I think the first wave is companies that really need Bitcoin.
The next wave is companies that want and benefit from Bitcoin that may not need it.
Apple doesn't need it.
They're going to be just fine, right?
Google doesn't need it.
Microsoft doesn't need it.
But they'd all benefit greatly from it, really greatly.
So I think that wave is coming.
Same thing applies to nation states.
I think the US may be an exception because of Bram's kind of foresight, but nation states,
there are nation states that need it.
Like if you have a fiat currency and your currency, what are there like 160 fiat currencies
out there, there are going to be 160 fiat currencies 50 years.
They're just art.
There's going to be some very small fraction of that.
So if you're a turkey and your currency is going away, Turkish lira is going away, you
would benefit from printing a shit ton of Turkish lira and buying as much Bitcoin with
your fake money as you could, right?
And backing it.
There's a number of countries in that situation, much like the companies that were early adopters
out of necessity.
I think we'll see nation states clamor in out of necessity as well.
Readings and salutations, my fellow plebs.
My name is Walker and this is the Bitcoin podcast.
The Bitcoin time chain is 879284 and the value of one Bitcoin is still one Bitcoin.
Two days episode is Bitcoin talk where I talk with my guest about Bitcoin and whatever else
comes up today.
That guest is Eric Weiss.
Eric is a longtime Bitcoiner and the CEO of Bitcoin Investment Group.
And he's also the man who orange pilled Michael Saylor.
No big deal.
I should also mention Eric's just a super chill dude and I love getting his perspective.
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Without further ado, let's get into this Bitcoin talk with Eric Weiss.
Eric, welcome.
It's good to have you on here.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, it's my pleasure, man.
I wish we could be doing it in person, but we'll have to save that for another time.
What a way to ring in the new year here this year.
I can't say I've done something in quite that spectacular a fashion before.
Nice to see so many Bitcoiners really cutting loose too.
It was a pretty amazing time.
I'm not sure many people have done Rung in the new year in that spectacular a fashion.
He went all out.
He said he would deliver a 100K party and he delivered a 100K party that I think people
will be talking about for a while.
He's a man of his word.
He said he was going to do it.
He did it.
Now, I guess we all have to wait for the one million party now that that's kind of, I feel
like it's kind of a strange thing.
That feels like the next psychological level to me.
I don't know what in between, maybe 420, 696 just for 420 and 69, but really psychological
price levels, it's like, no, it's a million now.
That's just, there's nothing in between.
It's just a lot of pain and property.
I think for having a party, every 100K pays for itself.
Party-wise, yeah, I'm not going to disagree with that.
But emotionally, yeah.
I think the next, who knows what the price will be, but I think the next really big emotional
level will be when Bitcoin flips gold.
That'll be the big one.
What does that happen at?
I knew this off the top of my head and then archived it.
It changes, right?
Because gold has had a good run and gold keeps moving.
I think gold is at roughly 18 trillion.
I think we're looking at roughly 9X from here.
Yeah, so I mean, you're looking at almost a million.
Almost a million bucks, yeah.
You know what, I was just looking at, actually, I had this pulled up here, just speaking of
gold, the chart of ETF inflows for, did you see that?
I think Bitwise put it out.
I didn't.
It's nuts to me that this little magic internet money thing is all of a sudden just making
gold look ridiculous.
This is just insane, right?
Yeah, that's pretty extraordinary.
I don't know how you can look at that and not be like, huh, if you're a no-coiner right
now and just not think like, maybe there's something here that I'm missing.
Maybe there's something too, this magic internet money, all these nerds have been talking about
for years and I was told was just a pet rock by Jamie Dimon.
I don't know.
Yeah, the most successful ETF launch in history, right?
I mean, that's a pretty meaningful data point, especially when you think about the fact that
that's Wall Street money, so to speak, coming into an asset that Wall Street has largely
poo-pooed for a long time.
Imagine when they stop poo-pooing it like BlackRock is and start promoting it.
The truth is, most investors are sheep and follow the herd.
It's very scary for investors to branch out on their own, make their own decisions.
Most investors don't spend their life looking at their investments.
They take the advice of professionals.
If you're a doctor or a lawyer or a business owner or any number of other things, you've
got your asset managers that you trust and they have their tried and true textbook that
they've been going by for a long time, diversified, blah, blah, that.
Those people work too hard for their money to go against the advice of their advisors.
As you know, Bitcoin and certainly hardcore Bitcoiners are people who are thinking from
first principles, questioning things, most importantly, doing their own work and not
accepting what they're being told at face value.
It's like once you start questioning any one thing, whether it's what is money or what's
the real inflation rate or COVID questions that people had where they thought they were
misled, any number of these topics where you start to question the powers that be, it opens
up this Pandora's box and you're left to think, what else have I been misled about?
The truth is, unless you break out of what the masses are doing, you are never going
to break out from the masses.
That's a heavy piece of wisdom to drop right off the bat here.
I love it.
It was accidental.
I assure you.
No, I love it.
I think it's such a good point.
