Straight up highway robbery, the corruption, the robbery that occurs for most people around the
world and what they deal with just because the money is so broke in most parts of the world
is changing and no government can stop that. I would say Trump's putting them in there for a
reason and the reason is probably to win midterms. Bitcoin has such a massive upside, call it a 30 to
40% annualized return, dollar cost average in the Bitcoin over time. That volatility is actually
advantageous to you. He's effectively a bank that is over collateralized to a point that
offsets the volatility risk of Bitcoin. You can store the private key in your head, in your brain,
and you can go anywhere you want in the world and you can still access that. Quantitative
tightening, everybody knows is the opposite of quantitative easing, is now over. If we end
2026 up significantly, I'm not surprised.
The Bitcoin Podcast
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Bitcoin doesn't care, but I sure do appreciate it. Without further ado, let's get into this Bitcoin
talk. Preston Pish, welcome back. It's, it's, I think, I'm trying to think the last time you were
on this show. It might've been with American hodl hodl. I think it was, it's been a little while.
It's been a little while. We've seen each other in person since then. Uh, but you know, now we're
separated by, by long distances and these, these darn screens, but here we are. It's good to see
you, my friend. Good to see you too. Yeah. It's been too long, man. You know, in, in, in the interim,
you have, uh, you have somewhat transitioned your podcast. You've had a Peter McCormick moment,
let's say not quite so extreme uh you still obviously talk about bitcoin uh on your show
bitcoin fundamentals on the investors podcast network but you also have uh uh technology uh
a tech infinity uh right that's the the new kind of new angle i i like it so far just you know as
a long time as a long time listener of bitcoin fundamentals like as it it's one of the shows
that's in my core rotation of bitcoin podcast to get my 40 hours per week i think this is a nice
angle that makes sense because like it all touches back to bitcoin but sometimes you need a more like
dedicated focus on some of these other emerging things that are happening. So I'm glad you're
covering it because you do an excellent job. Thank you, sir. Yeah, no, it was a little bit
selfish in that I just wanted to cover other things because I'm just naturally curious and
I find some of it fascinating. That's stuff that's happening in tech is just mind blowing.
And to your point, it is, it's, it's also a Bitcoin story. And as we get more tech abundance
and these humanoid robots.
We could talk about humanoid robots, driverless cars,
like all this kind of stuff that Elon is having a huge impact
on a lot where this is all going.
But there's many others.
It's a huge race.
And it is.
It's a story about how technology is taking over
and governments are going to have to offset all of that loss in employment
that's naturally going to occur over the coming decade.
And as they do that, it becomes a Bitcoin story.
And so all of this is kind of converging.
And, you know, it works out for me because I just, like I said, I'm super curious and I love covering interesting things.
And, you know, so I'm doing both.
I'm still covering Bitcoin quite a bit on the show.
So this is the hack of podcasting.
Podcasting is really just an excuse to be able to talk to fascinating people and, you know, and call it working.
Right. It's kind of it's the best hack ever.
Don't let anyone in on the secret, but this is why everyone should start a Bitcoin podcast or a podcast of some kind.
You know, it's a it's a great way to do it.
Yeah. Yeah. You definitely get to meet some fascinating people and just have fascinating conversations for sure.
And speaking of fascinating conversations, I have a feeling we may be about to have one.
I always end up having a fascinating conversation with you, Preston.
And it felt like a great time to have you on because we were talking just before we went.
We went live here and shout out to everybody who was already streaming this live on Noster and sending zaps already.
What a beautiful thing to be able to receive value just effortlessly with no middleman in between.
That's wonderful.
But we were talking about the vibes and the vibes are weird, Preston.
Yeah, vibes are weird.
You've seen more cycles than I have.
You've been around around longer than I have.
You're also much more tapped into, I would say, the macro side of this.
You're also tapped in to just, let's say, the industry side of this deeper than most people are just through the work you do at EgoDeath.
And I'm just curious what your current vibes are.
What is your read of all this right now?
How are you feeling?
Is it similar to what the sentiment is out there?
Because the broad sentiment I see, even from hardcore Bitcoin bulls, has shifted a bit bearish.
And I'm just curious where you're sitting.
Are you kind of hunkering down for the long Bitcoin winter?
Are you thinking that there's a huge dislocation between reality and price and sentiment?
Where are you at?
I'm confused.
I mean, I'll just be honest with people.
Having been through quite a few cycles, what you've seen historically is when Bitcoin's
down hard. It's liquidity. It's the plumbing. It's the overall monetary units in the system,
which is completely based on promises for measuring in fiat. And in the past cycles,
it was very correlated to risk on versus risk off and just liquidity flows. And what has me
most confused right now is I'm looking at the S&P 500 index and it's 1.5% off of the high.
right and normally if bitcoin's down i mean bitcoin's down about 30 percent from the high
typically if bitcoin was down that much you know the indices would be down 15 percent or something
they would be have sold off way more than nothing that they've sold off because we're
we're at all-time highs pretty much everywhere you look um in addition to that i would just say that
the fixed income market um at least in the u.s and japan's a whole nother story but in the u.s
fixed income is pretty flat for the most part over the same period of time.
And so you're not really seeing the liquidity flows. They're kind of demonstrating that,
you know, monetary units are being sucked out of the system that would warrant Bitcoin being down
30%. So there's something weird happening. I can't really define it more than that,
other than it's got me confused. But this is what I would tell the listener who's hearing that,
and be like, okay, well, what the hell do I do with that? What you do with that and what I've
seen historically with Bitcoin is anytime it offers you a decent price or a sell-off volatility,
just keep dollar cost averaging it. Don't overthink it. And it does exactly what you
least expect is what I've learned through the years. And that volatility is your friend. It
really is your friend. When it's bouncing around, if you're not trying to overthink it and over time
and you're just kind of saying, okay, well, this is my craft. This is what I'm doing. This is what
I'm doing to add value in the world. And I'm going to take whatever free cash flows I get out of that.
And I just dollar cost average in the Bitcoin over time, that volatility is actually advantageous to
you. And it helps you even perform better than if you just had a smooth line of Bitcoin going,
you know, up into the right, that volatility is actually advantageous to you. So I just tell
people to not overthink it. And if you're confused, sometimes, you know, that makes it easier for you
because you can just kind of let your dollar cost average just do the work for you.
Yeah, I'm certainly not stopping dollar cost averaging anytime soon or probably ever. Like
that's the beauty of dips, right? Your dollars go just a little bit farther. They get you just a few
more sats. But I think that one of the reasons that people are share your confusion is just because
it's just a weird, it just feels like a weird year. Like we're, we're lower now, I think than
even when like the beginning of the year, when, when Trump took office, basically, if you know,
if you invested in just about anything, if you took your infinitely printable us dollars and
put them in just about anything else, especially if you put them in gold, the gold bugs are,
you know, dancing on Bitcoin's early grave. If you, you know, S and P even is, I think is
obviously outperformed as you said. And I think people are just kind of feeling like, well, what
the heck you know i i was i was promised valhalla and here i am just you know bleeding out on the
battlefield i don't even have my my axe in my hand like how am i going to get into valhalla without
this i don't know what the axe represents in this in this you know metaphor but i'll figure that out
later but i mean where i want to go with this is a lot of people look at these four-year cycle
charts and say well if if we go by the prior cycles we should be here right now and we're so
much lower than that. What's going on? Where, where, what's your opinion on four year cycles
generally? Are, is this something that's been overstated in terms of its importance? Does this
hold some bearing? What are the other factors at play that people maybe aren't seeing that are kind
of leading to some of this overall confusion and just feeling of like, what the heck is going on?
