BTC Sessions - MicroStrategy Trojan Horse! S&P 500 GUARANTEED? | Preston Pysh, Isabella Santos, Ryan Cochran

Episode Date: September 3, 2025

Is MicroStrategy secretly positioning itself as Bitcoin’s Trojan Horse into the S&P 500? Preston Pysh, Isabella Santos, and Ryan Cochran unpack the hidden strategy that could force every institutional investor to own Bitcoin—whether they want to or not.FOLLOW TODAY’S PANELISTS:https://x.com/PrestonPyshhttps://x.com/isabellasg3https://x.com/FiatMentorRyanFOLLOW BTC SESSIONS on X/Nostr: x.com/[e-mail] private one-on-one sessions with BITCOIN MENTOR! Learn self custody, hardware, multisig, lightning, privacy, running a node, and plenty more - all from a team of top notch educators that I've personally vetted.https://bitcoinmentor.io/—------------------------------SHOW SPONSORS:BITCOIN WELL - BUY BITCOINhttps://qrco.de/bfiDC6COINKITE/COLDCARD (5% discount):https://qrco.de/bfiDBVAQUA WALLEThttps://qrco.de/bfiD8gNUNCHUK HONEYBADGER INHERITANCEhttps://qrco.de/bfiDARHODLHODL NO KYC P2P EXCHANGEhttps://hodlhodl.com/join/BTCSESSIONDEBIFI LOANShttps://qrco.de/bfiDCpCRYPTOCLOAKShttps://qrco.de/bg5Dvo#btc #bitcoin #crypto

Michael Saylor's strategy just qualified for the S&P 500 with an official decision coming this Friday and potential inclusion on September 19th. If it goes through, we could be looking at billions in passive institutional dollars flowing into MSTR and by extension, Bitcoin itself. So what does this mean for Bitcoin's price, for other treasury companies watching? closely and for anyone not adopting this playbook. Today on Why Are We Bullish, we'll be covering this topic and much, much more. Joining me for the conversation are Preston Pish, host of Bitcoin Fundamentals on the Investors podcast, Ryan Cochran from Bitcoin Mentor, helping individuals and businesses navigate Bitcoin education and self-custody, and Isabella Santos from GetBase TV and

BTC Isla, bringing a global and grassroots perspective. to Bitcoin adoption and freedom tech. Stick around. You are not going to want to miss this one. I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your bullish session. All right. I want to welcome to this stage,

Mr. Preston Pish, Isabella, and Ryan. Everybody, welcome. Thank you so much for being here. Very excited to chat with you all. Tons of great stuff to talk about. But I did want to kind of cede an initial conversation, especially with Preston in the room.

I know you talk a lot about this on your show and all of this crazy stuff that's been going along with Sailor and the Treasury companies and all of this, but it seems like a pretty big deal, the potential inclusion into the S&P 500 for Sailor's strategy. And it seems like there's a requirement

once a company goes into the S&P 500, that, you know, a lot of these ETFs and funds that are allocated to the S&P, they have to basically immediately make sure they're properly allocated based on, if I'm not mistaken, awaiting of kind of the size of each company in there. And so I'm just curious about your general thoughts. If it is actually added to the S&P 500, what does this do for not only micro strategy, But what does it do to Bitcoin as a whole? Because we all know what strategy is going to do with that influx of cash.

But what does it do to other companies running the playbook? And what does it do more importantly to other companies that are not running this playbook? Well, I would start off by saying, if included, and I don't know what it's going to happen. But if included, you have every owner of the S&P 500 that now has a surrogate, position in Bitcoin. Whether they like it or not, there's there's some exposure to Bitcoin. And I think that what's kind of playing out globally right now is this, you know, surrogate ownership of Bitcoin because so many institutions are starting to adopt it, whether it's through ETF vehicles or, you know, corporate vehicles. And then the corporate vehicles are being inside of the

ETF wrappers and it goes on and on and on. But if we were going to look at it from just a human population standpoint, and you take all of the people in the world, and you said, on this day, this many people had some exposure to Bitcoin, whether they were self-custodial, or it was through some surrogate wrapper. And then the day after it's included in the S&P 500, how many more people have that exposure? The number is going to expand significantly a lot. And I think that that's an important highlight. And it's just, you know, as a person that likes, and everybody else on the show here, likes to footstomp self-custody, Bitcoin.

That's the real ticket. That's the thing that's going to save you in the event of a currency meltdown and all these things. That is first and foremost the most important thing that we can possibly talk about. But that doesn't mean that, you know, your 70-year-old grandfather who has ETF, SPY in his portfolio, is ever going to self-custody Bitcoin. or even want to own Bitcoin, but yet now he does own Bitcoin.

And I think that that's just kind of something really important to kind of think about and ponder as like this Bitcoin virus continues to spread and find its way into everything. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's very interesting because, again, I, you know, I'm of, I'm basically the type of person that you're talking about, like self-custy or bust is kind of like. And it's not that I don't, you know, I think that what Sailor is doing is absolutely, you know, what he should be doing. It's smart. You know, and so, and a lot of people have done very well, you know, grabbing on to some MSTR and everything. For me, as an individual, I like to keep it simple, stupid. And if I feel that I can't fully wrap my head around the benefits and risks, simply, then my general answer is be good at something, spend less than you earn and save in money

nobody can print. And that seems to have been a pretty good pathway for myself. But with this inclusion, do you think, you know, assuming that it goes through, do you think that this kind of changes the global narrative? Because right now, there's a couple of things. There's still many, many people that are very, very dismissive of Bitcoin. And there's also a little bit of like a partisan, not a little, a lot of a partisan slant to it just because the previous administration was very, you know, was basically clamping down and trying to attack in it. Yeah, they were just straight up attacking it.

Yeah, versus the existing one, which yes, has also gone the shit coin route. But do you think that the narrative changes with this, does it change on like a, on a company perspective, just a general, this is a great asset for savings or pristine collateral, or even on a nation state kind of perspective, does it begin to change that narrative? I think it does, but it's really slow. I think it's way less profound than what we, as we're watching this, you know, all eyeballs from the Bitcoin community is watching it and saying, oh, wow, this is a really big deal. It is. But I think for your everyday person or somebody, they don't even know what the name of the company is or what it does or how it's doing.

I would argue most Bitcoiners don't know how he's able to buy so much Bitcoin. But yeah, I don't think that it's going to be as big of a deal as we might think it is as we're looking at it on the inside. Now, with time, I think you give it another two years and you watch what unfolds. if the company gets itself into the top 50 in the S&P 500 and maybe in the top 20, then it starts becoming a major talking point. And it becomes something that everybody's like, what the hell is this thing?

And how is he doing this? I just don't understand. And for a person to be like, oh, well, he's just securitizing Bitcoin with the fixed income market. They're like, huh? What? Like, what in the world does that even mean? I think that's pretty much where everybody is today. And I think people will still be there, even if it got into the top 20, from a market cap standpoint, 20 companies in the world.

I think people still aren't going to understand what the hell he's doing. I believe that. Yeah. Yeah, it's going to have to be the best performing company on the planet. And still, people will be convinced it's a straight-up Ponzi. The thing is, though, I think for him to be kind of at that market cap and of that, of that, size. Let's say he gets into the top 20 companies in the world from a market cap standpoint. Bitcoin's going to be at a million. I would have to go play with some numbers and figure out

the math. But off the top of my head, I'd be like, yeah, Bitcoin would have to be at a million plus for something like that to be kind of playing out, which is going to happen. It's just a matter of the timeline of when that plays out. So, yeah. I had one last question. And then I want to toss it to ESA and Ryan, if you guys have comments, on the topic at hand, but I did want to ask one thing. And the question that I had was in and around what's known as the MNAV. And first off, if you can maybe explain what that is for people that are unfamiliar, but also the trajectory of that metric over time, what it was prior versus what it is now,

because people are looking at the price of micro strategy and compared to before when it was at the all-time high versus now when Bitcoin has seemingly, I don't want to say it's like decoupled or anything. But in general, it used to be Bitcoin goes up, MSTR goes up like way more. And it's there's nuance to how the pricing has worked. So can you explain what the MNAV is and how that's quantified? Yeah, so in short, and I'm going to use dollar terms here, just to kind of simplify it. If the MNAV is two, that means that investors of the common stock are willing to pay $2 for every $1 of Bitcoin that sits on the balance sheet of the company. And that's pretty much it. So the question quickly becomes, well, why would I pay $2 for $1 a Bitcoin on the company?

and, you know, this just goes to basic economic calculation of a business or security analysis. And what that is is when you invest in a company, and we'll just take micro strategy and put it aside and just talk about Apple or you name it company. When you look at the company and the company makes, and we'll just use PE ratios because it's pretty much kind of the same idea, if you're paying for a company that has a PE of 30, you're taking $30. of your money to buy the common stock, and that company will make $1 of earnings. The PE is always over one. So if the P.E. on the company is 10, you'd take $10 to buy the company, and you'd get $1 of earnings or profit a year later. So if the P.E. was 10, you'd have to own that company for 10 years before all $10 of that principle would come back to you, but then you could still probably sell the company for a multiple of 10 or wherever it's at. So you can see that multiple

of what you're paying for the earnings power of the company is just an inherent nature thing of owning businesses and valuing businesses. And so when you're looking at micro strategy and you're saying, well, how much Bitcoin can he grow in a year? You know, the number, I think for this year, I don't want to say what the number is, but I think it's over 25% for the year so far. And so if you're paying a multiple of 1.5 or, you know, yeah, we'll just say, say 1.5 times the MNAV.

