The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin Skyrockets, Trump Makes Billions Of $$$ Overnight Selling Memecoins | Macro Monday

Episode Date: January 20, 2025

Join Dave Weisberger, Mike McGlone, and James Lavish as we break down what's happening in macro and crypto! Dave Weisberger: https://twitter.com/daveweisberger1  James Lavish: https://twitter.com/jameslavish  Mike McGlone: https://twitter.com/mikemcglone11  ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEKDAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/   ►► Arch Public Unleash algorithmic trading. Discover how algorithms used by hedge-funds are now accessible to traders looking for unparalleled insights and opportunities!  👉https://archpublic.com/  ►►TRADING ALPHA READY TO TRADE LIKE THE PROS? THE BEST TRADERS IN CRYPTO ARE RELYING ON THESE INDICATORS TO MAKE TRADES. Use code '10OFF' for a 10% discount. 👉https://tradingalpha.io/?via=scottmelker  Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://x.com/scottmelker Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.com/ Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe   Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c   #Bitcoin #Crypto #MacroMonday The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor. Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

Bitcoin made a fresh all-time high today after dumping below 100,000. Trump launched not one, but two meme coins. World Liberty Financial, his company, is buying up every Ethereum token they can find on the market. We have an inauguration, a bunch of pardons from Biden, and everybody is losing their damn minds. What better crew to unpack everything that happened this weekend than James Lavish,

Mike McGlone and Dave Weisberger. We've got macro Monday and it may be the most explosive yet. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. video, you can tell that I was so flummoxed by what happened this weekend that I decided to go to a bar at nine o'clock in the morning, Eastern Standard Time, and just start drinking on Trump Day. No, I'm just kidding. I'm at a friend's house upstairs in his bar. But wow, what a weekend. Absolutely unbelievable what happened. I'm just going to bring the team on right now so that we can start to unpack this. Mike, I don't even think we have to have a morning meeting, Mike. I mean, is even Bloomberg just talking about Trump on game coins today? Yeah, well, I think it's a good start. It's his speech yesterday. It's

everything that some of the people who did not agree with him or didn't like him or the media doesn't like him starting to happen. He is not going to go down in history as President Blowhard Weenie. He's going to start out right away hitting hard and everything he said. And he said he's going to set it. So why disagree with it? So that's finally showing up in Bloomberg headlines. The headline is emboldened Trump returns with new allies, clear goals. And you see, he also mentioned things like a national emergency, energy emergency. So crude oil is getting hammered. We obviously see what's happening in Bitcoin. So I think he's going to do what he said he's going to do as soon as possible, as soon as he possibly can. Things like regulation and tax cuts will take acts of Congress, but it's going to be a flurry of activity today and tomorrow.

And it's obviously good for crypto, but I think there's, for me, it's the macro that's kind of confusing is, I trust you, Dave, and James now to tell me what's going to happen with crypto now, because we're completely in the hands of a new administration of president who switched over to zealot from convert. But the macro to me is still the problem. And that is, I still see, at least from our chief equity strategist gina martin adams a stretched equity market um i see potentially that bond yield that 10 30 year that peaked up around i think it potentially peaked around five percent it might be heading towards the rest of the world that are maybe more than three handles um with crude oil peaking

around 80 a barrel right now it's 79.54 and the key thing i'll end with is in terms of commodities it's the beginning of the year and you see nothing but enthusiasm for prices go higher but very poor fundamental backdrop with the china in decline and trump saying he's going to pressure energy prices uh drill at will i mean it's not good for commodity prices and so i look at it as maybe we can keep lifting this great american wealth machine and keep inflation elevated and keep risk gases elevated which also may tilt the fed towards tightening which has been showing up on the screens lately god there's so much unpacked there um You go first, Jason, because I'm going to rip. I'm just going to go 100,000 feet here.

Okay. So economically, we've gotten some positive indicators economically over the last week. And so that has emboldened the bond traders to step in a little bit on the longer end of the curve and not be so worried about inflation. However, here's an incredible thing, Mike, is that we are currently above our debt limit. Our debt limit is like $36 trillion. We're currently above it. And Janet Yellen came out last week and said, hey, just FYI, y'all better be all over this because we're going to have to start doing extraordinary measures, which is not paying intergovernment obligations. And so they're just piling up more debt as we're sitting here. And so that debt number is growing. Those obligations are growing. They're just using

extraordinary measures and kind of what I call accounting voodoo until they can figure it out. But nobody's even talking about it. Nobody's even worried about it. Nobody's even thinking about the fact that we are bumped up against. We're over the debt limit again. Here we go. We're in a crisis.

We've got a new administration coming in. We're going to have to fight about it. And nobody cares. Just more debt. Let's just keep piling on. We're going to pay it with meme coins. James, you obviously were not paying attention this weekend to anything that happened. Because if you are a deep Trump believer, apparently, I once again, I'm suffering from horrible TBS because I was willing to call a grift a grift. My point about the Trump believer, apparently. I, once again, am suffering from horrible TBS because I was willing to call a grift a grift. My point about the Trump coin, and I'm not going to obviously hold anything back in believing it. Listen, you can love the guy. They piss me off literally all the time.

You can love the guy and still say that this was wrong, right? And that doing this days before the inauguration was wrong. But there's literally people telling me, guys, just wait for the master plan because this is how they're going to pay off the debt. You guys don't know. He's playing 4D chess. There's a cash grab, right? That's not going to happen. But I did see some of that, Scott, and I thought that you were right on everything you're talking about this weekend. But look, there are global macro headwinds, sure.

But the United States is clearly in the position to continue to take on debt, continue to expand the money supply, continue to fuel inflation. You've got a president who's coming in now that all he cares about clearly is money and asset inflation. He wants the stock to go up. He wants his meme coins to go up. I would be surprised if we didn't. Well, anyway, so the bottom line is we have a president who's very keyed in on these things. And Bitcoin initially reacted negatively this weekend

to all of this news. And the meme coin after meme coin, it was like, well, initially the Trump meme coin was like, eh, who cares? And then the Melania coin came. That's what it became. This is a bad signal. And then overnight, it kind of digested it and said, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Bitcoin is going to be Bitcoin. It does not matter. And it's going to benefit from the asset inflation we expect to have here.

And they're going to devalue this dollar. That's the only path we have now. And it's very clear that the broader markets, the analysts, nobody's even talking about the debt this is just insane and so it's clear that we're just going to keep it keep it on going you know keep tapping it and uh you know life is good they basically ignored it during the election cycle as well just for the record so that was you know purposeful i think from both parties because nobody's going to win on austerity. But now we are in the crisis.