Before I, before I answer that, I just want to say one more thing on my previous comment on the
dollar cost averaging piece. Because a person that hears that and be like, okay, so we just
blindly just keep buying something and don't think about it. And that's not what I'm saying either.
If I thought that the fundamentals of like what Bitcoin is providing from a value prop had changed
or that there was something technologically flawed in the code or the incentives or any of that,
I wouldn't be saying dollar cost average it. But I haven't seen anything there that warrants
concern or additional risk from anything that I've seen historically. In fact, I would argue that
as just like a strange data point, you have Harvard that tripled their Bitcoin holdings,
and it's the largest public position that they have, Harvard University. And I'm not one to just
buy something because somebody else buys it either, but these are knowledge points of elite
institutions that obviously are seeing something of value here or else they wouldn't be buying it.
You have little knowledge points like this kind of popping up all over the place of incumbents and
legacy elite institutions and people that are buying despite what many in the market would say
is the price is down. I'm looking at those types of things in conjunction with the fact that nothing
has fundamentally changed or been increased risk. And so I'm saying, okay, I'm just going to continue
to dollar cost averages thing that I think is going to change the monetary order around the
world. So I want to preface the recommendation with dollar cost averaging with these other
points that I think are also important for a person to continue to go back to and to continue
to always be asking themselves, all right, has anything changed? Is my thinking flawed? Is there
something that I should be considering that I'm not considering. Okay. If not, well, then I'm just
going to keep doing this thing, which is dollar cost average. Okay. So your question on the four
year cycle, what I would say is very early on when you had very few people engaged in this Bitcoin
protocol, I think that the metronome of what was happening from a four year cycle standpoint
with the halving happening every four years and the two-week difficulty adjustment and just the
way that the algorithm that was programmatically adjusting itself was much more driven by the
program and the algorithm and the protocol itself than what was happening with business cycles and
the broader. I think that was what was driving the train. And then I think as it matures and
And as it gets bigger, and there's some writing,
the book of Satoshi is a great book
where it just kind of goes and it outlines all of,
and it curates all of Satoshi's writing.
Satoshi even talks about this in the early days.
He's saying, so much of this is gonna be cost,
based around the cost or the energy that it takes to mine this as to like what the market value is going to be It protocol driven And then he says that as it becomes more widely adopted it going to have
less to do with that. And it's going to have way more to do with other external factors and macro
factors of the environment that it's operating inside of. And so what I would say is this might
be kind of a, you know, this, this, maybe two years back, three years back might've been kind
of a real turning point where the environmental factor in which the protocol is operating is
starting to be more of a determining factor. And so what you saw early on in these four-year cycles,
and I'm not even, I'm not even saying that it is the four-year cycle. I just think it was more
protocol driven. And I would say now it's less so. And so if, if, you know, we end 2026
up significantly, like I'm not surprised. And that would be in complete contrast to this four
year cycle theory that everybody would say, Oh, well now for the next year, it's going to go down
because every four years, that's what it, I think we're kind of moving beyond that. And I think that
just the overall liquidity in the, you know, the fiat system and how it's getting, how it enters
into the system is also a huge factor. So now, nowadays, so I guess that'd be my take. And I
know that's kind of a squishy, like easy way out answer. It's a little squishy, Preston, but I'll
let it slide. Well, no, okay. I want to talk about liquidity because I think it's like,
as Bitcoiners were like, you know, yeah, you know, and the Fed, we don't need them. They don't matter,
But they do right now, sadly.
You know, a cabal of unelected banker bureaucrats sadly controls the price of money.
For now, there's nothing we can do except opt out and buy Bitcoin or earn Bitcoin or mine Bitcoin.
But the point being that what they do actively affects us at this point in time.
This is one of the interesting things to me is this dynamic that we have.
I'm in Bitcoin for the long haul, right?
Like I'm thinking in five, 10, 20, 100 year increments for this.
Like I'm thinking about what happens long after I'm gone because I know what I hold.
But that being said, I also care about what happens in the short term because I'm trying
to figure out how to deploy the scant fiat that I that I do still have that is not already
deployed to Bitcoin.
And I'm looking at this next kind of this next year and just thinking about, well, we've
got midterms, you know, and politicians, you know, Trump loves to pump bags, especially
when they're his own.
He's got heavy Bitcoin bags.
Trump wants to pump everyone's bags.
We know this.
He wants to juice the system full of liquidity.
He's got a Fed right now that has been,
we know that Trump and Powell are not exactly the best of buddies.
Powell is going away in April or May.
If he doesn't, he'll step back sooner.
I think he'll probably want to finish out his term at least,
just to have ended it on that note, say I made it to the finish line.
But what are you watching for the Fed?
Now, I know that there's talk that basically as of December now, they're no longer going to be doing their balance sheet runoff, right?
That's not to say what exactly they're going to be.
Are they going to be adding their balance sheet?
I don't know, but they're going to stop running it off, right?
What are you looking at?
What are you tracking?
Are there certain things that you're saying, okay, if X, Y, Z happens, then this kind of accelerates my bullish thesis, or then I think things get pretty wild?
What are you looking at from that perspective in terms of this cabal of central bankers and what they decide to do with our money?
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I mean, quantitative tightening, which everybody knows is the opposite of quantitative easing, is now over on the 1st of December.
They've stopped quantitative tightening.
And so you're at a transition period where instead of quantitative easing is buying bonds and putting liquidity into the market and then them holding those bonds to basically juice the markets, quantitative tidying is the opposite of that.
So you're removing through quantitative tidying, you're removing the liquidity out of the system.
So they've stopped that.
And so you're at a transition point where they're going to start easing.
And then you see that they're going to be potentially cutting 25 bips in December, which is a loosening activity.
And so you're just kind of going through the wave.
You're kind of at the bottom of this tightening wave, and it might be a couple quarters.
It could be who knows.
I think for them, they're just looking at how much contagion occurs in the market.
And if there's no contagion in the market, they're just going to go about all of this loosening probably on a much slower timeline.
So, you know, at the end of the day, they've got to keep juicing the markets.
They've got to keep putting monetary units into the system, whether they're doing it at a COVID pace or they're doing it at a much slower, everything's kind of functioning pace.
That's yet to be determined.
You know, I know everybody wants somebody that can come in here and look into a crystal ball and tell them what's going to happen.
But, you know, I can't do that.
And anybody who tells you that they can is just making it up.
But the way I would just simplify it is there's times when it's very aggressive and there's times when it's not.
I would just say right now you're at one of these periods where it just feels like you're at a transition.
It doesn't seem to be progressing very quickly.
Um, and I think that, uh, the new, uh, Kevin Hassett seems to be the guy that's being named,
that's going to come in and replace Powell. I think that's in like April or May that that's
going to occur. Is he going to, you know, move the markets faster than Powell? Probably. Uh,
I would say Trump's putting them in there for a reason. And the reason is probably to win midterms.
Uh, and because Powell's just done and he wants somebody else in there that's,
that's more politically aligned with the party. So until then, you know, we'll just continue to
stand by and dollar cost average, I guess. Do you think that there's a, an appetite from Trump to,
let's say, root, reduce some of the feds, uh, supposed separation from, you know, from the
treasury, from the federal government, you know, they're a, they're a public private corporation.
We know that's a tenuous link there. I've seen some speculation that basically, you know,
Trump wants to kind of break that, you know, whatever distinction there,
there actually is there, break that down a little bit to try and basically,
you know, be able to apply more pressure, let's say by, you know,
by putting in somebody that's going to be a, you know, a Trump,
Trump loyalist, let's say. And, and, you know, when he says print,
they say, you know, how high basically.
