The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin Breaks $1 Trillion Market Cap | Altcoins Surge | Mark Yusko

Episode Date: February 15, 2024

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Bitcoin is over $52,000. Its market cap is over a trillion dollars. And the Bitcoin spot ETF inflows are absolutely going nuts, over $500 million a day and growing. Is it clear skies ahead? Am I missing something? Are there some major headwinds that I'm not paying attention to? Well, I've got one of my favorite guests of all time. As you guys know, Mark Yusko here to discuss this market, what's going on, what we can look forward to in the future, and probably to show us some cool socks. I don't know. And to talk some smack about politicians. This is going to be a really fun show, guys. Of course, we got the chart guys on the back half. Let's go. What is up everybody? I'm Scott Melker, also known as

the Wolf of Wall Street. Before we get started, please subscribe to the channel. Hit that like button. Sorry that I missed yesterday. I was extremely under the weather, but making a raging comeback right now. So glad to be back. And I wouldn't have missed Mark Yusko from the world. They would have had to literally prop me up in the hospital bed, turn me sideways, take the tubes out,

put the mic in and said, hey, man, we're doing this. Mark, good morning. Good morning. Glad you are. You're feeling better. And, and, uh, I, it, uh, I am impressed that, uh, you would, you would get out of the hospital bed for me. So I appreciate that. Of course. If we had you booked in advance, there's no way I would, I would ever cancel on you. So man, Bitcoin $52, look, you said we'd do some socks. So yeah. Okay.

So I have the green candle pants. You know, we're wearing green instead of orange. And I have the Bitcoin moon sock game. And it's not just, you know, when moon kind of Lambo. No, this bull market that's just getting started, we haven't even gotten to crypto fall. That doesn't happen until June. The halving is still yet to come. And we have one more, let's call it SpaceX-like explosion that was planned right after the Ides of March, before tax season this year. There's one more selling wave that's coming and people are going to go, oh my God, it's over.

No, no, no, no, no. After that and once the halving occurs, this is interesting. Are you talking about Genesis? Just for clarity, are you talking about the Genesis? No, no, no, no, no. Because to me, that's a nothing burger, by the way. That's a nothing burger. Every year, there are two something burgers, and they are bigger three out of the four years.

In fact, they don't really happen in the fourth year because the bad year, there are no gains to worry about. But what happens, the Lunar New Year, every year, we just had it. Before Lunar New Year, there's a bunch of selling in China to fill up the red envelopes with cash. And it has happened every year since Bitcoin was started. And everybody's like, why is there selling pressure? Do you not understand a billion six people filling up red envelopes with cash? They sell some Bitcoin. So that's one. And so we survived that. That was no problem. And that actually coincided with the GBTC liquidations and all that good stuff. But then you have Uncle Sam has to get paid. And you know what's amazing? It's amazing. I mean, government, we don't care about Bitcoin. Bitcoin's a fraud. It just doesn't matter. It's the fifth question on tax return.

It's insane. It's the fifth question. So even though they don't care about it. And look, after a really good year, and last year was a really good year, up 130%, 155%, sorry, 155%. So there's gonna be some taxes due and people are going to sell to pay taxes. And that happens every three out of the four years, because you get three good years and a bad year, three good years and a bad year, three good years and a bad year. And Tim Peterson, who I love, I love Tim, just put out this morning this cool thing that we just yesterday over the 52 weeks up exactly 100%. And that has happened, I can't remember exactly how many times he said, but in every incidence, the next 12 months, we're up 100%.

So that's interesting. And then the last thing that I was going to talk about, but I forgot, and we'll come back to it. Right. I mean, so now we're over again, this meaningful trillion market cap number, which listen, it's just a number, but it's nice to be back. And we really haven't spent much time above 50,000 in the history of Bitcoin. I think it's 190 total days, something like that. I mean, I think we're 20% off the highest weekly close and the halving hasn't happened yet. We are way ahead of where we should be if you were just looking at the four-year cycle and it's because of the ETF, right? I mean, this is- I disagree. I disagree. I think we are exactly on schedule. And I've actually been talking about this for a while.

I mean, you and I talked about this nine months ago, nine or 10 months ago. It doesn't matter. But I'm talking about it every Friday on the Margin Show for over a year that the four-year cycle exists because of the halving, right? Halving embeds this natural proclivity for price to rise. Otherwise, the miners who are integral to the success of the protocol would find themselves in a pinch because their electricity costs and space costs are fixed. So long story short, you have this cycle and the cycle is exacerbated by humans, like the people watching the show. And there are investors, people who buy assets

when they're below their fair value. There are traders who don't give a shit about fair value. They just like to trade movement. There are speculators, which are the other side of hedgers. Hedgers are people who produce things and have to sell, like the miners or oil producers. But then there are the gamblers. And the gamblers are the people who don't understand or really care. They just want number go up. And then they buy on leverage. And that's what pushes us to the crazy parabolic blow off top. It's not even here yet. On the other side. Pardon? Yeah, and it's not even here yet. I'm assuming that's the point you're about to make, but this has been spot-buying.