It's like you don't, if you're doing the same thing as everyone else, you're going
to perform the same as everyone else.
That's not how you get ahead.
That's not how you get out of a hole that you may have been left in by a broken monetary
system.
That's how you tread water.
When I look at just like, I find it fascinating to follow some of these dividend hero or whatever
S&P 500 index maxis on X because so many of them are still just vehemently opposed to
Bitcoin.
They view it as like, oh, that's cute and all, but I'll take my dividend portfolio any day.
That's just like, it's what they do.
They're going by the playbook that very savvy investors have told them is this is the path
to financial independence in the long term and just keep doing this and build up some
nice dividend cash flow and you'll be great and you'll retire early.
But it's like, if you're just doing that, even if you're really good at it, you're just
basically treading water.
Different folks have different financial needs and what's right for one group or one individual
is not necessarily right for others.
And there's a whole group of people out there for whom cash flow and yield is a really big
deal.
There's people living on fixed income in the last quartile of their life and they're not
really concerned about creating wealth.
They're worried about paying those bills and for those people, maybe a little longer term
wealth creation isn't the right thing.
And wealth is a relative thing and how it, once you've got your basic needs met, once
you can afford food and shelter and basic things like that, how money or how wealth
makes you feel is a very relative thing as it relates to happiness.
They've done a bunch of studies on this topic and there's the cliche, money doesn't bring
your happiness.
That's not really true.
It's true, money does bring you happiness when you really can't provide food for yourself,
for your family, etc.
So having your basic needs met, there's a strong correlation between money and happiness.
And then after that, the correlation between wealth and happiness is very interesting.
It's a relative thing.
So they've done these studies in particular, I think they did one in South Africa in one
of what they call the townships, which are essentially like these massive flums for lack
of a better word.
And these people are very poor, but from our vantage point, they just all seem very poor.
But within the township, there are different degrees of poverty.
So there's some individuals who they have a shelter made out of cardboard boxes and
stuff, and there are other individuals that have their shelters made out of aluminum.
And there's a big difference in relative wealth.
And so there can be people who are like wealthy people within the township and they feel the
same happiness that like a first world country billionaire feels relative to their rich
friends.
So it's a relative thing.
And so A, individuals should think a lot about how much money they need, what makes them
happy and are there thoughts around that constructive?
And then B, if you really do want to break out and have that relative wealth feeling,
you do need to think outside the box and try to do something different than others are
doing, but not just something different for the sake of doing something different, something
different that actually wins.
And I think that's, yeah, Bitcoiners are unique in that regard.
It is, it's such an interesting thing too about like the, you know, doing something
unique that actually wins.
That is an important point because like, okay, you can be a black sheep for the sake of being
a contrarian, but if you're losing, that doesn't really do like, okay, congratulations, you
know, you screwed yourself.
Like Bitcoin is this weird contrarian thing that also happens to make those who see it
quite relatively speaking to everyone else who is not doing it.
Bitcoin turns out it performs pretty damn well.
Yeah, it'll become less contrarian.
It's not, Bitcoin doesn't have any particular desire to be contrarian.
It's just contrarian because it hasn't been, you know, widely accepted yet.
So you know, I think that's going to change.
It's just there are a group of people who question things, who think from first principles,
who have found Bitcoin earlier than others and said, yes, this current system is broken.
I don't know that Bitcoin is the answer, but this, this ship is certainly sinking and I
don't want to be on the sinking ship.
This is the best alternative I can find.
I'm going to get on this ship and I'm going to tell others that I know about this ship
because I want others not to sink and oh, by the way, it also doesn't hurt my case,
you know, that this should win.
So I think there's a lot of that.
And then you also like, you know this, right?
But people who aren't in the Bitcoin community really don't know this.
You see a lot of other commonalities among Bitcoiners.
That's like really surprising, right?
You'll see like a lot of Bitcoiners, you know, are really against seed oils and question
how dangerous seed oils are.
And then you talk to your average, you know, highly educated physician who tells you, oh,
man, you got to, you got to, you know, consume these seed oils.
You got to use this sunscreen.
You know, this sunscreen is you got to protect yourself and it's like, well, wait a minute,
you know, you start questioning what's in those sunscreens.
Am I doing more harm than good?
And you'll see all these commonalities among Bitcoiners who start questioning things and
they subscribe heavily to, you know, more of a carnivore diet and eating good fats.
And people are like, what?
Like, that's bad for you.
You can't eat that.
And Bitcoiners are like, well, you know, you go with what you want to go with.
But you know, I've done the research and, you know, I'm not concerned with this high cholesterol.
There's only been one study, the Framingham study, and that showed correlation, not causation
as it relates to heart disease and, you know, it's this Bitcoiner mentality that you question
things and don't just settle for, you know, what your friend or what a physician tells
you.
And, you know, I think ultimately these are leaders really.
And the rest of the world will follow because they see it working.
And you know, just speaking of early adopters, like you were, you were a pretty early adopter
of Bitcoin.
