TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Ten31 Timestamp: The American Century (?)

Starting point is 00:00:00 I'm running late. I'm running late. I'm sorry. I'm running late, John. Happy belated 4th of July to all of our listeners out there and to you, Mr. Arnold. I hope you had a great weekend. I did. Great to be an American. Happy 4th. Let's do 250 more, at least. Very, very bullish on the U.S. recently, despite many, many, many issues that we talked about on the show that we need to work through. But I think good position to be in. i'm disappointed you didn't open up with proud to be an american or grand old flag i was trying to figure out what you're going to start the show with be an american where at least i know i'm true

Starting point is 00:00:36 i don't know the rest of the words but no we kid here i will say i'm just opening up maybe not singing but i sent out a tweet on on the fourth of july acknowledging like hey it's undeniable we're the best nation on the planet and i think what really makes us the best nation is the ingrained culture of high agency, risk tolerance, and industrious innovation. Innovative industriousness is what I said that is inherent in our culture. And as long as we have that alive and well, which I think mistakenly it is today, there's no doubting that those cultural values are still alive and well and exist very strongly today. As long as those things persist, I think we will always have the ability to right the ship we may have some uh some qualms about tax policy and

Starting point is 00:01:32 the the over the overstepping of boundaries at the federal level but i think those are those are details that can be uh fleshed out in the long run really what it comes down to is the people right doing doing things and getting out there and um making sure that on the free market side of things on the market side of things we're innovating and pushing the world forward which I think any objective observer would have to admit the U.S. leads the way in those regards. High agency culture is underrated, for sure. It really is. You know, all this is underrated.

Starting point is 00:02:03 It was for a while, but many people are beginning to realize, probably shouldn't have slept on this, is grid stability, generation capacity, and a focus on an abundant energy future. I think it's come back into focus. We probably went two decades here in the United States or in the West broadly without really focusing on this. But now with the AI boom, this is an AI show now, the energy grids are coming into focus. And I think more people are beginning to recognize that we need more cheap, abundant energy. We want to start off the show today with FERC ordering grid operators to promptly revise or justify interconnection rules for data centers and large loads. Yeah. You know, this is – we kid.

Starting point is 00:02:47 This is not an AI show. this is a bitcoin show i'll prepare everyone that we've got a lot of ai headlines this week to talk through but i think as i said in the newsletter this week it all really is connected and i think if you if you hold bitcoin if you care about bitcoin you're going to want to pay attention to things like this what's going on in the ad complex broadly both in terms of what companies are doing and also what uh what the u.s is doing what the government's doing and i think this is a really good example of that and marty you're right that it's uh it's basically us the U.S. here kind of marking to market a 50-year shortfall in energy stability, grid capacity,

Starting point is 00:03:25 our power production capacity, our ability to deploy that. We've all seen the various charts highlighting how that's flatlined on different metrics over the last basically 50 years relative to would-be rivals like China. So important theme that you've been calling out for a very long time, and it's now being addressed very clearly by the federal government. And I think, you know, Most notably, just this is, there's that piece of it, but there's also very clearly a desire to push very aggressively to accelerate some of these deployments. And from the top down, make sure that whether you like data centers or not, I think there are many arguments you could maybe make about living next to one. But regardless, there is a clear and explicit goal from the top down to push them forward, accelerate their development. and i meant to uh we'll see if uh we'll see if you can pull this up i meant to open the the deck

Starting point is 00:04:20 with the uh the lead image from the newsletter this week but i think a picture's worth a thousand words as it relates to uh this first order and you know what we're going to do uh we're going to talk about on the rest of the show but basically i think the the key theme for this this week is like if it wasn't obvious to you before for the last year for you know however long we've been doing this show. We are definitively moving in the direction of AI being a key strategic priority for the country, rightly or wrongly, that's how it's being viewed by the administration. And you can short that at your peril, but I think we are officially making AI too big to fail. I don't know how you can be bearish on AI, given that you can just go to

Starting point is 00:05:02 your favorite browser, your favorite tool, type in something ridiculous like this and get it back And in one second, this is clearly generating a lot of value for society. But in any case, I think this is kind of what we're looking at. Right. And this is if you take away one thing from the show today, I think this is this is it with Sam Altman, Trump and Mark Hendricks and all sitting together and telling us where we're headed. You should have the gun pointing.

