irresponsible and kind of stupid. And so I went from being a big fan of what they're doing to actually like, I don't like this behavior. And then seeing the response, and again, I'm not pro or against sailor, watching the response has been very disappointing to me, the sort of denying, you know,

that I said something or didn't say something, the denying that maybe we made a mistake. I just like humble people who admit they were wrong, right? Like if you do something stupid and you make miss, just just admit it. Say, I shouldn't. We went too far. Sorry, we're going to sell some of this Bitcoin back and we're going to stabilize our balance sheet and we're going to slow down a little bit. I think that would be go just really far in the community. But they're kind of just taking the denial aspect.

Why do they sell 32 Bitcoin? Why? Well, they said they were going to on their last. I know they said they were going to, but why? They said they were going to because there is, it's tax benefits sitting, like, just laying there that they can just walk over and pick it up. So they were selling it. They sold 3200 Bitcoin. Yeah.

It's not the, I'll give you a reason. Is like, I just, I just want to, before you go, that doesn't make sense. But you are going to, if you're going to capture taxes, you don't sell 32. You could sell. Yeah, real quick. They did it just as a little trial to say like, just so you know, we're going to do that. I just want you all to get used to the fact that we're going to be doing this. Here's a teeny little bit of teeny little sale just to get you used to it.

That's why I think they did just a small market. And the market freaked out. So my point is like that you're correct. I agree with that. It's a test, test sale. And they realize that, oh, if we do this in mass, if we're selling thousands of Bitcoin, the market's probably not going to like that. You know, go ahead.

I'll, I've been, I don't know. I mean, you guys, you guys are right. It's definitely, it's more than it being a test sale, what it is, it's a purposeful narrative violation. They wanted to break the narrative that Michael has been trotting out for four or five years at this point that they will never sell Bitcoin. They wanted to break that narrative. And I think the reason why they wanted to break that narrative is because if that narrative is in place, this is my theory, right, is that if that narrative is in place, they have a harder time going to their, their lenders, because their lenders essentially have them over a barrel because

they know they can't sell. So they need some, you know, they need to add some dynamic quality here and some flexibility so that they have the ability to sell their Bitcoin as needed to do what they need to do. Do you think that's what it did? Did the sale actually get? No, I think it accomplished the goal of the narrative violation. I mean, would they have preferred it to the reason they did such a small sales because obviously they were trying not to spook the market, but the market is like if you're doing

a test transaction, which is, by the way, in Bitcoin, we all do test transactions. This is effectively a test transaction. If you're doing a test transaction, then a big transaction is on the way. And a lot of the talk about MSTR to me on Twitter is like it's just rampant MSTR conspiracy hour on Twitter for the last few weeks. And it reminds me a lot of gray scale, gray scale conspiracy hour in 2022 or yeah, 2021, 2022, like the end of 21. No, that would have been like the end of 22.

We were having gray scale conspiracy hour. And the reason why it reminds me of that is because, effectively, anytime there's like a large pool of coins sitting in one spot, especially when the Bitcoin price starts to go down, Bitcoiners get really nervous that that entity is going to puke those coins. And then they go into overdrive, thinking about all the possible scenarios in which that entity will puk those coins. And like with gray scale,

people were saying things like, they don't even have the coins. They don't even exist. They sold. They were hacked. The coins have been gone forever. Right. And with MSTR, you know,

now they're saying things like MSTR is going to do this huge sale and whatever. And unfortunately, MSTR, when they did their narrative violation on purpose, you know, it added, it added fuel to the fire of these speculations. And I don't think that was their intention, but that's what happened because the market was in a temperamental place. But that seems to have backfired because, yeah, okay, let's just go back. They sold on or about the June 1st, right? Bitcoin went down 20% for a sale of $2.5 million with a Bitcoin, went down 20%. So the idea that this was somehow going to, increase their leverage with lenders. I mean, if I'm a lender and I say, you sold $2 million and you collapsed the price by 20%, that doesn't seem compelling. I'd be curious. I'd be curious you guys' thoughts on this, because I'll just, for anyone in the comments

