We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC042: Supply Chain Impacts & Bitcoin Discussion w/ Lyn Alden (Bitcoin Podcast)

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. Hey everyone, welcome to this Wednesday's release of the podcast where we're talking about Bitcoin and Macro. Today's guest needs very little introduction as I'm accompanied by the one and only Lynn Alden. Lynn is one of the smartest macro thinkers in the space and she recently caught my attention due to an article she wrote on the supply chain impacts that are plaguing the markets. On the show today, we talk about some of her findings in that article and we also cover some different topics on Bitcoin.

Starting point is 00:00:27 So without further delay, here's my chat with the brilliant. Lynn Alden. You're listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by the Investors Podcast Network. Now for your host, Preston Pish. All right. So like I said in the introduction, I'm here with Lynn Alden. Lynn, welcome back to the show. I have no idea how many times this is almost like an Alec Baldwin, SNL type thing going on here for Lynn

Starting point is 00:01:03 Alden appearances on TIP, but welcome back. Always happy to be here. Thanks for having me. This support. supply chain stuff is crazy. I posted something on Twitter just a couple days ago. I think I had a thousand comments of people providing firsthand accounts. And I mean, it wasn't like the same thing. It was like across the board, these impacts. I know you've been talking about it for a while. So my first question is, is when did it start popping up on your radar that maybe there's

Starting point is 00:01:32 something a little off with the supply chains? Well, certainly last year. I mean, I think most people were hit hard by, you know, seeing the, everything that was paper base going away. So paper towels, toilet paper, all that kind of stuff just disappeared from shelves. That's not a very common experience in the Western world, developed world more broadly. And so I think that got a lot of people's attention where you can see that this could actually be disrupted. And then I was talking to people in the, say, the food industry. And basically we're so specialized. So obviously, we were still producing enough food, but a lot of the supply chain is meant for delivering food to restaurants, the containers that comes in, right? So like packaging milk in like a five gallon

Starting point is 00:02:10 thing versus like a one gallon thing, for example. And you can't just, the machinery, you can't just quickly change to like one gallon is kind of, you know, countless examples like that. And when suddenly like nobody was eating in restaurants and everybody was going to grocery stores twice as often, that caused supply chainage. Suddenly you're too short on those smaller package stuff and you have an overabundance of these bigger package stuff. And it's kind of a funny problem to have, but it's actually it causes pretty significant issues. Those are the first two, the paper products and then some of the food issues, but then over time, those have expanded to pretty much everything.

Starting point is 00:02:43 Yeah, I have a friend that's in the contractor building homes and things like that. And, I mean, they went to, I mean, you just go back a few years and they're quoting homes and prices in advance of even building the house, like it's going to cost this much. And now, I mean, they wouldn't dare list a price until it is absolutely finished. In that particular space, they're waiting on windows for a house. They can't even close out the house. So, I mean, the one that you hear everyone talking about is the chip manufacturing with the cars.

Starting point is 00:03:14 And I think it's got a lot of airtime. But I think when you look into the housing market, the concern that I'm starting to see is, are we going to see a giant dichotomy between new homes and preexisting homes and the price point because of some of these implications? Well, we've seen to some extent with the car market, right? So because new cars are postponed or productions are cut, that elevates the price of used cars because that's kind of the market force at work. If someone has a spare car, they're not really using and someone really needs a car, the price goes up until the person who's not really using that car kind of wakes up and says,

Starting point is 00:03:48 wait a second, I can sell this for twice what I should be to sell it for. And so they sell to the person that needs it more or to a dealer and they kind of flip that. And so that's the pricing function coming in. And so obviously we've been seeing that in housing market. markets as well. So obviously when new houses are cost more to price, that boosts up the price of existing homes as well. You say, well, I don't want to wait this many months. I don't want to, that's going to be super expensive anyway. I'll just buy a house that there already exists. And so everybody does that and drives those prices up as well. And I would describe that there's different depths of how bad a supply chain issue is. And so, for example, the lumber spike was well known

Starting point is 00:04:23 because it spiked to like crazy levels and it came down, at least most of the way, almost as fast. And that's actually an example of kind of a shallow supply chain because we never had a timber shortage. Like we're not shorted on big like chunks of wood. We were short on sawmill capacity. So we had an unusually big demand shift towards suburban and rural homes at a time when, you know, we only have so much sawmill capacity. And those operators are not dumb.

Starting point is 00:04:47 So they're not going to put a ton of cab decks into a lot new sawmill capacity when they don't perceive this as maybe lasting too long. So they'd rather just kind of accept the higher prices and enjoy that margin. And so that's an example of a pretty shallow supply chain problem where it can disappear almost as quickly as it appeared once, say, higher prices kind of start paving that demand or if some of those operators do start to do some CAPEX and expand that a little bit. But then there are other things like semiconductors that are a deeper supply chain issue because it's more global, right? So it's obviously a very high-precision thing to do high-end semiconductors. A lot of them are in Taiwan or South Korea, for example, in a handful of other countries. And so a lot of semiconductor companies that you think of as semiconductor companies, like, say,

Starting point is 00:05:30 Nvidia are fabulous. So they don't actually make it themselves. And so there's actually, there's fewer semiconductor companies than you'd think. And so, for example, we need memory, RAM in pretty much every device we use. And literally three companies have something like 95% of the global market share. Two of them are South Korean. One of them is an American company. They have almost the entire market share globally of RAM.

Starting point is 00:05:51 And that's just one example. And so because in this world of everything, near it is super complex. So if you build a car with a thousand parts, if you're six things short of the car being finished, you're out of luck. I mean, that car is going to get delayed. Now, you can be creative and say, okay, we're going to ship this to the dealer and then send them the chips like in the mail a month later with instructions on how to install them. You can get creative, but it starts to really mess things up. I mean, this is like a, it's like an exponential system essentially. I mean, as people are hearing that, they're probably saying,

Starting point is 00:06:21 okay, so your example with the lumber sounds like it's just a flash in the pan, it's going to kind of work itself out as time marches on. But then when you transition into the semiconductor, it's something that's a lot bigger. So most people just want to hear that it's a simple solution. It's going to get better in six months or whatever. So how do you see this moving forward in six months from now? Are we still in a situation like we are today? Is it worse? Does it take a long time to sort itself out? Or is this thing over in a quarter from now? I think we could separate the structural issues from the more rate of change kind of near-term issues. And so the short answer that thinks no one knows, because obviously that's going to partially depend on, you know, is there like another round of the pandemic that shuts down more countries or makes them choose to shut down, right? So obviously I have to predict things like that. Then you have to predict other sort of fiscal decisions or policies by different countries. So some of it is just inherently unknowable. But I think a framework to think about it is that you have near-term issues, like let's say China shuts down the third largest port in the world because of COVID fears or