Yeah. I think he, he,
he wants to do that now because they're the collectively on the board,
it's not politically aligned with what he wants. Right.
so that's why he wants the change but if they were politically aligned he he wouldn't want the
change it's just it's a function of control he wants control of it and he doesn't have it and
if he can get it let's say has it goes in there and it kind of changes the composition of the
board and then they're just kind of doing what he's wanting well then he's not going to want
removed so it's just it's it's a political arm uh they say that they're not um and i guess when
you have a split between parties of like the, the, let's just assume that the, that the fed board
is politically aligned with the Democrats. Okay. That might be a controversial thing for people
listening to the show. I don't care. Let's just say that that's what it is. And you have a
Republican in there when it's at a, when it's at odds or it's a clash, it doesn't matter which
parties, which, you know, we could flip flop that and they're not going to be happy because
they don't have control. It's a political thing. So, um, I don't know what that, you know,
Well, and the Fed is a very convenient scapegoat as well from a political standpoint.
Like if you can say, well, look, everything would be okay if only the Fed would juice the economy.
I mean, usually it's if only they would print more.
That's the funny thing is like the Fed's almost the adult in the room in these cases, which I don't know what that says.
But, you know, that's the reality.
so okay uh leaving aside like our our crystal ball i think over the long term one thing is clear which
is we know that they must print right we know that this like nothing stops this train lynn alden has
created the economic meme of the decade maybe that maybe the century maybe the millennia i don't know
time will tell but we know that fiscal dominance is real there's no we saw what happened with doge
right um yeah they made some small cuts but it wasn't anything it wasn't on the order of magnitude
that that Elon and I think that's really kind of disillusioned Elon a little bit like thought
maybe oh look if we just go in there and we're just we just apply efficient you know business
practices to this and we cut out the waste then they'll get rid of it and kind of came out like
you know chain smoking cigarettes being like my god it's so much worse than I thought but I mean
the thing I'll say about Elon on that particular topic is Elon's a fast learner right he's a fast
learn. He went in there delusional in thinking that he could actually create change and efficiency
in something that is incentivized to not be efficient at all. It's incentivized to burn and
spend the money and get it out into the economy as the first receiver of all the freshly printed
and clacked on keys monetary units. And so he learned within, what was it, three months,
he figured it out and he and he was like i'm out of here this is a waste of my time because he
figured it out um you know let me go back to building rockets and sending people you know
things yeah yeah no it's yeah my my and my point there was just essentially i think there's this
uh a kind of a tacit realization on both sides of the aisle like no government republican or
Democrat controlled is going to slow down spending.
I mean, maybe they would slow down spending, but they're not going to meaningfully reduce
spending, probably not going to implement any austerity measures because those are going
to be wildly unpopular, especially when you'd have, you know, everybody now is at the point
where the money printer meme is so strong.
People would say, well, why are you increasing our taxes when you can just print the money?
You know, the MMT years have invaded everybody's psyche and they at least have a point in that
regard.
The end result is not what they think it will be.
But do you think we just continue to see this massive expansion of the federal public debt?
Do you think there is actually, like, if nothing stops this train, like, how far can this can be kicked down the road?
Or can it be kicked down the road essentially infinitely?
Because we're still the dollar, we're still the reserve currency, but we're now in a multipolar world where people don't trust treasuries as much.
Like we've seen that since, you know, the sanctions on Russia, I think was kind of like a breaking point where a lot of people went, oh, huh.
I guess maybe that's not so, you know, like that to me was a huge, huge shift.
And then, you know, everybody was obviously so preoccupied with the war itself that like that part, the monetary part kind of got just like pushed to the side, except for some people who were kind of ringing the bell saying, hey, this is a changing, you know, a changing moment here.
Where are you at with this?
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Now, back to the show.
I would just say that any politician that is trying to implement austerity doesn't understand the global game that's being played.
And this is the whole reason why Elon, once he figured it out, he's just like, well, I'm out of here.
This is impossible to change the global incentives, right?
So if you go in there and you say, oh, I'm going to play by the rules because that's what
austerity is.
I'm going to play by the rules.
We're not going to debase the money.
We're going to get this thing under control.
You have to convince all the other players in the game, all the other countries, to do
the exact same thing and to all of a sudden want to play by the rules.
Because as soon as you start playing by the rules and then China's over there debasing all their money and having all this buying power that they're then going and buying the scarce desirable equity off the U.S. board, you can see the incentives are forcing everybody to debase.
The incentives are forcing everybody to want to print real fast, put that money into the hands of their elite, and then go buy the profitable cash flow generating things on everybody else's board or game.
I'm using the monopoly example of multiple monopoly boards.
So that's the game that's being played.
And like, you're just not going to get away from that incentive structure unless something comes in and forces everybody to play a game of these are the monetary units you collect that nobody can control and nobody can debase.
Right. I think that right now, if I was going to maybe pontificate a little bit on why it's so confusing, I think you have a lot of capital that's chasing the AI stuff, too.
And when you look at the sheer size of like what that is, we're talking trillions upon trillions.
It's a new shiny object.
And it's the thing that's just attracting a lot of attention.
And could that possibly be why the sentiment in Bitcoin was lost in the second half of the year or maybe even like for a lot of 2025 for the most part?
And I think that that might be the case.
It's definitely a contributing factor.
Whether it's the dominant factor, I don't know. But I think that when you look at the size of that capital that is being funneled into just all the AI stuff, I think that it's a giant liquidity suck on other places where it could go.
Let me ask you.
I mean, I think that AI broadly is obviously like not going away.
I don't think that this is somehow like a fraudulent technology, anything like that.
But from a short-term perspective, the money that's being pumped into some of these things is just like outrageous.
Outrageous.
I mean, do you think there's the possibility of kind of a short-term bubble in a lot of these AI investments?
Like, is that something you're tracking or is this, is it just going to catch up?
And like, this is what's required right now.
And it actually maybe makes some sense for there to be so much money pumped in because
you got to do all this build out.
But like, also we don't necessarily have the energy infrastructure to even support that
build out here on shore.
So like, where are you at with this?
Are you thinking that there's the possibility that some of this stuff comes crashing on
the short term?
Obviously it's not going away long-term, not saying that, but like in terms of just current
kind of valuations, fundraising that's happening, investment, you know, money that's flowing
in here. How are you looking at this? Yeah. I mean, when you look at this, the players that
are involved, you know, you could say open AI is like an anomaly, but really they're,
they're backed by Microsoft. You got Google, who it's an extremely profitable company. You got
Facebook. They're extremely probably got Tesla, not Tesla, sorry. You got Elon with XAI and,
And just the players that are in this game have very, very deep pockets.
And more importantly, they have the ability to tap financial markets through financial
alchemy and can fund the crazy amount of capex that's required in this space.
And what I mean by tap financial markets through financial alchemy, what I mean by that is,
you know, look at micro strategy and their ability to kind of issue common stock.
It's almost like having your own printing press when you're a public company to raise capital.
These companies that the ones that I named, they can do the exact same thing and they can allocate
that capital into whatever they want. And so like their pockets are way deeper than
somebody who's just used to personal accounting and just, you know, living off of a paycheck and
And that's pretty much what they have at their disposal.
They might be able to go to the bank and take out a small loan to do whatever.
Like the rules that these big companies in these that we named are playing by and how they raise capital is way different than what the individual might understand or think about.
So I think that's part of it.
I mean, you saw this with the Oracle NVIDIA announcement where just the announcement alone pumped the market cap of the companies, which then they were able to transmute into cash to go buy more infrastructure just off of the announcement.
So you have games like that being played to say that it's a bubble or what I mean, it feels like a bubble, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it is because I think we're in some really weird times, to be honest with you, Walker.
I don't know.
But yeah, I'm going to keep asking you to have a crystal ball here, but feel free to keep shutting it down.
Well, you mentioned MicroStrategy, and I think that's a good opportunity to transition to that a little bit because Saylor and MicroStrategy have been taking a lot of heat recently.