Starting point is 00:05:28 I mean, the the the mega meme of Trump at the gunpoint and get in. We're making America great again. This is a PG rated show. Yes, this is PG rated. Get a loser. We're making AI too big to fail. And I couldn't. I mean, I tweeted it. I saw that you saw the tweet because you retweeted it. But I couldn't help but think of you when this headline dropped. I believe Axios was reporting on it. But OpenAI apparently proposed a 5% stake in their business, the Trump administration, to ease Washington pressure. And I thought this was a very creative way to create a regulatory mode instead of paying lobbyists to go lobby on your behalf. Just go to the Trump administration, which has been buying material stakes in American companies over the last year and say, hey, why don't you just buy 5% of us? Yeah. I mean, look, who knows what the real story is here?

Starting point is 00:06:21 Generally, these things don't get leaked unless there's strategic reason to do so. Most leaks are not actually accidental. So my assumption is that there's some fire where there's the smoke here, particularly given, you know, as we called out in, I think, last year, like last fall, OpenAI's CFO, excuse me, Sarah Fryer, was at a conference and kind of made a passing reference to maybe it would be good to have a federal backstop for all the build-out that OpenAI is engaging in and hyperscalers are engaging in. So that was kind of the trial balloon that I heard that, like, you know, it's one of those, you know, haha, just kidding, unless kind of comments and you float that into the ether. There have been a few more data points like that over the last year or so, and I think this is just the culmination of kind of what you would expect, particularly given, as you said, the federal government, the Trump administration has shown no shyness about taking material stakes in MP Materials, Intel, various other companies, clearly indicating that it wants to engage in the type of industrial policy that, you know, we haven't had in this country for at least 80 years. So this is one of those things that just feels very validating for everything that we've been talking about. And I think, again, should be a wake up call on how strategically the administration views these companies and this infrastructure. And I think that's going to have, again, a lot of implications for portfolio allocation and where we'll see policy going and where we'll see kind of favored and disfavored industries going over the next year or two.

Starting point is 00:07:44 Yeah, it will be interesting to see, I mean, what us plebs are able to get access to in terms of models, as we know. I think we talked about last week, Fable 5 re-release, but completely nerfed, reverting to Opus 4.8 for coding tasks and other tasks. And so it does worry me a bit, again, going back to the encroachment of the federal government into our everyday lives. uh are they just going to make it so we don't get access to the best models and those are contained to to the state which will then use them for surveillance mostly and i mean keeping up on this tip the the second man in the car with donald trump and the meme that he provided was mark andreessen and it looks like he has been brought on to the department of war uh which is this it's It's brought he's been brought on to the Department of War's new defense policy board.

Starting point is 00:08:39 So historically, you'd think these would be weapons manufacturers, logistics companies. And now we've got AI investors on the board as well. Yeah. You know, listed first here on the list in this PR. Granted, I think this is probably alphabetical by last name, so it might be a coincidence. But just interesting to see him right there at the top of the list. You know, I believe they dissolved the defense policy board as it existed when Trump came into office again in 25. And I think it's kind of been on hiatus until now. So, yeah, just there are more names on the list below that we didn't screen cap, but a very interesting top candidate there to be included.

Starting point is 00:09:16 And it's not it's obviously not just AI. It's, you know, with the other main kind of sexy theme in VC right now is defense tech and just hard industry more generally. But I think that it tracks and lines up that the DOW would want the support, the influence, the advice of a key figure across all of those industries, kind of a bellwether for where technology is going and where, importantly, technological investment is going. And right now, it's the union of AI, defense tech, the hard industry generally, again, deep tech, with the DOW, with the Pentagon and defense spending, just a theme that's getting louder and louder by the day. Does that have meaningful, like, kind of dystopian implications? like yeah it very well may but from just again kind of like uh an investor's perspective ten thousand foot view top down and just no data point kind of on that exact same theme of the growing intertwining of kind of frontier technology and especially the strategic

