The Pomp Podcast - Why the Bitcoin Narrative Is Shifting Right Now | Jeff Park

Episode Date: February 4, 2026

Jeff Park is a Partner & Chief Investment Officer at ProCap Financial. In this conversation, we discuss bitcoin’s recent drawdown and whether the market is in a true bear phase, the current inte...rest rate backdrop, and the Fed’s role in today’s economy. We also cover the nomination of Kevin Warsh as Fed chairman, Jeff’s outlook on precious metals, and a warning on one asset he believes investors should avoid going forward.=======================This podcast is sponsored by Abra.com. Abra is the secure way to access crypto and crypto based yield and loan products through a separately managed account structure.Learn more at http://www.abra.com.=======================As markets shift, headlines break, and interest rates swing, one thing stays true — opportunity is everywhere. At Arch Public, we help you do more than just buy and hold. Yes, our dynamic accumulation algorithms are built for long-term investors… but where we really shine? Our arbitrage algos — designed to farm volatility and turbocharge your core positions. The best part of Arch Public’s products is they are free! Yes, you heard that right, try Arch Public for free! Take advantage of wild moves in assets like $SOL, $SUI, and $DOGE, and use them to stack more Bitcoin — completely hands-free. Arch Public is already a preferred partner with Coinbase, Kraken, Gemini, and Robinhood, and our team is here to help you build smarter in any market. Visit Arch Public today, at https://www.archpublic.com, your portfolio will thank you.=======================Simple Mining makes Bitcoin mining simple and accessible for everyone. We offer a premium white glove hosting service, helping you maximize the profitability of Bitcoin mining. For more information on Simple Mining or to get started mining Bitcoin, visit https://www.simplemining.io/=======================0:00 - Intro0:56 - Is the bitcoin selloff sustainable?5:56 - Fed vs White House & is bitcoin looking forward or backward?13:10 - Kevin Warsh & the future of the Fed32:11 - Why precious metals are surging

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Starting point is 00:00:00 This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales. Using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. And for that reason, I do think we are in a bear market going forward. What should we expect? I think we should expect that having more accommodative policies may in fact actually
Starting point is 00:00:38 not be the catalyst to help us go into a bull market. But there is this other positive role Bitcoin that I always talk about. And I mentioned this is the end game. This is the mythical, elusive, perfect, holy grail of what Bitcoin is meant to be, which is what's going on, guys. Today, we got a great conversation with Jeff Park. He's a partner and chief investment officer at ProCap Financial. In this conversation, we talk about Bitcoin, the current bear market, what's going on with interest rates, the new Fed chairman nominee, Kevin Warsh. And also, we talk about precious metals, gold, silver, copper, platinum. And Jeff gives a warning as to one asset that you may not want in your portfolio moving forward. All that and more
Starting point is 00:01:14 in this conversation with Jeff Park. Before we get into this episode with Jeff, I've got a favor to ask of you. We work really hard over here to try to bring you the best information we possibly can. So hit the subscribe button on YouTube and let's get into this conversation with Jeff Park. All right, Jeff, Bitcoin's been selling off. I'm probably of the belief that we're going to go sideways to down. We're probably in a bear market. But 40% drawdown in Bitcoin's got people's attention. A lot of people are not very happy. What are your thoughts? Do you think we're in a bear market? Do you think that Bitcoin sell-off is sustainable? I think we're in a bear market. And I think we have been in a bear market for quite a bit.
Starting point is 00:01:46 And it's worth remembering that one of the reasons people really liked Bitcoin as a hedge was because they thought that there was a correlation to global liquidity, that global liquidity increasing would ultimately good for Bitcoin. And the truth is that's been broken for quite some time. So I think we have a tendency in crypto to imagine history repeats itself in a lot of ways that is kind of solving for your own behavioral biases that you have on selections of truths. So like all coin rally comes after a Bitcoin rally, or there's a four year cycle, or even
Starting point is 00:02:22 kind of this, if QE comes up and rates go lower, it's good for Bitcoin. All these things, they imagine the past repeating in the future, but it's worth remembering. There's things that are constantly changing about the world where everything looks a little bit different than the way you had modeled it before. So we never had an altcoin rally. The four-year cycle is broken. And I think the third thing that now we have to kind of move past to is this very taken assumption that for some reason, QE and global liquidity and rates lower, all of that is really good for Bitcoin and Bitcoin should go higher. I think that's the third one. And it's tempting to believe that because it's been the case over the past in most cycles.