If he grows the Bitcoin by 50% on the year, then the purchase price that you had was returned to you within that first year. And so it's important for people that when they're looking at like multiples, and this goes back to like my days of Warren Buffett and Ben Graham and studying all of that and talking about security analysis before I was even in Bitcoin is Ben Graham's big thing. And Ben Graham's from the 1930s wrote this book called Security Analysis, super famous book. basically everybody on Wall Street, you know, carries it around like they actually read it, but then they don't. But the whole point of Ben Graham was you don't pay for these companies that have these exuberant multiples.

So because you don't know when that multiple is going to deflate or go away. So this would be akin to paying a MNAV of 10 or 7 or 8 or whatever. And you buy it in an MNAV super high. And the market just doesn't think that you can actually put more Bitcoin on the balance sheet. It deflates. It goes down to an MNAV of three. And here you are. You lost half of the savings that you had in the company because you bought it at such a high multiple.

So this is a classic growth versus value investing kind of discussion that's now applying to Bitcoin treasury companies. So basically people that are willing to pay what the MNAV premium is are, are speculating that Sailor will be able to accumulate more Bitcoin on the balance sheet and thus the total value of the shares that you own will catch up and perhaps surpass what you paid for them. That's exactly right. And so I think the reason that you had this comment that before the MSTR price would move double what Bitcoin was doing and now it's going down when Bitcoin's up and all of that, right? Well, since the start of the year, Bitcoin, we were at about 100,000 at the start of the year, and now we're at, what, 112,000 for about a 10%

growth. And MSTR, you know, through that period of time is really, it has more Bitcoin on the balance sheet, for sure. He's issued a bunch of preferred stock through that period of time, which creates this perpetual drag, if it's, you know, a perpetuity, which most of them are perpetuity preferred stock. And so that is additional drag. on the company. And so you could you could make the argument that it's more levered through the preferred vehicles. And therefore, the performance as Bitcoin goes sideways is that the company's not going to do so well. But if Bitcoin would rip, call it to $200,000. I think that you might see the common stock perform. But again, it all comes down to what the market's willing to value

his capacity to add more Bitcoin to the balance, yeah, to the balance sheet. And whether he can continue to do that over time, whether there's going to continue to be a positive MNAV on the company. Awesome. All right. Now, I want to let me sleep now. Yeah. It would seem that everybody, there's a lot of strong opinions either way in the chat.

But either way, I want to, I do want to let either ESA or Ryan, if you guys have comments or questions, if you have questions for pressing or if you just have general thoughts on micro strategy as a whole, feel free to dive in. I have some comments on the whole thing. I think it's really a full circle moment to see what happens when you go all in on Bitcoin. Because, you know, hearing Michael Saylor talk about how Micro Strategy was a zombie company, how he could not compete with Apple, with Microsoft, you know, like the top SMP 500 companies. And just like him being able to even be on that.

list, it's such a like, wow, like this is what happens when you go all in into Bitcoin. Obviously, I do think like there's, like, we have to see what's going to happen with, you know, the normal population, how they're going to, you know, self-custody Bitcoin now because everybody wants the gains from, and like the easy access to, you know, quick gains. But watching it from the sidelines and seeing how he now is able to compete with those. companies that he thought he would never compete with by just honestly reading the white paper and just orange filling his whole like board of directors it's sort of like mind-blowing and it shows you what happens when you just like put your head down and you do the research you

put the 100 hours and you see that you know there is a difference and you can literally hack the system that has been sort of like screwing everyone over and he's sort of like turned it around and be like now I'm one of you guys and you guys you know what I mean like try to kill Bitcoin so many times. It's crazy what saving in money nobody can print can do for you looking at like the valuation of micro strategy before and after Bitcoin like in in four or five years at the like present. Do you remember what they were before they announced that they were doing a Bitcoin treasury strategy? MSTR.

So when I interviewed Michael right when he announced this back in, call it January, February of 2020, we did the interview. And he had $500 million of liquid, current assets, cash, basically in treasuries, I believe, on his balance sheet and that was it. And his company's earnings capacity was about 50 to 75 million annualized. I would guess somewhere in that ballpark. And so, you know, if you were going to put a multiple on the company, I would guess the multiple back then was probably 20 or 25 on those earnings. You know, it's a little bit over a billion dollar company, probably 1.5, 2 billion dollars in market cap is what it was valued at. And today it's over 100. So think about this, because this is the math on something like that. Let's just for real simple math, let's say it was a billion dollar company.

It might have been two. A billion dollar company for it to grow, it's retained earnings to over $100 billion. Okay. When they only make, and I'm going to round up and use a really big number, which it wasn't, $100 million a year. Okay. Do you know how long that would take? It's 10, 100. It's a thousand years. It takes a company a thousand years with $100 million to compound and retain $100 billion. He did it in five years. That's the math. Yeah. So like when when people are looking at and they're saying, I just don't understand like how in the world can somebody, how can somebody take that earnings power and compound it and basically warp himself a thousand years into the future with where it's capped at today?

And he did it because, you know, he, he understood the hack to Isabella's point, which is he's hacking the Fiat system. And people are looking at it and saying, I don't understand it. Well, it doesn't matter whether you understand it or not. He's, he's hacking the legacy system. And it's freaking nuts. Yeah. If you can get people to lend you stuff that can be created at the flick of a switch to buy something that can never be created by anybody else on earth. Yeah.

that's a pretty good deal. You should probably take that deal. So my thing is like what's going to happen with all the Bitcoin? All these companies are stacking. Isabel, this is a really important thing. I think that this is something we need to address because if we warp ourselves 10 years, 15 years, 20 years into the future, we're still going to have businesses. We're still going to have companies that are providing valuable services and products to the world, right?

Now, whether we have robots making all of it, that's a whole other discussion point, but we're going to have businesses, right? And the question is, is how are they going to custody their retained earnings? Because I'm of the opinion, 10, 20 years from now. It's Bitcoin. And we're not going to be saving in dollars or anything like that. You're going to be saving in Bitcoin. How are these companies going to be custodying it?

Well, I think that you're going to be using, you know, multi-sig institutional grade custody. And a lot of people don't like hearing that that. came out of the past decade where it's like, well, I've got my hardware wallet and I etched it on. Well, that's you as an individual at your house. But what do you do when you have a whole board and an executive team of people that, you know, I can't trust whether the CEO and the CFO or co-mingling and they're going to steal everything out of the treasury, right? These things become a very institutional grade like custody model. And I think that, legacy bitcoiners just need to get maybe a little bit more comfortable with the direction of where

the world the world wants bitcoin the world wants to use business is want to use bitcoin and so some of this is going to maybe not be what people want but it's going to be where a lot of it goes and in my humble opinion i like uh again a lot a lot of the issues that we've seen uh we'll call it the fuckery of the past is when too few people have too much control. And, you know, things in the background aren't what they seem. And it's easy for individuals to, you know, act maliciously before being caught. And like you said, the idea of multi-institutional, multi-sig, I think is a very powerful one, where you need a threshold of not just individuals,

but completely separate entities to collude in order to rugpole. And I think that won't just be the trend. It will be demanded by the market in the future. I think that it will take some lessons to get there as a norm because there's going to, you know, it's just cascading larger and larger rug pulls until people learn their damn lessons. it would seem. But, you know, as individuals, all you need to do is glean from this that,

you know, again, saving in money nobody can print is a life hack. And it may not teleport an individual a thousand years into the future if people aren't lending you billions of dollars. But it does allow you to save the fruits of your labor well into the future very, very effectively. and you can use the same or, in some people's opinions, better security tactics than current for your individual stack. So you can absolutely be learning something from this, even if you don't personally want to own micro strategy. There's still stuff to be gleaned here.