And I think from, I believe, like 2013, you kind of came around or found out about it
as a result of some of the just investment work you were doing at the time.
Sorry.
And I'm curious, like, was at that time, were you looking at this as a solution to the problem
of broken money or for you was it just like an investment?
No.
So, I was, I did a stint of about a close to a decade in internet venture capital at
the time, at the risk of dating myself, at the time when the internet was kind of just
taking off, right?
Late 90s, early 2000s kind of timeframe.
And we got, I worked for a couple of firms that invested exclusive venture capital exclusively
in internet related businesses.
What I was doing was called like internet capital group.
And we got very good at figuring out what the internet was good for and what it wasn't
good for.
And what the internet was good for was sharing information instantly, globally, very effective
for that.
And there are tons of great examples of that.
You know, one of the, one of the examples we like to use back in the day was if, if
you're, you know, living in your neighborhood and you're having a garage sale and you've
got a bunch of old books that you're selling, you know, and you've got a book on how to
fix a 1967 Corvette Stingray, right?
That book is going to not sell very well because nobody in your neighborhood has one and you're
crappy beaten up, you know, top 20 best seller paperback is going to sell better than that.
But the reality is the person who needs that book on how to fix the Corvette, that's a
much more valuable asset.
So if you can put that on the internet and share it with the whole world and the individual
that needs that book can find it, you know, that's, that's what the internet was good
for at the time.
What the internet wasn't good for at all was transmitting value.
It was terrible for that.
And people were very scared, as they should be, to even put their credit card in a website,
engage in e-commerce, put anything important in email.
And to a degree, they should still be pretty scared about that with all the, you know,
leaks and hacks and everything that we've had.
So when I saw Bitcoin for the first time, it was at a conference, a Bitcoin conference
in Miami called a conference.
There couldn't have been 200 people there.
It was probably about 100 people.
It was really small.
And I was just blown away that the internet could be used to share value safely and securely.
That was mind blowing.
And what was even more incredible was that party A didn't need to know or trust party
B and no intermediary was needed.
And you just knew that when the Bitcoin hit your wallet, that it was good, right?
And this was, this was mind blowing to me.
And I was like, okay, this is a, so I was impressed with it, not as a solution to what's
broken with money, but as a solution to how the internet could be used safely and securely
to transmit value.
I think that's, that's kind of fascinating.
I mean, you really came at it from initially at least the medium of exchange angle, a secure
peer to peer medium of exchange.
This was what just, and probably because like that's the lens through which you were looking
at things at that time.
Was there a, I think probably now it's safe to say you like the store value narrative is
very strong for you.
Was there a moment where that, where that flipped or do you still kind of hold those
two as being equally important?
It's an interesting question.
I don't know if I thought about it in that context.
So when I bought, when I discovered Bitcoin and was really impressed by this, my first
thought was, this is the future.
I need to start a business in this space.
I'm going to quit everything else that I'm doing and I'm going to start some kind of
Bitcoin company, whether it was, you know, and there were just no good ideas, right?
And even to this day, really aren't that many good ideas for Bitcoin related companies.
So, you know, I thought I could start a directory of companies that accept Bitcoin or things
of that nature.
It wouldn't have been a good idea then, wouldn't be a good idea now, right?
So it was hard to find a good business that I could invest in or start to do this.
And then I was like, well, okay, there's a fixed supply.
I'm pretty familiar with investing, supply demand.
If this is going to catch on, you know, the price of this stuff is going to go up.
So I bought a bunch of Bitcoin, you know, back then and it was just insanely volatile,
right?
Up a couple hundred percent, down 90 percent, like, you know, in hours or days, it was just
wild.
And I was like, okay, I probably, you know, this is too emotional an investment.
I probably put too much into this.
I don't know, like, you know, and then you start hearing about other ones coming out
and you're like, you know, who knows if this is even going to be around.
So I sold all my Bitcoin in 2014.
And yeah, so, you know, people say, oh, you are lucky.
Well, it's pretty hard for people to huddle all the way through.
And so, you know, I stayed close to it.
I had friends in the crypto industry and then as, you know, interest kind of picked up 2016-ish.
I started to stack again and started to get more involved and yeah, I've been stacking
ever since.
You know, it is funny too, because a lot of people here are like, oh, you know, you got
in in 2013 again, like, oh, so lucky that you got this.
And it's like, you're right.
Most people, the majority of people who did get in very early ended up selling probably
for a nice, you know, people that time is like, oh, you know, I'm up a couple hundred
percent.
Awesome.
I better, you know, take profits while I can.
And then inevitably those people, if, you know, there's someone like yourself who like
did see the value in this, you end up probably still trying to chase that original stack
that you're like, ah, you know, I wish I could get back to it.
But it's like, that's also part of the journey, right?
Like very few people saw it from the first time and just held the end more power to them.
Like that is a special, a special thing, but it's not the majority, you know.
You know, it's also, I think, a little unfair to look at it that way.
And I give full credit to those who were in early and help.