They just had the announcement as of yesterday, I guess, that they bought Bitcoin, I think 100 and some, up to get that perfectly round 650,000 Bitcoin number.
astonishingly large number of Bitcoin, like hard to wrap one's mind around,
but they're at that nice round number now. And they've also started, I guess, stacking some fiat.
They started putting a good amount of fiat reserves. It was like a billion four or something
like that on their balance sheet. What's your read of this? Because there was a lot of mixed
sentiment that I saw. A lot of people's kind of saying like, what the heck's going on here?
I thought you told us not to hold dollars and sell our kidneys for Bitcoin. How are you looking
at this? How are you reading it? What's your perspective? Yeah, I think there's, as usual,
there's a ton of confusion around micro strategy and the fact that he's holding that much cash to
service the dividends and the coupons that he owes. My understanding is that gets him almost
two years worth of coupon and dividend payments. So 1.4 billion relative to the 56 billion that
is Bitcoin's worth today. He has 650,000 Bitcoin on his balance sheet, which is worth about $56
billion. So when you look at these numbers and you look at what he's got to pay out the door 1.4,
roughly two years, and he's sitting on a pile of 56 billion, he's got a lot of capital and he's got
a lot of time to be right about this arbitrage that he's trying to pull off. And the arbitrage
He thinks that the Bitcoin return rate on an annualized basis is way higher than the coupons and the dividends that he's paying.
And if he's right, he's going to be able to continue to do this.
And I think that that's a it's a controversial thing because I think people just can't wrap their head around the numbers.
I think the numbers when people hear them are just so big.
I guess I'm talking more about retail.
um and then uh the other thing that i would say is it seems to be a little bit of a concerted attack
on the company recently i i buy into this i think jp morgan changing their their uh borrowing uh
ltv ratios i guess they went from like 50 to 95 percent so if people were borrowing against their
shares they they increased that like basically doubled that uh which you know changes you know
That is a major contributing factor.
The fact that you have all these news articles coming out, there was one in the FT I just
saw today, basically making it look like that they can't service their obligations through
dividends and coupons.
It's just straight up laughable, totally laughable.
In general, I think that what he's doing is actually going to be successful in the long
term.
I think he's going about it in a responsible way as far as the leverage ratios that he's using.
I don't think that he's putting himself in any type of financial stress whatsoever.
And the other thing that I would say on MicroStrategy is it's levered Bitcoin.
So if Bitcoin goes sideways, it's probably going to underperform it quite a bit.
And if it goes down, it's definitely going to underperform it.
And when it goes up, it should outperform it.
And so whatever your, you know, take is on Bitcoin, you know, having been in it for a few years, I would tell you, if you can't handle intense volatility, you like, it's probably going to be a place where you have sleepless nights.
So when you look at MicroStrategy and it's levered Bitcoin, whatever that understanding is that you have a vault of the of the volatility, it's just that and more.
so um i can see why you know maybe he he deals with a lot of haters online and a lot of it is
because you know buyer beware a lot of people that are that are buying it just really don't
even understand what they own in the first place and they just don't understand that uh whatever
bitcoin's doing he's probably going to do that with extra whether it's good or bad it also it
It feels like right now people either purposefully or accidentally forget what Saylor was doing in the depths of the 2022 bear market.
When everybody was screaming from the mountaintops that Saylor is going to get liquidated.
Yeah.
You know, Bitcoin is going to 10K, maybe 5K, maybe negative zero if you're Peter Zahan or whatever he said Bitcoin was going to, you know, at the time.
But everybody is saying, you know, the Saylor is getting liquidated.
Saylor is going to get liquidated.
It's over.
He's going to be a forced seller of all of his Bitcoin.
And what does he do?
I mean, he backs up the truck, so to speak, and does everything he can to load up on as much cheap corn as he can possibly get.
And that served him extremely well.
And I think sometimes he plays a lot of fiat games in terms of the financialized products that he's creating in terms of the way he's playing with the system.
But I think people forget that the guy is as hardcore of a hodler as you can possibly be.
So like, you know what I mean?
It just feels like that's getting that gets lost.
Yeah, no, I think it is lost.
The other thing that I think it's hard for him to do is when the price is down really
hard because he, you know, let's say at 100, he was there levering the company.
Let's just say five to one with the Bitcoin that he has versus what he's issuing.
And if the Bitcoin price goes down, it's difficult for him to basically put on that
same type of trade when the price is down, which is hard to buy the dips because your leverage
ratio went higher. If you're trying to keep it at a five to one ratio, if Bitcoin goes down,
like now you might be at a six or a seven or an eight to one ratio. And what you don't want to do
is double down. And at that time, if you've already told yourself, this is a safe and healthy
ratio to have, call it five to one. So that's where the strategy is a little bit tricky is
when the price gets punished, it is a little harder for him, especially if he did lever himself
five to one and call it normal market conditions. It's a little tricky to buy the dip. Based on what
he's doing, it's a little easier to buy the tops because you become less levered as the price runs.
And so how you figure that out from a discipline standpoint, I would argue maybe he's figuring
that out himself as they're building the ship and it's flying at the same time.
I don't know.
Maybe they have a strategy for how they go about that in a responsible way or not.
I don't know.
That's obviously not been disclosed to me.
But I think that one of the challenges that he has with the strategy is just the market timing and how you get levered But is is he in any type of financial stress Like God no
not that I can see, you know, based on looking at the 10 K and the 10 Q's.
Yeah. It's, it's really interesting. I think again, he's,
and what does he said just when you talked about buying the top, like he,
I think he himself has said, like, I'll be buying the top forever. You know,
Everybody always gives him grief because he shows the buy.
And whatever his buy price was is almost, not always, but almost always higher than whatever the price is on the day they announced.
And everybody, you know, well, why didn't you just buy it lower?
And it's like, I don't know, because he didn't buy it all just this second.
But regardless, I think we're Bitcoin either.
He's buying a lot of Bitcoin, which also is a factor.
Yeah.
Well, it's a lot of corn.
And I think one of the things that people are maybe a little freaked out about now is they start looking at this and they say,
well now you know uh you know if if and when and i think maybe mnav did go below uh go below one
and this has been kind of this barometer for uh for let's say that the the health or how much the
you know these companies not just microstrategy but they're the ones that obviously they're the
they're the 800 pound gorilla in the room full of you know like little mice running around
that's been that metric that people look at to say okay how's this doing how are people valuing
this is this something you put a lot of stock in and do you think that microstrategy i mean they've
said that they have the ability to sell Bitcoin if they need to. Do you think that's actually
something they do? Or do you think that's just something that they say to keep, let's say,
so that they're still saying the right things. They're not being looked at and saying, well,
you would need to sell Bitcoin in this case. Otherwise, it's a breach of fiduciary duty,
da-da-da-da-da. Yeah. I think that if they end up selling Bitcoin, it's because the price is down
super hard and they're in somewhat of a dire scenario. Like if Bitcoin was down 80%,
like maybe they would, from the high, they, they might be in a situation where they'd have to start
servicing it with, with, you know, the sale of Bitcoin. But I think it would have to be some,
some very deep, deep selling in the Bitcoin price and the, in the Bitcoin price action for them to
be in that scenario. And I mean, at the end of the day, they have to file, they have to file
find public financial disclosures and they have to list out all the things that could happen.
And that's one of the things that could happen. I don't see that happening, but yeah.
Yeah. So, I mean, one of the other areas where I think, again, I'm just, I'm, I'm, you know,
got my, my finger on the, the, the, the pulse a little bit and trying to figure out the vibe.
