The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin BREAKS OUT As Global Conflict ERUPTS! Here's What's Next...

Episode Date: January 5, 2026

Bitcoin surges toward $100K as Venezuela headlines and U.S. action/capture news sparked a shock-driven rally and short squeeze, while traders watched key levels for a continuation. We also covered why... the move may have been reinforced by returning spot Bitcoin ETF inflows, alongside a broader “risk-off” bid that pushed gold and silver higher. From there we zoomed out to the macro/policy setup—Fed rate-cut debate, Tom Lee’s warning of a 10–15% pullback early in 2026—and the regulatory backdrop, including Lummis retiring, Arizona’s crypto tax push, and the growing “Bitcoin-only” narrative.

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Bitcoin is breaking out as global conflict erupts. Of course, we're talking about the situation in Venezuela. I have a feeling we're going to get in a deep conversation today about the price of oil and what everything happening in Venezuela and around the world possibly means for Bitcoin and our beloved crypto assets. We are back after a week off, which we should never, ever take here for a macro Monday. Couldn't be more excited to get the show going here. with Dave, James, and Mike. Let's go.
Starting point is 00:00:48 Good morning, everybody, and welcome back. Happy New Year. I took over a week off. And to be honest, I felt terrible. I hate missing work. Dave just informed me, though, that you're not allowed to say, happy New Year after. or what, January 3rd? I don't know. That's what some moron told me, but whatever. Is it racist or is it sexist? I have no idea what this it is and I don't really give a crap anymore.
Starting point is 00:01:11 So, you know, I have unfiltered myself. That's my New Year's resolution. Oh, God. Hey, what were you last year? You were filtered? I was filtered. Good Lord. Okay, okay.
Starting point is 00:01:22 Well, we are working on launching a show called Dave W. Unfiltered. So I guess, you know, the filtered version of Dave is, no more. RIP. But Mike, let's get it going right here. Obviously, you, I'm assuming you had a monster of a morning meeting today. Coming back after the new year, we've got some light global conflict, price of oil all over the place. Bitcoin, silver, gold, all up. Stock's also up. Mass confusion. What's going on? I cannot hear Mike. I can't hear Mike either. James, can you hear? There we go. Try again, Mike. Nope. One second. There he is. Got me now. So honest focus right away on Venezuela said there, we did have a macro model, geopolitical model was published this week and point out. It should be expecting multi-year recovery in production and overall 4% headwind and crude oil prices. I don't know how to time that. But the key things you pointed out is lower gasoline prices this year. Expect inflation to not be a problem. And I have a long-term positive KAPX input.
Starting point is 00:02:30 Data is most interested in this year is non-farm productivity, expecting 5.4% in 3Q with negative unit labor costs running at minus 1.4% unit labor costs. That's quite positive stuff. So no inflationary pressure from the labor market. Labor demand slowdown is actually much faster, expecting 80 in the non-farm payroll, expecting 80,000 non-farm payroll. in 4.6 unemployment rate, inspecting GDP around 2% with decent productivity numbers, AI-induced cost savings, adoption pace kicking in later this year. She thinks expects unemployment to remain elevated due to AI and productivity, expect to fed to cut 100 basis points this year, which is well above consensus,
Starting point is 00:03:21 which is closer to 50. Ira came on, he agreed with, on his consensus, expecting more cuts than what really happen. He thinks right now the Fed's in a mindset of looking at cuts for every other meeting. He expects the Fed will be cutting longer-term coupons and expects during the entire Trump time in office, the actual long-term coupon amounts will decrease, which I'm sure James will have some comments on. Michael Casper, our equity strategies pointed out lower order prices are constructive for equities. AI is still driving everything, so it's just a minor factor. possibly more defense spending, lower oil, better for Fed easing, but their market pulse model index is approaching manic mode.
Starting point is 00:04:07 He pointed out that for earnings next year, the key catalyst is looking for is see how the market reacts to the courts react to Trump policies, Fed chair cutting rates wildcard, and earnings still incredibly constructive. He mentioned 13 to 14% for S&P 500 earnings. Audrey Child Freedom said she's still, Freeman, said she's still somewhat barest. the dollar, obviously not today, but expects more rates from the U.S. to be a pressure factor in the dollar. Didn't talk too much about yen, which I think Dave will jump on, but she's cautious. She's not as optimistic about the Bank of Japan for higher rates, and she's quite bullish to Aussie dollar and a Swiss franc. For me, I dumped in. I started out by talking about crude oil, so I started about talking about natural gas on purpose, because natural gas is
Starting point is 00:04:52 down 5 to 6 percent today. It has not really any connection with Venezuela. That's the U.S. and Europe, and partly because it's the season, and so is the insignificance of what's happening as far as any type of supply constraint on a Venezuela. It's only going to be a longer-term supply addition. And key thing I wanted, I pointed out, is the Americas are now becoming the massive, significant price maker on a global basis for crude oil. I just gave the statistic of the excess of supply versus demand of crude oil and liquid fuels of U.S. and Canada alone is 7 million barrels a day. 10 years ago, that was a deficit of 2 million barrels a day. Now, you add on to that
Starting point is 00:05:30 to Venezuela, Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, Guyana, all that's incrementally and more and more supply. So OPEC doesn't matter. Prices are going down and still pressure factor. And then I just, I dug into, I pointed out that what's happening in gold to me is still pure frightening. One key thing I mentioned is that gold to S&P 500 ratios, 1.55. The first time it reached that ratio is September, 1929. It started last year, 2.7. So the amount of ounces per one S&P 500 is declining. I'd still expect that to drop, but the problem is gold is just so expensive. Now, even like crude oil, 77 barrels of WTI per one ounce of gold. It's just frighteningly expensive. And I reminded people that we've never had gold and silver
Starting point is 00:06:22 rally at this velocity with the stock market volatility going down and still low. And I ended, I fully pointed out that I think that what happened in cryptos last year by the Bloomberg Galaxy crypto index rallying 20%, and dropping 20% is a worthy short this year. Maybe you get a 10% rally. Obviously, if it rallies 20% that would stop out the short, but to me it's more likely to head lower. Back to you. Yeah, James, I want to go to a point you made before we started, which is let's talk about
Starting point is 00:06:50 why everything's up, right? And I think you talked about in your newsletter. I mean, I just, when Mike brought it up, I looked at the Japanese 10-year yield, that gapped up today, nicely. I mean, that's a pretty big move, you know, for a Japanese yield that was flat for a few decades. And obviously, as Mike sort of hinted at, we have gold up, Bitcoin up, silver up, generally stocks up, bonds up. Yeah, it's kind of, it's, well, I think what we're seeing, honestly, is it's a little bit of a barbell trade. You've got, gold and metals just they're just screaming higher because of geopolitical tensions and and fears about the long-term effects of deficits and inflation and so you've got that on one side and the other
Starting point is 00:07:37 side you've got the relentless AI trade which is just it's just not stopping and that's the you know it's portfolio manager saying I've got to have exposure to these you know these AI companies and the the largest story across the entire world for for the economies and like this is literally it's not just a play on whether these these companies are going to have solid earnings it's whether this AI phenomenon is or you know the future of of the economies are built are going to be built around AI. And so that's one side of it. And the other side is, well, I've got to have something in my portfolio that can protect me against this deflationary trade, you know, meaning the deficits are
Starting point is 00:08:37 not going to stop. I mean, it's cute that we think that we're going to, that we're going to solve all of this fraud and all of the improper payments, whatever. It doesn't matter which government you have in place. It doesn't matter which administration is. This is just not stopping, you know. I did see that Waltz just said he's not going to get real. He's not going to go for re-election. So what's going to happen?