Now, I do want to let Ryan toss in comments, questions, wherever you want before we do a little rotation here. But Ryan, thoughts, questions. I guess my first thought is, you know, we've obfuscated our responsibility to our money for a long time. So to Preston's idea, you know, your treasury, you gave it to your bank. And then when it wasn't there, something was wrong, you call your bank guy and you're like, hey, let me, let me talk to you about some stuff. And now with the self-custody model, it can, it's not difficult, but it does take responsibility. So knowing that, I think that's the difficult part for people when you're trying to shift from micro strategy or something like that down to a,

of custody solution. It's a big leap for people. Well, the banks have to learn how to do what their craft used to be, which was custody, all over again. They don't even know how to do their job because it's been so, you know, the fiat has manipulated and mutilated all of like what custody even was. So I think for them, they're like literally having to go back to the history books on like, how did we do this in a responsible way before we started like reissuing what was in the treasury with paper and playing games because that's that's where it all went awry um but yeah no they they've got to relearn the craft all over again yeah yeah for sure um the other thing i was going to say on the micro strategy being

included um if you live in america most of the people will just toss 15% in their 401k every two weeks because that's what somebody told them to do before and the idea is i guess to orange pill people so if we can get some people with micro strategy in the 401k and they start to look at it or something and we all know this you have to do your own research yeah or maybe just do research you have to dig you have to ask yourself why do I just let these people control my money why do I have to call the bank when I want to take out something why don't have to ask for permission for anything is I want you get to that self-custody model and you can use your money however it was intended you know then like you're saying that true power comes in but it's really difficult for people to just jump off

that ledge a little bit you know to take responsibility for what could be a large large portion of their savings forever. So that's my comments. Yeah, I like it. I like it. Okay, well, I'm going to put a bow on this for a moment, but we are going to rotate to our next reason for being bullish. And actually, before we do, first of all,

anybody that's here new to the channel, thank you for being here. And all our returning viewers, thank you for joining us. I hope you're enjoying the conversation. If you are, give that like button a little slap. we are going to do a quick little shout out to our show sponsors. And when I come back, actually, Ryan, I'm going to start with you. I want to find out why you are so bullish this week and what is top of mind, what you're

excited about. Can you give us a little teaser before I jumped a break here? I'm bullish because I help 70-year-old set up their own nodes. I love that. That is fantastic. Okay. Well, we're going to chat about exactly what you've been up to, what you see from individuals, because I know there's a ton of people that watch this that are like,

how do I actually do this stuff properly? How do I actually self-cussy? What is important? What should I be looking at? And you get to deal with people through Bitcoin Mentor every single day. So we'll hear a little bit more about why Ryan is bullish on the other side. On the other side of it, we'll also give away a few sats. So get your lightning wallet's ready. And we'll be right back in about one minute. Bitcoin Well is the best place to be buying and selling Bitcoin in Canada and the US. And now with Bitcoin Well Infinite, it's also the best place to be making large buys at their OTC desk of over $50,000. Their white glove service gives you fast transactions, no slippage, and the lowest fees. You can scan the QR code on the screen or simply head to Bitcoinwell.com slash BTC sessions to sign up today.

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If you're looking to make use of your capital, don't sell your Bitcoin, borrow against it. You can head over to debify.com to check them out or simply scan the QR code on the screen. All right, we are back in. We're going to give away some quick sats here. All you need is a lightning wallet. And the way it works is I'm over here on Bitcoin well. Awesome place to stack stats in Canada and the U.S. But what I'm going to be doing is every time you buy Bitcoin when you first sign up or when you refer friends, you earn points.

You can use those points to get yourself some swag, which I just noticed they've got bid axes here. I could get three of them, four of them. Awesome. But nonetheless, you can also toss your points and toss a coin into the wishing well with a chance to win up to a million stats every time. I'm going to do that now. Whoever scans the QR code on the screen first steals the same. sats from all the other viewers. So good luck. And there goes the coin into the well. If you do snag the sats, of which there are 478 today, let us know in the comments or in the live chat. We love to see it. But with that, let's continue on. And Ryan, I'm going to pull you up top here.

And yeah, I'm going to tee you off with the same question. Everybody gets, why are you bullish? So I entered Bitcoin probably about 10 or 12 years ago. And it's really, it's a difficult journey. Usually you come from, you figure out there's a problem. And you say yourself, what is this problem with the money, obviously? And you have to be able to understand what the system is doing. And if you do not have a good teacher for that, it's a very difficult thing to try to learn. So in my case, Preston was my entry into the financial world.

bonds, treasuries. I knew nothing. I have a degree from a college with an econ heavy base, and I still didn't understand any of the stuff he was talking about. So years and years of listening to him got me to the position to understand what I was actually dealing with. Now, fast forward a little bit further. I find an opportunity for a position at Bitcoin Mentor, who with the wonderful Ben Sessions, I've learned most of my technical abilities from you, sir. And so now it's kind of like a full circle. I'm teaching people that I never thought would ever even want to understand Bitcoin. There's a group of us on the team, Ben knows that we all kind of have different personalities, different places we've grown up, all different time zones. And I tend to attract people over 50,

which I love because they come to, and I've been teaching tech for a very long time. And so when I, when I can get them in my hands and talk to them, now I'm teaching them the technical side. They already have kind of the finance side in place. And now I'm teaching. teaching 67 year old people. We're setting up starting on nodes. We're doing Vault Warden for doing Bitcoin or core or nots for having those conversations. And these are people who you wouldn't expect to have to do that. So for me, it's really been the whole full circle of kind of education, learning, learning, learning.

And once you give people that power, it's kind of like you download some software to them, where you give them a piece of software of power or integrity or their own, then they can move forward with this. And that's really the best part about it is giving people food to be able to run forward. It's wonderful. I love that. In the comments, by the way, we've got Nathan, also on the mentor team and my co-host on the Thursday show. He says that Ryan is the boomer whisperer. Now, I'm curious.

I do want to, because I'm obviously super passionate about this kind of stuff. And it's the very reason that this channel even exists is to get people to take those steps and actually realize, like, you do have. the skills to do this. All it needs is a little bit of time and like any new skill. You're just going to, it's going to seem a little foreign at first. But I'm kind of curious, the bulk of people that you're seeing, what are some of the hurdles that they're encountering? What are they looking to learn as a majority? And then what are some of the craziest, like far out their skills that you've taught to the most unsuspecting people? So the majority of the people are nervous

and they're scared because they hear these horror stories. And most people are afraid to even click on email links that they get. And corporate America doesn't help, sending them fishing stuff all the time and trying to trick folks. So generally most people want to understand what cold storage Bitcoin is, what running your own node is.

And so we kind of usually start there and try to get most of their money or get them moving off of an exchange and onto their own node and their own hardware. And understanding that concept, just enough itself, can sometimes be a challenge. But for most people, you get to the bare asset piece of it and they can kind of understand that. And then the second part to them is I always show them the air gap so that you can, I'm like, listen, if you air gap this, because that's their concern, is somebody going to steal it? Is somebody going to take it from me?

And I'm like, if you air gap it, you could just send money to it like a post office box. And nobody can ever, ever access it if you don't give them the keys. to do that. So that is that's kind of the majority of the people. I do have some real I do have this one use case that just popped up a couple days ago. So I have a gentleman. His name is Gary. I think he's 69 and he wanted to mine by himself. And not only did he want to mine, he wanted to solo mine because he wanted some lottery miners. So I'm with Gary and we're setting up his start. And I know we're putting Bitcoin knots on it. We're putting datum on it. And now he has six. And he's so excited because his hash is, you know, stacking up and he's swarming his bit axes. And he's talking to me as he's like,

I wish my dad was here to see this because he would just never thought I would be able to do something that's technical. And, you know, sometimes all we need is just a little handholding, right? We just a little confident. Somebody there to say, look, dude, I got you. I'll pick you up. You know, we're not going to do anything crazy. We're not going to mess anything up. But we want to move forward. We want to be better than we were yesterday. So that's sort of. It was super fun for me because I wasn't even solo minding myself for lottery, although I wanted to. And so I was like, hey, Gary, it's going to take me about a week to figure this out. So a couple node rebuilds, and we got to where we needed to be.

And now Gary's way, I saw a solo block hit the other day. And I was like, man, it's Gary. I love that. There is nothing more bullish than hearing. An almost 70-year-old has a swarm of bit axes solo mining to his start an eye. That's crazy. And he put, he put custom coolers on them. He was messing with them.