We're literally in it right now. We're executing extraordinary measures to avoid defaulting on the debt, just for everybody listening to understand what this means. The government is not paying intergovernment obligations in order to pile up all these obligations that they're going to have to pay later. These are liabilities that they're going to have to pay later. They're just piling up. It's a tab that they're keeping. And they can't issue more debt. They can draw down the TGA, the Treasury General Account, which is their cash account, and do these extraordinary measures for the next few months. We are literally in crisis right now and nobody cares. So it's clear that we're just going to keep piling on debt. We're going to figure out how to do it. We're going to expand the money supply. We're going to

allow for inflation to deal with it. And we're just going to keep going. That's obvious. Have you ever seen the movie Dumb and Dumber, James? Yes, I have. The guy opens the briefcase and he says, what are these? And he said, that's as good as money, sir. Those are IOUs. Every cent is accounted for. He's like, you're going to want to keep that one. It's like Lamborghini, $2 million. Welcome to the US government. IOUs. That's how we're going to fund our desk. Go, man. Whatever. Go for it, Dave. Dave, have fun.

So, well, no, look, there's a few things here. If we just talk to you macro, let's talk about the comp stuff first. So Lynn Alden posted a few days ago something that I thought made sense in terms of why the treasury bond rallied off of, bounced hard off of the 4.8 level and is now at 4.6. And her point is that when dollar searches versus other currencies, foreign countries have to trim their treasury holdings to support their currency. And so we're seeing lots of cross-currents going on here. So that means that we've kind of topped out at a level, like just under 5%, which that was just enough for them. They've got to start. Yeah, that's right. So we know there's stuff going on. Okay, so let's take a deep breath and look at what's actually happening here. We have one asset that is different than everybody else.

All the rest of crypto, which is Bitcoin. And we talk about this for lots of reasons. I actually am going to break crypto into three pieces for this rant. Bitcoin is more than anything else, is looking to be, to create, replace the role that gold used to have and is now kind of hanging onto by its fingertips. Gold used to be 100% of monetary aggregates. It's now around 7% of monetary aggregates or wherever it is. Bitcoin will demonetize gold and go past it. That is in a day like today, when we have one leader making you know, making his friends

and family billions of dollars by shilling off his name and his wife's name. And the other leader are preemptively pardoning what could be one of the, what people accuse of being one of the great mass murderers in history at Anthony Fauci and, you know, senators and others who are accused of lying under oath in congress preemptively pardoning of them of all their lives without an investigation into that that has everyone on the right enraged including me i mean i cannot believe you pardoned people like adam schiff who consistently at least spf is still in jail i actually was going people were starting to worry about that last night i i'm telling you scott my tweet this morning was going to be, at least he didn't pardon

SPF. So I guess you're right. There's a silver lining here. But look, all that stuff is noise. The fact of what happened this weekend is the most bullish possible thing that could happen for Bitcoin. Bitcoin is an asset that cannot be screwed with like this. And if you have a president who sees that billions of dollars get created for individuals by playing around with

this stuff, and he knows that he could potentially create, whether it's a Bitcoin strategic reserve, whether they want to buy it, we've talked about the trade. This to him is very promising. And this to him is a very good reason why Bitcoin very well may break the four-year cycle and not top out in the 250 range or 290 range or whatever we're talking about and actually get to gold this cycle. That is a very bullish reason. And why do I say that? I said, look, if something like a meme coin about him fighting that has absolutely no economic value can get to those levels that quickly and attract that much capital, what are the marginal players and speculators in Bitcoin who are not involved in Bitcoin? I haven't looked through all the data this morning because like Scott, I'm skiing and it's hard to go through my laptop. I'll go through all the stuff i normally look at but you know we have an asset here that when it went down

you know last night i was thinking oh god i wish i was on my computer i would love to play this inevitable bounce because to me you have the you have a bitcoin friendly administration after an administration that quite literally tried to crush it out of existence. And we do have to remember that. They tried to crush Bitcoin out of existence. And they caused, they laid the groundwork for Trump coin and Fart coin and others by effectively telling all founders that they couldn't create utility. They had to just stick to means. And we'll let you play with means because there's not much we can do as long as you

don't say it's based on our efforts. And I guess they went after, you know, Kim Kardashian and a couple of the others that were sort of meme-like. But they, in their tries, they tried to tell people they were going to build a community and pass on economic value. Nobody's trying with any of these things. And I've ranted about Gensler picking on the wrong people and being completely counterproductive and the exact opposite of what he should have been. But that's literally over now. And if you take a deep breath and you look and you say, okay, assuming the inauguration goes forward, assuming the nominations come in as we expect them to be, I mean, we are in a new world. And what's that new world look like? That new world looks like Bitcoin really taking its place as the base layer of internet of value. And so that's why I'm so bullish. It's really

crazy. I mean, yes, if you're a meme coin and Trump and Melania come in, I mean, the whole saga where Trump is in 70, then they announced Melania and Trump does the nosedive down to 30 something. And now it's back. Where is it? Back to 60 or something? Mid 40s last I checked. Yeah, mid 40s last I checked. We can check it. Yeah, let's let's I'm looking now.

Where are we? Official Trump, 49, 36. OK, whatever. You know, it's like a ping pong ball. And, you know, the volatility is crazy. It's not beta. It's volatility. and that that is something that's different i mean look some of the things that are ripping today are are things

that should have i mean solana should have you know that that rally made sense i mean we literally have the solana cheerleader in chief as the cryptos are in america i mean it's just a fact, right? I don't know the guy. I've invested. There's that, there's that all in podcast. They all talked about basically dumping their salon on retail that infuriated everyone. Yeah. Yeah. There's all sorts of stuff going on there, right? You know, chain link is one that went down at first. And I'm like, how the hell is chain link going down of all this stuff is you know people if the entire if the administration that was just a liquidity stuff trump was a black hole trump was a black hole everybody sold everything to get into trump who was a speculator in crypto holding any

offline that's what happened there i mean people were down 20 so you guys talk through the reaction of Trump coin and Bitcoin when Melania coin came out. What do you think? I was not at a computer, dude. I don't know what you tell me, Scott. I can unpack to you what I think happened. So there's some pretty good takes. So obviously they launched Trump in the middle of the crypto ball at 9 o'clock p.m. on a Friday night. And everybody's at the crypto ball. They don know, 9 o'clock p.m. on a Friday night. And everybody's at the crypto ball.