And one of the other areas that I think there's very bad vibes is around, around tether. And it
seems that like like whenever bitcoin is taking a uh you know a big old dump or a dip or whatever
we want to call it or in a protracted bear market as some would have you believe right now
everybody comes out of the woodwork to dance on bitcoin's grave everybody comes out to say that
tether to remind you that tether is in fact a ponzi and they're about to blow up and that the
only reason you know the ones i love are the people that are like the only reasons bitcoin's
price goes up is because tether is printing uh you know tether you know usdt out of thin air and
buying Bitcoin with it. And it's like, it's funny because a lot of people have managed to buy
Bitcoin without ever touching Tether. But okay, whatever you say, that everybody comes out of the
woodwork. And now you're seeing all like these rating agencies basically say that the amount of
Bitcoin and gold that Tether is holding is, you know, kind of dangerous. Tether also, I mean,
I think they just recently in their last, I think in Q3, they attested that they'd purchased basically
more gold than Sam Callahan put this out basically than like any central bank, which is kind of
mind-blowing. I mean, I think they already hold more Bitcoin on their balance sheet than most,
you know, most countries in the world. They hold more US treasuries than, well, now most countries
in the world. Is this TetherFUD anything? Or is it not FUD? Is this actually very real? Is Tether,
which looks to me like one of the most profitable companies in the history of humanity,
are they actually going to be going down, going under?
Or is this just, to me, this just feels like a local bottom signal.
When everybody's saying Michael Saylor's going to get liquidated,
when everybody's calling Tyler a Ponzi,
when everybody's saying Bitcoin's going to 58K,
maybe I've said it myself in a joking way.
I don't know.
Would I like to buy sats at 58K?
Sure.
How are you viewing this?
Is there any meat on these bones?
So let's start here by just explaining kind of where they sit
in the global world of finance.
So JP Morgan, which everybody's familiar with JP Morgan,
is one of the biggest banks on the planet.
Their market cap, if you value the whole business,
is $841 billion, okay?
$841 billion.
This summer, Tether had a private equity offering
and it valued the company at $500 billion, okay?
So I'm just trying, the reason I'm throwing out there
is just people, there's a lot of people that have never even heard of Tether. I know when you were
home for Thanksgiving, if you sat down with all your family and friends and said, Hey, uh, who's
ever heard of this company Tether? You might have, you know, 20% of the people raise their hands.
And then if you told the people, you know, it's valued kind of close to where JP Morgan is,
you know, again, JP Morgan, 841 billion Tether was recently valued at $500 billion. Okay.
people would be like, what? Like, what do you, who, who is this tether? What do they do? Okay.
So I want to start there and I want to frame it that we're not talking about like some backwoods,
like no, no name business. We're talking about one of the biggest financial firms on the planet
right now with tether. So what else I've learned, uh, cause the first time I experienced tether
FUD was in 2017. I think it was 2017. There was tethered truthers that came out and were like,
they're not backed. They're just making up these units and it's not actually being backed by
treasuries. And then we went through a bear market, which I think it went down the 2018 bear market
was down 70% from the high. And let me tell you, when something that is tightly correlated or
Or it's not that it's correlated, it's tied into the Bitcoin ecosystem.
And as closely as it is with all these other crypto scams that are out there and all these things went down, Bitcoin was down 70 percent.
Everything else was down 99 percent or, you know, to zero.
And Tether didn't blow up.
So then we go through the SBF.
When was this?
2022, 2023, you know, bear market, which Bitcoin's down again a crazy amount.
There's a massive, massive liquidity draw on the Tether tokens that were issued as far as the redemptions, and there's no issue yet again.
And so having gone through two of these deep bear markets where the liquidity draws and the redemptions on the tokens have been very high, I find the argument to be smirk worthy at this point.
Where I find it, if I was even going to go deeper, is those were periods in time when the coupons on the treasuries that they were holding were very low.
And what you've had since COVID is that the coupon on these treasuries have been very elevated, especially for an organization that has, for all intents and purposes, 100 to 200 people employed.
How many employees work for JP Morgan?
Hundreds of thousands, right?
And again, we're talking about a company that has a similar market cap, and they've got like maybe 200 employees at Tether.
So from an expense structure standpoint, I think that they're operating pretty efficiently and they're sweeping.
And here's the other thing.
What are they doing with the coupons?
Are they paying them out to all the token holders?
Nope.
No, they're actually retaining them as earnings inside of the company.
And then what are they doing with those retained earnings?
Are they just keeping it in cash?
because these are the profits, right?
The retained earnings are the profits.
So not only are the tokens backed,
but then they're kicking off profits.
And then what are they doing with the profits?
Oh, they're buying Bitcoin
or they have been buying Bitcoin for years.
They're owning gold, which is up tremendously, right?
And so I think people that are trying to spread FUD on it now,
it's just a concerted effort to to probably destroy whatever goodwill or branding is associated with
the trust in the organization that's what it seems like to me because from a numbers standpoint
i'm just looking at the sheer math and i'm saying this would have to be if they are fully backed
which you know they come out with report after report because they're a private institution that
they are fully backed, whether they are or aren't, I don't know. But I would think they'd be
incentivized to be fully backed so that they can get their 5% coupon or 4% coupon of all these
short duration treasuries that they're using to back. I would want that. I would want to be fully
backed. So I'm just looking at the incentives of the organization. I'm looking at the math of the
organization. And I've met Paula multiple times. I'm very impressed with the operator.
Very impressed with the operator from just the technical competence standpoint.
And so, you know, I'm looking at that and I'm saying it's an eye roll, but it's not.
And I think this is the this is a point to emphasize that it's not a publicly traded company.
So it's not like that, you know, when you have J.P. Morgan and you look at their balance sheet and their income statement and it's gone through countless auditing agencies in order to publish this public report.
it's a lot easier to kind of look at that and say, well, this is, you know, healthy or this
isn't healthy or whatever. With a private company, it's a lot harder to do that because they're just
not, they don't have the same rigorous protocol that they have to go through. So, you know,
I have these comments, I have these opinions, but I can't point to a 10K or a 10Q on the company and
say, well, look right here, because this is very clearly not in financial stress and doesn't have
issues and you know everybody out there on the internet has an opinion as to is because you don't
have those types of reports but yeah i'm not concerned about it at all yeah and and you know
even excuse me even with those types of reports uh you know things like for example a bank like
jp morgan could be bernie madoff's banker for many years and uh you know and well that doesn't show up
on all of those reports from all their auditors.
Or, you know, I don't know.
They could just imagine they could be Jeffrey Epstein's banker.
And, you know, boy, that's not captured in those reports.
So sometimes perhaps all those additional public reports
don't actually capture the whole picture.
But here's an interesting experiment.
Here's an interesting thought experiment.
And I'm not telling people what the right answer is,
but I'm going to help you think critically about something.
Remember when Silicon Valley Bank blew up?
And if you had, let's say you had $5 million on deposit at Silicon Valley Bank the weekend before the Friday that it blew up versus 5 million USDT tokens, which supposedly are fully backed.
And I suspect they are.
Which one would you have rather held on the Friday before?
Because Silicon Valley Bank has a Fed bank account, like all of it, right?
Which one would you have rather held that before that weekend where Janet Yellen decided Sunday night that she was going to save all the all the deposits?
Because it came down to one person's, you know, whether they were feeling charitable, charitable with your deposit.
But, you know, it sure makes you think the difference between a fractional reserve bank that one person can make a determination on whether you actually get the $5 million deposit or not versus the other one that.
And don't get me wrong.
Could the government go in there and stop payments on whatever?
Absolutely, they can.
And they may with Tether, any stable coin.
Right.
I'm not arguing that.
I know that they can do those kinds of things.
In fact, you've even saw Apollo tweet about like, oh, yeah, this payment that was supposed
to happen to whatever was stopped by us, right?