Starting point is 00:07:26 whatever. Obviously that, you know, that's going to persist until that opens up and then kind of, you know, a period of time after that. One COVID case is what I was reading in the news. Is this accurate? I don't know. I don't know about that specific number. But yeah, who knows? They have like a zero code. They're one of the countries like a zero code policy, as they call it. So yeah, I don't know. But so you have those kind of specific instances like port X is shut down for time period Y. and then it's going to trickle after that for a period of time Z, and then it should eventually normalize. The bigger issue is that we might have reached peak globalization. And so if you take

Starting point is 00:08:00 a step back for a second, you know, if you look back over 150 years of history, it's generally been a period of more globalization, which we can define as global trade as a percentage of global GDP. That's kind of the easy way. That's like the most, if you had to put it in one number, that's what it would be. And so up from the 1800s to the World War I, We had a period of globalization. And that was kind of the rise of America, the manufacturing hub, right? That was kind of, we were the emerging market, essentially, that was kind of rising and industrializing and kind of, you know, making a lot of things for the world.

Starting point is 00:08:33 We became a creditor nation. So obviously, the World War I period disrupted globalization by a lot. And then after that, you had tariff wars, trade wars. That was anti-globalization. Then he had World War II. And then after the whole, you know, after that ended and you had the rebuilding and you had the Bretton Wood system, you had this kind of reunification, we started another round of globalization. And we kind of paused in the 80s, but then after the Soviet Union fell in the early

Starting point is 00:09:00 90s and China opened up in the 80s and early 90s, we kind of had another leg up in globalization. It was boosted by information technology and automation and offshoring and things like that. And so if you look at the United States, starting in the 70s with the petrodollars system that a number of us have discussed a lot, like our friend Luke Gromans discussed it, we offshored so much of our, especially the United States did this, more so than other developed countries. But, you know, to some extent, all developed countries kind of outsource cheap things, like making a tire, for example, like a close or like low value add things. But the United States went further and faster than any other developed countries where we hollowed out our industrial

Starting point is 00:09:37 base to a much bigger degree than, say, Germany or Japan, or even Italy, like a bunch of other countries that didn't really have that problem. And so we accelerated that more than others. So we totally disconnected labor productivity from wages. So wages kind of went flat in real terms and productivity kept increasing because we arbitrage labor around the world, you know, cheaper environmental standards, cheaper labor in different countries. We can pollute over there instead of at home. And so there was kind of like this big arbitrage that helped keep costs down, but we sacrificed resiliency and we kind of sacrificed in the United States at least. We sacrificed the blue-collar labor force more so than most other developed countries. Global trade has a percentage of GDP.

Starting point is 00:10:18 reached a peak in around 2008. And so that was like 60% of global GDP, which is actually a really high number, if you think about it, that global trade as a percentage of global GDP was like 60%. It's kind of an intuitively high number. And so that has kind of flat lines since then, flat to down. We're still in the upper 50s. And so we haven't really, it's not like we just reverse globalization. We have not continued to globalize really at the rate that we were.

Starting point is 00:10:43 And that's due to a variety of factors. And so I think COVID was kind of a shock to that where, We sacrificed so much resiliency to help keep costs down more so than normal. And so finally, we got a shock to the system that tested the fact that we didn't have resiliency. And so now we're starting to pay the price for how we've distributed this in such a complex way that there are so many ways for it to be disrupted, either due to a pandemic or due to an overreaction to a pandemic in certain countries' cases, whatever the case may be, small changes can ripple through the whole system and cause these cascading delays and shortages. You were talking about the globalization and the petro dollar system and specifically about

Starting point is 00:11:24 the productivity versus the typical worker compensation and how that divergence. I think a lot of people that maybe spend time on Twitter see that chart get posted from time to time, where in 71 you see like this breakaway between those two things and people say, hey, what happened in 1971? and they're really implying coming off the gold standard kind of driving that. Is that a U.S. specific kind of chart, or do you see a similar dynamic playing out on an international level where the compensation for labor did not keep up with the productivity on the chart that we so commonly share?

Starting point is 00:12:03 That is for the most part of U.S. phenomenon. And so if you look at European wages, for example, they've not really had the same problem. Same for Japan. Now, you know, I don't have the charts in front of me. I would, I mean, there's some percentage of it that is pure automation. And so that's kind of been everywhere. And like I said, I mean, you know, even those net exporter countries, like say, Germany or Japan, they still outsource a lot of their cheaper things to say places like China or Bangladesh. So there's still some of that. But this is more so been an American phenomenon. And it's, you know, if you go back to that like 1971 chart, if you look at the trade deficit, it really kind of

Starting point is 00:12:41 takes off at around 1974 or so, kind of a few years after that. And so that's, it's tied to 1971, but it's really the system that came after it, which is the petra dollar system, where we started basically exporting dollars. And so that became our major export, which displaced our other goods, essentially. We basically priced it so that our exports were no longer competitive, and our import strength was very strong. And so that benefited people that work in health care technology, finance, government that didn't have their job exported, but then they got the benefits of that system, whereas the, say, the typical blue-collar worker that, say, made cars, right? Skilled, skilled worker.

Starting point is 00:13:20 They got some benefits from the system, right? So their dollar maybe retained more strength than it would have, but they sacrificed a ton for that as well. They either lost their job or their wages were severely depressed because you had your competition from other places. And then we really kicked it into high gear in the 90s with NAFTA and then in the early 2000s by helping to get China into the World Trade Organization. And so we've had this cascading series of things that really led the United States to have this

Starting point is 00:13:48 big structural trade deficit in a way that many of our developed peers don't have. And so we have a higher level of wealth concentration than virtually any other major developed country. Lynn, in your article that everybody needs to get out there and read, this article is phenomenal. You talk about three key attributes that are contributing to the supply chain impacts that we're seeing right now. The first one you said was the COVID-19 lockdown. The next one was the consumer behavior change and then your money supply growth. Can you talk to us about each one of these and kind of how you see the importance of each one of them

Starting point is 00:14:23 and how you would maybe weight them on the impacts that we're seeing right now? If we look at obviously we had periods of shutdowns and then we have these kind of rolling periods of shutdowns. And so those present some just natural limitations on a system that as we described is pretty fragile. It's global and it's fragile. And there's lots of little things that can go wrong that delay things. Like we only have so many container ships, for example. And so you can have big bottlenecks. Then there's only, there's key ports that if they're shut down, there's not a lot of workarounds.

