BTC Sessions - "The Most Bullish Market Structure In History For Bitcoin" | Carlasare, Ross, HODL

Episode Date: October 6, 2026

Mentor Sessions Ep 101: Joe Carlasare, Dr. Jeff Ross, and American HODL break down why Bitcoin at $85K is poised to break $100K, the dead four year cycle, and AI's economic impact in 2026.Nation states now hold more Bitcoin on a percentage basis than individuals do, and Joe Carlasare and Jeff argue that single fact rewrites the entire bull case heading into 2026. With Bitcoin sitting around $85,000, this conversation makes the case that $100K is the starting bell, not the ceiling.You'll learn why Carlasare calls the recent sell-off a self-fulfilling prophecy, why both guests believe the traditional four year cycle is finally dead, and how the walk from $100K to $1 million could happen faster and easier than most holders expect. You'll hear why long-term hodlers above $100K are already gone, why the Cold Card capitulation felt like the real bottom, and how liquidity, manufacturing, and speculation (the "three burners") tell the macro story right now. You'll also get a frank breakdown of AI's economic impact, the fight over compute governance, the IP and legal battles facing OpenAI and Anthropic, and the FinCEN rules on self-hosted wallets that were just rescinded.⏱️ Timestamps:0:00 - Intro0:40 - Calling The Bottom At $58K And Where Bitcoin Sits Now1:17 - P(Doom) Zero, P(BTC) 1002:34 - Nation States Own More Bitcoin Than Individuals3:23 - The Entire Sell-Off Was A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy4:36 - Why Flipping Green In 2026 Breaks The Four Year Cycle6:44 - The Cold Card Capitulation And The Double Bottom8:19 - Covid Distorted Every Economic Cycle11:03 - Bitcoin Trades On Macro Now, Not The Cycle13:14 - Junk Bonds At 14% And Broken Correlations14:25 - Only 2.5% From A Green Year, 20% From $100K15:30 - Why $100K Unlocks $200K, $300K, $400K16:17 - The Walk From $100K To $1 Million24:01 - The Michael Saylor Prophecy And Follow-On Buyers27:31 - James Check: There's No Narrative, Just Demand30:08 - Strategy Survived The Stress Test34:26 - Is The Equity Market Over Its Skis?38:19 - Creative Destruction And The AI Economy40:35 - HODL On The AI Red Capture And Robo-God Labs45:25 - Effective Altruism, The Vatican, And Compute Governance47:33 - The Coming AI False Flag52:47 - Can You Make AI Labs Legally Liable?55:41 - Do Local Models Beat The Frontier?1:00:41 - Will Wall Street Shred OpenAI And Anthropic?1:01:02 - China, Manufacturing, And The IP Problem1:03:13 - Is AI Output Fair Use? Courts Say No1:06:35 - FinCEN's Self-Custody Rules Rescinded1:07:19 - The Three Burners: Liquidity, Manufacturing, Speculation1:13:48 - What FinCEN Actually Changed1:15:15 - Joe's New Book And Closing ThoughtsThis episode references the Cold Card incident, Michael Howell's liquidity work, Lyn Alden's fiscal framing, and Joe Carlasare's new book. Hardware wallet and self-custody tools discussed in the sponsor segments include Trezor and Casa multisig.🔗 Links & Resources:→ Follow Joe Carlasare on X: https://x.com/JoeCarlasare→ Follow Jeff Ross on X: https://x.com/FormerDrJeff→ Follow HODL on X: https://x.com/americanhodl8🔔 Subscribe for weekly Bitcoin Podcasts🐦 Follow on X: https://x.com/BTCSessions🐦 Follow on X: https://x.com/theBTCmentor⚡Casa MultiSig & Inheritance: https://casa.io/sessions10% Off First Year Promo Code SESSIONS⚡ Sponsored by Trezor - Get Your Safe 7 Today: https://affil.trezor.io/aff_c?offer_id=352&aff_id=1088⚡ POWERED by Abundant Mines: Fully managed Bitcoin mining. Learn more at https://qrco.de/bgYKPB⚡ Sponsored by BITCOIN WELL: Best Place to BUY & SELL BITCOINhttps://qrco.de/bfiDC6💡BOOK Private Sessions with Nathan, Ben and the BTC Mentor Team: Master self-custody, hardware, multisig, Lightning, privacy, and more. 👉 Visit btcmentor.io #Bitcoin #BTCSessions #JoeCarlasare #JeffRoss #AmericanHODL #BTC #BitcoinMacro #FourYearCycle #BitcoinPrice #BitcoinBullMarket #AIandBitcoin #BitcoinTo1Million #NationStateBitcoin #SelfCustody #FinCEN

100K is almost like the starting done. I think it's probably the most bullish market structure in history. Looking for that low in October. You think there's still capital on the sidelines determined to wait until this month is out before they come back in? We're progressing into the digital age. And the people who refuse to allow that or acknowledge that, they're just getting decimated right now. And they are going to be destroyed. They just tried to get the Pope to say that AI was conscious, that it has a soul.

Oh, it's moving too fast. It presents an existential threat. We need a pause. is sort of a pretext for if something does go wrong to nationalize it in a Manhattan-style project. Wall Street has always had a contentious relationship with tax, and they're going to take a look at some of this shit and just be like... All right, good morning, gentlemen.

Thank you so much for joining today. Very excited to have this conversation as we're coming into now Q4 and take a look at Bitcoin. Now, I went back and checked out the old one. Not only did you guys call the bottom the last time we got together, the episode actually dropped on June 30th at 58,379, the actual bond. Since then, global bond yields have been on the rise, but since been actively buying long data paper, war stepped in with a 25 basis point hike, but it looks like he's done for

now. PMIs continue expanding for the ninth straight month, all while Bitcoin is sitting at around a beautiful 85,000. So, Hoddle, starting with you today, on a scale from zero to sell everything and drive a moped through the desert, how are you feeling about Bitcoin right now? Well, I just, I just tweeted this that my P-Domb is zero and that my P-BTC is 100. Good. So, that lets you know where I'm at, okay? A lot of people, by the way, a lot of people don't know what P-Doom is. This is like a word that the, the effective altruist and the AI guys are using. It means what is your probability of the AI becoming the Terminator and killing all of humanity, right?

So when you hear somebody say, my P-Doom is 20%. That means they have a 20% probability that Chatsy-B-T becomes the Terminator and kills everyone. Excellent. Well, I'm glad that your P-Dum is sitting at zero. your own that Bitcoin set raging at about 100 right now. Tell me, what's got you excited, man? What do you think? And you've seen so many of these things. You've been around for quite a while. What's top of mind for you in the Bitcoin space? I think, first of all, if it was the bare market bottom, and we were correct, then, you know, it being relatively shallow compared to

past bare market bottoms, you know, corresponds with a relatively shallow, you know, bull market top. And I think that's like structurally pretty bullish. It means that there's a very significant bid underneath Bitcoin. Another big, you know, tailwind here is that I just saw this thing from Willy Wu, actually, I thought was super interesting that Bitcoin is at 5% individual adoption, and it's at 8% nation state adoption. So nation states have now adopted Bitcoin more on a percentage basis than individuals have, which is kind of crazy to think about. And, you know, obviously, if you think about the type of buyers or Bitcoiners that Native States, States are. They're, you know, Bitcoiners with their own money printers. So there's going to be,

like, I think, a much larger and more sustained bid underneath Bitcoin on a go-forward basis. And, you know, I think that's wildly bullish structurally over the next few years. No, I agree. Joe, I'm curious your take on that, because you've been kind of consistently optimistic for 2026 throughout the year, despite everything that's going on. I'm wondering where you're sitting right now, how you're feeling. Well, my, you know, after the fact, interpretation of this is that the entire sell-off is sort of this self-fulfilling prophecy where people thought that they had to get bearish into this year. And I think you see that in the price action. Obviously, the economy stayed robust and equity markets have done well

and other assets have done well. So whatever it is, sentiment is really powerful in Bitcoin, because Bitcoin doesn't have the traditional fundamental style earnings and profits and so forth. So the self-fulfilling prophecy, I think, caused a lot of selling. The fact is that we went to 60K in February, right? And yes, we undercut it by a couple grand, 58K. But most of the year, you were just trending in the 60s and 70s so far. And to me, that's not what we've typically seen in the traditional four-year cycle bear markets, right? Yes, it did coincide with the calendar last year.

But to me, it was like people talked themselves into being bearish. almost unnecessarily so. And I think they expected to be able to buy this competitively bottom and now they're off sides. And right now, the thing that has me most bullish is that you're sitting in like 85, 86, 87K, right around there. You're about to flip bullish for the year, which breaks the pattern. Like if we can actually be positive in 2026, the best thing in the world can be to get people, get this four-year cycle mentality out of people's heads. because the whole thing that attracted me to Bitcoin, aside from the characteristics of the asset itself, was this idea that you didn't have to trade it.

