TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #571: We’re Gonna Buy Bitcoin And China Will Pay For It with Parker Lewis

Episode Date: January 6, 2025

Marty kicks off the new year with Parker Lewis. Parker on Twitter: https://x.com/parkeralewis 0:00 - Intro 0:36 - Crossfit 2:27 - Recapping the debt problem 17:23 - Unchained & Fold 19:16 - Yield curve discrepancy 23:21 - DOGE can’t help much 30:00 - Zaprite & SOTE 31:32 - Trump’s plans and the Fed 48:40 - Bitcoin and inflation are insufficiently understood 1:10:29 - H1B psyop and Sam Hyde 1:15:25 - Silicon Valley mindset 1:21:08 - We’re gonna get Shane Gillis 1:30:04 - Countering Tucker’s CIA arguments 1:40:03 - Quantum tangent 1:42:59 - Crypto bananas 1:47:16 - Manifesting victory Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ Fold https://foldapp.com/marty Zaprite https://zaprite.com/tftc Salt of the Earth https://drinksote.com/tftc Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Nostr https://primal.net/tftc Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Nostr https://primal.net/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://www.tftc.io/tag/podcasts/

You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. How's CrossFit been?

First rip of 2025, I'm starting there. It's been good. Can't believe you haven't made it into the gym. You know I don't. I'm so disappointed. So disappointed. I can't do the high cardio stuff. I puke.

I went once. You came once. You almost threw up after a 500-meter row. You did. I did throw up. but if Larry Lepar can do it and he's pushing 60, you can get in the gym. I get in the job.

I was at the job. I was telling you, I was at the gym right before I would hold recap today. I get to the gym. I just CrossFit. It's not my, it's not my thing. Jim tan laundry,

Jim tan laundry culture. Yeah. It's hard for me to 10 though. Let's get an Irish North Jersey or South South Jersey. Yeah. I get confused. Most beautiful beaches in the world. i will put my flag down and state that authoritatively the sand no better sand in

the world than south jersey you heard it here first cape may county interesting but yeah it's good we've got uh you know bitcoiners going twice a week you know a little crew there so we need you to be a part of it it's just a terrible time too no it's perfect time 8 30 that's right when i have to get the kids to school well we actually timed it so that people could get kids to school and then come so your kids go to school late i think they do what are they doing they do you're not allowed to drop them off before 8 30. oh yeah i think you get yelled at will's kids get dropped off at like 7 30 or 7 45. yeah so so 7 30 would have been you know we gotta create something that works for everybody yeah it doesn't work for me take

your kids different schools i got kicked out of the crossfit group chat justin i saw that is he making fun of me now yeah every time okay yeah we're not here to talk about crossfit i'm about to take a trip tomorrow it's the beginning of 2025 january 2nd sitting down to record this will probably be out next week but wanted to do a catch-up with you first rep of the year first recording good way to start the year great way to start the year with mayor parker lewis and a question that's been eating at my mind is a lot of hope and optimism for this incoming trump administration from an economic policy perspective but the string of our conversations dating back six years now

i think technically maybe even longer seven years yeah 2018 i think was our first rep has been there's too much debt not enough dollars everybody's very bulled up on trump's economic plan combination of tariffs lower income taxes the department of government efficiency coming in but as i was explaining to you right before we hit record we just talked about it on rabbit hole recap we're seeing delinquency rates for commercial mortgage-backed securities reach highs not seen since post 08 you're seeing credit card delinquency rates approach 2000 pre-2008 levels we've obviously got this massive debt crisis that seems to be ballooning out of control on top of that you have the fed having cut rates by 100 basis points in september and

the 10-year treasury has not acted the way it historically has when the fed cuts rates and is in perfectly inversely correlated with the fed rate cuts yields gone up means people aren't very optimistic about the fed being able to control inflation and the prospects for the u.s economy over the next 10 years and the question in my mind is even with all this hope and optimism behind the incoming trump administration is there anything they can do to avoid liquidity crisis the short answer is no i think there's nothing that they can do to avoid liquidity crisis or the only thing that can prevent a liquidity crisis at this point is the federal reserve preemptively creating a lot more base money and taking various measures to

put those dollars into places that help prevent liquidity crisis and that everything that happens on the fiscal side from the Trump administration or the outgoing Biden administration and the respective treasury departments, in my view, sits at a kind of at a level that is secondary to what the Fed does. And so I think that there's always a argument for better economic policy than worse. So anything that the Trump administration can do to promote a more sound, stable economic environment with the United States is a positive and should certainly pursue, but I view it as marginal to the 800-pound gorilla, which is the Fed and its monetary policy. So to kind of just catch everybody up in terms of like where we're at right now in terms of the Fed and the money printing and the debt creation, I always like to just kind of set people of, you know, kind of what's been happening in recent past, but then in the broader context. So about, say, in the end of 2007, there was about $53 trillion of dollar-denominated debt in the U.S. system, system-wide.

That's pre-crisis, and at that point, there was only $900 billion in all of existence as base money. So approximately 50 to 1, but of that $900 billion, only $350 to $400 billion was actually in the banks, and the banks are the source of leverage, and I think of that money as what's available to the banking system. And so the banking system could be thought of pre-financial crisis 2008 being leveraged 150 to 1. So the financial crisis happens. The Federal Reserve increases the supply of base money by $3.6 trillion

over three series of QE to take their balance sheet from approximately $900 billion to $4.5 trillion. They subsequently, over the period from 2007 to 2019, started taking certain of those reserves out. I believe it was somewhere between $700 to $800 billion, but it squeezed the banks a lot more because it's coming dollar for dollar out of the banks and not all of those reserves that the Fed has made available are sitting in the banks. So they ended up taking out like 33% of the liquidity from the banks. And then in September of 2019, there was the repo market crisis where interest rates in that overnight lending market went from 2% to 3% to 10%. And that was really before COVID, the inception of the wave of money printing that happened between 2020 and 2022, like the tail end of 2019, where the Federal Reserve then created $5 trillion through the course of the COVID lockdown. But really, that liquidity crisis had started before COVID.

So the Federal Reserve went from somewhere around $4 trillion in reserves to post-COVID, post-money printing to about $9 trillion. Then in the spring of 2023, the wave of bank crises happened. Silicon Valley Bank failed. First Republic failed. Signature, Silvergate for different reasons. but the fed then put in their um btf btfp btfp program to basically lend at par even if um your treasuries were underwater or underwater and they they began at that point to put a little bit more money back in the system but since then since they quelled that that series of bank runs

where everyone was fearful that if you weren't in JP Morgan or Citibank or Wells Fargo that your bank was going out of business. Once they quelled that, they then began taking money out of the system again. So from the post-COVID peak of money printing when there was approximately $9 trillion in reserves, there are approximately today $7 trillion. So they've taken out $2 trillion dollars from the system from 2022 to today at that same time where the u.s system stands in total the reason why they have to put the money in is to quell the liquidity crisis which is a credit crisis whereas they take the dollars out there become fewer dollars relative to the same amount of debt and then everyone figures it out and they start heading for the exits

It's essentially re-leveraging the system. So if QE is designed to work by first quelling a liquidity crisis and credit crisis by providing more liquidity, it's also designed to actually induce the expansion of credit. And so where the system sits today is at $101.5 trillion based on a report that the Fed just put out in the last month as of the end of the third quarter. So that system-wide federal, state, local, corporate debt, financial, non-financial, consumer debt, auto loans, mortgages, student loans, credit card debt, all of that is $101.5 trillion.