It's incredible. So what's happening now- We don't have a huge build-up in leverage yet. Fair value. We're nowhere close to the speculative top. This is fair value. Fair value, according to Tim's Metcalfe's Law model, and I've been using the Metcalfe's Law model since 2014. Metcalfe's Law is the definitive way of calculating the value of a network, any network, whether it's I've been rounding it to 50 to make it easy. But when we were at 25, not that long ago, I was like, look, we're going to migrate slowly toward fair value of 50. And guess what? Here we are, almost up to the halving. But then what happens is the halving in previous cycles doubles the fair value. Like, well, what do you mean? Well, think about it. If the block rewards go down in half, the price has to adjust upward 100% to keep the revenues the same. Now, this time there's a subtle

difference. So what I was saying before ordinals was that at the halving this year, now it's going to be April 8th, which is kind of a coincidence. That is a total solar eclipse, which I think is an interesting day to have the halving. But anyway, and so that 100K number was my base case. But then ordinals happened and transactions went up and transaction fees went up. So it's possible, and I'm still working on this part. It's possible that fair value only goes to 75 or 80. Let's just say 75. So then the investors have been buying all this time up to fair value.

Okay. Well, now we have new people. We have traders. We have speculators because the hedgers are selling. The gamblers haven't even showed up yet. Once they show up and once the leverage starts, then we go right through fair value. So right past 75. Probably in history, we go to 2.3X. I was going to say we more than doubled it. We go to 2.3X at the peak. So we went to 69 on a fair value of 30 or 68. And so I don't think we'll go 2.3 times because I think there's less leverage.

I think we go two times fair value. That's 150. So sometime between Thanksgiving this year and June of the following year, that's when we see the new all-time high. And then we'll have another crash. And you tweet about this, right? And then get prepared, right? That we will go past fair

value. And we will then have people come in and say, okay, I need to be short this. And the cycle will start all over again. And that's fine. Yeah. Here's the tweet I assume you're talking about. Everyone's talking about how much higher crypto prices will be in one to two years. Nobody's talking about how almost all of them will likely be down 90 to 95% from the peak in three to four years. It won't go down. Well, okay. I'm not saying Bitcoin will.

I'm saying that all this small cap stuff that everybody's spending all their money. 100% Scott and Scooter. The thing is, and I loved your comment on that, which is, look, Bitcoin is the apex digital asset. It is digital gold, right? Ethereum, world computer, probably pretty big deal. Then there's a few other cryptocurrencies that could maybe have a role, maybe not. We'll see. They're still vying for it. Then there's the thousands of utility tokens that are basically public or liquid venture capital, pre-seed stage, not even seed stage, pre-seed stage venture capital. The loss ratio on pre-seed stage venture capital is in the high 90s, 97, 98, 99.

So the vast majority of those projects are going to zero. Now, that doesn't mean they don't go up first, but the vast majority of them will go to zero. And if you're rifle shooting in those projects, find a different occupation because if you scattershot, shotgun blast, okay, build a portfolio, position size right, take some profits. That's fine. But yeah, if you're betting it all on one number, yes, somebody will win and we'll have to hear incessantly about them winning. But the average person loses. Yeah, there's a couple of topics here I want to get your thoughts on. One is this, gold ETFs bleed $2.4 billion so far in 2024 as Bitcoin ETFs hit record volumes.

I have obviously this tracker. We now have market cap of BlackRock $5.73 billion. I think objectively, that's a lot higher than people expected a month in. Fidelity 4, GBTC rising fast. I don't think people realize this was down to about $20 billion, now $24 billion. And we know GBTC was about $26 billion total when these launched. Now we're at $37 billion. Do you think that we are seeing people go from gold to Bitcoin, or do you think that these are coincidental events? Do you think that people are exiting gold ETFs because gold isn't moving, or do you think that this is actually money going from gold to Bitcoin, which is the narrative that our community loves? And I can't tell you exactly how much, but there's no question in my mind, no question. Actually, I'll just say there's no question. There's no question that people are selling, some people are selling gold, silver, other

things that they've used as a hedge. Look, there were people who sold the miners. There were people who sold MicroStrategy to buy the ETFs. No question that was happening because people who were prohibited from owning GBTC and didn't want to deal with the hassle. Or they just didn't want to touch it. Or they didn't want to touch it. Why would you buy something that was swinging premiums and discounts massively? Yeah.