Starting point is 00:14:51 So there's that issue. Then the second issue would be that if you have a rapid change in consumer preferences, but you have industry that might take a few years to adjust to that, then you can have a pretty significant bottleneck. And an example would be that if everybody wants suburban homes, they want to change the location at the same time. And you only have so much sawmill capacity, well, then you can have a spike in lumber prices. The same thing is if people buy more electronic equipment than they would otherwise because they're stuck at home, and you only have so much semiconductor capacity, for example, well, now you have a problem. And those foundries are billions of dollars and take time to build

Starting point is 00:15:26 and design. And so those are like specific examples of things, but there's like a whole bunch of changes that can happen. For example, if you can't take the subway, if you look at, say, New York subway numbers, they're super low. And if people are driving more, maybe they're not, they're not driving as much because, say, they're not going to nine to five job in physical form like they used to, but maybe more people need to drive sometimes. So they go and buy a used car, for example, well, then suddenly you have a constraint in how much used cars there are at the same time as you have a constraint on new car production due to those semiconductor props. So changing consumer behaviors against a system that can't just instantly adjust is another issue. And then if you look

Starting point is 00:16:03 at periods of inflation, you know, people often say, well, we have inflation because we have supply chain problems or we have constraints in the system. But I mean, every inflationary period has constraint. That's what inflation is. So every inflationary decade we've had is money supply going up at a quicker pace than normal. So monetary inflation combined with real world constraints that if our entire world was software, for example, then if money supply went up, you probably not see very big changes in price for software because we don't really have a constraint there. But in, say, the 1940s inflationary decade, you had shortages in commodities. You had shortages in labor, right?

Starting point is 00:16:40 Because you had all this extra jobs out there fighting. So that's why you had Rosie the Riveter come in and help build the planes and things like that because you were your start for labor and the commodities. So in the 70s, U.S. oil production peaked to we were more reliant on imports at a time when, you know, due to the war around Israel, we had those geopolitical issues where we were embargoed. So you had oil constraints at a time when we also had just gone off the gold standard. We were increasing money supply at a fast rate. And so you had a real world constraint combined with money supply going up at a quick rate.

Starting point is 00:17:12 And so what we see ever since 2020 is due to fiscal stimulus that is being monetized, we had a more rapid than normal increase in broad money supply, while we have, you know, changing consumer behaviors in real world constraints that are making it. So that essentially the fiscal stimulus kept demand elevated, so people could still afford things, but those things, we didn't increase the amount of supply of goods and services, or at least certain types of goods and services. And so that's where we started to run into these rolling issues where we have a lumber constraint, we have a semiconductor constraint.

Starting point is 00:17:43 Now you have affordable housing issues. So there's rent prices are going up, for example. And wherever there's periods of shortage combined with broad money going up, you're going to get periods of inflation or shortages. One or the other or both. So we like to talk about Bitcoin all the time. Do you see any of these chip shortages impacting the mining industry? And what that might mean for the price of Bitcoin because so much of it has to do with mining the

Starting point is 00:18:10 bitcoins and just more hashing power coming online in order to drive the expense, the electrical expense of the entire protocol. How does any of that play into your calculus or how you're thinking about it? So that's been happening for a while. I mean, you know, you had, obviously you had it, that would go back to a changing consumer preference, right? Because of the Chinese mining ban, suddenly you had more demand elsewhere, but there are shipping constraints and stuff. So some of that, some of those older miners probably just won't make it over. Those kind of, you know, sit around until they're obsolete.

Starting point is 00:18:41 So there's that issue. But then, too, you had even going back as far as, say, late 2020, you had semiconductor shortages that were impacting the miners. And they're not exactly first in line to get. you know, Taiwan semiconductor manufacturing to make their chips, right? So someone like Apple's like first in line and, you know, Bitcoin miners like number like 57 on the list. I mean, obviously I'm making numbers up, but they're not at the front of the line. And so, you know, you had semiconductor, I mean, you had a Bitcoin miner machine shortages, which meant that hash rate did not go up as quickly as you'd expect from the price. And so those who had the equipment were doing quite well in

Starting point is 00:19:17 terms of margins. And then, of course, we had the correction. We had the Chinese mining ban. And so for a period of time, it was we had a somewhat of an, easing in the minor shortages, right? So their prices came down of used miners, but we only have so much hosting facility, infrastructure around, you know, basically having them access to cheap electricity in a safe and properly designed environment. Those are multimillion dollar facilities that take periods of time to get online. And so we kind of had one type of shortage into another type of shortage.

Starting point is 00:19:46 And as an example, I mean, you know, compass mining, I think they're doing great work over there. I mean, they just had a South Carolina facility that will. was delayed. It was going to come online. And it's not there. Like, they partner with the facility operator. I don't know all the details, but they announced that essentially it didn't come on at the date they expected it to. Not to criticize them. I mean, they gave out credits to people who expected their machines to be online at a certain time so that I think they handled it as best they could. But that's an example of real world constraint. And I don't know the reasons. I mean, they might have had, they might have had supply shortages due to some of these other

Starting point is 00:20:17 supply chain issues or could it has been, you know, a labor issue domestically. I don't, I don't know the specific reason, but you do have these kind of periods of facilities not being, you know, say, fully online or fully present in time. And so it's been at somewhat of a premium. Now, eventually that'll be fixed. But, you know, that's kind of the real world constraint that we're going through. And that can keep hash rate from potentially going up as quickly as you'd expect from price, although we still have had a pretty good recovery in hash rate.

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Starting point is 00:25:06 So if you take a step back for a second, if you look over, say, the past 20 years, you know, the United States has grown as broad money supply at a little bit faster rate than Europe, not by much. And both of them have grown their money supply at a much faster rate than Japan. So people often think Japan's bringing a ton of money. But again, we talked out, I think this in previous podcast, there's a difference between base money and broad money. So Japan's broad money is actually the slowest increasing in the world. And so if you rank those regions by inflation, the United States has had the most.