Starting point is 00:10:18 industries you know with with the government once again yeah you have to hold a super position in your mind you have to have the dystopian sort of uh you have to be cautious of the dystopian potential that the government getting involved in the way that it is in your mind. But on the other side, the other side of the coin is, hey, we are at this inflection point and it is time to sort of batten down the hatches and focus on taking advantage of these technological innovations and making sure we lead. And another way to read this is it seems like the Trump administration is very focused on making sure that we lead here, which is good to see. Yeah. And the other, you know, it plays really well into this next headline or set of headlines

Starting point is 00:10:57 as well on what Trump says about TSMC doubling down with their planned Arizona investments and the fabs there. He says that in addition to this doubling, which I think was actually announced a couple of weeks ago, I missed it originally. It kind of flew under my radar at least, but he was promoting it last week and then said, we can have 50% of the share market by the time I leave office. We have now nothing. So we're going from zero to 50% share in two-ish years, which You know, you could take to mean that he's planning to run for like three more terms to get to that target. But either way, you know, I obviously it plays into everything we've just talked about with kind of the intersection, the growing intersection of the government and AI broadly construed. But I think this stuff is relevant as well from a Bitcoin perspective, just because and from a general like allocation perspective, just because if I look at all these headlines, if I look at the spending required for this.

Starting point is 00:11:50 And yes, obviously, in this case, like TSMC is, you know, funding it, we can talk about tax incentives, we can talk about different subsidies being provided, but private industries funding a lot of this, but in a world where you need this massive and rapid physical build out of difficult to construct infrastructure that historically takes, you know, years, like a fab is very, very difficult to kind of get up and running, especially, you know, on the leading edge, and getting many of those set up and getting to the point where you could even come close to sniffing anything like 50% of the chip. of the chip industry and the, of at least leading edge fabs in the world, you know, and in that world, in the world where you've got the government taking a 5% stake in open AI and, you know, presumably pushing it forward very hard in terms of its scale, its data center capacity that has access to its involvement in corporate life, all those things, like basically that is just not really a world to me that's compatible with anything but fiscal largesse. It's not really a world that's compatible with, you know, fiscal rectitude and rate

Starting point is 00:12:48 hikes and keeping a close eye on the Phillips curve and basically all of the kind of tools of conventional monetary and fiscal policy and kind of the neoliberal world that we've had post, you know, post 1971, basically. And so I think that's one of the reasons it's important to keep track of this stuff. Even if all you care about is Bitcoin, you're never using AI and you think it's all a scam or something or just you don't want anything to do with it. I think all of this is directly relevant to because of the scale of it it's all directly relevant to the the backdrop that you face as a as a bitcoin holder not to mention as it relates to the the dystopian implications you know the the things you may want to keep an eye on as someone who's you know say

Starting point is 00:13:29 liberty minded and uh individual rights minded um and uh you know how that may play into the choices you make in your personal life uh but either way in this increasingly connected kind of world increasingly connected set of policies decisions that are being made i don't think you can ignore this stuff. I don't think that you can just sit there and act like it doesn't matter. You know, this is very relevant on a lot of dimensions. Yeah. The scale of the capital being employed warrants paying attention whether or not you like it. I mean, in that note too, I mean, you have a few more headlines here on the chip side. South Korea says Samsung SK Hynix investing in AI semiconductor megaprojects. Apple seeks approval to buy chips from blacklisted

Starting point is 00:14:08 Chinese company. And then Andrew Kerin, who's an incredible follow, if you're not following yet writes very eloquently on what's happening in AI. He had this post that went very viral at the beginning of last week, which was, I'm posting this prediction now so I can quote it later. There has been a significant breakthrough in architecture specifically around memory efficiency, not by one of the big labs, but by a team that was spun out of OpenAI, and it's not SSI. They will probably announce it soon. So there's been one of the bigger themes in recent months is this focus on memory, DRAM, Micron, SK Hynix, and others seeing incredible valuation expansion as the supply constraint on memory has people banging down their doors. And I think