We didn't have him set up yet. So he's like, let me just go ahead and tinker with. these things. Oh my God. That is so great. Actually, what I did this earlier this week is I did. I got one of the, there's like the Canaan avalon. They're like, it's called the Nano 3S. But it's just again, like a simple little home miner. You plug it in. There's an app. And for this one, I was like, you know what? I want, I want my daughter to kind of start to clue into some of the mining stuff. She has already got her own Bitcoin wallet and she'll come to like the sat market here in Calgary and she runs around and like buys stuff at the booths. She gets half her allowance in Bitcoin and gets saved away.

So like she's already transactionally, she's getting it. And she also understands that saving Bitcoin is important and that the value can grow over time. So she's getting that. But I wanted to just plant a seed of like the understanding of mining. So I showed her this miner. I was like, all right, all right, this is yours. And we're going to plug it in. And this little light here and everything, it shows you kind of what's going on.

You don't need to understand exactly what it is right now. But it's mining Bitcoin. And I'm linking it to your lightning wallet. And you're going to get a tiny, you know, a few hundred sats every single day. And it's coming because this machine is doing work and it's mining Bitcoin. And now she looks at her wallet every single day. She gets another 200, 250. And yeah, she's finding it interesting.

So I think that's super cool. I think anybody that wants a fun weekend project with your kids is get a solo miner, point it at a mining pool that will allow lightning payouts and just point it to a very simple lightning wallet for them and let them check it every day and see the sats pile up, not only pile up, but grow in value over time. Pretty cool. So, yeah. I tell everybody, it's a get rich.

slow. You're not going to get rich fast. You'll learn a ton on the way, but it's a get rich slow scheme, not a get rich fast scheme. Exactly. Exactly. I do want to open up to East End Preston if you have any comments or questions for Ryan, anything like that. I finally got a bid X running. But I finally got there. So you did the plug-in. You did the whole thing on the browser and linked it to it. Are you rolling the Dyson. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. You got to do that.

It's like that dopamine hit every day. Maybe I got 300 grand for a $100 device. That's right. That's awesome. Issa, have you done any solo mining stuff before? Yes. I actually wanted to add that it's way more simpler than it sounds. I think it's very intimidating.

So I can relate to Gary like, oh my goodness. Like my dad would never believe I'm mining. Bitcoin, you know, in 2025. But once you do it, I think it's very, like, simple. I've tried using the bidax and the Apollo. And I think they look way more technical than it is. But I think it's just, like, getting it down. And once you have, like, the Ethernet and you figure that stuff out, like, the little line.

Because I tried with the Apollo and you needed, like, a specific wire to, like, connect it to like the internet or the ethernet whatever it's called and i'm like the least technical person ever so for me to say that it was pretty simple that anybody could do it it's like recommend to everybody yeah yeah so you're talking about the future bit one right yeah i have the future bit one the only thing with mining near the ocean is that it gets ruined by the salt oh no yeah Yeah, the like the fan. So that's the only downside. And obviously I feel like people want wild fats. So I've been like experimenting with like trying to like other mining pools and renting out a rig. But the thing is like here the equipment just it gets so rusty. Like I don't understand. It's so annoying. It would turn out that if you want to boil the oceans, you can't do it near the oceans. just how it goes they don't appreciate it um yeah no i mean there's a ton of great options out there

when it comes to so and i know we kind of honed in on one specific aspect of uh what gary and many others have done uh through learning but there's there's tons of great resources out there um i try to uh whenever i get the chance i i try to uh shill out this this page here but again this is like the learn page on my website. And it's just got a lot of default. I'll throw a little QR code down there for people to check it out. But there's just a lot of basic skills like hot wallets, cold wallets, getting Bitcoin, you know, privacy and all that.

But, you know, here's that. I think he said this is probably the one you have or the one before, but it's the future bit one. And yeah, a little home miner there. you know if if you're uncertain about some of these skills like just you know take a peek at a video and sometimes again as as Ryan said there's a little handholding and and it it does wonders for your confidence and again there's like there's deep dive if you if you want to look at other mining stuff there's like a full playlist on all the different devices you can play with and hell if you really need it go visit Ryan over at Bitcoin Mentor it's at the bottom of the page

But nonetheless, I don't, don't let being a little timid prevent you from from learning and leveling up as a Bitcoiner because it's a fun road. And, you know, the medium is the education. Like you don't learn it all and then you just do it. It's you learn through doing. So that's the important thing there, I would say. Yeah. But yeah, 100%. And I actually want to, I'm not going to go to break yet because I do.

I do want to do a rotation mid-show and I actually do want to go to you next for your topic and find out why you have been so bullish lately what you've been up to, what's top of mind. So I guess I'll tee up with the same question as Ryan. I'll give you a little spotlight up top here. But why are you bullish? What are you excited about? Why am I bullish? Honestly, the Bitcoin community right now. I feel like my reason always changes. But right now, it has been all the Bitcoiners. I just came out of like a 21 surviving on Bitcoin challenge. And that was my main fuel. I wanted to give up after like day three. I was like I cannot do this anymore. But reading like the comment and people like, like, all right, like you've got this.

You're going to like prove everyone wrong that you can survive on Bitcoin, not only spending wise, but also like finding jobs that will pay you in Bitcoin. So the community has just been insane. And I think we can see with like the topic that you picked for today, like the SMP 500. Like I feel like micro strategy would have not gotten up there without the whole Bitcoin community. You know, same thing with like in politics, you know, with the parties that we've elected and everything. Everything, I think, comes down to like the Bikwinners having more of a weight in society than we have before. And every year it goes through and I'm like, we're bigger than we think we are.

Well, we swayed an election. Yeah. I mean, I didn't want to say it, but like, we did. You know what I mean? Like, it's crazy. Yeah. It's really cool seeing both ends of the spectrum, right? You see like what you're talking about, some of the, you know, the craziest stuff that's happening, like, like being thrust into politics and the global stage and all of this and the S&P 500.

But then there's also, you know, stuff like what you're doing as a grassroots community. initiative like doing the doing the uh btc isla and and everything that you're doing in uh isla muheris and and you're living on bitcoin for 21 days and getting paid in bitcoin and all of this kind of grassroots stuff and i i think that you know people hear the big stories and they think that i can't have an impact but i think some of the most impact people can have is focusing locally because that's how bitcoin's tendrils get everywhere it's It's not Bitcoin itself. I mean, it is, but the people have to be there to kind of spread awareness and allow it to take hold in local communities.

And that's how it begins. And so, like, describe to me, what was this 21 days on Bitcoin? What was the goal there? What were you trying to do? To prove a point that you can survive on Bitcoin, I feel like many people forget the basic. like purpose of Bitcoin. You know, I feel like we've gotten so caught up in like ETFs, Bitcoin Treasury companies, and we forget that Bitcoin, it's literally an electronic cash system. And obviously like many of the, you know, Bitcoin voices out there, they say,

oh, don't use Bitcoin to like buy a coffee. It's a store of value. Like don't spend it. and I think we can't like straight too far from the actual mission, which is literally to better the money. I think it was like yesterday I read a white paper and essay that Wences said he's like an Argentinian. And he actually talks about something that I have stopped hearing about from the Bitcoin community. and it's how Bitcoin has, it's literally money that will not sort of like screw you over. And in his paper, he was mentioning how his family lost all of their savings three times. And it was because of inflation, because the government just printed out too much money and all these things. And for him, like what saved him in Argentina was Bitcoin.

You know, in third world countries and developing countries, if you're not part of the middle class and the upper middle class and, you know, you really don't have a way to save money. It's you work so hard until you're 80 years old until you die pretty much. And I see it here on the island. And the students that I would teach Bitcoin to, they don't think that they can save money because their money that they've all had their whole life just depreciates over time. And nobody explains to them, like, there's a way out. And for them, it's like, oh, this is too good to be true. You know, what do you mean?

Like, there's a money that's actually better than the dollar or better than all the other currencies. So it's really interesting to see how they can like buy Bitcoin or do something to exchange a Bitcoin, literally because you don't need a bank account to have Bitcoin. I think that is a huge misconception that there is in the whole world that you need a bank account to own Bitcoin. Like you, we need to start sort of like trading it more like money, I think. Yeah. I mean, I'm super passionate about this as well. I think, you know, people, naturally, you're going to have people, you know, storing value in it long term first, like a savings mechanism. But I think it's up to us, the crazy ones, to also spearhead it as a currency. Because, like, what's the end goal? Why does, why? Is Wall Street as big as it is?

