You're The Voice | by Efrat Fenigson - Ep. 90: Preston Pysh - The Great Monetary Reset Is Already Here

Episode Date: August 5, 2025

My guest today is Preston Pysh, engineer, Apache helicopter pilot, partner at Ego Death Capital VC, and co-founder of The Investor’s Podcast Network. Known for co-hosting “Bitcoin Fundamentals” podcast and authoring several books on investing, Preston is one of the most influential voices in the Bitcoin space. In this episode, Preston shares how his systems-thinking mindset and background in military aviation led him to identify Bitcoin early as a superior store of value. We explore the emergence of Bitcoin treasury companies, how public markets are being rewired from within, and why financial engineering inspired by MicroStrategy’s playbook could unlock asymmetric returns for institutions and retail alike. Preston unpacks the mechanics behind mNAV models, risk-adjusted performance, and why stablecoins could be a threat but also a necessary step in Bitcoin’s adoption curve. He reflects on the spiritual and psychological shifts required to truly “get” Bitcoin, the importance of hope, and the dangers of institutional inertia. This is a conversation about clarity, conviction, and how Bitcoin is remapping the future of capital allocation, gear by gear, company by company.► If you got value, please like, comment, share, follow and support my work. Thank you!-- SPONSORS & AFFILIATES --►► Get your TREZOR wallet & accessories, with a 5% discount, using my code at checkout (get my discount code from the episode - yep, you’ll have to watch it): https://affil.trezor.io/SHUn ►► Get 10% off on Augmented NAC, with the code YCXKQDK2 via this link: https://store.augmentednac.com/?via=efrat (Note, this is not medical advice and you should consult your MD)►► Watch “New Totalitarian Order” conference with Prof. Mattias Desmet & Efrat - code EFRAT for 10% off: https://efenigson.gumroad.com/l/desmet_efrat ►► Get a second citizenship and a plan B to relocate to another country with Expat Money, leave your details for a follow up: https://expatmoney.com/efrat ►► Join me in any of these upcoming events: https://www.efrat.blog/p/upcoming-events -- LINKS –Preston’s Twitter: https://x.com/PrestonPysh Preston’s Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@PrestonPysh Preston’s nPub: npub1s5yq6wadwrxde4lhfs56gn64hwzuhnfa6r9mj476r5s4hkunzgzqrs6q7z Efrat's Twitter: https://twitter.com/efenigsonEfrat's Telegram: https://t.me/efenigsonWatch/listen on all platforms: https://linktr.ee/yourethevoiceSupport Efrat's work: ⁠https://www.buymeacoffee.com/efenigson   ⁠Support Efrat with Bitcoin: https://geyser.fund/project/efenigson– CHAPTERS –00:00 Coming Up…01:33 Intro to Preston & His Influence on Bitcoiners05:05 Hope & Freedom For Younger Audience07:58 The Superspreader Phenomena - Bitcoin’s Treasury Companies09:44 Risk Management & Complex Systems Experience16:25 Understanding Value in a Financial Landscape25:48 Corporate Adoption of Bitcoin & Treasury Companies31:42 How Saylor Built a “Transmission” with Strategy37:34 The Product: High Yield Income47:34 Public Markets: The Perfect Landscape51:26 Treasury Companies: Target for Governments56:51 The Transitioning Financial Systems: From Fiat to Bitcoin, Via Stablecoins & CBDCs1:04:32 The Fiat System's Impact: Doom & Gloom Outlook1:06:21 The Future of Monetary Order by 20301:11:05 Will KYC Fade Out? And Link to Taxation1:14:35 Short Fireside Questions - Books, Focus Areas1:20:05 The Nature of Good and Evil Forces1:24:34 What’s Preston’s Role Today & In The Future

One thing that I think I have picked up on in the past decade of being in Bitcoin, the people who get it are the ones that at their core are hopeful for a brighter day or a brighter future. When Bitcoin came along and I saw that you could take immediate custody of something and no outside government could add more units and like all this stuff, I was like, this might be the solution. So I do my first buy and I bought it like $220. I swear to you, it probably wasn't two weeks and the price had ripped to $300 a coin. So what I thought was going to happen is the big seven and these companies would see Bitcoin continue to just rip. And because there's so much volatility, they would reduce their position size. But what's

happening is really interesting. Boomers and people that are retired need some type of reliable source of income. So the product for MicroStrategy is servicing the retiree space that doesn't understand Bitcoin. They just want income. The boomers are going to own Bitcoin. They're just not going to know they own Bitcoin. With enough time, taxes are going to be incentivized to change to consumption-based taxes. You made $300,000 last year. We don't care. But you went out and bought a fancy boat, and we're going to tax the hell out of you on that. Hello and welcome to another episode of You're the Voice. I'm Efrat from Lugano, Switzerland at Plan B Network.

I have the honor of sitting here with one of my teachers, idols, I don't know how to call you. I'm a fangirl, Preston Pish. How are you? Thank you, Efrat. Wonderful to be here. Excited to do this. I know Lugano is amazing Lugano is fucking unreal it's unreal everyone wants to live here once they get here and I can understand I'm in that category yeah same right okay I'm gonna start with a quick intro for my audience that may not know you because some of my audience is not in Bitcoin yet but they are getting there yeah I'm working on it so Preston is an investor educator hold on I'm a little bit old um engineer and co-founder of the investor podcast network known for co-hosting

bitcoin fundamentals and authoring several books on investing president has become one of the most influential voices in the bitcoin space renowned for making complex financial systems accessible to wide audiences that is true i can vouch although i still i'm struggling from time to time but you're a good teacher his analytical depth paired with a calm but cutting critique of fiat dysfunction has made him a guiding voice in the growing movement towards monetary sovereignty how's that it's good it's pretty good yeah that's what i'm trying to do at least no you're doing awesome work i've been a a preston student for about for several years now and i just want to start with a funny story that this is what have become of me of late yeah a few

years ago friday night you're supposed to be like out partying friends and all that i'm sitting at home on my couch just like 10 p.m and texting with a friend of mine we're both bit corners and we're both like in our journey to learn as much as we can we're in the obsessed stage yeah so we're watching stuff all the time and sharing links with each other and he's texting me he's like what are you doing friday night you know 10 p.m studying and i'm telling him you really want to know and i take a screenshot of my tv which is you and um trace mayor oh yeah doing graphs five years you remember that five years ago you're analyzing graphs yeah like taking a photo of the crowd it's like dude it's friday 10 p.m and you're watching two guys who analyze the graphs look what has

become of you yes it's because of you yes i mean it is bitcoin uh you know yeah but so just so you know how i'm spending some i apologize no you shouldn't i love it i love it i wouldn't be doing anything else this is perfect and and about a year and a half ago when we met in madera i told you that i would really love to interview you but i'm not ready i needed the time to learn more and even now i feel like i'm not ready but i'm still doing it because i'm never ready you know what effort there's people that are early in their journey there's people that are much later and want to talk about super complex nuance to it and the the bigger audience the bigger group of people that are coming to it are to the left side of

that that are showing up so like you can go anywhere on that curve and have a discussion yeah it's okay you're a bit retarded we love you retarded okay um what did i want to start with we are here at plan b networks where we're teaching students who want to come into the bitcoin space um when you speak to younger people like here what do you try to live them with and your talk later today called the super spreader can you share a little bit about what you're gonna share with them and then what do you what do you want to leave them with yeah it's not a covid talk although it's probably a super spreader um in general i think with like the younger you know audience and people that are maybe coming into this for the first time really

