TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #575: The Big Print with Lawrence Lepard

Episode Date: January 25, 2025

Marty sits down with Larry Lepard to discuss his upcoming book. Larry on Twitter: https://x.com/LawrenceLepard Larry's website: https://ema2.com/ The Big Print: https://www.amazon.com/Big-Print-Happened-America-Sound-ebook/dp/B0DS9W8FFS 0:00 - Intro 0:36 - Trump coin and the new administation 8:48 - Fold & Bitky 10:43 - Larry's book 12:31 - We’re reaching the fourth turning 15:52 - Skeptics and crypto frauds 18:09 - Metcalfe’s gold rush 24:25 - Unchained 25:26 - A newcoiner is never late, nor is he early 30:05 - Scott Bessent and the monetary reset 33:22 - Manufacturing a soft landing 48:08 - Events escalating in magnitude and freqency 52:37 - Marty's price prediction for this cycle 55:55 - Cultural touchpoints for adoption 1:05:52 - Plugs Shoutout to our sponsors: Fold https://foldapp.com/marty/ Bitkey https://bitkey.world/ Unchained https://unchained.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. Larry, the legend, Lepard.

Welcome back to the show, sir. Hey, Marty, always good to be with you. I really enjoy talking to you. I do as well. It's better in person. It was great seeing you in person in Abu Dhabi. It was an interesting conference. It was my first time in the Middle East.

Yeah, absolutely. uh it's uh it's spreading you know people are buying it everywhere trump coin oh boy don't get me started it's spreading everywhere yeah you know you got to take the good with the bad right i mean there there are a lot of things that are really great about trump and uh you know his ego and all those other things are what drive him to be who he is which is in many ways great there's it comes with some flaws too yeah if we're all being honest with ourselves i know there's a lot of people catching about the meme coin i think it's a terrible idea obviously but is there anything more on brand for the trump family no absolutely i mean you almost could have predicted it i mean i

was i was around when he created trump air this is a long time ago he created an airline to compete with the eastern shuttle from new york to boston in the early 80s so the guy just can't help putting his name on yeah he's gonna put his name on buildings airplanes boxes of steaks board games coins all of it golf clubs wineries and now the digital economy meme coins yeah golf courses yeah we've got a few of those yeah let's put aside the meme you know the good news is i mean think about how much more crypto friendly and bitcoin friendly this administration is and if it comes with with a few things that we have to hold our nose on well that's the price we pay right i think it's well worth it i can't no doubt about it it's well worth it i mean i i just feel i feel sorry for

people who get sucked into that shit and they're gonna lose their money bitcoin has been arguing for this like they're a contingent of bitcoiners but are you just like when um the idea of levying an illegal securities lawsuit against Ethereum came up, would come up. People would just be like, just let it fail. Let people touch the stove, learn their lesson, and they'll all be funneled to Bitcoin. At the end of the day, it's all funneled down to Bitcoin.

Well, that's right. We know how this ends. We've seen it. Yeah. Speaking of ending, the Biden administration ended. I saw you tweeting about this. I forget it was last week or earlier this week, But Janet Yellen left the Trump administration in a pretty shitty spot.

How many people did they pay to have them stand on the steps and applaud her departure, right? There was way too many. Those had to be paid actors. Yeah, I mean, it's really quite a mess. Trump is inheriting a bag of shit. And there's a strong argument that says that if he wants to break some glass, He should do it early

While he can still You know in the economy While he can still blame Biden Because in a couple years He's going to own Whatever happened Yeah It's not looking good

Reverse repo markets Or the repo markets Are draining Janet Yellen Just out of the corner Of her mouth On the way out Like by the way

The treasury is almost Out of money We're going to hit The debt ceiling In a month Commercial real estate Delinquency rates Going up

And it's weird It's just This weird juxtaposition of that backdrop uh federal government debt um far surpassing 37 trillion dollars now i believe and um the interest expense on that debt surpassing defense spending you have that that backdrop of europe crumbling as well um probably a good thing for the people of europe that the overbearing communist system needs to break but uh you have all that and then you have the trump administration coming in looks like as you mentioned a significantly better environment

from a regulatory perspective it's very clear at least with the executive orders that have been signed and the people that have been placed in the administration that economic policy is going to be much better for the next four years, at least it seems that way at this point. And people have an incredible amount of optimism. The headline of yesterday was the golden era. Across every paper, we're heading into this golden era. But there is this 9,000-pound gorilla in the corner of the room,

which is this systemic debt issue. Yeah, it really is. And I mean, the bull case is that AI is going to save us and that all these hyperscalers and all the capex they're, you know, spending is keeping the economy going. And, you know, perhaps it will. I mean, if it does keep going, it's going to have to be inflationary. That's something I think we know. I mean, I just wrote my quarterly. It's available on my thread on X.

And, you know, we're just, we're seeing the CPI go up month by month. We're seeing a lot of labor pressure. You know, when the longshoremen went out in October, they got a deal that was 60 plus percent over six years. So that's 10 percent a year wage increases. And that's a long way from 2 percent. You know, also, like earlier, there was a great chart from Tavi Costa that showed that agricultural commodities were up 28 percent last year. which is that's why the grocery store hurts so much right i mean you know so this two or three percent cpi that they're aiming for not even achieving the two uh it's it's just it's not

accurate and things are much worse than that shows so the only way they can keep it going is ultimately to print more um that's the name of the book you know the big print i mean we know it's coming i mean they've kind of done it in a sub subterranean way in the sense that you know yelling to suck the money out of the reverse repo and use that to grow m2 but um i think eventually it's going to come to a head and interestingly enough i think we're going to see a titanic clash between powell and trump um because we absolutely have to have lower interest rates to lower that interest expense and to roll those bills i mean janet you know janet really left off with a bag of when she termed everything you know didn't turn out enough debt and then tilted toward doing

bills and so we've got all these bills rolling over and if they're at a rate of you know four percent plus um that's you know the one point two of annual interest that's going to be a much bigger number and uh it's you know we all know what the debt do move is it seems like we're looking at it so uh it's my view is kind of like popcorn it's just going to be a very interesting year yeah yeah it's going to be it already is an interesting year but well i think when you consider that's what parker and i have talked about i just talked about with turdemeester and that's my big question like is there a looming liquidity crisis like you mentioned reverse repo i've been trying to um juice um stealth quantitative quantitative easing

with that but it seems like that is reaching the limits of which it can be squeezed and yeah it's been drawn down a couple hundred million now um the other thing that has helped in terms of liquidity is it's a global liquidity issue we all know the money comes from everywhere and china's been running like crazy and so you see i'm starting to go up again i've got a good chart on that most of my quarterly report so you know it um it's a it's a toxic macro setup and uh it's gonna blow up i think but so far it hasn't sup freaks this is now you don't want to skip because fold has a great offer for you everyone knows about fold the app where you can earn the most bitcoin rewards for everyday purchases i did this yesterday me and my wife we use amazon to buy