Although closed-end funds, people buy closed-end funds all the time. People buy junk bond closed-end funds. They buy – and they sell at a discount. But still, you're right. There are plenty of people who said, I'm not going to touch it. The ETF legitimizes, air quotes, and despite all of gloomy Gary's protestations and Fudd, I mean, the guy, I don't understand. He just looks so sad all the time. Like, his life is miserable.

He reminds me of, most people have seen Animal House except the youngsters who go see Animal House this weekend. Amazing movie, right? And Donald Sutherland, when he's up in front of the class, he's like, oh, okay. I'm sure you find Milton. I actually find Milton as boring as you find Milton, but this is my job. And I think he's like, I have a really important job. I don't have to talk about this boring Bitcoin stuff. He doesn't want to talk about it. And so he just spews nonsense because he's on the payroll of Ms. Warren. And I call them the naughty nine, the Bitcoin marketing club that someone put together, the nine haters. And look, haters are going to hate. Why are haters going to hate? Well, because they have a lot to lose. Anyone in the traditional financial services world or anyone

who has bankrolled, Ms. Warren, I'm looking at you, probably shouldn't do that. I probably shouldn't personally confront people of power, but whatever. Although it was really funny, Scott. Well, hopefully it doesn't happen today. I was doing a podcast once and I was going down my rabbit hole on FTX, which I have some pretty juicy stuff on FTX. And suddenly the lights went out and people were like, oh my God, the black hats came and got it.

I got you, man. It happens to us on Twitter spaces the other day. Oh my God, they did. It did. They shut us down. They shut us down. We get rug pulled there very regularly. So you summoned her. You said Elizabeth Warren. So now I have to bring this up, even though she's not implicitly mentioned. This is Tom Emmer, the GOP majority whip of the Congress. Today, I asked Treasury's head of FinCEN and OFAC about the Wall Street Journal's reporting on Hamas's digital asset fundraising campaign. Undersecretary Nelson confirmed on the record that the Wall Street Journal's numbers were inaccurate and that crypto was not even a popular tool for Hamas terrorists.

So we know this. The Wall Street Journal published the article. Elizabeth Warren went on a tweet campaign and then went on a letter writing campaign and then went on a raising awareness in Senate campaign saying that this was the new narrative against Bitcoin. It was being used to fund terrorism. That was outright just dispelled by on-chain data. We knew that, but they've kept going with the narrative. And now you have one of the heads of FinCEN. These are the people who know better than anyone saying this just isn't true.

And we still have Elizabeth Warren and friends writing letters and tweeting and aggressively saying that this is what crypto is being used for. Jamie Dimon, right? KML, KYC, terrorist, shut it down. Look, it's convenient for them to rail against the things that are disruptive. And this is not unique. This has happened for centuries. Centuries, there have been disruptive technologies, right? And disruptive ideas. I mean, Galileo wasn't really well-liked when he kind of said, you know, the world doesn't

or the universe doesn't revolve around the world. He wasn't well-liked and, you know, he suffered for his sins, so to speak. But every disruptive idea or every disruptive technology has been resisted by those with the most to lose. And that's logical, right? I always use the favorite example of the red flag law. Everyone knows, heard the term red flag, and we use it for different things. But where it came from is when the unions who scooped the poop of the horses and saddled the horses and made the whips didn't like the horseless carriage. So they lobbied, fancy word for corruption, paid New York City to pass a law called the red flag law that said if you had a horse's carriage,

you had to hire a human to walk in front of it with a red flag. Now, has anyone ever seen a person walking in front of a car with a red flag? No, because that was a dumb idea, but it actually was a law that got passed. And inevitably, disruptive technologies that are good, not all disruptive technologies are good, but disruptive technologies that are good catch on. They cry, complain, object, try to dissuade people through FUD and just outright lies. This movement of electronic and physical analog assets into the digital world is not going to stop. I mean, I kind of love this in the sense that for years, and I mean, literally years, like since 2017, 18, I've been saying every stock, every bond, every currency, every commodity, every asset in the world will be tokenized, meaning in line item on a ledger. Now we have Larry Fink, who is way more powerful and way more successful and way

wealthier than me saying like almost word for word and like, you know, imitation is a sincere form of flattery. So thank you, Larry. Yeah. The Larry Fink roadshow was really not on my bingo card for the last year. And I actually credit that for a lot of this movement. And I think that it's genuine. I really think that he gets it. Mooch told me he gets it. I believe him. By the way, Elizabeth Warren, I don't know if you heard this,

but there's rumor, and I reached out, that John Deaton, one of our favorite lawyers, everyone loves one of our favorite guests, just changed his address from Rhode Island to Massachusetts and is going to run against Elizabeth Warren. Wow. Did you hear that? Wow.