Starting point is 00:09:01 You're going to have somebody else replace him that likely the stuff just doesn't stop, you know. Fraud is systemic. You can, yeah, you can. I'm an affiliate voter. I hate the political side of it. But like, I live in Florida. And if you think what's happening in Minnesota on daycare fraud is bad, take a look at the history of health care fraud in Florida.
Starting point is 00:09:20 It X's it, and Rick Scott oversaw literally the largest fraud in Medicare history when he was a CEO of Columbia and ended up as our governor and a state senator. Right, exactly. So it's systemic. That's the word that you used. And I agree with that, Scott. It's systemic, and that's not going to stop. So you are going to have long-term inflationary pressures, in my opinion.
Starting point is 00:09:46 that's just going to continue now the question is and this is why it's kind of a barbell trade you know you have geopolitical tensions you've got worries about AI being some sort of overbought bubble like mike talks about every single week you just have to look at the charts and see this stuff is just i mean it has been screaming higher relentlessly so what do you do do you own bonds to help yourself well we saw what kind of trade that was in 2020 that ended up being a very bad trade for people to own bonds, long bonds, not just cash. There was no, there was no, you know, yield in, in Fed funds and money markets and people weren't sitting there.
Starting point is 00:10:28 But, and yeah, so this is another thing is that what I wrote about this weekend was the TLT being a pretty crowded short trade. And for those, for those investors who are not as experiencing this stuff, you know, expecting there to be a possible short squeeze on this. it's not it's not the same as a stock which has limited supply of shares so i explained in the newsletter how that functionally actually structurally works and how logistically you borrow shares from a prime broker to to short these things and where those shares are coming from the etif is different so tl tl is an et f that follows the price of long bonds and so that means that it owns
Starting point is 00:11:11 underlying exposure to long bonds. And so, but the, the question here is just because it's such a large short out there, does it mean that it could squeeze higher like a game stop? And the answer is emphatically no. It's not the same structure. You have authorized participants who actually go out there and create these shares. And if there's an arbitrage between where the NAV is and where, meaning what the underlying value of, what that what that ETF holds and where the ETF is trading they can go create shares to take
Starting point is 00:11:47 advantage of that arbitrage it's a completely different function and and logistically how you how you short these things so it's just just be aware that that's that's that's that's that's not the way that this will play out there's not going to be a short squeezing ETF in my opinion Dave maybe you have more light to shed on that because you've you've actually been an authorized participant I believe so but you know it's just it's just something for people to be aware of now the question I brought up in the in the newsletter because people have heard me say for a long time I'm a long-term bear bond a bond bear sorry it's well you know it's still really it's still dark here so I'm finding my footing but but you know being being a bond bear doesn't mean that you could be wrong long
Starting point is 00:12:37 short term and Mike poor Mike has learned this the hard way like we all have over the long haul of being investors in wall street you can be right overall and be wrong short term like right long term short long short long short so and that's just you know but the question is where's a long bond going and i still believe that structurally we have deficits that are going to continue to put pressure on these things and unless we have some sort of, you know, AI deflationary miracle, which would not be a miracle for the economy, truly. Or we have the Fed step in and actually do real QE and yield curve control.
Starting point is 00:13:25 The long bond is going to be where it is. So, but that's kind of, that's kind of what that newsletter discussed and the push and pull of that of that trade. And are we on the right side or the wrong side of that? and I'd be interested to hear what what Mike has to say about that now going forward off of it. Well, I mean, my opinion, Dave, and being an authorized participant before, this is just a different structure. There's no way, there's no structural short squeeze in an ETF. You're right. I mean, but, but you can certainly get squeezed in bond futures. You can certainly, which is what the, which is what the people are using to hedge. You can certainly get squeezed on the ability to create because the way that bond creation works is there's baskets of what's on the run versus off the run for the TLT, et cetera.
Starting point is 00:14:17 I don't want to delve into the plumbing. It doesn't matter. What you need to know is where the push and the pull is coming from. So it's whose interest is it for the U.S. to be at a, what are we, 170 basis points over the rest of the world now on average, Mike? I don't know, whatever the number is, something like that. Whose interest is that, is it in to be for that? Now, why do we have, are we paying structurally higher rates than the rest of the world? It's because dollars in the reserve currency.
Starting point is 00:14:44 Every single time some human being makes the statement, the world is getting de-dollarized. While I don't believe that to be true, if you do believe that to be true, then you are bullish on the long bond. You may not realize you're bullish on the long bond, but you are. Why? Because if the U.S. wasn't the reserve currency, why the hell would the U.S. bond rate be higher than Italy? I mean, it just, it's completely illogical. And so, and, you know, Mike points out that the Chinese situation on their long bond and their yield is well under ours as well. Same thing.
Starting point is 00:15:16 So, you know, there's a lot of push and pull that goes on. And the bond markets are the most manipulated markets on the planet. And they're manipulated by monopolists in their own countries. So the JGB is manipulated by the Bank of Japan. The U.S. is definitely manipulated by the Fed and the other G7 central banks. keeping a regime long. Betting in that game is perilous. And so most of the smart money bets on the,
Starting point is 00:15:43 bets on the side of where they believe the interests of the monopolists are. And so just understand that, because that's one of the reasons volatility is muted. There is no person who could make the statement. Well, I know that the U.S. is going to print $6 to $8% every single year and purchasing power is going to go down that much, you know, or at least the supply is going to go up. So I'm going to be happy with my 4% yield on the long bond. Nobody's making that economic rational statement.
Starting point is 00:16:16 What they're saying is this is the benchmark by which I am measured. And so I'm going to hold some of that benchmark because I won't get fired for holding some of that benchmark. Or if they're in the hedge fund universe, they're saying I can lever up a hundred times and be smarter than the average bear and capture a 20 basis point move one way or another over the next year, levered up, you know, 20 times or more, and have good performance. And so they're doing that trade. And all of this is a lot of plumbing and stuff and all the armchair analysts get it wrong. You know, they don't understand that's what's actually happening.