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tell them to pick up a BitKey. Go to bitkey.world, use the key TFTC20 at checkout for 20% off your order. That's bitkey.world, code TFTC20. Yeah, there's a lot to get through. Um, but inevitably when things do blow up, cause I think mathematically as the, uh, hens are going to come home to roost at some point and actions are going to need to be taken

the next big print, which gets to your book. And I think it's a good time. Hopefully people, um, there is enough time between now and when that is inevitably, um, going to come to fruition in between now and then once the book launches we were talking uh within the next few weeks hopefully people can get their hands on it and really understand the problem um because as i mentioned we were in abu dhabi i've got a an early copy of the book in pdf form and um your your intent with this book was to explain how everybody's fucking us

ultimately, continuously, over and over again, which leads to more printing and why. Let me use that word, but that's about right. There have been some great books written. And I've borrowed heavily from this book. I mean, this is

a Saifedean book and a Lynn book. But what I found in handing out the book on standard, I often found people would get it, they'd start to want to be heavy, and they wouldn't read it. And so what I tried to do was kind of tell a story and make a more easily understandable narrative that anyone could relate to.

You don't have to be a financial type. I mean, as an example, early on, I had some people read it who have no financial background, and one guy said, what's the Federal Reserve? And so, okay, so I get a footnote explaining what the Federal Reserve is. No, trying to eliminate your, I think the last part, before we pause to fix the technical difficulties,

saying you've learned, people have read the book, don't know about the Federal Reserve, and haven't really experienced tumultuous times in the market, whether it's 2008, LTCM, going back to the 70s, 80s. Yeah, that's right. I mean, it's again, you know, the the money problem is a sophisticated problem that if you're just an average American, you don't think about it very much, except, you know, your prices are going up and, you know, the inflation, you experience that, you know, front and center. And then you've got a bunch of politicians on the left who are all saying it's the greedy corporations that are the problem when it's really not the greedy corporations. It's the Federal Reserve. And more importantly, it's the way the system is structured. I mean, the system is structured, as you said earlier, to require inflation.

It's just math. You know, without inflation, we've got, you know, debt. Our money system is based on debt. And so, without a growing base of debt, you can't service the debt. So, it's going to continually grow. And it's, you know, that growth has started to compound. And anybody who plays around with compound numbers knows that they eventually go parabolic. And we're kind of in that stage now.

now the as parker would say we're in the suddenly phase you think you think we're in suddenly yeah i think we are i mean it it feels to me like we are um you know i mean i this again my quarterly my most recent quarterly had two charts that show um you know the value i mean the the 10 year bond used to be the base layer of collateral in the world everyone was the securest thing in the world and everyone relied upon it as a mechanism for pricing everything else And in 10-year bond terms, gold since 2020, which is when the big print really, the last big print really started, gold's up 200% and Bitcoin's up 2,000%. And so, to me, these are both clear signs that we are in a sovereign debt crisis, a full stop. And so, and, you know, those kinds of things don't get easily solved.

And, you know, Powell thought he could do a Volcker and just raise rates and, you know, calm down the inflation. Everything would be fine. But he's wrong because when Volcker did that, the GDP was 30 some odd percent. Now it's 120. So, you know, he made the problem worse inadvertently, you know, caused Silicon Valley Bank to fail. And, you know, it's going to just continue until we blow up again. And at that point in time, they will have to print more money. And eventually, I think we will either have extremely high inflation leading to some good political leadership and a monetary reset, or we'll have extremely high inflation leading to hyperinflation and the complete failure of the currency.

And it's unclear which. It depends upon politics a lot. But I think one of those two cases is going to happen in the next several years and then become acute before what I kind of consider two. I think this whole thing is going to get solved by 2030. not six years away but um you know we're in it and it's a fourth turning and they typically take about that amount of time so my view is we're gonna we're gonna see we're gonna see this end game play out pretty quickly and um you know the book i mean the book is divided into two sections the first part is the problem you know how you're getting screwed how they're screwing you why

they're screwing you how the system is broken for the average american and and really average world citizen. And then the second part of the book is the solution, which most people watching this podcast probably know it. But for those who don't, it's Bitcoin, you know, from the base layer on up. And so, you know, I educate people as to what Bitcoin is and I try to dispel, you know, the rumors and concerns. I mean, there's some really, I think my wife made a very meaningful contribution. She doesn't know anything about monetary policy. She's a writer and artist and, And, you know, it was an ad executive when she was working and she read it and she had a lot of comments like they're not going to understand this. You know, why don't you clarify this? Why don't you clarify that?

And but she came up with one really great suggestion. Why don't you write a chapter and call it skepticism and just talk about how, you know, all throughout history, whenever something new has come along, there's been skepticism, you know, whether it's the Luddites or the Red Flag Act or, you know, Krugman with the fax machine or, you know, there are 20 examples. I mean, you know, people saying that, you know, nobody would ever need a personal computer, et cetera, et cetera. And so I did that. And then I also did a lot of debunking of the difference between Bitcoin and crypto because, you know, frankly, as we all know, Sam Bankman-Fried really did us a disservice. And the whole crypto industry, frankly, a lot of it, almost all of it, has done Bitcoin an enormous disservice because Bitcoin really is not crypto. It's a technological revolution. And crypto is a bunch of fraud in most cases. So, um, you know, I've, I've tried to separate those two and then there's at the back of

the book, there's even a section called, you know, objections and, and, and answers. I mean, the kind of thing you would do at the end of a case study where, well, this thing uses too much energy. No, here's a page that explains why it doesn't, you know, or whatever, just to, you know, the standard objections are, you know, we, we can't have deflation. It would mean the great depression. No deflation is what we want. Deflation is a good thing.