Starting point is 00:03:04 But it's worth remembering, again, that some things could look different. And right now, this is the final boss. If you go back to global liquidity, I would say it has been going up pretty steadily in 2025. Michael Howell tracks it pretty well across his own expertise. I think we are now around 170 trillion, and it's coming from all directions, China and the US. It could probably accelerate, but the point is that it's been going up. And you can almost see that because asset prices have all gone up. Metals have been in a frenzied rally. Corporate credit spreads at an all-time low. So I think there actually is a lot of reasons to think that Bitcoin should have also have already participated, but it didn't. So there's something fundamentally broken there.
Starting point is 00:03:51 And for that reason, I do think we are in a bear market. And I would argue from that reasoning, we probably have been in a bear market starting in the middle of 2025 when the Fed balance sheet has been a little bit more less accommodative, especially with the treasury kind of building back is TGA. So going forward, what should we expect? I think we should expect that having more accommodative policies may in fact actually not be the catalyst to help us go into a bull market. We have to accept that reality and possibility, which actually makes me a little bit optimistic about what could be the catalyst for an upside performance for Bitcoin. I've talked in the past about this concept of negative row Bitcoin and positive row Bitcoin. And the negative
Starting point is 00:04:38 row Bitcoin is the version we're all used to, right? Like if interest rates go lower, it's more accommodative. Risk assets go up. Bitcoin's a risk asset. So Bitcoin should go up as well. That's negative row Bitcoin. I think it's the one that most people accept to be the truth. But there is this other positive row Bitcoin that I always talk about. And I mentioned this is the end game. This is the mythical, elusive, perfect, holy grail of what Bitcoin is meant to be, which is when Bitcoin goes up as interest rates go up, which is very counterintuitive to the QE theory. But what it's undermining is the risk-free rate itself. In that world, what we're saying is actually because the risk-free rate is not the risk-free rate, because the dollar hegemony is
Starting point is 00:05:19 not the dollar hegemony, and we are no longer able to price the yield curve in the ways we've known, that means we need something different, a different model of commodities, a basket, and Bitcoin is that hedge. So that version of positive row Bitcoin, I wonder if that is actually the thing that's going to matter. And a lot of the excitement that I think we're now seeing kind of with the direction of appointing Kevin Warsh as the Fed chairman is I think to reimagine, hey, we got to fix the system. Like the money supply and the monetary system is broken. We know the interrelationship between the Fed and the Treasury is not at the level that it should be to drive kind of the agenda of national securities. So all of this points to me like the thing that could
Starting point is 00:06:02 maybe get Bitcoin out of the funk is totally forgetting everything we've ever known in the past and going back to our true value, like the ideological Bitcoin. Why are we in Bitcoin to begin with? We're in Bitcoin because we believe in scarcity being a solution to the manipulated technocratic supply of money. So liquidity provisioning and global liquidity, by the way it's happening is actually not Bitcoin's friend. So what's interesting to me, I think, is there's two different ways to analyze this. The first is, historically, I think we have looked at monetary policy as the big driver of the economy and kind of asset prices, etc. It does feel like the current administration in the United States is trying to wrestle control of the economy away
Starting point is 00:06:45 from the Federal Reserve. And they are doing that through deregulation and tax cuts. They're doing it through tariffs. They're doing it by trying to weaken the US dollar. There's all these components that they are doing. They're getting a tailwind from AI. And it does feel like the Fed, whether self-induced or not, is kind of on their back foot a little bit. And they're trying to figure out, hey, there's a lot of moving pieces. Where are the tectonic plates of the economy and how should we act? So there's this maybe sliding scale of how much of the economy is controlled or influenced by the Fed versus economic policy coming from the White House. And we're trying to figure out where do we lay on that one? But the other thing is, I do think about how much of Bitcoin is a forward
Starting point is 00:07:26 looking market versus like current versus maybe past. What you're talking about from the psychology of Bitcoin holders is actually like we're driving looking in the rearview mirror. Four-year cycles always existed. You know, all this stuff has always happened. And so I actually don't need to look through the windshield. I can just look in the rearview mirror and it tells me where I'm going. I think you're saying like, no, like look through the windshield, right? That might be a better way to evaluate. And so then the question becomes, is Bitcoin acting based on current economic conditions? Or is it actually looking forward and trying to predict? And the example I've used in the past is 2020, a bunch of investors went and bought Bitcoin and gold
Starting point is 00:08:01 because they said inflation is coming. And so markets were forward looking as they usually are. If Bitcoin is going down, does that tell us deflation is a bigger risk? Does that mean that maybe there's some other thing that it's warning us about? Like, how do you think about maybe the sliding scale on a horizontal basis of like fed to white house and then maybe this like forward or back of how far in the future is bitcoin looking you know and try to put maybe the the price action in context yeah there's a great way to frame it i think there's like this concept also of like peacetime bitcoin and wartime bitcoin in my head which is that in a great period of peace and prosperity where we expect kind of the monetary system to work the way it should for all