bitcoin's a message of hope and freedom and you know there needs to be i think that there needs to be some type of uh theme of of that most importantly kind of worked into whatever you're showing them that they can see the world in a very positive lens. The one thing that I think I have picked up on in the past decade of being in Bitcoin is the people who get it are the ones that at their core are hopeful for a brighter day or a brighter future. People who look at the world and say the world's broke, it is, but they're also looking at the future and they're saying it's also going to be broke and maybe even broke worse, it's almost impossible for them to see Bitcoin. It's almost like it's like a curtain that's closed and it's impossible for them to

see it. So at a very early stage, maybe you're young, you're in your 20s or whatever, and you're trying to come into this space, they really deeply need to understand at their core that Bitcoin is hope for a better tomorrow and um i think that that just needs to be kind of expressed in any interaction or anything that that you're dealing with and i know that sounds really qualitative and um but having seen the number of people with just crazy amounts of intellectual horsepower not get bitcoin and i keep asking myself why and if when i spin it back and i kind of assess like why are they not getting this and like the root is they just literally think tomorrow is going to be way worse than today it's emotional and even spiritual it's definitely mental and if you don't unbreak

some of your mental beliefs and your pre-existing beliefs that are limiting the way you see the world then you can't really get it no you may get it as an investment tool but you won't step you won't go further than that you'll be further you'll trade it stuck there exactly you'll trade Yeah. And you're like, yeah, I have Bitcoin. I have it. I have it. I bought it this week. I have it. No, it's not about having Bitcoin. On the talk. So the super spreader thing. So what I would say is that up until this point, we've been early stage adopters. And when you look at that, the growth curve or the adoption curve, you're very early stage adopters up to this point. And we're already at like $2 trillion in value, market value in dollar terms. And I would say you haven't even breached or gone into the next phase, which is where the really aggressive move starts to come where everybody's got some type of exposure to it in some form or way, whether they realize it or not. and so what i think we're at a very strategic point in time where that's what's coming next

and i think that what's going to bring it here is people might laugh when they hear me say this but that's what the presentation two hours i'm going to go through like why and it's the bitcoin treasury companies are going to be the thing that are the super spreader yeah so you wait with that because i've got questions about that i want to kind of lead people into it with you um which is perfect You're the Voice is brought to you by Trezor, the original Bitcoin hardware wallet company pioneering the development of self-custody for crypto assets since 2013, empowering individuals with an open source device, enabling beginners and experts to easily and securely hold their coins. I find my Trezor super easy to use and recommend it to my friends and family. Enjoy my 5% discount on Trezor product by clicking the link in the show notes and using the code FLAT. okay you have a before we dive into the treasury companies you have a deep systems

engineering mindset and you were an apache pilot helicopter pilot a job that requires extreme focus coordination and system thinking under pressure how did that experience shape the way you approach uncertainty and risk today especially in financial markets bitcoin and tech Yeah. I would say that, especially in the early days of Bitcoin, I remember when the price was 200 bucks a coin. And back then, we didn't know how it was going to scale from a payment standpoint. For me, that was never much of a problem. That didn't really hinder my overall thesis of why I was owning it. Even back then, I was buying it because of the store value properties and the fact that gold was compromised, uh, through cash settled derivatives markets. And, um, there

was no way for, um, you know, the argument back then, and we literally covered this on our show back in 2014, 2015 was we'd have Jim Rickards and other people on our show. And it was like, all right, so like, how does this 2008 crisis like resolve itself? And the talking point then was well you're going to have these special drawing rights out of the imf and they're going to become the central bank of the central bankers and somehow through magic that's going to allow the whole world to continue to to globally cooperate and function and i'm saying well no like like you're still like everybody's just debasing their currency and then this is just a higher but we i mean that was the only thing that was available that that was the only thing

that seemed like a maybe a solution but probably not um and uh the gold markets like i said were compromised through cash settled derivatives and like the the latency and the fact that you still have a human in the loop and like all of those things now it works if you're like custing the gold and they keep printing all this fiat that value that gold should continue to go up but as far as gold being used as an instrument at the state level it's just not going to work they're going to continue to like adjust the ledger with a paper and pencil to like make sure that there's more units on top of whatever's in the vault so then i'm bringing you back to your skills as a pilot and yeah i'm sorry i'm an engineer i'm i'm so maybe getting there but um so i was looking at

that and saying when i saw bitcoin and i have this engineering background and i understood forms of encryption so like when you fly and you're talking on radios you encrypt the signal and um that way you know the other side can't understand what you're saying so like i understood encryption i understood some of this stuff at a very basic level um and so when bitcoin came along and i saw that you could take immediate custody of something and um no outside government could add more units and all this stuff. I was like, this might be the solution. I was never sold on the special drawing rights out of the roadmap. I was like, cool story, but I don't buy it. And Bitcoin comes along and I was like, wow. Now to the risk and volatility piece of being a

helicopter pilot and that kind of preemptively preparing me for Bitcoin. So I do my first buy and i i bought it like 220 and i swear to you it probably wasn't two weeks and the price had ripped to 300 a coin and so like just to put this in perspective this would be like we're at 100 000 right now and it jumping to call it 170 or whatever i you know i don't know the quick math but it would be like some like in two weeks yeah and i was like you know stop the train like what the hell do i own right here you know i've participated in like traditional markets where if you did 20 in a year that was a screaming great investment that was awesome really good and if you had moves of two to three percent on the day like that was that was pretty aggressive

that was a lot of volatility. So I experienced that in like a matter of two weeks or something. And I was just like, holy hell, what is this? Like what in the world is this? And it immediately forced me to the books, to dive in even harder than I had already. Like I had already read a book. I'd watched some Trace Mayer videos back then. He was doing videos on Real Vision back in the 2014, 2015 timeframe. And I watched those. He had this video on network effects and I was like, as an engineer, I was just like, wow, this is incredible. Um, so it just forced me on a intellectual treasure trove hunt of deeply trying to understand what in the world I was holding. And, um, luckily for me, and this was, I found that this is really strange for this,

for this space is I, I feel like I deeply understood the problem first and then found the solution yeah and i would argue that 95 plus of people don't see the problem they they they find the solution before they even understand what the problem is and they arrive there through speculation and just like friends or whatever and then have to reverse engineer to understand which is why so many people sell it come back go through this emotional journey and then they realize what they had at the beginning that's right but that crazy volatility i was prone to be able to i think i was prone to deal with that pretty well just because of my background of just dealing with risk risk yeah yeah i think so you're resilient yeah i was just kind of like okay well

i'm not getting shot at so that yeah it's not that bad it's not that bad it's all in perspective right yeah awesome okay i also saw the problem when i got in like before i got into bitcoin so then when i was introduced to it yeah it was like okay that's what i was looking for yeah that is the solution i get it thank you that's it game over i don't need anything else let me dive really dip into it very quickly yeah yeah awesome okay how do you okay now we start getting into the interesting topic how do you think about value today in general in a world where money itself is being questioned what does it even mean to value something whether it's a business a currency or a network like bitcoin yeah well i think you first have to start in the