So I've just tried to attack it from every single possible angle and get the average human to see that this is obvious and it's an incredible opportunity. One thing I actually I kind of arrived at this in writing the book on my own that I thought was an amazing, not an amazing. To me, it was a big insight was just the nature of Metcalfe's law and the nature of value creation in network businesses. and um and so i point out that when you know the internet really changed the world in a big way it was the first big you know well the microprocessor was a big revolution pcs fine but but it all led to the internet which was the first the first revolution pre the bitcoin revolution which is the next one and one of the things that's very interesting is that in the internet there are businesses in the internet that in a 20-year time frame from the time the internet really kind of

became commercial around 2000 until present 24-year time frame have gone up by you know amazon 218,000%, you know, Google 9,000%, Facebook 3,000%, you know, Microsoft 4,000, you know, there are network businesses that have increased thousands and thousands of percent from the day when they were introduced. And pre the internet, that just didn't happen. I mean, if you study, you know, General Motors from 1915 to 1960, it didn't go up thousands of percent. It went up a lot in value, but not the kind. And by the way, that was over a 50-year period. And by the way, it's also why I miss those businesses. I mean, I remember looking at Amazon and Facebook as possible investments back in the early days. And I looked at the multiples and I was like,

I can't pay that much for this. It just makes no sense. Because I was trained in the old, you got to look at the PE and you got to look at the cash flows. And I didn't understand the way that networks grow in value, you know, as a square of the underlying number of users. I mean, basically Metcalfe's law. And that's just, that's a very powerful, different model for looking at investments. And it's why, you know, you have to hold your nose and pay what you think is too much when you're investing in a network business, because if the network continues to grow, pretty soon it's not going to be too much anymore. You know, and I think one of the biggest things i'm encountering right now trying to get wealthy friends to buy bitcoin as they all know i have a

much lower basis and i've been buying it for a bunch of years and like well how can i pay a hundred thousand for stuff you were buying at four hundred you know ten thousand fifteen thousand twenty thousand you know i'm getting robbed and i'm like no you know did the people who were buying microsoft in 1991 get robbed you know i mean because if it's gonna if it truly is sailor's model that it's going up forever laura you know it doesn't matter where you buy it you just gotta buy it right yeah and so to me i i we've got to get that across to the average american because that that price bias is really large in my experience yeah and building on the the network business example you just gave too whether it's amazon apple microsoft google pick your

pick your litter of the uh the fang stocks like that network business is somewhat limited too like they each like google with android apple they compete against each other amazon and walmart compete against each other it's kind of a win it's kind of a winner-take-all generally i mean it's yeah you want to be in the leading one which is why and bitcoin's clearly the leading monetary solution by by you know miles orders of magnitude so you know to me it's it's just it's so incredibly obvious what's going to happen here yeah and it's got a much bigger addressable market as well absolutely i mean this isn't just you know selling books and then you know walmart like stuff i mean this is money this is every single part of human interaction because there's very little that

happens in this world without money being involved so yeah it i mean and it goes to and i've got you know i mean there's so many great i mean you know your stuff marty i mean so many people that i've drawn on and pulling this book together i didn't write this book i crowdsourced this book and put it in order to make it simple for a normie to understand right and you know like i've got jesse meyer's chart in there that shows the 900 trillion of assets and here we are with bitcoin at 2 trillion bitcoin is two-tenths of all the financial assets in the world two-tenths right i mean it's of all the assets in the world and bitcoin could go up 10x i.e we could be at a million dollars a coin it'd be two percent it's still trivial i mean art and cars and you know gold are more than

that so it really it's got it's just got so much headroom above it right now and so many people think they're too late and they're not i mean it's obviously they are late compared to you know max i mean you know and don't we all wish we were back there buying it i mean i bought some at three or four hundred god i wish i'd bought ten times as much but i didn't have the vision to do it and you know i thought it was going to fail i wasn't sure to me it was an experiment in 2013 or 14. you know now it's no longer an experiment it's a movement you know and that's the point i was just going to make like you can easily make the argument yes the the price tag that you see on a per bitcoin basis is obviously right below all-time high so it seems like the most expensive

ever but to your point there many people thought it was and many people i think it would accurately describe it as an experiment back then. And so from a risk adjusted perspective today. Well, that's exactly right. The risk is the risk is significantly lower. I mean, I remember talking to people about it. And I frankly, I was concerned about that the government was going to outlaw it, ban it, tax it, attack it, etc. And then the ETF got approved. And you know, suddenly, that was no longer such a big issue. So, you know, it's, it's clearly starting to you know go mainstream as we all can see and you know sailor talks about we're in the you know really in the 10-year kind of gold rush period where it's going to i i think just explode into

everybody's consciousness i mean when it gets to 200 and 300 and 400 you know people are going to be one hang on say what is going on here yeah you know this this isn't a bubble i mean this is this is a movement and and if and if that's matched with the price of everything else is going up really rapidly then we could end up seeing you know a large scale adaptation of gresham's law where you know people realize oh my god i i gotta get out of this burning fiat money and into something sound 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

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to your Bitcoin strategy. Go explore the potential futures at unchained.com slash TFTC. Bitcoin is going up. Make sure you're protecting it the right way. Make sure you have a good partner that is Unchained. Go to unchained.com slash TFTC. I've got a couple of thoughts here. The first is I gave a Bitcoin 101 presentation to a high school class a couple of months ago, and had that one question brought up to me. It seems very expensive now. It was like $95,000 when we did the presentation. I was like, yeah, it may look that way.

It's too late for me to adopt it. I was like, no, it's literally a better technology. It's a better monetary good. Is it too late to adopt fire, the wheel, the combustion engine? Exactly. No, you're always going to want to use the best technology. I have a funny story on that. What's that?

So I'm down at the New Orleans Investment Conference, and I'm talking to James Grant, do you know who he is he writes grants interesting no time i have i have enormous respect for this guy i mean he's been a you know hard money gold guy sound money guy for you know 40 years written all kinds of great books and just incredibly solid and i said to him i said you know james i said jim this is really something you got to open your eyes to and focus on because it's meeting menger's definition of money i mean people are accepting it it's trading it's got real volume etc and this that and the other and he looked at me he said yeah you know larry so when it's been

been around a thousand years, then maybe I'll start to have a serious look at it. And my response to him was, Jim, are you going to wait a thousand years until you accept airplane flight? I mean, you know, it's a fucking technical innovation, right? I mean, why does it need a thousand years of history to prove itself? You know, it's already proven itself. It's got 16 years of very solid history with no problems. I mean, to me, that's conclusive. But some people just don't see it, or they're wedded to the old way, you know, that gold is the only sound money in the world. It's not, you know, and it's significantly flawed compared to Bitcoin.

And I say that, as you know, I was a gold guy before Bitcoin existed. I was as hardcore a gold guy as there is. Yeah, and just steelmanning Jim's argument, too. It's like, well, did the first people use gold as money wait a thousand years to use it as money, or did they just recognize? Exactly. I mean, it's like fire. Well, you know what, this hasn't been around long enough.

don't really believe in us let's stop doing this you know let's just eat these animals raw yeah there's a weird there's something weird about the uh the mental blockers that people put on um to avoid seeing um the the obvious innovation and superiority of bitcoin yeah yeah i mean it's yeah it is it's strange i mean you know so i mean i get it with the fiat people i mean they're you You know, to them, they're not feeling any pain and they like the system the way it is because it benefits them. I get that. I mean, those are the bankers and others. I see a lot of the time.