So when you think about that in context of pre-financial crisis, we started with this credit problem, this credit crisis, too much debt, not enough dollars, $52 trillion. Now that system has nearly doubled in size, and it is induced by the creation of money. So $101.5 trillion of debt stacked against $7 trillion actual dollars as base money. And functionally what happens is the Fed goes from $9 trillion to $7 trillion. The amount of debt doesn't go away. The debt is continuing to expand. The federal government's running $2 trillion deficits plus that as they take the base money out, that $9 trillion going to $7 trillion, there's fewer dollars that are being competed for not just by the debt that exists but everyone in the economy. But if you think about it simplistically of debt to dollars, it's functionally re-leveraging the system. And 100 divided by 9 versus 100 divided by 7 is a significant difference. It's a significant re-leveraging of the system. So basically when we think about whether it's credit card delinquencies or commercial loan delinquencies or the 10-year going up when they're lowering short-term rates, the way that I think about it is the only thing that can influence the supply side of dollar interest rates is the supply of dollars. And the Fed controls that. So while they may be, quote, reducing the short end of the curve, like the overnight borrowing rates, they're still taking money out of the system. Like, you know, I haven't looked in the last week, but up until this last month, reserves provided by the Fed were continuing to decline.

that more than anything is driving interest rates higher across the board because there are fewer dollars competing for more and more debt that exists and um the competition for those dollars becomes zero sum which influences interest rates so when i think about that relative to what the the trump administration can do on the margin it pales in comparison to what the fed's doing and i don't personally believe that the fed understands the cause and effect of its actions it's not trying to create an all-out liquidity crisis it's looking at inflation and all these different metrics and probably not focusing as much as it should on the re-leveraging of the financial system and the liquidity crisis that it's inevitably going to cause that's going to

induce the need to print massive amounts of money to quell a credit collapse yeah so from i guess 11 to 1 leverage around 15 though yeah which is significant but it's it's that that 2 trillion of base money that two years ago was available and sloshing around and it's impossible to know what that tipping point is. It was impossible to know in 2019 what the tipping point would be for the repo market, but then it shows up overnight and everything changes. What's impossible to predict is when and where. What's possible to predict is the inevitability of there being a liquidity crisis if you are taking dollars out of the system and putting them into a black hole while this metastasized credit system remains there and ever growing

yeah hard to predict the when pretty certain that the if is going to happen oh certain it's not an if it's it's a certainty it's just a it's a mathematical dilemma and that i was when i say that it that it's difficult to predict when or where i mean that you know in the 2008 financial crisis first it was subprime but then it expanded out it was commercial paper it was everything you know kind of it snowballed and became a waterfall effect and then in 2019 it was the repo market so you know it's like if they if they had a problem with mortgages in 2008. And then one of the primary instruments that they purchased between 2009, 2014, their first QE one, two, and three were mortgages. Certainly they were going to have their eye on the mortgage

market and making sure that if something was becoming dysfunctional in the mortgage lending market, that they would have their eye on that ball. In 2019, they were probably still looking at the mortgage market and seeing that things were normal in the mortgage market and then completely caught off guard when the repo market broke in 2023 not recognizing that their interest rate policy was affecting the reserves of the banks with the treasuries yeah that basically induced bank runs yeah you know that as banks had to sell assets to meet withdrawing deposits that they were having to realize these massive losses that the Fed itself had created

by rapidly increasing interest rates. Yeah, that's just Frankenstein. So when I say it's impossible to know where, it's like there's somewhere in the credit system where maybe they're focused on the commercial loan market and they have a plan because they're seeing this stress, but there are functionally cracks everywhere because every dollar of credit is competing for the reserves of dollars.

And so it becomes zero-sum. They're taking dollars out of the system, and then the market generally, each individual market as well as the market in totality, have higher interest rates because there's fewer dollars that are there to be able to lend, and which critical functioning market totally breaks first is impossible because it's a function of the market. It's a function.

I believe in 2019 what induced that, or at least it was rumored, was that JP Morgan pulled from the repo market. Went into cash. Went into cash. And maybe the Fed didn't know that or maybe they weren't coordinating that with the Fed. And so because it's market-driven,

you know, somebody supplying funding to roll over commercial loans, say there's a big player and they decide, nope, no longer doing this, then that market breaks. This rep was brought to you by our great friends at Unchained. As Bitcoin's role in the global financial landscape evolves, understanding its potential impact on your wealth becomes increasingly crucial. Whether we see measured adoption or accelerated hyper-Bitcoinization, being prepared for various scenarios can make the difference between merely participating and truly optimizing your position. This is important freaks. This is why Unchained developed the Bitcoin Calculator, a sophisticated modeling tool that helps you visualize and prepare for multiple Bitcoin futures. Beyond traditional

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New users get a 20,000 sat welcome bonus. with their first gift card purchase. Don't leave sats on the table. I'm going to stress that. Go sign up now at foldapp.com slash marty. That's another interesting thing. You brought up rollovers, too. I imagine the Fed's going to be shitting their pants right now,

and the Treasury, because, again, they've cut rates by 100 bps, and the 10 years moved completely inversely to those moves. It's up 100 bps. well the fed funds rate is down 100 bps and we have a lot of debt to roll over next year truly i think one of the numbers i saw out of the 36 37 trillion that we've already amassed i think something like three to five needs to be rolled over maybe even seven yeah sure and the question is i mean my understanding i haven't been following this like a hawk as some others might

day-to-day, I follow it kind of in the aggregate level, is borrowing shorter terms, issuing T bills rather than longer term treasuries. But somebody has to hold all that debt, right? That $36 trillion that exists just the federal government, that $36 trillion is part of that $101.5 trillion in terms of the total system. And understanding that there's this difference between the Fed dictating the reduction of short-term interest rates versus the market and the market's willingness to buy and hold longer-term credit. And longer-term credit is how everything about the system is funded.

If you think about some people have revolvers and credit cards that could be pulled in a month, But if there's a business issuing commercial paper, it might be 30 days. Or if Apple's issuing debt, it's a multi-year bond, five-year bond, seven-year bonds. If someone's taking a mortgage, it's typically 30 years. So no one generally, if they're relying on credit to fund their business, is doing it in a way that is on an overnight basis. No corporate credit is going to say,

well, I'm planning my finances with this debt, but this debt might not be there tomorrow. Most funding of individual balance sheets, corporate balance sheets, and government balance sheets is term debt. And the reason for that is you want to know for an extended period of time that, okay, I've taken this money, I've borrowed it, when am I going to have to pay it back? Obviously, the federal government is, quote, unique in the sense that it's so intertwined with the Fed that it can functionally rely on the Fed printing money to not only directly purchase its debt but to fund the market with incremental dollars to be able to purchase it. But that is a constant source of tension where, you know, in this case where you highlight the fact that the 10-year has gone up and the federal funds rate has gone down, it's because that 10-year is actually competing for term financing in the market.

It's like someone has to be willing to hold it for a duration, you know, in this case a 10-year duration. And they're looking at things like interest rates, but also what other assets can I hold? And, you know, is it worth taking, you know, a four and a half percent or 5% return when I can own Bitcoin, you know, like that becomes a opportunity cost, an opportunity cost. And when real inflation is, you know, five to 10% or worse, probably, then you're real, you know, you're, you're really just holding nothing. Yeah. No, and I think, I mean, you wrote gradually then suddenly. And you don't know the when. And I've probably said this before in the past,

so take it with a grain of salt. But particularly with the debt rollover in the 10-year, not playing game with the Fed funds rate, we surpassed a trillion dollars in interest expense on the debt this year. if they have to roll over five to seven next year at these interest rates you can see it easily blowing above one and a half trillion and then to your point about bondholders whether it's public debt or corporate debt whatever it may be having to weigh the opportunity costs like how much of the decisions they're making on an ongoing basis as we head into more as we

veer into 2025 is like can i actually trust that i'm going to get paid back in 10 years on this government debt like look at the state of the fiscal side of the u.s economy and how much they've expanded the debt in recent years and even if they wanted to get very fiscally responsible bring in doge to cut cut things like have they already amassed too much where it's a runaway problem yes it's a it's a runaway problem i don't um i think that the the goals of dozer are great virtuous but virtuous i think that there's a really nasty game of politics that will stand in the way right but then even if it didn't the way the fed system works is built on credit and there's

basically if you looked at the expansion of credit over the course of the last 16 years since the financial crisis the expansion of the public debt has accounted for of that 50 trillion at least 50 percent i i can't remember what the federal debt was in 2007 i think it was around 20 no it had to be lower than 12 i was gonna say 21 maybe yeah so So if it's now, say if it was 12, if it was 36 now, then that would be $24 trillion of expansion. I know it was $4 trillion when I was in high school,

which would have been... Donate yourself. 2002. So can you see, Logan, can you see what the federal debt was in 2007? Just Google St. Louis FRED federal debt. It's approximately 50%. So the point I'm getting at is that if the federal government debt were not expanding, like that's what's creating this overall credit expansion, which is part of what the Fed needs to, it needs the total credit system to be growing. If it's not growing, it starts to collapse on itself.

and so if the there's this kind of catch-22 where if the amount of debt that the fed the federal not the federal government not the fed was creating suddenly like started to contract well that money's going to somebody you know it's getting out there into the economy so that itself you know i don't think that they're going to be able to do it but like it's damned if you do damned if you don't like the system is so imbalanced and broken that if you you know what's most likely to happen or what's a certainty happens they're going to print money but in this in this kind of scenario the fed's going to have to step in to buy the government bonds to they're going to have to monetize the debt to control the interest rates