Starting point is 00:14:52 one thing that we've touched on and others have been saying is like, yes, there's so much demand for this memory. It's likely that there's going to be some sort of innovative breakthrough that makes it more efficient. And that's what Andrew Kern is alluding to here. Yeah. You know, I included this just because, to your point, this has been the bottleneck trade du jour of kind of the AI complex. And I think just as it becomes more and more kind of a tall poppy of bottlenecks and issues within governing the build-out here and governing the pace at which this stuff can move forward, if you take it seriously that the federal government sees this as effectively a national security issue of winning this race, rightly or wrongly, and

Starting point is 00:15:39 you're a memory bro, I think you should consider the incentives that the government faces and that companies face and that developers who are outside the memory oligopoly face to both provide an alternative, but also to get new supply from somewhere, even given the significant amount of time that it takes to stand up new DRAM capacity, the capex is eventually going come one way or the other if it's as important as the government thinks it is or and or the alternatives are eventually going to come in in terms of different you know architectures or different clever things you do with software whatever it may be or perhaps even as the apple headline shows you know come from uh carve outs with uh with our arrival across the pond uh in

Starting point is 00:16:22 china in terms of providing additional capacity that way so again i think it's just like another example of like this is something to watch for correlations basically going to one in terms of you know old rules needing to be somewhat thrown out and needing to always keep in mind there are going to be i don't think this race is going to stop just because there's an oligopoly printing you know 90 gross margins and uh basically holding an industry hostage i think we should prepare for there to be either some combination of uh crazy new capex incremental breakthroughs or just incremental supply source from elsewhere so this would be something to watch too as it relates to the government's kind of uh influence over let's say the the ai trade as well

Starting point is 00:17:02 as just what uh you know the natural path of innovation can do yeah we had a major breakthrough on the the compute front on the gpu front last week with uh the uh i forget the name of the company but they basically came out and said they can do the training much more efficiently and optimize for memory much more efficiently too i think they've redesigned anything in a batch yes yeah yeah it'd be interesting we don't have to get into you know edge versus video versus the rest uh on on the show but um no doubt like there are going to be you know a thousand ways to skin this cat you know it's whether it's memory or something else over the next few years so i particularly if the the incentives are there from you know the the highest level yeah and i think i

Starting point is 00:17:43 mean also if you're just looking at like the earnings reported meta specifically what they're talking about like how quickly they're running out of compute and how quickly they're trying to accelerate the capacity expansion the compute that they they operate um and they're they keep think they're going in and saying all right we need to expand capacity and they're thinking they're estimating on the high end and then they get the capacity up and running they realize like a demand is still way higher we haven't even we haven't even probably broken the 0.1 percent of the adoption curve yet of the agentic economy. I think we've been beating this dead horse for many weeks, but the demand for compute is going to go exponential, parabolic, all the way to levels

Starting point is 00:18:29 that we can't even fathom. And on that note, I think you highlighted this tweet from Matt Dratch, which I'm not going to read the whole thing because it's a bit long, but I think it builds on a theme that we talked about last week, which is this open source versus frontier model sort of question that many people have. What's going to win out? I think what you said last week is being confirmed here, which is going to be a combination of the two.

Starting point is 00:18:53 Yeah, yeah, I think it's just an interesting one. People can read it at their leisure. If you're watching on YouTube or something, you can look at the pieces we've highlighted. But basically, yeah, I think there's, as you've seen, I think there's a contingency of, say, Bitcoiners, Bitcoiners, Bitcoin community, or just kind of people online who are kind of desperate to call everything a bubble and call every market top, you know, call 20 of the last two market tops.

Starting point is 00:19:16 But there's this view that, well, AI is going to be not monetizable on the frontier because everything's going to get commoditized by, you know, cheap open source models and Chinese models. And as we know, China always wins. And so there's kind of nothing here. And this is all just, you know, shoving money into a furnace. I think it behooves people, I think, to read a post like this. Matt Dratch is a PM at Exodus Point. And just kind of think through whether that's actually true or whether AI as it develops will look something like the human economy that we already have, where you have a very small amount of people driving a significant amount of value and getting paid accordingly, right? There aren't that many on Wall Street. There aren't that many