But the gold guys, you know, many of them have made the jump the way I have, but not all of them, obviously. And a lot of them are really locked in the past and just can't see it and accept it. It's a shame because they've got the monetary piece right and they predicted it right for a long time. And it's happening. But they haven't made the switch. I mean, I sat next to Peter Schiff on a panel down in New Orleans as well, and I see pain in the guy's eyes because I think he knew he could have bought it. I mean, he could have bought it a dollar or two. I mean, Max was pumping him on, and he knew what it was.

He was very early on aware of it, and he just kind of came to the conclusion, no, this isn't going to work, and that's that. And now I think he's just so, you know, I think his ego just won't let him go back and say, you know what, I made a mistake. I mean, hell, Saylor in 2013 said it wasn't going to work, right? And he just re-evaluated it. think he read safe's book and it caused him to change his mind and uh you know that's i mean that and there's nothing wrong with it there's nothing wrong with not understanding something new when it comes out that's fine but not taking the time to continue to learn and then and dig in and maybe revise your views as you get additional evidence i mean i know when it came out my great

fear was that it was going to fail like all the other efforts i mean i saw e-cash fail i saw digit cash fail you know um i saw b money fail and uh so when i first saw it i mean the reason i wasn't buying it a dollar two i was like yeah i've seen this it doesn't work you know they all failed and of course i didn't know what the difficulty adjustment was i didn't know i didn't know anything about the technology or hashing or any of that but i just said oh yeah you know mental here is it great yeah money based on the internet yep been tried doesn't work done you know and then but then you know then it went from a dollar to a hundred and then it went for a hundred or a thousand i was like oh you know larry i think you might have blown the call here

right and i did i blew the call yeah you didn't blow it you just just took it just took you a couple of seconds well no but i did i mean god damn it i wish i bought it at a dollar like max i did too i did too the uh no i mean i think that's the unfortunate thing is that people are going to be forced into bitcoin due to And the scenario, which you described earlier, which is like the two paths that the Fed and the Treasury have right now, is like, do you completely debase or do you reset? And on that note, have you been following anything that Scott Bassett's been saying over the last year? Yeah, I sure have. I've looked at that really carefully, and my partner, David Foley, and I are all over that.

And we know some people who know him, so we've got a real sense of where his head is at. I mean, first of all, consider a couple of facts that maybe some of your audience don't know. One, he's a gold guy. He believes in gold, which means he understands sound money. He said gold was one of his largest holdings. He's been impressed by how much gold the central banks have been buying, et cetera, et cetera. So that's a fact. And I also know he likes Bitcoin, but he hasn't said that publicly or stated it as much.

The second thing he said somewhere in one of the pods that I listened to in the last couple of years was something along the lines of, you know, the monetary situation is troublesome and we may need to do some kind of a reset, you know, and he compared it to like a Bretton Woods reset. And he said, and if that happens, I want to be at the table. So I was like, whoa, I mean, this is not Janet Yellen, right? This is somebody who, you know, I think may understand Triffin's dilemma and the issue we're all very much aware of. And so I think that's a big positive. And, you know, He, I think, is trying with this 3-3-3 plan to thread the needle of getting us from here to there. Sadly, I think that he and Trump and, you know, Musk and Ramaswamy, or it used to be Ramaswamy, I guess he's dropped out of Doge, you know, are perhaps, in my opinion, being a little naive or a little unaware of just how deep the problem is, how large the problem is.

I mean, one of the things I wrote about this in our quarterly, too, is that, you know, we got a big bump in the market and we got a big, you know, sigh of relief that Trump is coming in. And therefore, maybe he's going to be able to, you know, Doge is going to help and they're going to cut the budget and balance the budget and the monetary issues that we all that everyone says we face. They're all going to go away. It's all going to be good. And, you know, that's that's Elon, you know, talking about self-driving in 2018 when it's not really ready yet, because Doge just can't do what they say they're going to do. They can, at the margin, they can help. And I'm all for cutting government access and expense and balancing the budget. I'm all for all of that. But if you look at the math, unless we decide we want to cut, you know, Medicare, Social

Security, defense budget, you know, by 50%, you know, it just, it can't happen. That's where all the money is. And so, you know, it's this monetary train that Lynn Alden, you know, in fact, I've got a chapter in the book and I got her approval to put it in there called Nothing Stops This Train. you know this train is just bearing down on us and it's as you said earlier in the podcast it's math it's just math and so that's why you know i have such a high level of confidence that we're right and that you know that we are going to have a monetary you know event here that's going to lead

have to lead us towards a sound and monetary system because the one we've got is wrong and broken yeah and going back to your comments about the trump admin potentially having to fight the fed and jerome powell i mean that's another thing is he keeps rates higher and i don't know where the 10 year is today or the 30 year is but you know they've been elevated and moving inversely with the fed cuts which has not been which is a historical anomaly absolutely and we've got a lot of debt to roll over this year it's um i'm sure the scent is like we got to do something to and fix the long end of the career. Yeah, I mean, I've got the one in the two-year at 4.2 and 4.3,

the 10-year is at 4.6, and the 30-year is at 4.8. I mean, and I think the average interest rate on all the federal debt right now is in the threes, low to mid-threes. And, you know, if that continues, I mean, I think we're rolling $6 trillion of bills. I think I've got that right. I could be wrong this year. And at these interest rates, federal interest expense is going to increase, and that's going to make the deficit worse so we really they really need to i mean as luke roman

does such a nice job of pointing out they really need to get interest rates down um and and and let inflation take place you know which is sad because it hurts all of us but without that the whole thing is going to implode um because the the interest expense is just going to continue to consume the budget which is i mean if if jerome doesn't play ball and i've listened to the fireside chats and podcasts where secretary of dissent has discussed the idea of brett woods 2.0 like maybe he just convinces trump like this is what we got to do get everybody to the table and i just wonder in 2025 what what does that look like yeah very very very hard to know i mean if you did a bitcoin strategic reserve i mean you know trump said something else that i thought

was very interesting. We said Bitcoin is the new oil. I mean, you know, they had an inflationary problem in the 70s. And part of what part of the way they did dealt with it all was, you know, the petrodollar. And they had a they had a deficit problem. And the trivets dilemma, I guess, was biting in the 70s. And what they did is they revalued oil up greatly, you know, with the Arab oil embargo. And apparently Kissinger was involved in part of that process. And, you know, I mean, if you've got too much debt in nominal terms today and you've got to devalue it, what do you devalue it against. You've got to devalue it against something that's neutral and that's got a more limited supply. Historically, that would have been gold, but we're beyond that now.