They don't even know what's happening. No idea. No idea. And then it was a fair launch because it was unannounced. Anyone who looked knows that, like, the insiders sniped all of the initial supply, basically. You know, tail's all the time. They get about 80% of what's existing and floating and hold 80% on investing schedule. So obviously, Trump went absolutely nuts. If you want to talk about why Chainlink or anything else went down, it's because you've never seen a liquidity suck like this. The

president of the United States tweets a meme coin and says, buy this. All of a sudden, you're talking about $60, $70, $80 billion in market cap for this asset. And then as if that wasn't enough, the problem was there was kind of a rumor that the insiders didn't expect it to go as big as it did and didn't play it the way they wanted to and sort of like willy nilly fired off Melania. But obviously, I think what you saw was that there was not much new money in these things. This was the same hot potato in crypto and the money came from somewhere else and went to somewhere else, and then came out of that with people trying to jump into Melania. And I think when Bitcoin went

down, that's the moment I've just discussed. I'm telling you, I know people are thinking that's what me, but I asked people, friends, they were like, crypto's a joke. This is stupid. I'm selling it, even Bitcoin at that moment. And then I think they woke up to their census two hours later and said, we're probably getting executive orders tomorrow. All sins will be forgotten and forgiven. Right. But this is you have to think about this. Gary Gensler's out. There's no SEC chairman right now. Right. He launches not one, but two meme coins the day before inauguration when the president by the Constitution is not allowed to enrich himself financially based on, you know, the abuse of others, a lot of terms about it, but very clearly in the constitution,

he couldn't have launched a meme point today, probably, although I think they will launch 10 more of them and not really care. But I think it was this perfect window of opportunity to just make a ton of money. And listen, like I said, like you, I think that the Trump presidency is going to be absolutely incredible for this industry. This is probably the biggest signal that this will be incredible for this industry because the governor is off. Every person I've talked to who's in America and in crypto, not even specifically Bitcoin, is like, fuck it.

I'm going to launch a mean coin. Literally. They're like, it doesn't matter. The president's doing it. There's no more illegal. You can do whatever you want. So for better or for worse my first reaction was this is great for crypto kind of bad for humanity it's a terrible

signal like it's wrong you know it's a grift it's a cash grab it's never gonna have utility but hey here we are the industry should go absolutely i think it's exceptionally macro monday i mean macro monday mean coin. That's mean money. Mean coins. That macro mean coin Monday. You know, it is, it is funny because,

you know, Lynn Alden had another, another really interesting tweet. This one I actually disagree with, but I agree with most of it, but I disagree with some of the conclusion. She made the point that all the trad five people pointing to us boomers, people who look like James and I i and mike uh and say oh

yeah you know they sold it the reason bitcoin you know topped in 17 was because of the icos and they sold bitcoin because of that and then the reason it topped you know uh was luna collapsed and we all know that and you know and and they're looking at the meme stuff and saying ah this is going to cause the same thing it's going to cause all the serious money to fly out of it. I think that's just wrong. I think what will happen is people on the margin will say, you know, this whole thing, the whole crypto thing is crazy. What are you lunatics doing? It's a holiday. We have, it's Martin Luther King Day today. The markets are closed. So we have, while this is going on, we now have three uninterrupted days where the only

markets that are trading worldwide are crypto markets. And so they look and say, you're crazy. And that's all probably true. And so there is some people who will be disgusted. That said, none of this is going to have any impact on BlackRock and their investors, Fidelity and their investors, Morgan Stanley's, you know, E-Trade launch and their investors, Fidelity and their investors, Morgan Stanley's E-Trade launch and their investors, all of the financial consultants that are now going to be free to be able to offer crypto trading services over this year.

It's going to have absolutely nothing to do with that. If you've seen this movie, like we have, we know the internet bubble wasn't a one or two month thing. It went on for a long time, right? You know, there was, it was sort of mildly interrupted by Y2K, but it went on, it was going crazy for the entirety of 1999 with stories like I always talk about NetTaxi. I mean, NetTaxi seems cute now, you know, Swan Valley snowmobile gets renamed to NetTax net taxi in 1998 and it's worth a few hundred thousand dollars it zooms to a billion dollars oh my god how how huge could that be actually

it's like 800 million and then falls back within a year or two back down to being worth nothing again that seems cute now things zoom to a hundred billion dollars but i mean with the world financialization that we've had and the amount of monetary printing that we've had the amount of of assets and everything that James rails about every time he gets to, you know, old man yell at cloud at the debt. And by the way, I agree with you, James. I'm not I'm not memeing you. I'm just saying that, you know, sometimes you feel like, you know, how can people can't see this? Financialization is very real. But my point is that didn't take down the NASDAQ and it was happening constantly. It was years. It took two or three years and it really took the valuations to get ridiculously extended on individual companies. Now, Mike has made the point, he's been very patient here,

that there are a lot of assets around the world, not just crypto, whose evaluations are very, very extended now. And maybe in the macro, it's as extended as it was back then. I don't know. I'd have to look through those metrics, but I'm not sure that that's true. Curious what your take on that is, Mike. But the point is that it doesn't necessarily derail you. What I do think is going to happen, and this is the amusing part of it, is this administration is going to be net worse for meme coins in the sense of that it's going to have real competition. If you're a founder in America and you're building a token that can have value behind it or build a community behind it that you can actually pass on something, well, you're going to have an actual runway where today that runway has barbed wire across it.

That barbed wire is about to get, the guy is about to get sworn in and take the big bolt cutters and get rid of the barbed wire that's locking in the real crypto industry. And so this is a really interesting backdrop. It could go, the volatility and the bumpiness is going to be all over the place. But understand, real value expressed through crypto is now open for business or is about to be.

And that's a very big deal. Mike, stepping out of like the macro picture that we've discussed so many times, I really just want to know like your gut reaction when you saw what was happening this weekend in a vacuum.

Oh, massive speculation never ends well if you're smart enough to get out and make some money great remember i'm born and raised in highly speculative relinquished markets and futures typically is 20 to 1 remind me everything i see is very is it it 1927, 28 or 29-ish? We have a complete dependency now for Bitcoin has to go up in the next year. I've just never seen something like this. I'm trying to, you know, it has to go up now because if it goes down. You know, you've been on, I think you've been on a very active, like you talk very often about meme coins and the amount of extra kind of market cap that's in this market that needs to be flushed out. I mean, you couldn't get a more gratuitous example of that, obviously, this weekend, if you believe that, right?

I mean, we just got the president launching a meme coin on a Friday night. There used to be sayings like, buy the rumor. I don't have to say the rest of it. We're definitely getting pretty good rumors. We're going to get facts soon. It's going to be the greatest thing ever. And I'm loving, enjoying hearing the same things I've heard every time Bitcoin gets expensive. Oh, it's different this time. We're not going to have the drawdowns like we used to. And I just still have to point out the 2.5 million wannabes. And then I was getting pushed back a

little bit this week on an X about Bitcoin. I said, you know, it does have a much higher correlation to Dogecoin than it does to the S&P 500 or gold. Thank you. Go ahead. Keep going, Mike. Mike, keep going. Put a pin in that one. He's got a few things I want to bring over to the macro. And that is, we have...