And that when you think about, well, should I hold a government piece of paper for 10 years that not only has interest rate risk, but has market risk, right? Because if you look at the actual mark-to-market value of the 10-year or the 30-year over the last three or four years, there's massive mark-to-market losses. everyone has always in my lifetime which now that i'm getting a little bit older you know starting to be multiple cycles but there was always the idea of the fed put the fed put the fed put the fed put and then jerome powell and the fed tried to you know really quote get out of it and they raised interest rates fast and they left them high for an extended period of time and the idea that the fed put is there is no longer assumed as religion it's dubious everyone knows that they're going to have to come in and buy bonds but the individual investor's

mindset of there's a bunch of people that just got burned myself included am i going to be the one to take this gamble, or should I just buy Bitcoin? You know, because that increasingly becomes the opportunity cost. I can opt out of this. I know they're going to have to print money. I can, even if you're considering a trade, which I don't consider it a trade, even if you're going to approach it as a trade, are you going to trade the Fed and have to worry about

whether it does something unpredictable like it did massively increasing interest rates? Or can I play that same trade and just buy Bitcoin? Because if you're viewing it as a bet that the Fed prints money, you can just take the time and uncertainty of what the Fed does and when out of the equation. Because anyone who's buying treasuries as a financial participant right now is doing so with the idea, well, the Fed's going to have to come in and buy these and they're going to increase in value and the dollar is not going to lose its value as fast as the amount of money I'm going to be able to make on my mark to mark gains. So therefore, I'm going to gamble on what and when the Fed steps in

to have to buy all these treasuries. And so just owning Bitcoin is a less risky proposition than trying to time the Fed. This rip was also brought to you by good friends at Zapparite. If you're a Bitcoiner and run a business or an independent contractor, you should be accepting Bitcoin as payment. If not you, then who? If we believe that fiat is systemically fragile and is a risk, the rails that that currency runs on are risk as well. You need to begin accepting Bitcoin as soon as possible. Invest in the future of your business. Create a redundant rail by accepting Bitcoin as payment using ZapRite and reduce risk for your business. I've done this for my business here at TFTC. We use ZapRite. It allows you to easily create invoices, payment links, or connect

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treasury specifically they can't overtly come out to the market and say we're gonna start diversifying some of our treasury assets into bitcoin because we don't know what the stability of the u.s treasury bond market is going to be like in the long term but is there some i don't know i from hearing trump speak at the bitcoin conference i'd say it was 90 10 that he doesn't under he like there were certain things that he said that indicated oh maybe he gets some of this and he's he certainly shifted significantly from where he was five or six years ago so he's no longer dismissive of bitcoin in 2018 2019 he was dismissive of bitcoin it's not money it's too volatile it competes with the dollar yeah the

dollar strength yeah to 2024 and he's appealing to a base but he's saying other things like i want every bitcoin to be made in america you know and you know i understand that this requires a lot of power we want to make cheap power so there's things that he's shifted on that signal there has been some positive progression of his understanding of bitcoin but then when he says have fun playing with your bitcoins and everything else you have to accept that there's a missing link where he's not really seeing the clear picture i think what's more likely is that he likes winning, and Bitcoiners win. Yes, we do.

We keep winning. We never get tired of winning. He respects winners. He respects people that are fighters. Bitcoin goes down, and then it doesn't die, and everyone's still out there saying, you need to be saving in Bitcoin. And I think he wants to win.

I think he understands enough of it to know that there might be something here and we can't afford to not be there. So I think that while it's not well-reasoned and well-strategically thought out, he has at least said something along the lines of, like, maybe we'll use this Bitcoin to pay off our debt. But I don't think he's Machiavelli thinking about how he's going to buy a bunch of Bitcoin and then shift the world to a Bitcoin standard just yet. But I think he knows that it's something of substance and it's a base of people he needs to appeal to and that the US can't afford to not be there. And so in my view, I think there's this important detachment between the US dollar, the Federal Reserve, the federal government, and US treasuries and what's in the interest of the US government and the US people and the American people versus what's in the interest of the Fed and the Federal Reserve. And it's a very messy situation where the federal government relies on the Fed to finance it, and so they're very much in bed with each other, but their interests are actually distinct. So if you looked at a scenario where El Salvador has been buying Bitcoin, it has dollar-denominated bonds, and the actual owning of those Bitcoin is improving the credit profile of the government. Now, there's a lot of socioeconomic investment and governance that's changing to also make it a better credit, but it has this Bitcoin, and this Bitcoin can become part of the collateral that you might need to get your loans repaid.

the same can exist with u.s treasuries but you either you know they just either convert the 200 000 that they own to a strategic reserve and there's a question as to whether they really have clear claim on all 200 000 because i think like 100 000 of them are bitfinexes but regardless there's a difference between basically shifting what they currently hold into a permanent reserve and actually buying it because how do you buy it you either have to issue debt or use some revenues from government operation or maybe take tariffs but you know somewhere you know it's there's a dollar of debt that either is growing or you know being repaid and so you're using those dollars to buy Bitcoin rather than either, you know, repay debt or cause the debt to expand

faster. So I think that, you know, one of the things that was part of the fight in Congress was extending the debt ceiling. I don't think that from what I've seen, it doesn't seem like a high priority in the short term, at least to cut spending, to bring the debt to zero. I think Trump has talked about how our country is going bankrupt, so he's very conscious of the debt, but I don't see it – a shift in administration and then suddenly the proclivity of Congress and the president to get together to spend as much as the government is taking in will change. this is the idea of issuing treasury debts and taking say 10 of the proceeds by bitcoin to hold within the bond that makes sense to you that be i think it makes sense for everybody but the calculus has to be different for the the u.s government because of the u.s dollar now in my view the u.s dollar and the interest of the u.s dollar and the federal reserve are distinct from

that the government will also accepting and recognizing that one funds the other, that if you were going to shift to, we're going to start holding Bitcoin and we're going to use dollar, you know, we're either going to use dollars to buy them or, um, just not sell what we, what we hold, that there's a consequence to the dollar status. if the if the us government is doing that so anybody else that has dollar denominated assets if they could do that and they're comfortable with the leverage and the timing of the leverage and they're comfortable with the bitcoin volatility it makes a lot of sense but even though the federal reserve is the issuer of the us dollar many people even though i think it's

technically incorrect and foundationally incorrect think about the us government as the issue of the dollar it does extract a lot of power from the dollar that other parties don't one for one and so i think its decision to issue u.s treasuries and buy bitcoin has different consequence than anybody else not just the value of bitcoin but to the value of the dollar yeah well the dollar at this point is pure confidence game so any signal that you're not as confident in the dollar as the U.S. government. And I think it's very important, anybody listening to this, watching this.

Just think about this. If the U.S. government said, hey, we're going to own Bitcoin, it's going to help us pay off the U.S. debt. What are the holders of the U.S. debt supposed to think? Why don't I just hold Bitcoin rather than your debt? Yeah. It's a rock in the heart's place.

But I do think there is going to be a lot of social framing and it's it's not going to be clean it's definitely going to be messy but i think what you're really focusing in on here again is something if you're listening or watching this to take home from this conversation it's really internalized the u.s government and the federal reserve have distinct motives and things that drive them there's big overlap but at a foundational level they are distinct they are they are not one in the same and somebody holding the u.s government holding bitcoin would in theory improve the likelihood that more value is ultimately returned to credit to creditors of the us government than if it didn't

um because bitcoin's more valuable than the dollar i thought that saylor had an interesting point where he talked about selling all the gold and using that to buy bitcoin which is an interesting idea i still think that there's a consequence for the dollar even if they did that but that's part of cynthia's plan too right just to maybe still buy as much as i don't know not i didn't didn't think that the bitcoin is selling gold go to the fed and get the gold notes which are currently marked at 42 an ounce marked in the market and then you send that gold to to buy bitcoin that that might be the case i'm not 100 sure yeah if it were me i'd just take the terror i'd sell it by taking the tariffs and say that we're gonna buy bitcoin and china's gonna pay for

it i like that it's good framing i think people will get behind that framing yeah it becomes a lot easier this is like now you got my mind racing too like would it be better for the u.s government and to stave off any potential run on the dollar system because they're signaling that they think bitcoin's a better store of value than u.s treasuries would it be better just from a regulatory perspective like eliminate cap gains eliminate income tax as much as possible and essentially encourage people to adopt at an individual and business level Bitcoin and build payments and treasury systems at the individual and company level on the private side,

let individual Americans accumulate Bitcoin debt situation, just let it run wild and hope at the end enough American individuals and businesses have Bitcoin that it doesn't even matter if the dollar, It goes crazy. Does that make sense? Yeah, I mean, I think it does. I think that it might be politically easier. I'll say two sides.