And the natural thing is Bitcoin. And so I think one of the things they're going to be facing, if they do an SBR, and as you and I both talked about in MENA, Matthew Pine says he thinks they are going to do an SBR. I think they are too. The question then becomes, how big is it? how aggressively did they do it? How much does that push the price of Bitcoin? And does Bitcoin become the natural choice for some kind of a monetary reset? And I think the answer is all of those things are possible, but how we get from here to there is anybody's guess. All I know, though, is I feel very good owning Bitcoin and a little bit of gold. Yeah. No, I think it would have to play a part and the strategic reserve i mean that's i mean luke's talked about this

like how do you because that's that's the catch-22 maybe it's not a catch-22 but it's a very hard problem rocking a hard place probably better can they get out of it like because we signal we're accumulating a million bitcoin it's like all right everybody dumps treasuries and well that's right and the dollar slides and and i mean but it is a way to devalue the dollar and we need to devalue the dollar. The other thing that's beautiful about it is, in the Jason Lowry sense, is that it, you know, I mean, China and India and a lot of the Middle East, other countries, they've all made their bet on gold. And, you know, if we make our bet on Bitcoin, you know, we neatly leapfrog them in terms of, you know, being on a monetary standard that's sounder and

more likely to win in the long term. So, I think they'll do it. I mean, that's my take. They're going to do it but you know how and when i mean it's anybody's guess um you know one of the things i said earlier though is i mean in my opinion whatever trump's going to do i think he's got to do it relatively quickly because he's got a year or two at the most of grace before any economic problems become trump problems i think if anything happens in the next six months he can say hey biden did this you know i'm just i inherited a bag of shit biden did it yeah but after that period of time i think he's gonna you know it's gonna stick to him and so if they're gonna break some glass my opinion is they've gotta they've gotta do it quickly and i think they're smart enough to

know that but i'm not sure yeah not only from the perspective of being able to levy the blame on the biden administration and the mess that they left but also just from the the bitcoin adoption incentives on that level like i have it on good authority i've talked to people behind the scenes living looking to get intros because there are other governments who saw the campaign promises made by trump and particularly around bitcoin and said all right we got to move and behind the scenes are are looking at it i think there's a lot of that going on we've all heard you know various rumors and things some of the stuff we're not allowed really to even talk about but i think there's a lot of i think there are a lot of governments

I mean, this is all, you know, nation state FOMO is right around the corner, kind of the way I see it based on what's going on. Yeah. And from the perspective of Trump, too, like this would be an extremely savvy move, not only for, I mean, this is how you would manufacture a soft landing for the American economy, not only at the federal level, but I think one thing I hope that he and the people that are surrounding him understand is that Americans on a per capita basis own the most Bitcoin. So you're going to have this massive wealth effect of the individual Bitcoin holders in the United States. And if you're worried about any collateral damage from that, I think you have to factor in that American Bitcoin or wealth effect into the equation and they can help recapitalize the economy and get things back on the ground, back on their feet rather quickly. Yeah, it's a very good point. I mean, it's a very good point. I mean, you know, but let me just say that almost no matter what happens, I don't see how we do any kind of a reset without there being a pretty big one time inflationary event. And but my as I argue in the book, much better to do it once, have it hurt, get it right and then be on sound money, because history shows that when you return to sound money, economies function pretty well.

but to get from here to sound money, somebody's going to have to lose because there are a lot of assets out there that are misvalued, most particularly bonds. And they're going to get marked to market and the bondholders aren't going to like it, you know, and that's, and that's going to be inflationary. So, you know, there's, there's no way out of this trap without, without some pain. But, but frankly, if we keep going in this direction in the slow walk thing, we're just going to have continued inflation and it's going to go from two or three percent like the 70s back up into double digits and you know i mean i think what's going to ultimately happen marty is people are going to be screaming about inflation so loudly that this monetary reset is going to get

forced on the politicians in the world you know that people are just going to say you know no moss we just can't take it anymore you got to fix this and the volcker approach isn't going to work we can't just fix it with high interest rates you really almost have to do a debt jubilee book talks about that yeah no i mean and that's i think maybe the catch-22 is like what you just described if the bonds particularly get marked to market like the i mean that's the unfortunate consequence of the post-2008 reserve ratio regulations have been thrust like most these banks are just holding treasuries as their liquid reserves right well and and it's going to hurt you know it's going to hurt seniors it's going to hurt the boomers i mean the boomers will probably

get paid everything they're owed i mean because nobody's willing to restructure social security and you know means tested and increase the age and do a lot of things to fix the medical system you know okay fine so boomers are going to get paid all that money that they were owed but the problem is it's just not going to buy anything close to what they thought it was going to buy because the price level is going to be two or three x where it is today you know and and that's I mean, there's, you know, you can, you can create, you can manufacture a short term so-called free lunch, but eventually you got to sit down to a banquet of consequences and that's common. Yeah. But it'll sound scary to a lot of people. It'll be like doom and gloomers. But that was actually the one thing I took. One of the things I remember very acutely from our conversation in Abu Dhabi at dinner that one night is how quickly you believe the economy can recover if you allow these things to happen. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. That's the good news. That's the really good news. I mean,

I've studied a lot of hyperinflations and it's amazing. I mean, human beings want to get up every morning and do useful stuff and take care of their family and work hard and make money and have a fair system. And so, you know, there've been countries that have been ravaged by hyperinflation. They go back to, you know, sound money standard, boom, and the economy just recovers and heals. It's like amazing, you know, but let's not forget the ravaging does occur. I mean, a good example of that, Ecuador, I think it was in 2000, had a massive hyperinflation and just money is worthless. And then, you know, what they did is they actually dollarized. They just went on to a dollar standard.

And, you know, on a relative basis, the dollar was so sound compared to their existing currency. And the economy is thriving, booming, you know, very quickly right afterwards. So this has happened in other places as well. So now the people get scarred. I mean, in the 20s, the 23 German example, you know, the people were so scarred by it that that's what led to the rise of Hitler. So, you know, I mean, sadly, there are winners and losers in these monetary events. And you just can't help that. I mean, if you wanted to prevent that, you should have prevented the system from getting as broken as it's gotten broken.