I know that you will. I mean, I'm intentionally firing you up because that's is we have. I know that you will, I mean, I'm intentionally firing you up because that's what we have to disagree on some things, just from a macro standpoint, we do have a new president coming in. And it's typically the optimism of how much better he's going to make it. Yet we have the highest, most expensive U.S. stock market in history by many measures. Great. It's got to go higher, get better. Yet last year, the stupid rock beat the stock

market. And this is things I hate to see. I don't want to see gold beating the stock market. Yet gold has all this competition from Bitcoin and still beats the S&P 500. We probably can look back from history and say that was a bit of a warning. And I look at the iterations of next year. And this is not hypothetical. The Bitcoin will be up or down 40% based on its first standard deviation move of its annual volatility. It's about 40%. So no one can conceive of going back to around 60, which would be a shocker, but it's got to go to 140, just on a normal correlation move and based on its history, yet it's already gone up a lot. And I just look at the whole space is now we have a new government. In some ways, we have to thank Gary

Gensler for this. I mean, nothing like anybody showing, especially in life, I always taught my kids, you want to see the dark side sometimes to really appreciate the good side in life. And he showed us the dark side. Thank you, sir. But now we've completely swung over and we have an administration completely embracing massive speculation in an industry that has unlimited supply and ease of entry. I just kind of look at some of the histories of what came after the stock market crash of 1929 that set up to try to prevent excesses like this. So I'm looking at this as good luck. Like Soros says, when you see a bubble join it, but we've had had a serious bubble. Now there's

a risk that Bitcoin is going to be stuck within 10% of a hundred thousand for quite a while. It's got to go higher. So that's why I look at, I'll tilt over to the macro. The macro globally is very bad. And I'll end with this. The question is, you know, when you have a pretty extensive import in the U S by corporations for clients, there's one main reason for that is for profits. Why do you offshore if you're Walmart and Amazon or anything else? Because you can get better profits of doing it overseas. We're shifting that, which means tariffs are going to push back on profits. We already see profit expectations, I'm sorry, earnings way too high, which means we're going to have a normal correction. So here's what I'm still waiting for, just the normal 10%

correction, S&P 500, and then we'll see how the dust settles and see where we should reallocate capital. What if we have a sudden 10% expansion of the money supply instead? So let me finish with that, James. I'll end with that too, is I do love when people point out the debt is on a one to 10 basis, US debt historically is basically about a one when it comes to affecting long-term interest rates. The 10 is inflation, inflation expectations. debt historically is basically about a one when it comes to affecting long-term interest rates. The 10 is inflation, inflation expectations. And this is one of the things that got me out of the trading pits almost 40 years ago when I pointed out what's happening in the rest of the world. The rest of the world is seeing risking pretty severe deflation, most notably China.

The interest rate in China for that 10-year note is like 1.7, yet they have debt to GDP much higher than us. The interest rate for the 10-year note in Japan is one and change, yet their debt to GDP is much higher than ours. Yes, I agree it's a bad trend, but I do see people addressing it. And to me, the bond vigilantes have been in place by U.S. rates are so high now versus the rest of the world. It's potentially something breaking. And that's what I see with gold outperforming the stock market, despite the fact it's got major competition from Bitcoin. So there's two massive whopper wrong assumptions in what you're saying, where we actually disagree too.

A whopper wrong assumption. What assumption number one is, is that you treat an asset that is aspirationally you treat an option like an asset you know I've said this many times but but it comes across Bitcoin at this point will either reach escape velocity in this cycle or the next cycle after this but in this video in the not so distant future to where it is highly pursued with gold and beyond, or it won't. That is not an asset that you look at and say, oh, its annual volatility is X and therefore it's going to, no, sorry. If you try doing that, if you traded options that way, looking at the volatility of the option itself,

you go broke very, very fast. And that's what's happening to shorts at BitGlance. We saw this morning, right? People were piling under the shorts saying, okay, the cycle's over, then it's getting their faces ripped off. And we'll see what actually happens later. So that's assumption number one. And I say it, and we joke about it because I talk about it a lot, but you can't look at it that way. It's very, very important. Okay. What's the second assumption? The assumption that you make, and you actually understand that what I'm about to say is correct. So this is a little bit harsh for me to say it that way, but so be it. It makes for good TV. Inflation is not created equal. There's consumer inflation and asset inflation.

And we're in a world where all the powers that be want asset inflation and are trying to engineer as much consumer inflation, disinflation as they can. And how do you do that? Well, you prioritize capital over labor. You make it cheaper. This is pre-Trump. You make it cheaper to outsource. You make it cheaper to automate by making capital effectively free so that you can do that. And now we have an administration that says, okay, we want to make the U.S. as cheap or in the same ballpark as the rest of the world. Keep in mind, the reason the rest of the world is so much cheaper, there are two reasons. One is what everybody talks about, but it's only 20%, which is the cost of labor. U.S. cost of labor is more expensive than the rest of the world. And 20% of the reason it's cheaper to outsource is because of U.S. labor. 80% is because of our regulatory structure and what it costs to actually build a business and build something. China, you've talked about this many times, Mike. How much does China cost to build the cities and all the infrastructures, the nuclear reactors they're building, everything they're building?

It costs so much less to build it there than it does here. And that is exactly what this administration is trying to tackle. Will they be successful? I have no idea. I certainly hope they're successful, but if they are, then the amount of inflation we'd be importing, because if we can't fix that, then tariffs and trying to build everything in America, if it costs 5X to build things here, well, inflation is going to be in the double digits very, very quickly. And I think that's what you and a lot of economists are looking at. And it may very well be true if you can't slash the red tape, because it's not just red tape. It's everything. I mean, it really it permeates every single thing you try to do.

Think of it this way. In California, we have this great example. Gavin Newsom, that I'll try to leave the expletives off of it, but probably the least likely person I would ever want to run anything, including a lemonade stand, actually said a week ago that, well, one of the things we're going to do to help homeowners is we're going to make it easier for them to rebuild because we know it's too expensive to build in California. Think about the gravity of that admission. It goes way beyond just state rules. It's the entire rulemaking structure.

It's the environmental difference. Those of us who are environmentalists believe you shouldn't be able to spew toxic waste everywhere. Well, China, when they dig up rare earth minerals, which we use for all our windmills that we think are so green, and our solar panels, cause toxic waste pits in the middle of their country. And they just say, yeah, no one's living here. Well, we don't care. You can't do that in America. You literally can't. Even if we did find all the rare earths that we wanted, we couldn't get them out of the ground as expeditiously as

they do. There's so much of this. I could rant forever on this topic, but the point is those two assumptions matter. So if you bring that back to what James said, though, we have to look at asset prices. And asset prices, if you were put in a time capsule, if you were Rip Van Winkle, i.e. you fell asleep for 20 some odd years at the end of the internet, but you were put in a time capsule, if you were Rip Van Winkle, i.e., you fell asleep for 20 some odd years, at the end of the internet bubble, you woke up in 2000 and you went to sleep in 2003, as the internet bubble is pretty much winding itself down or about to embark on the huge bull market that got interrupted by the GFC, but more or less has continued. And you see this bull market of financial products.