It might be politically easier to say, hey, look, this is money. We're not going to tax it. So, you know, and what they would likely do is, I think that in a prior bill that Senator Lummis had been working on, there was a de minimis de minimis exception which i think was six hundred dollars but i think it's far too low maybe it was something that's like if you're buying a real good or service there's not tax but if you're trading it for dollars there is a tax so that it's more directly tied to commerce like hey if you use this bitcoin to buy a car it's not taxable but if you're just

selling it for dollars and it is i think that politically that would be an optically make more sense i think that even something like that probably gets killed because there's some other lobbying power that maybe it's people who you know are issuers of stock like wait you're taking capital gains off bitcoin you can't sure you charge capital gains stock if you're taking it off of bitcoin you know so there's enough i think there's enough private interest that would actually try to hinder that hinder that and that's why the most likely thing the easiest thing i think is just an executive order that basically says we're not selling the bitcoin and we're creating reserve i think anything beyond that just becomes a lot more politically challenging of like how do you

acquire what are you selling what are the consequences because there aren't a ton of consequences just to say hey this is a permanent reserve and i think that that is significant in itself it instantiates bitcoin in a big way without the federal government having to go out and say we're going to sell something else to buy bitcoin and i think that the consequence for the dollar in a negative way is extended out if they just do that because if they were to do that, setting aside what the federal government does with the debt crisis, because at a certain point, you just have to admit that you're bankrupt and that people aren't getting paid back.

At some point, either the market's going to force that on you or you're going to come up with a plan before the market forces it on you. My view, and I don't exactly know how you would do it, is that it goes a lot better if you pulled the plug rather than having the market pull the plug on you if you think about a company that does a pre-packaged bankruptcy or a restructuring before they've actually gotten to a point of a default that they can't cure they actually have a lot more negotiating power in that world so i don't know if that's what trump is going to do maybe he you know what he what he seems to be doing with whether it be like the panama canal or canada or greenland

you know maybe he you know wields the the power of the office to negotiate external debt away you know which isn't ridiculous as an idea well i mean let's brings up an important point which is his selection for treasury secretary. I've been following Scott percent. The, that guy has zero understanding of Bitcoin, by the way, is external to Bitcoin.

Have you been following his posturing at all? Or some, some on his, I've seen a few clips, not, not following closely. Well, I think very aligned with what you were just describing.

he's been openly talking about on podcasts and at events specifically within the last 12 months about a brett woods 2.0 like the need for for that like a basically soft recognition that the u.s government's not going to be able to pay off the debt we need to get the world powers at the table to essentially figure out how to reset this interesting he's talked about that in the con context of the currency or the debt because bretton woods was really bretton woods 1.0 was everything being pegged to the dollar in the world monetary order rather than the debt scenario but i'd be i mean i'd be interested to go back and listen to some of the stuff that he said well imagine this sound like again how intertwined they are distinct but

very intertwined imagine this time around specifically yeah considering how big the problem is that have to be they're likely yeah it needs to be a negotiated yeah settlement and recognition and it's not unique to the united states government functionally every government's in debt that in a way that can't be repaid now because the u.s has been the reserve currency they've had this drug that they could abuse more so than than everybody else so it's not unique to the united states but the problem might be as bad here maybe you know here in japan it's probably less so in europe but similarly in europe i would not want to be in europe i wouldn't want to be in europe either europe seems pretty terrible i don't want to be in texas but what do you think this

this means for bitcoin i mean let's shift from the focus on the trump administration's policies the treasury's policies the fed policy its potential effect on bitcoin but take a zoom out tomorrow is bitcoin suite 16 as uh it's a protocol that's been live and in the wild january 3rd 2009 tomorrow's january 3rd 2025 bitcoin turned 16 it seems like it's reaching a state of maturity at least from acceptance that it is here to stay it is an asset worth holding whether you're an individual company a nation state whatever it may be and you have to imagine everything we just talked about for the last however long 45 minutes whatever it may be is on the minds of governments individuals companies across the world and granted it is

a very short period of time but um since september bitcoin has significantly increased in value who knows that's just typical cycle but the 10-year going up and it's going up with the dollar right Now that Dixie's pumping, Bitcoin is going up as well. It seems like it's moving in ways it hasn't historically compared to traditional markets, particularly connected to the Fed and the debt. Is Bitcoin going to manifest as a true safe haven asset? In the short term, no.

Okay. It's just, it is too under-owned to behave as a short, as a... Get into that. Paint the picture of how under-owned Bitcoin is. I would say that it would be a stretch if 1% of the population had any material exposure to Bitcoin. I can't remember who...

Like one benchmark I would use is like the microsoft shareholder proposal it was 99.5 that said no yeah but granted historically shareholders voting against board proposals is like that percentage like this never happens okay but how many of the s p 500 companies on bitcoin less than five Is MicroStrategy in it? Are they in NASDAQ? I don't think MicroStrategy. Square, Tesla.

Is MicroStrategy in the S&P? No, they're in NASDAQ. But even if they're not, or even if they are, if it's Square, Block, Tesla, assume MicroStrategy is. Is there another one? yeah less than one percent of the s&p yeah so less than one percent of the s&p there's a five yeah five would be one percent so it's a good benchmark to say

no more than one percent of the population has really figured it out and you know tesla hasn't figured it out either you know they own some but they sold 75 of what they held they bought like 40 000 bitcoin and then they now have 10 000 now they've probably learned something about bitcoin in the interim and probably have a much better understanding about it now than when they bought it but since tesla bought bitcoin in 2021 not a single fortune or not a single s&p 500 company has disclosed that they bought bitcoin if they are it's one or two but i don't know one by name And I think we would know it. So the idea of something being a safe haven, I think about it as people are already piped into this asset, whatever that safe haven are. And when something happens that becomes dislocative in traditional markets or causes people to become more conservative, they shift their allocations to the things that's more conservative and they're already piped into that.

There's infrastructure built out for those flows to flow. Yeah, exactly. There's infrastructure, the people that want to own the asset already do, and they're increasing their exposure in that time of fear or in that time of something occurring to need whatever you go to for a safe haven. So if less than 1% of the world is really piped in, and it doesn't mean it's like, yeah, you can buy, virtually the entire world is piped in to be able to buy iBit, the Bitcoin ETF. But if fewer than 1 in 100 understand Bitcoin, how do you flee to the thing that is, quote, supposed to be the safe haven asset if you don't own it in the first place?

That fleeing is typically, oh, I'm going to increase my exposure to this safe thing by 5%. Well, 99% of the world has zero, functionally. So it, by definition, is not a safe haven. It's the one thing that's not correlated to the dollar. It will be the one thing that continues to be not correlated to the dollar because it's the one thing that's actually competing with the dollar. So I think it's going to continue to behave like it has over the last 16 years, but also the last four years,

which is it's going to go up as more people figure it out. And then some of those people are going to sell or existing holders are going to smell a small percentage. So there's going to continue to be cycles in the short term and that it feels like we're still in the very early part of a adoption wave that roughly a hundred K feels stable and boring now. And there might be something that happens a la, you know, So March of 2020, where there's a liquidity crisis and Bitcoin goes down, maybe it goes down again to $70 or $60, but it bounces back and then far exceeds any other assets when they print money.