right now, I'm an idiot, I know nothing. So this is just me kind of going outside my wheelhouse a little bit. But I feel like almost the sailor, the strategy story is somewhat coming to an end. And I even feel this recent sale that there's a need for that company to leave the Bitcoin space. Like any Bitcoin or adoption that MSTR is going to get, you've already completely saturated that market. You need to go beyond it. And to the Hoddle's point of having the narrative violation, it feels like they at some point had to kind of leave us behind and try and go for larger pools, larger capitals, new markets, new friends.

And this is kind of part of that transition. And because I'm looking at it, I think last time I checked, the operating business is bringing in something like 40 to 42 million per month. And their dividend obligations, I think, are over 100 million. So the operating business isn't sufficient to supply the dividends that they have to pay out now. So it's either like you've got to find other ways of generating, getting more capital coming in, or you're going to have to somehow grow the operating business. But I feel like they may be, this may be like early signs of they've done all in Bitcoin with Bitcoiners that they can and they look to something else. I'll even say like, it's not a shot at all.

I've been bringing it up on the live stream is kind of for fun. But like Brunel just had a wonderful in-person interview with Sailor. And the comparative views on that to a year ago tells me that the, the audience isn't necessarily interested and he's got to find somewhere else to hang out. Anybody jump in. I'll go for it. Listen, man, I've done this myself. I've been like, fucking on Twitter, like number one hoddle guy.

I'm fucking American Idol. I'll never sell you. You sell you're a bitch. Fuck yourself. And then, you know, I decided I like not working more than I like working. And I was like, I'm going to take a few years off. And I got to sell a little Bitcoin to do that. So like I violated my own narrative.

But am I any less committed to Bitcoin? The answer is no. but it is a narrative violation, you know. But look, we constantly learn this lesson. I don't care if it is altcoins, shit coins, I don't care if it's NFTs, I don't care if it's call options or MSTR or other Bitcoin treasuries. Bitcoin is going to outperform over the long run. You have these little runs, and this is, this is partly the, I think, part of the explanation

for the muted returns in 2025. Last time it was all about altcoins, right, and NFTs and all that crap. then people are piling into treasury companies and levered plays on Bitcoin. And that capital went into MSTR. Well, okay, just on a relative basis since, I'll give you the math, since October, actually, let's go from November, from November of 2024, okay, when Trump was elected, MSTR has underperformed Bitcoin by 60%. We've been better off holding Bitcoin.

Easily. It's not even close. 60%. And people were making this argument. it's a leverage play on Bitcoin. We're going into a bull market, Supercycle man. All you have to do is hold levered plays like MSTR,

and that again is disproven. The last year. Rest and peace, Gideator. Rest in peace, 410. I completely agree. It's almost like the human bias to do something. We always get so bored, but the simple answer is like you don't necessarily need

the GLP ones. You probably just need to eat less sugar and go to exercise. You probably don't need to lever up MSTR or get into stretch or any of these other things. You probably need to buy Bitcoin and sit on your ass and do nothing. But you had Nathan, I mean, Hottle just brought it up, our good friend, Gladiator.

I remember talking to him at the, I remember our good friend, we were talking to him at the point, and he owned like zero Bitcoin. He didn't even understand Bitcoin, but he was fully ported into MSTR. And not just MSTR, leveraged MSTR, like the triple X leverage. There was like an article. I put my whole parent's retirement into the triple X leverage MSTR ETF. Is that for real? Yeah. That's awesome. I think it was in the Wall Street Journal. It was a crazy time. I ran into him at Sailor's Party, by the way. I hope he's doing well. I like the kid, but yeah, it was, you know,

I've said this many times on pods, but I stole it from Francis Pouillette, who said that people think leverage as a time machine to being an OG, and it's not. Like, you are in Bitcoin now at 60K today, and, you know, that's a good opportunity. If Bitcoin is going to fucking millions of dollars of coin, 60K is an amazing opportunity. So you can't say, I wish this amazing opportunity was even better.