You would say oh my god how could the price of this be that but people ignore that money that the dollar is the denominator and if you make more of it what do you think is going to happen to prices and we keep doing that right james isn't that kind of the point well i mean and any indication is uh hindenburg closed their their-selling fund for a reason. This is a guy who famously picked off Enron. Too much stress. Can you imagine being a short-seller in this environment?

I mean, I can't even fathom how painful that would be. It's money sloshing around having to find a home i mean if you're if you're you you're a person someone you know drops you whatever you know a million dollars where are you going to put it you're going to put in a bank account we know that in that that that it's it's to use michael saylor's analogy it's a melting ice cube you know it so where are you going to put it you know you put it in two years okay well fine you know maybe for two years are you going to put it? You know, you can put it in two years. Okay. Well, fine. You know, maybe for two years, that's okay. You get 5% interest or wherever you're at 4.6 or three. Maybe buy some real estate, maybe buy some stocks. Yeah. Right. And what do you do? You take

a piece of it, you put it out on the speculative curve and you buy lottery tickets. And what are lottery tickets? Well, lottery tickets are OTC equities, really small cap equities, and meme coins, and other sort of crap. Trump and Melania. And so when Mike talks about 2.5 million Bitcoin wannabes, they're not 2.5 million Bitcoin wannabes. They're 2.5 million lottery tickets. They're beanie babies.

Bitcoin is sitting there, and Bitcoin, like gold, Bitcoin outperforming crypto, at some point in our lifetime, is going to look as bad for the crypto industry in terms of what's actually happening. Because crypto is going to be assets at some point. All equities are all going to be crypto in the next 10 years because it is way cheaper. No, it's true. You could have an equity, a actual claim on the assets of a company, but it's all going to be tokenized because tokenization, the way crypto trades is so dramatically more efficient, lower cost, less friction, 24-7 global, full multi-currency, everything is going to trade that way.

Soon you will not be able to distinguish. An asset will either be a claim on the equity, the value, the ownership of a company, the future earning streams of a company, if it's utility or it could be a DAO, it could be whatever, a debt obligation, or it could just be something that we think is worth value because, hey, we like it and it's kind of funny, which is a pure meme coin. And that's what we're seeing. Eventually, we're going to grow up and everything is going to be crypto. So the only issue is going to be, well, what's its value based on? Well, its value is based on people thinking it has value.

Okay, cool, right? You know, that is what it is. And I keep making the point that we're all going there. So it's, you know, here we are today, crypto markets are open. They're going to trade a lot. I haven't looked, but yesterday, just yesterday, Sunday, a Sunday in the middle of a three-day weekend,

CoinRoute's had one of its top 10 most busy days, facilitating, trading, and helping our clients save money. I mean, billions of dollars. It's just insane. To this point, Dave, you remember back in the, and both you and Mike remember, I don't know, Scott, if you traded these or not, but in 99, 98, 99,

when the internet bubble was just getting really big. And you had all these companies that were, all they did is they said they're WWW something. And every single IPO was hot. I mean, every single IPO was gangbusters, out of control. If you could get 100 shares or 1, thousand shares as a huge hedge fund of an allocation of one of these, you made massive money because they were so hot and they went into the market and they traded straight up. It feels a little bit like that with the meme coins, because people aren't really thinking about utility or value. They're just like, I got to

get in the next one. I got to get us another lottery ticket. Just got to get in the next one, got to get in the next one. And then there's so much money sloshing around in there. It didn't disappear, the money. It just went other places. And some of the stuff was way overvalued. Obviously, that stuff just went to zero. But it feels like that in this moment. But then the markets, they continue to mature and grow up. And I think that Dave, you're right. Then it's obvious that this is where it's all going. It's just a question of how much, how much pain do we have to, how many growing pains do you have to go through to get there? Right. Yeah. I mean, I think that's kind of the point. The point is the more money we continue

to spend and create, the more money they're sloshing around, you're going to get ups and you're going to get downs. But in that, in downs are harder. Now, we haven't gotten rid of downs. And at some point, people are going to wake up and say, wait a minute, this stuff is all crazy. The emperor has no clothes and there will be a bust. And what will the bust be in? And how will that affect other assets? How correlated are all these things to each other? And in all of that, the ghost correlations, when you get past the first day? Like this weekend. This weekend proved correlation goes to one.

As Scott said, the black hole of Trump coin. All of a sudden, money gets sucked out and everything goes down. And then you wake up to Monday. But that to me indicates that there was not much new money. That to me indicates that it was yet the same speculators that have been here the whole time. Scott, it was the middle day. We're talking about the middle day of a three day weekend. No, I agree. But I'm saying to me, like there was a there was

a sentiment in my first my first thing was like, yeah, this is awful. But man, he's going to bring in a lot of new people. I think that might be happening on exchanges. But yeah, but listen, it's you know, if a lot of people come to buy Trump coin, who wouldn't have been here, that money will find a home. Now, okay, and now let's bring this back to Mike's other statement that I want to talk about. And I got the two people in the world that are the best to talk about. Mike says Bitcoin is correlated to Dogecoin. Well, and Scott has always said, how did you get into crypto, Scott?

By trading Dogecoin. I mean, by trading does coin I mean by trade by trading all coins but those was my first love damn right so now you have an entire generation of crazies who uh who are going to get into crypto because they have a new thing that happens the first love is that bullish or bearish massively bullish obviously and and and and and and if this was the court of law i would say the defense rests but i will point out that but but that really is important because if you want if we all we care about in in macro more than anything else is watch the liquidity and if you were saying that this idiocy and it is idiocy i mean you can say whatever it is i mean trump himself probably thinks it's kind of funny and i think it's funny

but if it brings in more money into the into the sector to get more people to actually start looking at the real stuff that is massively bullish in addition to all the other massively bullish things that we talk about every week and that's an interesting comment just quickly ch quickly, Chris here said moonshot where he can basically just buy like crypto with a credit card, you know, had over 200,000 users in 24 hours. I saw that, but I also saw an analysis that the bulk of those were crypto natives just looking for the fastest way to get in. So I'm not saying it's not true, but I don't know that that was 200,000 brand new entrants into the market. We know that wallets, you know, one person can own 200 wallets and it's very hard to tell how many people. Listen, it's going to bring a lot of new people.