Starting point is 00:19:54 Ken Griffins or Stan Druckenmiller's or Paul Tudor Jones's in any industry of your choice, whether it's tech or energy, whatever. I'm sure we've all worked in a place where you identify someone who's like 10x or 100x whatever better than than you and anybody else and those guys get compensated accordingly and so i think yeah there's going to be a world where it just behooves people to to realize like there probably will be meaningful strategic value in frontier intelligence now who gets access to that is does that become you know basically gated for national security reasons or does it only go to the top 50 companies in the world not really an outcome that i'd want to see but i think you're kind of burying your head in the sand if you're trying

Starting point is 00:20:32 to make the argument that because open source intelligence will improve and will be cheap, ergo no one will ever pay for frontier tokens at some point, I think it's probably going to be just the opposite. There will be a small amount of incredibly valuable frontier tokens consumed. And that means that effectively there is probably going to continue to be all of these types of headlines that we have talked about today as it relates to the government's view of how involved they should be on kind of the frontier side yeah that's something developing we will obviously stay on top of it something that we covered last week who knows what's happening with the uh with the ceasefire is it on is it off i have no idea right now it could be on could be off it's it's probably

Starting point is 00:21:15 like you said last week not in the best interest of either side to to get clarity and a resolution to what's happening but let's look at the data and the data is looking pretty good if you would like cheaper gas prices, Saudi oil flow hit 90% of pre-war rate. As ships exit Hormuz, Iran's floating oil stockpile swells as major buyers stay away from them. So I think what we talked about in probably like a month or two into the war, it became clear that the disruption in the Strait of Hormuz has actually been good for the U.S. in terms of its control over oil flows. And And I think one of our biggest allies in Middle East, Saudi Arabia, hitting their flow, hitting 90%. You have people staying away from buying Iranian oil.

Starting point is 00:22:01 And it seems like the power structure of the oil market has shifted in our direction. And last week when we met, the price of WTI was at $70. As we speak right now, it's at $69. So WTI coming down as well. Yeah. You know, as much as I didn't want to include any Iran headlines finally, I felt like this was just an interesting combination of, you know, seeing Saudi ramp back up to close to pre-war rates while Iran, you know, is having much more difficulty actually moving its stockpiled inventory, basically 90% of which I believe

Starting point is 00:22:32 is still sitting on the water with no clear destination. And a big chunk of that is because China's independent oil refiners who were previously the main kind of offtake valve for a lot of this flow have not returned to market very quickly. Could be a lot of different reasons for that. But in any case, it's a really interesting bifurcation to see, especially during this kind of 60-day ceasefire window where if you're Iran, you probably want a better negotiating hand than that. You don't want to be struggling to, you know, oil is a massive driver of financial flows for the country. You probably don't want to be in a position of not being able to move a meaningful amount of that stockpile while you're kind of awaiting final negotiations

Starting point is 00:23:13 for the current memorandum of understanding. So again, just another narrative violation here as it relates to what the outcome of this whole conflict was gonna be and kind of what it means for the US and China's relative leverage. So definitely keep an eye on that one. I'm sure we haven't heard the end of it

Starting point is 00:23:31 because we'll have more to discuss when the 60-day MOU window winds up. But I think definitely a data point on the direction of kind of what we've been talking about. Yeah, I mean, you've lost over, but I think it's important to know, particularly in the context of Bitcoin, China, who knows what's going on there. I'm sure you've seen it, but like the charts of the Chinese housing market seems to be collapsing.

Starting point is 00:23:50 It's at levels that we're not seeing since 20 years ago. And just tying this to Bitcoin, I think many people are focusing on the Fed's policy and whether or not we're going to spin up the money prayers here in the U.S. to ensure that we win the AI battle. I think another driver for Bitcoin, despite the fact that China has banned Bitcoin mining many times, I think life finds a way. And if you live in an economy that is going to turn on the money printer, which China has, if you've been following Michael Howe from Capital Wars, I mean, he's been pointing this out throughout the year. China has been driving global liquidity higher, and their housing market is a big part of their economy, particularly their citizens' savings accounts. And I think if that is viewed as systemically important, they will continue to turn liquidity pumps on there.

