The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin Is Built For The Economy Nobody Sees Coming | Mark Moss

Episode Date: September 12, 2026

Mark Moss joins the show to break down Bitcoin’s sharp rebound, why institutional buyers accumulated while retail capitulated, and why he believes the cycle low is likely already in. The conversation dives into AI-driven economic growth, higher interest rates, Treasury intervention and why those forces could ultimately strengthen Bitcoin’s long-term monetary case. They also discuss Bitcoin’s path toward a $1 million valuation, the evolution of Bitcoin treasury companies, and how Strategy is pioneering an entirely new financial model around BTC. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What if the Bitcoin move everyone just watched was already being telegraphed by the people with the most money? Today, I'm talking with Mark Moss about why retail capitulated while institutions accumulated. The whales were accumulating this whole time. They did not lose hope. They did not lose faith. They knew exactly what was going on. And they were backing up the truck. What the Treasury's intervention in the bond market really signaled. The signal is that we are going to intervene in the bond in the currency markets to keep them stable. And why Bitcoin may be entering a completely different macro-neutral. environment. I think we're entering this economy that's capable of tolerating higher rates.

It should have higher rates, but the interesting thing is the government can't tolerate the higher rates. And that's where Bitcoin fits in. We also get into AI higher rates the next phase of the Bitcoin cycle and why Mark believes the bottom may already be in. Was this the start of the next major Bitcoin move? Find out now. Let's go. Today's video is brought to you by Kalshi. You probably know Kalshi for prediction markets, but now you can also trade crypto-perps directly on the platform. That means Bitcoin and other major crypto assets with leverage on a platform that's US regulated by the CFTC. CalShe has the lowest perps fees in the United States and you don't need to be trading millions of dollars to get exclusive benefits if you sign up through my link.

Trade just $100,000 in volume per month and you unlock a bunch of VIP perks like one basis point taker fees, private invites to Calci events, and more. You can sign up using my link in the description and you'll get $25 when you trade your first $50. We both showed up in our official Bitcoin podcasting uniforms. Man, I can't, I can't waste the decision in the morning on what I'm going to wear. My shirt is the, it's, that's, it's my go to as well. It's so funny. I can't waste a decision on what I'm going to wear or what I'm going to eat.

It's like, I'll be the same thing every day. We're so predictable. So let's start with the market. Obviously, we've seen a, I think, massive regime change. Bitcoin had been ranging and trading down in the low to mid-60s forever. We had massive complacency. People were giving up. And once again, Bitcoin did what Bitcoin does.

And we had what seemed like an overnight move up 20-ish percent and now have sort of, I think, lifted the ground floor up higher. So I would just love to start by unpacking what you think happened, why and what the means. Yeah, I think that, you know, most retail. got caught off guard by that move of Bitcoin, like you said, it does what it does. All of a sudden, there's a big move, which, by the way, is one of the biggest moves we've seen in Bitcoin's history. But a lot of people get caught off guard by that. But I think when you sort of peel back and look at the fundamental drivers of that move, but more specifically what the whales were doing,

it becomes pretty apparent, right? So unfortunately, we don't get real-time daily access into what the whales are doing, institutional moves, the family offices, the funds, etc. We get, you know, quarterly moves reported to us. And so when we look at what the quarterly moves have shown us, we can see why this move happened. And so, you know, I know you've spent a good amount of your career doing technical analysis. If you look at technical analysis, I mean, that 60,000 level was just viciously defended, right? And so now we can see the actual reports that show why. So for example, while retail was still capitulating, unfortunately, we saw this, this move, more than any other move. We saw this massive move from weak retail hands into long-term institutional

hands, which is terrible because Bitcoin's supposed to be the people's money. But we can see that in the filing. So for example, we saw, I believe J.P. Morgan had increased their Bitcoin position by 25%. We saw Jane Street, which had reduced their, Jane Street, which is one of the largest market makers on Wall Street, had reduced their Bitcoin position by 70% in Q1, but had now built that back up to almost a billion dollars. I think it was like $980 million of Bitcoin position. And so what are they doing, right? Well, they're the market makers. So they're sort of like gearing back up to provide liquidity for the market. We saw the legend Paul Tudor Jones increased his Bitcoin position 18.9%.

We saw the goat, the greatest of all time, Stanley Drucker Miller, his own family office, started rotating out of several of his AI positions, specifically around semiconductors, et cetera, and move into AI Bitcoin positions. So I think across the board, we can start to see this one, we can see that the whales were accumulating this whole time. They did not lose hope. They did not lose faith. They knew exactly what was going on.

And they were backing up the truck. That's proverbially backing up the truck. Cryptoquam put out a piece of research that said, Wales, wallets holding more than 10,000 Bitcoin, had added almost $2.9 billion worth of Bitcoin in the previous 60 days, while wallets of 10 Bitcoin or less had basically sold almost 10,000 Bitcoin. So there's like weak hands, unfortunately retail, there's the, what is that Wall Street,

the psychology of the Wall Street trader or whatever, right? So it's like capitulation, fear, disbelief, and they were selling, selling, but the whales were backing up the truck this whole time. And so that kind of now tells us why that 60,000 level was so defended. And so then when we see this move happen, it doesn't really come as a big surprise when we see that. Yeah, I agree with all of that. And it's the same whales also, to add to that, the wallets that were selling above 100 were the ones that were buying down at 60. So the guys who were never sell even got re-interested after taking their billions out above $100,000 and reentering

down at the lows. And I thought one of the most, you know, sort of telling signals we had was how seemingly endless bad news had no effect on the market. Old card hack, existential crisis in self-custody, all of the data breaches, sailor selling, which was supposed to be the unimaginable, you know, debt of Bitcoin. And Bitcoin kind of just floated up throughout that entire phase. I mean, I was making a lot of videos over the past few months about how Bitcoin was showing every bottom signal I liked and most of them are what you just said, which sadly is retail weekends transferring coins to strong hands. I think sometimes we can make the market overcomplicated and investing can actually be broken down very simply, right? It's like supply and demand, right?