So don't think for a second that the payments can't stop with the stable coins because they
can.
It's completely centralized.
It's completely captured by governments, period.
Bitcoin is not, by the way.
you can store the private key in your head, in your brain, and you can go anywhere you want in
the world and you can still access that. That's the difference, folks. If you want to know the
difference, that's the difference. And no government can stop that. But as we're talking about state
It's just a little fun little thought experiment for people to think about and why banking from a fractional reserve versus fully collateralized one is different.
Well, that is kind of like the ridiculous irony of all this, right, is the people calling Tether, saying that they may be insolvent or all these things.
It's like they've got no apparently no qualms about fractional reserve banks that are levered up to the to the hilt and have, you know, have no reserve meaningful amounts whatsoever.
And I mean, I saw something I don't know if this was true, but the same it was the same agency that was declaring that Silicon Valley Bank was actually like fine.
It was solvent like a couple of weeks before they were, you know, wiped out basically is the one that was was basically casting some of this the shade on tether.
Is that correct? Or was this just some, uh, is this just some speculation?
Say that again.
I thought it was like what the, I'm forgetting the name of it.
Like the same group that was, uh,
attesting that Silicon Valley bank was solvent and fine and whatnot.
Very close before things blew up is the one that is basically, uh, you know,
putting, casting some of this doubt on tether or basically saying, look,
this isn't, this is too risky.
I don't know that.
Okay. This, this may have, you can't believe everything you read on X.
you know you can believe everything you read on Noster though that's a fact okay so so speaking of
speaking of kind of tether adjacent things I know Jack Mallers just I think this morning
put out an announcement that they are now going to be moving forward with with 21 I know this has
been something that's very kind of hotly anticipated just given the size that they're
going to be operating I mean I think they're coming on to the coming on to the market if
If this goes through, assuming it goes through, coming onto the market with the number three spot of Bitcoin holdings, basically, right?
Behind MicroStrategy, obviously, and then behind Mara.
Something in the low 40s, 40,000s of Bitcoin.
What's your read on this?
Because in my mind, I look at these Bitcoin treasury companies.
And first of all, you should just, when in doubt, if you're listening to this, you should just buy spot Bitcoin.
You should dollar cost average.
You should focus on your craft.
You should save your time and energy in something that cannot be debased, which is Bitcoin.
But I find all of this fascinating.
And there's a lot of us that, you know, play around a little in these treasury companies as well.
In my mind, I see MicroStrategy as obviously the clearly differentiated, again, 800-pound gorilla.
Then there's all the other ones.
Mara operates with a good amount of size, but also they're a Bitcoin miner.
It's kind of a different paradigm there, right?
21 is going to have quite a lot of size.
There's some of these others that have, you know, at least tens of thousands of Bitcoin.
And then there's this very long tail, very long tail.
What's your read on overall?
Is this a winner take most, a winner take all scenario with these treasury companies
in terms of these sort of pure play or pseudo pure play ones where they're really, you know,
we're not talking about just a company that's has Bitcoin on its balance sheet.
And because that's the prudent thing to do, which I think eventually all companies will do that.
That's just going to be what you do.
You keep money you can't afford to lose in Bitcoin.
But what's your read on the state of the treasury company market right now as it relates to you got a long tail.
And a lot of them seem like with a protracted drawdown in Bitcoin, they're just going to get even way more wrecked than MicroStrategy.
We're already seeing that happening, right?
Yeah. At the end of the day, I think that I look at what Michael's doing at strategy as probably being the most.
How do I put this?
Like he's he's securitizing Bitcoin and he's issuing credit instruments into the legacy financial system, equity markets and fixed income markets.
and he's offering yield that you can't get anywhere else.
And he's doing this by having an over collateralization value of Bitcoin
on his balance sheet to do it.
He's effectively a bank that is over collateralized
to a point that offsets the volatility risk of Bitcoin.
So if we just say Bitcoin can go down by 70, 80% on an annualized basis is what its drawdown amount is, you can see very quickly why he likes to be over collateralized five to one.
So the over collateralization is a function of the expectation of how much it could draw down.
And so if it goes down 70%, 80% and he's over collateralized 5 to 1, then he's still backed 1 to 1 with what he's issuing.
So similar to Tether, which we just talked about, which is collateralizing and issuing tokens off of U.S. treasuries and then sweeping the profits into Bitcoin.
Michael is, he's the same thing, but instead of using US treasuries to collateralize, he's
collateralizing Bitcoin.
And he has to do it in such an over collateralization way because of the volatility of what Bitcoin
is inherently.
If that volatility, let's say we had 10 more years of data and the biggest drawdown of
Bitcoin was 50%, his over collateralization could change, call it three to one or two
to one versus the five to one. And so he's offering because Bitcoin has such a
massive upside or it's demonstrated this network effect that is achieving, call it a 30 to 40%
annualized return. He's able to pay out quite a bit of yield for what he's collateralizing,
which is the Bitcoin. And when you look at what Tether's doing, they're not paying any of it out.
they're sweeping and keeping it. But what they are providing to the world is if you're in name
it country where your local currency gets the based 20 to 50% annualized and you're giving that
person the dollar, which means it's not getting to base by 20 or 50%. It's just holding its value
in dollar terms for them. That's why they don't even need a yield. They just want it to outperform
the local currency. And so what you're seeing is different products, different ways of going about
things. And so what you could argue is that micro strategy is a product for an advanced economy.
And some for somebody that's, you know, in one of the G sevens of the world that have,
and I'm going to use air quotes here, strong local fiat currency, relatively speaking, right? Yeah,
Relatively speaking, compared to Bitcoin, what he's doing is giving people that are participating in those markets something that will do better than the dollar, which is the 10% yield that you're seeing on some of the different preferred products that he's doing.
So if you want to compete in this, I know this is a really long answer, but I'm trying to frame it up so people can kind of understand like from the global lens why these different things exist, why they have value, why people are using them and whatnot, right?
If you going to compete as a and we throwing around this term treasury company I would define a pure treasury company as somebody that trying to compete with what Michael doing which is collateralizing the Bitcoin offering some type of
yield against it. And to do that, it really comes down to the trust that you place in the operator
to always remain over collateralized and to not blow up is what it really comes down to.
So let's say you wanted to compete and you wanted to go up against Michael.
So you can do it in, I guess, a couple of different ways.
You could say, well, I'm not going to be over collateralized five to one.
I'm going to be over collateralized 10 to one.
Just using like a little bit of an extreme example.
I'm going to be over collateralized 10 to one.
I'm twice as safe as he is.
Okay.
And so therefore, I'm going to offer a product that instead of it giving you 10%, it gives
you 7%.
but it's twice as safe. Now you got the challenge of just marketing that. And part of the challenge
in the marketing is just the financial education that you need to understand the value prop
and whether you need that much of over collateralization to... Let's go back to the
numbers on Michael. He's sitting on $1.4 billion of cash to service the dividends and the coupons
for the next two years without ever having to sell the Bitcoin, the 650,000 Bitcoin that he's
sitting on. Okay. So do you need 10 times over collateralization because you're concerned that
he can't meet that obligation for a discounted yield? And I'm not even saying that you would have
to, you know, you, you wouldn't have to, uh, you, you could maybe compete with him at the same yield
of 10%, but you're, what you're sweeping or what you're making is probably going to be less than
than what he's able to do. So his, so that company for, if you're buying the common stock,
it's not going to compound probably as fast as his, because he's a little bit riskier.
So like all of these things are like, so as we talk about treasury companies and your core
question was, is like how many of these things can exist? How many of them could be out there?