Starting point is 00:08:41 we can underwrite like the framework of investing as the way we've known it right but that's like a peacetime bitcoin and in that peacetime bitcoin it is maybe talking about inflation and hedging inflation all that stuff but the wartime bitcoin is different because wartime means it's actually not monetary policy that is driving the future outlook for how we're thinking about growth it's probably going to be a combination of industrial policy military policy and fiscal policy that takes the front seat versus monetary policy. And I think you see this in history, where between democracies and some maybe more oppressive authoritarian versions of governments, that during moments of crisis, monetary policy takes a backseat to the importance of the actual
Starting point is 00:09:27 power struggle that emerges. So I think in a way, you're correct to imagine what is Bitcoin's bet in the future going to look like. And part of what I think happened so far also with the Trump administration is it really looks like the world got more centralized. So in the past, there was this ideation and beautification of this idea of decentralization as a virtue, that we're more anti-fragile if we can allocate resources differently across systems and create some checks and balances, and Bitcoin and crypto would do that. But if you really look hard at what's been happening here in the US as well, from a crypto policy perspective, it's moving towards a model of centralization. Stablecoins are literally bringing banks into the conversation
Starting point is 00:10:13 about how to centralize the concept of yield. Tokenization also, I think the way it's being taught really with a lens towards equities rather than long tail assets that historically hasn't had a securities market also points its fingers towards centralization. And of course, Trump, Trump himself being at the center of this gravity in the centralized role of government endorsing Bitcoin also gives it like this centralized energy. And so I think the bet has always been that Bitcoin will do well when the world is a little bit more fragmented, when there's a little bit more chaos and directionlessness that is the cause for Bitcoin to then be embraced. And so I think we're entering this wartime zone now. Like the peacetime version of Bitcoin was like, let's
Starting point is 00:10:56 get kind of national support and build crypto policies and infrastructures, market structures, Genius Act, Clarity Act, all that stuff and get people in. We've tried it. I think we're trying to figure out if it's working or not and if it's getting people into crypto and into Bitcoin the way we expected it to. And over time, what you realize is actually maybe it's not working that way. And you just revisit that original mission of Bitcoin. It's actually not that. It's not about Clarity Act. It's not about some of these market structure things. I mean, they're important from an industry building perspective, but at what cost, right? And the thing that Bitcoin represents in my mind has always been true to its heart. It's about censorship resistance. It is about
Starting point is 00:11:35 decentralization. And it's about freedom money. It's about really giving money to people who need it. And what you see is Americans have lots of other ways to bet. They don't have to pick Bitcoin. They can pick silver medals. They can pick copper. They can pick their next AI themes. They can do a lot of stuff. The people who need Bitcoin are the people that are oppressed. And I think maybe the underwrite for the future is if you believe the world is going to be more fragmented. There's going to be more oppression. There's going to be more capital controls. I think that's a big one. We're already seeing it with how socialist policies are trying to handicap capital mobility relative to human mobility. It's happening in California. We're going to see it in
Starting point is 00:12:13 New York. These are the energy that I think redrives the importance of Bitcoin. And so my outlook is I'm still very much interested in Bitcoin. I'm very bullish Bitcoin, but it's because I think it's going to get a lot worse from the perspective of centralization of the role of government. And Bitcoin will reemerge as the hedge, the ultimate hedge to be out of and opt out of that system. Today's episode is brought to you by Abra, the secure way to grow crypto wealth. Abra offers individuals and institutions end-to-end crypto wealth management solutions, including custody, trading, yield, and crypto-backed loans through a unique separately managed account structure where title is retained by you, the client. In other words, your assets
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Starting point is 00:13:29 and there is no re-hypothecation. Find out more at Abra.com and tell them Pomp sent you. Again, that's Abra.com and tell them Big Pomp sent you. Now, you mentioned Kevin Warsh. He's obviously the new Fed chairman nominee and he had some very positive things to say about Bitcoin. He didn't go in super deep detail, but it definitely seems like he understands
Starting point is 00:13:52 he has a place in the world. he doesn't think is competitive with the US dollar. Some of the things you're talking about and maybe Bitcoin going into this war time, it almost feels like Kevin may not think that Bitcoin is going to be a solution there, but he sees it still as like a place in people's portfolio. What are your thoughts on him as the Fed chairman and how he may help or hurt Bitcoin going forward? Yeah. Let me tell you a little story about one little interaction I got to enjoy with Kevin Warsh in the past. This was probably in 2021, 2022. And, you know, I'm such a huge fan of Kevin because I think he really represents somebody who has great domain expertise about how things work