just making sure everybody understands that for a family of four that have young kids you know car seats very valuable a bit for somebody who's single when kind of partying and having fun they care less about a car seat when i'm looking at it from a investor's lens which is how i normally step into the conversation is right out of the gate i just start talking about the numbers as if I'm trying to compound and grow my net worth is typically how I talk about value. Because that's kind of my expertise and that's what, you know, I do the podcast and that's how we always frame things. So when we're looking at value from that lens, you have to understand like what is your risk-free rate and everything else is a decision point based on opportunity costs

from there. So when I was studying Warren Buffett pretty heavily, one of the things that fascinated me about that approach is there's a little bit of prediction in there, but mostly a lot more math in there to be on the right side of growing value. And what I mean by that is you first have to define and say, this is what my risk-free rate is. And so let's say the risk-free rate is 10%. If I'm going to go and try to buy something that I'm looking at through the math and it's telling me that the return is 20%, the next question is, is at what risk beyond the 10% that I feel like I can get almost no risk? And so then it becomes this question of trying to figure out and define all of those risks

and then trying to determine whether it's worth the additional 10% return. And it's really that simple. And then if I'm looking at the math and it's giving me a 5% return, I don't even think about the risk because I'm never going to buy it anyway. It's that simple. And so prior to Bitcoin, the risk-free rate was really kind of like the S&P 500, whether people realize it or saw it that way or not. It was really kind of the S&P 500 and whether you could outperform that growth rate. And when you look at S&P 500 performance returns, and I'm going to just kind of use like the last 10 to 20 years, those returns are about on par with the debasement rate, maybe a little bit better. And a little bit better would be like 2% better on average, which sucks.

It's so low. Which sucks. It's horrible. So when you're looking at that 2% return above the debasement rate, you also have to have a discussion about like the volatility risk, like how long is your holding period and all those kinds of things. And for some people, their holding period might be a year and you might get chewed up and you were probably better off just kind of like holding that in some type of treasury, which is underperforming the debasement rate. And let me just define that for people. Yes. So that debasement rate, the easiest way that I can define it is just what is your compound annual growth rate on the M2 money supply? And then to define that even more, like, are you in the US? Are you just looking at the US debasement rate, which is actually one of the cleanest compared to everywhere else in the world, which is typically a little bit higher? up to, I would say in the US that the basement rate's about 8% to 10%. And then I would say

everywhere else, it can go as high as in developed economies, it'd be like 10% to 14%. And then outside of developed economies, it's in excess of 14%. And people think it's 2% to 3% because the banks tell them that's the inflation rate. So, so if you can't invest and exceed those numbers that I just said, you are losing value. Like you go out and you perform some work and you, and we'll just talk in dollar terms, you make a hundred bucks, um, next year, it's basically $90. And the year after that, it's like 78. Yeah.

It's like, like it is getting, well, it'd actually be like 82 or whatever. Or no, it is right, what we said before. So it's declining at those numbers. That pace is really aggressive. And so then you go to the S&P, and let's say the S&P is outperforming by 1% or 2%. So you made your $100, and although it feels like it's 12% gain, and it should be like 112 in actual buying power terms is probably more like one or two percent so now it's 101 maybe 102 but you had it locked up that entire time so that's the other piece you got to talk about is

what's the lock up to get that growth so there's a lot of like factors in there and i think for most people they're so focused on their day-to-day job of just making money making the hundred dollars that then preserving it is in safety and says this all the time you shouldn't have to have two jobs one to make it and then one to keep it and um so this is this is important so i say all that because for people that are looking at well what is your benchmark today that you use for that hurdle rate that we're talking about that you're trying to outperform and for me it's bitcoin And I think for anybody that deeply understands Bitcoin, your hurdle rate is Bitcoin. And so what's Bitcoin's growth rate?

Well, power law is one way to look at it. There's many ways to look at it. But if we're trying to be somewhat conservative, it's like 40%, 40, 50%. It's 40%. There was one of my Preston lessons in the last few years. you did a really good exercise where you showed that even if you picked like the lowest point in the graph of the last 14 15 years yeah and took a four-year term from that point onward yeah you would land on like the lowest return would be 25 a year so like the worst case scenario

is 25 yeah and we're on a 40 average and yeah i would say now it was higher early on and then you look at the power law and i'm and i'm not a i'm not preaching the power law is you know how it's going to be for sure in the future but i think it's i think it's a good just uh basic roundabout way to kind of estimate if i hold bitcoin for four years what should i kind of expect out of it and i think that today it's about 45 annualized so so you you specifically are looking for anything that is more than 45 percent to justify you adding it to your that's right strategy in a risk adjusted way yes which is not easy to find no but i think that there's well it goes which will lead us to the super spreader yeah tired of feeling like your freedom and future are fading away do you live in

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in-depth content and my fireside chat with professor desmond use my code a flat for 10 off i hope you find great value in it so then let me ask you just before we get to the mnav and and the treasury companies did you expect this level of corporate adoption at this stage of bitcoin's life cycle we're now seeing the public companies not just holding bitcoin but being valued differently because of it did you see this coming as part of bitcoin's growth and adoption cycle yeah yes and no um so let me tell you what i thought was going to happen i thought you were going to start to see companies put like a hedge into their balance sheet i thought you were going to see like the apples and the googles

of the world you know they make a bunch they make a bunch of money yeah and then what they do when they can't employ it operationally is they have what's called marketable securities they'll go out and they'll buy like brookshire hathaway they'll go buy coca-cola they'll go buy not a majority stake, something that's 10% or less, it's treated differently in taxes based on the ownership levels and things like that. So these companies go out and they buy other businesses that they think are exceeding a hurdle rate. They put it on their balance sheet and they do it in a way that's a small amount and it's listed as marketable securities on the balance sheet of the companies. So what I thought was going to happen is the big seven and these companies

would see bitcoin continue to just rip there's tons of volatility in it and because there's so much volatility they would reduce their position size to handle the vol i mean this is like yeah investing 101 yeah super like everything they teach even a person that is not an investor it's just yeah in logic yeah you just reduce the size and then you can deal with the volatility and so that's how i thought this was going to unfold but what we're seeing is and you do have some of that but i was expecting it to be way more on a net basis across like all companies especially publicly traded companies that they would have a hedge or a one to three percent position size um but what's happening is really interesting where you have uh i don't know if

you're familiar with clayton christiansen's uh innovators dilemma book but this is a book where he's a harvard professor that wrote this idea that like big corporations have a really hard time innovating and the best thing that they can do is basically spin off or uh create a small little shell company that their whole focus is on the disruption of their own business but that but they're wholly owned by the the large conglomerate and so what you have happening is effectively that for what i would argue the entire public equity markets with treasury companies they're going out there they're they're effectively the and this is another core point is because of all the etfs what you've done is you've you've stripped away voting rights and governance

out of all the large major corporations. And it's distributed so like the distribution of the voting is so spread out that there's nobody actually sitting in the seat of the board and the CEO of the company where they want to go out and make any type of risk decision. Everything is about risk reduction so that they can continue to sit in the seat, get their board fee, get the CEO pay. And as long as they don't mess anything up or rock the boat too much, they continue to sit there and have the job. And I would argue that the reason that that exists is because of the ETFs holding so many shares and it being all distributed and the

voting rights are all just like spread out. And so because of that dynamic, nobody wants to go out there and put Bitcoin on the balance sheet because they're looking at it and they're saying, i could look stupid i could this could fall on its face and then i would be the ceo and then they're going to kick me out and i don't have this plush awesome job right so because of all these dynamics very famous saying no one no one was fired for taking ibm yeah yes right that's exactly what it is yeah yeah they want to be safe um so that's that's why it's unfolded the way that it has. I just didn't expect everybody to be so, well, I didn't expect them to be so risk averse. And I mean, it's like super risk averse, the decisions that have led up to this point.