Like 101. But also I think from a real simple model, I just learned just really that's got cemented unto me in 2008, but then again in the 2017 crash in December 2017. But markets stop going up when there's no more buyers. And markets stop going down when there's no more sellers, which is why you look for that capitulation, like when all the last of the sellers are exhausted. And so we saw that, right? In the last 30 days, we saw sellers had been completely exhausted. And to the point that you made, I also looked at that, right? When bad news doesn't move the market down anymore, there's no more sellers, like you're pretty much at the bottom there. You mentioned Drucken Miller specifically in his rotation from, I guess, AI.

back into some crypto-adjacent things. Interesting, one of those was a hyper-liquid treasury company, which blew my mind when I saw that filing. But, you know, I think it speaks to a broader idea that we've had a circulating hotball of money over the past few years, right? And I think Silver caught that bid for a while. AI has certainly had that bid for quite a while. There was oil traders, you know, and that was going crazy for quite a while. And Bitcoin just was kind of out of fashion for a while. But now, you know, I think you have probably done some research into other evidence that maybe that hop ball of money or at least the AI trade specifically is starting to rotate back in our direction. Yeah, I mean, I think that that kind of shows it into the to the point the goat.

I mean, you have to look at what the goats doing. What was interesting about what he did is the sectors of AI that he rotated out of, like I said, like more semiconductors, and then the sectors he rotated into. So he bought four Bitcoin positions, but they're really AI Bitcoin position. So it was a bit deer, Iren, riot, and there was one more, I forget. But those are Bitcoin mining companies that are also now rolling out AI HPC, right, the high power compute. And so really he was sort of like using this bridge. And I think that's really telling for a couple of reasons. So when you understand the way technological revolutions work, about every 50 years, we get one of these. And what happens is we get this cluster of technology that all of a sudden gives us

new building blocks to build this new world that we didn't have before. So about every 50 years, it's happened six times in the last 300 years. And so you look at the way that the money gets into fund these technological, technological revolutions. And so it sort of goes from speculative capital into productive capital. And I think we're starting to see signs of that rotation actually happening where everyone's like, oh, you know, these these large-scale LLM models, they're building all this and it's going to be like the railroads and they're going to bankrupt and there's typically that right i mean sure we have that speculative capital that a lot of times doesn't have a return unfortunately for those people for those investors but then the market moves to

more productive investments and i think that's what we're starting to see in the ai boom is it's maturing a little bit we're starting to see that we'll get into some of the job reports that came in GDP numbers that are being forecasted the durable uh orders that are coming through in manufacturing and so i think we're starting to see that rotation and then back to as i said the goat right is he's going into productive capital so not only Is it a capital that was put into the Bitcoin mining facilities, but now they're also providing the HPC. And I think the way that Bitcoin and HPC work together in one facility is really interesting because, you know, Bitcoin is this highly volatile, high beta asset, where HPC is like this low volatility, but high, high performing assets. So you sort of, you're able to balance those things out specifically, but even more specifically, like Bitcoin and the Bitcoin network are what will power.

it's going to be the building blocks to build the AI. And so we have this agentic, you know, agent to agent commerce, if you will, this agentic commerce that's building right now. McKenzie says it's going to be $5 trillion by 2030. And that's not only driving the profitability of the AI companies through the model, the models or the tokens are exploding, but then the ability to have Bitcoin and the Bitcoin rails even more specifically for that to all move on.

Yeah, I find it fascinating how well, positioned Bitcoin miners were for this new generation, right? And because especially in a world where you see people protesting data centers and there's regulatory capture and there's issues with getting it done, they're sitting there. Their facilities exist. And it's not as easy as flicking a switch, but it's a hell of a lot easier than starting from scratch, right? And I'm actually wondering if it's almost disingenuous at this point to call them Bitcoin miners because I think they're just AI data centers that might mine some Bitcoin, or at least that's where they're headed. Yeah, I mean, of those of those companies that I mentioned, I mean, they're still mining considerable amount of Bitcoin.

Some of them are actually increasing the amount of Bitcoin that they're mining. Some are reducing it. But I mean, there's an equilibrium there. So they're not abandoning Bitcoin by any means. I think they have extra capacity, at least what I'm seeing. Now, there are some that he didn't invest into the names I didn't mention that are making a big pivot out of Bitcoin into HPC. So it's happening. But it's, again, if you study the way these technological revolutions happen, you can see that the way that this money

is flowing through this hot ball of money, as you said, it's a little bit predictable. And I think that rotation, that capital rotation is one of the signs we wanted to see. Yeah. So sticking to Drucken Miller, he obviously wrote that scathing op-ed famously using AI, the Washington Post, about the Treasury intervention in the bond market, right? So which is interesting because both Warsh and Bessent worked for Drucken Miller. So it's kind of like he's tapping his old employee on the head and telling me he's doing a bad job. But I think we can all agree that the trigger for this Bitcoin move was when Besson made the announcement that the bond buyback program was going to happen, you know, that they were going to intervene.

They were going to double it. Yeah, and that sort of it wasn't the amount. It was the signal, right? And then Drucken Miller really came over the top and said that's a terrible idea. So it's a good way for us to start a conversation about what? what's happening with interest rates and the bond market and whether, you know, it's sustainable, it's broken. There's a lot of takes here. Yeah. So I thought that was interesting. First of all, I mean, there's a little side note. But I mean, yeah, he took a lot of heat for saying that he wrote

the article with AI, which imagine if you said that, you know, I didn't write this letter by hand. I wrote it on a typewriter or I wrote it by a computer. Like a question a math on a calculator instead of on paper. Yeah, so it's like, I mean, obviously, you know, you're smart enough and most of the audience is smart enough to understand that like, I mean, come on, anyone that's having AI do their thinking and they're talking for them, that's pretty ridiculous. But knowing that Stanley Truck and Miller is the goat, I highly doubt that he did that, but for you to, you know, run something that you've written through to battle test it,

critique it, optimize it, like, why wouldn't you do that? Right. I do that all the time. I mean, you know, Scott, I'm a little bit of a psychopath when it comes to like trying to get better and better than I was yesterday. And I'll take interviews that I do like this or keynotes that I go give and I'll put the transcripts and I'll have it critique it. So I can try to get better next. I'm like, why wouldn't I do that with the superhuman digital intelligence? Now, I doubt the goats having to like come up with his thesis and talk for him.