Starting point is 00:14:37 and why sometimes you have to break the way things work to be able to make the next step forward, that you have to reinvent yourself and actually revisit the root of the problems and to actually know and diagnose the problems, you actually do have to be a bit of an expert. You can't just come in and break things for the sake of it. But the people who know things tend to be incumbents of not wanting to change things. So it takes a lot of courage. It takes a lot of bravery to be able to have that mindset. And I think Warsh has that. The other thing is, he's an incredible technologist. So in the conversation I've got to enjoy with him now four years ago, I remember him distinctly being enthused by crypto. He loves it.
Starting point is 00:15:18 And what he said was, there's a lot of phonies in this world, lots of phonies, and a lot of phonies that think tech is just magic, and they don't really know what it is, but they're just kind of like making a bet on magic, and they're not really there for the right reasons. But he truly, truly, truly believed deep in his heart that this isn't magic, that blockchain is not a magical thing, that it actually is going to solve a lot of problems and bring efficiencies. And Bitcoin is a core part of that cultural fabric. And that's, I think, really important because most technicians are not those who actually understand technology.
Starting point is 00:16:00 It's quite untypical to their mindset to imagine the innovation gap. So when we talk about even this idea of productivity growth that the Fed cannot see because they cannot see that AI is bringing deflation, that gap exists because there are people who, unlike Kevin Warsh, can't imagine the future would look different than the past. So I think one and foremost, he's a technologist at heart, which is incredibly important. I think we need to have more government leaders, especially in the monetary seat who believe that. And the other thing is, there's a lot of great content that he's produced in the past because he's been in the Fed before. And what you see as you study his action is that he really does believe in the institution of the Fed too. So when there are
Starting point is 00:16:48 people that are like, oh, Fed independence has to end. He's not that guy. He's not saying it has to end, but he understands why it's been challenged and what it takes to kind of re-underwrite the institution so that it is able to regain the trust of the people. And the thing that he says that's always stuck with me is this idea that the inflation is a choice. And what we now sometimes see with Powell and other Fed chairmen is that they act like inflation is not their choice, that they blame other stuff. They're like, oh, inflation happened because of tariffs. Inflation happened because of the war in Ukraine. And they almost like try to not take count, like not take liability for the fact that no, the Fed literally chooses inflation. It is a policy.
Starting point is 00:17:32 It is part of the mandate as to why they're there in the first place. Price stability is literally why they do what they do. So I'm always kind of smitten by the fact that he's able to critically assess his own kind of colleagues and institutional biases to be able to say, like, there are things that we got to do better. And the thing about inflation too, and I see sometimes you're picking up on this by tracking trueflation and all that is inflation and nominal change in price are like different things. Because I think people sometimes confuse like inflation is like, oh, price of this thing went
Starting point is 00:18:10 up by like 5%, so it must be inflation. That's just a price change. Price change can happen for a lot of reasons. It could be a war in Ukraine. It could be tariffs. Those things can bring changes in price. What inflation actually is, is what that change rate is thereafter. Inflation is always measured as like a rolling concept, right? It's ear to ear. One-time price change does not equate inflation in the future. And that is the key thing to understand about the role of the Fed. The Fed's job is not to monitor the change of price month to month to try to underwrite that gap. That could be a one-time event. Their job is to underwrite the slope of that change over a long period of time. And sometimes that notion, I think, gets lost as well. And that's where I do
Starting point is 00:18:55 believe in Kevin Warsh's statement that inflation is a choice and the Fed has all the tools to control it if they wanted to. You know what's interesting to me is two things can be true at the same time in terms of you can have high grocery prices and no inflation. It's just that the prices didn't come down. That's right. There's news this week that PepsiCo is going to drop prices on a number of food items by 15%. What I find most interesting is there's an element of deflation, but there's also an element of Elliott investments coming in and being like, hey, we got to tighten the belt here, get growth going again. The company is saying that they want to juice growth by lowering prices. They're going to put a big marketing campaign together around
Starting point is 00:19:44 same size, lower price type of vernacular. But there is still this element of like, Well, you can only drop your price, especially in food, where there's very small margins, if you can get your expenses lower. And so I think what people always want is they want like a very simple answer. It's black or white, inflation, deflation, high inflation, low inflation, whatever. The truth is actually like it's a complex system. And I think it's Bill Ackman's got like the famous YouTube video where it's like explaining the complex, you know, economic machine or something.