No, you're breaking news. That is that is awesome. And I I will now tweet my my massive support. Go check it out. Eleanor Tarrant kind of broke it. I reached out to John and he said, can't say anything yet, but I'll need your help. Which to me means very seriously considering a run against the live where i know that's an extreme long shot you know coming from here she's as powerful as it gets but man you got

to if you have an opportunity to support someone that you uh believe in going against the literal singular face of the enemy i think that that you got to take that shot. Of course. And look, I applaud those in the community. I mean, Bruce made a run and others have made runs. And Brock actually tried to make a run. He tried to run as president. So, I mean, look, and I applaud people who try to go with the enemy. The good news though,

in this case is while that would be amazing to have a legitimate, intelligent, I shouldn't say she's not. She's very smart. She probably is very smart. She probably is. She just says dumb stuff to be provocative and to create, you know, FUD. So she probably is smart. But she is, like so many, completely corrupted. And it makes sense, right? I mean, the challenge is to run for senator. So John's got a big nut in front of him, you have to raise $100 million. That's a lot of money. To even have a small shot. To even have a small shot. Oh, yeah, yeah. No, no. I mean, well, the average win, right? The average win for a Senator is $100 million. And most people don't have it. Like Meg Whitman did. She spent $103 million of her own money and lost, unfortunately. I mean, I don't know. I mean, I don't know her well, but I thought she was better than the person she was running

against. But if you don't have $100 million and you have to raise it, it turns out the people that give that kind of money to you expect stuff. And it's perfectly logical. So either we have to change the rules, like we've got campaign finance, yet you can still have a super PAC that can spend unlimited amounts of money and you can donate unlimited amounts well then where are the where are the limits so you know and again and i like robert kennedy but i don't think any independent could ever win um but you know i felt badly for the guy because he's like yeah my family's kind of offended at the ad but i didn't do it it. It was the Super PAC that dropped $7 million.

Oh, they were offended by the Kennedy ad? I thought it was great. Oh, no, no. I thought it was... I think, as I understand it, there were some members of the family that were... Some members of his family that don't support him, so they don't want him to use John's memory, legacy, I assume. Yeah. Correct. I mean, he kind of has the DNA. So, you know, invoking memories of Kennedy's past, I can't see that being a problem, but there were people who are upset. But he didn't write the ad, right? It was this massive, you know, super PAC. But anyway, we digress. I think the really important thing, I wanted to do something with you, Scott. What if we tried to make the case against Bitcoin? I said it in the intro,

maybe I'm missing the headwinds, but I just don't see them right now. That makes me scared, actually. The fact that I don't have a bear case right now is extremely concerning. So let's say that this is created by the NSA and CIA to basically funnel a worthless currency, the dollar, into this non-worthless thing so they could backdoor steal it from everybody. What about that? I'm willing to listen. Obviously, I've heard many times the argument that it was the CIA or the NSA that created Bitcoin. And I've seen some pretty compelling arguments for it, to be quite honest. Why they would do it is where I start to not really comprehend. I understand what you're saying, but man, Bitcoin's going to have to get really, really big for that to happen. So that would be the benefit of everybody who holds Bitcoin.

So is that really the worst case scenario? That's not really a headwind for price. Here's the problem. Here's the problem. Literally, you'd have to get 100%. Not 99, not 97, 100. Because as long as there's one Bitcoin or even a fraction of a Bitcoin in the hands of the independent nodes, then all that would happen if you canceled the, like, you know, Max and look, I love Max and Stacey. I love them. They're great. But when Max says, don't do the ETFs because they're just going to seize them. I'm like, well, okay. So let's pull that thread. Let's say BlackRock et al, the plan is to get the boomers to put their money in this thing, and then we're going to steal it from them. Those are the voters that put those people in. I don't think you would want to steal their stuff, but okay. Let's say, because they're not stealing the stuff from the degens and the people who have it on their ledger. They're stealing it from the boomers who are putting the boomer wrapper.

But okay, let's say they did that. What happens? Well, let's say they had a third of it. Let's say they get a third of the Bitcoin. So a third of the Bitcoin disappears. The other two thirds goes up in value. Yeah. That's a bad plan. So unless somehow you can get all of it. And here's the other reason I don't fear this.