Why do people have to become professional investors just in the hopes of making it to retirement? It's because the money's broken. They can't be good at something and just spend less than they earn and save. Because if they save, as you said, their money is worthless. Mexico is a great example, especially in the 80s, the devaluation of the currency that happened then. You hear Ricardo Salinas talk about it a lot. But like people continually lost, you know, large pieces of their savings as the currency was was repeatedly devalued. And so, you know, it's just done at a pace in most of the world where people will kind of put up with it and not realize why they're having to have a second career as a professional investor.

but in other places it's it's much more stark and noticeable you know Venezuela Argentina places like that and and so if you're not at the extreme end of the spectrum then you you may there may be people that just kind of miss what's truly happening but I think if we can get to a place where it's just as simple as you know save your money that would be that would be amazing what if you you could just save part of your paycheck. And that was it. And then you just one day retired.

That would be incredible. That's kind of what you can do right now if you live on a Bitcoin standard. And again, I get when people have the mentality of don't spend your Bitcoin, if you also have a lot of dollars. Obviously, you want to get rid of your dollars. But again, if you get to the point of being as crazy as some of us, you don't have a dollar. anymore. You don't want them. I don't want people still try to pay me in dollars and I I refuse. I don't want it. I literally don't want like if somebody there's a contract coming through and they're like can we can we do like a cross-border wire? I'm like are you fucking crazy right now? Why would I subject myself to that? I think I don't think so.

So, yeah, I think we need to normalize. And it's not going to be the funny thing is it's not necessarily going to be the people that are spending that maybe drive that. It'll normalize it, but it won't necessarily drive it. It will be the merchants that disincentivize people spending dollars. You know, like what in Venezuela, who wants to actually receive the local currency? No, they want U.S. dollars. They don't want a wheelbarrel full of bullshit, right? Like, who's going to, they're going to go to the most familiar strong currency that they know, which is the U.S. dollar.

And so I think eventually that comes home to roost for Bitcoin as well. It'll be like, you want to pay me in dollars? You may as well give me Venezuelan Boulevard's because it seems equally appealing. So that's where I am at. But I recognize I'm a crazy person. So I do want to let Ryan and Preston chip in here and just, again, general kind of Bitcoin community feels and like the, you know, how Bitcoin is is capturing a pretty wide spectrum of people from like the world's largest capital allocators to like the little guys in in smaller countries with inflation or the crazy people that are living on a Bitcoin standard. How do you guys interpret this? You sound like the crazy person today, but in 10 years from now, you're not going to sound like a crazy person.

I hope so. I hope so. I mean, honestly, the thing that, to the points that were being made earlier, I was in Riga with you, Ben, and they had ARC up and running over there. This was such a big deal from a payment technology standpoint, because now you don't have, if you're a vendor, you don't even have to think about channel management. don't have to worry about whether you have inbound liquidity in a channel. It's all been taking care of for people that just don't have the technical chops to be dealing with all of that. That's a really big deal. Like when I look at our payments ready, our layer two lightning payments ready, prime time, like we snap our fingers and the whole Fiat legacy system fails and Bitcoin is there ready to go. From a payment standpoint, I don't know that you're there right now. But I would tell you from an engineering tech standpoint, it's

getting there fast. And like when I see things like that in Riga for the first time, and just for some context, a year before that, I was, you know, I took a pitch from some of the engineers on Arc. And we were being told, yeah, we think it's going to need a soft work in order to do this, but they weren't quite sure. Lo and behold, a year later, it didn't need a soft work. They figured out a way to do it. And its work, it literally was being used to buy sandwiches outside of the conference. And they didn't tell anyone either. They didn't know all the vendors were on Arc with the little Bitcoin eyes machines that normally would take lightning payments. And anybody walking up there would make a lightning payment. But the vendor was dealing with Arc and everything was instantaneous and

handled in the background, which is so cool. Yeah. So I'm looking at that. And I'm saying, you know, that's a reason to be bullish because, you know, you can look at, I could make the argument that if Bitcoin never even stepped into the payments side of things and it just served the store of value piece, I think that it, I think it's going to solve a whole lot of the issues that the world was plagued with prior to Bitcoin, which is gold doesn't work because it's, it basically turned into a cash settled derivatives market and is compromised by the, you know, the the government handlers that issued the paper units on top of it. And if they never can settle the underlying because it's too difficult to move and they just continue to keep it in the vault,

that's why we found ourselves in the situation we were in. So Bitcoin solves that without payment technology at all. And I would argue, you know, the world would probably put a price tag on that of call it $200 to $300 trillion just for store of value. So that's a really big problem that's been solved. But if you can not only solve that problem, but also make it useful from a payment standpoint on top of the 300 trillion price tag that solves the gold problem, now who knows what the value is that it's going to literally erase fiat currency off the planet long term. And I'm here for it. I'm here for it. I'm ready for it. And I just think that we're very, when people say we're early, I don't think they have a clue as to like how early we are. We are crazy early,

even right now in 2025. And so payments are going to become a much bigger, much, much, much bigger thing, I think five to ten years from now. And when it does, the tech is there. Like the arc is a great example of engineers working extremely crazy brilliant engineers. Like I'm telling you, if you think some of the things that we sit around and talk about and pontificate are impressive, Let me tell you. You talk to these engineers and what they're doing to do things like ARC, it will melt your brain how smart these people are and what they're doing. So it's very exciting to see.

Yeah. I can't wait to, again, I got the ARC wallet and I was playing around with it. Cooke's from BTC Pay. He was showing me and getting me on the wallet. And I got my first ARC transaction and kind of played with it. Pretty cool. And I love that you don't have to deal with like. new channels and all of that. But yeah, I mean, again, the people working on this stuff are

our next level. And, uh, you know, having people explain to me how like it took, it took long enough to understand things like eCash and like Fetamints and Cashew, uh, let alone arc. And I'm still, my brain is like, you're an idiot. You're not going to get this. I want to address one of the comments that I see here where somebody says, uh, what he's saying now, can exactly happen to Bitcoin. And I want to address that with respect to payments. Because I think that when you talk about payment technology, especially settling in a self-custodial or a near self-custodial kind of way,

that reinforces and makes the network way more robust and stronger to prevent what has happened with gold from happening. Now, I'll caveat that with, it's really easy. Let's say, Ben, let's say you owed me $50 million. And I'm saying, hey, I want the payment right now and I hold up the QR code and I put it right there on the screen. I can validate really fast whether you send it to me or not or you actually had the $50 million worth of Bitcoin to send to me. And that's not something that you can do with gold. It's just it's not.

And it's one of the main reasons of why it got captured and why. it got papered over and why you have cash settled derivatives markets on top of gold and why I don't think that that's going to be the case with Bitcoin. You literally saw Black Rock go out and partitioned, or, wrong word. They went out and tried to get in-kind redemptions for their spot ETF. And what that represents is exactly what I'm talking about, which is give me the underlying Bitcoin. I don't trust the custodian or I want to have the capacity to call it if I want to because I always want to be able to pick up the phone and actually collect on the underlying as opposed to paper receipts. Yeah. They're effectively preemptively stationing their French battleships in New York before the Nixon

rugpole on gold. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Can it happen? Sure, anything can happen. The probabilities I would put way lower than, you know, the gold market for sure. Yeah. Ryan, I want to get your thoughts here as well, anything you want to tap in. Quick question for Preston. If they did an in-kind redemption on that, how would they let you take custody of that? You think it'd be some multi-sig type situation? I think it's institution to institution is how that's going to happen, unless you got massive bags. Gotcha. Like if you had massive Ibit bags in excess of probably $10 million or $15 million, then they might let you somehow actually take custody of the underlying. And I even think even then, if you're like an individual when you were in that situation,

I think it's still going to be a pain in the butt to do. But between institutions is where that really kind of kicks into gear. And you need that between institutions. If BlackRock thinks that Coinbase is issuing a bunch of paper, they can then go to them, be like, hey, we just want the Bitcoin. We'll put it with this other custodian. And so Inkind Redemptions enable that between institutions. That makes sense.

I was going to piggyback on what Lisa was saying. I just, there's almost like an event horizon in a Bitcoiner's brain where before you are okay with dollars at any point in time, you're like, oh, they're just investing. I'm just investing these dollars in Bitcoin. I'm investing these dollars and whatever. And then it becomes a point like you said, I don't want dollars. Like I want to exchange all of my dollars for the thing you cannot print. And once you push people, once you get to that point, everything we say kind of falls in

line. It seems like, oh, it's way more easier. It makes way more sense now. I do understand that there. is a huge and I'm sure we've all tried to orange pill people. Just my failure rate is probably 99.9%. Do you go back to Weimar, Germany in the 1920s? And just look at, read the history of it. Big debt crisis by Ray Dalio. He has a whole play by play month by month of what happened in the 1920s through this period of time. It's a fascinating read just to kind of go through those newspaper clippings and like what the headlines were.