Starting point is 00:16:53 And so really, when you're looking at bond yields, you know, we haven't had bond vigilantes for a very long time. The last time we saw even a breath of bond vigilanteism was after Powell tried to put, you know, keep, you know, get Kamala into office with the 50 basis point cut over. And you saw what that did to his credibility. In my mind, he lost his credibility by being, by doing that. And I think a lot of the market did because we watched the short rate go down 50 basis points and long rates go up 50 basis points because that was clearly politically done.
Starting point is 00:17:25 And a lot of people are saying, well, the same thing's going to happen when whoever Trump nominates and they bring, you know, long rates out. I don't know. It's a bit different. One is to try to influence an election. Another is to try to implement an economic policy. And we can talk about what those will be. So, you know, I look at the most important point on the long bond is the denominator. And the answer to why is everything going up? Well, there's different reasons. I mean, Mike said it. If corporate profits are going to are expected to grow by 14 By the way, corporate profits are already at the highest percentage of GDP in recorded history. Expect the stock market to continue to perform.
Starting point is 00:18:03 At the same time, we have printing, printing, printing, and printing, and the dollar is reserve currency when the exporters, the producers of crap, China, and their allies, would have been hoarding gold. So expect gold to go up because they can push on it. And there's lots of momentum money still plumbing into gold and silver. Now, silver, which we should talk about, is another thing entirely. Silver, if you look at the history books, you start to learn the longer term, and I mean very long-term stat-arb trade, says silver will revert, to use Mike's words,
Starting point is 00:18:41 because I love reversion. Silver's natural reversion would be to where it traded vis-a-vis gold in the 70s after Nixon unlocked the gold window. And if you look in the 70s, the average was in the 30s. It traded as low as like 31, 30, et cetera. It traded at 40, but it was in the 30s. We're now at, what, 52, 53, something like that. I mean, it's moved a bunch to, you know, this morning.
Starting point is 00:19:04 It's moving a lot. But, and, you know, if you look at it since that time, it's been as high as 120, I think, and it's probably averaged around 80. And so now people are looking at it with recency bias saying, well, at 50, oh my God, you know, it's bound to revert back to 80. Ask yourself why. Why did gold get so much higher than silver? And the answer is because gold got a huge monetary premium.
Starting point is 00:19:29 That's the fact. And that monetary premium was the only thing sustaining it, except that the world, the entirety of the gold bug universe has believed that gold's fair value against the dollar is somewhere between, depending on who you listen to, the lowest I've heard out of a gold bug is 5,000. Most people think 10,000. They think it's been manipulated lower all of this time.
Starting point is 00:19:52 So it's a really interesting, seriously. I mean, if you go down that rabbit hole, you would know what I mean. It's like going down the Bitcoin rabbit hole. Right. A million dollars by 2028. But the point is silver is in huge structural deficit has been in structural deficit for a while. Only the difference, the change over the last three years, that's the massive change that people don't want to think about here is the massive difference by having the cost.
Starting point is 00:20:18 contract for differences market. So doing some research over the weekend. And the best estimates are the contract for differences market, which is it offers 100x leverage on all this crap, is bigger than the CME for silver, larger. That's wild. And the CME to heightening margin requirements, when when everyone thought it was going to prick the bubble down to 50 and you heard me two weeks ago saying, nope, it's actually long term bullish. And people thought I was nuts. And the reason I said it was long-term bullish, is because short-term bearish, but long-term bullish, is because market makers now have a much harder time hedging. Because the more you hurt margin, the ones who are using that margin of the market makers who have to make markets onto the CFD market.
Starting point is 00:21:04 And so if the retail FOMO crowd goes back into silver and it starts basing and starts moving higher again, you know, you can expect that relentless kind of rally. And in fact, you know, today we're back up over 75 again, right? You know, so we're, and we'll see what actually happens. We don't know whose advantage this is. And China's export controls are a big deal. If they give out licenses to all the people who are currently exporting it, then expect silver to slide back into the 60s.
Starting point is 00:21:31 If they don't expect to continue to rise. And this is the sort of things going on there. So we talked about stocks. We talked about gold and silver. Yeah. Crypto. Yeah, I want to say, like, give you your flowers. You kind of have been pounding the pavement on this idea.
Starting point is 00:21:45 of the hotball of money moving into metals and maybe that that was part of the reason that crypto hasn't seen as much interest as it has in the past and you know we have platinum making new all-time highs palladium making new all-time highs silver making all-time highs i can't help but look at that as a corollary for what we used to see in the crypto market when bitcoin would make a high if we make bitcoin the corollary to goal how the money would trickle down into all coins and we would see kind of these massive moves the upside that said i will say just very very very quickly. We have Bitcoin, Ethereum, Salana, XRP, the only ones I looked at this morning, all breaking above their 50 daily MAs again. Ethereum's actually back above its 250 MA, which has not
Starting point is 00:22:25 happened. So there's a lot of reasons to have some renewed interest here in crypto. And I say that because I want Mike to argue with me before we move on to Venezuela. I'd like to make a point on crypto before because I think it is extremely important. Look, I made the comment on when I retweeted the space this morning that 2025 should be considered from a crypto perspective, a mulligan. Now, it's not really a mulligan. It was a, it was the Trump administration or Donald Trump himself took a gun, pointed it at foot of the crypto market and pulled trigger. You know, the Trump meme coin, Melania cream meme coin and Miele's bullshit Libre meme coin really, really, really damaged the, the crypto market in ways that we hadn't really seen before and took a lot of
Starting point is 00:23:13 interest out of the market. And so the market really was harmed in terms of the popular opinion and the fact that it got polarized, it basically meant half of the United States was not going to touch it. Because literally our country is so frigging polarized that if Trump says, A, then there's half the country is going to say, yay, yeah, and the other half of the country is going to say, boo. It doesn't matter what he says. He could say the sky is blue and you would get that. So I read this one on this weekend. I thought it was pretty good. He could literally save a drowning child in the ocean
Starting point is 00:23:50 and the liberals would come out and scream that he's starving the sharks. Yeah, that sounds about right. So I think crypto definitely got put into that. I would expect that the rest of this year, I mean, yeah, his kids are going to keep talking about it because that's their business. But he's going to be, I think, let his people do the talking. We'll see. Maybe that's time.
Starting point is 00:24:11 I wrote a newsletter this morning that was about my predictions for 2025, and one of them actually was the return of the anti-crypto army because of those exact things that you just talked about. Right. But I think they're all of Trump's involvement in the industry. Yeah. And I think if that happens, that's the most bullish possible thing for crypto, because it will cause the midterms not to go the way that everyone expects them to do.