You didn't have to become a speculator. You could just hoddle it. That's the whole idea. Like, you hoddle, don't trade. You know, stop trying to play these games where most people are going to get wrecked. Most people are going to lose Bitcoin. So I think it's very constructive. And as soon as you get into the 90s, all people are going to be talking about is how do we get back to 100K,

how quickly we're going to get back to 100K? And as soon as you break 100K,000, the only thing that people are going to talk about is when are we going to make a new all-time high. And I think this can happen really quick. I mean, we're within 30-odd percent of an all-time high right now. You get yields to come down. You get some bullish catalysts in the real economy, which I think Dr. Jeff and I agree on. I think Bitcoin can absolutely rip. I still don't see why we can't make a new all-time high this year. I think people are like strangely bearish here at like 85, 84, 86K, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. We've had a massive rip. It needed time to consolidate.

As soon as you get sort of the election behind you, as soon as you get some of the volatility events, I don't see why we can't run really fast. Because I think nobody at this point is, you know, in prior bare cycles, I remember thinking people said Bitcoin was done. I don't hear anybody saying Bitcoin is done. It's just a question of like, when do we time it? Do we do it now? Do we buy in November?

Do we buy in January? To me, that is more characteristic with sort of a mid-cycle correction rather than like, you know, let's the panic. It's all hitting the fan. Everything's falling apart type, you know, FTCS style collapse and all these other analogs. So I think all that's breaking down. I think it's very bullish. I think there's a lot of selling we digested among long-term hoddlers above 100K.

They're gone. They're out of the marketplace. Stronger hands have those coins now. So once you get back up to, you know, the 90s, I think it runs real quick. And I don't think we stop at 120. I think it's going much higher. Just to tag what Joe said here. the cold card

bottom, I guess, it wasn't the actual bottom as far as back in June. But it felt like a very capitulatory moment because I knew Bitcoiners who were longtime OG Bitcoiners who were selling just sort of almost reflexively like puking up their coins out of fear. And that often is what capitulatory bot. That is what capitulation looks like and feels like.

And so that kind of felt like, you know, we had a little double bottom there around the cold card. incident. But I totally agree with Joe that, like, I think the four-year cycle thing is we're definitely trending towards tagging this year as a green year. And we're, you know, possibly even going to get an all-time high this year or near, you know, the beginning of next year. And, you know, if we break 100K this year, if we end the year green, it becomes really hard to continue arguing about a four-year cycle, in my opinion, because it's a complete break of the pattern.

Whereas if we get an all-time high this year, I mean, it's just like you, you, you, you, dragged the four-year cycle out behind the shed and shot it in the head. Like, it's completely dead. Completely. There's not even a conversation that can be had anymore at that point. So, yeah, I think the four-year cycle guys are running out a wiggle room. They're all doing this thing where they're like retrofitting the cycle. Like, well, if it's actually a long cycle compared to a short, it's more of an oval cycle

instead of an actual circle. And if you look at it on, you know, and they're doing a lot of retrofitting and stuff. And it's like, no, man, I think it's dead. And I think we just got to let go of the four-year cycle. thing. Yeah, as a heuristic. Along that lines, you know, there are there are cycles in other markets besides Bitcoin, right? There are liquidity cycles, all these different things. What I, what I would be curious about Jeff's take on is that some have theorized that COVID was such a massive disruption, that it screwed up everything in the subsequent puke of the bond market in

2021, 22, 22, having to catch up with the elevator rates of inflation. That that screwed up the entire business cycle that we've sort of been in this weird, funky sort of muddling through period, really since 2022. We've never had a true manufacturing cycle. And now we're finally going to get that in the years to come. So we're starting an economic cycle as opposed to ending one, which I think is a fascinating thesis. I'd be curious what Jeff thinks. I think, Joe, that we talked about that on our spaces, because that is my theory. And when you look across these economic cycles, monetary cycles, all these different cycles, Bitcoin, four-year cycle, presidential cycle. Look at all these different cycles, as you say, they're everywhere. But what it looks like when you look across the

arc of time, that there is like this huge boulder thrown into the pond because of COVID, and you had this, you know, huge splash. And it just threw everything off and distorted everything. That's the main word I think of with COVID is the distortion that came of it because of the supply chain just shut down because of shutting down small businesses literally just, you know, killing small business. And then the massive monetary stimulus and the massive fiscal stimulus, it's just taken the market so much time to recover from that. And so like as you mentioned, I was saying like back in 2023, I was waiting for the manufacturing sector to finally come back to life again. And it didn't. And then I was waiting in 20. I was like, it's got to be 2024. And

then it didn't. And then I'm like, it has to be, it just has to be 2025. And then it didn't again. And now finally in 2026, we're seeing the manufacturing sector rev up again. And so does that mean we're going to have like an extended cycle this time? I don't know. It's hard to say what the future holds. But all I do know is you can look back now and say we didn't have a normal economic cycle. We haven't had anything normal since COVID to your point. And so I think that also distorted Bitcoin.

And we saw that. We saw that in the non blow off top of October of 2025. and because we didn't have a huge buildup of leverage and towards the end of 2025, we didn't have a lot of leverage to liquidate these leverage long liquidation cascades that you see at the bottom, like the capitulation form phase of bear markets. We didn't have that either this year. And so I just think, well, that's normal now. And what is super exciting for me is I'm so excited to not have to talk about the four-year cycle

being possible anymore and being proven wrong every year. Because I used to say for several years that I just don't believe in the, a four-year cycle. I have many headlines where I said the four-year cycle is dead. And then I was proven wrong because, like, literally to the date, you know, it peaked and to the date at bottom. And I think this time we can definitively put it to rest that the four-year cycle is dead. Bitcoin is a major global macro asset. It trades on macro factors now. And we can just not even have to worry about the four-year cycle anymore and think about it from a macro perspective. But going back from a macro perspective, just put Bitcoin aside for a second. Think about how many

Nathan, like indicators that Tradfai utilizes regularly that have just broken over the last five years. Like people talked about the yield curve inversion. I can't, how many Twitter debates that I get into with people about the yield curve inversion causing a recession or proceeding a recession? The SOM rule, right? This this 90 year rule about how when unemployment rate tricks up by a moving average rate of X amount, that that is a signal for an economic slowdown or recession. time and time again, we saw all these sort of traditional benchmarks that people would point to and say that's really an indicator. I mean, you had reports about recession calls that were like over 90% chance of recession next year, totally bogus. Economic growth accelerated into those calls.

So it's just fascinating. Everything got scrambled and cooked by COVID, which makes sense, right, because it was such a huge disruption. Yeah, I think also there's this like boomerism thing where there are all these, especially like the, uh, the doom, the doom and gloom boomers, you know, who are on Twitter spaces all the time. Like, they sort of believe that the world is as prescribed to them or was told to them when they were children and that it works in certain ways. And a lot of those beliefs are just fundamentally incorrect and have been incorrect for 30, 40, 50 years.

And, you know, you can see they're incorrect, but there's this belief that like, well, come on now. We have to get back to the baseline at some point. It's like, no, no, we don't. this train has no breaks like you know let all them is always saying like this thing goes to infinity they're going to keep printing they're going to keep inflating don't fight the fed yada yada yada just take advantage of what's happening recognize what's happening and take advantage of it yeah well look look at this model like i mean we've had an absolute like devastating move in the bond market just

you have junk bonds at 14% right triple c's for yielding 14% 10 years selling off like crazy the move index breaking out And you have Bitcoin ripping alongside it. You have the dollar, right? Everybody always, all the crypto traders, they're like, oh, the Dixie is running higher. So that means Bitcoin has to puke. And, of course, like Bitcoin has run alongside the Dixie moving higher. So all these, like, traditional correlations have broken down.

And I think it's fascinating because I think it's telling you something that there's a powerful, real demand for Bitcoin. This is the early stages of a big bull move. And I think what has me most excited about it is that even the bulls, Even the bowls are like, well, maybe we can make it up to, you know, 100K. Maybe we can make it up to 120. But, you know, I don't know if we can get much higher. There's sort of diminishing returns to Bitcoin. That is setting this.

Now, contrast that with like last time in 2024 and 2025, you had multiple people calling for 300, 400, 500, 500K Bitcoin, right? It's kind of the exact opposite, right? No offense. No, I completely agree, Joe. I'm actually curious on that note of the sentimentia because one, I was taking a look here. for us to have a green year, we're only like 2.5% away from a green year. We came in at about 88,000, a little over 88,000 in January.