And what you can see is that at a certain point, the vendors are like, you can't pay me in that garbage. Like, I need to light that on fire to stay warm. You can pay me in gold. You can pay me in some other foreign currency that's not melting down. And so how are we going to see from a payment standpoint, how is all this going to unfold? Well, it's going to unfold in the weakest currencies around the world first. And, you know, if the currency is getting the base at 50% annualized, like those countries are just

going to inherently understand Bitcoin a whole lot. lot faster than others. Now, they might move to the dollar because they're brainwashed at the dollar is better. But eventually, you're going to arrive at the king at the top, which is Bitcoin. And the timeline is the part that you just can't predict, but you can look at the incentives and see how it's going to unfold first in those locations and does slowly trickle up until, you know, because the dollar's no better than, well, it's better than those because it's only getting the base at 10% annualized. But if half your money is being stolen every seven years, because that's what 10% does, you know, then you quickly figure out that there's better money

out there, especially after you've seen it persist for more than a decade. A second book, by the way, when money dies. Yeah, there's another good one. Excellent. Again, it's just an examination of what happened in Weimar, Germany, during the hyperinflation. And some of the craziest things in there are the thought processes that went through the people in charge at the time where their rationale was there's so much demand for money for for German marks that we need to meet the demand we need to create more money to meet demand and it's

like well everybody always wants more money and so they just kept on making more and more and they'd announce it proudly we are just we're creating however many hundreds of millions billions trillions, whatever. Like, they would just create currency and then proudly say, we created more currency to meet demand. It was just so back. It was unbelievable. I often say that the way a currency fails, it becomes in such high demand and so desirable

that everybody has to have it. And that demand reaches such a fever pitch that it immediately goes to zero. Okay. And it's, you ever watch the Aladdin movie, right? Under the movie, the Jafar character, he becomes so powerful. He's wishing for all this power. He's becoming so powerful that he gets stuffed into the lamp himself. And he has, he has become a zero. He has now become a servant of everybody else, as opposed to being the most powerful. And so what I find really interesting about the dollar, especially when you start getting into the stable coin discussion, everybody starts saying, Oh my God, the dollar's getting so powerful.

Tether is expanding. We're pushing dollars all through the world. It's competing with Bitcoin. And I'm literally sitting there. It's like, can somebody pick up a history book? And can somebody read what happens to a fiat currency when it becomes so powerful? It gets stuffed in the genie bottle. And then it's a servant to Bitcoin and people that actually have sound money.

100%. Right. Ryan, sorry, I feel like I cut you off there. I don't know if you had anything that you were trying to say before I jumped in. No, all of that. Just agree with all of it. Awesome. I love it. Love it. Yeah, highly recommend read when money dies. But yeah, I mean, you know, join us.

Join us as some of the crazy ones. Use Bitcoin. Go to a local circular economy and see what's up there. I heard of a really cool one, actually, when I was out in Vancouver at Learning Bitcoin. There's one in Comox Valley on Vancouver Island that just kind of started in the past. Yeah, in the past year, it's a really small town, but they've got like 30, 40 merchants already onboarded. And it's just like really tiny. But like you go there and, you know, a ton of people except in Bitcoin. It's been like they put in a whole bunch of effort in it.

And it seems to have popped out of nowhere. So it's super cool to see. And there's all these little initiatives that are just popping up around the globe. I think we're going to see more and more of them. And I think we're going to see very, very interesting mixture of like small, tiny little towns where you can kind of orange pill like a full street kind of thing. But I think you're also going to see like communities within a community. And what I mean is like huge metropolitan cities where like the Bitcoiners step up.

And if you know where to go, you can survive on Bitcoin. And it's almost like an underground society where you just, you give the wink and the nod and the sign. And you know where to go and you can just like, you know, get whatever you need. So I think that's coming. and if it isn't, then we're going to will it into being. Because we're going to build it ourselves. So we are going to do a rotation and Preston.

I'm looking at you. I want to find out while you're bullish. We're going to do a quick shout out to our sponsors. And on the other side, we're going to find out what Preston is so damn excited about. There's always something to be excited about in Bitcoin. But we'll be back in one minute. Looking for a simple and secure way to manage your Bitcoin on mobile, Aqua Wallet has you.

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and it's ideal for newcomers and advanced users alike. The TabSigner gives you a low-cost, user-friendly option for those just getting started or for convenience when traveling. You can head to coin kite.com and use code BTC sessions for discounts or simply scan the QR code on the screen to get started right away. All right, we are back in and Preston, I'm looking right at you because I need to find out what is top of mind for you and why you're so bullish.

So let us have it, my friend. I was bullish about Arc. I mean, that's, well, let's chat about it. Let's chat about everything. Like, I mean, I can come up with, I mean, I can come up with another one, but it's kind of lame. Well, I don't hear it.

I love Preston being lame. It's one of my favorite pastime. I mean, my thing is finance. Right. So I'm looking at financial markets. I'm looking at the macro backdrop. And I'm, I'm just saying, hey, they've got to print. They're at the point now where they got to really kind of turn on the printing press. I don't know if it happens. It's going to happen in like the next six months. And what are the things you're seeing that are giving you those red flags? Like what's what's popping out of you? You know, what's really interesting is you, you're at all-time

market highs right now and in equity indices. And, but I think if you did a poll and you kind of looked across just the broader economy, middle class, the lower class within the U.S., and people are hurting, like, really bad. Like, they just don't have a disposable income. They don't have the ability to kind of really do too much. I'm looking at just where the treasuries at. I don't know if you saw Bessett's comment recently. I did. So I've seen, like, isn't the long-term treasuries, they're not looking so hot?

And I don't know what Besson said. Yeah. All 30-year bonds are in a massive sell-off globally. It doesn't matter which developed economy you're looking at. They're selling off like crazy. You know, they're saying they're going to drop interest rates and the next. And that's going to be an interesting thing for people is, I suspect the 30 years are just going to continue to sell off. And the yields are going to go higher and higher, even though they're dropping rates on the short end of the curve, which is what they control.

Like the overnight money rate is going flat or down. So it's kind of like, I have a question thrown here. So when you're talking long duration treasuries, long duration bonds, so 30 years, somebody is effectively lending their dollars to their local government and they're saying in 30 years I get back my money plus X percentage. Yeah. They're trying to sell these. But when they can't sell them at a certain interest rate, they're forced to basically on the market

sell them with a higher interest rate, which is problematic because then the debt repayment that the government has to do goes up. How is that? Can you describe a little bit of the situation? The easiest way I would describe this is if a 30-year bond is yielding 5% or 6% and that's the interest rate that you're going to get, and you buy that thing and you hold it for the 30 years and they're debasing the money at 10%. In real terms, you're losing 5% a year.

Yeah, like in buying power. So if you take that 5%, you know, I could use easier numbers like 7%, then half of the value is gone in, what would that be 10 years? Yeah. So after 20 years, that half is now 25%. Right? And then that 25% is 12.5% by the time it actually matures after 30 years. So these numbers are crazy for anybody that's trying to store and preserve buying power

and these types of instruments when the, basement rate is that much different from what they're currently yielding. And the government's trying to keep the yields flat or lower. So good luck. Yeah. Yeah. So you've got, and you said this is not, this is not specifically the U.S. This is a global phenomenon right now. Yeah. Yeah. This is a global, I don't know if you can find James Lavish just tweeted something out this afternoon. Like 20 years. Yeah, if you pull up his accountant can show that, but that just shows you all the yields on 30-year bonds are selling off like crazy, which means nobody wants to own it because nobody thinks that the inflation rate, the debasement rate is going to be able to keep pace versus the

yield. So they're selling off and chasing. There you go. There's the chart. This one. It's one of those lines are a different country. So you got Japan, Germany, U.S. and the U.K., and you can see how they're all going higher. In the U.K., they're approaching 6%. In the U.S., they're right at 5%. And as we all know, the M2 growth rate is around 8 to 10%. So the real difference here is everybody's losing 5% of their buying power if you're in the U.S. and in the UK, which that's absolutely terrible. Who wants the store their buying power? And the opportunity cost is Bitcoin. And this goes to the preferreds that Michael's issuing at 10%.

And it's like, would you want to own that? which is fully backed and fully collateralized by Bitcoin five times over, or do you want to own this thing that the government's going to the base even work? And that's assuming they keep it at 10%. It might go to 15 or 20%. You've got 30 years to figure it out. So, I mean, people are understanding clearly. They're seeing the writing on the wall like, hey, you know, your stated inflation numbers are BS because assets are clear.

That's the indicator. And so they're saying, okay, I'm getting a crap deal here. So they're fleeing to what currently? I've seen that, again, gold is on another tear. Well, you got equities making all-time highs. So all of that fixed income capital is coming out of that market. It's going into gold. Gold's getting bid.