I just thought it was pretty interesting the way that we saw the market react to that piece more than like what was even in the context of what he was talking about. Yeah, so talk about what you think of the move that Bessett made. What do you think the signal is there? And is that some sort of massive shift in the way that markets are going to operate? Yeah, so I think like, I think, you know, obviously in the Bitcoin circles, like, I mean, of course they're going to sacrifice the currency. They're always going to sacrifice the currency. There's no historical parallel ever where we've seen a country that can print currency that

would just choose to not and just choose to default. Like, of course they're going to do that. So like, you know, from the gold sector, you know, the dollar's going to fail, the bond market's going to crash, and we sort of bring that in. And that's certainly one driver. Of course, the debasement is one driver. And it's the main driver for gold. But Bitcoin benefits from that debasement driver.

And then it also benefits from the technology driver. So I want to get into that. But I think going just kind of sticking on what you're asking about percent, I mean, of course, if you're going to save the bond market or the currency, you're going to sacrifice the currency every single time. So it's like not like this surprising thing. I think, you know, in a little bit more educated circles and the conversations that you have on your show, it's more about what does that mean? What does it signal? Are they losing control of the long end? And I said, what does it signal? Scott percent went on CNBC and said, we're sending a signal.

That was actually the word that he said. And so I think that's what Bitcoin is is picking up on. But I think I have a little bit of a different take than what I see most people talking about, in the macro circles. And that's that I think most people are looking at the bond market thinking that dissent can't control the long end, that we are gonna lose control of the bond market, that whatever's happening in Japan and the unwind and all these things that are out there.

And I think everyone's sort of still, the generals fight the last war, so to speak. We're waiting for 2008 to happen again, but I think everyone may be positioned for the wrong economy. And the reason why I say that is because when we're waiting for the debt crisis, to happen or the bond market's going to revolt, the bond digital entities, right? There's going to be recession. The AI bubble for sure is a bubble and for sure it's going to crash and all these

different things. Unemployment. I mean, if AI takes some jobs, even just a little bit, an unemployment rise is just a little bit, it all falls apart. But I think all that's watching the wrong movie. And so I think the way that I'm looking at is my thesis is that maybe we're moving into a period where nominal growth actually stay stronger. Long-term rates actually go higher. And And they go higher than most people expect. But the economy keeps expanding even in that environment. And the reason why is because the marginal growth engine, the growth of these companies is less interest rate sensitive.

So it doesn't matter. What's happening in the economy to get this growth doesn't care if rates go up by 50 basis points. Doesn't matter. And so they're spending so much money that I think we're entering this economy that's capable of tolerating higher rates. It should have higher rates, but the interesting thing is the government can't tolerate the higher rates. And that's where Bitcoin fits in. So I think like, it's not going to stop this train, as Lin Alderman said. She talks about it from a fiscal dominance perspective. And I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about actual real growth.

I got a bunch of numbers here. I'll share with you if you want to. Yeah, please. Yeah. So again, so if we kind of look at the old paradigm is that most investors have been trained to think like higher rates equals tighter financial conditions, which it does, right? You make money more expensive, less people buy less of it. Higher rates equals tighter financial conditions, which then leads to a recession and then lower earnings and then lower asset prices. And I think, you know, in the old economy where that made sense where marginal growth was driven by, you know, assets, housing, autos, bank lending, things like. that. But I think if we try to apply that to what's going on today, like we're in this like post-World World War II reindustrialization period. So we have to look at it differently. So I think it's like if rates go higher, do they still have the power to kill the economic growth? And I think that's a thing. So what I saw is just this week, we saw the jobs report come out. That was a pretty big deal. I want to break that down, but we also saw that the Atlanta Fed put out their GDP forecast, and it's running around 6%.

Now, if GDP is running a 6%, which, by the way, Trump has said that we should be running a GDP 6%, percent percent percent number, Lutnik has said the 6 percent number. And for perspective, the 6 percent number is an eye-watering growth number that China achieved when they were doing their big buildout. Like 6% is this crazy number, but that's where the Atlanta Fed is putting that right now. And so if we get that 6% number, historically the 10-year treasury is usually a few hundred, maybe 200 points above nominal GDP, at least like pre-1990s. So then if that's the case, if we're really going to see 6% GDP growth,

then you could easily argue for 8% 10-year treasury, not 4 to 5, which I think is pretty interesting. him. But, you know, when Trump came in, he had this, this policy of, you know, obviously, make America great again. I call it make America investable again. So through the tariff, you know, whatever you want to call that through his tariff policy of trying to reindustrialize growth in the United States, he also was getting companies or other companies and other countries to invest into the U.S. So then what happened? So I think we had about just under, just under $10 trillion of commitments to build in the U.S. So we're going to get $10 trillion at some point, put into the US for what to build, to build what,

to build mines, to build refineries, to build factories, to build automations. That's jobs, that's material, like this is massive, right? And so like that's what we're starting to see. And so we can see that in the data. So for example, the July capital goods imports were $140 billion. Capital goods being imported for what to build this?

durable good orders reached 339 billion rising in four of the previous five months. So like all that investment capital that he said we are going to get appears to be hitting. It appears that we're building based off of the imports, based off the durable good orders that are happening. Employment, so we got that employment. The payrolls went up in August 162,000 jobs, which is massive. but I want to look inside the jobs that were created to try to understand what's going on. And so we saw manufacturing employment was 58,000 above its December 2025 low. So like we're getting the growth in the sectors that should be happening.

So it looks like we can see it moving through the snake, so to speak, right? We had the commitments for the capital. We can see the capital is being deployed. We can see the jobs in those sectors growing. We can see the orders for the material is happening. And so all that's that's moving through. And so when we were looking at, you know, what do we see? Q2 headline GDP was 1.5.

1.5. And now we're getting up to, you know, I think in Q3, they're forecasting 4.7, but getting up to 6%. So I don't know. When I look at that, when I look at the productivity, when I look at that money moving forward, I think that the amount of growth that we're going to have, and of course, percent said this, he said, what did he say?