So we have all these treasury companies that are being stood up by people. When you look at the core of the people that are doing this, they deeply understand Bitcoin. They understand public markets. The pipe investors, the private investment and public equity that are initially seeding these companies are people that understand Bitcoin at a very deep level. So when a treasury company goes to the market, they first have to raise this pipe, call it 500 million to a billion dollars or whatever. And so all those pipe investors are people that deeply understand Bitcoin. They seed it, they stand it up, and then they start doing what MicroStrategy has laid out this whole blueprint on how to tap fixed income markets,

reduce the volatility for the demand of the boomers that want the fixed income, and then just point it over to the common stock. And then you have the potential for outperformance in a risk, you know, in an increased risk way, which we could talk about compared to just holding Bitcoin. Yes, I do. Yeah. No, no, go on. No, but you do have the potential to outperform Bitcoin on the common stock side. Right. Do you think each of these treasury companies, or at least a lot of them, will have all these different types of financial products eventually, even if they start up just with one or two? When you say financial products, you're saying the different types of preferred?

Yes, yes. Yeah. Yeah. So I like to explain what Michael's done with all the preferred stock and even the – he doesn't really – it seems like he hasn't obviously said anything to me, but it seems like he doesn't like the convertible debt because of the delta hedging that happens on the strike prices, which is a whole another topic. But if you look at the whole breadth of the issuance that he's done away from the common stock, what I like to describe it for people that maybe don't understand any of this terminology, he's building a transmission. It's a transmission is what it is. As another engineer. Yeah. As another engineer that has like a deep – I admire what he's doing a lot because I have an engineering background.

I understand finance and you're kind of like merging these two things together. Yes. And what he's done is he's built a transmission. So let's explain that for people. Please. Why, like, what is a transmission? A lot of people drive their car. They know the term.

They kind of have an idea. There's a bunch of gears in there, but like truly like what's the purpose of a transmission? And the easiest way that I can describe it is on a bicycle. So everybody's familiar with a multi-speed bike. Yep. and so if i ask the person like why do you have all these gears why do you have the transmission on the bike and the answer is to handle the the difficulty the that's right utility the your environment changes and your the power in your legs doesn't yeah and so how can you still

go up the hill which is a very adverse environment yep when your leg power isn't going to change like it's not like your legs get three times bigger to go up the hill they're exactly the same size but you're still able to go up a hill and then on top of it if your environment changes and gives you really favorable conditions which is a downhill how can you leverage that and go super fast to take advantage of the natural environmental setting yep and so a transmission is what allows you to adjust to your environment despite the fact that you're in a fixed setup of power so when we look at like what michael's doing with all these very good analogy very good when you look at what michael's doing yep he's preparing for an adverse

environment and also a very advantageous environment when these central banks like print and they they lay on the floodgates of fiat he wants to be able to set the sail he wants to be able to change the gear into 21 the 21st gear on the bike and rip down the mountain okay yep He also is prepared for what we just went through, which I would argue for much of 2023 to the start of 2025 was a tightening environment. It's akin to going up the hill. And I would say that all of this issuance that he's done in the preferred stock market is preparation for the next time that they would go about tightening the fiat. in going up the mountain okay so um how this gets really hard to explain from a financial standpoint but for in general i think we we we stop there he's built a transmission he can adjust the gears

based on the environmental setup if they're tightening the money supply or they're loosening the money supply he has all the gears there to like make this thing rip and to keep and the goal is on the bike if you stop you have to put your foot down or you fall over and the name of the game is to keep the inertia in the wheels to keep it going forward and i i feel that what he has on the market today is enabling him to to keep that thing moving forward and that would be a positive mnav like an mnav over one and do you think most companies will be able to reach that level of maturity or sophistication over i think so yeah if they do it right i think so i think they follow his uh lead his blueprint just because a kid uh uh a seven-year-old kid has teeny tiny legs

they can still ride their bike now they might not be able to get the momentum right of the adult on the bike but that little kid can still ride the bike with the transmission right yeah if they all build the right mechanism that they can do it now we're we're still using the bike analogy if you build a gear that was um like had just tremendous amounts of torque in order to to uh turn the wheel think about it when you're on your bike if you try to change your gear you have to be able to turn the wheel to get the gear to pop to the next one right yeah you don't want to get caught not being able to turn and so what you might get are some people that are designing gears that far exceed the capacity in their legs to turn the gear and they get over levered it's

really neat that the terminology yeah in like mechanical engineering which we're talking about and finance is actually like very similar very similar very cool yeah okay and then i'm diving a little bit deeper so the mnav so what do you think of the mnav valuation model for bitcoin companies so mnav for those who don't you don't know market net asset value approach where a company's capital and debt are weighed against its bitcoin holdings and it's still a new phenomenon in corporate finance this is a new beast that they have probably never seen before and many people struggle to understand if this valuation method is grounded and sustainable do you see this as similar to the early days of valuing companies like microsoft in the 90s for example

the 80s actually when traditional models failed to capture emerging value like everyone we're seeing that you know we have a pc at home maybe and then this microsoft is starting to churn out all these computers and you're starting to think about the future what could become of this and people are looking at this company called microsoft and how do we value that yeah it was very foreign back then i think right this is even more foreign than that so yeah so it really is because what's going to be the hardest thing for people to understand with bitcoin treasury companies is what is the product like right it's going to be lost yeah what are the operations like i don't understand the operation right like an idiot i asked you last night like

do they really not need to have a product or a business yeah this is the product okay this is it this is the product boomers and people that are retired need some type of reliable source of income, period. If you go back to the very worst point in time for boomers that needed income, it was 2020. And the reason it was 2020 is because the entire debt, the bond yield curve was just pegged down to hardly anything. And so if you retired in that moment in 2020 and you're sitting there and you're saying i just need a reliable source of income i don't necessarily need it to grow i just need to like put this lock all this buying power that i've preserved into something that just pays me some type of income so i can retire the yields you were getting were just an

absolute pittance i think the 10-year treasury in the u.s got to like a half a percent 50 bips so like you got you got a hundred thousand bucks like you can do the math real fast on like what that is and it's it's a joke it's a total joke um so you need a whole lot of money in order to have any type of so the product for microstrategy is servicing the retiree space that doesn't understand Bitcoin. They don't need to understand Bitcoin for the most part. They just want income. They need some like 10%, 7% plus so that they could take their million dollars, lock it into something and make, if it's 7%, they're going to make 70,000 a year. If it's 10%, they make 100,000 a year on a million bucks. That's what they desperately need. And that's

assuming you got a million bucks, which for a lot of people that are retiring aren't even close to that. So that's the product. The product is the desperation for retirees that need income and of high yield. And it is a product born out of fiat reality. Yes. Yes. It's not like we're saying that it's good that it's happening but that is reality that is the world we live in under such a monetary system yeah so now the question becomes okay so like how is he delivering that in a way that's safe yeah right because it's like okay you're giving me 10 the common person immediately says well everything else i can go in the we'll just talk preferred markets is is eight percent or seven percent how are you giving me ten percent which is two or three percent higher with the

same or better risk profile because they just can't understand how that's possible and the answer is bitcoin yeah because the hurdle rate on bitcoin is you know we said 40 45 percent annualized now there's a lot of volatility in there and that's so they're looking at it and say, okay, I know it's gone up forever to date, but how about all that volatility? How has that not worked into, but what, what he's doing is on one hand, you got Bitcoin over here on his balance sheet that rep the common stock holder, you know, like all of that it's here and it's growing it. We'll just say 45% annualized. And then over here, which is separate, you got this preferred stock issuance. And let's just take 10% so it's an easy number. He's issuing shares.