So I don't necessarily think that's going to happen. I'm just saying something like that's possible because there is a looming dollar credit crisis depending on what the Fed does. And what the Fed has shown us to do is that from 2008 to 2020, they moved a lot faster, or 2019 really. so i would expect them to move even faster this time maybe they preempt it maybe they start printing money before it becomes apparent and there isn't that real acute liquidity crisis that's interesting that's a that's a change of thinking for me you've always said they'll never print until they're the problem i don't i don't until they do i don't think that they will they've always waited for the problem, but what, what they shifted from 2008 to 2020, Neil Kashkari,

I would say was probably, um, key in this where he is basically signaling the alarm saying like, we can't allow what happened in 2008 to happen. And if we wait, it's just going to make our problem larger. And then we're gonna have to do more eventually. So that, that psychology has shifted my view is that it is very difficult politically optically for the fed to go print a bunch of money when food inflation is 10 to 20 percent every time i go buy food i think how are people not feeling like the dollar's hyper inflating every time they buy food it's insane right i think people don't feel like i think you listen to the warm-up episode uh i need to watch the last 30 minutes i've listened the first two i think that was a great

insight into i mean shut up billion spud but two guys really haven't been focused oh actually no i did well yeah i watched the i watched the the whole thing yeah yeah i mean but spud talking about how much paint oh yeah no that was a great part yeah he was talking about um where you know they basically take that on and it's a risk you know it's an upfront cost and it was something like you know paint going from like twenty dollars to a hundred like good paint it's like no one you can't you don't can't use good pain anymore it's five x yeah something like that yeah um so i just kind of go off on that to say that it it is difficult optically for them to come out and print a lot of money without there being some market event that allows people to say yeah i

understand that there's inflation but the market was crashing because they had to do it so i still think until they until they cross that chasm it's more likely that they wait for there to be a clear liquidity crisis to then step into print money i'm just saying that they certainly shifted from 2008 to 2020 and maybe they go the step further this time i'm raising that to say in the context of bitcoin everyone always have to has has to have their head on a swivel you have to be cognizant of something like march of 2020 where bitcoin went from 8 000 to 4 000 right before the halving right so many people it was two months before that 2020 halving may of 2020 and bitcoin bounced back and then massively outperformed every

other you know broad asset or index i think you know if bitcoin went from eight you know adjusting from that $8,000 down to $4,000 and back to $8,000, Bitcoin's up approximately 12 times, and something like the S&P is probably up 75%, or you know, one multiple.

Something like that could happen again, but it still feels like we're right in the pocket, early pocket, of an adoption wave, so while something like that might happen in an acute crisis, it feels like there will be significantly more adoption from here but more adoption from here

means it going from one percent to two percent or half a percent to two percent that's crazy to think like a doubling of adoption to two percent yes to two percent so i think in that world like bitcoin can't be the flight to safety because it's one definitionally under owned and then it being under-owned is the best signal for not understood. Did you read Ross's letter?

He sent it to me. I just need to read it. Yeah, I was going to read it tonight. I read some of the experts, but I was going to read the whole thing tonight. It's really, I highly recommend if you haven't read Stone Ridge's annual 2024 investor letter written by Ross Stevens, founder and CEO of Stone Ridge.

Go read it. But the reason I bring it up is external to the letter. I think one of the trends I've been paying attention to, I know we've been talking about this on the side off and on over the last year, but I can't get my mind off of it is this idea of giving Bitcoiners the ability to not have to sell their Bitcoin. Unchained is a perfect example.

like the the lending desk giving you the ability to get dollar liquidity without selling your bitcoin and it seems like more products are coming to market that are going to enable that which should hold supply off the market for longer who knows how much supply but i think in terms of building the infrastructure that would make bitcoin a potential safe haven asset in the future these types of products and stone ridge talking about nidig spinning out a product that allows you to get lower interest rate loans and they're essentially leveraging premium payments on insurance products that they have exposure to

to enable that type of dollar liquidity for Bitcoiners. I think that's great. I think all sorts of maturation and capital markets development in and around Bitcoin and for people that hold Bitcoin helps accelerate the normalization and adoption of Bitcoin. So I think that's good. Nothing can get around the fact

that someone first has to understand Bitcoin. There will be a time. We always come back to this. There will be a time. We always come back to this. When people adopt Bitcoin, like they pick up the phone and use it and they don't have to understand it.

But we're not at that time yet. That's why I like these products though, because they're focused on people who do get bitcoin no i like the product too i'm just saying that to to um to shift bitcoin forward we need more adoption so you put out the comment about you know 2025 is going to build i'm going to be even more militant about helping people understand bitcoin that is that a good goal Great goal. But that 1 in 100 problem, realistically, it's probably more like 1 in 200. It needs to become 1 in 100, 2 in 100, 3 in 100. And what drives us from where we're at to that point is some prior understanding of Bitcoin. So somebody listens to a podcast, somebody reads a book, somebody goes to a conference and hears a talk, and then something happens in the real world.

The Fed starts printing money more. Damn, those Bitcoiners were right. They said they were going to have to print money, and then they did. And this printing of money is tied to Bitcoin or, you know, somebody hears somebody talk and talk about how the money printing is what causes inflation and the way to protect yourself against Bitcoin. And then, damn, they go to the grocery store and the eggs are $15 a dozen rather than $9 a dozen or $8 or $7, whatever it is. They keep getting higher. And then someone looks up and Bitcoin's $200,000 and they say it. okay, I've connected this prior knowledge

to something in the real world that's allowed Bitcoin to unlock for me. That the way to really accelerate is getting more people to understand Bitcoin and that that is a function of education. Yeah, and unfortunately for us, the Silicon Valley tech bros behind Trump are distracting people.

I saw you tweeting at Shabbat the other week. Yeah, yeah. It's bad. I think so. I mean, he quote tweeted Kyle Simani, who was pumping the helium token in his talk. Yeah. Explaining.

It doesn't help people understand Bitcoin, right? Do you think that's self-serving or do you think he doesn't understand Bitcoin? I think he doesn't understand Bitcoin and I think it's also self-serving. I think he, you know, from his prior podcast, he's a Solana bag holder in his own terms to the tune of like he made a comment

that meant it seemed like he owned a billion dollars, which is a lot but you know he's someone that is out there positively talks about Bitcoin but I would say has a fiat mindset

he wouldn't make the comments that he does about other grifting things if he really understood Bitcoin if he did then he's just a sociopath which he might be

but I think it's more likely that he doesn't understand Bitcoin he's you know right or wrong no fault of his own fiat minded what's the issue 100 year bonds venture investors think

they still dollars their unit of account they think that the dollar their bank accounts going up in dollars even if they're translating bitcoin to dollars is this the measuring stick of success not necessarily like in bravado but I'm playing the game and I'm winning the game

I'm winning the game means I'm creating value if I'm accumulating more money which of course it's not because they're just printing more money but i think that that i think the more likely explanation of that silicon valley grift mindset which is functioning all of them the other thing i said was that silicon valley is largely a monoculture it's all group think they all one person does something or one venture firm does something and then everyone focuses on that theme and they and

i have not met one silicon valley traditional vc that understands bitcoin not one not one i don't know if you have i'm sure i'm sure there's somebody out there but not in that you know sequoia a16z benchmark whatever the other ones are um that they all got on this combination of blockchain revolution and ethereum and they sold that story to a bunch of people and those people happen to be the people that are around trump peter teal said that he sold all as bitcoin or functionally all in his stuttering way and then these people can't talk peter peter teal is the guy behind vance right and david sachs you know he probably speaks the most cogently about bitcoin but still he's got blind spots he invested in multi-coin right so i do

do think that it is a they also invest in props that they invested in fold like they're in yeah and i believe they also uh invested in river i think too i think they could be wrong that could be i think they invested in voltage so but still when you have somebody going out there and then thinking that there's some fundamental value in solana it's kind of it might be one of those things where they are making calculated risk assessed well what's the probability of this first that without it's tech investing it's tech innovation yeah and there's a probability of success and if successful then this will have a positive outcome that will outweigh the failures of these other nine investments my point is that the that tech circle that's around trump

seems to be more of the Silicon Valley group thing that doesn't understand the money side of Bitcoin. And I think that that could stand in its way, but it's not going to stand in the way from somebody buying the Bitcoin standard or listening to a podcast because there's truth and objectivity in the world. And despite all the noise, people are finding the truth.

And what it feels like to me, like the year of 2025, even though bitcoin is so under owned and so misunderstood or is under understood a word no uh under understood now uh it's certainly under owned that other words not a word but that little understood people do not understand it the very few people understand bitcoin that it does feel like for whatever the critical mass because i've always thought that the critical mass is somewhere like five out of like five percent of people then once five percent of the population gets it once it's one out of 20 it just snowballs and that's when there will just be the you know one exit of the crowd of theater somewhere around one in 20 people so if it's one

and that that it might maybe it's one in a hundred maybe when one of a hundred i don't know but there's going to be a tipping point and it's not the majority it's somewhere a lot earlier than people think that it feels like we're getting closer to the point where it's where a critical mass of people that have not yet accepted the reality that bitcoin's the new world order the new form of money well well be careful turning that around what do you mean and throughout new world order we're not we're not we're not the new world order here i don't even know what that You're going to get, you got like conspiracy theorists going to be like, yeah, you're left now. Yeah. You're left now. Okay.