Starting point is 00:25:37 Europe's had less than that. And Japan's had way less. And so basically, if you have two economies, then they go through this pandemic. And one economy does not do fiscal stimulus. They're going to have a reduction in demand for certain goods because some people are out of a job, people are tightening their belts more. And so there's reduction in demand as well as the reduction in supply. And so you'll still have these certain areas of constraint that are challenged, but on a broad sense,

Starting point is 00:26:03 you probably want to have a lot of prices going up. Another hand, if you have another economy where they have the same supply constraints due to the issue, but then they also print money and give it to people, then they're going to have demand to go up to where, you know, back up to normal or even higher than normal, but supply is constrained. So they're going to have more inflation. And so, and people can debate whether that's good or bad. I mean, basically, you'll get a faster rebound in nominal GDP, probably higher consumer sentiment, things like that, but you'll also have more inflation, more constraints. And part of it comes down to the preexisting condition. And so we talked before about how the United States has

Starting point is 00:26:36 higher wealth concentration than most of the developed countries, we have a higher rate of people that are paycheck to paycheck, which I think is played into the reason of why we did bigger fiscal stimulus in many other countries, because we had, say, a larger percentage of our population vulnerable to not having a job for six months, for example. So that was kind of the consequence of doing that. And I think that would go down, that would go back to like the Ray Dalio long-term death cycle phenomenon where, I mean, there were a lot of papers that predicted this would happen in the next downturn, even though obviously they didn't predict a pandemic. They're like, next next time we have a downturn, we're going to monetary policy three, as Dalia would call it,

Starting point is 00:27:14 where we're just going to hand out helicopter money, we're going to monetize it, and we're going to hold rates low, even if there's inflation. So it's kind of like we're walking through this playbook. It's almost eerie how much we followed that. And that's really because of a lot of the preexisting conditions in the system. So as we fast forward into the next 12 months, I mean, have another sell-off or another downturn in the economy, I think it could totally happen. So what does that lead to as far as the response goes? And you're seeing central bankers, particularly here the Fed and the U.S., signaling that they're going to tighten and then Powell goes there and does his speech and kind of is like, yeah, maybe we won't, but everybody

Starting point is 00:27:53 else is saying we are. Like, they're really throwing out a lot of mixed signals on their forward guidance. And it almost appears like they know that they need to do it, but I think they're a little concern that if they do start to do it, that they're going to really just caught, they're going to wreck havoc in the market. So what are your thoughts on the forward guidance that we're having right now? And then the chances that that could actually be a mistake. And then what kind of response are we going to see next relative to the response we just saw through COVID? Yes, I really wouldn't want Powell's job here. He really doesn't want another pivot named after him, right? So like the Powell pivot from, you know, early 2019 after the big quarter four,

Starting point is 00:28:32 2018 selloff where he tried to tighten. He talked about how it was on autopilot. And then, you know, the stock market fell 20%, but more importantly, the junk bond market totally froze up for six weeks, just credit froze. So that was kind of like the iceberg under the full, that was the issue under the surface. Most retail were looking at the stock market, whereas like, you know, Powell was looking at the credit market, most likely, and panicking. And so he had to pivot and be like, no, no, we're just kidding. We're not on all autopilot.

Starting point is 00:28:59 We're data dependent and we're not going to just, you know, ignore your signals. So he did the famous Powell pivot. And so I think the last thing he wants is to try to tighten into this. And so what we saw back then was, if you looked at GDP growth rates, it peaked around mid-2018 and started to decelerate. So we were not in a recession yet. We were not, we didn't have negative GDP growth, but we had decelerating positive growth. And so they were tightening into a decelerating economy, which opens up issues.

Starting point is 00:29:26 And so actually we see kind of the same thing now where the economy and rate of change terms, GDP probably peaked in quarter two. of this year, you have the base effects and you have the stimulus and all that. And so now we're decelerating in positive territory. There are some metrics like retail sales that are outright, you know, going down a little bit. And they're going to, they're going to potentially be tightening into that. Now, it's a little bit different because back then, back in 2018, they were actually tightening, you know, they were doing quantitative tightening and raising rates. Now it's more just like, do you want to be super-dove-ish or hyper-dovemish, right?

Starting point is 00:29:58 So it's, they're getting less dovish rather than actually tightening, which is a, you're tightening rate of change terms, but you're still not actually tightening. So they have a higher chance of getting away with some of that because they've already, you know, all there, we're seeing so much reverse reproactivity in the market. There's basically bank banks are stuffed full of cash, other financial institutions are stuffed full of cash. There's collateral shortages in the treasury market, in part because the Fed bought so many of them, and also because the debt ceiling and the TGA drawdown so that the treasury has issued fewer treasuries than they otherwise planned to do by this point because they're constrained. And so,

Starting point is 00:30:33 you have a treasury shortage. So if they were to buy fewer treasuries, it actually probably wouldn't be the end of the world for a period of time. I think they have some runway to actually taper to some extent, but they clearly want to push that as far as they can before they go. The other challenge, the reason I wouldn't want his job is because, again, going back to the long-term debt cycle thing, when debt is this high of a percentage of GDP, you pretty much need a long period of negative real rates in order to make the numbers work. And so it's kind of like you got to inflate away the debt without saying you're inflating away the debt. How long when you're saying a long period of time? Like, what are we talking? I mean, that would depend on the speed. I mean, you know,

Starting point is 00:31:13 in the 40s, you spent, you spent a decade with deeply negative real yields. And then you had a couple decades where you kind of broke even. And then you had the 70s, which was another decade of deeply negative real yields. And so it partially depends on how much, how negative they yet, right? I mean, it's a question of both magnitude and duration, but they can't, that's not a mandate, so they can't say that out loud. So back in the 40s, in order to fight World War II, the Fed was pretty much captured by the Treasury. They gave up any pretense of independence and were captured until like 1951. And so they're kind of in that situation now where they were kind of like pseudo, you know, gave up independence for a period of time, monetizing debt,

Starting point is 00:31:55 you know, doing everything they can. But they don't want to give that illusion that they're just going inflate away the debt, have people lose confidence in the currency. So they're kind of playing the narrative game where they're saying, we're going to be accommodative, but no, no, we're not monetizing the deficit. We're not going to, you know, we're not going to devalue the currency significantly. And so that's a really challenging environment. So they can't say out loud, we have to hold rates zero while inflation's running hot because, you know, federal debt to GDP is 130 percent. That's not the part they can set out loud. So they have to say, like, you know, we want to be accommodative until we have maximum employment. We think the inflation

Starting point is 00:32:29 transitory. So they have to kind of dance around the issue. And it's a really challenging thing. So that's why as much as people like to blame the Fed, a lot of my blame is, say, back in the Greenspan era, where they did have more levers they could pull. They could have made better choices, I think. And now they're stuck in our corner where they don't really have that many options. And so you're choosing between bad options, essentially. They definitely weren't dealing with all the memes back in the 1940s. Yeah, I mean, the good point there, I mean, basically, information travels faster now, whether in meme form or anything else. And so in 1940s, you know, you would get a newspaper.

Starting point is 00:33:07 You get away with it, yeah. Yeah, you get away with things. And now it's like Twitter's monitoring it minute by minute. People that work in like a grocery store can tell you who the chairman of the Federal Reserve is. And like, you know, information has traveled far, far quicker and more people are aware of it. And that's part of the populism that we find ourselves in now. where everybody knows something's wrong with the financial system. There's different opinions as to what's wrong with it, different levels of information about what might be wrong with it.