Starting point is 00:20:17 and you just start to realize like most people actually don't even understand the relationship between like interest rates and you know consumer prices right or whatever bitcoin almost feels like it takes all that complexity and just it's like you don't have to you don't have to learn any of this yeah there's this thing very dumbed down supply demand right if more people want this thing it is going to go up in price if less people want this thing it will go down in price over time uh savings not investing not understanding you know all this kind of stuff but i think then it goes back to this idea of like are they trying to reimagine the monetary system yeah and if that's true are they trying to make it simpler are they trying to take this big complex machine and say
Starting point is 00:21:01 look can we boil this down to like very simple for anyone to understand yeah here's my hope it's complex. I don't know if it actually can be simpler. However, I think they should make it more transparent. And I think they should make it more honest. I think part of the loss and the confidence of Americans as how we're understanding our monetary system isn't just because it's gotten complex, it has. Part of I think Warsh's cleaning up to do will be to kind of change the role of how the Fed uses its balance sheet. But beyond that is this kind of now like almost obvious lie that is being shared that is at best observed as lack of transparency. So, for example, in the last meeting in January, one of the questions that was asked to Powell
Starting point is 00:21:48 was how to comment on the role of the dollar and its price relative to the rate setting mechanism, right? In the context of the dollar now having kind of strengthened quite a bit. So, it obviously matters because that's what interest rate parity is all about, right? Like, it matters as to what the underlying currency is to what the long-term yield and interest rate should be. Like, it's a mathematically close-ended relationship. But Powell kind of came out and said, we don't care about the levels of the dollar in the ways that we conduct our own policies.
Starting point is 00:22:27 And on one hand, you can kind of understand he's trying to simplify that that's not his domain of expertise. But I think by doing that is ignoring the reality that it matters. You can do both. And so this is where I'm really optimistic about the possibility of a new Fed-Treasury accord that Besant and Warsh can re-underwrite, because it is absolutely true. The heart of the issue is, again, going back to the Triffin dilemma, the dollar as a reserve asset has two rules that are contradictory.
Starting point is 00:22:56 To be the reserve asset for external and to be the saver's asset in the internal have contradictory biases and they fight against each other. So it's not that we need Fed independence. We actually need Fed interdependence with the treasury. And I think we need to move towards that world. Like independence does not just mean it cannot have interdependence to other government agencies. And I think once we kind of move away from this idea of like the Fed independence is being challenged to the Fed must have a functional interdependence with our treasury to actually enact policies that make sense, then I think we'll have made a great leap forward
Starting point is 00:23:37 in regaining the trust of the role of the Fed. Do you think it's better or worse or indifferent that Warsh and Besant are drunk protégés, worked with him? Absolutely. Kind of like two guys coming from the same spot with the same mentality, maybe one of the greatest risk takers to ever live.
Starting point is 00:23:58 just feels like one of those situations like you can't ignore the coincidence. No, it gets me juiced up. I get so excited about it. I mean, I think I've been as vocal as I can be online that I have called my bet that Warsh has to be the Fed chairman since last year. And it really is because this is such a moment in history where you can get two people that trust and know each other who are both practitioners of the market under possibly the greatest practitioner of the market, Stan Druckenmiller, to actually bring on change. And the trust factor when you have that kind of interpersonal relationship at these levels cannot be understated.
Starting point is 00:24:32 So part of why I think, you know, it's so funny, like on college, you saw like, at one point Warsh was a runner-up, but then Hassett came in and he was a runner-up and then he came back down and then Rick Reader came in and he was then gonna be the runner-up. And the whole time I was like, guys, you're missing the big picture.