But I'm saying it feels like, uh, you're in, uh, you know, the new, like the new standard of money, the new monetary order, the new monetary order that no one controls it. You just all have to play along now, um, that people who've been paying attention, but they've been denying, I feel like they're in a straight jacket. Like they, Like they want to keep finding some problem with Bitcoin. And as it finds equilibrium at approximately $2 trillion,

and as the idea of a strategic reserve is being talked about for a number of different countries and Ray Dahlia is coming out saying it's a, it's a, it becomes a harder to nine. You just see like when I make the straight jacket analogy, it's like, there's, there's less and less wiggle room to,

to deny it. you're just kind of taking a lot of energy to not make a lot of headway that the people that are curious about it it's easier for them to find a resource and understand it and it's becoming that much harder to deny and it feels like we're close to that critical mass so now i really like your comment on the monoculture and in silicon valley and that community if you will being disconnected from the reality of the common man the everyday american citizen i think that popped up over christmas with this whole h-1b visa that's a psyop why is it a psyop because they somebody wants you focused on it we talked about this in text didn't we yeah we did but

yeah what did we discuss it's a psyop what's it distracting us from where we come to conclude deporting violent illegal criminals and securing the southern border that there was some interest that wanted it to be about oh you just don't like immigrants and so the whole h1b thing came out of nowhere was was not i feel like trump's made some comment about in the past but like it was it was non-existent on the campaign yeah they forced the issue and then and then suddenly vivek ramaswamy makes a dumbass tweet and then somebody else put out a tweet about what's the guy's serum sriram serum i don't know i don't know but that guy um so it's a side but go on i was gonna say like highlight and obviously they want people

focused on that rather than the bigger issue which is the board southern border locking it down and deporting violent illegal criminals is the number one priority yeah but i do think there is some validity to the idea that the there is but that's why it's a sign up yeah there's got to be some validity okay to distract everybody okay focusing on the validity validity is that silicon valley completely disconnected from and going back to the vex tweet which i think was had vek on um a couple years ago i think he has good intentions but it was completely misguided with this tweet and this idea yeah i think he has enough self-awareness to realize that he really fucked up yeah but i did i mean the silver lining of it was people were like all right

you're going to put this out there let's go search the h1b visa database and see who's actually coming in via this program and it was obvious that it is being abused to the point where it's essentially just corporations trying to bring in people to pay them lower wages at the expense of the American. I do think that that's, again, not the intention of the program, but likely the solution. I thought it was funny.

You set up a system. We were texting about how it was a PSYOP, and then I was sitting on my porch, and the postman walks up to my door speaking some foreign language that I couldn't even tell you what it was. I'm like, why is this the U.S. Post Office? Cause I wasn't even like FedEx or DHL wasn't a private corporation.

I was like, why is this? Like he was literally actively on his, um, you know, Bluetooth talking to somebody in a foreign language. Like, why is this the postman?

This is America. But anyways, I do think that it is, and it was part of the, um, again, I'll accept the PSYOP, but the,

who was the guy, Sam Hyde? Yeah. I never heard of Sam Hyde. Oh, he's but it was great that he goes to kiev he's the ghost of kiev samuel alahid is he no i mean sam i've been on a sam hide for for i it's like a millennial um most famously known for his comedy but i think if you understand his comedy logan correct me if i'm wrong and your thoughts on him

but i think at the end of the day is like a very uh impressive i don't want to call him philosopher or whatever but like he he thinks very hard and he's very articulated about this and i think comedy is the medium through which he gets a lot of these political ideas like he gave a ted talk yeah so well i'd never heard of him yeah so the first of my knowing him was you put that tweet several people did but he put that out on chris uh new year's eve right it's like a 45 minute video everyone should watch it you know it'll propagate psyop but in the interest of that go ahead but he talks about in that how it's a very marxist idea to think about individuals as economic units and that if you're just thinking about them as economic units then you're missing

the point that you have to believe that there's worth in each individual and that if you don't care about the American, one of the broadest point he was making was that if you don't care about the American people, first and foremost, and you're just focused on America's idea, you're not equipped to lead. But tying that back to Silicon Valley investors, it does feel to me, and part of it might be biased by my own frustration that there is very much a group think and no one seems to be able to break out of it to understand bitcoin to then lead the way in helping all their peers understand that they've missed this or they've misunderstood what's happening here that if this the silicon

valley mindset feels very and also like not just talking about silicon valley vcs but what their capital produces what yeah what what they what they focus on building as a as a region they used to create value now it feels like they are more fiat than anybody that they think about everything as a fiat unit economic unit and they're optimizing to make fiat money and to track the fiat scorecard because the accumulation of money in a sound money environment is associated with the production of value that if nobody could produce more money the person that has the most money has produced more for others than they've consumed from them so there's something noble in that

but if you live in this broken world where you can acquire money without actually delivering value then it becomes very pernicious as an economic incentive but if you don't know that you still might be chasing that end goal of well if i'm accumulating more dollars that's a signal that i'm delivering more value when it might not be the case it feels like the silicon valley investors have this very fiat minded of focusing so much on the economic unit and failing to understand that they stopped actually creating things and creating things of value and that that's just an unfortunate reality

and hopefully they come out of it and realize that there's a difference between making money and producing value. If you're producing real value, you will also make money, but you can make money without producing things of tangible value. And in this world of crypto and fiat,

they've optimized for trying to make fiat rather than produce value yeah no it'll be actually bookmarked this let's keep checking you know there's just thinking like post 08 like wall street financial system rightfully so is the boogeyman the not the boogeyman but the the thing that people pointed out was like you created this problem you hyper financialized the global economy and levered it up and destroyed it and it's funny just uh socially sociologically post 08 like there was a big confluence of factors leading to this i think one major factor was a disdain for for wall street and many people started focusing on tech so it'll be interesting anthropologically at some point in the future to do a retrospective and just see if

that shift of talents and people not recognizing that the problem at the core of it was the money it just shifted from Wall Street was probably still a material part of the problem today but a lot of it shifted to Silicon Valley and tech as a sector yeah I thought about how when I came out of college the the brands that were most pristine if you were associated with the brand that was a signal that you were the best it was goldman sachs it was google in a different ballgame it was harvard and it was anything having to do with silicon valley like if you work for andreessen horowitz before it was a16z that was the equivalent of goldman sachs

on wall street and again it might just be my echo chamber but for each of those like google a16z and goldman or harvard their brands are now counter signals for people that are out of the matrix that if you're still using those as your benchmark then you're you're both chasing the wrong thing and it's also there's a growing number of people that look at you and say like oh you that was what you wanted to pursue like how why wouldn't you do something more noble than that or something more worthwhile so it's interesting how that shift where it was the the stain of wall street after the financial crisis but it might increasingly become this super

out of touch we're going to change the world's kind of fraudulent silicon valley mantra yeah and i am curious i mean i you know i am hopeful that that change trends the way that we got on this was that the people around trump in that inner circle are all these silicon valley tech people who seem to for the life of them not be able to understand bitcoin i hope that changes it's not like damn you know may they all be damned and burn the beds burn the bridges hopefully they figure out trying to burn bridges here so yeah hopefully stoke a critical conversation discussion that will hopefully be ongoing and that's and we've talked about this that's one thing i worry about with this the people surrounding trump in this administration as it pertains to economic

policy and crypto policy quote unquote i hate that i even have to say that like it should be bitcoin policy and yeah the thing we got on this point of it's not going to be those people that help accelerate us towards a better understanding of bitcoin those people that are around trump maybe rfk jr maybe vivek but certainly not vance certainly not sax who's he's made his head of quote crypto and all those people in the circles around teal vance sax because that are a monoculture while that's the case i think everything's lining up like this you know the stars are aligning of unlocking a massive wave of people who do real things and create real value in the real economy to understanding bitcoin i think that's the beauty of bitcoin as well

is while certainly i think we would both agree that we would prefer for incoming administration and the people being placed in particular positions to really grok bitcoin and understand it the gravity of it and the importance of putting forth good policy i think you can go back to the war mode episode like more education getting to the minds of people like billion spud and their audience and the small business owners that zap right is that the other guy's name spud it's his nickname yeah okay andrews is really yeah when i was trying to find his name to write a note in the book for him i was like i mean i've always listened to podcasts but i don't even know the guy's name yeah um point being like you don't need while it would be preferable for those people

to put forth sensible policy and not get distracted by broader crypto. Ground up, people getting this information, you see the zap right every day, is happening. Yeah, I mean, I think that information is getting out there. And I think maybe it's that, because I do think you and Will going on the War Mode podcast and having that long discussion,

It brings really important information to War Mode's audience in War Mode's own voice, in Billion Spud's voice, trying to understand it and reason through the questions and asking. And I think one of the things that was most consequential about the 2024 campaign cycle was Trump going on all the podcasts. so i think that one of the things that hopefully continues to happen in 2025 is not only someone like yourself and tftc getting more and more bringing more people in to the tent like having people like sam and courtney who you had on discuss health bringing kind of people into our world but then also us going on more mainstream podcasts and talking to their audiences to help them on hopefully rogan having somebody on that's a bitcoin that actually understands it that that as a strategy to

having people understand the message is having somebody else be able to ask questions that's actually you know not initiated or doesn't yet fully understand what's there but getting to ask the questions to be educated themselves like there was the podcast that uh who was it like Breedlove went on a podcast with Danica Patrick, you know, getting more Bitcoiners to go on Danica Patrick's podcast. Yeah. Which,

you know, she's got a huge audience. And so I think I expect that more of that will happen. Are you ready for Rogan? What's that? I think it's gotta be you or safe. I mean, you are Austin.