Starting point is 00:24:34 All I know is that we used to do well when Gary Gensler said stupid things. And now that everything's so positive, we don't have an enemy. But go ahead, Mike. Exactly. That's what I miss about Gary Gensel, Elizabeth Warren. They volunteered to be the antagonist, to be the Aaron Burrs of history. And I thank them for that because they give you something perfect. It was like, oh, now we've got a great, you know, here's the dark side.
Starting point is 00:24:58 Well, here's the bright side. But the key thing I want to tilt over to and show a few on my screen is the nickname I saw. I earned a weekend ago was called McRetard. I love that nickname because that was, it was just, you know, sometimes McAdidot, but it was, I saw that on X. I'm like, thank you very much. Because first of all, now I know your position. I know you feel concerned about it.
Starting point is 00:25:23 I'm just a strategy just making a call. I'm not, I don't have positions on. But the same feeling I got last year, I mean, I started not the same thing, but I was getting that feeling from the questions people asked me about cryptos a year ago. they would start out with, okay, McRetard, why are you thinking this? I'm getting the same thing. I just got it this morning in silver. I'm like, I'm sorry if you haven't been on silver for the last five years.
Starting point is 00:25:45 Some of us have been bullish, this space and medals forever, but you have to take the pain. Now that it's gone up, the allow, point out the lessons of silver. And I'm going to show you this chart in a second. Here's, first of all, the silver. This is the silver versus gold chart. It's broken down. Silver is just way too expensive versus gold now historically. I didn't think it'd break below 80.
Starting point is 00:26:04 and it did. On the same scales, I have gold versus the crude oil. It's crude oil. Mike, the gold silver part, could you go back to 1970? I can't right now in 1985. In 1970, I can't. But this one only goes, let me just see if we can. I doubt it. Let's double check. But I want to just finish the key theme I had on this, and then we'll go back to that. It's not doing it yet. Is the, here we go. So we go back to 1970. The trend is typically higher, 1970 right there and right now it's at 58 the mean median low the last few years has been closer to around 7580 so it's broken down can it stay below this 10 year low the key thing i want to point out is those the bottom line in this space now it feels to me very much like cryptos last year it's the
Starting point is 00:26:53 up too much risks and highly elastic commodities i mean that's what to me cryptos are less commodities are just highly elastic and people are learning that the hard ways just never want to to buy silver after it goes up this much partly is the lessons of 1979 the last time it had a rally like this it closed at $32 an ounce and this year as well it was 28 but i want to tilt over to my key theme i think's going to be this year and show this on the chart and that's tlp i think tl tl t is going to be one of the best trades this year because i look at tl t right now you get around four point almost five percent of return if the price is unchanged on the year you're getting five percent i look at this as a put on the smp 500 um with no time the
Starting point is 00:27:34 Okay, virtually no downside and nothing but outside. That's the way you look at. Now, that's my view. So once I'm showing you here, it's just the 30-year yield. The last time, 30-year yields running at 4.86. The last time it ended the year of a 5% was 2003. Now, I like the views that inflation, the deflationary forces now are less than now. I think they're more so than ever.
Starting point is 00:27:53 But what I show you in this chart is copper and the S&P 500 on the same scale. The bottom line is why I see TLT or the U.S. bond market is basically just, to put and that's me 500 now is that's all that matters when you get to 2.3 times GDP. If it drops 10%, that's almost 25% of GDP. It has to stay up. So I rope that into copper. Copper industrial metals, industrial metals last year were up about 20%. The total market cap of the global stock market cap went up to $151 trillion, according to a Bloomberg metric.
Starting point is 00:28:25 That was about 22%. You see the connection? Industrial metals will go up as long as stock market goes up. Copper will go up as long as stock market goes up. Cryptos have to have the stock market go up or else they're going down. And either way, I think they're going down. That, to me, is what's happening in this year. And that's what's shifted.
Starting point is 00:28:40 Gold is telling this. By gold's rally last year, gold has never rallied at this velocity ever without stock market volatility going up. And again, it's the first week of the new year. Everybody buys. It's the time to rope in. But it's going to be matter in the next few weeks. It's going to really make a difference.
Starting point is 00:28:56 So could I go back to that chart, the gold, silver chart? You want to put that back up again. And Dave, when you're done with this point, I want to talk. Venezuela. Yeah, but I think that if you go back and look at the 70s, I think in the middle of the 70s is where we're going. Okay, that's about 35. That's exactly right. That's exactly where I think we're going. And why do I think that? I think that the reason for gold to be above, to have gone to this level, there was lots of reasons. It was, you know, if you believe the Fiat era is being shaken, if you believe the geopolitical order is,
Starting point is 00:29:32 changing. And if you look at what was happening in the 70s in the geopolitical order, I think it's the closest thing to what we have today. You made the point about elasticity. Silver is in a structural deficit. There is literally no price elasticity of supply in silver. You can't get it. Stop. Stop right away. Silver can come out of your underwear drawer. My mother just said she just sold a silver bracelet. That's the thing. Don't forget. Silver comes out of underwear drawers. Over. That's, I'm totally, I totally hear you. I know. Hey, look, dude, you know, do you see what these are? Here, hold it up to the camera. We're talking, you know, yeah, you know, 50 cent, whatever. Yeah, yeah. I solo Jews, like we can see that. I love those. There you go. I give him away his gifts.
Starting point is 00:30:19 He's got, you know, I have, I have plenty of silver that I, that I've been thinking about. And I can tell you that it's in the U.S. because the silver smelters are running full. full bore you literally full bore you cannot get uh you're getting discount to the spot price and i'm not going to sell it until you until the price because i think the price is going to be elevated for a while i'm not selling it until uh until you get back to spot price because it doesn't make any sense to right it's the same thing is true with that that is true but the the mining of silver is is is not as elastic as it used to be and the industrial demand is huge and increasing Things like the new battery technology, things like basically everything that we're using, cruise missiles, they all use enormous amounts of it.
Starting point is 00:31:06 You point out copper, and that copper chart's hugely important, right? Copper is so correlated to the S&P and to the global GDP and everything that's going on. You know, silver is more correlated to the AI trade. So just understand that there are some very interesting dynamics. This AI trade and the metatrends, EVs, right? and then the AI trade and alternative energy are all silver bullish and have all been worked through. And so honestly, when you start looking at supply demand dynamics, to think that we can't return to a gold server ratio that we had in the 70s before gold took on its own, you know, big
Starting point is 00:31:45 monetarist thing relative to Fiat is, I mean, I think that that's a perfectly reasonable outcome and it could happen. And that's really the only point. I'm just talking about a much longer term reversion than you are. That's all. Let me give you my 2026 outlook for silver. Momentum's heading towards 100. It can easily get 100 and back towards 50. On a first standard deviation move on annualized volatility, which is around 30%, that's a normal range. The key thing to remember is everything you pointed out, Dave, we've been in place for years. These are things that what happens in markets, once it hits the mainstream, that people who don't dig in the market, and like I had a guy this morning, give me the Mick Idiot.