Starting point is 00:33:35 But it's kind of something that we all understand to different degrees. And information travels super quick. And so it's really hard to keep people in the dark about what's happening. Kelly Evans had this awesome chart. You put this in your article where she was showing how the personal consumption just exploded after COVID in this chart. It's an awesome chart. We'll have a link to your article in the show notes where people can see this.

Starting point is 00:34:00 What do you think was actually driving this? Do you think it was a change in behavior for what they were trying to consume? Or do you think it had to do with some of the UBI checks and some of the fiscal spending that was just stuffed into the hands of everyday Americans that was driving it? Certainly both. And so basically, if you're told that you're locked down now, you know, you're going to, and like restaurants are like, you know, either closed or they're less pleasant, right? because they're operating at half capacity and travels, you know, either, especially international travel is a lot more frustrating now or at some cases blocked or just harder.

Starting point is 00:34:36 And so people say, okay, I'm not going to go on that international vacation. We want to have a home office. We want to have a better kitchen. So it basically a change in consumer preference. And they might buy more electronic equipment. They might do things like that. And then the stimulus made it so that more people could do that. So obviously, if you'd say I had zero stimulus, it'd be some percentage of people that wouldn't

Starting point is 00:34:59 be able to make those changes. And they would just be, but they'd probably be riding in the street at that point. So the stimulus checks go out. They allow those changes in consumer behavior to happen, but then you run into real-world supply constraints. And so if you look at that chart that you're referring to, our purchases of goods skyrocketed, whereas our purchases of services took a lot longer to recover because that's things like restaurants and travel and hotels and things like that.

Starting point is 00:35:26 And so especially in the United States where we specialize in services and we exported most of our goods to other countries, that's an issue. So that's why our trade deficit got a lot worse this year or over the past year because we kept our demand high with stimulus checks, but a lot of that just goes straight out the door to China because we're buying more from them than they're buying from us because they're not doing as much stimulus, and they're not kind of boosting their demand as much as we did. I know the funds that are going to be part of the infrastructure deal, and it's a massive deal at this point.

Starting point is 00:36:02 I think the last number I heard was $3.5 or $3.6 trillion aren't going to hit the economy for quite a while. How do you see some of this playing into it? And does this just add more fuel to the fire for the supply chain implications that we're talking about right now, assuming that they wouldn't kind of work themselves out in a year from now. Yeah. So, I mean, the stimulus bills earlier were these fast acting ones. So people got money right away. So they could either, you know, they could either put it into a home improvement.

Starting point is 00:36:31 They could put it into something else. They could put it into meme stocks, doge coin, whatever they want to do. Whereas infrastructure is going to be like a multi-year thing. We still don't know exactly how big it's going to be. We know it's going to be filled with pork. And so it's, it depends. how useful and productive some of that ends up being. If you spend money on things that are not productive, then it tend to be inflationary. If you spend money on things that make things far

Starting point is 00:36:56 more efficient, it can counterbalance some of that spending. A good example would be the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System, for example, that was a huge gain in productivity, even though at the time it was like the biggest public works project in modern history. And so it really kind of depends on how effective that spending is and over what period of time. Now, a lot of people think that, you know, certain materials like copper or silver or nickel are likely to, you know, have this constant source of demand over the next decade due to electrification and infrastructure, things like that that are basically, you know, potentially propping those things up. And another component to inflation is that, you know, commodities tend to go through these big, like, roughly

Starting point is 00:37:37 15-year cycles where you have a period of oversupply. So prices come. collapse, so nobody puts money into the space, and eventually demand keeps going up over time, while there's not a lot of new supply coming online, prices go up, and so you pull more people into the space, and you get oversupply again. And so the past decade or, you know, so has been a period of commodity over abundance, or at least most commodities. So we've had, we've had more oil, thanks to shale that we know what to do with. A lot of it was unprofitable, but they, you know, they let their money on fire so we could have cheap gasoline prices, just unintentionally. And so, you know, we had this period of commodity over supply, but now going forward because of

Starting point is 00:38:16 those long periods of low prices, there hasn't been a lot of new supply coming online. So there's no giant new copper mines. Well, there's some, but there's not a ton coming online. And, you know, we're not investing in a lot of, say, long-lived energy projects. And so I think as you head out deeper into this decade, we're more and more likely to have these kind of ongoing, you know, higher commodity prices, most likely, especially when you combine it with, with currency itself losing value. Yeah, you had an awesome chart in your newsletter as well that kind of showed, I think you went back, back into the 1800s, right?

Starting point is 00:38:48 On that chart showing the commodity prices in these large like 15, the 20 year cycles. This is another thing that I know Stan Drunken Miller talks about talks about with long commodity bull bear cycles and something that I know he has traded for years or those bigger trends. But it's an awesome highlight in your article. Yeah, that was a chart from, it was the guys from Incrementum, they put out an annual, they call it the in gold we trust report, but it's really a giant macro report. For the record, those guys, even though they're like gold guys in Europe, they also like Bitcoin and stuff. And so that's their approach. But basically, and they included that chart from, I believe it was some stifle, but that particular version of the chart was was formatted for their publication. And yeah, you basically have these giant commodity cycles. that occur pretty regular intervals. And obviously, you know, you have to monitor the details to see how far you are into that interval because they're not going to be exactly the same. It's going to depend on, you know, just different human choices along the way.

Starting point is 00:39:51 But, you know, most evidence shows that we've been to this pretty long period of commodity over supply. And for many types of commodities now we're in, or at least we're looking at, a pretty good potential for more supply constraint and tighter supply demand spreads. All right, Amazon versus Alibaba. And the reason I bring this up is because I know in your model portfolio that you have, I don't think I see Amazon in there. I know that you have a position or you're recommending a position in Alibaba. And the reason I'm questioning this or bringing this up is because of all the concerns with having Chinese equities at this point,

Starting point is 00:40:29 especially with some of the actions that they've been taking. I know some folks are even going as far as is saying, hey, this is their big chance if they want to take action on Taiwan, this is kind of the prime time to do it with everything that's happening with the U.S. and Afghanistan and the fact that they've already done something similar with Hong Kong. So I'm kind of curious your thoughts on that and just kind of analyzing the difference between those two. Yeah, so I actually do have Amazon on the portfolio, but not, that is one of the fang stocks I do like pretty much, whereas there are other fang stocks that I avoid at the current time. So

Starting point is 00:41:03 Amazon is one of the ones I do like. For China, I do have a position in Alibaba and J.D. as well. My view with them is that right now they're basically so beaten down in terms of valuation and sentiment that they make for an interesting kind of contrarium play. And especially, I mean, some of them like JD. JD is a pretty well-run company, for example. They specialize in logistics infrastructure. And so they've been, you know, kind of attacked by their kind of more authoritarian governance approach where they wanted to shape this highest certain direction. So they go after those. And there are a lot of concerns that the United States might go after some of our tech companies in a similar way. I mean, you could argue that some of them have achieved monopoly-like,

Starting point is 00:41:44 like aspects. And so if you look at China, for example, some of the actions they took against them were justified in the sense that, you know, you had, say, like one giant platform, say, If a vendor uses a competitor, they can't use our platform, kind of these anti-competitive practices. So China wanted to cut down on those, which I think was fair. But then, of course, because it's China, they went authoritarian, they went human rights issues. They went way too far in other directions.