I mean, and the book walks you through every single step they took. I mean, you know, they got rid of Glass-Steagall. They modernized commodities futures. You know, I mean, it's just one thing after another. I love that line in history. It's like Rosanna, Rosanna, Dan. history is just one damn thing after another they just kept making it worse yeah and that's i mean it like you said things are extremely mispriced right now you have you have liquidity flowing

into areas of the economy that arguably shouldn't be in and is there for the wrong reasons i think as a millennial like housing is one that sticks out to me and as a young man with family and a growing family that would like to move into like a very comfortable forever house like i wouldn't mind a little repricing of the other real estate market absolutely no too much wealth has been stored there and yeah no it's yeah there's all there are all kinds of things that are just completely mispriced right now i mean i yeah i i see it um i mean you know it um yeah it's bad And I think, too, if you had an Ecuador event like you described, God forbid with the dollar, but potentially with the dollar with how things are going, I think Bitcoin, maybe not self-custody Bitcoin using lightning and stuff like that. But I think the infrastructure of the industry is such that it could help facilitate a somewhat smooth transition to a Bitcoin economy.

I agree. I mean, I like to think that this isn't ugly, that the mandibles is not the way this plays out, that we're all smarter and better educated than to let it go down that path. um you know it could it could be better than i'm hoping for and i hope it is i really do um i just i do know though that um there's going to be there are going to be a lot of assets you know what has worked for the last 40 years is not going to work in the next 10 or 20 you know and and what's going to work in the next 10 or 20 was is just different i mean and i think people are going to be kind of blown away you know this this to me is very much like the turning point that occurred when Volcker raised rates in 1979 and 80 and put us on a

deflationary path. I mean, the long bond at one point traded at 15%. There was a guy named Gary Schilling who got wealthy by buying long bond zeros, you know, which means he bought the zero coupons way out. And he made a 10 bagger in five years, you know, so just because he could see that deflation was coming. And I remember very clearly, I remember I started the business in 82 and three And everybody and the brother thought, you know, we'll never solve inflation. It's here forever. It's absolutely inflation is the problem of our lifetime. And, of course, that was just the point at which it started to come down.

It came down consistently for 40 years. And, you know, as you recall, before all this broke out, the Federal Reserve was saying, hey, we're winning in every single respect, except we're not hitting our inflation target. We've got no one. You know, inflation is too low. We need 2%. We need animal spirits. Of course, when they printed 42% of the money in two years, they were able to actually generate some inflation. And the amazing thing is that, you know, that Jerome Powell, who wasn't an economist, you know, couldn't foresee that that was what was going to occur.

The even more amazing thing is that Janet Yellen, who is a Ph.D. economist, said it was transitory and didn't see what was going to occur. I mean, you know, it is like we're being run by, you know, people, the country's just being run by people who are incompetent. I mean, it's unbelievable. Well, not only that, but being run by people who are incumbent, like Janet Yellen from the Fed to the Treasury. Jerome Powell's been in this place for a while. And so those two particularly have overseen a lot of the monetary abuse that has been levied on the populace over the last 15 years. And I think that's to talk about the big prints and you have 08 and you have European credit crisis and you have 2020, really 2019 with the repo spasm and you have 2023 with the banking crisis and each thing led to a big print. And it seems like the time between each event is becoming more and more compressed.

So here we are in 2025, two years from post-2023. I would not be surprised if something materializes from liquidity perspective. And the magnitude gets larger, too. I mean, it took Bernanke three or four years to grow the Fed balance sheet from $900 to $3 or $4 trillion. I mean, it took Powell, what, 18 months to go from 4 trillion high threes to nine, you know. So he printed $6 trillion in 18 months. I mean, that, you know, I mean, the next one, that's why I call it the big print. The next one is not going to be, you know, it's going to take more.

Every one of these interventions takes more and gets larger. And that's why, you know, the system is slowly but surely, in my opinion, spinning out of control. you know and that's that's unfortunate but it is what it is it's just the math of compounding maybe the aliens will come and solve this problem there we go yeah we'll get it yeah doisex machina we're going to get solved you know we're going to create a credit bubble at some higher level yeah i don't think so we need to i mean i you know i talk about this in the book i mean i really blew it i thought 2008 was it i thought the whole system zerp and and uh you know QE. Okay, this is it. We're going into hyperinflation. But I was totally wrong. I mean,

they were able to sterilize it and kick it up to the next level, you know. I mean, that was a credit crisis driven by a housing bubble. And they kicked it up into what we now all call the everything bubble, you know. And the next level, it's the sovereign credit that's at risk and the money that's at risk. And there's no level above this. I mean, if the sovereign credit goes bad and the money goes bad, you know, the next level is we return to sound money, full stop. So, that's coming but you know the path from here to there it's going to be it's going to be a tortured one and i think we all have to be prepared to you know deal with some serious volatility i'm sure you've seen dan oliver's great chart the mermicon chart of how volatile the deutschmark was in gold terms

when the as that currency failed you know i mean gold was the right thing to hold obviously in a currency failure event but there were months when it went up 40 percent there were other months when it went down. And so, you know, there's a lot of volatility and that could happen here. I mean, I, you know, I remember holding Bitcoin in 2020 when March came around and it got hammered, you know, down quite a bit. And, you know, as we all know, we've had some very big drawdowns. And so, you know, when Powell started, you know, doing rates in 2022 and we discovered that Sam Bankman Freed was a fraud and that most crypto was a fraud, we went from 67 to 15. By the way, That $15,000 point in the year after that was a 22 or something.

What an amazing buying opportunity. I mean, you're buying that then for what I paid in Thanksgiving of 2017. Yeah. And you had five years of history, and you were able to enter back in at a time at a price below what I paid in 2017. It's like, wow. Maybe there will be another opportunity because, again, liquidity. Well, that's my point. That's the point I'm trying to make.

I mean, you know, everyone buying now, I mean, you know, you got to have strong hands here. I mean, I personally think the cycle goes to, you know, the two, three hundred. And then I think we I don't think that the dips are going to be as big as they were in the past. I don't think we're going to have any more 70, 80, 90 percent dips. But a 50 percent dip is very doable in any volatile asset. I mean, this happened in Amazon. Again, I laid it out in the book. And so, you know, if we scored on up to 250, could it correct back to 125? 25? Absolutely. You know, and that person who finally capitulated at 250, watching it go down

50%, like, oh, shit, I blew it and blow out their holdings, which would be a huge mistake. But that's, that's the nature of these things. I mean, you know, adopting a new currency, and we're trying to put the ocean into a swimming pool. And, you know, guess what, the swimming pool is going to overflow at times, it's going to be empty, it's going to be a mess. Yeah, no, this could happen on the way up to you can imagine a 2020. Well, that's the other thing. I mean, Samson might be right. Maybe we go to a million on this cycle. I mean, I'd be curious to know. I mean, what's your best guess as to this cycle top? Okay, I'll tell you how I've been thinking about it. If the SBR is real. Right. I think it is.