I am in Austin, but I think safe would be best. You know, if safe can't make the flight, then I'd be B team. but I want to say do not

no I'm just saying push yourself to the B team hey Safe was on CNBC finally finally he did a great job too

he did a great job and Squawk Joe Squawk was drooling over him drooling so that was great

speaking of this Matt McCusker Billy's brother we got to get it on the books we're talking to his brother we're going to schedule yeah isn't he here

he's going to be in here yeah he's here he's going to come in yeah so the thing just the grassroots of getting there's no way around it Trump being in office the strategic Bitcoin reserve

more people talking about strategic Bitcoin reserve certainly positive the circles around him not positive to accelerating Bitcoin all of it is more positive than if Elizabeth Warren was functionally running the administration policy

I like to think the framework I would have is that Bitcoin doesn't really need favors and accelerants people can make our lives miserable if they want to make our lives like elizabeth warren running policy it wouldn't be a disaster and just as an individual make our lives harder so just taking that pressure away pressure away will be great for bitcoin over the next four years even that over a long enough time horizon would accelerate bitcoin as well the trying to strangle it ultimately ignites the fire but it can make a lot of people's

lives miserable in the interim particularly people that are building bitcoin tools in this jurisdiction so from that standpoint it's hugely positive they don't need to do anything else other than not continue operation choke point 2.0 and otherwise really try to restrict bitcoin from a tax policy or what the irs is trying to do right now so i think it's a huge positive all of that exists as a baseline the true accelerant of bitcoin is more people understanding it and so if we're going to be militant we're going to need to get people in this studio and go out to the world and talk to other people's podcasts yeah that's trump led the way we need to follow that's your advice for milton marty just get all more podcasts you have you have you bring those people

in like matt mccusker shane gillis i expect shane gillis and matt mccusker to be in this room they're pretty busy men you know they're busy men but they're making a lot of money they need to be preserving that purchasing power because yeah well they got it good they need to they need to me maximizing it there's too much and then going on their podcast you know you getting them out you doing you and will going on the war mode and having it be i don't know what you call that a simulcast or cross post they haven't posted on their feed yet we need to i need to text billy billy get it up yeah that cross post but if you go on the youtube it's all they have a rabid fan base yeah we're in it but it's been crazy to see the youtube comments of here for war mode

actually learned something it was cool yeah they need they need to get that actually cross-posted so i'm saying that that would be good you going on we need you stop talking about me you all of us yeah everybody that that will be the if you want to militantly accelerate sitting down with somebody that has an audience of a million people hey call her daddy i'm here no don't do that way i'm here Mark Cuban looked so pathetic. It's because he is pathetic. Wait, did he go on the color day? No.

Did he go on Hawk Tua? He went on Hawk Tua. She hasn't shown up. She launched that meme coin and went dark for the better part of a month now. Isn't it a sign of the fiat economy when Hawk Tua can become a... That's a psyop. It's just, whether it's a psyop... She went from like Man in the Street interview, the biggest podcast.

It's not the biggest podcast, but it's just a podcast. Yeah. But the fact that Mark Cuban had the humiliation ritual of going on that podcast might make it all worth it. Do you think Mark gets Bitcoin? No. Do you think we'll get Kyle to understand Bitcoin this cycle? The year 2025, do we get Kyle?

I say yeah. Come on, Kyle. The year 2025, Kyle Bass understands Bitcoin. He comes around. I believe this is the year. Kyle. I'm optimistic. It's not some Chinese PSYOP.

We can walk through. I was joking with somebody that somebody thinks it's a Russian PSYOP. Someone like, who is it? Some big Wall Street investor thinks it's a Russian PSYOP. Like a household name. I was like, yeah, it's kind of funny because that person thinks that it's a Russian PSYOP. Kyle thinks it's a Chinese PSYOP. others think it's an NSA

Tucker Carlson thinks it's the CIA so here you got three people you know pointing the gun it's like oh it's China oh it's Russia oh it's the US it's like guys don't you see what's happening here like it just is and it works and if there are

three different of these you know high profile thinkers are thinking that it's you know one of the US China or Russia that all have conflicting interests like there can't be a story that it's one of the three of them and it's more likely to be none of them and

the reality of the situation is it has, Bitcoin has to work. You have to assume that it was and then be able to reason to yourself of knowing why even they couldn't stop it. Wait a minute. Let's dig into this because I love the way you explain this. You need to write. This is for Tucker Carlson.

This is the next gradually then suddenly essay. Okay. why the government why a government didn't create bitcoin or even if how would you how would you phrase the chapter so i don't know what i would name it but but my understanding is that tucker carlson thinks that the cia created bitcoin or cia or nsa that's his hang up and i don't really care other than he has a big microphone so it'd be helpful for him to understand it but that the logic that you have to approach it with is that for bitcoin to work now i don't think that the

cia created bitcoin but in order for you or anyone to adopt bitcoin as money you need to approach it from the perspective of as a thought exercise let's assume that the cia created bitcoin now I need to evaluate whether there's any consequence to that if I'm correct in my wrong assumption that the CIA

did create it could they stop it because the only way that Bitcoin is viable as money is if they in fact did create it and if they in fact couldn't stop it if there was nothing that they could do to undermine it

Only in that scenario could Bitcoin be viable as money because it has to be the scenario that whether or not whoever created it, whoever created it could not now undermine it. Whether that was Satoshi Nakamoto, a genuine person that altruistically wanted to do some good in the world or the most. Or Satoshi Nakamoto, the CIA spook. Right. It has to have been either of those two characters and not be possible for either of them to prevent, regardless of who that entity is in anybody's mind. And that in order to be able to reason through, is there anything that X interest, the US government, the CIA, the state of Russia, the state of China, is there anything that any one of those interests could do individually or together to prevent Bitcoin requires some first principle understanding of how the Bitcoin network works and why it works. being able to visualize these this construction of nodes that are very ephemeral

that can come and go and be spun up on new hardware and disappear keys having copies and being in multiple places and then that being the how of like how the network

actually works and passes messages and why it works and being so redundant and why it would be impossible to stop by any individual actor or groups of actors. And then the critical why it exists of why the world needs sound money and why everyone has an incentive to adopt a form of money that can't be printed. And then why everyone has an incentive, not in terms of the greater good, but in terms of their individual selfish interest to ensure that nobody else can cheat, that everyone

has the incentive to prevent everyone else from printing money. And because everyone has that individual interest, that's why the Bitcoin network from an economic incentive perspective is so sound that in order to go back to the challenging of if the CIA created it, can they now stop it? It requires that knowledge. And so I do think it's a good thought exercise for someone that's hung up on, well, what if the government created it? It's like, well, assume that they did. The only way it works for anybody that's adopted it to this point, they've had to reason through that. They've had to come to the conclusion

that it doesn't matter who created it. In order for it to be money, regardless of the who, no one can stop it. Steel, man. Agree with everything you just said. But Satoshi, CIA spook, accumulated a million Bitcoin. I mean, does the U.S. government just get an unfair advantage? No.

Does anybody who held Bitcoin earlier get an unfair advantage? That's what Tucker's going to say. When you're on Tucker Carlson, we're manifesting right now. Logan, manifest with us. Hold your hands up like this. There you go. What's he going to say? He's going to say, I think this is a poor steel man.