Because when I first got into this back in 2013, and I was talking to Dan Moorhead and he was trying to convince me, and I make the joke, but it's not a joke. I was not running drugs on Silk Road. I was not a cryptography student. The first time he said the word Bitcoin to me, I was like, I don't really understand. I mean, tell me more. And he's like, well, it's infrastructure and it's this new form of money. I'm like, okay, tell me more. And it took me a while, but I eventually got it. But I remember Googling saying, I'm going to do some work. And if you Google Satoshi Nakamoto, what comes up is Intelligence Central.

Because Nakamoto is the surname of the families from the central region, central provinces of Japan. And Satoshi means intelligence. I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That's too close to CIA. So I worked up this whole thing about they had a backdoor, right? They put a backdoor and they created this and then they're going to steal all the money. And you're like, well, why would they do that? Well, if you could take shitty money, dollars, and convert it into good money, Bitcoin, and then steal them, that's a good plan. So Scott Stornetta, who is a venture

partner of ours, Scott invented the word blockchain. He and his partner, Stuart Haber, literally invented the word blockchain. And he's a pretty smart guy. He's forgotten more about blockchain and AI than I'll ever know. Cryptography, he's a cryptographic expert. And so I said to him one day. He said, do you think this could happen? And this fast, he said, no. What do you mean? You thought about it for like five seconds. He says, well, here's the thing. The way you're thinking about a backdoor cannot exist in Bitcoin because it's air-gapped. I'm like, okay. But then just as fast, he said, but ETH, yeah, it could happen on ETH. I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa. But that was really interesting that he said both of those things. I thought it was crazy. Yeah. I agree because the worst case scenario then is an extremely bullish scenario for the

holders of it. And it would literally have to be from people's cold dead hands with the passion of the holders in this community. I mean, if you've held Bitcoin from $10 to a thousand, back to a hundred to 20, back to three to- Oh no, Scott, you're just lucky. I love Lena, I can't pronounce her last name. She's the cartoonist and she has the Bitcoiners are lucky with the fire and the falling off the cliff. Yeah. But now everyone's like, well, you're just lucky. What are you talking about? Anyone who's been here for any period of time, yourself, anyone in the community. We've lived through shit. I mean, I've had clients literally say, I will fire you for even talking about this.

Like, really? I mean, I'm talking about a few percentage of your assets to diversify your portfolio. It's the best diversifying asset in the history of assets. I can actually back that up with data. It is the best diversifying asset for putting a diversified portfolio together, right? Which remember, concentrated portfolios make you rich. Diversified portfolios keep you rich. My whole career up to the last five years was about the stay rich business. I was in the stay rich game. So rich people and rich institutions came to us and said, keep us rich. Well, the way you do that is have a diversified portfolio, equity oriented, long-term focused, heavy on venture capital and innovation as an asset and heavily diversified with high volatility assets that are uncorrelated to one another.

The highest volatility, lowest correlation asset in the world over the last 15 years is Bitcoin. I keep hearing how correlated it is. It drives me nuts. What are people looking at? It's 0.0 correlated to bonds, 0.15 correlated to stocks. Those are facts. And people say, no, no, no. They'll look at one month and be like, look, they both went up or they both went down.

Seven weeks. It's a random walk in the park. Days don't matter. Weeks don't matter. Months don't matter. Correlation is a long-term statistic. And short-term moves and wiggles don't matter. In fact, and look, I love the Bitwise guys. And we're investors in Bitwise and I hope that company does really great because then I'll make some money. And I love them and I love Hunter and I love Matt. But Matt tweeted out this thing yesterday saying that he was talking to an advisor who said, you know, if we get a couple more days where stocks get hammered and Bitcoin's up,

my clients are really going to be interested. I'm like, oh my God. No. They don't get it. But that means we're early, man. That just means we're early. No, no. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. We're so early. I show this now all the time. Brian Estes sent this to me. 60-40 portfolio, sharp ratio, adding Bitcoin or crypto 10 to it, the more you add, the higher your sharp ratio goes. That's it. Why is it like, so it shouldn't matter if Bitcoin goes up when stocks go down. If you have an emotional hatred for Bitcoin, it mathematically improves your portfolio, period. This is the argument. No, no. It's period, end of story.

And look, I am fine if you want to say that, and I love Brian. Brian is a good friend and I love the man and one of the most inspirational people I know. But I'm fine if you want to say, his numbers are wrong. What do you mean? He's using the 15 years and the first five years of the data are bogus. Take them out. Take them out. It doesn't change. The numbers do go down a little bit, but not very much. Even the last 10 years, and the last 10 years are purely legit. Starting 10 years ago, you could put institutional size capital to work. The first five years, no. The first five years, it was a,

you went over from 0.003 cents to a dollar. Fine, that doesn't count. I'm okay with that. But from kind of multiple hundred to today, all of that counts. And the people are upset. Well, the volatility is going down. Yes, it is. And so did Amazon. It's 1229. Yeah.