Starting point is 00:24:48 Like, yes, of course, this is Trump's decision, but really guess whose decision this ultimately is that Trump needs, it's Besson's. Who does Besant want to work with that he trusts and can bring the change he is hoping and imagining for this country? There was never going to be anybody else. Never. And I think once you realize that moment of this clarity to which this is so powerful that we can now do things on the global stage that you can't without the trust factor, I think there's a lot of reasons to be excited about it. And again, I know sometimes people get a bad rep for being billionaires and that if there are billionaires, they are self-serving and they're not going to look out for the common people. I actually take the other side where you want billionaires to actually do meaningful things
Starting point is 00:25:37 because if you're not billionaires, you're probably doing bad things on the other side. So it's better to have people who actually are well-resourced to not care about making more money for themselves, right? I think the last thing best and worst would have on their mind is like, how can I make more money for myself? I think they're at the point where they're like, how can we fix the system? And that's why I'm more optimistic that you have somebody who knows the market, like they're practitioners of the capital markets, and they know why the institution for all its virtue is still broken and can come around to it with the intellectual charisma and integrity and clarity
Starting point is 00:26:15 to get the communication across the line. And that combination is actually quite perfect. You don't want a socialist in that chair. You don't want like a nationalist in that chair. You want a technocrat, but you want a technocrat who's actually practical as well. Today's episode is brought to you by ArchPublic.
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Starting point is 00:28:37 Yeah, what's interesting to me, I guess, is when you think about them working together, you have two guys who not only understand the US system, they're very globally minded. And when Besson went and did the stuff in Argentina, in hindsight, looks pretty smart. At the time, there was a lot of flack being thrown around. And I think that even people I was talking with on the show, et cetera, were maybe not critical, but just kind of like scratching their head a little bit. Why are we doing this? why are we spending money on this um it does feel like the united states is like risk on
Starting point is 00:29:12 is very much like let's build you know type mentality but also a little bit from a monetary standpoint you know hey we're gonna cut some fat and you know make some changes and when you get in that mindset you need people who understand probability and risk yeah right and i think that's maybe what you're getting at here is like these people that's what they've been doing their whole career yeah right and uh besant i don't know if we went back and we looked when besant was nominated how many people were like this guy's going to be amazing at his job i think people he's smart you know he understands that whatever i don't know if there was this like overwhelming he's going to be amazing i think objectively if you look at it you're like he may be one of the
Starting point is 00:29:50 best treasury secretaries we've had you know my lifetime okay he didn't have a lot of experience he didn't work at the fed i don't think right he didn't work inside the government warsh almost brings together like one plus one equals three he was a fed governor during the global financial crisis he's you know done all these things inside of like the machine and then he went and like you know basically tried to exploit those as a trader with a drug and now coming back it's a really interesting dynamic where they're almost bringing different experiences but that level of trust does you know bridge the gap yeah i think what you're talking to is that you really need to be like a systems thinker right because you know when left gives
Starting point is 00:30:27 the right might take. And you actually have to understand the probabilities as to how that coefficient of interaction might affect ultimate change. And so what that means, to bring it all together, means you need to appreciate that monetary policy does not exist in a vacuum. It really exists with fiscal dominance in the backdrop of what is happening with the treasury. It exists with industrial policies in which Trump now wants to onshore our manufacturing economy and invest in semiconductors. Those three prongs all interact and play together. This composition, this orchestra exists where they all have to be in sync. They need to be unified in the mission that it's ultimately driving that I think is only possible if you're able to have that multivariate
Starting point is 00:31:14 mindset. And the challenge, unfortunately, with most academics and most who have not worked in the for-profit sector is that the nonprofit world isn't really built for systems. It's not built for kind of assessing anti-fragility of the many variables that can affect kind of the direction of your building. Nonprofit world, and actually I would almost argue like authoritarian, like centralized top-down government type of world is you take the order and you just do it. And you just like allocate resources, but there's no accountability, right? So you just kind of spend, spend, spend, spend, but there's no actually learning of like, how does that impact anything? You know, that requires a little bit of like a for-profit critical assessment mindset and a lot of self-awareness, frankly, that I think can only come from that experience.