He's paying a dividend of 10%. So if the share value is a hundred bucks, he's paying a $10 dividend annualized on that $100 share issuance. And the person who holds that gets that $10 every year. But when he issues that $100 share, he immediately takes that cash, he turns it into Bitcoin and he puts the Bitcoin on the balance sheet over here. So what he's doing is he's providing the fixed income to the person here. There's a third, let's just say it was 40% here. There's a 30% difference between what this is growing at. And that 30% arbitrage is how he's making money for the common shareholder in excess of just the Bitcoin growing itself.

This is a business. It's a flywheel effect, and it's so genius. This is using Bitcoin to secure. You're securitizing Bitcoin, turning it into a fixed income instrument for somebody. And so a person might look at this and say, these people over here buying the preferred and buying the fixed income.

Like they're foregoing all of this upside. Yes. And they're okay with that. They don't care. They don't care about 45% returns and something that's super volatile that they don't understand. Right. All they want is the income. And so he's giving it to them.

Now, if you're stripping away, and so this doesn't have a lot of volatility. You're stripping the volatility out of it by the way that, and we could get into like, how is that possible and everything. But he's taking all that volatility out of it, and he's giving these people their 10% consistently. The underlying share price of the preferred doesn't move very much. That much. Okay? And so they're happy.

They're getting exactly what they want. But when you take this and you're stripping all that volatility away and you're taking that out, he's giving that additional performance to the common stockholder. And so when you're looking at Bitcoin's performance, which I would say is right here, this should outperform, but it comes with additional risk, custody risk, operational risk that he doesn't get overextended or over-torque the gears, all of those things. That's the additional risk with the outperformance. Over here, you have underperformance, but you're less risk because they're higher in the stack than the common stock shareholders. um if they would go through a bankruptcy or like you know all those things they're the first ones paid out well the debt holders the first ones paid out and then the preferred but yeah what's happening is very intelligent financial engineering and and it couldn't have happened until today

because there was no underlying asset like bitcoin no to allow this to have happened no it's a creation that is only made possible thanks to this new invention that's right yeah it's gonna be super honestly it's gonna be super hard for people to wrap their head around it i know and because also most people don't know how the public market uh public companies market work the corporate market work corporate finances is something that only people that worked in tech and had options maybe have looked into it and their their company was private and made an exit now it's public so they have to learn what it means and like so few people understand that shit i've been in tech for 20 years but only in private and not in public companies so i've heard

of it but i never took the time to dive deeper and now i'm looking at it i'm like okay it's time i need to understand and and i am learning it and it's not easy but it's it's fucking fascinating the incentives the incentives but it's not a scam not at all it's not a scam it's like completely legit i think for anybody listening to me just describe that yeah they're listening and they're they're probably uh really curious and thinking there's that sounds way too good to be true that can't persist like all of those types of things and i you know 100 people listening to that description i suspect 95 of the 100 are going to say that's too good to be true that won't last and it's going to fall flat on its face and i'm here to tell you i think you're not just wrong

but extremely wrong in that thought and i would encourage you to dig a lot deeper yes yeah it's like have fun staying poor kind of one other thing that i think is really interesting with this yeah is this has to happen in public markets. This will not work in a private market. And the beauty of that is the reporting requirements for public companies has such a higher bar over private equity in what is disclosed and what's reported for everybody to see what is actually behind the machine. And so when you're looking at a company that's implementing this strategy, you should be able to see very clearly and very obviously if they're about to over-torque the machine, if the transmission was engineered very poorly.

Yep. You can calculate this. You can just look at it. Calculate everything. That's right. You can go in there. You can calculate all of it. You can see all of it.

And they can't really hide the fact that they've over levered themselves or whatever. It's all on public purview for everybody to audit the books. So that makes me think then when we Bitcoiners always say Bitcoin makes life more honest. This is one of the ways how it's turning financial markets to be a little bit more honest. Yeah. Right? There's a visibility aspect of it. It's all out there.

You can validate it. Yeah. And yes, it's fiat, but it's making fiat a little bit more honest too. Yeah. People might look at it and they would hear all the, a Bitcoiner would hear this and they would say, but Preston, there's so much paper Bitcoin on top of this. Okay. And I think this is a very valid concern that people bring up.

But where I think that this is going to self-correct or just kind of automatically take care of itself is a i think the emergence of a bitcoin treasury company uh strategy we're like we're first inning or national anthem level we've only just beginning like this has just begun and so the more of these that you get the more that they're going to just suck all of this bitcoin out of the market. And it's going to be in a very institutionalized custody model. And I think that anybody who's sucking the amount of Bitcoin out of the market, like we're seeing with MicroStrategy, now multiply that by 10, now multiply that by 100. And I don't know how this kind of sets out, but I'm looking at it from a global lens. And I think

there will be 100. I don't know if it goes higher than that, but there's going to be a lot of Bitcoin treasury companies that are doing this. And then the requirement for more custodians is going to increase naturally. If you're holding a lot of Bitcoin, why would you possibly want to have it all with one custodian? It makes no sense. So you're going to incentivize more institutionalized custodians to spread the coins of the treasury across. And I think that that's a good thing that's a healthy thing for the market if it will decentralize that then yeah if naturally there'll be more of them and and they'll compete with each other hopefully then that will create a healthy dynamic in the market yeah but yeah self-custody is still important but it's

different for retail than for corporate yeah it's it's very different to hold your own bitcoin in your own self-custody than having a company with such a huge amount of bitcoin and then relying on a hardware wallet to do it this is this is another really important conversation that i think needs to be addressed in conjunction with the bitcoin treasury companies right so you're going to get to a point in all of this where the governments are going to be like oh like this is really bad for us to be able to meet our financial obligations. Where that point occurs, I don't know. You could be five years, you could be 10 years, I don't know.

But there's going to be a point in time when they realize that they have to start accepting Bitcoin to pay the bills and that the growth rate of their spending, which is just parabolic, has to not just be capped, but has to start declining. When that moment occurs, they're going to be, what would be politically popular? What would be politically unpopular? Politically popular would be, we've got to go find a treasury of Bitcoin to seed and put into our treasury that impacts the least amount of people possible. Where can we get the most points without hurting or disrupting that many people?