It's just a lot of large numbers. I mean, Amazon actually, even today, has the same long-term volatility as Bitcoin. Amazon.com stock has 80 vol, eight zero. No, it doesn't. It does. It's just math. And every year in the 28 years it's been a public company, every single year, it's had a double digit drawdown. It had two double digit drawdowns last year, every single year. And the average is

31%. So every year for 28 years, on average, if you held Amazon, you lost a third of your money. But when was the right time to sell? Never. Probably never. But who bought it on the IPO and held it today? There's only five people in the whole world. Jeff, mom, dad, ex-wife, and Bill Miller. Bill Miller's cost is 7 cents. He's the only guy. And this Bill Miller senior, there's Bill Miller 4, who's great too. And they're Bitcoiners, by the way. In fact, you should have Bill Miller for on the show. I don't know if you ever had. I would obviously kill for that interview, but I have not. All right. Which is funny that you're mentioning billionaires. Literally, my newsletter this morning was entitled The Billionaire List, and I just literally rattled

off 50 people that are billionaires that are are holding and proponents of bitcoin now i don't think people realize at this point we're getting to the point where there's almost more billionaires who like it than hate it and the ones who hate it are bought anyways there's probably a lot because if you are a billionaire right this goes on you're already rich right so if you're already rich, right? So if you're already rich, you have either by luck or brute force or whatever, you have been educated, either self-educated or by your advisors or whatever. That diversification is a good thing and diversifying assets are a good thing. And all you got to do is go back and watch people like Druckenmiller or Paul Tudor Jones. They don't talk about Bitcoin moon. They don't talk, you know,

they actually don't wear moon socks like me. They don't talk about, you know, the price. They talk about it's a diversifying asset. It's like gold. It provides a hedge against the other things in my portfolio. It's the greatest macro asset in the history of macro assets. Well, what's a macro asset? Macro asset is an asset that, again, is uncorrelated to the traditional assets of stocks and bonds and cash, things that Vanguard loves. Which, you know, here's the thing. Vanguard. I shouldn't make fun of Vanguard because they're more successful than me.

They're more successful than me. They built an amazing business on the premise of we're going to lobby. Okay. We're going to lobby. We're going to pay lawmakers to install us as the default go-to application for people in their retirement. And we're going to pay a lot of money for that privilege. And then we're going to charge low fees, but on a huge amount of money. And we're going to scare people into thinking that you shouldn't do anything novel or interesting. Just passive. It, just passive.

It's just passive. And here's the thing. If that were such a great system, then the average person wouldn't have sub $100,000 in their 401k and have no ability to retire, right? If it was such a great system, right, they wouldn't allow you, if you're under 65 years of age, to have fixed income in your 401k. That should literally be against the law. I was just going to say, they don't even recommend gold.

An RIA literally is just 60-40, stocks and bonds. They don't even go as far as to say you should diversify beyond those assets to hard assets of any sort. And look, every sophisticated pool of money in the world, everyone, endowments, foundations, sovereign wealth funds, pensions that are run by intelligent human beings, has a diversified portfolio that integrates these macro assets, hard assets, other assets into the portfolio to improve the Sharpe ratio, the return per unit of risk. And now, the flip side of that is, if you're not in the get rich business, I mean, if you're not

in the stay rich business, right? Then it's okay to be concentrated. It's okay to take some punts. But again, don't take single punts. Make sure you take enough punts so that the few that do go to zero don't destroy you. And let your winners run. In fact, I was blessed, right? I came down here to North Carolina where I live now, 26 years ago. And as a kid, I was a young kid kid and I got this job to run the endowment at UNC. And one of the guys that became a mentor was Julian Robertson. He was, you know, an alum and we had a big chunk of the portfolio with him at Tiger. And for whatever reason, he took a liking to me and I got to spend a lot of time with him over the years and God rest his soul, but amazing man. I mean, maybe the best investor I've ever known. I mean, there are plenty of good investors in the world, but I've met lots of them. I got paid to talk to the smartest people in the world. That was my job. That was pretty cool. But Julian, I asked hundreds of people that work for Julian

over the years that have started some of the most successful hedge funds on the planet. I asked hundreds of people that work for Julian over the years that have started some of the most successful hedge funds on the planet. I asked them, what made Julian so great? And they're like, well, he was the most competitive person. Oh, he had the highest integrity. Oh, he was so brilliant. He could do the numbers and his big thing was never fudge the numbers. Okay. Well, that's good. But they all said one thing. And lots of, that's good. But they all said one thing. And lots of people said different things, but they all said one thing. He had an uncanny ability to double up. He never doubled down. When something went against him, he's like, I'm out. I'm wrong. I move on. But when things would go well, he would double up. But that's the antithesis of diversification.