And I think the number is actually pretty small. I think that once the market starts getting,
cause it really kind of comes down to the demand of the products of owning the preferred stock and
who wants to buy that. You're not seeing any type of over demand for the products. And I say that
because I see he keeps raising the interest rate on the STRC preferred, which tells me that the
demand isn't taking it there. So like people are not being enticed by the high yield that they're
getting enough that they're, that he can just keep the yield where it's at. So, you know, I would,
That would be an argument, at least in the interim, like in the next six months, that there's, you know, one treasury company is enough.
But that's really saying.
Now, if we fast forward three years into the future, let's say these products start to become really popular, which, to be honest with you, Walker, I think in three to five years from now, these preferreds are going to actually become pretty popular.
And I think that the market's going to, you know, demand these.
And as there's more and more demand for the products, I think that that offers up the case for there to be more treasury companies.
But he can just keep as long as the as long as he can keep that collateralized five to one ratio in place, because that's also a factor here.
Right. Let's say there's tons of demand for these products and the yields on the products, the preferreds start pushing down.
Let's say that there's so much demand that you're only getting a 6% yield on it.
Well, now that is an indicator that he is probably saturated on his over collateralization because maybe the Bitcoin price is moving slower.
That offers up the opportunity for more treasury companies to come into the market and service this at a higher yield.
So it's a supply-demand thing.
if I was going to answer your question very generically and not with like all this technical
nuance, I would just say, I think that there's room for a few of them. I think there's room for
a few of them, but not a lot of them, like not 10 in the U S market, probably three in the U S market.
Now this is talking about a pure, basically Bitcoin bank is what I'm talking about.
I think that there's also going to be a prevalence of just companies that are operating on a Bitcoin standard.
So you got companies that are going to have Bitcoin on the balance sheet as they do their product or service.
And maybe they could be conglomerates. Right. You could do a Berkshire style like, hey, the holding company owns 10 different companies.
And those companies all have different products and services that they're offering the market.
And then the company's taking those free cash flows and they're just sweeping them into Bitcoin because it's giving them the highest yield instead of chasing upstream or downstream product lines that are aligned with the business operational subsidiaries.
So there's that.
That's a whole different thing that I think today in the market, people would say, oh, that's a treasury company.
It's not a treasury.
It's just a company that's operating on a Bitcoin standard.
And I think that you're going to have, I mean, 10 years from now, I think everybody's going to be doing that.
so uh yeah no i i appreciate that was uh that was a very thorough answer preston there was no
squishiness there there's no squishiness there at all so i i thank you for that and i think it's
going to be really i mean perhaps a lot of uh a lot of people running these treasury companies
in the u.s may not like to hear what you just said but i think that that's kind of uh a rational
thing i'm excited that you know for example like a block is a great example of a like that's a
that's a let's say that's a financial services company but that has bitcoin at its core what
they've just done jack doris's block with square opening up bitcoin acceptance for four million
plus small business merchants in the u.s is awesome what they're doing integrating bitcoin
and cash app more so than it already is and kind of using bitcoin and lightning as the rails behind
the scenes is is fascinating and like really like these these are the things present where i see
stuff like this. And I imagine if this sort of announcement was made in like 2020, that this
would be something that just like rocket ship the price. Right. And it's almost like counter
intuitively, almost more bullish that that actually doesn't, that doesn't move the price at all. That
has literally no impact on price. Nobody, nobody seemed, I don't want to say nobody seems to care.
The majority of people, you and I care. I know a lot of Bitcoiners care. A lot of people care,
A lot of small business owners care about these sorts of announcements.
But like the quote, the market in terms of Bitcoin and saying like, wow, this is a huge
thing.
This doesn't move the needle at all now, which I think is kind of just a testament to Bitcoin's
maturity a little bit too, right?
It's like this sort of thing.
I mean, even Vanguard yesterday or today coming out and saying, hey, by the way, I know we
said we weren't going to allow our customers to interact with these Bitcoin ETF products,
but you know what?
We will now.
Like these sorts of things these capitulation moments on the other side of this I think are just like massive bits of very bullish news And again this gets back to kind of like my original point about this massive disconnect between what I seeing from let say a news standpoint like fundamentals nothing
has changed.
Bitcoin is still Bitcoin.
Hash rate is still extremely, extremely shockingly high.
All these incredibly bullish things are happening.
And there's a disconnect between what the market, how the market is pricing Bitcoin.
I know you had a great recent episode with Luke Groman.
Always love listening to you two talk together.
because I think you're one of the best people at kind of teasing out some of these things with Luke.
And listening to that conversation, it seems that Luke is quite short-term bearish.
And he's somebody that I really follow closely in terms of what he says.
He's got a lot of things figured out.
He's pretty right on a lot.
What was your biggest takeaway from that conversation?
I'm curious.
Are you on board with Luke in terms of where he's at?
or do you diverge from him a little bit on some of these things?
No, I often agree with Luke.
There's very rarely that I disagree with Luke.
I'm just, the thing that I guess I've learned
from participating in markets for a few decades
is just so much of it comes down to the whims
of the central bankers
and how much liquidity they're putting into the system.
uh some of it also has to do with just uh market sentiment and where like the new shiny object is
and i think that the shiny object object in the last year has really been ai
and just uh there's been a huge suck of capital that's kind of gone over there
um i think that that the whims and the flows of like how much liquidity they're adding in
can just change so, so abruptly. Like you can go into like the Silicon Valley bank thing was,
was a great example where there was a lot of liquidity flowing out of the system, like in
like the span of a week or two weeks. And this speaks to the fragility of the legacy system is
what it really speaks to. They come in and they just, you know, they create a new backstop facility
like over the weekend. And Hey, if you're holding long duration bonds, that's okay. Just put them on
deposit here. We'll give you the full face value of it. And, and voila, like the whole thing was
solved a matter of like a week. Um, and what, what it's taught me is you can't afford to be bearish.
Like you can't afford to be a raging pessimist. Um, you can't because they're just going to figure
out a way to paper over it and dupe everybody that's participating. And then it just bounces
right back. And that's why, I guess for me, I've just become really, hey, did something technically
change with Bitcoin? Is there some type of flaw in the code? Is there some flaw in the logic?
And if the answer is no to those things, I'm just going to keep buying more of it because I know
they're going to have to print. I know they're going to have to paper over. I know they're going
to have to stand up a new backstop facility and they'll call it something different. They've got
to do more QE and they're going to call it something different. And they're just going to
keep the charade going. And it goes back to, you know, Lynn, there's just like nothing truly stops
this train and they can't afford, and they can't allow the impairment to get too out of control,
the cascading impairment and contagion. They can't allow it to get too crazy.
Uh, so that's what I've learned through the years. And anytime I've gotten super bearish,
it's, it's usually involved me making a bad decision or just, uh, losing out on opportunity.
And so I just remain positive, remain, uh, uh, you know, an optimist and all of it. And,
And if the market goes chasing the shiny object and they're not really valuing this thing that I think has tremendous value, which is Bitcoin, it's just an opportunity.
It truly is just an opportunity to go buy more.
Don't overthink this.
Figure out a way to add value to the world.
If you are adding value to the world, you'll have excess free cash flows and then take those free cash flows and go buy something that the government can't ever take away from you.
It's really that simple.
I say amen to that. It's funny. I've not, uh, obviously not been, you know, uh, looking at
markets for nearly as long as you have a old man. Uh, no, I'm kidding. Uh, you're, you're still,
you're still a spring chicken in my book, Preston, but, but no, you know, I, I, what I have learned
is that right at the moment where I start feeling like that little bit of a pit in my gut where it's
like, Oh, maybe I was wrong. That's like, that means Nope. Nope. You need to flip the script
and realize that that that capitulation you're feeling that verge of capitulation that's that's
probably that's like very near whatever a bottom might be and so you know and the same that's on
the top it's but it's hard right the same feeling on the top when you just when you're just itching
to go out there and shit post and right it is the surefire like we're probably kind of getting a
little toppy right now i'm not so good at spotting the tops yet that one i haven't got as good at
and when you got like the mike greens of the world tap dancing on bitcoiners graves like that's
there's a bottom close by it might not be the bottom but it's close by yeah lots of lots of
gold bug celebration lots of uh fiat economist and analyst celebration right now it feels bottom
Maybe we nuke to 58K.