I think it is, too. If MicroStrategy continues to do what they do, not in the sense of accumulating Bitcoin, but inspiring other corporations to add Bitcoin as a treasury asset, and if the buy-borrow-die mantra really becomes internalized with a lot of Bitcoiners, if better lending products at better cost of capital come to market, This cycle, which I'm hearing is very likely this year,

and even the big four banks, SAB 121, gets revoked today. I wouldn't be surprised if they begin taking Bitcoin as collateral to issue loans. That's a lot of supply that could stay off the market because of access to credit products or new demand actors who are going to buy and hold for decades. and so i think the combination of those three things and particularly if the retail bitcoin investor becomes privy to the buy borrow die and they're able to successfully leverage that strategy without taking on too much risk or leverage it's hard to see why people would sell bitcoin and

that point where the float is and with all these different actors vying for the very the most scarce asset in the world things could get weird so a high six figures maybe even touch seven figures i would not be surprised boy i hope you're right i mean that'd be a lot of fun um but i i kind of tend to i tend to think it's two two three hundred i'm very highly confident we get there i'm sure we get to 200 um i'm pretty sure we get to 300 beyond that it's all gravy in my way of saying it i mean i i one of the things i use is the meyer multiple just kind of the you know the price compared to the 200-day moving average and it would be quite a spike to be up around you know a million bucks a coin it could be but i think at that level you'd actually see some coins you'd

see some supply emerging i know some of my supply would emerge you know and uh and and so you know we'll just have to see but i look at i agree with you i mean there's a there is a lot of demand out there and we just don't know i mean um you know i've always used the power law model as kind of my lower side base case. And then I've always assumed that at some point, if a mass Gresham's law event takes place, that model is going to break to the upside and not come back down. You know, and maybe we go to a million. I mean, if we truly have outright currency failure, I mean, it's going to go to infinity, you know, in dollar terms. I don't think we're ready for currency failure yet. I don't think enough people are aware of it, of the issue and the problem.

But we're on the road. You know, we're definitely on the road towards currency failure. Yeah, it's insights. But as we said, we've been saying this for a long time. Who knows how long? Well, we have, and it's taken a lot longer. You know, there's a lot of institutional momentum in trust in the dollar. Yeah, that's a good point to bring up.

institutional momentum, not only in trust in the dollar, but for the Bitcoin case, like you had Ray Dalio come out yesterday. I hold Bitcoin. He's got it. He gets it. Larry Fink saying, I'm talking to sovereign wealth funds. They're deciding

is it 2%? Is it 5%? He's I tweeted out this morning, wait long enough by the river and your enemies will start pumping your bags for you. It really is true. I always kind of sense Dahlia would get it because Dahlia had been a gold guy he'd been a sound money guy I think he

just didn't understand the technology yeah I mean look guys like Paul Tudor Jones they got it instantly I mean he says the fastest horse I think Druckenmiller gets it but doesn't he kind of admits he's just not up on the technology and so he's not comfortable being in it I think although I bet he holds a little bit of it look everybody gets there eventually I mean I remember talking to Max years and years ago and I was kind of there but not all the way there I still believed in gold And he said, you know, gosh, it sounds like you're kind of orange-pilled, but not all the way. And I said, that's about right. I mean, you know, I get it, but, you know, it's a little bit of a show me.

And I think everybody's Bitcoin journal, some people are different. Some people just get it totally and go 100% right away. I think most people have been in the investment business for a while. It takes them a while to fully kind of grok it and go down the curve, get all their objections answered, and then maybe live through a few cycles and see that, hey, you know what? This is kind of working, and, you know, I can't. I'm hard-pressed to figure out what stops it. I mean, when people say this is going to blow up or it's a potty, I say, why?

You know, show me the case and explain to me why. I mean, the only ways it fails, in my view, are massive technical failure. I think we're beyond that statistically in terms of the number of blocks and time it's run. The other is if everybody loses interest. You know, if suddenly, I mean, this, I've often said, I mean, money really is a collective illusion. I mean, money is just what we all agree to be money. And that was Menger's great point. You know, Carl Menger, the founder of Austrian School of Economics.

And so, you know, if suddenly we all just say, you know what, this stuff's just not so great. I don't care about it anymore. Let's, you know, something else is better. Let's go somewhere. Well, that would be an issue. But that's not really what we've seen happen. You know, the adoption wallets, hash, I mean, whatever metric you want to use, they're all growing solidly. continually you know use cases um etc so uh i i don't see i don't perceive there to be that much

risk of this not happening i think there i think there are a lot of different paths though i mean the speed at which it happens that's to me that's a very uncertain thing i mean we could you know it could take a long time to get to a million or we could be at a million in a year i i just don't know yeah by long time i mean five years i think within a five-year window these are a million dollars a coin easily easily easily i agree i just wonder because we'll wrap on this but i think the um i think the first major like splash of bitcoin into the mainstream psyche was 2017 that cycle right so we're approaching 10 years or like eight years since that cycle and obviously we've gone down gone back up going back down and now on our way back up and i just wonder

And between, you know, during that eight year period, like how many touch points did most people have in, in marketing, they talk about, uh, touch points before conversion. Not many, but I, but I think, I think we're now at the stage where you'd be hard pressed to find some American who's not aware of it. I mean, people who, you know, in my circles who thought I was nuts, you know, years ago are all asking me about it. I mean, just, it's just hard not to be aware of it. I mean, they're talking about it on CNBC, you know, et cetera.

And so you got it. It is in the conversation now. It's well within the Overton window. It doesn't mean everyone's adopted it. But I think the awareness is clearly there. I mean, 100,000 really was a big milestone. It was a big, big deal. And, you know, and I think some of the skeptics are going to get tired of being wrong. You know, they, well, it's a bubble. It's going to burst. Well, you know, it's had big drawdowns. Yeah, it has. But I mean, there's never been a bubble that's burst four times and keeps coming back. yeah it's yeah that's that's the reason i brought that i was like i wonder on the meme memetic cultural sociological side of it like yeah is there a a bitcoin brand touchpoint threshold that we're approaching that people just simply can't deny gotta be there's gotta be i mean i i do know among the younger people you know like like i've got kids in their 20s well they're all aware of it and a lot of them are stacking it i mean i'm i'm kind of my friend my kids friends i'm impressed i mean you know the boomers are you know a mixed bag and a lot of them are just ignoring it but young people you know they're interested they get it um

they get the problem that it solves they're seeing you know the inflation they're seeing the housing market they can't buy a house you know they're wondering how the hell this whole mess is going to get resolved and then once they start to study this they're like oh my goodness this is it i mean is that as i've always said it's your generation that's going to be the hero generation you know you and jack and all the other people are doing this stuff i mean that's you know and it may get really messy here in the next 10 or 15 years but you know you guys are going to establish the new system and and bitcoiners are going to politically establish the new system because frankly let's face it the people who end up running the political system often are the

people who have a lot of money because they got the time and the ability and the support to you you know, to get involved in politics and make decisions. And so, you know, when Bitcoiners in general become fabulously rich, which I believe will happen in the next five or ten years, you know, we're going to say, hey, you know what? Let's try and make this place a better place. Let's, you know, let's get sound money people in government. Let's balance the budget.