That's the antithesis of rebalancing. I'm not in that business. For my winners, when I'm right, I'm going to press the pedal to the metal. And that is the hardest thing to do in investing, full stop. Full stop. Man, I know we're almost out of time, but I want to just make a comment on what we were talking about with the billionaires and the argument of Bitcoin being a store of value. I think the problem is that for 99% of the world, they have no value to store.

I think billionaires are getting it now, to your point, because they've already concentrated, made their wealth, and they're looking for diversifying assets, the Sharpe ratio, these things we're talking about. But these are for wealthy people. Right. Well, and to that point, Bitcoin is past the stage of the super wealth creation, right? It's not going to go from $1 to $50,000 again ever. Now, it is going to go from $50,000 to $150,000. It is going to go from $150,000 to $500,000. Those are perfectly good multiples, 3x each time, so 9x total. That's fine. But that's different than if you want to go down a level to Ethereum, Ethereum probably outperforms maybe as long as there's not a backdoor. And down below that, you know, if Solana fixes their problems, you make more money in that. If, you know, Avalanche kind of catches on.

And so you keep going down and down at the bottom, there will be new things that get created that solve new problems. Some of them can make you a thousand X, two thousand X. Look, we made two thousand times our money on Solana. It's the best multiple I've ever had in my life. And that wasn't my money. It was my client's money. And I'm happy. And I get a little piece of that. But that, and it wasn't even me, right? That was Kyle and Tushar and whatever. But that happened only because you went from an idea, the germination of an idea, to wide acceptance. I won't say

mass adoption, but wide acceptance. And there will be other projects like that, but you got to realize that for every one of those, you're going to have four, five, six, literally they go to zero. And I can name the ones that went to zero, like Harbor and others, but it's okay. And that's why investing has to be a portfolio approach and you got to have your core holdings that preserve your wealth. But to your point, if you're still in the wealth creation phase, then focus on innovation, focus on new ideas, focus on having enough exposure, and then have the ability to let those winners run, but don't ride the losers. That's funny. I tweeted this right before I let you go. I tweeted this yesterday. I want to make money in crypto, buy stuff, and wait a while. Thanks for attending my TED Talk, Greg. But to

the point of what you're saying, I immediately got maxis who I respect saying, want to make money in crypto, buy Bitcoin and wait a while, ignoring there was a crypto. Every time I say crypto, I get the Bitcoiners that come in. And I said, I don't buy Bitcoin to make money. If you're a hardcore Bitcoin maxi, you shouldn't be triggered by me saying, buy crypto and wait a while if you want to go up because of the point you just made. I'm buying Bitcoin because it is my money, right? And to hand it down to my kids, but I'm not buying Bitcoin to sell it to Biggles2x. So that's not a money-making scheme to me.

It's a great line. I buy Bitcoin because it is my money. My money. And since I'm Mark Yusko, that's MY. I like that. My money. No, I'm Mark Yusko, that's MY. I like that, my money. No, I'm just kidding. But it is. That's the whole point. And that is okay, right? Once you have money, you want to get it out of dirty fiat into a good store of value. But you can make it in the fiat world. You can get paid your wages. You can invest it into other things. I mean, no harm in owning NVIDIA. I have been wrong.

I wouldn't own it here, but plenty of people- I thought it would go down to 300s to fill a gap. So look, but the point is owning things that go up a lot, great. And you want to own Shiba and Doge, I don't give a crap. I'm not going to do it. But if you do, just remember to eventually convert it into my money, right? Which is the Bitcoin. And that's the whole point. But the Bitcoin maxi thinks only Bitcoin? Well, okay. But that just means you're not an investor. Because if you're an investor,

you're going to want to invest in venture capital and energy and AI and chips. I mean, we just made an investment in this company. And look, I'm not saying that it's going to work, but they have an idea. And they're six years in to developing a chip that would basically obsolete every chip in every cloud server in the world. Okay. That could be worth a lot of money. Now, it could fail miserably, but if their chip does what they think, which will allow you to access your information without decrypting it, I mean, that is monstrous.