So that's just a, that's a boring afternoon for Bitcoin to get above 88 there. And then additionally, the back to 100 is only 20% move. It's less than a 20% move from where we're sitting right now. That's not difficult to do. I'm curious, Joe, then, if you think that the, you know, the calendar call, looking for that low in October, do you think there's still capital on the sidelines determined to wait until this month is out before they come back in? Yeah, I absolutely do. I mean, that's why I go into some of the crypto trader rooms because I hear them all talking about this like, oh, it's 10 years of data. Never let me wrong. Maybe it happens in November, not December, but we think lower lows are coming. There's still people making 40K calls. I think there is a lot of capital. And then more importantly than the capital that is waiting from the traders is I think that psychologically the media and the narrative, it starts going once you get close to 100K.

That 100K is a massive psychological thing. I mean, for normies, I think once you establish 100K as the floor, I think it unlocks 200, 300,000, 400K. 100K's almost like the starting belt. You know, I said this on previous pods, but I went to the bar with my friends who, none of them hold Bitcoin, despite, you know, years of me proselytizing to them. And without being told from me, they all knew the price was 100K when it was around 100K. just they all knew that. And, you know, so like Joe's saying, like, the normie mind picks up on 100K as the beacon. I think another thing here, too, is like a lot of the people who are long in the tooth from years and years of crypto trading and like, you know, one year, what is it?

One human year is like seven dog years. Well, okay, like one Bitcoin year is like 20 years and tradfi, right? So, like, yeah, we got, we're, we're so tired. We're weary. We're like, oh, my God. I have to keep pottling. Just kill me now, right? So I think a lot of us are thinking it was so hard to go from, you know, zero to a hundred

that it's going to be so much hard diminish returns, blah, blah, blah, to go from $100K to like $10 million. And the truth is that it's going to go from $100K to a million much faster. It's going to go from a million to $10 million even faster. And, you know, there's going to be a lot of people that sideline themselves, take themselves out of the competition, you know, prevent themselves from generational wealth because they're just they're tired and they're you know it's been a long time and they want to start living life and they want to have material comforts they want to spend their money and they're like what is all this hoddling for if i'm not going to actually spend it etc etc um peter teal there was he was on a podcast and they

asked him about why he sold facebook early when you know and he was saying he incorrectly basically thought it would be easy to go to a billion and much harder to go from like a billion to a hundred billion right or from 10 billion to 100 billion and it turns out that it's easier to go from 10 billion to 100 billion, than it is to go from zero to 10 billion. Same principle applies in Bitcoin. Like the gold market, right?

Like last year when gold was, you know, we had to take shit from Peter Schiff when we were having like, the Bitcoin was down and gold was ripping. I mean, think about that. Like gold is a huge market, much bigger than Bitcoin. And it ripped like crazy. So the idea that Bitcoin can't do the same thing because some sort of bullshit diminished returns narrative,

I think that's just completely assonite. I think it's going to go faster on the backside than it did. on the front side because there's going to be more participants. Like that stat I quoted earlier, there's 8% you know, global penetration of nation states. Okay, so it's not like institutions, then nation states. They're all picking out at the trough all at once. And when, you know, the game is on, the game is on.

Like, get yourself a chair. Don't be left out. No, I completely agree. Jeff, your thoughts? Just one take on what Willie Wu posted that thing you're talking about, hoddle, the nation state adoption, being ahead of individuals. individual adoption. The one caveat is multiple any, the second tweet below that, he talked about like the actual countries and what and how they're doing this. Several of the countries,

their main, the way they acquire or accumulate Bitcoin is through seizures. And so the downside as individuals is it's hard for us to acquire Bitcoin through seizures. It's very easy for governments to do that. So they're not really acquiring it. So anyways, I quibble a little bit with his data, but the point being nation states are. The guy in the cold card hack, you know, whoever's buying that. Right. He did some seizure work. Yeah, right. Yeah.

Maybe we should take up that line of work. Well, we need digital letters of mark. That's what we need. Digital letters of mark. We go back and get our shit. All right. That's what we need. I'm pretty stoked, Hottle, that you're saying that you think that things are actually going to accelerate from here in terms of Bitcoin price.

Because I'm sort of, I'm not a hardcore diminishing returns, but I just think law of large numbers that eventually it kind of slows down. Like, in fact, I was just thinking it was about a decade ago where I first started for the first time buying Bitcoin, 2016-ish. And it was, the price was like in the $5 to $800 range. I thought I was totally late at that point. By the way, I like to tell this to people. Like, I thought like, oh my gosh, why would I even buy this? I'm so late to Bitcoin. Like people have already made 1,000 X or all that kind of stuff. But I'm like, well, I might as well try. And then, of course, I went down the crypto DGN rabbit hole and that ruined me and took all my Bitcoin. That's another story. But so about 10 years, it's gone up about

100x, right? So it went from about 800 to about 80,000 where we are today. So are you saying that 10 years from today, you think that the price would be possibly more than 100x from where we are today, like in the 8 million range? Let me clarify what I'm saying here. I'm not necessarily saying it's faster. I'm saying it's easier. So when you get to a certain size, it's more automatic, right? Now, whether it ends up actually being faster in a percentage basis, probably not. But on a nominal basis, the numbers get so large so quickly. You know, like, for instance, we had a 50% down correction and we're like, hey, 50% that's not that bad.

That was like $60, like $7,000 a Bitcoin or some shit. I can't do the math, but it was, that's a lot of money, man, per one Bitcoin, you know? And so like there's going to be a thing where, you know, it's like we're two steps forward, one step back and that one step back is like $2 million a coin, right? that's going to feel like a crazy psychological move. And what I'm saying is that it's easier for large things to grow larger. Yeah. You know.

I like to think of it in terms of the class of hodlers because there are certain levels for every distinct cohort of hodlers, depending on what year they came in, where the money is very difficult for them not to part ways with a few coins. You know, if you're at 2015 or 2016 or you're seeing $120,000 Bitcoin, it makes it difficult not to part ways with some coins. For the 20, 2017, 2018 crew, I think, you know, it's probably closer to 200K for a lot of those people. For the next crew, right, if you've been post-2020, say, you know, you bought Bitcoin in the 20s, maybe 40s, 50s, that's like sort of your average cost basis.

Do you really part ways at 150? I mean, that's a 2, 3x? I don't know. I think you got to get up, I think you got to get up above 200 to really unlock some supply for sellers. So that's how I look at. I look at it like, okay, what levels will unlock supply, you know, if you're in a bull market, that's pretty strong. And to me, it's, you know, north of $200,000. I also think, real quick, to your point, you know, what happened the last cycle back in October is tons of whales unloaded above 100K. And those whales aren't going to be unloading again above, like they've already unloaded. They've already taken their chips off the table.

They have their, you know, a multimillion dollar or more lifestyles locked in. They're not going to be unloading. So this time, to your point, Joe, where we get above 100K, to me, it's sort of blue skies. They're going to be talking about the all-time highs, which will get blown out pretty quickly, I think. I don't know that there really is another, you know, I don't even know if 200K is a milestone that most people are thinking about. Like, to me, it might just be all the way till a million where we see the next huge unload.

10K had a lot of gravity behind it right and I think if you look at 100K it has a lot of gravity behind it as well but then between the orders of magnitude there's not a lot of gravity in there right and you can just slice through those things humans are kind of dumb we're kind of base right why do we love tens right here baby got 10 fingers that's why we love base 10 okay so when we think we think in tens because we learned to count as little children on our fingers.

And it's just a psychological principle where you go, you know, yeah, why would I sell it 300K, 400K,000k, 500K, K? When it's obviously going to a million if we're right here in the range. So I actually think the walk from 100K to a million, I don't know. I think a lot of people are thinking it might take deep into the 2030s, like 2036 or 10 years from now, basically. And, you know, my gut sense is, you know, let's. And again, I've been wrong on like so many bullish. I'm directionally correct on Bitcoin, but every one of my specific predictions is way too bullish.

And I'm just like, let me tell you why it goes to a million buck or every time. I do this every time. So I get it. I get it. I'm like a broken clock who's always wrong. Understood. That said, let me tell you why I think this goes to a million pretty fast. Okay.

It's like, it just to me, it's a lot easier psychologically and the types of buyers that are here and, you know, the institutional players and the nation states are just, you also. got people parking long-term capital here, right? Whereas in the, in the beginning of Bitcoin, it was really only crazy people who were taking speculative, speculative flyers on Bitcoin who were parking long-term capital and like significant amounts of money. The reason why Michael Saylor was so interesting to everybody is because he was a man who was prophesied by those of us who were early speculators as like one day there will be a man who parks billions of dollars in Bitcoin and then he showed up. And his name is Michael Saylor. And we were all like, oh shit,

This is amazing. And we liked it not because we, like, particularly love Sailor, although, like, you know, pros and cons, like people like him. But it's because we knew that there was to be many more follow-on investors, and because of that, the price would go far higher. And it just proves that somebody is willing to pay literally billions of dollars for these digital strings of information that we all speculated on from back in the day, right? So, like, it's real.