Starting point is 00:32:25 the Mick Retard question because I wasn't pointing how bullish I was in silver, because that's the point is you're supposed to be bullish these things years ago. I'll give you an example of like gold. I was bullish for Cold Break above 2000 in 21, 22, and 23. Finally did in 24. That took three years of being Mick Retard and it finally broke out. The lessons you learn is do not buy these levels. I'm just cautioning people that risks are enormous here.
Starting point is 00:32:49 After you go up, that's why I tilt over the TLT. Just imagine a year where we don't, it's completely assumed that's some people, 500 is going to be up 10%. Just imagine if we end up down 10%. That's a massive trade. It's the key thing to remember. Look at that divergent weakness or strength. Now, silver's already had its run. Good luck buying it here. TLT was up for about 5% last year, despite the S&B 500 total return, up 15%. See that, despite that excess inflation kicking it, but the key thing I'll remind you also, even copper. Copper's approach, and it's one of the best before in commodity state, not because of what's happening in Venezuela, because it's just been
Starting point is 00:33:25 the momentum, but it might get to near six. It probably is. It's 591, but every single time in history it's done that, it's correct significantly, particularly when everybody gets lost. Now, the fundamentals are no nuns. We all get that, but the bottom line is deflation in China when you talk industrial metals. And that's that yield in China, 1.86. That's like iron ore hasn't gone up. Crude oil hasn't gone up. So these are industrial metals that are, there's major science that they can easily just revert. Yeah. Now, the funny part is, is that change some of the numbers, and you and I agree. Silver is going to be volatile this year. I don't, what my assertion, is we have not seen the blow off top yet, and we will see a blow off top. And I just think
Starting point is 00:34:05 that blow off top could be higher than you do. Don't disagree. Is, yeah, you know, once you get that blow off top, there's going to be an unrelenting bear market because people are going, there's a huge incentive among all the people who are using it to drive the price down and to push and kick this momentum trade out and suck the life out of the momentum trade. So you and I don't disagree. I'm just stating my target is based upon a gold silver ratio of that. And the gold, I think, has some structural tailwinds from China and other places that are probably buying it and have hoarded it. And so we'll see what happens. But I do think that this is a year. And I made the statement. My prediction is simple. I think that gold, silver stocks will end the year up. Well, we'll go up at some point. I think the
Starting point is 00:34:50 stock, I want to talk about the stock market a bit in predictions. I think the stock market's going to have some interesting things going on. But I think Bitcoin will outperform all of them for a bunch of different reasons. I think that it's absorbed every body blow and has the market is like, you know, if you think of a bellows, you know, in terms of what, whatever, all the air is out of the crypto market, right? All the crypto speculators are out. And so any sign of strength, any sign of movement, any sign that the supply overhang isn't there anymore, you will see a rally. And it will be a historic rally in nominal terms, but in percentage terms, it's not going to be as big as other historical rallies. I mean, I don't think we're seeing
Starting point is 00:35:32 a 5x or 10x like we've seen in other cycles. But a 2x, 2 to 3x, I absolutely think can happen. And that's actually my prediction is somewhere around two to two, between two and three times from here because of this reason, and I don't think the stock market will be down. Now, the stock market, there's one other prediction that we should make. I just want to put a line in the sand. The thing, I don't know that the bubble gets pricked, because honestly, with earnings projected to grow by 14 percent and AI driving earnings better vis-a-vis GDP, I don't see a massive stock market correction, but I do see one massive headwind to a lot of growth stocks. And that's a simple thing, a massive incoming wave of IPOs. The massive IPOs of all of the AI companies
Starting point is 00:36:21 are going to take oxygen from a lot of today's growth companies. And you should watch for that because it is literally what happened in 2000. It was after all of the IPOs that happened in 89. And it takes a while for this to occur. I don't know if we'll see the impact of that this year or not, but watch the space. How the anthropic XAI, Open AI, IP, go and how much money and where that money's coming from is going to be very relevant. But we'll talk about that more when we get closer to it. I want to ask, so James, Dave obviously said he's bullish on Bitcoin this year. I also am, but first, I would love your take on what you think for 2026,
Starting point is 00:36:59 but that I do want to pivot to Venezuela because we have these kind of takes about Venezuela that the price action right now of Bitcoin is a result of what's happening in Venezuela, that gold and silver are result of what's happening in Venezuela. I think you could just make the argument that's the top of the price. the year and all these things are up a bit. It's coincidence. It's coincidence. I mean,
Starting point is 00:37:17 $90,000 is not like, if it jumped to $110 or something, if it was like a silver, you know, like when the banking collapsed or something and we saw Bitcoin make a 20% move overnight, that would get my, you know,
Starting point is 00:37:29 get me going. It just seems like we're ranging. But go ahead. I would love to. Yeah, no, I agree. I agree. It's just a year-end phenomenon for, for a Bitcoin where you had
Starting point is 00:37:39 massive, you know, loss harvesting tax loss harvesting i think at the end of the year for hedge funds especially ones who had two-sided trades on and so you had you had part of that going on then you had uh you know obviously there's been massive debate on twitter whether or not oh gs are selling but every single chart i've seen is suggested that they had been selling relentlessly since July. And they just let up this last couple of weeks. So, and now they look like they're kind of done. And maybe it was tax loss harvest for them too. Or, you know, the way that they were trading around them. Who knows? Because they have obviously billions of dollars of long-term
Starting point is 00:38:27 gains in there overall. But it's hard to tell who's been doing what. You just have one of the things that you have in Bitcoin that other securities don't have is you could you could literally sell something for loss turn around and buy it um the next day and it's not going to be a wash sale so it's just a different it's a different yeah it's a different animal so i did it with some coins that i actually wanted to hold i had some losses at the end of the year i sold and uh re-bought at the exact same price and uh took took the loss yeah so if you bought if you bought bitcoin at the beginning of the year, you could, you know, beginning of 25, you could have sold it at the end of 25, bought it back the next day and harvested some tax losses, you know, it's just, it's just the way
Starting point is 00:39:14 it is. So it's kind of a, I just think that that's been keeping it in a range. Where it goes from here, I think it goes higher this year. That's all I know. I don't know. I hate price predictions. Yeah. I have no idea. I mean, I think it just gives it a separation of general trajectory expected by each person here we know mike kind of down i think all of us sort of up i guess what i would ask all of you and maybe we go to mike first on this like the impact of what actually happened in venezuela there's been some bad taste dave will tell you that some of them are mine um not about what's happening in venezuela but how do you i mean i guess handicap the the rhetoric to some degree right so we have what happened and we can all unpack
Starting point is 00:39:57 whether it was right, wrong, I think it's both. So there's that, right? I think Maduro being gone. I love how everybody's a geopolitical expert. Right, but I think that it's good that Maduro is gone. No question there. What I question as sort of like a libertarian leaning is whether it was our job to do it and what comes next because the United States has a very long history of people celebrating
Starting point is 00:40:18 in the short term but being very bad for the people of the country in the long term when we affect regime change, whether you like that or not. But then you have, you know, Trump coming out and saying, hey, we need Greenland too. And, you know, what about Columbia and things like that? So, Mike, I mean, you know, is there a, does this change at all sort of the environment or is it, is this on your D.I. list? I don't know where it stands. It's very important. One thing is that just my colleague sitting behind me had to flee our Caracas office.