Starting point is 00:24:43 That could be beneficial for Bitcoin before we even see liquidity turning up here in the West. And so that's something to pay attention to as well. And then another bullish tick for Bitcoin, President Trump disclosed that he has more than $50 million held in cold storage. Yeah, look, so this is for, you know, so qualifications here, like obviously on its face, like Keteris Paribus or Prima Fascia, like a pretty, pretty bullish headline for the President of the United States to be holding that amount of Bitcoin is particularly in self-custody. But to be fair, this was from December 31st, 2025, so perhaps he has not had diamond hands since then. Given the volatility this year, we'll have to wait and see till basically next year what he actually did since this is only an annual disclosure.

Starting point is 00:25:29 We also don't have anything to comp it to from the prior year. So I don't know. Is this up? Is this down versus what he had before? It's hard to say. But all the qualifications aside, it's just in line with everything that we've been saying as it relates to Bitcoin over these last six months, not to beat the dead horse too much, but these are the kinds of things that you'd be looking at if you really cared about holding this

Starting point is 00:25:49 thing for five to 10 plus years. What are the people with influence doing? Are they putting their money where their mouth is? And certainly, I think we can make a lot of arguments about how appropriate it is for Trump to be putting his money where his mouth is in the office that he holds, particularly as it relates to WorldLibertyFi. But in any case, I think the headline of speaks for itself right like if you if you are generally aligned with the idea that trump is positioning his portfolio you know for the benefit of uh his his family and his personal wealth relative to where he sees u.s policy going and the policies he wants to enact well this would be kind of in line with exactly what you'd want to see if from just the perspective of uh bitcoin's

Starting point is 00:26:32 price if you were bullish on bitcoin and you wanted to hold bitcoin so you know uh do you Do you like it as an American who generally prefers to see perhaps less active trading and direct financial involvement from the chief executive? No, probably not. But it speaks for itself as it relates to where you see price segments going. Worth keeping in mind in the mosaic of what's happening under the hood in the spare market. In a quick Google search, Donald Trump's net worth is estimated to be between $6 and $6.5 billion.

Starting point is 00:27:06 Less than a 1% allocation. I mean, it's just prudent portfolio management here. As BlackRock recommended, right? He's just right in line with their classic recommendation. About a 0.8% allocation compared to his net worth. And last but not least, we mentioned at the end of last week's episode, because the news dropped right before we had reports, we didn't have time to include it in the deck, but it would be remiss for us not to touch on it. uh last week strategy announced a digital credit capital framework designed to strengthen digital

Starting point is 00:27:38 credit enhance liquidity preserve long-term bitcoin exposure and support long-term value creation this is basically a playbook set up to to tell the market how they're going to manage their balance sheet and when they they will i've never heard that ring before imminent threat national with a flash flood warning okay that's what i got pray for me the uh set up the framework and then this morning hit the tape that that strategy sold 3,588 Bitcoin for $216 million to fund dividends on their digital credit securities. Yeah. You know, I think we, our, our, our, our very good friend, Matt O'Dell, managing partner at 1031, you know, has been asking us why we're not talking about Stretch Moore on the show. I think he's an ardent Stretch Bull. So it felt like we needed to

Starting point is 00:28:26 maybe address it a little more. You know, frankly, I think this is everything we've talked about thus far today and in our prior episodes, to me, is actually much more important for Bitcoin over the long term versus what, you know, one company does with its Bitcoin treasury. That said, you know, I will say, like, I don't know that either of us have particularly interesting takes on Stretch or the prefs. I think we would both be of the viewpoint that, you know, this is not inherently a Ponzi scheme, but is ultimately just something that is very path dependent in its success. And it requires Bitcoin to do certain things over a certain amount of time. It requires prudent issuance and policies around that from the company. And it looks like they're certainly

Starting point is 00:29:04 moving in a better direction as of last week. I'm not totally clear on why after raising a USD reserve for about 17 or 18 months of dividends, they dipped into the Bitcoin pot to fund dividends this week versus just using the cash reserves. But that hit the wire right before this episode. So there may be something I'm missing there. But yeah, I think, you know, this is a piece of the overall Bitcoin mosaic that definitely has impact on price day to day, particularly as it in this bear market, when there's kind of an ongoing overhang of, you know, what the company is going to have to do and whether they'll be, quote unquote, liquidated or not.