Starting point is 00:31:57 And I agree that having people who have been capital markets participant gives you the most credibility when then you're as a public official on the other side to be able to bring leverage. Because right now, we're at war. We are not in a world where you can look at the rule books of what Janet Yellen did and think that repeating that is going to help your case in the future. You need to chart your own path. And when you want to chart your own path, you need to have credibility. And that credibility can only come from having the authority to imagine what's possible as a systems thinker. It cannot come from somebody who is in an echo chamber of a closed-minded kind of institutional force as it has been. Last thing I want to talk about, two minutes we have left, is precious metals, gold, silver, even copper and platinum. Up a lot, down a little, up again. Yes. What's going on?
Starting point is 00:32:54 Yeah, look, so this is part of the reason why I think we have to re-underwrite the thesis on Bitcoin. We've had frenzy. The frenzy just didn't come for Bitcoin, but we've had it. And we're seeing it across all the precious metal complex. So what do I think is happening? I think global liquidity has been great. And frankly, if we get a rate cut and liquidity goes up, I actually think that it's likely that these things get crazier. Maybe some of it comes to Bitcoin, maybe it doesn't. But the point is, we're already here. And so in terms of silver in particular, I mean, I think this is the retail trade right now. And I am quite worried. I'm quite worried because it reminds me of altcoins. It is the precious metal altcoin.
Starting point is 00:33:36 It's actually kind of perfect. It's actually a perfect comp to altcoin. It's the Ethereum of precious metals. Well, I don't want to be mean to the Ethereum community, but it is a feeling that I have and I can draw some analogies to this. All right, let's hear. So look, most commodities, you just have to analyze it by two dimensions. Really easy. Demand and supply. That's it. So when you look at the supply, the reality is silver is actually not more than a byproduct of mining other metals. I think people don't realize this. There are no dedicated silver miners in the world. Very little actually. Most of them are mining for zinc or copper or other things. And silver
Starting point is 00:34:15 happens to be like a little byproduct that comes out. It's like a freebie. So what is that in the crypto altcoin world, it's like you're yield farming and you get a little freebie. You're actually investing in ETH, but because you're using ETH to go on some chain to yield farm some random token, that random token is like a little boost, right? You're getting a little higher APR because that token happens to come into your ETH activities. And then you sell that little token and you get an incremental yield. That's silver. All miners don't really price silver mining on the economics of silver mining. It's just a bonus, right? So the price setter, what I'm trying to hint at, is not silver in the way that production activities are determined. Production activities
Starting point is 00:34:57 are determined by zinc and copper and other things. So in a way, what does that mean? The supply is quite large as well. Unlike Bitcoin, which has scarcity, unlike gold, which I would argue has more scarcity, there's actually a ton of silver. There's a ton. And so the price will eventually discover where the clearing price is. And people will, because again, silver is an excessive gain for a corollary function that's not their prime purpose, it'll crush the price. The other part is on the demand side, right? So, sometimes you'll hear about, well, no, silver is being rejuvenated because the AI thesis and the industrial utility on solar actually makes it pretty useful. But the reality is silver is a substitution good.
Starting point is 00:35:41 silver is priced because it has a high voltage conductivity and it's probably the highest of all the elements, but copper is not very far behind. I think it's only like maybe 5% less efficient, meaning silver is good, but it's not like 80 times the price good. And so silver is actually a fungible thing from itself. And it is a substitution where other things can take place. And it's already happened. A lot of solar panels now use copper because silver has gotten more expensive to that point. And so you got demand where you're not really inelastically in need for because the properties you have is not perfect. Also, it's not a reserve asset, right? There are no central banks that are buying silver. And on the supply side, the economics don't work the way
Starting point is 00:36:27 you expect mining to be, and there's an abundance. So all of that points to generally the fact that I think it's not going to go well. But it reminds me a lot of altcoin because it has high vol, high leverage to gold. And so it's so similar to how people would say altcoin summer is on the back of Bitcoin's rise causing other kind of things on the sideline to perform. But guess what? Most of these altcoins eventually find its price where the demand and supply curve intersect. And I think for that same reason, like if there's any lessons crypto investors can take away from the past four or eight years to now, silver is exactly a precious metal altcoin and all the constructs of that analysis that crypto investors should be familiar with.
Starting point is 00:37:11 So are you saying watch out below? I think we need, yeah. I would say, hey, you had a great run. It might be time to rotate that to Bitcoin. All right. Thank you. We're curious to be able to follow you online. You can find me on X, my handle is dgt10011.
Starting point is 00:37:30 And you can also find my writings on Substack for which I have the link on my profile. Amazing. All right, we'll do it again in the future. Sounds great.

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