Starting point is 00:40:42 She was in news because she was physically threatened by the Maduro administration. That's with her family. And so there's a significant elation of hope here in Miami that, oh, maybe Cuba's next and maybe Colombia. because most of the people, tons of people you meet here, are refugees and very successful because they're very motivated, but they all have family and friends. So the excitement is in late, obviously, I mean, once peaceful transition to power and we all know that's a risk. But the key thing from a market standpoint is, yeah, it makes sense that you'd see a little
Starting point is 00:41:13 bid in safety assets like gold and bonds. But crypto is, to me, that's more what's happening for the time of year. The significant so for Venezuela is the macro, I think. For crude oil, it's a pressure factor. Overall, it means more supply. It's the geopolitics, which you could Dave and you and James, I think, can digger better than me. But I'll just point out in Miami, there's so much optimistic hope about what's happened. But I want to tilt over a little bit.
Starting point is 00:41:41 Now, just point out my few views on, because we were talking about cryptos, then you can tilt back to Venezuela, unless you want to go there. I just had to show you two quick charts on cryptos, and why Muglone is still a retard or McDiard bearish, whichever would want to call me. And this is just looking at Bloomberg Galaxy Crypto Index. I think this is a worthy short. It was down 20% last year. I over relate with S&P 500.
Starting point is 00:42:03 It's the same level as it was in 2021. S&P 500 is March tire. It's just horrible performance, high volatility, market piled on, great back test, and now the masses are in it, great trades over. Show me the proof. And then I look at the Bloomberg Galaxy Cryptoenix divided by S&P 500. It's been flatlined since 2017. So it's showing nothing.
Starting point is 00:42:23 And then here's the short little trade. This is, we're in the pinprick. We're in the breakout, say, this is the S&B Bitcoin. It's stuck in that narrow range. It's ready to break out. So, coiled spring, it's got to set above 94,000. Maybe it does in the short term. But the bottom line is volatility, 30-day volatility, is the lowest, absolute lowest since
Starting point is 00:42:41 2003, when it broke above the 100-week moving average. Now it's just hovering on that support. The key thing, it's never hovered on 100-week moving average without going below it. So maybe it's different this time. But to me, that's the key thing to watch is that in this absolutely has to be up. And that's why I want to tilt over to a question to all of you and Dave. If you're bullish Bitcoin, I suspect you're bullish the stock market because, okay, I just don't see if we can have a year up with Bitcoin, the stock market down. Now, that's pretty substantial paradigm shift.
Starting point is 00:43:11 That would be quite positive. But right now, I think the sense is, yeah, we all get it. Greatest back test in history. Masses are in it. It trades over. Yeah. I think that this is a massive recent. bias issue, and it completely unignores the fundamentals.
Starting point is 00:43:28 If you look at the growth of the Bitcoin network over the same period of time, it's up 7X. It's sort of like ignoring Nvidia's profits and looking at Nvidia's chart from four years ago and saying, where would it go? And if you did that, then you really would be McRetard, but you're not, and you wouldn't do that. So I think that it's extremely important to look at the fundamentals, because if you don't look at the fundamentals, then looking at charts just as line squiggles, you miss the big moves, you miss Amazon, you miss Apple, you miss invidia, and you'd miss Bitcoin. I think it's as simple as
Starting point is 00:44:00 that. I think it's a large part of it. Bitcoin, by all accounts, when Luna happened in 2022, there were waves of forced selling. People who didn't want to sell had to, or if they're, and I hate dredging this up, Scott, because, I mean, it's still painful for you. When Voyager collapse, you lost piles of money, when Celsius collapse, a lot of people lost piles of money. When FTX collapsed, people lost piles of money, and many people were forced. And through all of that, forced selling from people who didn't want to sell, who were told they had to, all of that, they got Bitcoin down to $16,000. That's what happened.
Starting point is 00:44:40 And at the same time, the network is 7x or 6.5x, what it was back then. So to think that Bitcoin could go to those levels because of chart squiggles, I think is the height of silliness. I just think it's literally silly. It's the same thing as people who predicted Google and in video were massively overvalued five years ago. And oh, by the way, there are a lot of people who thought the Mag 7 were overvalued five years ago, a lot of people, many of which I respect. I'm not saying you're one of them. Like I have no America. Dave, it's because of what you said that makes them even more bearish Bitcoin. It's shown divergent weakness against what used to be a fundamental factor. The market has changed.
Starting point is 00:45:17 The answers have changed. Now what matters in cryptos? is we've put in a significant peak with the election of Donald Trump. That was a Faustian bargain. It's working out that way. And now we do see this is a space that tracks an unlimited supply of cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin was just the lucky of being first. Stop. No, I'm not.
Starting point is 00:45:32 Part of my unfiltered is don't say stupid shit. Bitcoin is not unlimited. Bitcoin is no more similar to Solana or Pump. Fun, you know, Pepe the Frog than Nvidia is to General Motors. But let's talk about that because the general world believes what Mike says. They don't understand it. If you talk to any normie out there, they do not understand the difference. They just think it's the oldest one.
Starting point is 00:46:01 So I believe there's an arbitrage there. And the arbitrage is in knowledge. And that knowledge, as it does come to market, more and more people understand it. They understand how these ETFs work and I bit. and it's a gateway to getting a piece of something that is a digital gold. It's a gold upgrade digitally. Now, that's going to take some time, and it's going to take the mainstream media to stop hammering it every single time it moves.
Starting point is 00:46:32 But, you know, it's that, that again, it's a learning process. And that presents, it presents opportunity. That there's a, there's a knowledge arbitrage going on there. Right. I'm going to a wager. Here's a wager. Mike's got a bet. We got a little.