Let's have term limits. Let's, you know, let's run this thing the way it should be run. And, you know, let's reform all these areas. And, you know, we'll have one hell of a renaissance. And then, you know, your hero generation will live out, you know, the next first turning. It'll be just a fabulous time. We'll have all kinds of AI and robotics and, you know, living standards will be great. I mean, I've often said it's amazing to me that we don't live better than we do, given all the technical innovations we've had since the 70s.

I mean, you know, we've had this enormous, I mean, you know, PCs, the Internet, all of this stuff. It's just it's groundbreaking what we can do. And yet, you know, most people are still struggling to put food on the table. And I'm like, huh? Where did all that productivity go? And the answer is it went into the pockets of billionaires. You know, I mean, that's that's the broad answer. But it's accurate because 90, you know, 1% of the country owns 92% of the wealth.

So it didn't get it didn't get evenly distributed around the way it would have if the money had been fair. Yeah. So fix the money fix the world right that's uh fix the money fix the world thank thank you for that phrase i always try and credit you with somebody the other day on twitter said hey well pardon said that first no i didn't i took it from marty i and i probably took it from somebody else it's just well who knows we all got it yeah you know what you know what it was from like most people probably won't remember this reference remember the what's that show fix the uh yeah save the cheerleaders that's yeah that's the whole concept that's where it came from i think yeah right yeah

play on that like it's uh yeah just to take off on that that's what i hope anybody's new to bitcoin and you mentioned jack and i was with uh jack was in costa rica we were hanging out and i did his money matters podcast and i think he he um he's he's doing something really special uh not only at strike but with this money matters podcast and we were talking about it it's all new new users to bitcoin um they have a live chat and it is people are asking the right questions and i think he's a perfect um individual he's such a he's such a great spokesman for bitcoin i mean you are too and there's so many people in your generation just doing such a great job it's it's cool to be the old guy kind of watching it and just you know cheering you guys on that's that's fun it's

fun to be uh on this ride with everybody you yeah it is it is a fun ride i mean i i love i had dinner with Jeff Booth and in Middle East, and he said, So you know, the cool thing about Bitcoin is that everybody's working for me. I mean, Michael Saylor is working for me, you're working for me, Marty, Ben's working for me. We all kind of contribute to the network and helping this thing grow and become better. We all work for each other. It's really a beautiful thing.

Yeah, it is. And I think, I hope more people are starting to get it. And I think the younger generation is especially is like, You know, I think Jack's, Jack's, the phrase that he's been running with, like, why would I work for money that somebody can print is. Yeah, I love that phrase. That was great. That was great phraseology. Yeah, I love that. Really landing with the younger generation.

I think they're looking at it. It actually makes a lot of sense. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, right. Now that you mention it. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's, look, it's all good.

I mean, it's, I mean, you know, we are winning. I mean, maybe we'll be like Trump. We'll have so much winning. We just can't stand it anymore. We'll have to see. we'll have to start losing to feel something um exactly yeah well you know look they're we shouldn't get too cocky because there will be bumps along the road um and the other side does have some weapons and i've i've watched them for 40 years they play rough and um so you know it

wouldn't be beyond them to do some things that throw sand in our eyes they already have a choke point but there'll be others yeah yeah yeah don't definitely don't get complacent but um where can uh anybody is so interested well so of course i'm on twitter and x it's just my name lawrence lapard i make a lot of noise i scream at the central banks that's you know old man yells at central banks that's me i have a website ema2.com i write macro letters with my partner david foley who runs the bitcoin opportunity fund with james lavish uh they're raising money right now if anyone's interested that's a great fund they're doing some really smart stuff um and um you know Obviously, I've written this book, which is available for pre-sale on Twitter.

I'm not on Twitter, on Amazon. You can buy the Kindle version of it. They won't let me pre-sell the hard copy and paperback. And as we talked about before the call or before this started, my hard date is February 14th. I will definitely beat that. I hope to beat that by a lot. I mean, maybe like a late January date, maybe a February 1 kind of date. We'll see.

It's in the layout right now, and I'm a perfectionist. I want to get it perfect. And so, and we're not perfect yet. So every day we try and make it a little bit better. And when it gets fully laid out, it'll launch. So. Yeah. Logan, pull it up on the screen so people can see it. Oh, that'd be great. If you could. Yeah. Obviously it's 10 bucks for Kindle version. I can support it. Great. I mean, they have all kinds of algorithms, the more, you know, we've sold a bunch of them, but the more we can sell, the better off we'll be in terms of getting it to spread wide and getting more promotion out of Amazon. Um, before I announced the book, I will, I will announce that it's about to be released. So

you can go back and cancel your Kindle order if you want and buy the hard copy or the paperback instead. Um, so when I, when I, when I've released it or when I'm about to release it, I will say so on Twitter. So, um, yeah, any, any help you can give me, I appreciate it. Amazon makes it really easy. I just hit the one click buy and it was, um, go check it out. It's 10 bucks. It's $9.99. So the, uh, the big print on Amazon, uh, great SEO. If you search the big print on Google, it is the first to come up. Oh, is it? Oh, that's good. Yeah. So, so people, when, when I originally put it up, people say, yeah, I'm searching for the big print Lepard and I get all these pictures of

leopard prints, right? And people on Amazon were selling, you know, fabric with leopard prints on it. I was kind of like, well, yeah, okay. I guess that's it. It makes sense. I figure misspelled you know leopard and you're looking for print yeah the big print search on google we're going to link to it in the show notes larry the legend lapard everybody stop stop thanks marty you know i got my start with you way back when and i always remember that i deeply appreciate it and all your support and help and the slogan everything so you're you're you're a good guy and a good friend and well the feeling it's all making the feeling is mutual and i have have a story for you uh after we after we finish recording here peace and love freaks