Anyone who's ever played poker understands pot odds. Sometimes you make a big bet at the end, knowing that the odds are that you're going to lose, but the pot odds justify it because the size of the win is justified to put your money in. Even if you think you're going to lose. Amen. My greatest, my greatest poker moment ever, and then I'll let you go, was-

It has to be better than our poor blackjack moments. Oh, no. Well, that was fun. At least we had fun together. Okay. But yeah, that was- Mark and I lost a lot of quick money playing blackjack just to hang out. Go ahead.

Yeah. Yeah. It's just entertainment. But my best poker moment ever, David Swenson, again, God rest his soul, the father of the endowment business. So every year there'd be a big gathering of endowment executives and we'd get together and we'd play this poker game. And it was $20 buy-in, small odds, no big deal. But at the end of the night, David, who was a pretty good poker player, would pull out the wallet and start like tossing hundreds in.

And we're like, oh my God, really? He was just trying to bully everybody and buy the pot. And I was poor because I worked at a little university. But I'm like, I might have it. Take off your watch, your shoes. Exactly. And I'm like borrowing money from the guy next to me. And again, there's not a lot of money in the big picture, but I got the river card.

And I won $1,400 from David Swenson. And it made my life, right, at the time. And I came home and my wife confiscated. So those are ill-gotten. I'm going to take them and make sure- And flip them into a valuable handbag. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. I know exactly. We're over time. Thank you so much. By the way, Bitcoin at $52,800 right now. So still pushing.

You know, the longer we stay on the higher it'll go. So maybe we just stay on all day. We'll be at 60,000 before the end of the day. But Mark, it's always amazing to have you. I saw James Lavish was actually in the comments. Funny. You're always in the comments when I have James and James is now in the comments when I have you. So it was perfect. Everybody follow Mark. Thank you. And, uh, look, look, I enjoy this so much. I feel so blessed in that I tell people all the time, look, I'm a late in life venture capitalist. I came in this business. I get to hang out with young, smart, passionate, intelligent people. I have more fun today than I've ever had.

I loved my career. I loved every day of it. But I'm having more fun hanging out with you and James and Dave and all the people in this business because, and again, I don't want to be overly dramatic, but because we're changing the world. And that's cool. And it's real. And it's going to be persistent for eons. And we're a little part of that. And that's fun. Awesome.

I agree 100%. I literally said that to my wife. I was like, I'm really enjoying work these days, man. I said it this morning. It's great. I missed it yesterday. Tell your better 90% that I said hello. I enjoyed her feed as much as you did.

All right, man. Thank you, Mark. And we will speak very soon. All right. Talk to you, much as you will. All right, man. Thank you, Mark. And we will speak very soon. All right. Talk to you, man. See you. All right, guys. And before we go entirely, I do have to mention our amazing sponsor, Devi up there. Actually, they just officially launched. So you can see here, more Devi grows, more social impact, less footprint, better lives. If you haven't been following, I've been telling you guys about them basically once a week. Pretty serious team. We talk about the former head of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, the inventor of the Kindle, CIO of Starbucks, the president of Universal Pictures.

Those are the people behind this. You can see it right here. If you do decide to trade, it's on Gate.io and Uniswap. I think it's done exceptionally well, to be quite honest. I haven't even looked because I'm not in it to talk about the token. But for all the companies in the world that are working and investing and some being forced to deal with ESG, this is a blockchain that they're all looking at. I'm hearing rumors that there'll be announcements with governments, huge institutions. There's a lot coming for them. There's no affiliate link.

There's no upside for you clicking on it. For me, I just ask you to click on it down below to check it out because it's an incredible project, something that we don't take sponsors lightly. We talked to them for a very, very long time before choosing to have them on. I think it's really important that you guys understand that. And it's just absolutely worth checking it out. Oh, by the way, I mean, while I'm sharing things, I showed this to you guys before my newsletter. Do you guys subscribe to the newsletter? I write this five days a week, completely free. Today, as I said, was the billionaire list. I'll show you this. What was the last one i took a day off was it like one of them i

listed a whole bunch of altcoin charts the full bitcoin analysis here that a bunch of altcoin charts i was looking for i said hey just look for this pattern every one of these is absolutely booming right now very easy i give the basics on how i trade guys you know worth checking that out as well i'm worse chill am. I'm just terrible, terrible at promoting things, excluding myself. It's probably my worst thing. Anyways, guys, that's all I got for you today. I got to go hang out on Twitter spaces. Today, I'm also interviewing Austin Federa from Solana, a bunch of other things going on. Busy days, but having a great time. See you back for the friday five with nathaniel

whittemore and sorry chart guys didn't show up today i didn't realize he wasn't going to be here i didn't check the schedule i've been off that's my bad but he will be back i'm sure next week that's all i got guys see you later Let's go.