Corporate. corporations you go to one company yeah that has very few shareholders and that's going to be the prime target if they've got a lot of bitcoin and not a lot of people that hold the shares like that's target number one okay so the reason i bring this this idea up is can you get out performance in a bitcoin treasury company just by everything that we just laid out yes is it more risky? Yes. Is it going to attract more people to own the shares than just owning Bitcoin and self-custodying yourself? Yes. That's a concern. So for a person that's hearing all of this, what's the correct sizing? I want to outperform Bitcoin. My main thing is how do I get the most

performance in investing and let me talk about it in media and let me try to do it myself and and i just laid out like how it's possible to outperform bitcoin so you got to own companies that are able to do this this thing that we're talking about but it comes with added risk and one of the biggest risks beyond the custody beyond the operations is the the government's coming in and nationalizing, because they are literally in desperation mode, nationalizing some form of that treasury. What, a 6102 kind of situation? We don't know.

We don't know what this will look like, whether it'll even happen. But if I can go, if I can look at the incentives and I can say, I can understand how this would be an incentive for them to do that, the question then becomes- It's true that that would be a target. Absolutely. Absolutely. it's a target so as an investor you have to you have to apply a risk factor to that right and then how you handle it as an investor is the sizing going back to risk you got to properly

size it so to properly size it you have to say okay well like how much outperformance do i think I can get? And then adjust your sizing based off of that. And is it a total loss? In this scenario, it would be a total loss. So you got to factor that in. So I talk about this from time to time in interviews. There's an equation called the Kelly criterion that helps you figure out the sizing of investments. People can use AI. It's not a simple math equation, but you can go in there, work with AI to say, help me use the Kelly criterion to estimate I have an investment and the optionality would be something really simple. Like I think I can get a 45% return with self-custody Bitcoin. I think I could get, and we're just going to throw a number out there.

These are not the numbers. I'm just going to use this as an example. I think I can go get a 55% return by owning common stock, whatever, that's a Bitcoin treasury company. But it has these other risk factors that I would attribute to X, Y, and have the AI walk you through it. And what should be my allocation? Now, what would be my allocation for that outperformance with all these additional risks versus just owning the thing that's giving me this crazy high return of 45%? And what I think people will find when they do this is that your sizing is actually pretty small for the outperformance. But when you look at it and you just look at the additional return that you're going to get for the additional risk, what you'll find is that the sizing actually needs to be pretty small relative to just holding the thing that is your, quote unquote, risk-free rate.

Yeah. Yeah. Wow. I'm getting a private lesson. okay i'm moving on to something that is a little bit more macro so how do you see the role of stable coins evolving yeah and what's your opinion about the latest u.s legislation of stable coins especially your take on people calling it cbdc's yeah um so when i when i'm looking at this with like an engineering lens um bitcoin has this crazy high frequency to it

um it settles every 10 minutes it's got this crazy high market cap and it's only going higher like two trillion um at a 45 compound annual growth rate so you can see where these numbers will be very quickly going higher. And then you look at the legacy system and the frequency at which it settles, particularly with respect to dollars and euros and all that. Closed on weekends, like all of that. It's gotten a little bit better in their ability to settle faster with like, you can now do a Fed wire. It literally goes out within almost an hour, I would say. And you have to ask yourself, okay, so why are they doing that where they used to not? And what I would say is that entire system is slowly and gradually coming up to the frequency

of Bitcoin and the efficiency of Bitcoin. It's crazy efficient, Bitcoin, when you look at it from an engineering standpoint. So in order for this handoff to occur of legacy way of doing finance to the future of finance you have to match or like come to the frequency of where it's going in order to pass the torch it almost be like you watch the olympics and you have a relay and they pass the baton like if those runners aren't on the same frequency at the handoff the handoff can't happen and so that's why the first runner starts running before the that's right the other one It's exactly what it is. So that they can be in the same patient.

So people that are saying, because what is a stable coin? A stable coin is a tokenized sovereign debt issuance that's been tokenized and is immediately saleable. And we can get into whether it's technically sound and immutable and uncensorable, which it's not. Okay. But again, it's a representation of the legacy system. So people that are looking at that and saying, oh, the government can take that.

Yes, they can. And they've always been able to take it. Yes. It's not new. That's right. That's right. Nothing's changed. If they don't like you and you didn't KYC the right way, congratulations, they can take

your money. Nothing's changed. The only thing that's changed is the pace and the speed at which it moves. Perfect. And in order for this handoff to happen and where, in my opinion, everything's going, you have to continue to increase that frequency to get it up to the handoff. If that doesn't happen, I think that you could have a pretty disastrous scenario on your hand because what you have is just credit impairment. People can't get access to the thing that they're accustomed to, that they understand. And they don't understand Bitcoin.

They do understand the legacy system. And if they can't get access to it and they're like out, now all of a sudden commerce starts shutting down. Global trade starts shutting down. It's a disaster. It's a disaster. So this is like a gradual, inevitable stage of the migration process from a legacy system to a new monetary order. You have a bunch of doomers out there, and I'm not going to name names, but you have doomers that are looking at stablecoins and they're saying it's a CBDC. And I'm saying, yes, it de facto is.

Yeah. I'm not arguing with you there. Yes. But in the same hand, this doomer might say that, oh, yeah, will Bitcoin go to a million? Will Bitcoin go to 10 million? Yeah, I think it will. And so then I look back at the Doomer and I say, okay, so how in the hell do you think you're going to get enough dollars in the system that are vibrating at a frequency high enough to take it there? Right?

Like, how is that possible without stable coins? Yeah. Securitizing the debt issuance and putting more of these dollar tokens into the hands of everybody all around the planet. Because I don't think you can get there without increasing that frequency of exchange. Yeah. And is it still confiscatable? Yeah, it always was. It always was.

There's nothing new here. That's exactly how and what Caitlin Long said when I interviewed her about, you know, you think you have financial privacy today. You don't. You don't. They have control. Yes, right. It is becoming easier to control you with these technological means, but it's always been like that since, you know, decades now. And Pierre and Morgan Richards said in the recent interview that they also, like you, thought, you know, we will see a crash of the legacy system and then a rebuilding of a new one.

And we're actually happy to see that what we are undertaking now is a gradual process from one to another. So they're really reinforcing that. And I agree with you in the sense of the Doomer's view of, you know, we're fucked, this is CBDCs. Okay, and now what? Because what is happening cannot be stopped. No. There is no other way to go. This is happening whether you like it or not.

Exactly. And what you're actually alluding to is Bitcoin is the end game. We're going to get there. Yep. There are stages, there are steps to get there. We are now in probably the first or second step of the legacy system adapting itself to be more ready to advance to where we need it to go. Yep. So it's kind of this evolution, this organic evolution, I would say, of those systems, right?

And I love it that you, you know, the first thing you said when you started answering this is that there's a certain frequency and energy efficiency to the Bitcoin system. And this is almost like I oftentimes speak about Bitcoin in a spiritual sense, feeling like it's got a certain frequency. So it's funny, you're talking about it from a very earthy physical perspective, it is operating on a certain frequency and the other systems are not. And there needs to be some kind of elevation or ascension in frequency for them to communicate, to be able to work together. And yes, along that way, you may bump into adverse reactions that you don't like. Find your way of navigating inside that little chaotic transitory phase. You know what, Everett? It goes back to the very first thing that we talked about, which is at a person's core, are they hopeful? Right.