Starting point is 00:46:50 TLT beats I bit this year. TLT beats I bit. That's my view. That's the year. No. We'll take that way. Good. So McClone's the retard with hopefully I'll be in here for you.
Starting point is 00:47:01 I'm telling you right now on. We call you McRibb. Because we like to rib you, Mike. We're calling you. I appreciate. I love it. It's love. Man, it's love.
Starting point is 00:47:11 A big family. I like the gloom better, per se. I know you to be a. smart dude. You're a gloomy dude. Yeah, but we're allowed to say retard again, Dave. And that's the what's like, oh, okay, well, cool. Or whatever. I don't know. In the 80s. Yeah, go ahead.
Starting point is 00:47:24 I think that the, the point that is missed when you look at 2025 is people just keep missing something is that for Bitcoin to become digital gold, there need to be wave upon wave of distribution. You can't have Bitcoin being held by the people who were all cypherpunks and have Bitcoin being digital gold. It has to end up in the pockets of the average people and in pools of capital all around the world. And in order for that to happen, people have to sell. Which we had, we had a looks like about a million coins,
Starting point is 00:47:58 more than a million coins came out of old pockets. By the way, I think it's double that if you take it in different treasuries into account. And, you know, the tax, you know, that are, but while it lasted, people, you know, fell over themselves to be able to want a tax-efficient basis. you know, find exit liquidity from morons like me who bought Nakamoto and others, you know, buy a lot, but you know, whatever. It's like you, you see, you saw that. So we saw a lot of distribution last year. Now, is it going to continue? Will it continue to hold it down? I mean, when you talk about the stock market going up and Bitcoin went down in a year the stock market
Starting point is 00:48:35 was up. I mean, that correlation was broken. You know, the four-year cycle said that last year should have been an up year. It was a down year. Obviously, a four-year cycle is bullshit, because it's three data points. And to look at that is dumb. But I just don't see these relationships being relevant. What I do think is what I see is the ultimate statar play is that Bitcoin today is still at the cheapest it has ever been relative to its own network strength.
Starting point is 00:49:02 And every other time it's done that, it snapped back and gone into some version of euphoria. Now, will we see no more new euphoria ever again in Bitcoin? I don't know. I mean, today I think was the first day breaking the longest streak. I haven't looked at the Fear and Green Index this morning, but I'm going to guess. So we out of fear? Then we might be out of fear for the first time.
Starting point is 00:49:21 The longest streak in its history of Bitcoin being in fear and extreme fear, I think might have just ended from October through through to now. That is an insane statistic in a year when it was literally down 10%, which as Mike points out is a blip. It's nothing, right? And so understand that those are the reasons that I think that. But I think we all know that much time. we should talk about Venezuela, and I'll go last.
Starting point is 00:49:46 I was going to go. It depends on where you look, by the way, because I'm looking, let me just see. I'm looking at the crypto fear and greed that I have here, and we're still in fear. Well, there you go. Okay. Is that alternative me? Yeah. I don't, yeah.
Starting point is 00:49:58 So that one, you know, we're still there, but it's, it's, it is what it is. People say it's the first day in over a month that Bitcoin didn't, didn't collapse at 945. Right. Actually, it rallied because I think people expected the short. and when shorts get crowded, they tend to turn into longs. You know, it's just, you always want to be contrarian. I mean, if I really believe that everyone that, and I actually don't like the fact that Mike's being called McRetard by people, although I think they may be more on silver.
Starting point is 00:50:29 I hate going with the crowd. I agree with buying when they're crying and selling when they're yelling. Absolutely agree. I just think that people in Bitcoin are, you know, it's morose and still, and now they're cheering, but we're still at the top of a range. I mean, we would need to break out basically well over 100 for people to get squeezed. And yet almost every technician that even the ones that turned long that said, okay, fine, we're not going to go down to below 80, all believe that 100 is going to be, is a bare market rally.
Starting point is 00:51:01 And so it really is that strong. It is the weekly 50. You know, the chart squigglers, they just kind of see that's never, you know, if we lose that with strength we usually go to the 200 so i see that but let's say yeah we only i realize we don't have that much time james you were jumping in no i mean just about venezuela because people are wondering about that so there's a few things yeah that that does it produces a little bit of uh of investor angst and on you know geopolitical um you know possible conflict there's not a war going on it you know i think it it took like six minutes to extract this guy you know so it's not
Starting point is 00:51:40 like it was, it's not this ongoing conflict. However, like Dave said, we just created a situation that's, it's possibly unstable. So we've got to, we've got to stabilize it. So that's why you could see things like gold up in a, you know, a risk off trade. Now, as far as oil is concerned, you know, Mike correct me if I'm wrong, but this is going to take years for this to resolve. And the reason for that is the infrastructure in Venezuela is it is, it's not been maintained and up to date. And so it is, it's going to take billions, many billions of dollars, possibly, you know, tens of billions of dollars to fix this infrastructure to get it productive. There's a few things for people understand. You know, it's not going to be the United States spending money on it.
Starting point is 00:52:37 It's going to be Chevron. It's going to be, you know, I think Chevron's the only oil company who's allowed to operate there from the U.S. right now. But that's where the money is going to come from. And they're going to profit from it for sure. Was this about oil? Of course it was. I mean, that's just the United, you heard the administration say it themselves last night. It's about oil, too.
Starting point is 00:53:02 You know, they're going to, you know, reap benefits from that. it's also about just realigning global political like global alliances and so you're you know we're literally looking to realign in a way that's that's not just strategic but it's it's you know geographical now I'm not a geopolitical expert and that's about all I can really say about that from my limited perspective I don't know exactly what all of those levers are this is a massively complicated situation. It's not as simple as oil. It's not as simple as just removing a dictator. So this has to do with China and Russia and Taiwan. These are all factors in this. It's not something that's just as simple and straightforward as the main
Starting point is 00:53:54 media likes to make it. I love that. And I just that that's where like I get mentally stuck because I hate the arguments where people are like, the United States government wanted to free the Venezuelan people. Like we don't give a shit about Venezuela people. And if we wanted to people from dictators fly over to Africa. Come on, man. I got a push back there. So we is a really complicated thing. Marco Rubio gives a lot of crap about the Venezuelan people. Yeah. Marco Rubio cares. It is literally the single most important thing to Marco Rubio, and he has been so consistent about this forever, is freeing the people who are under Marxist dictators in Latin America. But to get that done, Dave, you need a benefit.