But the reality is it was a, it was a venture capital S investment in 2013 and before and
after, venture investments have a particular profile, which is, you know, one out of a
hundred work.
And so investing in general has to be viewed on, if you don't have unlimited capital to
invest, you have to view investing on a risk adjusted basis, right?
Like what are your potential returns for the risk you're taking?
What's the chance you're going to lose all your money versus make X, right?
And you can look at like a lottery at the extreme version of that.
You can buy a powerball ticket for a couple of bucks and win a billion dollars, right?
But you know, there's like a 99.999% chance that you're flushing your two dollars down
the toilet.
It's like a lot of these are attacks on the mathematically challenged, right?
So and then, you know, Bitcoin was kind of, it was that venture style investment back
then.
I would, I would suggest that day as we sit here today on a risk adjusted basis, Bitcoin
is a much better investment now than it was at, you know, $500 per Bitcoin.
The chance of Bitcoin when it was 500 bucks of Bitcoin or something, you know, 10 Xing
was really remote, right?
Very remote that Bitcoin was beginning, was going to become thus digital store of value,
right?
And now that dies kind of cast, I feel like Bitcoin has already won the digital store
of value and the chance of it 10 Xing and flipping gold is incredibly high.
And so I think that, you know, on a risk adjusted basis, people put their money and now we're
going to do absolutely terrific.
It's a better investment now than it was then.
I think that's such a hard pill for people to swallow.
Like I agree with you.
I think it just, it's like tough for people to wrap their minds around, right?
Because they see that it's at, you know, whatever it is now, like 90s, you know, 96, okay, it's
a rounding error away from 0.1 million, right?
And they look at that and they say, well, gosh, that just, that feels so expensive.
But then you look at it, even just like at it, if you look at an individual level, right?
We're at like, what, something around like, like, I don't know what you said, like 1%
Bitcoin adoption, like that may be, that may be even generous, depending on how you look
at the on-chain data and like it's tough to make an accurate prediction.
But we're at a, we're at the starting line of adoption still.
Yeah, I've had those thoughts personally, right?
It's like after you bought Bitcoin sub a thousand, it's very difficult to buy it at 100,000.
But you know, for a while that was difficult for me, like emotionally difficult, mentally
difficult.
And that all went away.
Like if I have money to invest and I want to invest in something that I have high confidence
is going to like 4X in like a relatively short time, I don't have anything else that's going
to do that.
Like literally nothing.
So it's like, okay, am I really going to pay $100,000 per Bitcoin?
Which I've done by the way, actually that's an exaggeration.
I think my last trade was at like 97.7 or something.
So am I really going to pay 97.7 per Bitcoin after having bought it at like 500 bucks?
Yeah, I am because I don't have anything else that's going to quadruple.
And I got to put that money into something.
Otherwise, the value of it's just, you know, the purchasing power is getting whittled away
at a, you know, seven to 10% a year.
Now, I think that's just honestly a great message for people that like, it's like,
to hear from somebody who has bought Bitcoin at levels that right now most people would,
you know, are salivating at thinking, you know, I wish I could have done it.
It's like number one, you probably wouldn't have.
Number two, if you did, you probably would have sold it.
And number three, like you're hearing it from somebody who has had this experience of doing
both, this is still a better risk adjusted play right now than it has ever been basically,
which is I think like that should give people heart, you know, especially young people who
have like a long investment horizon ahead of them, most of your life ahead of you, like
that's still a lot of time to stack sats.
And they're always going to be cheaper today than they will, you know, four years from now,
which is the other nice thing.
That's true.
Yeah.
It makes purchasing, it makes any material purchase very challenging, you know, mentally
or emotionally.
And, you know, I should probably, you know, get a new home at this point, right?
And it's very, very difficult for me to do that because I know if I just wait a couple
years that home is extensively going to be free, you know, so it's very challenging.
This is one that I'm personally struggling with right now because my lovely wife very
much.
She's been working right now and she very much wants a home and I'm like, baby, just
like give it like a couple more years.
If you're patient, I promise you we will get an even nicer home and it will cost us even
less in Bitcoin terms, you know, but it's tough.
Like you delaying that gratification is not easy, especially in this fiat world.
I'm going to stop in a similar boat.
Yeah.
So you know the struggle.
The struggle is real.
It's very real.
And I'm kind of curious too, because obviously, you know, we just talked about like the fact
that you're getting new cheerleaders on board for Bitcoin, let's say new members of the
Bitcoin marketing department, like the Black Rocks, the world.
Fidelity has obviously been been actually kind of a very vocal proponent for a lot longer
than most institutional players.
Abigail Johnson, right?
Correct.
Yeah.
She is the CEO in AIR.
And she was mining Bitcoin like early, like, you know, this is clearly somebody who got
it early and who was in a seat of power where she was able to, you know, make moves on this
and more power to her.
And I'm kind of curious from the institutional side of things, because you have a fund as
well.
You talk with a lot of high net worth individual or family office types.
Is the, do you see the, is their narrative shifting?
Are they asking new questions?