He said that at the same time they announced double the, treasury buybacks, he said, the $40 trillion is not a magical number. It's just a number. And he said the same thing that everyone in the Trump administration says, we can grow our way out. And that's a whole different topic. But we are growing. We're growing. And then back to the high rates. So, okay, so if they trade higher, so what? Well, then that makes these companies that are taking on this debt to build out the CAPEX. That means their prices go up. Okay. So, what? Like how much, right? So depends on what studies you're looking at, but the model token usage is forecasted to grow hundreds of times, hundreds of times. I mean, it's growing so

fast, which means their profitability goes up. And so if we look at, if they pay 25 basis points more or 50 basis points more for the money, what does that do to their profitability? I mean, it brings it down minimally. minimally. So it's not going to stop it. This economy is going to continue to grow hot. The bonds going up is not going to stop that. Now, it does hurt the Main Street guy. It does hurt the mainstream guy. And then there's a massive driver for Bitcoin, but I'm going to pause right there. Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there because as you said, it can sustain higher rates. We've all seen insane numbers in CAPEX spending by the hyperscalers and all the companies in the

United States. And a lot of people have aptly pointed that that's sort of a form of stimulus, But this kind of puts the highlight on Warsh, who I don't understand why this guy took this job. Why would anybody take that job? Billions in Estee-Lotter, you know, a fortune and be living on a yacht right now. And instead, he's between, I would say, a rock and a hard place. Because nobody in, like the market is pricing in a rate hike, right? But to your point, like 0.25 and 0.5, it's not going to make a difference anyways. So Trump is screaming about cuts.

I mean, he effectively threatened tariffs on the Fed the other day. If you saw somebody stop, right? And the big elephant in the room is that $40 trillion number. And I respect Besson, but I don't believe that that's not a meaningful number. And if rates go up, refinancing of that debt becomes more expensive. That creates more of a debt spiral. And as you said, the government can't sustain higher rates, even if, you know, the economy can.

So I don't know where that puts worse. I can't imagine him hiking rates, even if prediction markets say 70% chance, even if Fed Watch, whatever they say. I can't see him doing that when the assumption is that his job was to come in and, you know, ease the situation for the Treasury and for Trump. And we have midterterms.

So imagine raising rates into midterms. The one thing, though, is like it's not about absolute debt. So the 40 trillion is sort of just a number. Like if I have 40 trillion in debt or I have a hundred trillion in debt, but I make 500 trillion a year, what difference does it make? So you have to look at the absolute volume or the absolute number of debt in context of what the economy is doing. And so we look at like debt to GDP to try to give us that context. And certainly, you know, we're over 120 percent. We're way too high. So certainly we want to get that back down to 80 or, you know, maybe. be hopefully 60% debt to GDP. But the 40 trillion is just a number. But what does that number mean? You know what I mean? Like if you have a million dollars of debt, that may sound terrible. Actually, a better example. So just this last week, maybe Robert Kiyosaki's been getting roasted all over Twitter because he's like, I have $1.2 billion of debt. So that sounds bad. And people are like, oh, he should probably read his book, Rich, Dad, Poor Dad.

And like, people are just like jumping on the bandwagon. Okay, he's got a billion. billion dollars of debt against 10 billion dollars of assets like i'll take that position any day and so anyway back to the debt the 1.2 billion of debt for kiyosaki sounds terrible the 40 trillion of debt for the u.s sounds terrible but in context to what and so i think we're i think we're missing that the other thing that's pretty interesting um i'm building this new forecast model for my bitcoin for for uh long-term bitcoin price prediction i gave a keynote at bitcoin mina a couple years ago and i kind of i kind of tried to forecast bitcoin's price out to 2050 using more of like a venture cap capital lens. So there's a whole bunch of ways we can look at it. River's new research was pretty

insightful. Obviously there's power law. But I was looking at like what are the markets that Bitcoin is disrupting? So bonds, treasuries, store value assets. What will that grow based off of money growth projections? And anyway, so I'm building this new model. And what I found pretty interesting is the rate of debt growth is actually decelerating. So it's big in total dollars. But the rate of growth is actually decelerating, which is something. And then if we get the economy to accelerate, and then again, we can bring that debt-to-GDP ratio back down. It's different. Now, that still doesn't help the, like, still the government needs rates lower.

How do they afford $1.2 trillion in debt service, right? I mean, in Q2, we did 1.5% annualized real GDP down from 2.1% in Q1. So I love their estimates, but, I mean, call me crazy. but I don't believe the estimates or the job numbers or any of it. Yes, I think it's constructive. But like even the job numbers that you presented, I would make a pretty sizable bet that does get revised next month while nobody's looking to show a completely different picture

because that's what's happened every month and every six months. It happens every single time. The challenge to me is like what data, and I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but like what data can I trust that won't be revised when I'm not looking? Well, it's all revised, like you said. they put it out to make the headline and then they quietly go back and change it. It's not a Trump thing. It was a Biden thing. It's just they revised down like 880,000 jobs in a

year or something. I don't remember what the exact number was, but like a whole year of markets reacting to positive job data was a complete farce that was revised down after it didn't matter, right? Yeah. What I would say is to your point, like how do we even calculate GDP? The way we calculate GDP is completely wrong. That needs to be completely rebuilt. How do we forecast the GDP? All of these numbers are hard to believe, which is why any serious analyst, number one, you got to look at a whole bunch of indicators. You can't look at one. But it's also sort of like the directionality and the move and the relationship of the data that I think helps us tell a picture. So, you know, whether it goes from, you know, 1.5, 1.2 up to 4.5, 4.5 doesn't really matter as much, like the absolute

number, as much as like the direction. And more importantly, like, are we seen signs that were transitioning this from, like I said, a speculative investment cycle into a productive capital cycle. And so, like, is that, you know, the Trump administration has, again, announced nine, nine and a half trillion dollars of investment capital. Is that? Because just imagine, let's just say hypothetically, if these companies and countries invested and spent 10 trillion dollars in the U.S. to build out factories and data centers and refineries, would that make a meaningful difference in the economy? Of course. Of course it would. Like it'd be massive, obviously. So then will it? How much of that 10 trillion will actually come?