They literally the most powerful and influential person on the planet is firing off meme coins willy nilly. That's going to bring a hell of a lot of new people, the same ones who buy Trump steaks and Trump shoes and Trump, you know, water and all these things. This guy's been launching me coins forever. He just found a more effective way to do it. So one of the things that we're macro Monday, we're supposed to talk about macro topics. And one of the things we haven't touched on is that Davos, the world economic,

the forum starts today in Davos. And normally you'd be like, oh, here we go again. You get all these executives up there. You got JP Moore. You got Jamie Dimon. And by the way, I was in New York this last weekend seeing that building, the new JP Morgan building. Have you guys seen this thing, this monstrosity? It's got a – well, Mike has.

It's got a – it has a black diamond on every side of the building. It's got this well mike has it's got a it has a black diamond on this every side of the building it's got this big diamond on it so kind of feels like a mark of a top but anyways um so he yeah so that's his legacy he's got this big jp morgan building with a diamond on it but you normally think oh here we go davos we've got the you know the world Economic Forum going on and we're going to hear about the negativity around Bitcoin, how it's just used for drugs and sex trafficking and money laundering because you've got all these executives up there. They're just talking bad about it. But this year, you got Larry Fink going to Davos, a year after the greatest launch of any ETF in history. It's a completely different feeling for Bitcoin this year in particular at that forum, which is just interesting that again,

there's just nothing like it's just yet another, it's just another, you know, check Mark. It's another, you know, I don't know, a checkpoint for Bitcoin.

Here we go. It's just now it's becoming mainstream and adopted. Now I'm interested to hear how it's talked about in Davos this week. As you could say, especially just really quickly, if we get a strategic Bitcoin reserve executive order today or tomorrow, how much would that drop? Oh my God.

And that's another, I mean, that's yet another thing. I mean, I'm just thinking macro, typical mainstream investing. Davos is this week. Last year was super negative. This year could be a different, it could just be a different tone about Bitcoin because Fink is speaking there and because of the greatest launch in ETF history. The Bitcoin, the BlackRock Bitcoin spot ETF, everybody's listening. Right. And that is a very, it's a telling sign. I mean, people, for very good reasons in some

cases, in some cases overblown, have a tendency to be very negative when they're in Main Street about Wall Street. You tell someone you work for Wall Street, they say, oh yeah, you guys are just money grubbing, blah, blah, blah. Okay. There's truth there. And the reason why that truth matters is because all of the firms on Wall Street have been prohibited from making money on Bitcoin or anything in crypto. And that is about to change. Every single time, in every asset class, in every situation, when Wall Street has had the ability to make money on an asset class for the first time, that asset class has done, let's make it multiple choice. Has it done A, has it gone up naturally? B, has it kind of stayed where it was? C, has it gone down? Or D, has it fucking exploded?

The answer is Z. We all know that. And that's literally what's happening here. That's why the president of the United States and his family is like gleefully jumping on. They're trying to say to the Biden crime family, hold my beer, you know, and they're doing it legally, right? You know, Biden, you know, took money from, you know, his family, James, his brother, and his now pardoned son took money from China and Ukraine and this, that, and the other thing Trump is basically doing it at his family's doing it out in the open and legally. And they're, and they're, they're crushing them in terms of value. It's billions instead of millions, you know, say what you want to say about this. I'm not going to put a value on it, but you know, if you could do things legally, wall street has literally exists to, into

financialize this country by legally making money in ways that if you took a step back and you said, do we really think that we should have, you know, billion more people making money from mortgages than the banks, than the old savings and loan that allow people to buy houses? Well, here we are. We've accepted that for years. The housing- Oh, crypto allows, I mean, Mike, doesn't crypto just open the door to all of the best and worst behaviors that sort of Dave is alluding to here?

I mean, Trump just printed like $70 billion worth of money. Like he made, if you were looking, if you believe it was all his, he probably made five, 10 times more than he made in his entire career in 24 hours by simply tweeting something and allowing someone to like pump a meme coin. Doesn't this just unlock the insanity times 10 if all of this becomes legal because the president is doing it? And I'm not saying right or wrong. I'm just saying the strategy that wall street has used to make money over the years have now been supercharged with whatever dave drinks every single morning well that's a

good lead up well i just i love always like for years every time i present publicly most first thing i'd ever say about cryptos is go to coinmarket.com and and sort on volume this was six years ago when Trump still hated him. And Tether's number one. But you know what number four is right now? Official Trump. So there's no lessons in history about risk of massive excessive speculation and inflation. And remember a guy from the trading pits who's seen the Ds, the deaths and divorces, guys who made a lot of money and lose it. They get divorced and a lot of them end up committing suicide. This is the way markets are now.

We're in a massive speck of the frenzy. It's awesome. It's great. But when you get the average person getting involved and think it only goes up, it's just I had to go back to Irving Fisher's quote from 1929, a permanently high plateau. Dave, you have to be careful saying things like that because you're saying things in a way that it's different this time. Yes, we have a president.

But I'm not. I get it yes we have a president this is unique this is unique but this kind of but i want to be number one was looking the macro the fed to ease i thought last year was a bit of a mistake we all saw what happened it just increased inflation and increased bond yields they were wrong so far the market's telling them they were wrong by easing it's an ease in this environment means this is an environment they should be taking away the punch bowl. Stock market going up at two times GDP means only inflation, means massive wealth creation, which is wonderful. But it means excesses, which humans are human nature is famous for. Massive, massive, massive divergence in wealth creation, like continued divergence in wealth creation, where the separation

of wealth is only going to get worse. It is true. That's why we talk about it. That's why we talk about it. And that's why we talk about Bitcoin, because we want people to protect themselves. So let's point about one thing about that. You want them to protect themselves with a highly speculative digital asset. And virtually everybody I ever speak to about Bitcoin who's more normie, which I would consider myself, and many times in my history I was a normie before I got into markets, of course, it was 40 years ago, they all have these. And almost always they ask me not about Bitcoin, but, oh, which coin should I buy? And they're all speculating, which, great, it's fine.

Right, because they're trying to keep up. You pointed that out a lot. Is that a way to get ahead? Let's point out the major reason why there's massive wealth distribution indifference in this country is because the wealthy are making so much money. But you go around anywhere now, your minimal working class person has one of these. Now, they're on their phones. They have the basics of life. They have food. They have water. Yes, they have to work. But remember, I got a lot of family members who are wage earners. It's the wealth creations because that's what America does great.

It ain't happening in China right now because Mr. Xi put on the screws. And this is one thing I love about the big picture macro is the world's most powerful demand for economy is tilted over to crypto, partly because we can. It doesn't really matter. And the second largest country that's led by the most autocratic communist leader since before Mao is pushed away. Why? Because they can't accept it. It's pushing the whole world. I think what crypto said initially is two free decentralized markets. The point is prices are just so expensive. Now, when your average person jumps on at these levels and expects to make 10x,

it's really scary. The time to make 10x is when you typically hear, oh, it's crushed, it's beat up. And now it's just too much enthusiasm to be aggressively long. And I agree 100% with that last statement. But what James and I are both telling you is the denominator fucking matters. When you have a 36, when you're debt to GDP in the G7,

if you take unfunded liabilities into account, it's over 120%. Forget it. With unfunded liabilities into account. Over 120%. It's over 120%. Forget it. Add unfunded liabilities, it's absurd. Then we're at 200%. So what does that have to do with speculation with altcoins? I agree with you in that. Everything it has to do with it.