I don't know.
If we do, I'm going to sell that other kidney of mine and back the truck up.
Actually, I won't even have a truck to back up.
I'll have sold my truck, gotten rid of that.
But that's the thing.
It's like we don't know.
Things can happen in the short term, but it's long term.
The thesis remains intact.
Bitcoin is unchanged.
Bitcoin is more resilient than ever.
I remain exceptionally bullish, perhaps irrationally so.
But I would say it's responsibly bullish.
And that's because I know what I'm holding, right? And doing whatever I can to accumulate as much of it as I can and provide value to accumulate more and accumulating that for the purpose of providing for my family and the family that is to come and building a thousand year generational legacy so I can buy myself an island citadel at some point.
But that's a long ways down the road.
But, Perez, we're coming up on the end of time here.
I just maybe wanted a very quick gear shift with a couple minutes left.
If there's anything on – we've talked a lot about the price.
We've talked a lot about liquidity and macro and microstrategy and everything.
But you obviously follow all of that.
But another huge part of your life is what you do at EgoDeath Capital,
investing in Bitcoin businesses, in the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Is there anything you're seeing there right now that is, you know,
this is kind of the stuff that goes under the radar, right?
Like there's not really bearishness there.
It's like the builders are still building.
Is there anything you're looking at that you can at least discuss publicly
that you're super excited about, super passionate about,
super bullish on from a technology perspective I think that the Lightning Network is actually way more powerful than what many would want you to believe I mean you said recently about Jack with Square and
that you can basically go to any business in the US that has a Square terminal and pay with Bitcoin.
And that's happening. And Lightning is what's enabling immediate payments to occur. And there's
tons of building happening on top of that. You have ARK, which was something that I just saw
this past, the end of the summer. I think it was in August. I was out in Riga and we used
ARK on top of Lightning for immediate payments. And the reason this is such a big breakthrough is
because you don't have to manage liquidity channels, which was a huge burden and something
that technologically was a setback.
And, you know,
ARK is a new technology
on top of Lightning
that takes that away.
And then you have businesses
just kind of standing up payments.
The issue I think that you,
that you run into
on the payment side is it's still,
it all comes down
to the education burden.
People just don't even understand Bitcoin.
Why they need Bitcoin.
They still think that they need dollars.
And, you know,
I guess when you're looking at
you know, let's say you're operating in whatever country and the current local currency is getting
the base by 20 to 40% annualized. Looking at the dollar as the solution, it is a solution to that.
It's just not the best solution, in my humble opinion. And but again, a lot of this comes down
to what are their bills denominated? And well, they're probably denominated in that local currency.
So if they can get something that's 20 to 30%, you know, better improvement than what they owe in their, in their liabilities, well, then that's a win.
And so it's just kind of take time for people to see it.
And I know I'm getting away from the ego death, but I, my, my general point would be, I think that there's a lot of building happening on top of payments.
A lot of these businesses and a lot of these companies are early from the demand that is slowly picking up.
I think that companies that are building and integrating stable coins in addition to Bitcoin are probably going to have an easier go at being viable in the market, which might be a controversial take for people that are hardcore Bitcoiners.
Bitcoiners, but I also firmly believe in the market demand and signal will tell you kind of
where you need to be and where you need to be building, even though we kind of know where I
think the end game is going to take us. But yeah, those are some of the things that I'm seeing. I
think it's really exciting because I think for everybody in the world, they're now going to have
an opportunity to be transacting in something that's way better than these, since some of these
local currencies, which are just, I mean, it's straight up highway robbery, the corruption,
the robbery that occurs for most people around the world and what they deal with just because
the money is so broke in most parts of the world is changing. And I think that that is going to
have a profound impact on just global cooperation and global value creation for everybody around the
world. Yeah. You, you, you think the dollar's bad. Wait till you see all the rest. Like it's the
prettiest horse, the glue factory. It's the skinniest kid at fat camp. Uh, it's, but boy,
the, like the rest, the rest are real bad. You know, it's, it's, it's all relative, right?
Yes. Well, I have one last question, which is Preston. Have you read every book that's behind
you on that shelf? It's such an impressive shelf. And have you read all of them?
There's a few people send me books. And if it's one that I don't have the time to read, then I
I'll throw it in over.
You can't see over here, but I have the shelf continues.
I throw some of them over there, but I would say of all the books up there.
Yeah.
95% of them I've read.
Yeah.
That's a better ratio than my bookshelf.
So I've got, I've got some catching up to do the proof.
The proof of, of all of these is I've probably recorded a podcast about most of them to believe
it or not.
I haven't recorded a podcast.
I probably have an executive summary somewhere on our investors podcast website for almost
all of these books.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's a lot of proof of work.
It's a lot of proof of work, my friend.
Sorry, say it again.
All these book reviews and all the podcasts that we did, it was before AI.
And what we were trying to do really was in Stig Brodersen, myself, back when we first started the podcast, what, 2013 or something like that.
Wild.
we were like, you know, like if we can't get the guest on the show, like, let's just read the book
and we can just kind of summarize and just talk about the book. And like, that could be an episode.
It was us kind of like hacking ways when in the early days when we couldn't get a guest,
let's just read the book. So we went through like all of these lists of billionaires and what they
said that their favorite books were. And we just started like just reading the books. Like we tried
did knock one out. Like, I don't know, we were on the pace of like a book a week to every two weeks,
we were like plowing through a book and then we would just immediately record a show as to like
what we learned from the book. Um, yeah. And then we would, we would type up an executive summary
before AI and we had all these executive summaries out there that, uh, and that would go out to the
people on the, on the email list. And I mean, it was like this whole thing for a long time. Yes.
yes you you guys were you know uh you were doing spark notes basically and people i don't even know
kids today probably don't even know what spark notes is necessarily like it's just like because
you just like rock yeah yeah exactly just yeah chat gbt grok whatever it is now that that's that's
incredible man 2013 what a wild ride for you guys that's i mean now you have no problem getting
anyone you want uh as an interview you don't you don't just have to read their book anymore that's
not true on the tech on the tech side i think because i'm such an outsider on the tech side i'll
reach out and people i think you know they're just busy or whatever and yeah no i when on the
bitcoin side yeah sure but tech it's it's challenging i'm trying to get different guests
hey if you know somebody and you want to you know let me know i'd be more than happy to entertain
any guests on the tech front but yeah there you go well and uh on that note everybody should check
out your show bitcoin fundamentals uh also tech tech infinity or technology infinity infinite tech
Infinite tech. Dang it. I got it. I got it backwards. I'm sorry. Infinite tech.
Also on the investors podcast network, the investors podcast network,
but thank you for coming on the Bitcoin podcast again, Preston,
anywhere else you want to send folks a link, I'll link that I'll link your
Noster. I'll link your X anywhere else.
If people have a business and they're looking to raise capital,
go to ego death.capital and just fill out the form there and we'll take a look
at it.
Awesome. Well, Preston, this was, this was a treat. Great catching up with you.
Thank you to everybody who joined in on Noster and watched this live.
And if you're not on Noster and you're listening to this now wondering what the heck is Noster, just Google it.
And you'll find out.
And you can come find us over there on Noster and watch these shows live in the future.
But really, Preston, thank you for sharing your time.
This was a pleasure.
Thank you, Walker.