Will any of it? Well, so we want to then like follow that. And so what we can see right now is the data is showing us that it's actually happening. The money is actually starting to get into the economy. And of course, not all 10 trillion of it yet, but the point is is that, okay, this is committed. If that happens, we get to here. Now we just have to track how that's happening. So whether GDP goes from 1.2 up to 3.5 or 4.2. It doesn't matter as much as the thesis is playing out, at least in my opinion. Yeah. And I think if they end up cutting rates when they probably shouldn't, it probably throws some gasoline on the fire anyways. The rate thing, though, is like.

At this point, like, I think I've been of the, like, the opinion that the Fed was neutered long before Warsh. Yeah. Yeah. What is a, what is, what is a court of point? move even. And then cares. Like how does it affect? Pal cut rates but yields went up. Right. I mean, your mortgage went up when they cut rates. So the, that's what I'm saying is markets don't believe it. The bond market is, you know, the vigilantes is like to call them. They're not buying it. So what does it matter? Because, because, you know, if we think about it like this and again, as I said earlier, like we can just make investing super simple. Another way to think about when I think about rates and I said a quarter point, who cares is like, you know, with, I don't know,

whatever, $1,500, I could go buy this iPhone, but I could also go buy $1,500. So if Apple made this, you know, from $1,500, I don't know what the new phone is, but $1,500, and let's say they put them on sale for $500, they would sell more of them because they're cheaper. And so I can actually buy $1,500. What's the cost to buy $1,500? What's the rate, obviously, right? So when the rate comes down, money's cheaper, people buy more of it. But that being said, buy it for what?

And so if I'm buying it to put into productive uses, all I need, I mean, that's just my hurdle rate. And then I just have to be able to grow that capital faster than that hurdle rate. And so when the economy is, you know, the GDP is accelerating, when we see this thesis, as I said, with these large frontier models selling tokens, the token usage is going to explode so much if they pay one point higher, it barely changes their profitability. It changes it from, I think, Jordi Visser did a video and it was like it changed it from 70% to 60%. Yeah, it's marginal.

Like 70 to 60%? What do they care about one point? And so that's where it's like a quarter point, like whatever. I don't know. Yeah. I've never, listen, I've never been a macro economist by trade or anything, but I've never found the entire market more fascinating than it is right now because of AI and all of this KAPEX spending. It's very hard to, I think, understand all of the inputs right now. Really hard to unpack it.

But I think where it gets interesting is then we think about it, like where does Bitcoin enter this? Because like we're talking about the growth, the economy, AI, etc. But then we have the government side, right? So then if the government debt is too large to allow a real like market clearing interest rate, while we are seeing nominal growth and technological productivity, like growth. or at least remaining strong, then the government, like the policymakers, they're incentivized to try to keep the cost of capital below what the market would demand. So that's where like this financial repression playbook, this liquidation of government debt playbook starts to come in into play.

And so I think that's where it starts to like really shine the light on where Bitcoin's at. Because Bitcoin has not just this technological growth in front of it, but it has this debasement trade in front of it. And so the government's going to be forced to sacrifice the currency. They're going to be forced to sacrifice that, which is just that long-term debasement driver for Bitcoin, which is why, as you said earlier, when Scoppa sent came out and said they're going to announce doubling the treasury buybacks, it was the debasement trade that took off. Yeah, it's exactly right. I find it so funny, though, that all that really matters for Bitcoin as far as people believing in the narratives is price going up.

It's still that way, right? We can scream about the debasement trade with Bitcoin $65, but all of a sudden it's relevant again at 80. The asset hasn't changed. All that's changed is the price in one week. Yeah. And Bacent said that we're sending a signal. What is the signal? The signal is that we are going to intervene in the bond and the currency markets to keep them stable. That's the signal that they're sending. He did that at what I think it hit 5.31 was the level. I don't know if that's necessarily the red line. He didn't say that was the red line. It was just, this is the signal.

Like, we're going to participate in this to do what? To suppress yields and provide liquidity. Yeah. And that's why it's interesting because people were sort of wrongfully defining what he said as either yield curve control or QE. And I get that it can be those things by a different name, but it's neither. Because it would only be yield curve control if he had said 5.3% is our pain point. and we're buying everything we need to buy

to stop from going above that level, right? That's Japan. Right. And QE is the Fed, right? So, like, he made it very clear. He said, this is going to come from the Treasury General account. This is money we already have, right? He sent that signal to make sure that nobody thought

that they were going to print money to do it. So it's kind of threading the needle, interestingly, in between. Yeah. Yeah. So he sent the signal, the market got the signal, loud and clear. Again, like anyone that talks about this, regularly i almost feel like it's like a broken record like of course they're of course they're going to do it like um that's why you know i've my my my entire invest in thesis i actually gave it to this kid this

morning i'm like it's real simple right the two things in life that are certain are death and taxes and then of course money printing right those are the three things and so like over a long period of time they're going to destroy the currency they're going to they're going to print the money the liquidity is going to push asset prices up and uh if you want to get ahead you buy scarce assets and you perform a expect out of attack. You borrow in the weak failing currency and you buy stronger appreciating currency. And that's what the, that's what the, you know, that's sort of what that whole price on the yields is, where the bonds is, right? Because these, these frontier models, these, these hypers, they're borrowing at a fixed rate in a failing currency to put it into something that will

outperform that. And so, yeah, they're going to print. comments on the yen recently where he said, I'm the now. It was like, yeah, I'm your captain now. He literally said, like, you dare traders to bet against the yen. I'm the house. I mean, it's like, he's really not mincing words at the moment. I'm so impressed by Bacent. And, you know, to the point that you said about Warsh, like, who would even take that job? I mean, for anybody to think that they can control a market is delusional. obviously. So anyone trying to take that job, it's like a losing proposition. But Warsh and Bissent, both of them, I mean, they worked for the goat. Like Janet Yellen, I mean, Janet Yellen was an academic, right?

I mean, that's all she ever was an academic. And even Powell, he was an attorney. But like, you got Bacent and Warsh who actually like traded trillions of dollars at the highest level. And Bacent, specifically he made a billion dollars in a day twice by breaking you know breaking the peg both of the bank of england and against the end so he made a billion dollars trading against the end and he's kind of doing it again and and i certainly wouldn't want to trade against him i'm not i'm not calling his bluff yeah i'm not call his bluff so you mentioned that you're working on a bitcoin model can you give us any uh early uh peek at what you're thinking or how you're viewing that yeah so um i did So one, I built this, How to Retire for Bitcoin calculator two years ago, about 150,000 people took that.