Because the difference is we don't have a docile aging population like Japan. No, no, Mike, it does. And there's two messages here. One message is very important that you're making, which I agree with a hundred percent, which is people who are trying to make 10 X their money instead of intelligently invest and looking at this are going to get hurt. You are right. I do not believe this time is different. I think to even insinuate that is it's annoying because you know, I agree with you on that point. I call them lottery tickets for a reason. You know what else do they say about lotteries?

The lottery is a tax on the poor. The lottery tickets that our governments sell, that all governments sell, are a tax on poor people. They are the most regressive tax on the planet. And I do believe that the entirety of speculation is bad. I mean, look, I ran business, you know, I ran two sigma securities, right? What did we do? We took the other side of all retail trades. We saw what happened. I mean, retail doesn't always lose money by any means, but there are a lot of people who get crazy and it's always at the end. At the end of every bull market, you see people pyramid up and speculate up and start taking more and more leverage right at the worst possible time. And I rail about that constantly. And so, yes, I agree with you on that.

The but is if you're an institution and you're intelligent and you're looking at what's an intelligent bet, intelligent bets are things like we are devaluing our currency. We have to. And that does something. When you have market interest rates below actual where a free market would set interest rates, you end up getting malinvestment. It is as simple as supply and demand parts of economics. And what I have been saying is that's been happening for years. If you set out with a blank sheet of paper and said, I want to create wealth inequality, what would you do? Well, the first thing you would do is you would have fiat money and you would be printing it relentlessly because people who have money now can make money because assets appreciate. So if you're trying to do the bad thing that we're saying is bad, then you wouldn't be doing what we're doing. Now, of course, what's the one asset that doesn't print relentlessly? Bitcoin. And there are people who

understand that. There's a reason why the demographics are the way they are and so please criticize me if you will and i deserve lots of criticism but i absolutely agree with you on who could get hurt and what they what could happen but the one part and yeah exactly and 100 mike all of that and let me just say that then you can then please uh answer all this But the one phrase that you said that kind of bugs me is a highly speculative asset. Now, it's a new asset, and it's only been around for 15, 16 years. But highly speculative is not really fair anymore, because it's got over $2 trillion in it. It has handled transactions relent a without a hiccup for over a decade now

um it is backed by a massive amount of energy massive 175 terawatt hours there's 20 nuclear reactors running continuously all year and so my you know the the quote i use is that it is it is just a fortress of digital power and and it's nation-state level resistant. It's growing every day. And so that's the difference is that I don't believe it's speculative anymore. Is it new? Is it volatile? Is it growing?

Yes, it is. Will it remain volatile in the short term? Yes, it will. But I don't think it's speculative anymore. Let me rephrase that a little bit. Bitcoin is digital gold. This is what got me into the space a long time ago, reading Seyfriedin Amas' book. I completely agree with that. We all know who goes back in this program a long time. It is digital gold, but there's times when gold gets too expensive.

Stock markets get too expensive and markets get too expensive. You have to be very careful. That's why I think we're on L. So the key thing I want to reiterate is 2.5 million digital cryptocurrencies are highly speculative digital assets. What's to find what they are? Nothing wrong with that. Most of them are. Bitcoin was the father or mother, whatever you say, for all those. The key thing I want to reiterate, Dave, is what you said is professional investors absolutely know and get if they're adding Bitcoin to an existing portfolio, they're adding massive, they're adding to the risk of their correlation with the stock market right now. Now you tell me that's different. I want to see the proof. I have

not seen the proof yet. Everything's making record highs. Bitcoin's leading the way. It trades it three times about until they're great. But most of them get that. Now your typical investor doesn't get that. I get getting off of zero makes sense. But if you're 100% allocated equities and you take 3% of that and add it to crypto, you have much more high exposure to risk assets as led by the stock market. Historically, there's only been two down years

for the stock market since 2011. Both times, Bitcoin on average dropped around 70%. Yes, it's outperformed. That's the facts of professional investors. And let's look at ETFs. ETFs have already, on a risk-adjusted basis, have reached parity with gold around $220 million. Yes, it's risk-adjusted.

I guess that doesn't matter until you're less wealthy, like some of us, and you lose money. So to me, that's the macro. I just pointed out we've had this most wonderful event. The world changed on November, November 11th. President Trump is the president as of today. Is this the time to be getting over long Bitcoin? If you were smart enough, like you were James and, and, and Scott,

and even Dave, when it dropped down to around 50 in August, this is just not a level to be. Okay. Okay. Okay. You've got to, you've got to define your timeline. You've got to define your timeline you got to define your investing timeline my investing timeline is very long and so i don't care i'm leaving i'm not selling it i don't know it depends on what happens with the dollar you know but it's long it's longer than four years i'm sorry you're right well oh yeah you're quoting word yeah exactly so i mean but

that's the point is my timeline is very long if you're just trying to make a buck and you and you may need liquidity yeah it may not be the right time to jump in but if this is going to be a long-term investment for you four years or longer then i think you're fine and you just you just wait it out and that's the point i you know i had a long conversation this weekend with Bill Barheit, the CEO of Abra, because obviously they're still doing Bitcoin lending. And I just wanted to understand structurally how it was, even though I'd done a podcast with him. I think everything's going to change for Bitcoin, whether it's MicroStrategy or the banks having SAB 121

overturned. But I think it can be a forever thing, Mike, for people who are willing to take a 30% loan to value ratio on a loan against their Bitcoin. If Bitcoin continues to rise, I know this sounds crazy, but you literally never have to pay. If you took a loan at $100,000 Bitcoin and only took 30% out and Bitcoin goes to one-fifth, literally never pay that loan or its interest, and you never have to sell your Bitcoin. It's the billionaire playbook that's never been available on Bitcoin, but is available on Tesla stock for Elon Musk and such. So I do think that as Bitcoin becomes more financialized, the big holders are going to have to sell less to fund their lifestyles because they'll be able to do all the other things. Exactly what I wrote about this weekend in the in my newsletter exactly i don't disagree but it predicates it's an if statement based on one simple fact of it has to go up in price okay no problem no problem it's going to

have to go up right right on a you know 35 loan is bitcoin cutting in half and you can add more i'm just saying if you're very safe about it and you do it in the right way, one bull market sets you up for life and you never have to sell. Let me rephrase that, Mike. Let me rephrase that. Go up. It's not that Bitcoin is going up in price that the U.S. dollars continue going down in value.