The prophecy is real. basically. And I'm just saying like, we're going to go from 100K to a million, I think sooner and faster than people think we are and it's going to be a little easier than people think it's going to be. The number of people that I talk to that haven't taken Bitcoin off the exchange is honestly quite frightening. And those that do, a lot of them by one device, get it set up and never look at it again. Their security ends up becoming a snapshot of whatever the hell they knew that day. Bitcoin is not a sedative and forget an asset. Hoddling is an active process. I've helped a lot of people build their way to multi-vender multi-six setups and almost every time

Trezer was one of those devices. Intuitive, secure, Bitcoin-only firmware available, and open source. And that last one is really important. They've always been open source since the very beginning, since 2014, when they built the very first hardware wallet. And those recovery words that you got stamped into metal, that standard was co-authored by Treasor's founders. This is a company that the industry has literally been building on for over a decade. But there's one thing that nobody could open up, the secure element, the place where you actually store your keys. The Treasor Safe 7 has two of them, and Tropic O1 is the first open-source secure element.

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And as for your family, Kasa and Heresy, means you're not leaving them a locked box with no key. You invite them with an email and their key lies dormant while you're still alive and should that day ever come. You don't have to worry about them having to figure it out when you're not around to ask. You've already taken care of it. So head to cossa.io slash sessions promo code sessions to receive 10% off your first year. That's cossa.io slash sessions code sessions. Click the link in the description down below or scan the QR code on the screen. I agree. Joe, I kind of like your take on. So I was talking with James Check the other day. One of the things he highlighted to me was this idea that there's no narrative going forward for why

Bitcoin's performing well. You can't say it's like the 40-year downtrend and bonds. It's not because of rate hiking or rate-cutting. There's really nothing that people can point to of why it's going up right now and why I think it will continue, except for there's just demand for the orange coin. That's it. It's that people want to own this asset. They want to be part of their portfolio. I think about passive flows and things coming in as well. But I'm curious on your view as we continue grinding up higher here, what the narrative shift is, and if you think it's just going to be just kind of broader acceptance of it as an asset class. Well, the short-term narrative, shift in my mind is entirely this, you know, again, self-fulfilling prophecy of the cycle theory.

I think people have positioned it. They front ran it. And I was saying it's back in the summer, right? If everyone expects it that some sort of bottom in Q4, it won't come in Q4. And I think there were people that sold, right? And they sold in October. It effectively bottomed in February. There was a lot of cleanup, a lot of consolidation. And then once you found solar exhaustion with the STRC, hysteria and MSTR hysteria and cold card incident, I think people said, okay, this is washed, sellers exhausted, we're going to buy. And then once you get closer and closer to that calendar, and I don't like it, I think it's kind of stupid, but I'm not going to fight the market when the market clearly believes that

there's some mystical four-year cycle that you have to be positioned long here. And the four-year cycle in some ways, I think gives many people more confidence just to invest. They just think for whatever reason that they're guaranteed a bull market here. Maybe it doesn't work out. Who knows? I don't, I think it will personally. But to me, that's the big move. Aside from that, I think that, you know, when you look at this, and I'm a big believer in

the Jordy Visser framing, so I always credit him for this. But this idea of the IPO moment, what Hoddle talked about, the whale selling, to me, that was massive. Because I think people mistook the muted returns of 2025, wherever we was expecting this big blow-off move, they mistook that for somehow fundamental weakness in Bitcoin. And I read it as the opposite. I read that as purging the people that were always psychologically ready to sell above under K, that was their sort of back of their mind. I'm going to take 20% off. And a lot of these people still have tons of Bitcoin, by the way. I represent some of these guys. They will tell you,

like, I peeled off 25% of my supply because if it goes up from here, I'm going to be very happy. If it goes down, I'll be also very happy. But now I have cash that it can redeploy and buying house. and things. And I don't begrudge people doing that. If they want to do that, that's fine. They had to put up with a lot of BS for 10 years holding Bitcoin, many of them. So more power to them. But in terms of like the fundamental catalyst, I think it's a huge fundamental catalysts

that STRC and MSTR were tested in a bear market. Okay? You don't, you know, smooth seas do not make skilled sailors. You don't want to have those vehicles. And obviously the rest of the Treasury complex got shellacked. But you don't want the big preeminent ones not to go through a bear market and be stress tested. And I think the fact that they survived it and they're going to be, you know, STRC is trading roughly back to par. And, you know, they didn't have liquidity issues.

They've got a cash runway. They've got a cash cushion. All of these things, to me, they speak very well for a very strong, sustained rally forward. I mean, you got to remember, I was on a space back in, I think, June, Peter Schiff said MSDR was going to zero. He said STRC was going to zero. He was telling me how the entire thing is going to blow up. Sailor's going to have to liquidate all his coins below 20K. I mean, these were real things that people were saying earlier this year.

And they've been disproven time and time again. And once that narrative takes hold, once you have a narrative, like we have the mutest, most muted Bitcoin bear market in history, those things are really powerful. And I think they're mostly powerful to institutional investors. Like, you know, institutional investors, they can stomach 30, 40 percent of clients. That happens in major mega-cap tech names. They can't stomach 80, 85%. That's a wipeout.

That's where you lose your job. So to me, I think that narrative is going to be catching hold. And yeah, I mean, all I see are positives for Bitcoin, given how the market's constructed. I think to Hoddle's point, in terms of the raw, you know, ROI, maybe we're not going to see what we saw in the early days. But in terms of the ability and easiness to hold it moving forward. I think it's probably the most bullish market structure in history for Bitcoin.

Agreed. I think you've got all the major like barren narratives over the years. They kind of like, you were just wrong, especially if we're back above all time high, especially if it happens this year, like what narrative do you possibly have onto? Schiff, all those guys, you have, you have no credibility, I think at some point in time. I think we're nearing that point. And they combine that with basically financing the lifestyles of the OG so that they're no longer interested in maybe looking for that stretch goal to take some coins off the table.

I think it's a pretty good setup. Now, Jeff, go for it. And one thing before I forget, because I think it's not repeated enough. And maybe Jeff or Hoddle, you know the exact stat. But I believe with Ibit in the bear market, they saw outflows in a bear market of roughly 2% assets under management. Is that right? Do I have that stat right? It's around that.

20. Jeff? Was it 20? Let's look at up. Who's got chat of PT? Look that up. Because I think the outflows for even if it's 20, I mean, that's remarkable for that vehicle. You're talking about the fastest growing ETF in history.

And a lot of fast movers, right, they boom, they bust. The fact that even 20% of outflows during a bear market, you know, you didn't have, the tourists held. Yep. There were very few of them that actually just left and were gone. Well, Joe, to your point, there was, I'm trying to remember which one was. there's two other kind of like Bitcoin ETF vehicles that had come up and they're the only ones gaining on Ibit right now. They're very small players. But the key thing there was that they had the smallest fees, right? So the hint there being that, okay, if people are going and shopping around

picking the smaller option because it's got less of a fee attached to it, they're thinking long term. They're thinking that they're parking this capital and it's going to ultimately stay there. And I think you're right. I think that's where a lot of the capital is going into the ETFs and continuing to flow into the different ETF products is thinking long term. They're not sure. term speculars, they're not short-term traders. Jeffrey, are you able to find it there? I'm sorry, no, I can't. I'm trying to work with it at the moment.

Well, I could be wrong. Maybe it was like a 20% rotation or something, but the number 80% was what was sticking in my mind. Like 80% didn't move something along those lines. But you're right, it wasn't a huge drawdown. We didn't even see like, I don't know, it didn't feel like there was a major, a major trad-fi kind of event.

Joe, I'd be kind of curious, just a little bit of a weird side tangent here too, because I know that you take a broader look at equities as a whole. Do you have any concerns about the broader equity market right now? Again, we talk about these old metrics that don't really matter. And again, the yield curve was inverted for God knows how long and it didn't end up amounting to really anything. I think I saw Schiller PE is at its second highest peak at about 40 right now. Do you worry about broader market getting out over its skis a little bit and then maybe dragging Bitcoin back down or no?

So I saw some of the things I look at. I was texting Jeff about this. I saw some price action I didn't particularly, I wasn't particularly fond of in the last couple weeks here. But those sort of signal for a false positive. So I had a hedge in place about a week ago. I've since taken it off. To me, I'm very optimistic on the equity market.