I built a 2.0 version of it. And now it's like a, I vibe coded it. It's like a web app before it was just like a spreadsheet. Now it's a web app. It's really cool. And I put in the biggest models that, the most authoritative model. So I have strategies model, the bull base in the bear case. I put in VanX model.

I put in Bitwise model. I put in the power law model. And so basically, you know, if you want to forecast Bitcoin and think about how I could retire of Bitcoin, I have to understand like where I think it's going to go into the future. And so in this calculator, you can choose which model you want and you can choose a bare base or bull case. And then you can sort of forecast that out. And I thought, you know, I should put my own model in there.

And like I said, in, I did the keynote, closing keynote at the Bitcoin Mina conference. And basically the way I took, I looked at the Bitcoin price was based off of a venture capital lens. So like in venture capital, the way that we would look at a company's future valuation like Uber, for example, is what are the markets that you're going to disrupt? How big are those markets? And what percentage do we think is realistic to capture from those markets? So if I get 5% from taxis, from limos, from vans, we can be this big, right? We saw that both Uber and Airbnb took 10% of their respective markets in less than a decade. And that doesn't mean that hotels and taxis went away. Doesn't mean the dollar has to die. So the way I'm looking at built as model,

all the way I talked about at Bitcoin Mina, and that was pre-AI, so I had to do it back of the napkin math and I'm no quant. But I looked at the store value basket, which is bonds, equities, currency, collectibles, fine art, real estate, which is the biggest, and then of course, Bitcoin. And then I looked at the size of that basket growing. So from 2010, I think it was, forgive my math here, it's been a while since I looked at it, but it was about $300 trillion. By 2020, it was about $900 trillion. Right now, today it's about 1.2 quadrillion. I think by 2030, it's about 1.5, 1.6 quadrillion by 2040.

So where does that basket grow into 2030, 2040, 2050? And based off of the increasing amount of liquidity that's coming to the system. So that's why I was looking at the rate of growth of the money supply and the debt and all those things. And so what I'm trying to do is forecast how big that basket gets into time. And then what percentage do I think that Bitcoin can take from that? Could it get 1% of the basket, 5% of the basket, 10% of the basket? And of course, it's the basket. So like individual things, how much can it get?

So because Uber is more convenient than a taxi, it's easily able to capture quite a bit from that. Right. So if the idea is so much better. So Bitcoin is certainly a better monetary asset. It's certainly more sensitive resistant than an offshore bank account. And there's 30 to 40 trillion sitting in those. it's certainly better than gold for almost every, you know, metric that we could measure, certainly better than bonds, all these things.

So could it get 5%, 10%, so anyway. So the model is, one, looking at the projections of money supply from the CBO, from the IMF, from the BIS, et cetera, and then trying to project out the growth of that basket and then think about if Bitcoin captures X% over time, where does it get to? So that's, and then I'm going to put that into my Bitcoin calculator as one of the models. because now now we have access to AI, superhuman digital intelligence, I could be a quant, or at least I can pretend to be one. Yeah, what I find so interesting is it used to be like, you know, Bitcoin's a trillion,

gold's 11 or 12 or 13, Bitcoin just needs a 13x, and then we can be gold. And then like gold casually, two or three X, right? Gold wasn't supposed to be able to do that that fast. So I think it actually made it more realistic in people's minds that Bitcoin could be a $21 trillion dollar asset, right, a million dollars a coin or whatever. That's not crazy by any stretch if you think about it in context of the amount of debasement that will happen, as you just mentioned. Yeah. You know, multiple quadrillions. What's a million dollar Bitcoin in that bucket? That's barely

even probably grown in scale versus everything else, relative. And that's the way to look at it, right? So if that store of value basket becomes six quadrillion, like Bitcoin only has to get 2% of that, like 2%. And then what? What? what percentage is realistic? And like I said, Uber and Airbnb got 10%. And so 10% seems pretty realistic when you think about how superior it is as an asset. And then what I think is also really important about this exercise, at least the way that my mind views it is that everybody thinks if Bitcoin hits a million, then gases $500 a gallon and stake, you know, all these things, like the dollar's dead. But that's not true. That's not true at all. Like Bitcoin can just take

a little bit of value from each of those baskets. And it doesn't mean the end of the dollar. Like it doesn't mean hyperinflation at all. And I think that's that's really important to understand. It's not like all of a sudden, like I said, hotels went away or hotels had to, you know, quadruple the price to make up for it. No, it just just took a little bit of the market. It's money that's already there. If you think about money like energy, energy's not created. It just sort of transfers. And so it just takes a little bit of that capital and moves it over here. I used to book nice hotel rooms for three or $400 that are now three or $4,000 night. Okay, they did increase. I guess it's, you did that.

I just celebrated my father-in-law's birthday two days ago and he just turned 80 and he got this card and it said in the year you were born I think it was 1946 here's all these things that happened in 1946 and one was like the prices of things and we were having this we're at my sister-in-law's house and we have this big steak dinner massive stakes beautiful and on the thing one of the things was like steak was like 50 cents a pound yeah and I'm like how much were these steaks like oh 30 bucks a pound Not bad. Good work if you can get it, you know, on the price increases. It's pretty crazy. So what else you're thinking about at the moment, right? What else are you working on? I mean, I think we've covered sort of some of the big thesis, but, you know, I don't know what else is on your mind. Well, I think that, you know, a couple other things that I'm thinking about. So one, like I said, building out this new, this new model to go along with my new calculator model, which it's free, everything's free. I have a guide on how to use it and apply it. It's like a five-year retirement plan. And then the number one question I get asked is like, who do you, who should I use as a lender?