Are they a doomer? 100%. Right? and so people have been hurt by this legacy system they are angry with the legacy system traumatized i think they're traumatized and you know what i understand it absolutely i understand it and um i'm not looking down in any way in fact i i feel for these people and why they see the world so negatively is because man there's been some massive rug pulls of this system in just literally just eating away at people's life source of the work that they perform and then just

stealing it in a way that they don't even understand that it's being stolen from and they look around and they're blaming everything else because they don't understand this really complex system but um to the point of the cbdc part or the stable coin part is they're looking at it they're saying this is just more of that broke system and and they're scared they're fearful that it's going to overpower bitcoin right and i'm looking at it and saying you had no idea how powerful this bitcoin thing is and there is nothing to be fearful of i always reach the same yeah it's like you're worried about the wrong thing like i'm not worried about it doing anything Don't worry about how I can get some or more.

Yeah. That's what you should be worried about. Yeah. And that's your real safe bet to hedge yourself from this chaotic, destructive fiat world. Yeah. Oh, yeah. The earlier you get to learn about it, the better. Okay.

So how do you see then the monetary order changing, let's say, by 2030, like in the next five years? Yeah. um you think we're gonna see both a world with cbdcs and bitcoin or yeah i think between now and then that's going to really start to pick up where it's more common it's it's more in the global conscious bitcoin is than ever before right um i think that the corporate treasury stuff is really going to ramp. And it's going to bring in a whole new wave of people that just are like, oh, yeah, well, I mean, Bitcoin's at $300,000. I think the sats are going to start to become the more dominant unit that people talk in by 2030. Really? It's going to take...

Yeah, it doesn't feel like that right now. But I think in 2030, it will. um i think the emergence of bitcoin as payments is going to really kick into high gear right around that time i think between now and then it's going to be mostly corporations gobbling up bitcoin putting it on the balance sheets to rewire public equity and then want to earn some yeah and but because that's gonna that is then going to transition into the treasury companies buying the equity, the valuable equity that actually has a competitive moat. But that's another phase. I think that's the 2030 where that starts to really kick into higher gear. Because that has to all be repriced in Bitcoin terms, at multiples of people that'll blow their minds, like low.

And it's not the retail adoption that's going to explode what people have been maybe expecting. Well, it's going to be surrogate retail adoption that they don't even understand. So MicroStrategy going into the S&P 500, everybody owns the S&P 500. Right. Everybody now owns Bitcoin. So implicitly. Implicitly, yeah. Right.

So they're going to own it that way. They're going to own your, the boomers, they're going to own fixed income ETFs. Yeah. The driving factor in these fixed income ETFs are going to be the issue of preferred stock and convertible debt from Bitcoin treasury companies. So the boomers are going to own Bitcoin. They're just not going to know they own Bitcoin. So this is fascinating how all this is playing out. So you're saying, we're basically in the

process of reinstating Bitcoin's position as the next reserve asset of the world, and it's shaping up in that sneaky roundabout way for most of the population, which is not going to know, they don't understand, and they will continue to not understand, and that is fine. And that's how we transition into the Bitcoin standard in a way. And then, so for your emerging economies, by 2030, I mean, we can just look at the 45% compound annual growth rate and extend it out. And you can see the price is pretty high by 2030. And what you're going to have in those economies are vendors that have been paid in stable

coins. They're now used to operating on this digital money thing with their digital wallet and accepting with their little qr code because they've been you know accepting stable coins yeah but they're also going to see in that same wallet that the thing that they continue to accept payment for just keeps going down relative to this other thing that is just keeps going up and then for simple psychology yeah that's right so then they're going to get into this habit of sweeping savings excess retained earnings into bitcoin for their small shop or whatever they'll start sweeping it into bitcoin and then i think by 2030 2032 ish time frame now they're

going to start going to customers we only want the bitcoin right because when that flips yeah once that and these timelines you got to realize i don't have yeah sure crystal ball i don't know sure but i'm just kind of looking at things and just trying to estimate like growth rates you know after it's gone to a million or whatever and it keeps going up people start to like put two and two together and they're saying i just want this thing over here i know and not that thing and so you're slowly orange pilling people with the tokenization of dollars yes with the stable yeah yeah which goes to the baton handoff in the thing right so the aqua well then it's like perfectly positioned to yeah they have it or yeah samson's good like this is his vision

all right i love it you i think it was in your last chat with james chick uh on your show that you said that kyc might be fading out right i heard you say that kyc well i think you said not tomorrow but eventually yeah can you take me through your logic there i was fascinated Hold on. KYC will fade out. That's good news. How? Why? Tell me. Well, I think to understand that, you first have to understand just taxes at large. So the whole reason for KYC and everybody knowing the metadata behind every transaction is because they want to make sure that you're paying your fair share at the end of the day. And so you're peering into the back end of any and all large transactions so that the governments can make sure that they're

getting their fair share and that they're being funded. With enough time, taxes are going to be incentivized to change to consumption-based taxes. Instead of capital gains. Instead of like, hey, I know you made $300,000 last year, so you need to pay up. okay instead what it's going to be is you made three hundred thousand dollars last year we don't care but you went out and bought a fancy boat and we're going to tax the hell out of you on that because you're consuming a lot you're going to be taxed a lot and so you have states in the u.s that have a lot of consumption-based state tax and then others that don't and so when you're looking at uh like what is fair if you're going out and you're buying mega yachts okay you should

probably be paying higher taxes than somebody who can't like even afford a car um and what's driving the incentive for the governments to move this way is the governments aren't going to be able to peer into the back end rails of bitcoin and lightning and all these other things that the engineers are working so hard to design so that you can't peer into the back-end rails. So once payments really start picking up in Lightning and Cashew and all these types of things, what the governments are going to have to pivot because their incentives are taking them there, we can't peer into the back-end on all these transactions. So now we need to start doing a consumption tax and then we're okay so then once they go down the consumption tax route

now all of a sudden they don't really care about kyc anymore because they're getting the money they're getting the money yeah and and what's fascinating is i think it's just a more fair way to tax you know based on consumption a lot of bitcoiners will say tax no tax no matter what you're evil but i don't see the world moving that way i think the the world's always going to have some form of tax, some form of government. Where that goes, I don't know. I suspect it's going to be way smaller. Governments are going to be incentivized to be smaller in the future, 10, 20 years from now. And it's mostly maybe entirely because of Bitcoin that they're going to be incentivized to be smaller for the first time ever. That is very hopeful. Thank you.

okay i have just to end up i have like a series of a few short questions i want to do like these are the hardest ones short questions short answers i know i know i know they they are but um let's see if we can get it okay that's an easy one what's one book that has nothing to do with money but deeply shaped your thinking if it's too hard okay um this is this is an interesting one because you love books people are gonna read this one and be like whoa preston's out there uh the cabalion the cabalian yeah okay yeah probably one of my it is cabal like probably one of my uh it's hermetic uh philosophy of like ancient egypt um probably one of my favorite books of all time i would put that in like my top

five of all time cabalian thank you very much for that recommendation i'm gonna check it out yeah awesome it's an interesting one okay okay what are you currently obsessed with an idea a pattern a problem is it the treasury company or is it something uh not really not really actually not really actually uh i would say it's much more ai based than like what is intelligence is probably what i'm more interesting like thinking about a lot um and what's really really neat about ai is i think it's just like opening and unlocking our ability to really understand our own thinking and our own brain and um i love reading books about the brain yes um Um, but little things, little things for me that I'm just like, I find myself just kind

of sitting there and thinking like, wow, that is the wild, the parallel. So like, I've always struggled or like really tried to contemplate, like, why do we sleep? Right. And I've tried to read books about it. I've never been really too convinced that like the way that the books kind of like talk about sleep have really convinced me really well. but um what's what's interesting to me i'm there using chat gpt or grok and i've got a thread going on something super complex or whatever that i'm working through and the thread gets really long

and then the model because it's digesting the context of everything that i've talked about is really struggling speed wise to service the next inquiry right and what i'm what i'm seeing in this is it's almost like a person at 11 o'clock at night yes that needs to sleep and compress everything down like because it's what that what it's not doing is compressing like everything in the in the thread it's just serving you and serving you and serving you so what i'm integrating what i'm doing in ai is it gets really long it gets really laggy and then i i'll go in there and i'll say all right i'll put it in deep research and i'll say i want this entire thread compressed without any information loss.