Are you hearing like, how have those conversations changed with more of this, like let's say,
institutional buy-in from the Black Rocks of the world?
Because obviously, like, Larry Fink is somebody that people pay attention to.
There's no way around that.
Yeah.
I mean, first, a little commentary on Larry Fink and Abigail Johnson, right?
There's a similarity between the two of them that's different than Jamie Dimon or the CEO
of Vanguard, right?
So what's unique about Larry Fink is he started Black Rock.
He is the CEO of Black Rock.
He does not answer to anyone, right?
And he is very independently wealthy.
Abigail Johnson is not just the CEO to Fidelity, but she is the heir to Fidelity as well.
And so these individuals who are free to think for themselves that don't serve at the pleasure
of the board, that don't have to worry about getting fired, those are the ones that had
the courage to look at this for first principles, form an opinion, and then they're not worried
about getting fired.
They're like, yeah, we're going to stand behind this.
This is the real thing.
And then you get someone, Jamie Dimon is not the right example.
I have a lot of respect for Jamie Dimon as a CEO of a financial company, but his entire
livelihood depends on not seeing this.
So not giving him a pass, but you understand why it's a little bit threatening to a company
that serves as the world's largest intermediary.
So you can understand why some CEOs get it, some don't.
The narrative has changed dramatically.
A few years ago, it was pretty much the same thing.
It was my son, my granddaughter.
Somebody in their family had been telling them about Bitcoin, that this is the real deal,
and they end up having a conversation with me because now it showed up in the Wall Street
Journal or CNBC, and it's got a little more legitimacy.
And maybe their kid or grand kid wasn't completely crazy.
And so they're kicking the tires a little bit.
And whether it was a conversation and they didn't invest or a conversation and they did
tip a toe, it's very different now.
Most of my family office clients now, their view is, tell me what I need to buy more.
They're stacking.
So some of these last dips, some of my bigger clients were sending capital, full conviction,
buying the dip, and it's like they really get it.
They've done the homework, they love it.
The other thing that's kind of fun and interesting is some of these folks have massive net worths.
And while their Bitcoin positions are very large in mine and your world, in their world,
they're not that large.
But it's still the asset that they're most interested in and have the most fun with and
pay the most attention to.
I have one of my clients.
I went to his home and put the price of Bitcoin on the lock screen of his iPhone so that
I could see the price.
And they get a kick out of it.
They like it.
The narratives have changed a lot.
Now they're proud of what they did.
They're telling their friends about these investments and more and more capital is coming
in.
Then they start hearing Trump talk about it, nation-state involvement, et cetera.
And boom.
Plus, they've now seen a lot of their friends crush it on their Bitcoin.
And so there's some FOMO too.
It's like you get a bunch of rich guys at a cocktail party talking about stuff and one
guy saying that he was up 26% for the year.
And then one of the guys in the group is like, oh, yeah, I was up 125.
What?
So FOMO's real are around among that group of people.
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Now, I mean, that's interesting.
And I suppose it is certainly undoubtedly a more exciting investment than most that
kind of group may be used to.
I'm curious too, because one thing I wanted to get your opinion on, just as somebody who's
been around for a while also is just intimately familiar with the kind of corporate strategies
that we're seeing unfold, right?
So we've, because you mentioned kind of founder-led or founder-CEO, owner-CEOs like
Fink, like Johnson, like Michael Saylor, who was obviously, I think it's fairly famous
at this point that you kind of gave Saylor the orange pill that started him on his journey
after much insistence for a while.
And then he kind of came around to it.
We can all be handed the orange pill.
We have to take it ourselves, I think.
But he's also obviously a founder, CEO, and chairman of the board now, excuse me, but at
the time CEO.
And you see others like Eric Semler with Semler Scientific.
You see, I mean, what is it?
Genius Brands, another one.
A lot of these micro-strategy kind of copycats, and I say copycat in a positive way, because
clearly it's a strategy that's working, they tend to be kind of founder-led, founder-controlled,
founder-controlling interest, whatever companies, oftentimes smaller, because again, the founder
still has that control.
Do you think that that, at least in the short term, is kind of the, is that going to be the
kind of barometer for whether a company has the potential to put Bitcoin on its balance
sheet?
I'm interested in that to say like an Apple, where you've got basically a hired CEO, Tim
Cook, he's not a founder.
Do you think it kind of requires at this stage right now, just because of the career
risk to somebody who's not a founder CEO, does it require that sort of corporate makeup
in order to make these sorts of decisions about Bitcoin right now?
It does require that.
I think what's more unique about Semler and a micro-strategy is, and the other companies
that have adopted Bitcoin to date, with the exception of some of the miners, they kind
of had their back against the wall.
Semler was a single product medical device company whose product lost adjudication from
insurance companies and was kind of a zombie company.
Micro-strategy was a business software company that was competing against the likes of Microsoft
and Salesforce.
They were sitting on a pile of money, $500 million, something losing by Michael's calculation.
As he said, $50 million a year in purchasing power at 10%, and the company was trying to
make $50 million a year.