I think it looks great. I think it's breaking out here now. To me, the, yes, you can have a correction of, you know, three, four, five percent, any point. You could have one later this month. You get one next month after the election. But no, I mean, I don't have any sort of big negative bear market call on equities. I don't see why that would occur. I think people are obsessing about this yield curve and they're obsessing about the long end.

I think that if anything, long end indicates very strong growth, which is what is driving. A lot of this, I think energy shock is a big thing. The longer that persists, the longer I'd expect yields to stay elevated. But, you know, the opposite is also true. I've been surprised before. Things can just wrap up. We can, you know, abit defeat in Iran, you know, be on our way and you can see oil prices crater. So I'm not negative on equities.

I think Bitcoin's far more attractive. You know, to me, whatever's been running really hot, I'm much more cautious on generally. Like, you know, gold, people were obsessed with gold in the early part of the year. Gold's been one of the worst investments this year. Equities have done fantastic. against gold. Now, that's not to say gold can't go up from here. It absolutely can, but, you know, sort of it had its day last year and now it spent most of the year consolidating. Equities have done very well. I would not be surprised if you started to see small caps and more cyclical stocks start

to run and Bitcoin run really hard into next year. Jeff, your thoughts? Oh, man, lots of thoughts. By the way, there's a bunch of construction around me. So if it's getting too loud, let me know. I can just mute my mic. But so I agree with Joe. I'm generally quite optimistic. I think there's just so much doom and gloom out there right now. And every time the 10 year ticks up another, you know, 10 bips or whatever it goes up, people flip out and talk about the world's going to end. And I mean, I still remember vividly people saying the market absolutely cannot tolerate rates above 5%.

And now they're above 5% and we're, you know, now they're sitting at 5.34%. Those people that talk about that only talk about the dumer side of it. And I get that. It's important to think about what are all the bad things and what could go wrong. But you should also look at what can go right. You know, and if rates are, as I believe, the combination of future growth and inflation expectations, and I'd say, well, 5.34% seems pretty good. It seems about right. We have a strong and getting stronger economy right now. We have some inflation, but it's not out of control. Now, what, most people, they all flip out when I say that, but it's cumulative inflation that people feel in the grocery store. things are expensive because they've been getting increasingly expensive for the last many, many years. It's not just this year that things got expensive. And so that's a chronic problem. And it's a problem with the debasement of money as well. And so I'm generally optimistic. I'm with Joe, like the other argument that people will say, well, okay, if you say, well, stocks are going to keep going higher. The rebuttal, I always get our, well, it's just AI driving it. It's just this AI bubble.

And I'm like, but that's part of the economy. That is the economy. They're like, if you strip out AI data centers, there's actually a contraction in manufacturing right now. I'm like, okay, but you don't strip that out because that's part of the economy. And that's what the economy is doing. And so I think what the boomer, domers are having a struggle with right now is we're actually seeing creative destruction in our economy.

And that's a good thing. We're seeing the old analog businesses not being able to keep up with the new AI centric models that are just ripping, absolutely just ripping. And so we're progressing into the digital age. And the people who refuse to allow that or acknowledge that, they're just getting decimated right now. And they are going to be destroyed. That's what creative destruction is. So as a business, they're not going to make it. They just, they are not. And so if you have to just embrace this. And if you embrace it, then you have a pretty, it's hard not to have, I think, an optimistic view. You see what's coming. You see abundance coming. You see like, you know, abundant and basically free intelligence,

super intelligence for everyone, regardless of your income levels. You see robotics coming next and how that's going to create an abundant supply of just tons and tons of goods and services for our country and for the entire world. That's hard not to be optimistic about. And you see lots of these gains, productivity gains flowing into the price of Bitcoin. It's hard to not be optimistic about that as well. So I look at that, sure, we're going to have our dips. We're going to have times where things drop down, you know, things get scary for a week or a month or whatever. But in general, especially here in the United States, we live in an economy that's basically based on the U.S. stock market. So as the stock market goes, so goes the U.S. economy. And so goes most of the world as well.

And I think that trend is going to continue. And I think the current administration is going to do everything in their power to make sure that continues for, you know, at least the next several years. So I'm quite optimistic. Yeah, Hoddle, I saw you noddling along there. So I do want to get your thoughts. And Jeff, I want to come back to you because we had the three burners, which was manufacturing, speculation, and liquidity. So we'll touch on that in a moment. But Hoddle, I saw you nodding along and nodding along. And we started the conversation talking about P-Dum. I'm just curious, your thoughts on the kind of AI space right now and what Dr. Jeff was talking about.

I'm super interested in all the AI stuff. I'm interested in it from a political lens. I'm interested in the attempted reg capture that's going on from the duopoly that is, Anthropic and Open AI with Elon trailing behind like, me too, me too. I'm part of the, you know, I'm part of the red capture. I'm, I'm really interested in the IPOs. You know, like, I think that Anthropic is, you know, filing now and Open AI is going to go in 27 is what the rumor is. And I'm interested to see how the market is going to respond to these companies because,

you know, right now, like, okay, the headline here is AI big deal. And if you don't understand why AI is a big deal and how the creative destruction that Jeff was talking about, start playing around with these tools. I find a lot of people are just not that interested in using them for whatever reason because they're kind of stuck in the old frame of reference, the old frame of mind. But I'll give you an example. This is a small example. But, you know, I wanted a fitness tracker. And there are some good ones on the app store. There's My Fitness pal or Macro Factor, stuff like that.

But nothing really was what I wanted. I wanted one that was kind of a momentum tracker where I was just like, did you eat? eat healthy today. Yes. Did you sleep good? Yes. Did you do your workout? Yes. And then you just, you know, build a little momentum graph, right? That's what I wanted. So I fucking had chat GPT Astra one shot it, which means I put in one prompt. I said, here's the kind of, you know, I talked into my phone. I said, here's the kind of fitness tracker I'm looking for. It created it. I said, wow, this is amazing. And then I started using the app. I didn't go through a bunch of iterations of it. And now, you know, a lot of those apps like my fitness power macro factor, which I

described are $100 a year, subscription fee is, this is full free, right? So chat GPT is eventually, or whatever AI model you end up using is going to be your all-in-one app store for your personalized software. It's going to completely destroy things like, you know, Adobe or, you know, these, these office suite software products, any subscription-based software products. And if you're going to compete on those, you're going to have to, you know, with a subscription, you're going to have to offer a lot more than what I can get just through my chat GPT plan or my Claude plan or whatever. And so I think that the people that aren't paying attention to these tools, they don't know how powerful this stuff really is.

Like, it's, you know, one thing I've been doing is using the flagship AI's, a combination of Opus 5.5 and Astros 6, these are the paid plans. Again, you have to be kind of rudimentary when you talk AI because a lot of people are not doing this stuff. These are the paid plans with OpenAI and the paid plans with Claude, okay? Each one's about $200 a month, $100 and $200 a month, depending on what the plan is. And what I do is I have a 3D printer in my garage, okay? And I take pictures of things.

And then I get myself a set of digital calipers for $25 on Amazon. I take a little measurement, and I send the measurement to Claude. And I say, I want a piece for this. And I want it to be exactly these dimensions. Now create it. And Claude creates it. And then I shuffle it over to Astor and I say, make this look pretty. And then Astor makes it look pretty.

And then I go, dope. And I send it to the printer. And then a thing that I wanted to exist now exist in physical reality using AI models because I don't know how to generate STL files or Ducad or I've never designed an industrial product in my life, but I can do it using the AI model. So again, this is like the rebirth of like American manufacturing, like home labs and garages, like, you know, AI is going to hit the entire economy. It's going to hit everyone's job.

It's going to be a hundred times bigger than the internet. So if you're not paying attention to it, you're not paying attention to it. You need to start paying attention to it. You need to start using it because eventually you're going to, you're going to be forced to anyway. So you might as well get ahead of the curve. If you're a person that works a job, it's going to make you hyperproductive at your job. If you're in a corporation, your corporation probably has all sorts of pilot programs for

people like you that are power users. And you can get out ahead of it while everybody else gets their fucking job copied and eventually done by the computer program. Right. So like you can make yourself defensible and you can survive this thing. Now, at the same time, like let's talk like the flagship stuff is, is, is the, the market can absorb these massive valuations on these companies when you have the open source models that are nipping at the heels and local AI is actually coming, you can run these amazing

models that were like flagship models from eight months ago on a 16 gigabyte Mac Mini now. And those are super impressive. And they don't have subscription plans attached to them. And they're free to run forever. And the open source players are going to, that's the way they're going to get in the game. And China is obviously creating a lot of these models. They're distilling from American AI. And there's just a lot here, right?

Like, there's a lot, a lot, a lot to unpack. And most people I find are just not paying attention to any of this. Right. So I'm just giving you, like, the high level summary of, like, all the things that are going on. And then, you know, there's this political movement, which is called effective altruism, which is connected to FTX. Okay. So, like, the FTX guys were effective altruists.