Starting point is 00:54:35 and the benefit of the way i understand i understand you know let's not let me make three really quick points three hot takes number one is we is the closest corollary to what happened was norega in panama and i'm old enough to remember when that happened and we made one mistaken panama by the way the supreme court said we had all because norega just like maduro was indicted in a u.s. court for drug trafficking. The Supreme Court's already ruled it was legal. So all these, excuse me, retards in the Democratic Party, all their talking points are ignoring one of them. And by the way, and many of them are lawyers, which means that they probably would fail their bar exam if they had to take it again, or ignoring the fact Supreme Court's already said this.
Starting point is 00:55:20 And the Biden administration put a $25 million bounty on the idea. I want to remind people, when I say these things, it has nothing to do with Trump. It's a United States policy going back to the 1960s. Oh, no, no, no, we're going to get there in a second. But so point one, Supreme Court's already said it was legal. Panama was the biggest thing. The problem in Panama was we took Noriega out and we didn't, didn't help stabilize the country. Stabilization is key. That's why you're seeing. And what happened was 10 years, 15 years later, Panama was in a much better place for having taken Noriega out, but it sucked and there was chaos in the interim. And historians will tell you, and I have friends who are in Panama, who say it's a great place now,
Starting point is 00:56:05 who operate businesses in Panama, but they will tell you that the history shows that they only wish that after the U.S. took out Noriega, that they helped, that literally helped stabilize this situation so that the drug cartels, the chaos, wouldn't happen. So that is the learning from history. And Rubio knows this far better than I do, and he's sitting in as a secretary of state. So understand when Trump stood up and said what he was, it was with that hat. Does he know any of this? Was he indirectly about the course? Not he knows as much as I do, which is what Marco Rubio was telling him, what the historians
Starting point is 00:56:36 and the military are telling him. So that's thing number one. So I don't give, I give him a lot of credit. That's why I'm using this for actually saying what he did, because that was a mistake. We made it. If you're going to take out somebody legally who was a drug, basically no different than the head of a, of a cartel because in fact they've proven, well, alleged, they've proven up for a grand jury to believe it, that Maduro was ahead of a cartel.
Starting point is 00:56:59 So that's thing one. Thing two, Monroe Doctrine, 1823, that's how far back you go. And the Monroe Doctrine says, we are not going to let, in that case, it was Europe, we're not going to let foreign powers operate in our hemisphere unimpeded, and is undeniable that China and Iran were operating in Venezuela. And if you think that isn't the issue, is that oil? It's more than oil. It's oil.
Starting point is 00:57:23 And I don't know if Bill Ackman, is right about it being rarerous. I don't really give a crap. What I will tell you is this is Trump basically saying the Monroe Doctrine matters. We're extending it to the rest of the world, period. And we have the perfect pretext for doing so. That's what he's doing. Now, you could argue that we shouldn't be having the Monroe Doctrine anymore.
Starting point is 00:57:42 Make that argument. That's fine. But to say that we're deviating from history, once again, absolutely. No, I think that we have a very long history of doing this exact same thing. Exactly right. And I think that the point is to try to do it better. because we've done so much worse. If we can do it better than it.
Starting point is 00:57:58 In terms of putting up dictators and doing regime change, and I am massively against regime change in general. It's just, it's a big, look, whether it's the Shah of Iran or in Chile or, you know, in, in Argentina, it doesn't matter. There are so many places where we have done horrible things in the American history. This is, this potentially might not be a horrible thing. This might be a good thing. And there's a chance to make that happen.
Starting point is 00:58:22 The third thing I want to talk about is the rumor running around. about Bitcoin. Because there's all sorts of rumors, Zero Hedge published an article that Venezuela has a huge amount of Bitcoin and that it was all, and it wasn't Venezuela, that Maduro had laundered drug money to create an enormous amount of Bitcoin. All I will say is I don't necessarily believe that's true. I don't have any notion, whatever. If it is true, it may be the single most bullish thing that could possibly come out of this, because it would effectively mean that the United States, when they've been talking about, we're going to, to have a strategic bitcoin reserve we're going to get it through confiscation we're going to have it
Starting point is 00:59:00 i think it would mean they have it because we're not talking about now by the way they don't have to take all of it they could give some back to the venezuela people they could use it to pay for doing a lot of what they're doing back to the uh victims of the pig butchering or whatever we call that they could go back to they could do whatever the hell they're going to do but to think that that doesn't make a to think that if it is true that it doesn't create a massive incentive for the United States government to see Bitcoin go higher is literally putting your head in the sand. So I'm not saying it's true, but just understand if it's true, because I've seen takes saying, oh, this is really bearish.
Starting point is 00:59:37 It's like, no, it's, it would be monstrously bullish. I also think it's probably bullshit. So I just wanted to make the, those. Mike, you get the final word on Venezuela before we jump. Oil. Well, it's, it's definitely oil, but I think it's more the macro that Dave is and we're focusing. And this, what does this mean? Let's look at Putin.
Starting point is 00:59:58 He's still running a war that he's horribly losing. And look at Mr. Trump, because he wanted to get rid of a leader. Trump did it overnight. I mean, it's just amazing how this shows how there's some of a little bit of American supremacy doing things right. Now, obviously, it's the post. It's a peaceful transfer power that matters. But it's just a show of that. Am I still with you?
Starting point is 01:00:21 It's just the show of that it can be done. So who else, like the quote from Marco Rubio is, any leader in Cuba should be concerned. It's the whole world should be concerned. Now you're going to push back in Trump. I just look at, obviously that's bullish for gold. But the bottom line is, is that bullish for our highly volatile cryptos? I don't think so. Yeah, I think it's insanely complicated.
Starting point is 01:00:44 And I think we did a decent job of, of, at least how complicated it is. I mean, it's just, none of us really know. It's just, it's pretty complicated. Yeah, I'm just, you know, like, It blows my mind sometimes when I hear bitcoins who's described themselves as libertarians, then cheering when the United States does the most anti-libertarian thing is, which is intervene in foreign affairs and countries that are not our own. Maybe it'll be a great thing for the people this time.
Starting point is 01:01:11 I have no idea. I have my doubts. But we're going to go ahead and leave it. People think it's TDS. It's so funny. I see it in the comments all the time. I think it's equal. If you think that any of us here have TDS, you should have watched the show when Biden
Starting point is 01:01:24 was president. I think that we're more hypercritical. And once again, I think that this is a United States policy and certainly not a political one, considering as he said, Biden had a $25 million bounty on Maduro's head. Let's hope for the best. 105, it's great to be back. Thank you, Dave, for president.
Starting point is 01:01:44 I told you, my new background is going to be the Oval Office. And I love the energy today. It's great to be back. We will be back, of course, next Monday as well. gentlemen that's all i've got for you thank you so much happy new year even though we're not allowed to say it uh and and we're going back to mcgloom in my opinion mike okay got it love it all right thank you gentlemen see you next week bye to build their Bitcoin stack.
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