That's a treadmill.
When you've got 2,000 people busting their ass to make $50 million a year and you're
losing $50 million a year of purchasing power, he was looking for stores of value so that
wouldn't be the case.
I think what those companies had in common was a degree of desperation.
There are many, many thousands of companies in that situation.
That necessity led those companies to be adopters of Bitcoin.
The peace about them being founder-led in both cases meant that they were able to get
it done.
It's very hard to get it done if it's not a founder-led situation.
Similar time I think had voting control of my strategy, Eric had tremendous influence,
had similar scientific.
They were able to pull it off.
It's more challenging in companies where that's not the case.
I think the first wave is companies that really need Bitcoin, and then the next wave is companies
that want and benefit from Bitcoin that may not need it.
Apple doesn't need it.
They're going to be just fine.
Google doesn't need it.
Microsoft doesn't need it.
But they'd all benefit greatly from it, really greatly.
I think that wave is coming.
Same thing applies to nation-states.
I think the US may be an exception because of Trump's foresight, but there are nation-states
that need it.
If you have a fiat currency and your currency, whether they're like 160 fiat currencies out
there, there aren't going to be 160 fiat currencies 50 years from now.
They're just all right.
There's going to be some very small fraction of that.
If you're a turkey and your currency is going away, Turkish lira is going away, you would
benefit from printing a shit ton of Turkish lira and buying as much Bitcoin with your
fake money as you could and backing it.
There are a number of countries in that situation, much like the companies that were early adopters
out of necessity.
I think we'll see nation-states clamor in out of necessity as well.
I would agree with that.
One more thing, because I want to talk about the nation-state side of things a little bit,
one more thing I'm curious of is, do you think that maybe right now these companies that
are larger in a very comfortable position don't have the necessity?
Do you think the necessity ends up being created by enough other companies putting Bitcoin on
their balance sheet where it starts to look like a bit of a breach of fiduciary duty not
to have the best performing asset in your treasury?
There's definitely a game theory component to it, but there's also a real life theory
component to it as well.
If you're a big tech company and you're not a monopoly, but you're a duopoly or an oligopoly
and you have competitors, if one of your competitors were to buy a crap ton of Bitcoin and you
didn't, right?
And Bitcoin 10Xs and now this competitor that you may have been substantially larger and
more successful than has more capital than you do, that gives them a tremendous edge.
That's a way for your competitors to leapfrog you.
So I think you will see companies buy Bitcoin when they're competitors do just as an insurance
policy, right?
It's like, well, Samsung bought a ton of this, Apple doesn't really want to, but maybe they
better just to protect themselves, make sure they don't get a chance to leap from them.
I don't know about you, but in terms of very large companies that do have a pretty significant
market share, Facebook looks more and more likely.
Not because of Facebook specifically, but because of Mark Zuckerberg's, let's say, recent
transformation into appearing to be slightly more based.
I don't know.
I mean, I think he still has controlling interest in Facebook.
He does.
He said that on the Joe Rogan podcast.
Yeah.
I think Facebook is likely, I think, from what I've heard, Mark is a pro Bitcoin.
And you have to remember that these big companies, the last thing they want is a target on their
back from the United States government.
And you start dabbling in something or putting something on your balance sheet that the sitting
administration might take exception to, you could bring a whole bunch of heat on that
you don't want.
And if you watch Zuckerberg's interview on Rogan, you can see the type of scrutiny he
was getting.
They were just looking for stuff to nail him on.
And who knows?
They could go after him for any number of AML, KYC, Bitcoin-related things that they make
up.
So I think that kept a lot of companies out of it.
But once it's kind of accepted and clear and embraced, I think you'll see big companies
embrace it.
I think Mark's a big fan of Bitcoin.
I think Elon's a big fan of Bitcoin.
I think Mark has a goat named Bitcoin, if I'm not mistaken.
That's what I've heard.
I don't know if that was just a meme or if he actually has a goat named.
I mean, great goat name.
So you mentioned just like this, if we all know the past administration, the Biden-Harris
administration was undeniably hostile towards this industry.
That is a fact.
They didn't like us.
Yeah, that's putting it very mildly.
And I think, do you feel kind of a vibe shift right now in terms of where, I mean, we've
got the Trump inauguration, what is it?
It's the 20th.
So less than a week away.
He's obviously, I mean, he was in Nashville, clearly, you know, Sailor, I think, posted
something from Mar-a-Lago recently.
Like clearly the Trumps, how deeply Donald himself is thinking about this, maybe who
knows, but I seem pretty clear that his sons are definitely have gone a little bit deeper
down the rabbit hole.
How do you think this starts to shake out?
Well, he's thinking about it.
Yeah.
I think Donald's thinking about it himself quite a bit.
We went from being very much out of favor to being in control.
If you look at, you know, the cabinet picks, we've got a lot of very big pro-Bitcoin people
in there.
You've got RFK Jr., who is obviously very pro-Bitcoin, free to money.
You've got Howard Lutnick, who's going to be Secretary of Commerce.