Starting point is 00:42:11 So one of the issues, I think, is that it is good to have international exposure at this time. But I think it's certainly fair to leave out countries that you just don't want to invest in. So I think it's fully fair to someone say, you know what? I want to have zero China's equity exposure. I don't want to deal with that risk at all. I don't want to take any thought space from me. And I think that's a fully fair conclusion as well. And this, the counterpoint would be to say, you know, you can have a small position into something that is very kind of beaten down and low sentiment. And it can do very well as a somewhat

Starting point is 00:42:40 uncorrelated investment. So if you look over the past year, Chinese stocks and American stocks have been quite uncorrelated with Chinese stocks performing poorly, American stocks performing very well. and you can easily have a period of time where that flips around. And so it depends on what type of portfolio you want to have. But overall, there's different types of exposures that someone can have. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. No, it's not your imagination. Risk and regulation are ramping up

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Starting point is 00:46:13 prospectus at fundrise.com slash income. This is a paid advertisement. All right. Back to the show. What are your thoughts on the concern of Amazon right now, considering so much of their products are sourced from China with all the supply chain impacts that we were talking about earlier? Does this mean that it could be kind of a rough couple quarters ahead based on some of those things? It would partially come down to how much they can pass those prices on to consumers. And so with Amazon, it's kind of a hybrid business because you have what you think of as the retail business. And they also have the cloud computing business, which is actually where a lot of their margins come from. So it's funny. If you look at a lot of

Starting point is 00:46:54 e-commerce companies, a lot of them aren't very profitable, but because Amazon's had that hybrid model that that's served them very well. Certainly Amazon has risks to it. And so I'm not like overweight Amazon. I just have a pretty small position in Amazon. But I do think that we're still having a basically structural period of e-commerce gaining over physical commerce at the same time as cloud computing is still gaining market share as well. And so overall, I think, you know, basically Amazon's been in this like more than a year-long price consolidation for a while. And so actually as expensive as Amazon is, they're actually relatively inexpensive compared to their 20-year average. They're kind of like moderately below average. And so I wouldn't be

Starting point is 00:47:36 surprised to see another leg up in their price overall. At the same time, they haven't done financialization the way that, say, Apple has. So I like describe it as like a rocket ship going to space. They let off the first boosters, and then they continue with like another thrusters as they go further up. And so if you look at something like Apple, they had this huge period of growth, massive growth with the iPhone and everything. They build up a ton of cash. And then they said, okay, now we're going to start financializing. So now we're going to issue debt. We're going to buy back our shares. We're going to pay a dividend. And so they got that second leg of growth.

Starting point is 00:48:08 If you look at their revenue, it actually hasn't been growing very much at all, but they really optimize that per share aspect. Whereas there are other giant companies like Facebook and Amazon that have not pulled that second lever yet. They haven't financialized yet. They're still in like the rapid growth phase. And so I think that they still have that lever ahead of them to pull. And so it'll be interesting.

Starting point is 00:48:29 But the big risk is that you could have changing politics in the United States where everybody's overweight the S&B 500, including international investors. Everybody's piled into U.S. markets. And then we have a change of pace. And we decide, okay, we're going to raise corporate tax rates or we're going to go after Amazon and Facebook and Apple more so than more so we have before, maybe not to the extent of China, but maybe more than the slap on the risk that we've done in the past. So everybody gets piled in. And then that's when, you know, you kind of go after. And so that's kind of the risk of everybody on one side of the boat at the same time. All right. So I know you've been a critic of Ethereum. I'm obviously a critic of Ethereum,

Starting point is 00:49:08 so I don't know how balanced of a conversation we're going to have here, but they recently did their 1559 change in monetary policy. What are your thoughts on what's happening with Ethereum right now? Has your thesis changed? Has it stayed the same? I'm just kind of curious where you're at. Yeah, it's not really changed. The funny thing is, so in my premium research service, you know, I've been, I kind of separate price action from what I actually think of the fundamentals. So, I mean, I've been saying since January, like, I was like, okay, once this breaks above like 1400, like the previous highs, this thing could run. I mean, it's, you know, when Bitcoin has has a bull market, some of these other things can go up even more. So I'm saying, like, you know,

Starting point is 00:49:48 I was actually pretty tactically bullish on Ethereum, despite every time I say that, I'm like, but it's, you're dealing with a very different set of technical reliability here. And, you know, but then when you look at something like Bitcoin. And so it's like, I do that in order to preserve objectivity. If I just didn't cover Ethereum at all, it's like, well, you're clearly just kind of putting your blinders on and only covering the chain you like. So I say, okay, Ethereum is big enough. I'll certainly cover it.

Starting point is 00:50:13 And just like my view on price action for a period of time, it can be quite different than my view of the fundamentals. So I'm saying, like, it's, you know, they've constructed a supply squeeze is pretty well engineered. And so on one hand, you launch Ethereum 2.0 staking. So it's one way staking. We don't know when Ethereum 2 is going to be launched. I mean, they've changed the dates a number of times.

Starting point is 00:50:33 And so you have this one-way lockup period. It's kind of like the grayscale trust that Bitcoin was going through. So you have this one-way lockup period. Then you do EIP 1559 where you're burning Ethereum now. So they like to call it Oldersound Monetary Policy. But that only, it's the fact that you've, you now have a less inflationary protocol. But the mere fact that you could change the monetary policy is different than if you just can't change the monetary policy at all, right?

Starting point is 00:50:59 So someone later could change it back, potentially. And so they're in that environment now where as long as that's in place, you're kind of creating a supply squeeze. And so kind of like how you have Bitcoin going off exchanges, you have Ethereum going off exchanges. And so you have a pretty powerful price mechanism. But I think the long-term longevity of that is more in question than the one for Bitcoin. And as an example, Ethereum just had another unintended chain split.