It's going into equities, which are putting in new all-time highs. And I would argue, the thing that's really confusing for people during a currency meltdown is that the stock market in that local currency terms, like if you denominate the stock market in that local currency, the stock market for profitable businesses, it goes hyperinflation too. It goes way up. But the replacement value or the new currency that supplants it, or if you're looking at it in foreign currency terms, like let's say you were looking at the Venezuelan stock market whenever the currency melted down. It would look. in the local currency, it's going straight up.

But in dollars, it was going down. So some of these things are really hard for people to kind of wrap their head around. And that's why if you pull up and you denominate any stock in Bitcoin over, you know, four or five years, it's going down. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. Even denominating the stock market in gold over the past number of decades, it looks relatively flat.

Yeah. It absolutely does. Yeah. Yeah. I've got a question here. We're seeing equities. We're seeing gold. Curiously, why would you say that real estate is not responding in kind?

What is the problem there that people aren't fleeing to what traditionally would be park your money here? It's safe. So real estate is a market that is highly dependent on location. So if you go to highly desirable locations, call it. it beachfront property. You hear Michael, you know, sailor goes, oh, if you buy a house in the Hamptons. So you go to like some of these highly desirable locations and you're going to see that some of these places are absolutely ripping because the people that the one percenters are making tons of money in this environment. It's the same thing as a proof of stake system. If you've got all

the money, it's really easy to make a lot more money. And when you go to the places where those people want to live, those real estate prices are ripping. If you go to places that are not desirable or have a declining local economy, they're going to have a really challenging situation and they're just not going to get bid. So that's a harder one to talk about because it's very nuanced. It also gets into how landlock some of the geography is. Like you go to an island or here's a good example. You go to Wyoming. You go out the Jackson Hole and you go skiing and you go and you look at the property prices. And it's totally insane what the prices are. Well, it's because there's national parks and all this protected land.

And it's almost like you're on an island there in the town of Jackson. And so what happens to all the property? Well, it's a desirable location. The land is landlocked. And anybody with money likes to live there. So you see the prices get bit. Are you seeing, I feel like there's a similar thing playing out in equities, though, where, yeah, the average of everything is all-time highs. but it's like the best performers that are pulling the weight.

Is that true? So the other thing that you see is the consolidation of equity. So the MAG 7 or the big guys, they're just able to going back to a proof of stake system and why it's a cesspool is because if you've got all the money and you hold all the chips, well, you can go out to any competitor and you can offer them some crazy price

that you know they're going to take because they just, you know, they want to be rich and they want to, you know, sunset often or just pull off into the sunset. And so then that company becomes a bigger and bigger conglomerate. So when you see a currency melting down and it's not a healthy currency and it's not pegged and it's being debased it, call it 10% annualized, what you get is a very unhealthy ecosystem with respect to businesses and the consolidation of those businesses. And to bring it full circle. back to the original topic, is this the destiny of Bitcoin? First, perhaps, as consolidation of capital in things like MSTR entering the S&P 500, but then gradually a realization, hey, this is sucking up all of the capital. This is where people are parking their money for a long term.

Absolutely. So what I think, you know, people, this might be a really controversial. And I, I, I, I would imagine most people would not agree with this. But I think the emergence of a lot of these treasury companies, what this is, is you have legacy equity with a board of directors that just can't figure this out and make decisive risk-based decisions. All of their decisions are based on derisking themselves so they can continue to make their million dollar salary and that they won't be thrown out of their seat. And therefore, the boards at this stalemate, they can't make a decision on Bitcoin. if they do, they only buy a 1% position of it.

And what the treasury companies are or what they're kind of like representing is the, the opposite or the anti-impetent board. And they are going out there and they're saying, hold on, we just need to put all this buying power on the balance sheet. We don't necessarily even have to have an operating business right now. But if we stuff enough buying power onto this balance sheet, as we get to the other side of of this currency meltdown, then we can buy all the products and services and assets of these other companies and strip mine these companies for what's actually valuable inside of them.

And then we'll just bolt that onto our corporate entity. And so in the meantime, how are they making money? Well, they're making money on the arbitrage opportunity between Bitcoin's performance and the fixed income market, which is yielding nothing or, you know, 5%. And it's to getting the base, the currency is getting the base at 10%. So they're looking at that. Michael's issuing, you know, preferred at 10%. And he's making, call it a 45% return in Bitcoin annualized, according to power law, for, you know, a 30 to 35% spread.

Some people will say that can't persist. I think it will because of how broke the fixed income market is. And so these companies, as they're doing this, they're just going to continue to amass more and more Bitcoin onto the balance sheet. And they're going to be the ones with the real money to go and buy the real assets that actually have. have a competitive mode and competitive advantage on the other side of whatever this thing is. Damn. Okay. I want to see if either Issa or Ryan have anything to tag in, I feel like I've been kind of monopolizing here. But if either of you want to tag in comments, questions, go ahead. I have a quick question. I'm sorry, Preston. Do you think with the stable coin bill that's coming out,

plus we have, we got long end running up, right, and then short end they're trying to take down. Are they just going to flood these stable coins? I mean, are they just going to keep pushing the treasuries there? Are they going to try to maybe yield curve on the control on the long end? Or do you see that playing out anyway now that that doesn't place? I would make the argument that the long end is pretty much lost. And that's arguable too. I think you could get a lot of people that would argue that.

But I find the long end, the 30 years is kind of lost. And when you look at the emergence of who is the buyer, who's an actual free and open market buyer of any type of debt, it's really kind of the emergence of stable coins are the buyers. And this is why all these politicians were tripping over themselves to pass the Genius Act. I mean, they were literally falling over themselves to pass this thing. And the reason they needed to pass it is they need somebody to be a free and open market buyer. And so that free and open market buyer, they don't want any of the, any of the debasement risk in the asset that they're buying to peg the issuance of their token.

What I mean by that is if they go out and they're buying 30-year bonds, which aren't even like providing a higher yield. So there's like no, there's no carrot even on the stick. That's the thing that's hilarious. There's no carrot on. If the yields on the 30-year were like 10%, if, you know, is what they probably should be, right? That's what they should be. If they were 10% on the 30-year, you may have.

have some of these stable coin issuers saying, ah, we'll put up like a 10 or 30% position of 30 year bonds on our balance sheet to back the stable coin that we're issuing. In my opinion, that would still be a bad decision. And I think they would probably agree with that. So that would be the only way that I think that they would start buying the long end of the bond yield curve. But they can just go out there. They can buy, you know, a one month note. And it's yielding the same thing. It's yielding, call it 5%. And then, they can just sweep all that into Bitcoin. They don't have any type of debasement risk if they get it wrong, you know,

and they don't even have to worry about it. So then they're just completely derrisked at that point. Wait, so the 30 year is at what? And the short-term notes are up here? I'll pull up the chart here. Give me one second. Yeah. Yeah, it's totally insane what the yield curves are.

Let's see here, Treasury yields. Okay. your 30 year is at 4.9%. Your federal funds rate is four point, which is the overnight money rate, is 4.33%. Your one month is at 4.2%. So you're getting a fraction of a percent. Instead of going a month, you're going for 30 years. From one month to 30 year, you get 50 basis points, which is a half a percent. There's zero incentive for anybody to do that. Who the hell would buy that? Well, that's why in Japan, they own like half of their own bonds. Yeah.

Yeah. Nobody wants that. This is exactly the point is. And this is why I said the 30 year and the long duration bonds, in my opinion, are lost. Like anybody that's buying that, it's probably a government. It was probably some handshake between governments. It's like not even a real market. The real market is happening at these super short durations, like overnight to,

you know, call it three month money issuance. And the bigger story, the way bigger story is, is who are the free and open market buyers that are emerging, their stable coin issuers? What are they doing with the coupons that they're receiving from the buys? They're sweeping it in the Bitcoin. Yeah. It's just like, it's, it's the, you know, it's the back to the future meme where a Biff has the, you know, the queen and he's hitting McFly on the head. Hello, McFly. It's made up. Like, I don't know what to tell people.

It's just so freaking obvious. That's wild. Do you think that these stable coin issuers, does that accelerate, does that accelerate Bitcoin in the end because of that tactic? Well, what's going to get interesting is depending on how many you have that kind of like emerge in this. I'm using air quotes here, free and open market. It's going to get so blended and merged with just the stable coin issuers being part of the government

that I don't really know how to kind of like answer the question because I don't think they're going to let there be like. And I just don't even think the market's going to settle on there being 30 of them. I think the market's just going to get used to like four or five of them because nobody does any type of risk analysis. And they're just going to be like, oh, well, it worked yesterday. So I guess it's safe, like end of analysis. And as they get bigger and bigger, I mean, it's become that those entities are basically the government. Yeah. Right.