I say going to be assuming all these people are confirmed, right?
You've got a Secretary of Treasury who is not only pro-Bitcoin, but owns Bitcoin, right?
They had to disclose their holding.
So you've got an incoming SEC chair that is bought in Atkins that's very pro-crypto,
pro-Bitcoin, and is going to, you know, get rid of Sab-1 21 Day One.
You know, and from what I'm told, secondhand, you know, Trump didn't say it to me, but to
someone I know, he looks at the price of Bitcoin every day.
And he thinks of the price of Bitcoin the way presidents have always looked at the Dow
Jones Industrial Average, or S&P, as kind of a barometer of what people's financial
emotional state is, right?
Stock markets up, people are happy, right?
Kind of thing.
And Trump views Bitcoin as that barometer for younger generations.
So he looks at the price of Bitcoin every day.
Every president wants, you know, the populace to be economically happy and sound.
And so, yeah, I think Trump, you know, has a vision of making the price of Bitcoin go
up so that these younger generations are happy.
And he said it.
He said it many times, you know?
He said, don't sell your Bitcoin.
He said, you have no idea how wealthy your Bitcoins are going to be.
I mean, you know, the man doesn't mince words.
He speaks pretty clearly.
So, and then, you know, the picture you alluded to, Eric Trump posted a picture of he and
Michael at Moralago where they had dinner and the caption was, and this is Eric Trump's
caption, not Michael's, the caption was, two friends, one passion, Bitcoin.
So it's pretty powerful stuff.
You know, Eric Trump was on stage at Bitcoin conference in the Middle East saying, you
know, Bitcoin's going to a million dollars.
Almost seems like maybe he, he knows.
I mean, I agree with him just, you know, Bitcoin's going to do what Bitcoin's going to do.
But it almost seems like maybe he's talking more near term.
I mean, how do you think?
I have no idea.
But it's clear to me that they understand the value proposition of Bitcoin.
They respect the people who are mining Bitcoin.
It's a big deal.
They respect the hollers of Bitcoin.
You know, Trump, Trump, you know, what was, I forget his exact name.
His exact words when he spoke in national.
But he was saying, you know, he was talking to the audience and he basically said, you
people are the innovators of this age.
You know, you are, you know, you're, you're this revolution, you know, and I think he
had genuine admiration for the people in that room and called out a few of them by name.
So, you know, I think the admiration is real.
I think it doesn't hurt that, you know, Bitcoiners and crypto enthusiasts supported him financially.
I think Trump was really astute, whereas the Biden administration and Kamala Harris were
really stupid in the sense that there are zero votes to be had for being against Bitcoin
and crypto.
And there are tens of millions of votes to be had for being in favor of it.
And at the end of the day, politicians want to get elected, especially if it's for something
that they think is good for people.
Something that is a very, I mean, if you are claiming to support freedom and American ideals,
you should support Bitcoin.
If not, I guess you don't like freedom very much is kind of how I would, how I would look
at it.
Yeah, I think we'll have north of 290 members of Congress that are pro Bitcoin and pro crypto,
which is pretty extraordinary.
I mean, it's a pretty, just because it does feel like these last four years, especially
there's been such an all out war from, I mean, you know, led by folks like Elizabeth Warren
and her, I don't even think she had an anti crypto army because again, like, there's the
number of people who are vocally and doggedly pro and enthusiastic about Bitcoin absolutely
dwarfs the number of people who are vocally and vehemently against it and think it is
evil.
The majority of people are just indifferent at this stage, I think that that's fair to
say.
But like to your point, it's like, yeah, you're going to get votes and donations by being
pro Bitcoin.
You're not really going to get any of that by being anti.
Like that it just doesn't shake out that way.
There are a number of people in government who say that government knows best and government
should be bigger and leave all the big decisions to us.
We will take care of all you people.
And there are other people in government who think that, no, this country was founded upon
the principles of freedom and independence and individual sovereignty.
And they rightfully acknowledged that Bitcoin is a tool to help those people achieve that
independence and sovereignty and therefore embrace it.
So they just have different views on the role of government and what they want for the people
in this country.
One thing I wanted to circle back on, because you mentioned SAB 121.
Can you talk about that just a little bit for people who don't know what that is and
just like what the context of why that was important and what Biden did to kind of quash
any hope at fixing that in his term?
Sure.
So banks make money by lending out money, right?
Fractional Reserve Bank, right?
And the last thing they want to do is have to like hold money in the bank itself.
And so SAB 121 came from the SEC and Gary Ginsler, which said, if banks want to custody
Bitcoin or crypto, they have to hold dollar for dollar reserves against it.
So if you want to hold a billion dollars worth of Bitcoin, you have to hold a billion dollars
in US dollars in your bank.
That's a billion dollars that you can't lend out and make money on, right?
So no bank is going to do that.
It's like a death blow for banks holding crypto.
And so Congress took this up and there was a vote in Congress as to whether or not Congress
agreed and this should be okay.