Starting point is 00:51:25 And the price just didn't care. Because security is just not like the number one priority of that protocol in the way that it is for Bitcoin. And so Bitcoin makes these very slow deliberative consensus changes. We can take all the time in the world because we don't put difficulty bombs in the chain, whereas Ethereum has these difficulty bombs that kind of give the developers, you know, kind of an upper hand in terms of putting changes through so they can fork to new chains and the community kind of shifts over to them pretty readily. Another big challenge I think about Ethereum is that a lot of it's built on decentralized finance,

Starting point is 00:52:00 but it has these kind of big centralized points to it where you feel like you're decentralized, but at the end of the day, you're not really resilient to state attacks. It's actually a good analogy is the supply chain issues we talked about earlier. We got prices pretty low by sacrificing resiliency to globalize our supply chains, arbitrage everything we could. And so now they're saying prices are only higher because of supply chain issues. It's like, well, they're only low in the first place because we sacrificed resiliency. So now we're getting, now we're paying some of the price for that.

Starting point is 00:52:31 And so, you know, if you sacrifice decentralization to do something that is kind of neat and fun and that can work for a period of time, but you never know when you're going to be exposed to an attack. Maybe Gary Gensler wants to crack down on you. Maybe just different state actors want to go after you. You're not really set up for that type of kind of resilience. You don't really have that like Hydra, Honey Badger aspect that say, Bitcoin has. So in addition, we're seeing smart contracts can migrate to other smart contract

Starting point is 00:53:00 chains. So you saw, for example, Tether used to run on Bitcoin on the Omni layer. And then it switched over to Ethereum, which was more suitable for it. And then when Ethereum got expensive, it shifted over to Tron in many cases. And so now we're seeing interest in Solana, for example. And so they can shift to more and more centralized blockchains that make, you know, they sacrifice decentralization to be more efficient, but then they don't make full use of the blockchain because they're not decentralized, which is kind of the whole point of a blockchain. Do you find that the protocols that have an underlying token that is more inflationary, that that will attract more utility on to the, for the use of smart contracts?

Starting point is 00:53:45 So if you're looking at Ethereum and it's got this ultrasound, quote unquote, ultrasound token to it, are they disincentivizing the people that would be using it for smart contracts because of the token is becoming more and more valuable? And so a Nick Carter's argument, I think this is his argument as far as whatever working capital you're using in order to service that smart contract, it's not something that you actually want to use, almost like if we were going to apply to like Fiat, When we debase the currency here in the U.S., it attracts other foreign currencies into the country in order to be used to consume goods and services. Is that something that we would see on the protocol layer? There's a couple layers to this. So one of the well-formulated arguments goes back to 2017 from John Feffer.

Starting point is 00:54:35 He wrote that paper like the institutional investor's case for Bitcoin or something like that. I forget the exact title. And he basically made the argument that, you know, smart contract protocols. are more like, say, copper or oil. They're more like working capital. Or, you know, it's a casino where you use those chips when you're there, but then you cash out. You don't want to, you don't store your value in casino chips, right?

Starting point is 00:54:57 You get out when you're done playing in the casino, they store it in something, you know, more universal that's money. And that it's really hard for a platform to be, to optimize, to be both money and efficient smart contracts. And so Ethereum's got so much going on in the base layer. And, you know, so it's more complex, more. prone to being buggy, like we've seen with the unintended chain split, and more issues going on there in order to do more on the base layer. And the problem is, so they're sacrificing some

Starting point is 00:55:24 degree of decentralization to do more things, but then if another chain comes along and says, we're going to sacrifice even a little bit more decentralization to be even more efficient, things can migrate over there. So partially can come down to how inflationary the monetary policy is, right? So that could, you know, they want to keep those transactional fees low, but it also comes down to how centralized the nodes are. And so, for example, Salon is getting attention because of how high the transaction throughput is. But if you look at the node requirements, they're super high. You need like a data center to run one of those, right? So the bandwidth requirements are like insane, you know, the CPU requirements. And so it's not just about inflation versus deflation

Starting point is 00:56:02 that affects how efficient a smart contract program is. It's also about how hard it is to run a node and any sort of like sacrifices you're willing to make to have this more like enterprise grade thing that is, say, higher transaction throughput, and therefore lower fees, better usability for the person who wants to trade stable coins or defy or whatever they want to do, but then you sacrifice auditability and the ability to run your own node, kind of the whole block war size and Bitcoin, that we know how that resolved. So some of those are basically making the opposite decision and saying, we're going to make a node even harder to run than Ethereum, and we're going to have, say, more transaction throughput.

Starting point is 00:56:39 And so we're seeing that kind of play out. So they have a couple of different levels they can pull if they want to increase efficiency, but every one of those levers comes with tradeoffs. And so with EIP 1559, I've seen some good analysis that showed that essentially what they did, if you look at transaction fees before and after, it cut out a lot of the lowest cost transactions, right? So it's kind of like you eliminated the really cheap ones. And so overall it has kind of increased transaction fees.

Starting point is 00:57:06 But we've also had NFTs and other things like that, increased chain usage that also contributed transaction fees going up. And so generally, we've seen a tendency where over time, things will migrate to whatever chain is cheaper. So Ethereum does have something given network effect, but it also has these cheaper competitors that came later. And so it would be interesting to see how that space plays out. I said to view them all of them as equities.

Starting point is 00:57:28 There are all these different equities, and they're mostly kind of focusing on speculation. So it's kind of like a bunch of casino stocks, essentially, where you have Bitcoin on one hand, it's actual money. It's got this credible, decentralized, auditable process that optimize security above everything else. And then you have a bunch of these other equities that are kind of like these somewhat decentralized, somewhat centralized operating system that most see folks around lending, leveraging, trading other tokens that themselves are often these other types of platforms to do the same thing. And then now speculation on art, essentially. So they're very speculation-based, and they have a lot of the qualities of equities rather than money. Gary Ginsler just gave himself a high five listening to you.

Starting point is 00:58:13 Well, I mean, the SEC does have that, you know, they have that general guideline for what constitutes a security. And, you know, you issue, yeah, you issue tokens ahead of time. And then you have some sort of centralized team that is going to work to increase the value of those tokens. And so that's what a lot of those models look like. Especially when you get into the staking that's paying interest. Yeah. And also, I mean, proof of stake in general. So if we look at how corporations work, they work on proof of stake. And that's a good thing for corporations. So if you're the founder of the company and you control 51% of the stock, you should have more say in the company than somebody who bought one chair, for example. Whereas if you were organizing how you do voting, if you got more votes based on how much money you'd have, then Jeff Bezos would have like a million times more votes than a school teacher. And we would quickly become an oligal. Right. So you'd have a handful of people that can dictate.

Starting point is 00:59:07 policy. And so that's not good for democracies or money, even though it's good for equities. These equities are these optional things that you can choose to participate in if you want to or you can go to another one. Whereas money is something that's more universal or voting. It's more universal. And so proof of stake is generally not how we organize things in those fields. How do you see a lot of the policy playing out in the coming year or two? Do you see the SEC he's stepping in and really kind of exercising and working with Congress in order to get like the buyer bill, the draft buyer bill push through? Or do you see this as being something that's going to be extraordinarily hard for the SEC to do anything at this point?