Starting point is 00:29:38 I think there's probably meaningfully excessive bearishness on that front, which is not an endorsement to go buy MSTR or any of these vehicles. But either way, to me, you know, as I look back, as I pull back to like a 10,000 vote view and i look at everything that the administration's doing you know i just we talked about a lot internally i just asked myself if you were if you were the u.s government and you wanted to mean to build a material bitcoin position and you were already pretty comfortable demonstrably comfortable and playing in the public equity markets from the public purse with you know different companies with strategic strategically advantaged positions in their

Starting point is 00:30:16 industries. And you wanted a quick and insurmountable kind of lead over other countries with your Bitcoin exposure, with your strategic Bitcoin reserve. And you wanted to do that in a way that was, you know, credibly budget neutral. And you could maybe do it out of the ESF at the Treasury for under, you know, $40, $50 billion. And you, you know, wanted to buy from willing sellers. You didn't want to telegraph like a five-year plan like the ARMA does or like the Bitcoin Act did to allow the market to front run your Bitcoin purchases. You know, I just asked myself, like, how would I do it? And I'll leave it as a rhetorical question for the listeners. But I think all that is to say, like, I think there's just a lot more going on in the relevant,

Starting point is 00:31:00 the mosaic and matrix of things people think about as they evaluate Bitcoin for their personal portfolios and just as a strategic asset for the U.S. You know, there's a lot more going on broadly across ai across re-industrialization across what the administration might want to do you know creatively with its portfolio than just what happens with stretch day-to-day so yeah that's that that's where i'll leave it i'll kick it back to you marty and you can uh you can take us home i'm a big leaver nominative determinism strategy strategic reserve drop the micro i'll say it there uh i've been saying this on the show wouldn't be surprised i mean we we clipped something thing that I said a couple of months ago on TFTC. I said it out. There was a very strong reaction

Starting point is 00:31:42 to it. People say I'm crazy. And I'm saying, hey, I'm not saying this is the case, but I think it is plausible. And it is something that you have to keep in mind as we move forward and agree with what you said, especially considering the willingness for the Trump administration to take stakes in publicly traded companies here in the U.S. And just a note on the forward guidance and balance sheet management strategy has enacted. I said this last year, and to your point, I think the bearishness is way overextended. I think the thought of microstrategy getting margin called

Starting point is 00:32:22 is being put out there by people who don't understand. I don't think they could ever get margin called. They have plenty of Bitcoin. They're going to be able to survive. Yes, they may have to sell something. They could even have to sell a material portion of their treasury, But I think they will survive in the long term. Mike Blum has always been with the forward guidance, which really started this time last year, their Q2 earnings call, where Michael Taylor gave forward guidance on how they were going to utilize the ATM.

Starting point is 00:32:50 And within two weeks, he sort of led on that forward guidance. So from a management perspective, that signaled to me like, hey, you may want to put some forward guidance out there and stick to it to make sure that people are confident in what you're doing. And I think since then, they've sort of strayed from forward guidance and been a bit erratic with how they've been going at these things. And I think they're learning on the go. And hopefully, this digital credit capital framework is new guidance and framework that they will actually play within the bounds of, which should give more confidence in the market that they're actually going to do what they say they do. That's my thoughts on it. I'm not saying it's a Ponzi scheme or anything like that. I think strategy, if they want to gain confidence in the market, it's like, all right,

Starting point is 00:33:31 set forward guidance and then actually follow up on it, which I think is a pretty sensible take. Yeah. There's a last thing I'll say is there's a, I tweeted like a year ago, maybe that listening to all MSTR discourse feels like the, the, the meme of inglorious bastards where the guy is putting up, you know, a free or breeds, whichever it is, the wrong number, the wrong number of fingers for what he's trying to order. And you've got the, the other guy looking directly into the camera because he knows like this guy's a fake that's what all of this feels like on basically every side to me so i just i've kind of frankly tuned out a lot of the most vitriolic mstr discourse from both bulls and bears you know cosine what you say pretty much wholeheartedly and again would

Starting point is 00:34:12 just encourage people to step back and think about the the much bigger picture that's kind of going on here yeah we'll see you guys next week Thank you.

TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Ten31 Timestamp: The American Century (?)

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