They're also all in weird sex cults together. I know. This is real. It sounds like I'm making it up, but I'm not. Okay, so the effect of altruist guys who are in these weird polychial sex cults with each other, just like what was happening at FTX, are now embedded in all the flagship AI labs, and they all think they're building a robocod. And they think that robocod is going to destroy humanity,

and they're all sort of worshipping it and doing pagan sex cults with each other. Again, I wish I was making this up. I'm literally not making this up. It sounds like I'm making it up, but I'm not, okay? And then those people are lobbying the government and the Vatican. They just tried to get the Pope to say that, AI was conscious, that it has a soul. Like, they're trying to get the, the,

the Vatican to sign off on it. Like, it's insanity what's happening right now. And this, the reason, here's another reason you need to care about AI. You need to care about AI because whoever ends up controlling this thing, if the government is able to put restrictions on this, they're going to fucking own your life. Okay?

They're going to completely own you. Like 100% root and stuff. What do you mean restrictions on the frontier models? Is that what you're talking about? Any AI restriction. Everybody should be, be able to have access to AI. The ultimate plan... What I don't understand about that is that everybody can buy, like you said, the Mac,

Mac Minis, Mac Studios, and run them locally. So how could, what kind of restrictions? Well, the EA guys, Joe, you probably don't follow the track this as closely as I do, but the, the EA types, they want something ultimately called universal compute governance. And the reason they want that is they want to strip your read-write accesses to your computer. They want your computer to be sort of read-only, talk only. And the new devices and the new devices and the new hardware that are coming are going to make that happen. Open AI is going to ship this silver hockey puck looking thing. Facebook just shipped this Tomicacci looking thing that's got a cute,

it's got a cute little guy on it. His name is Muse, and he shakes his little butt, I think, if you wiggle him. And ultimately, you're just going to carry around a little device that you talk to in your pocket, and you're not going to have read-write access to your computer because, again, I sound like I'm going off on a deep tangent here, but I have to, like, get all this information out. There's going to be a false flag. with AI, some point in the near future, okay?

And that false flag could be literally anything. It could be bioterrorism. It could be heat-seeking missile at a local airport. Russian plague. It could be whatever, okay? But AI is going to be the story for why this thing happened and for why we need universal compute governance. And once you get universal compute governance because of,

you can say, we need universal compute governance because of terrorism, or you can say we need universal compute governance because of we're building the robogod and we might not be able to stop it. so the government's got to stop it. If you can do either one of those things, then you can get mass control of a population. You can control literally everything with AI. You can create a surveillance state

that would make Joseph Stalin blush. You know what I mean? Like, that's the other thing, too, is like this, the other worrying part about AI is that if it's in the hands of the few and it's used against the many, totalitarianism has now, the marginal cost of totalitarianism has now gone to zero.

So it's very easy for me, to create a dossier on each one of you using AI that's operating in a 24-7-on environment. You all get your own personalized FBI agent who digs into your psychological profiles, who's monitoring everything you're doing wrong, and who's nudging you into compliance constantly. So again, this is the world that we are barreling into, and most people have no clue it's happening. Right. So I sound like a sort of schizo-crazy person when I try and explain it, because there's a lot to know here because it's moving very rapidly.

And there's a lot of unholy alliances between, you know, the Democratic Party, the, you know, big government, the bureaucracy, the entrenched bureaucracy, the flagship labs, Silicon Valley, you know, the whole thing. It's just like... We just had, I think it was like I saw over the weekend, Project Meridian with Palmer Lucky and Elon Musk was announced from the Pentagon just a little while ago here as well, too. So I completely agree that they're 100% in bed and in cahoots. and it's only going to probably get worse from here. Yeah. Yes. And you can't let them take away.

The big thing is you cannot let them take away your privileges to write code on your own machine. Okay. That's the big thing they want to take away. And there's a lot of steps between here and there, but they're working on those steps as we speak. And the more asleep people are to it, the more likely it is to occur. You know, like, for instance, like the most blatant red capture attempt ever happened on Twitter, where, you know, Sam Altman and Dario Amade, who are both at, you know,

ostensibly competing flagship AI firms, came out and were like, we need a government slowdown on AI. And then a week later, they both released brand new models. So it's like, you can self-police at any time. By the way, from a legal perspective, we can make the companies legally liable for everything they do. So that's another way to self-police them. But, like, the idea that we need, you know, to entrench them as a permanent duopoly

that's embedded within the U.S. government. in order to monitor and control all Americans is just fuck off. Fuck off with that shit. Bitcoin Well, you know them, you love them, long-time supporter of the channel, and one of the easiest places to buy Bitcoin directly to your wallet in the U.S. and Canada, but that's not all they do. So for anyone looking to make a big purchase, there is Bitcoin Well Infinite. Because the hard part is in the buy, it's making sure you don't leave a giant mess for your family.

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Joe, I do. It's a wonderful job and a wonderful experience because you never know exactly what's going to come up or what I get to ask. I originally was going to ask about basically the risk of an AI bubble

popping, as I think that ultimately would get a bailout from the U.S. government because I think you're completely in bed together. But I have this opportunity to come to you, Joe, and ask and just get your reaction. Any thoughts on AI worshiping

pagan sex cults that Hoddle has laid out for us? Well, I do want to comment what he said. That's real, Joe. It's real. Well, listen. I've thought things sounded crazy before that ended up being real, so nothing's off the table. Google SlutCon, look into it.

Well, here's the problem, though. So this idea that, oh, we can just make the AI companies liable, given the size and scope of the threat that they present, to me, there's no amount of liability that would realistically be recoverable or damages that could be recoverable. to the real economy if there truly was some sort of, you know, lab leak with an AI model that caused significant damage. In other words, if you're talking about potential range of damages in the trillions of dollars, the entity's bankrupt. All the directors are bankrupt. There's no way to make people whole. So when you have sort of like a societal level threat, to me, it's not merely, it's not enough to just say, oh, well, they'll be legally liable for anything that happens and comes down the pipeline. You have to actually put some sort of framework in place. You have to actually

put some sort of framework in place. But that's a false paradigm. There's no such thing as a lab leak. There are no AI lab leaks. It's fake. It doesn't exist. No, no. I'm just saying in the event of something going wrong,

don't even think about a leak. That's probably a poor choice of words. If something went wrong, like there's no ability. It's kind of a cold card, right? Like, cold car doesn't have the money to make people whole. Like, it's like, what's the point?

Well, I guess the point of legal liability would, if the labs are claiming that they want slowdowns, that they're going too fast. This technology is too dangerous, right? Et cetera, et cetera. Then it's like, okay, well, let's police you with lawsuits. Because you're going to be a lot more thoughtful about what you release if, you know, you have the sort of Damocles hanging over your head constantly.

I think the more likely scenario, and this is just my belief in somewhat of a conspiracy theory, I guess, is that the idea of, oh, that's moving too fast, it presents an existential threat, we need to pause is sort of the pretext for if something does go wrong to nationalize it in a Manhattan-style project. That to me makes way more sense because the idea is, I mean, look at just some of the revenue projections and the profit projections that they put out. There's no way those things are going to come to fruition anytime soon. But you can give yourself a way out. You can get that off the public sector dole. You can do a parachute out for all the early investors if the government were to absorb it and were to absorb multiples and have, you know,

Manhattan-style project where we own it. And some of the concerns huddles raising about, you know, dystopian state and surveillance state and lack of inability to do this yourself, to me, that that would be far more disastrous of an outcome if the government just took it over. If you didn't have this private sector driven, if you had it all in the hands of a few actors at the government, to me that would be far more of a negative result. You won't. want it to be distributed. You don't want one, you know, small lab in San Francisco to control this technology. You want there to be competitive market forces and alternatives. But the question I keep going back to you, and I'd be curious with Jeff and Hoddle think about this, is that,

you know, because the models every 10 months have gotten to such an efficiency where they can be run on local computers, and I expect that trend to continue, at what point to the frontier models, do the advantage? Do we get to a diminishing return standpoint? where the frontier models don't offer much more than what you can run locally on your computer. Obviously, there will always be some advantage. But, you know, like Cottle said, you know, the best models available now can be run locally that were, you know, the best models that were available 12 months ago can now be run locally. At what point does that, you know, come to the point where I have, I have enough of a model

that I can do 95% of everything except the most advanced theoretical physics. And that's what I mean. Yeah, Joe, I would think of it like kind of like high frequency trading in the sense that, Like, does the average person with an e-trade account need to be, like, you know, checking the veracity of how close they are to the fiber optic lines of the stock exchange? No. But if you're a high-frequency trader, you do need to be. So, like, where it matters, where there's an edge, where it matters, you're going to need flagship AI.