That's the point you're borrowing. You're borrowing an inflationary asset against a deflationary asset. Thank you. Yes. So let me I don't disagree with that, but that's what gold has done historically over time. And when you actually measure the court, what really pushes Bitcoin up or down over time, even our Bloomberg economist team did it. Dollar doesn't even fit in there.

It's one 10th of what really matters. Macro big picture over 10 years. Yes. But look at the dollar versus all the other currencies on the planet. Let's think of fiat currencies. I get it. It's still the best horse in the race. There's nothing even close. I don't disagree with that. That's why I don't. What currency is better? I mean, fiat currency is better than the dollar.

But dollars still will buy you fewer things today than they did 10 years ago. Period. Every currency, every fiat currency history and plan. And it's a losing race. Except for maybe a Spanish piece of eight, right? By the way, I don't know if you guys saw. Go ahead, Dave. Yeah, please. No, go ahead, Scott. I was just going to say, I can't literally get Twitter up on my computer, if you guys are wondering.

But World Liberty Financial, obviously Trump's company, just announced that they're unlocking more token supply to sell on the back of their demand. In case you're wondering, this was the one that was this World Liberty Financial was raised by accredited investors in the United States. And now that he's inaugurated and can't launch a meme coin, they're going to sell more of those tokens. Then we're on the fixed schedule that people are raving about for all the other launches so let me let me ask one thing in history what happened with gary jensler he came at you see he showed us the dark side thank you very much we're gonna look at his him from for history like aaron burke he did us a favor now we have this situation the complete opposite we have this crypto present there's nothing anything that can go bad i just look at at it as, all right, good luck with that one. Just be careful. Well, all I'll say is this. If you understand

that Hester and Paul Atkins are both disclosure-based regulators, that things like what Scott just said is if you raise an asset and you say, this is the schedule that's going to happen, and then it isn't that, you're going to get prosecuted. Having an SEC that ignored bad guys, ignored FTX, ignored Voyager, ignored Celsius, ignored all the bad guys, and focused only on stopping innovation and allowed meme coins, basically they allowed all the bad behaviors. And what Mark Cuban in his rant today, and I'm going to respond to his rant on Twitter, to Jeff Dorman, who Jeff is brilliant and Mark basically just took an absolutely ridiculous potshot at him, is if you do those things that we think are bad behaviors and you have reasonable regulation, you will get done.

And that's what we want regulators to do. We want regulators to say, if you say, if you tell people the token economics are X, Y, and Z with the supply schedule of Q and it isn't, and you deviate from that, then you broke the law and bad things happen. And that's what we want. We want that. We've literally had the polar opposite of that. So when you say these things, just understand what you're saying. The Biden administration, the Democrats in charge, put Gensler in that seat to destroy an industry and to hold back innovation and not to protect investors. Protecting investors means if I buy something, I buy it on the basis of information, and that information turns out to be a lie, the person who lied to me goes, you know, pays fines or goes to jail.

That's what needs to happen. And I don't believe James or I even remotely disagree with you on that. My problem is let's not be disingenuous. Let's understand that that is exactly what's going to happen. Yes, is there going to be grifting? Yes, is there going to be stuff at scale? Yes. The same people brought to you, you know, there's so many different things that have happened.

The same people brought you Enron. They're going to bring you new crypto scams. And hopefully they will also go to jail. Yeah, I know. I saw that. The household nuclear reactors. Okay, great. If that were true, it would be fucking awesome.

But let's just say I'm going to stay skeptical until proven otherwise. But my point is we want regulation to make these disclosures be real, be forced material. And if you deviate from them, you go to jail and you have to give people money back. And ultimately, this weekend is going to shine a huge light on that, and eventually we'll end up in a better place. Now, is there going to be a lot of volatility to get there? Absolutely. Is there a lot of crap that happens? Yes. Is Bitcoin through all of this just building block by block every 10 minutes? Also, yes. Yeah, I think it's very clear the winner here should be Bitcoin and all of the insanity, which you, I think, eloquently sort of described at the beginning. I mean, James, did you buy Melania? Just in case. I never did. Got a little bag. Melania perp fuge.

Do you think we're going to see Baron and John Jr. and Eric coins? I think it's past the deadline. I think it's past the deadline. It's starting now, right? I'm not watching on TV.

I think it's at noon EST, I think. Oh, it's noon EST. Oh, okay well it could drop any minute we could do this we could uh do this show for 15 hours i wish that this show was like going to be later this afternoon too because we're going to see the executive orders so we're going to have a lot more i think to talk about as those come out because that's right and just as executive orders quick prediction i do not believe there will be a Bitcoin strategic reserve by executive order buying.

I do think he probably will have an executive order saying don't sell the stuff that they own. And having a study to allow what's going on. I think that there will be actually significant action happening that we aren't going to see. Because it doesn't make any sense for the U.S. to say we're going to buy and let everybody buy ahead of us. Exactly. So I want to be really clear about that, you know, in terms of that. Now, could that cause a sell off of Bitcoin today? Yes, it absolutely could if people are stupid and if they're smart, it will go up from here. But we'll see what happens. People do a lot of crazy things. And remember, none of the other markets are open to trade this stuff.

So people are going to trade it. I think it's very important to understand. Go ahead, Mike. Yeah, I think it's very important to understand. All futures markets are open. You can trade gold. You can say crude oil. You can trade S&P 500s.

They're all open in futures. Right. Yeah. But I mean, you can't trade individual stocks. Yeah. No. Hopefully. Yeah. But I mean, you can't trade individual stocks. Yeah. No. Hopefully. Yeah.

Yep. I agree. The technology is amazing. I admit that. I think it's pretty clear that a lot of people believe that Trump would be the first Bitcoin president. I've said so. I think it's very clear that we have our first crypto president and there's some important

nuance there and that things are going to get absolutely wild over the coming weeks and the next four years. Hard to predict what's even going to come. Listen, as I said, if this all brings a ton of liquidity into the market and 5% or 10% of those people find their way to Bitcoin, which is what happened with Doge and NFTs and Metaverse and DeFi summer and all those things in the past, it will be a massive net positive for the space. I think it's all systems go for crypto in the United States. So for better or for worse, if Trump meme coin gave us that,

I think it will shake out as a net positive for the industry, right? And so we'll take what we can get. Guys, it's 10.07, 7.07 for the skiers and the Vegas guys out there. I don't even know what we'll be talking about next week, but I can just promise it's going to be epic. It was a great conversation.

Thank you guys, as always, for helping me unpack it. Heading over to Twitter spaces in about 10 minutes. See everybody else here tomorrow at 9 a.m. Thanks, Mike. Thanks, Dave. Thanks, James. Later. Let's go.