You know what I mean? You basically have Sidney, Sidney Sweeney wants to sleep with you. And you're like, could I sleep with you and your friend? No. Dude, she's going to, she's not going to want to do that, man. This is the article. Go for it, Joe. No, I'm just saying, he moved all of his investments worth about 120, 112,000, the defiance

ETF. Defiance ETF is the levered MSTR. Do you know the date of that? I can tell you in a second. Be curious. Well, you're pulling that up. I just want to highlight too. Like right now, we're looking at 59,600, 682 per Bitcoin. And that's about 2K, little, actually no, close to 3K under the 200 week moving average. Going to that idea of having leverage is the way to teleport to.

Okay, mine's outdated. Thank you, sir. Either way, I think we're still under the. 200-week moving average. And that idea of like trying to port yourself through time with leverage is not like, I agree that. I think, again, not financial advice, monetary advice. I think now is a phenomenal time, if you haven't already,

to continue buying, to continue stacking more Bitcoin. I remember during the last having, I rarely get like an emotional response to anything going on in Bitcoin these days, particularly like price related. But I remember when at the last halving, having a bit of a panic, thinking, oh, fuck, I've run out of time. My ability to accumulate that this is going to run away from me so fast, I'm never going to be able to hit those accumulation goals.

I'm screwed. I'm kind of stuck here. I'll just have to live with that. That hasn't been the case. And that's absolutely been a blessing, not a curse. Jeff, any thoughts? Joe, did you find the date? I did find the date.

The date of the article here apparently is, you know, December of 2024. December. I'm just looking. So the price of MSTX, I say, seem that's what they're talking about, the Defiance Daily 2X long. It was about 780, somewhere in that range. And now it's now, and it's, now it's $9.

$9. Oh my God. It was too optimistic. Well, it just, after hours it jumped at 9.40. Leverage will wreck you, dude. Leverage will fuck you up. Don't do it. Just save.

Pretty much every time I played around with leverage, I've gotten burn. You know, so it's like good lessons to learn. It sucks, but it's good lesson to learn. Hopefully you don't learn it with your whole stack. 100%. All right. So, boys, making sure we round out a bit of the end. And I'd love to have you all back to do this again,

maybe in a couple months or closer to the end of the year. Jeff, I'll start with you. Looking forward, looking past the summer, we've all had a boring, we've had a lovely summer. The weather's been great. We're coming into the fall. We're just approaching where we're going to start thinking about the next presidential race.

End of the year, October. What are you kind of thinking? What are you seeing? What's your outlook right now? Are we just still kind of grinding along? Do you think they were seeing any changes in markets overall? They're like, no clue at this point. You're talking like macro or?

It's a macro, just overview, yeah. What am I thinking? So I think that if you look, if you take the 30,000 foot view, you can see the macro shift kind of from quarter to quarter. And I think that clearly this quarter from like the beginning of Q2 to the end of Q2, which were just about it, was the semiconductor story, right? Everybody knows about Micron. They know about Nvidia.

They know about, you know, every semiconductor. And we're going to see, I think, a major rotation going forward as we head into the summer. And I think we're going to get back into sort of what we discussed earlier, where it gets back into discussion about the real economy. So hard assets. I think Bitcoin has gotten beaten down. I still think we're going to be beaten down for a little while here. But then hard assets are going to make a recovery. And I think gold makes a recovery as well.

I'm personally bullish. I think that if you are excited about the economy growing and you don't care as much about Wall Street, this is a great time to be bullish. I think we're seeing real economic growth and we're going to continue to see that. I think that like we discussed saving in Bitcoin, quit using leverage. These are fantastic times, historically speaking, to just be stacking stats. right. Odell's wisdom will live forever. Like just stay humble, stack sats, don't use leverage. Don't get caught up in these other products that everybody talks about.