And so I have like this six-step vetting guide with even a prompt. So you could vet the right person. So it's all free. I'll send you a link if you want to if you want to set that out there. The other thing I think about is like I gave this keynote at the Bitcoin Vegas conference a couple months ago and it was a the personal treasury revolution is what I titled it and it's like how do we think about if you think about what sailor did he took a company that he couldn't grow the revenue of right and he said you know for 10 years I I traveled 10 times around the world and I tried to start a new line or develop a new line or increase this or acquire this company I just couldn't get the revenue up so they were stuck at about a two billion dollar valuation and uh which there's nothing to sneeze at

But he was just stuck there. He couldn't grow it. It couldn't compete against Microsoft, et cetera. And he said, what if I stopped trying to make more revenue? What if I stopped trying to run the business like a profit and loss, income and expenses? And I stopped trying to just grow revenue because we're kind of capped. What if instead of that, I focused on the assets that I have and I try to grow my assets instead? And he created a Bitcoin treasury company.

But how can we as individuals take that and apply that personally? because most of us, we think, well, for me to get to that, you know, place where my assets can pay for my life, where I'm asset freedom is what I call it, financially freedom, whatever you want to call it. I have to work harder. I have to make more money. I have to get a second job, start a side hustle, start a business, whatever. But why not just spend some of that time focusing on growing the assets that I already have? That's a personal treasure revolution. Think of myself, not just as someone who just works harder or skips my morning coffee so income or expenses why not grow the assets that i have now what did the sailor used to do that he used debt and equity and everyone pretty much in the world specifically in the united states we have debt and equity we have that we're in a debt-based monetary system

and so how could we think about bitcoin and maybe our entire portfolio overall maybe my real estate my business whatever i have and think about how do i grow my assets using the best asset in history that what i call bitcoin the cheat code and then debt and equity to do that. And by doing that, you know, he took a company that he couldn't grow past $2 billion. And within five years, it hit $100 billion. So what could we do if we thought about ourselves as a personal treasure? Most all Fortune 500 companies have a person, a treasurer that sits there and manages the treasury. But we don't think about that. Most people think about trying to make more money, but we don't think about growing that. So that's one big thing that

I spent a lot of time thinking about and building out. I wish that all the Bitcoin Treasury companies had read that when they launched and just Yolode into the top and then did nothing. It's so funny. Yeah. A lot of the, and listen, you know, we talked about this at length. And I think that they'll still be a consolidation. And I think a lot of those ills, as you pointed out to me in the past, will largely be cured

by Bitcoin going up. I was part of one of the biggest launches last year. and it failed. It got wound down. Yeah. So, you know, I had an inside look. I mean, I was in the middle of that. And it was the largest equity raise done last year, no debt.

We had every ingredient for success. And I honestly believe we are like this close to like escape velocity. And we could have been right there with Stryver asset. But instead we didn't. And we missed by that. much and unfortunately the company got wound down and investor capital got returned back to the shareholders and it was uh you know it was a failure by many many accounts um but that i would say that even being inside of that uh which is pretty terrible um i'm still just as bullish as ever on

the bitcoin treasury companies yeah i think they just need to have an actual plan in business right And I don't think like you put and behave like we would. Like I always said, and you and I had this conversation. I said, I'm a really big fan of the idea of making money and putting it in Bitcoin. Starting there. You know, like the original micro strategy strategy, which was. Yeah, I don't agree with that, though. That's where we disagree.

I think that, I think, sure, every business that produces revenue and profits should put it into Bitcoin. Of course. Every company should be a Bitcoin treasury company. Sure, of course, right? every human should, every person should, every business could have short, of course. But that's not the financialized company. It's, you know, there's 10,000 business models that could be a Bitcoin treasury company without like an underlying profitable business.

And the profitable business is the financialization. It's BlackRock. How does BlackRock make money by selling financial products? How do insurance companies make money by selling financial products? So I think that's the path I see for Bitcoin treasury companies, not like I have like what Lynn Alden and the ego death team have now started. Orange juice. Yeah, orange juice where they're buying, you know, private.

It's a private equity company, right? A private equity place. They're buying businesses and taking their revenues and putting into Bitcoin. Sure, every company should put Bitcoin on the balance sheet. It doesn't make them a Bitcoin treasury company. And the problem with that is that private equity, and it's a tough game. And just because you've been great in business doesn't mean you can be great in every business. But more specifically, the reason why I have a, I think why I have a problem with that, Scott, is just clearly, and it's what Michael Saylor told me specifically about strategy.

And he said that our job is to do one thing and keep it as clear as possible to what Bitcoin, for the investors to know and to be tied to Bitcoin's volatility. So I don't want to produce different products. It's one of the reasons why he's only focused on stretch. He's like, we're not going to do bonds. We're not going to do any of that because I'm doing one thing. I want the investors to know what I'm doing. And we want to be tied to the volatility of Bitcoin. And he said, he gave this story.

He said, imagine if God came to me tonight and told me the market's going to crash tomorrow. So I woke up in the morning and I hedged strategy's positions. And sure enough, the market crashed, the strategy didn't. It didn't crash. That'd be great, right? No, it'd be terrible. Because the market expects me to move with Bitcoin. If they want to change their position, they can change.

but they don't want me to act irrationally. And what happens is when you take a business that has some other business, whatever that business model may be, whether it's building out AI or whatever that is, all of a sudden we have to understand that business and what are the operational difficulties and challenges of that business. And then, oh, by the way, they also have this Bitcoin thing, but then the market doesn't know how to value that.

And the stock traders, the option traders, don't know how to position that. And so that messes up the company long term. Now, yes, every company should have Bitcoin. Every company should be a Bitcoin treasury company. But it's not the same as the company that makes the financial products. It's so interesting because when STRC launched, he and I had a conversation in Money 2020,

and he sort of alluded to the facts like, I wish I had gotten to STRC first, right? I didn't have to go through the process of the convertible notes and the STRD and the STRK and all these things. Not that there was an issue with them, but he just wished he'd gotten there first. And you mentioned Strive before. they kind of got to learn the lessons of sailor and just do that thing.

Yeah. And they're doing it really good. Yeah. We don't have, you know, because I think people can just look at the balance sheet and say, I totally understand this, right? They're like, I know exactly how they're going to buy it. I know exactly what I'm buying. There's no debt.

I don't need to figure out what all these other things are. And listen, that's a credit to both of them because they can't do that without sailor going through the entire process. And Sailor can't create the thing without going through the entire process. I mean, what do you think? I know we've got to go in a couple of minutes. but what do you think of sort of the strategy maneuvers here? I guess I'll call it the bottom, but towards the bottom.