But how many people does that, what's the, what's the, it's a small percentage, but it probably represents a large part of the economy. And it probably represents, yeah, and it probably represents the most, you know, sort of scintillating things that are happening. things like high tech, things like Wall Street, things like medicine, scientific research, nuclear physics, all that kind of stuff. So like the flagship AI will be crucially important in every domain that actually matters. But to the average person, you're completely right that there will be a diminished returns in a sort of AI assistant thing that will happen. Yeah.

Jeff? I think what's amazing is, well, you know, learning from the internet back in the 90s and early 2000s, we're still. in that phase where the picks and shovels plays are the way to make money in this business. You're not, just like you couldn't invest in the internet itself, I don't think you'll be able to invest in AI itself, which is, by the way, is what makes Bitcoin really cool, because you can invest in the base layer. That's a whole different story. What I think we're moving too quickly is the application layer of AI.

And so the winners of this next, say, five to 10 years and beyond are who can use AI as an application and make money from doing that. Sort of like how, you know, Google and Amazon and Facebook learn how to use the Internet as an application and made, you know, billions and trillions of dollars. I think that's the phase we're moving to. And so, like, as far as what's going to happen to, like, say, open AI and Anthropic, they're already doing that.

So they have a subscription model first. That only, by the way, only about 2% of Americans pay for. They actually pay for it. So everybody who uses 98% of Americans who use AI, they don't really know what it can do because they're doing the free layer, right? So they're kind of behind the curve really far behind. But what's happening is, and what is, I don't hear hardly anybody talking about this. Businesses have been pouring their proprietary information into these AI models.

And now the AI models are turning around and creating little applications for it, right? And so these plugins that Open AI and Anthropic are handing out and going to make billions of dollars off of from the application layer is the loss of these companies that gave them their information willingly. And so the concern is if these AI companies get consumed by the U.S. government, all of that information just goes to the government. I think they already have access to it if they want it. And the dystopian state is basically already here.

And as Haanl talks about, we're rapidly progressing. A good example of what Jeff is talking about is recently Open AI had announced that they had completed a very complex longstanding math problem. I think it was called Navier Stokes. Stokes. Stokes. Yeah. And what turns out that one of the premier mathematical researchers, mathematicians who had been working on that problem was using Open AI. In addition, he was working in conjunction with an Anthropic employee who, and they were both using Open AI, in addition to Anthropic, I believe. And, you know, they, you know, the opening eye came out and was like, we solved it. And it's like, yeah, you solved it using this guy, the mathematicians work, basically. And there was a lot of controversy around, you know, they were like, well, we actually solved it in a slightly different way. And it's like, well, could you have solved it at all if the premier mathematician was not feeding his work into the AI system? And the answer is probably not, right? So, yeah, I think that a lot of these claims that are being made by the Frontier Lab, they're just. just complete bullshit.

And when we talk about the IPO, like, sense of these things, AI is a big deal, right? That's, that's, like, non-controversial at all. And it will be a big part of the economy. Does that mean that open AI and anthropic are not lying through their fucking teeth or that their business models make any sense? No, it doesn't mean that.

And so, I, you know, I personally am kind of waiting to watch Wall Street shred these guys. And I think they will. Wall Street has always had a contentious relationship with tech, and they're going to take a look at some of this shit and just be like, no fucking way. What the fuck are you talking about? Unless it's backstop by the government in some type of way, I don't understand.

Jeff, I'm curious your kind of view on this. So my understanding is that China has been really using AI on the manufacturing base to kind of improve things there. And even with Hoddle's example, referring to the mathematician's information and work being stolen, I'm wondering your views on AI implications for U.S. manufacturing, because I know that's one of the important things for basically your three-burner model. And then additionally, I'm thinking about the implications in terms of intellectual property. I feel like so, and I could be wrong about this, but I feel intuitively I feel that a lot of the U.S. economy is built off intellectual property, software development, tech services, things of this sort of nature.

And whether you, like me and I'm taking the philosophical standpoint, regardless of your feelings or even potentially the legal standing regarding intellectual property property, it's just gone. It's just way too easy to copy everything. You cannot have a moat around it anymore. I'm curious your thoughts there, Jeff. Well, I would defer the intellectual property argument to Joe and how to protect that in the AI ages is, I think, very, very. challenging, so I'd love to hear his take. I'll just go back to what you're saying before about manufacturing and AI's usage. AI is going to, and already we're starting to see it, is going to greatly increase productivity across, I think, almost everything. So every field, including manufacturing.

And so to Hoddle's point of just an individual in their garage being able to print 3D parts that was previously basically impossible or only for a real select few people, you know, anybody can, if you can think of it, you can do it now. And that's the society, the, the world we're moving into is moving so fast. It's moving exponentially that if you can think an idea, you can actually create it into existence. And so we're seeing like, for, and one example is that we're seeing the creation of solo, solo entrepreneurs, LLCs are just like exploding right now. So young people are realizing that they can use this to start companies and to make money doing something productive, of creating a good or service just on their own,

which would have required, you know, tens or hundreds of employees in the past can now be done with just a single person. That's pretty amazing. And we're moving, and that's going to just only accelerate as more and more people understand this and start to put that into practice.

Joe, how can I pass that on to you? I'd love to think about what your opinions are about IP and the age of AI. Well, I think it's changing IP. You know, I, I think it's no different than some of the piracy IP piracy that was pervasive throughout China, really, for most of the early 2000s. You had to develop a framework and sort of controls in place, and people will say, oh, there's no way you can put controls and people do it all the time.

You know, right now, I'll just tell you my line of work, virtually any case that involves a trade secret or any sort of proprietary or information, there are protective orders that are being put in place, that if you violate it, you're basically losing your law license by putting any LLM, you know, on the other side. There's numerous restrictions that are being put in place in companies where, you know, if you're sharing it with any, any AI provider, you know, for example, like the claw at highest level, they can't retain any data, they can't train on any data, they're putting the company at risk if they were to do so. And to Hottle's point, right, unique and human-created IP, if it finds its way into LLMs unlawfully, there's civil recourse.

I mean, there's major settlements involving authors that have been put together where, you know, Anthropic and some of these other, I think it was anthropic. One of the major LLM providers, they were training their models based on copyrighted texts, based on, you know, fiction works and the author's got to pay out, right? I think that's going to continue. I think there are many people that are just going to run a file of copyright and IP protections and there's going to be civil lawsuits of plenty that will follow and some will get redress, some won't.

But really, you know, what I think is going to be a bigger deal is that those with very proprietary confidential information, data secrets, they're going to take additional steps to ensure that that does not find its way into the LLMs. That's going to be the comparative advantage because despite the brilliance of this technology, if you have any kind of secret sauce and you don't want it to find its way into the LLM, it is essential for you to try to mitigate that process and put safeguards in place. So I think it's going to be a big challenge. It's not going to be easy.

It's going to be something that every general counsel thinks about all day long is how do I prevent IP from being cannibalized through LLMs? Let me pitch you a legal argument here, Joe, see what you think of this. I'm a lawyer for Anthropic and or Open AI. And my claim here is that all of our outputs are sufficiently transformative to be covered under fair use. So therefore, it doesn't matter that we stole your data. Does that fly or no? It's already been rejected by- As it?

Yeah, by multiple federal courts. It's not fair use. Good to know. Interesting. You're training it for a proprietary business. It's like you're taking someone else. And the sad thing is there's a lot of people unwittingly putting very confidential information into these things. It's a disaster in the legal realm where you get clients using LLMs and ask the legal advice.

What I find interesting is I immediately have this parallel to Bitcoin that we're going to have like Coca-Cola and the kernel is going to have to put their recipes in like an air gap device. Like you're all going to have to learn how to hold this information offline and on steel and on titanium and all that sort of thing that the Bitcoiners are kind of paving the way. Doc, I do want to come back to you with the burners. but actually I want to pause for one second, Joe, just thinking about the legalese sort of thing. I thought it was just this morning. I think there were two proposed rules from FinCend that got dropped that they're no longer pursuing with regards to, I think, self-custody and privacy and Bitcoin. Did you see that?

Are you aware of those at all? Any updates there? No, let me look at those real quick, but I can comment on a second. One second. Okay, well, you're pulling that up. Doc, I'll come to you, and I apologize. I'm going to keep calling you, Doc, that's what I always called, even though it's former Dr. Jeff at this point in time. We talked a little bit about manufacturing there.

in terms of the three burners of manufacturing liquidity and speculation. I'm not sure how liquidity is necessary doing, particularly as bond yields are rising. And as far as speculation, at least I don't feel any right now, but what are you seeing? So burner number one is liquidity. Liquidity, and again, I always like to defer to Michael Howell here, right, of cross-border capital. He's sort of the guy who made liquidity famous and he does some of the best work on it. he talks about liquidity being in these about five-year cycles. I think it's about 62 or 63 months or so that it tends to ebb and flow.