Like how are they any different than the government? Yeah. At that point. And I guess my last question here. You were talking about how the smaller currencies are going to get crushed first as we kind of were. are way up the ladder until it's effectively the US dollar versus Bitcoin and eventually just Bitcoin versus gold maybe, you know, something like that. But, you know, if we're getting to that point, again, with the stable coin thing and the push to have like regulated stablecoin issuers,

is this a play that accelerates that where, you know, you're in some other country and the debasement, even if it's marginally more than the U.S. dollar, you're just like, screw it. I'll just use tether or something like that. Is that where we're headed? I think for the international markets, I think they're already kind of moving in that direction where it's just like, oh, I'm just going to use this stable coin instead of my local currency, which is going to get them used to using digital wallets, which is going to get them used to just like the cognitive change of buying things over their phones. That's going to happen.

But as this blob gets more powerful and bigger and bigger, right, as it gets to the Jafar moment, right? And it's become so powerful. What I think you're going to find, because it's going to be the dollar. And what I think you're going to find is that the government, the U.S. government's going to start tapping on shoulders and saying, hey, we don't really like that transaction and, you know, we, they just go straight to the issue. It doesn't matter if it's on Salana. It doesn't matter if it's on Ethereum or Tron or even on Bitcoin for that matter.

The company that's issuing and securitizing the treasuries can get a tap on the shoulder. And we just don't like this transaction that happened between this entity and that entity. And we want you to reverse it. And they can because it's not Bitcoin. Yeah. And the more that the more that. they start trying to control as it gets bigger and this is the medium that it's being going through they're just going to start tapping on their shoulders and I think that that's going to be the moment where people are like oh snap like they can just like reverse these I thought this was like decentralized I thought this was like no wrong it's not surprise surprise when there's

counterparty risk it doesn't matter what chain it's on yeah it doesn't matter what it's on yeah interesting interesting um okay easy I I don't know if you have any before I begin to wrap. Did you have any final thoughts here that you wanted to toss in? So it's kind of like based on like what we're talking, what we talked about like micro strategy and all these Bitcoin treasury companies, like eventually we're going to see governments that are going to want to stack their own Bitcoin and everything. Are they going to just end up buying these treasury companies instead and like in the back end?

Is that what's going to happen? because like, for example, right now, micro strategy owns like 3% of the whole big ones. So, like, the U.S. government can't compete with that. You know what I mean? This is what I would say. First of all, the answer is absolutely that can happen. Absolutely, they could just go in there and nationalize the asset. And the reason why is because all these people that are running these companies,

if the government comes and taps on your shoulder and they're saying, hey, we want to own this equity because we need the Treasury to fund ourselves, people don't want to go to jail, right? It's institutional custody, right? That's how it's going to be, the Bitcoin's going to be custody, and people don't want to go to jail, and so they're going to play nice with whatever the government asked them to do. So that's the risk of owning all of these things.

Can it outperform Bitcoin? And I tell people, of course it can. Them securitizing Bitcoin in the fixed income space, like all of it, all of it as I lay it out and I look at how they're doing it and what they're doing and where it goes. Can they outperform? They can. Does it come with additional risk? You better believe it comes with additional risk. And the biggest risk, maybe not today, but call it 10 years from now, is that risk right there, is what does that look like? We just had the U.S. government take, what was it, a 10% position in Intel this week? Yeah. Okay. And so then,

And this is the other thing is how are they going to do it? Are they just going to go in there and nationalize the whole thing all at once? Probably not. It might be this slow, a gradual progression of them owning the equity that they then start taking control of whatever the treasury is. And the other thing that I would point out is a lot of this comes down to the speed at which all of this unfolds. If it unfolds really fast and like we get a real meltdown in, you know,

fiat currency. I would argue that the nationalization of treasury companies and anything that they can get their hands on, the ETFs, whatever, is going to happen way more aggressively. If it happens much slower and this transition is, you know, a decade to two decades, then I think we have a fighting chance of maybe free market force is kind of coming back and it not being as egregious of a money grab in a honey pot, like, stealing situation. But who knows? I don't know. But there's nothing better, like, well, like we always say,

there's nothing better than self-custodied Bitcoin, like, period. Why do we keep supporting, like, stuff like this? You know what I mean? Well, for me, I talk about it from an education standpoint. I'm just trying to make sure everybody's informed. And, you know, this is another thing that I'm really passionate about. I believe in free and open markets. Like if somebody wants to go out there and do something risky,

I think they should be able to go out there and do something risky. And I'm not saying that I'm promoting this or promoting that. I just, I think everybody should be able to be a rational actor, put on their big boy pants and big girl pants and go out there and make their own decisions. And if they fall in their face and they bloody their nose, well, I don't know what to tell you. You made a bad decision.

It's that simple. And I think it's also we're at a point in Bitcoin, okay, where, what are we, 17 years into this experiment, right? Something like that. As a parent, when you raise your kids, okay, and they're 12 years old and they're 10 and you're teaching them all the little things that they need to know before they can become adults and then they turn 18. If you're still trying to parent them at 18 years old, it's too late. It's too late. In fact, you might have the opposite effect on them. as you're trying to coach them and tell them what to do. And where I think Bitcoin is right now is I think it's kind of at that 18 year, it's moving out of the house.

It's kind of making its own decisions. It's playing in Wall Street. And we're like, oh, no, God, be careful. Don't go there. Those are the bad people. And the fact of the matter is, is the code's written, all the engineering is pretty much out there. There's going to be a little bit more. But if it's actually going to win and it's going to go all the way,

and take over the global money supply. I think we're kind of at a point beyond like what's the term with a black hole, the event horizon. I think we're kind of past the event horizon of whether we've coded everything we can and have everything in place for the most part, maybe 99% of it's kind of there. And we've got to let the thing move out of the house. And we've got to treat it with respect. And we've got to like, you know, educate people on all the risks and what can go right,

what can go wrong. Hopefully there's not too many weekend vendors between now and maturity. Hopefully, hopefully Bitcoin itself can do a little bit better than Bitcoiners at conferences. I mean, I'd say crypto is out there. You know, it's at the frat house. It's out there doing everything right now, right? Yeah, 100%.

Well, I think this is the ideal time to round everything up. I do want to say a huge thank you to everybody, for coming on. I'll quickly just go down the line. And if you guys want to point anybody watching towards, you know, anything that you think would be useful to them in their Bitcoin journey or something cool that you saw or if you have, you know, websites, anything you want people to head to, please do. I will say anybody that's joining us here for the first time on the channel, thank you for being here. Of course, subscribe. If you enjoyed it, drop a like. But Preston, since it was just your topic, I'll go to you. Anything you want to point people towards any

final thought, feel free. I have a podcast. It's in the We Study Billionaires feed. The Bitcoin show comes out on Wednesday. The other traditional finance stuff that I'm sure a lot of people on this feed probably don't want to listen to is also there. We have three different shows throughout the week, but we would love to have you. Hell yeah. Awesome. Ryan, I'll go to you. Bitcoin Mentor.io, if you want some help training wheels on your bike to help you get to where you want to be, an integrity above all else. Everybody take care of each other out there. Hell yeah. Isabella, yourself. Myself, I would like to invite all you guys to the Bitcoin Fit Games here on the island

October 2nd to the 4th. And if you can't physically come out and, you know, be with all the Bitcoiners here on the island, I would say to, you know, stay tuned on BTC, Isla, our YouTube show, and follow the cool projects that the GetBase team is doing. Hell yeah. And if anybody's curious about what everybody here is doing, all their links will be in the show notes down below. So make sure you go check them out. And Ryan Preston, I want to challenge you guys one of these days to head over to Isla Mojaroz with me.

We're going to check out Isabella's gym that they built there. We're going to crush a workout altogether. I sold the Bitcoin for it. I'm kidding. With letting you get Bitcoin back loans. So there you go. There you go. Well, we'll go. We'll crush a workout and we'll pay for admission to the gym in Sats. Hopefully you accept lightning. Of course.

Awesome. Everything here runs on Bitcoin. Awesome. Awesome. I love it. Well, everybody, thank you guys for being here. Everybody that enjoyed the show, thank you guys for being here. Drop a like. And Preston, Ryan, Isabella. Thank you guys. And everyone else. This was your daily session. We'll see you guys. time. Hey, you. Yes, you watching the Bitcoin price movements and the latest exciting news. It's awesome to stay informed, but the real power of Bitcoin comes from taking control. Don't just watch,

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