And I want it delivered in a PDF so that I can seed it into a new thread, okay? Oh, wow. So then the AI will go there. It'll think for 10 minutes. It compresses it all. It turns into like this 20-page PDF. I quickly go through the PDF.

It's pretty much captured perfectly, right? I go into a new thread. I feed it the PDF. Right. And I say, this is a conversation in a previous thread. I want you to ingest this. And then I want to continue asking questions. And the speed is like right back to where I was at the beginning.

And I was like, did I just figure out why we as humans sleep? Are we to compress? Is our brain going and compressing? Because they say your memories aren't. Absolutely. Right. So you read these books and they're like, oh, yeah, you don't really remember things as they occur. You have to absorb it into your consciousness.

like stitched together in a compressed way to these other experiences other things that you've had and so i'm looking at i'm just saying well we have to sleep because we have to compress everything from that day absolutely and and add on to that it's not just the brain it's also all the other organs but especially the liver that has to then digest everything you've eaten throughout the day you have a lot of poisonous elements in your body that the liver needs to clean out the whole way down your spine that are dealing with your different organs that are you know that are then having to compress everything that they learn through the day of you ate something weird for the first time like i don't know that that's my focus this is the stuff that i like i get super down

the path and i'm with you because the human body is the most fascinating machine yeah which we know so little about and we walk around in the world feeling like we have cracked it all and we are the most advanced uh species oh we have no fucking clue yeah nothing yeah i love learning more oh thank you so much for sharing that that's perfect okay you're pretty good at it it's not short but that's perfect that's a really long answer okay okay what's a belief you hold that few people in bitcoin would agree with probably some of the the stable coin stuff we talked about earlier okay yeah they would just go stable point equals bad yeah okay yeah i think your your point of view is is realistic and even a bit futuristic you you are seeing how you're harnessing that for

the mission of the greater mission of bitcoin that's that's i think it's going that way but yeah yeah i think you're right but we'll see what's um okay do you believe that there are truly evil forces shaping global policy or is it mostly just broken incentives and institutional momentum yeah for me i'm gonna get i'm gonna get hung up on this definition of evil i think if you if you look at the definition of good and evil right i think if you really break that down and you're saying what is that what is that i think that uh evil well evil is is energy consuming and good is energy giving or mutually beneficial to to all participants And so when we look at evil forces, I think what has happened is souls that have lost their way because they've played a game that maybe started off as being a win-win or energy sharing and a net growth that then got kind of distracted or kind of pulled off in a direction where they just became energy consuming and really only caring about themselves.

and not anything else in their environment or any people in their environment. So are there people like that in the world? After I defined it, are there people like that in the world? Absolutely, 100%. But there's also people over here that are doing everything they can

to always operate from the lens of a win-win, that they're giving energy, they're expecting some back in return so that collectively them and their environment can flourish and when we look at nature when you look at you know uh trees and how they're interacting with yeah everything right it's it's an energy exchange that are they consuming yes are they giving yes to their local environment um humans have a way to kind of get outside of that and i think it's just kind of because of um we're still learning our we're still adapting with this sheer horsepower of intelligence that

we have to slowly get to to the point where maybe we're much more harmonious with nature itself so yeah the answer to your question another love it these are not quick answers i'm sorry i'm sorry perfect perfect i love it okay um you've spoken to so many experts have any guest or conversation fundamentally changed how you view the world uh i think every one of these interactions even down to like an interview like this changes you in some form or fashion have there been some that have changed me more than others yes my problem is i've done a lot of interviews it's really hard for me to like we're in the thousands right i don't know that i'm at a thousand i'm probably 700 interviews or so

of that i've given yes that i've been the moderator or host for now how many have i given i or been on the receivings i don't know but probably a thousand um yeah there's a lot out there that i could hit on unfortunately like what's popping in my head are the people that were maybe a little bit more famous that i've interviewed that were like personally uh interesting or important to me in the moment but i can't really say that maybe i learned right but you were really eager to talk to them i was eager to talk to some people yeah like the first time i interviewed bill miller i was like ecstatic yeah absolutely ecstatic like me with my my person teacher okay and finally what do you think your role is in this transition

we're all going through why are you doing what you do so i think my role over the last 10 years This has just been education and making sure that the knowledge, the torch of Bitcoin is being spread to as many people as possible. I have a sneaking suspicion that it might be shifting in the future to more of an execution and operational type role to put all of what I've learned through the years and the network that I've built into application. I look at, I think the universe looks at knowledge and wants to make sure that it's actually applied and not just spoken about. You know, it takes a lot of energy for the universe to kind of put, to compress all of that data and information into a source. And I think that it wants to use that in many different ways. Education is definitely one of them to spread the information in a concise way. But I think it ultimately wants it in whatever source for application.

And so I don't know what that is, but I just have a feeling, I guess, that maybe in the coming decade that it'll be maybe more application-based. Can't wait to see. I mean, it is already a little bit with ego death. That's right. I mean, not a little bit, but a lot. Yeah. Are you doing hands-on work with some of the startups? Oh, yeah.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Really supporting their growth. Yes. Okay. Yeah. Can you say which ones?

I would say most of my time these days is spent in the venture capital realm, working with founders, working with a lot of diligence. You know, if you don't like to kind of conduct diligence on whether something is valuable or not, you wouldn't like it. But a lot of time spent there. and i guess that's probably why i'm saying what i'm saying is because i see a lot of my time and energy being spent more towards the application of allocating capital into the space and you enjoy that and i really enjoy that yeah yeah a lot well i honestly don't like the uh i don't like being recognized i don't like being really no i would much rather kind of i would much rather a homer simpson me myself yeah yeah into the hedge disappear than anything else to be honest with

you yeah so yeah i guess that transition will will be good for you then yeah just for uh for a period of time you know i feel very privileged and very lucky to wake up to this thing to this world on time while you're still doing that because you've been one of my greatest teachers So I really want to take the time and thank you from the bottom of my heart. Like I told you, I've got weekly Preston hours, so keep rolling it as long as you can. Thank you. And I appreciate it. This was a lovely conversation.

And I love that we have touched more than just the, you know, usual Bitcoin stuff and really have brought it together with how the universe works. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for being with us. please take a minute to give this episode a like, a comment, and subscribe or follow. And please share it with your friends so they can also get value and choose to take some positive action in their lives.

Till next time.