That's another thing that has changed significantly, though, right? And the main reason it's changed is because of what things like Operation Twist, the Bessent Twist, the things that they're doing is they're basically taking everything on the long end and moving it to the short end. So they're taking long-dated treasuries and those cycles that are, you know, 10, 20, 30-year cycles. and moving those into T-bills, so basically less than one-year duration. When they do that, what that's doing effectively is it's taking a future claim for dollars and taking that right now.

So it's more cash-like. So the more you move from the long end to the short end in the borrowing that Congress is doing and that the Treasury is facilitating, the more it actually puts liquidity into the system. And so even though we should have been on and we have been on this sort of slowing liquidity cycle. You can argue that Bessent is basically bridging this liquidity gap. And that's a big reason why we're not seeing what. And by the way, I think Bitcoin was kind of front running that into 2026.

The reason the stock market didn't follow that is because of this fiscal stimulus, the nothing stopped this train, you know, Lynn Alden concept of basically the federal government is just pouring money into all things, AI and energy. and military and related entities, rare earths, base metals, those kind of things, building that out. And those entities are what's pushing the stock market higher. And so I would argue that if the federal government, if the Trump administration were not doing that, we would have actually been in a bear market in the stock market in the U.S. And Bitcoin probably would have had a little further to fall. But because of this bridge, this Bessent bridge, I'll call it, he's sort of bridging us across by

changing the liquidity dynamics, by moving the maturity from long to short. And that's causing enough of a liquidity stabilization or bridge to sort of keep stocks floating higher. And now, getting back to what we talked about 30, 40 minutes ago or so, because manufacturing was in a contraction, basically from 2022 all the way through early 2026, now manufacturing is finally starting to rise and it looks really healthy. Like, it looks fantastic. The deregulation that the Trump administration had set in place is finally starting to take hold and the liquidity is really coming in. And so we're seeing real capital expenditures. It takes a while for that to happen. People just sort of think like, whoa, you know, I didn't see it. They were complaining about not

seeing it show up and manufacturing. It takes time to do this. You got to spend the money and then you actually have to do the building. You have to get the crews and the machines and create the buildings and create these products. And now we're starting to see the fruition of that. And so that leaves me quite bullish. So that whole burn so burner number one liquidity, we're seeing that bridge. And it's, it's, it's, uh, it's not ripping higher, but it's steady, which is kind of surprising because we should be seeing a decline technically from a cyclical perspective. The burner number two of manufacturing is looking fantastic. Like that makes me exceedingly bullish. And mainly for Main Street America. So for blue collar Americans, it's, they're putting these guys back to work, these people

back to work. And it's very good for the Main Street economy. It's very good for America as a whole. And what's awesome about it is this will mean years and even decades of productivity gains because of today's capital expenditures. Like it's very, very bullish. And because it's AI related stuff, it moves exponentially. It's moving so quickly that we'll see these gains more quickly than we saw them in past cycles. So all of those things kind of, you know, we may see a dip or a blip at some point. And to your point earlier, I think AI is officially too big to fail. I think the Trump administration is just all in behind it. And they're painting it as it's this existential risk. Like, we have to win the AI race. What that tells me is if something happens, if there's some

sort of dip, if there's some sort of false flag, something that puts us to where things get super dicey for a certain period of time, the federal government is going to absolutely just come in and barrage the system with liquidity to support it. So the U.S. taxpayers will be funding this AI buildout, whether they like it or not. So I'm very bullish that even if we do have some terrible incident, it will continue on and it will be fully backed and that will cause risk assets to do quite well. And we'll see that. Bitcoin will sniff that out and it will front run it. So I think until then, Bitcoin just continues to grind higher. If we have that moment where we have, say Larry Lepard's big print, right? Where something comes in to force the central bankers

to do some quantitative easing, Bitcoin will sniff that out and we'll start seeing an acceleration in the price of Bitcoin. And maybe we'll get to Hoddle's, you know, quick 10x, easy 10x in a year or two or three. So everything leaves me bullish from investing perspective and Bitcoin perspective. And then quickly before I get clarification from Joe on the new FinCin rules there, speculation, Jeff, we're speculation at right now. So we're still not seeing that much, right? You'll know when it happens when you're on X and the crypto bros start making fun of the Bitcoiners. When they're like, dude, you only made 10x and I made 1,000 X on this NFT or whatever, right?

You get those stupid things. Like you'll start seeing that coming out and you'll start seeing people post charts and things showing that leverage is spiking. You'll start hearing on, you'll probably see TV commercials of Coinbase and other things say, hey, we got this new 50x leverage product. We got 100x. The Trump administration, the SEC will approve like 5x levered crypto funds, things like that. Like that's when you know you're getting into the late stages of the bull market. And that's when you get that exponential rise higher in the price of Bitcoin. And so I think we're nowhere near that right now.

That's probably a couple years down the road. The luxury watch market is also a good canary in the coal line to watch. Yeah. If people are, if Rolexes are trending up, you know, things are getting speculative. And Lambo's. Good call, Hottle. Joe, what did you find on the FinCEN changes? Oh, this is massive news. I'm glad you flagged this. So basically, there were two proposals, so almost a 2020 proposal and a 2023 proposal. The 2020 proposal related to self-hosted wallets,

and it imposed for any transaction above $3,000, a bank had to have reporting requirements and verify someone's identity when interacting with a self-hosted wallet. And then the 2023 proposal was involving mixers, international mixers, that banks and regulatory institutions that interacted with any sources suspected to come from those mixers had to designate it as primary money laundering concerns under the Patriot Act.

Both of these, the 2023 and the 2022 proposals from Finston, have been rescinded. And the basis for rescinding the proposals to implement by Finston was the response to the comments. Many people voiced comments, which, you know, people say comments don't matter. But in this case, they looked at the comments. They said, we think this is moving too far.

And it runs antithetical to the Trump administration's deregulatory policy. So obviously put in place in 2020 and 2023. Interesting. I think the 2020 proposal came under the weaning days of the Trump administration. 20203, obviously, that was under, you know, the Biden tenure. So that makes sense. But both of them are gone. Both been scrapped.

Obviously, very good news that FinCEN. is rescinding those proposals. Fantastic. Glad to hear it. All right, gentlemen, is there anything else that I miss that you want to flag or leave people with before we get together before we get together again next time? My book dropped last month. I'm on Chapter 7, by the way. I think it is.

I just got out of the church. It's fantastic. Oh, thank you. Yeah, yeah. If you are not a reader, it's available on Audible, unconfiscatable. I would appreciate you picking up a copy. I tried to tell a good story that I think all Bitcoiners could enjoy, but also Normies. that have no experience with Bitcoin.

If you have a friend or somebody just wants a good thriller, I suggest you pick it up. I think you'll enjoy it. I think it's a good story that needs to be told. Beautiful. Hottle, what do you got coming up? Anything to report? Read Joe's book.

I write it. No, I didn't read it. I bought it, though. That's the important story. I bought it to support, Joe. I love it. I love it. And Jeff, what about you, my friend?

I listened to Joe's book on Audible, and it was very well done on Audible. And I told Joe this on Spaces last week. I didn't know, Joe, that you had it in you to write such a good book. Like, it is very, it is a, it is a very interesting book. The, the, the way he incorporates the fictional story with teaching about Bitcoin and the benefits of it, you know, and the intrigue involved and all of the different characters. who get involved. There's a surprise, basically every chapter, something you didn't see coming, but it's realistic. All of this was very, like, it's sort of like I'm a fan of Mission Impossible, like, you know, the Dead Reckoning and Final Reckoning, the recent ones that came out, it feels

kind of like reading Mission Impossible or like 24, like it's intense like that. I was stressed out. I don't generally like disturbing violence, and there is some disturbing violence in there, so caution on that one. But Joe just did a bang up job. And if you guys, if you're, into thrillers or you want to learn more about Bitcoin. It's just a great story. So Joe, kudos to you, brother. That was very well done. Thank you.

Appreciate it. So far, so good. Hottle, are you on Twitter or anything right now? Or no? Yeah. Okay. Well, go follow Haudel on Twitter, follow at former Dr. Jeff and follow Joe Carlisaria on Twitter.

Thank you guys. This has been fantastic. Thanks, man. Thanks, guys. Take care. Cheers. The Sacks cold thing is real, by the way. I didn't make that shit of.

I'm leaving this in. Thank you. If you enjoy this episode with Hottle Jeff and Joe as much as I did, hit that like button And make sure you subscribe and check out the previous episode with James Check.