I will tell you one last thing. I have been such a happier person since I got off social media. I barely do anything anymore and I just hang out with people in real life and I'm just like way happier than I was in the past. I don't miss the Twitter arguments about Bitcoin price and sale or any of those things at all. life is good so I would recommend that to anybody who's looking for a change I'm not surprised I'm going to be a good way to Hoddle looking forward at end of the year

are you going to be able to finally afford that burrito or Bitcoiners going to be friends again where are we at? Yeah I did when I went to Chappala the other day I was like I got triple meat and they they were like we got a triple meat guy coming here and I was like yes right I am a triple meat guy so I felt good

felt good about that one I listen I'm just the guy who says things and like I have a reputation for just being a guy who says things. So I'm just going to be a guy who says things and say Q4 is bullish and we're back to all time highs. Fuck it. You can just say things. Like why do I got to,

I don't got to accept the narrative that we're going down. Fuck it. Uh-uh. We're going up all the way. So that's what I want to leave you with. Okay. I love it. I love the enthusiasm.

Joe, end of the year, coming into the fall. What are you paying attention to? What are you watching? Okay. So first and foremost, I will tell you some alpha here.

Okay. Okay. On September 1st, 2026, there is a book being released on Amazon about Bitcoin, okay? I know the author very well. I highly recommend you pick it up. It's called Unconfuscatable, available on Amazon. I really think this is going to trigger the beginning of an epic bull run. Hopefully we get this thing made into a TV show or movie.

But Unconfuscatable, available September 1st, and that will trigger a massive bull run. And I honestly think that there's a lot to be optimistic about with the economy, with things going on that we've talked about here with Bitcoin. I think, again, everybody expects this Q4 bottom, right, which tells me that you should be careful if that's going to come to fruition. Because, again, maybe we don't rocket higher from here, but maybe we put in the bottom over the next several months as we're tranching through the mud, as Jeff put it. I think that could be a far more probabilistic outcome than most people think. And if that's the case, you could have a very big FOMO catch up rally. You know, everybody remembers the 2018 brutal year, right? But what people forget is in 2019, and I know Hoddle knows this.

I think Jeff probably knows it too. You had this monster run, like really starting from the beginning of 2019 to where in June, we ran up to like 13K. You had basically, what is that? Like from 4K to 13K, you had like a 4X almost to 4X, 4X, 3X. That's a big run, right? And you could see that similar type of identity. play out. People saying, you know, what, the worst is behind us, we're done with these issues,

with Treasury companies, we're ready to move forward, ready to have a monster bull run in Bitcoin. And it could match up pretty nicely with the political calendar, depending on how the elections shake out in November. So I'm really optimistic about that. And the final thing I'll leave you with is that the times when Bitcoin is depressed, the times when the price action is bad, when everyone's fighting, those are the times where it's really easy not to go through with your old commitment to yourself that was, I would love to buy 50K Bitcoin. I love to buy 60K Bitcoin. But always think, if I'm sitting here two years from now and Bitcoin's above 200k or above 300k, how am I going to look at my past self and how stupid I was? I mean, I can tell you

vivid memories of when I should have dug deeper and bought Bitcoin and more Bitcoin, because I bought a little bit, but we never buy enough, right? At 3200K, at 4200K, at 6K. And it was all noise, right? Like, you know, I definitely acquired a lot, but I could have done more. And here, you know, whether it goes to 40K or 50K or is already bottomed, it's sort of irrelevant. If you still believe in the dynamics of the asset being fundamentally strong, what's the difference? Who cares? I mean, it's all noise at the end of the day. If you enjoyed this episode with Dr. Jeff Hoddle and Joe, make sure to like and subscribe and check out the previous episode with macro analyst Ben Rabidow.