Starting point is 00:59:49 There are certainly people that are closer to the regulators that might have more insight. I mean, he's pretty much said that he would need more budget to really go after this. So it almost seems like they want to outsource that to the exchanges and basically put more on them to restrict the types of tokens they let on their platform. So it's kind of like if you're not sure if something is an unregistered security, it probably is. And we'll see if they get budget increases and we'll see if they kind of start doing some shock on all and go after some of these platforms that they think are the most egregious or if they just kind of grandfathered certain things in and let things, you know, kind of keep going as they are. And they're kind of attacking

Starting point is 01:00:25 multiple fronts. I mean, one thing, you know, they're responsible for, say, approving a Bitcoin an ETF in a certain form. They're also, you know, we've seen Gary Gens to talk about payment for order flow, like what Robin Hood does, for example. That's unrelated. That's unrelated. And then there's the question of what tokens they want to go after. So they have multiple battles on multiple fronts and they only so many people.

Starting point is 01:00:47 But, you know, there are people that understand the inner workings of the SEC far more than I do. Lynn, what are your thoughts on the borrowing and lending in this space? you're seeing a lot of the exchanges now offering interest rates for either staking or like if you have your Bitcoin, you make a deposit. What are your thoughts about the risks associated with some of this, this custody and this rehypothecation risk? And is it worth it or is this something that you just avoid altogether? What are your thoughts on it? Well, so I minimize my exposure to it. I put a small percentage of my Bitcoin into BlockFi a while ago. It was basically an amount that

Starting point is 01:01:27 it's partially because I wanted to explore the ecosystem, right? So I wanted to see the ecosystem being built around it. So I talked to the CEO to discuss their risk and everything. I talked, you know, I talked to one of their VCs. And so I eventually put a small amount in that was not, you know, just a small percentage of my stack. But as industries have come down, that's obviously become less attractive. Now you're kind of taking on risk without word. And then staking on exchanges is kind of a different story because that's another centralization risk, right? So running, say an Ethereum validator, assuming Ethereum 2 goes through, is a pretty expensive ordeal, right, to run a validator. And so a lot of people would rather outsource that to an exchange.

Starting point is 01:02:08 What if it never goes through? Well, then, yeah, well, then that's a whole other can of words. But even say it goes through or even take, say, another proof of stake protocol that's already gone through, people are already staking it on exchanges. So the custodian is the one that really has the power there. It's kind of like how Vanguard and BlackRock can vote on behalf of their trillions of dollars worth of shares for their passive owners. Yes. So if you go back to say the Bitcoin block war, we saw that when we were talking about how big they wanted to change that block size to, you had like 80% of the mining hash rate

Starting point is 01:02:42 in favor of a block size increase. You had major exchanges in favor of it. And they still couldn't get it through because they couldn't compete with the node network. So the user node network was decentralized enough that even the big quorum of large companies in the space, couldn't get that through. Because if Bitcoin was a proof of stake system back then, and all those big custodians and exchanges said, no, we want this change to go through. And we know we're the ones that hold the validators or most of them.

Starting point is 01:03:09 So we're going to go ahead and vote to do this. And so it risks centralizing the system in a similar way that our current system has become rather centralized, where you have a handful of billionaires that are super well-connected and, you know, can contribute massive amounts. money to political campaigns and financialize that whole thing. It's kind of like if you could buy votes. And so proof of stake, I just inherently view as equity like and prone to centralization, which again is only good for a system that you can say opt into or opt out of compared to something that like, say, Bitcoin is trying to, you know, make a reasonable shot for being like global

Starting point is 01:03:48 money where you don't want, you want to minimize centralization risk as much as you possibly can with a project that has that level of ambition. So, Lynn, I don't have any other questions for you. I know we could probably talk for the rest of the night here, but I just want people to know how much I love your newsletter. Anytime I ask you to come on, you're just so generous to come on with your time, but I'm a huge fan. And anything that you publish, I read with a highlighter.

Starting point is 01:04:18 I print it off. I'm holding here. Like, anything that Lynn does, I immediately print it and go through it because you're just so thoughtful on so many different. areas. And one of the things that I like about your newsletter is you actually go in there and you call out individual companies. You have various types of portfolios that you're providing to people that pay and subscribe to your service. But it's so beneficial for me to see what you're looking at because I know your depth of knowledge and your filtering of everything that's out

Starting point is 01:04:48 there is unprecedented. So I just want people to know your newsletter is amazing. I can't promote that enough. We'll have a link to it in the show notes. Is there anything that you want to highlight, maybe your Twitter profile or whatever, so that people may be listening to you for the first time and they want to learn more about you, they can find you. Yeah, I appreciate that. So people can find the bulk of my work at Lindaldon.com. That's why I have a free newsletter that comes out every six weeks. I have public articles. I have a low-cost research service. And then at Twitter, I'm at Lynn Alden Contact. And so people know me from different areas. So I cover Bitcoin a lot, but I also cover other asset classes and macro in general because we are in such

Starting point is 01:05:28 interesting times. So, you know, the long-term debt cycle, the fourth turning, whatever you want to call it, we're going through some pretty interesting changes at this current time. So I at least do my best to try to explain what's happening, explain what I think things mean. And it's always probability basis. You can't predict the future, but you're saying, okay, so this sector looks very expensive or this policy change has the risk of this happening. And then we kind of monitor that over time and see which things played out, which things maybe went in a different direction of why. And people say they find it useful because, you know, it's just a very complex environment that we're in. And if I just piggyback off of what you're saying, you're exactly right. You're

Starting point is 01:06:07 never saying this is going to play out. What you're doing is you're showing this array of potential outcomes. And not just in one sector, I mean, the breadth of what you're covering is, is mind blowing in these write-ups that you're doing. And you're saying, hey, this is what I kind of think is the most probable, but this is the other side of the story. And it provides, it just arms me personally with so much just knowledge. I just love it. But anyway, thanks so much for coming on the show.

Starting point is 01:06:35 I love doing this. And hopefully we'll be able to do it again in the near future. Happy to. Thanks for having me. Hey, so thanks for everybody listening to the show. If you enjoyed the conversation, be sure. to subscribe to the show on whatever podcast app you're using. We really appreciate that. And if you have time, leave us a review. So thanks for joining us this week. And we'll catch you next Wednesday.

Starting point is 01:06:57 Thank you for listening to TIP. To access our show notes, courses or forums, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decisions, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by the Investors Podcast Network. Written permissions must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.

We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC042: Supply Chain Impacts & Bitcoin Discussion w/ Lyn Alden (Bitcoin Podcast)

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