You know, I think, you know, you mentioned earlier that when they sold Bitcoin, it didn't cause the market to crash because when he sold was a 32, when he sold 32 Bitcoin, the market seemed to dump. But when they sold big amount, like it didn't. And I think, you know, one, you know, of course, Saylor has been broadcast a million times saying never sell your Bitcoin, which he then clarified. I'm talking about personally, you know, we're a business. And I think it just, it kind of shows a couple things.

Like, number one, like, they're, they're trying to build a business. And I know you've talked to Saylor many times. You've been around them a lot. I've been around them a lot. And if you talk to him or if you just listen to him talk, he's always talking like 10 years out, 10 years out. 10 years out. He's playing like this long game. As a matter of fact, in Vegas, we did this small dinner.

And he said, because that had been about six, Bitcoin had been sold out for about six months at the time. And he's like, what is it with these people? He's like, everyone thinks such short term in this game. He's like, in this game, if you can think, five years out, you're just going to crush everybody. He said, if you can think 10 years out, you're a demi-god. And so he's like, you can't even have a baby in less than nine months. What are people tripping on six months? Anyway, so he's always thinking 10, 10 years out,

and he'll often say that I don't think out past 20. So that's like his range. And so what it shows is that he's, he's maneuvering in the markets to build long-term wealth and not trying to play a short-term game. And it kills the options traders and all those guys that are trying to trade short-term on a long-term move. But I think they're doing what they need to do to set themselves up to be one of the most valuable companies in the world. Yesterday, I had a conversation with Porter Stansberry. He's a wealth of information. You should have him on. And he has his own Bitcoin models. And I asked him about strategy. He's probably one of the best, you know, equity researchers that I know of. And he, you know, to his credit, he's like, I haven't done the deep dive, but now you make me want to go do it.

But he said, I don't think there's any company that's going to beat strategy, any equity company that will beat strategy over the next like 10 years. So I think that's the long game. I agree. So it's so funny that when I went on, I actually, people were literally criticizing or accusing me of being like a paid strategy show when I was just pointing out facts that were wrong. like he'll be insolvent or bankrupt. I'm like, this guy has $850,000, Bitcoin. You know what bankruptcy or insolvent from me. And like, I would say that they'd be like, who's paying you?

You know, but I kept pointing out to everyone who is dumbering at the bottom that, you know, force selling from strategy would be the worst thing ever that like even if all of that was true, if Bitcoin goes up, all things are cured. And it was because you had to also have the assumption that Bitcoin was going to go down and stay there indefinitely. Yeah. Right? And I, and here we are, you know, Bitcoin's in the high.

70s, 80s, wherever it is, but when this comes out, and nobody's talking about strategy and solvency anymore after a week of price action. I mean, I'm just thinking about him saying a long-term view, you know what I mean? Like, STRC will go back to par. I bought it in the 70s. People said I was retarded. You know, like STRC will go back to par. They'll eventually raise enough cash. They'll close out the converts. It'll cause some volatility. St.RK, they'll get all these things cleared out. and they'll have a million Bitcoin and STRC, you know, floating around par. And Bitcoin will be in the hundreds, whatever. Yeah.

Yeah. That's the way I see it too. And I put something on X where I was like, you know, oh, he survived another bear market because in 2022, it was the same thing. All the same thing. You know, he's going to be liquidated at $15,000 Bitcoin. He's going to get wiped out. It's like the same old story. And he haven't even done a basic amount of research to understand.

He can't get wiped out. There's no mechanism for that. But yeah, I think, you know, another thing is like he's building and or I should say pioneering now, other people are building it as well. But pioneering an entire new, I'd almost call it an entire new financial system. The entire financial system system that we have today is built off of a model of discount of future cash flows. So we measure stocks based off of a P ratio to the price of earnings into the future. And even bonds are based off of give me the money today and I'll pay you back off of my cash flow in the future. And what they're doing is a completely different model where it's like when you give them the money, they buy the asset.

Like they're not hoping that the investment into an AI dentist center has revenue in 20 years to pay you back. They have the asset today. And so we're pioneering this new financial system, this new way that we've even thought about it. And they're doing it in real time, marked to the market on a daily basis. So back to that Uber example, I mean, you remember the early days of Uber and we would hear headlines like, oh, Austin's allowing them to come in. And then, oh, New York City cabs, you know, banned them. And then, oh, they got, you know, this other area.

And then this area banned them. And imagine if they were traded mark to market on a daily basis. The volatility of Uber would have been so crazy, but they were private for most of that. And then they launched once they were big enough. And so, you know, he's really building out sort of like this new financial model, mark to market on a daily basis. And we just get to sit back and watch and talk about it. It's the last question.

Do you, like me, believe that the bottom is in here on this cycle? for now. Yeah, I believe the bottom is in. I mean, I would say probably with about 80% probability. I think the bottom was in at the level that we got to at the 58,000 level. Could we get back and retest, you know, back into the mid-60s? Certainly, we certainly could. I think maybe we could retest at the 200 weekly moving average kind of a thing. And I'm not a technical analyst, but I think we could. 69, I think right now somewhere in there. Yeah. Yeah. So I think we could get back and retest those levels. But I would say the low back to whatever it was at 58. I think that was the low. I don't see us dropping back below that. And I think, you know, I was certainly on the bandwagon,

Scott. I'll throw myself out there that the four-year cycle was was dead. Some people are still hanging on to that. I don't see how you technically could. Oh, it's a mid-cycle correction. Okay, whatever. But I think what's happened is it sort of turned into like this like self-fulfilling prophecy where people wanted to front run it and they got out of October now because October is Yeah, exactly. And now they're front running, getting back in, and it's happening a month early, you know. Wow, I agree, man. All right, well, dude, thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it. Can't wait to see the calculator and to dig into all that. So you have definitely please send me that site when it's done. Yeah, I'll shoot it over. All right, man. I once again, really appreciate it. I look forward to doing this every time.

Hopefully we can do it again soon and maybe in white T-shirts. Next time, white T-shirts. Got it. All right, man. Thank you.