I'm not saying it's a good steel man. i could just see like this is what somebody's gonna say okay wait repeat it like is it fair that the u.s government launched just accumulated a million coins before every other nation so my answer to that running with the assembly not saying that we believe this is cia we don't believe it satoshi the spook best understanding he's a innocent young american or western european that speaks english and created bitcoin because there's a problem with printing money that's almost certainly what happened but again for this thought exercise to help people who get hung up on the idea that maybe it was the nsa or maybe it was cia

we walk through the logic of you have to assume that they did and then be able to understand why even in that case they couldn't stop it okay assume that they did and Satoshi is rumored to have a million Bitcoin, you say, no, if you created sound money for the world that worked and everyone can voluntarily opt in, no one has to use the system, and there's 21 million, would the person or entity that created it get 5%? Because the beautiful thing about it is no one can create money

and you can only spend the money once. so if you don't use that money to create things of value then it just gets eventually distributed so if you think about it as an individual entity it's the exact same dilemma which people are going to come to and say you bought bitcoin when it was a thousand dollars this isn't fair you have a hundred times as much bitcoin as much purchasing power or maybe not Well, in many cases, it becomes orders of magnitude harder to accumulate the same amount of nominal Bitcoin with each passing cycle. So the answer to that is that the people that valued Bitcoin before everyone else afforded everyone in the future the ability to value it. and securing private keys and carrying those private keys forward

to be able to spend the units of economic value to facilitate trade and create things of real-world value, everyone should get that benefit because they afford it to everyone else in the future, not just in the rest of our lifetimes, but everyone beyond there. right so i think that you know there's always there's going to be people that say it wasn't fair like holding bitcoin was easy or seeing bitcoin before it was easy to see was easy but that's that dilemma of people that were early to bitcoin like it's applicable to satoshi spook

yeah 2010 is applicable to satoshi the spook so if dustin trammell one of the first bitcoin miners on the network got a lot of bitcoin then he valued Bitcoin before everybody else and he afforded everybody else the ability to because he valued it, right? So it's to everybody's benefit because it's this infrastructure and utility that applies to 8 billion people in the world

and so even the last person that adopts Bitcoin that's alive today in future generations is going to benefit for what people very early did. so of course it's great and if the guy satoshi came back and dumped a million bitcoin on the market that too would be good for bitcoin there wouldn't be a risk when can we expect the essay i've got a long list of to-dos i think you put this one up to the top i like this one i i thought i was thinking that the quantum question would be the quantum so but it gets people i've had people that were hardened

you know hardened Bitcoin they're in three different people that are close to me like hey we're good with this quantum stuff right so I think that it's one that was also something that Chamath

came out and talked about he's like when I saw that Google came out with this willow I had to cancel all my meetings and do the calculations to be like when does this break Bitcoin and what the math says and there's there's some you know questions around the collision resistant or whatever talk these bullshit artists you're giving like a trump impression for chamath

i feel like sometimes i feel like sometimes you do like a an irish i don't know there's yeah okay whatever but my point is that um that that one gets people yeah that chamath said is like bitcoin could be broken in three to five years and what those people never you know do the math on as silicon valley quants and intelligences is like when does jp morgan break then when is the u.s the digital u.s dollar system stop working because it's built on about http literally they always do this on bitcoin because they're so stupid but so i feel like the quantum question i don't i don't feel like i individually can write it but i think from a logical standpoint i'll be able to create a very

logical hierarchy to help people reason through it and it gets a lot of people i'm going to talk to jimmy about like him writing like the technical aspects and then me kind of providing that logical architecture so that was going to be the next one but what would the title of the satoshi the spook bitcoin oh we'll figure it out but i agree that that's a good one even the the idea is even if a spook created bitcoin bitcoin can only work if the spook can't stop it and so you need need to understand why that needs to be your adversarial thinking because it is true you have to assume adversarial that your enemy created it yeah you know and if your case your spooks your enemy then assume the chinese ccp created assume russia made it in a basement assume the cia and

then try to figure out why what if mark human invented bitcoin not i think i'd have to dump it i think i think that you should have seen him i didn't watch the hawk to a podcast i would never do that but just watching the two minute clip that was on twitter that guy could not have created bitcoin even before that he said that he was playing dumb he would rather have bananas than when he can at least eat bananas he's playing didn't justin's son buy the six million dollar banana and then eat it yeah yeah i talked to him about it after you just tell yeah apparently like the art installation did he do that because of mark cuban i don't know if he did that because i don't know um but apparently he was telling me like it's he has copyrights to the instant like

that it's like the design of the installation is copyrighted so like you can take duct tape tape it to a wall and literally have museums rented out and he gets like copyright royalties on that this is this is very fiat oh yeah i don't even want to he was describing it i was like wow this is incredible i have to see i have my friends that are normie land tradfi friends like combination of hedge fund private equity wealth management are they getting it yet no they they see things like that and they're like this is bitcoin that that's that's the reality of the majority of america they see things like the shitcoin crypto guy buying the banana for a million dollars and saying he's going to eat it and they associate they literally will text me

that and be like this is bitcoin and i say no that's fiat okay we've got our third essay for gradually and suddenly volume two the banana on the wall is not bitcoin yeah crypto is not bitcoin no i think i think we're close to volume two here it is shocking how many people see the most degenerate things nfts bananas crypto shitcoin guys buying them for millions all the grift none of it's Bitcoin and people have this mental association

that that is Bitcoin that's real that's what we're up against here Milton Marty is going to come out Milton for Bitcoin adoption but should we be more Milton towards the shitcoiners I think part of the Milton

we got to be positive here but we have to reinforce in each one of those venues or communications in an express way that this is this is something different and hit it head-on because if you think that you're doing that without being express and hitting it over the head 10 times someone i've sat in conversations where two-hour session i'm explaining bitcoin bitcoin bitcoin saying things like money converges to one and then a wealthy dude will introduce me to his friend and say hey this is parker he's my crypto

guy like how's it feel to be somebody's crypto guy so it's it's bad it's gotten it's some days it's made me want to quit i'm not your crypto guy but uh ain't your buddy guy but um so that's just reality you can hammer the bitcoin message bitcoin bitcoin if you are not expressed that this thing crypto is snake oil it is grift and when i'm talking about bitcoin is only bitcoin and helping them look into the camera understand that it is that grift and bitcoin isn't crypto and like when the paint stuff with it wasn't even paint it's a duct tape no i'm talking about billion billion you know helping them be like and like this other stuff is nihilism you don't need two forms of money they're just trying to get your bitcoin that that's an important part of the

message so i think we got that through to them i think because there's so many it's a new year stop doing drugs kids stop doing drugs bitcoin is not crypto crypto is not bitcoin there's real signal here there is there is it was a great way to start the year yeah glad we did it first rip in the saddle good way to accelerate for our own so like it's kind of got got me focused for today that's why i knew rather than rather than wait till monday to really re-engage just like no i'm gonna get some shit done today so we're getting shit done it's a new year built at marty's here parker's gonna be on joe rogan and tucker carlson by the end of the year you heard it here first we're gonna get shane gillis in the studio parker's manifesting that for us is it gonna be

great yeah if shane gillis 2025 will be the year that kyle bass understands bitcoin i can't i feel like some bitcoiner is going to go on rogan and we'll get shane gillis and matt mccusker in the tftc studio let's make those three pretty humble goals humble yeah and we'll get to five percent we're gonna get to five percent tipping point too if you're militant enough you got to be militant freaks i don't know i feel like if we just get to two i'd say it's probably half a percent so we just get to two percent double it quadruple it if we're at half percent half to two yeah that would be a good goal all right all right i think we solved everything we needed to accomplish in 2025 here we just laid it out yeah too much debt not enough dollars

nothing to trump yeah beware of liquidity crisis okay guys it seems like it's coming i've got like you gotta have that sense tingling right now that uh head on a swivel phil geiger had a great tweet where he said he's like Bitcoin's going to go to 100k and he had a few other comments and he's like and then it's going to crash back

to 58k gain so I'm not saying that's going to happen but everyone has to mentally prepare the Fed has been draining dollars out of the system amount of debt has continued to go up

if they continue to do that preemptively digitally creating more dollars there are consequences to starving a dollar debt denominated system from dollars and they've been doing that for going on three years now leading indicators are screaming right now

yeah but Bitcoin remains the answer in all cases and will only accelerate the need to print money if they do but you have to can't get caught off sides survive all weathers so you think my super cycle posture is pretty piss poor no i'm not saying that i'm just what happens between here and 12 months

from now might be particularly volatile be prepared freaks up and down go by gradually and suddenly buy the book get it for your friends because you have them we're in the process of writing volume two right now as we sit here so goodbye peace and love Thank you.