And I think it was generally assumed that the Republicans would say, yeah, banks should
be able to custody crypto.
This holding reserves is a bunch of BS.
And Democrats would fall in line with what the Democrat SEC chair Gensler's guidance
was, which was, oh no, no, banks have to hold these reserves.
And what happened was something different.
The Democrats voted along with the Republicans and against SAB 121, right?
And that's because the Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi's of the world, their constituents
are the banks too and the banks wanted to custody crypto.
And so when it looked like this might pass, Biden said, if it makes it, you know, Gensler,
right, you know, presumably there was some conversation between the administration and
Gensler and, you know, Gensler obviously said, you know, you need to veto this.
And Biden said, if this makes it to my desk, I'm going to veto it.
And sure enough, it passed, made it to his desk.
And then at the 11th hour in the middle of the night, he vetoed it.
Trump saw this and saw the uproar and was like, wait a minute, he's like, there's like 30
million votes for people who want this shit.
Like this election is going to be decided by less than 30 million votes.
I want those votes.
And that's when Trump came out really strong for Bitcoin and crypto, which was a genius
on his part.
And you know, the Biden administration panicked and said to Gensler, hey, you're going to
lose us this election.
We just lost the crypto vote.
You need to get us our crypto vote back.
And the only thing that they had that they could do was the Ethereum ETFs were pretty
clearly getting rejected by the SEC.
And there was none, you know, before the Bitcoin ETFs, there was a ton of conversation between
the lawyers and the SEC working out little details.
And then they got approved.
Right.
There was none of that with the Ethereum ETF.
It was dead silence.
They were getting rejected.
And then pretty much overnight, they got approved.
That was the Biden administration's way to try to get back the crypto voter.
So yeah, that's what happened there.
And now we've got, you know, apparently Trump said it.
I've heard Paul Atkins has said it as well.
If and when he becomes chairman of the SEC, that day one, Sab 121 is going away.
And why is that so massively important?
It's so massively important because, and it's not going to start right away, banks are not
in a position to custody Bitcoin tomorrow or crypto tomorrow, but they will start putting,
you know, the technology in place to do so.
And once banks can custody digital assets, then what you'll get is you'll be able to
borrow against your Bitcoin.
You'll be able to borrow against your other digital assets.
You might even get paid interest on those assets.
Right.
And that is what is going to enable these assets to go up so dramatically in value when people
don't have to sell them for liquidity.
It's like, oh, we're talking about buying a house.
Want to buy a house?
Okay.
Leave my Bitcoin and JP Morgan and let me borrow against it at 7%.
I'll take 7% money all day with an inflation rate that's higher than 7%.
Right.
Like, I get to ring the register.
It's great.
So, yeah, and you don't have to sell your Bitcoin.
So I think that's going to be a massive, massive catalyst down the road for US dollar
price appreciation of Bitcoin.
I mean, it's going to be really interesting to see if you remove so much of that, the
need for that basically liquidation, right?
You remove the need for people to do that by being able to borrow against it.
Not everyone is going to want to.
Not everybody's, you know, a lot of people are going to say, no, I'm not, you know,
putting my, not giving my Bitcoin to JP Morgan and borrowing against it, you know, screw
them, screw the banks on my own bank.
And that's fine.
Individuals can freely make whatever decisions they want.
And that's how it should be.
You know, I'm curious also, we're at this interesting time right now where obviously
individual adoption is still, I think, very small.
I mean, even institutional adoption is still really small as a, just a total percent of
the wealth that is out there in the world.
Do you have something in mind for like, is there like a next big Bitcoin adoption milestone
that you see?
I mean, I mean, is it like a nation state?
Is it like a Bitcoin strategic reserve?
Is it something else?
Like what are, is there a benchmark you're looking at where you're like, ah, this is
like the next chasm we need to cross?
Or is it just kind of this slow like step by step at this point?
You know, I don't think about it in those terms anymore.
You know, in my mind, the big things were a path to legitimacy.
Right?
It was, when we started down this path, it was, is the US going to outlaw this?
Is this going to be viewed as a legitimate asset?
Right?
And that was the, that was the big chasm that we needed to cross.
And I feel confident that we've crossed that chasm and we're not going back.
Now it's about the merits of Bitcoin and Bitcoin and other digital assets.
You know, the other digital assets will be provided a framework and a path to legitimacy
as well.
And now it's about whether or not those assets have value and they're, and, and, you know,
we've got our shot.
We're legitimate now.
We're not a thing for criminals.
People understand the merits of it and Bitcoin will either rise or fall based on its merits.
So I think it's just a natural progression.
I don't think there are any massive milestones.
I don't think a strategic Bitcoin reserve is necessary.
I think it would be good for the US.
I don't think it matters to Bitcoin.
There will be nation states and countries around the world that adopt Bitcoin at a necessity.
I think Trump has signaled that the US is going to be a leader in this and he wants
this to be the home of innovation in the center of it.
And I think that's terrific and smart.
But you know, we're going to get there on our own merits or we're not.
I feel confident that we will, but yeah, no more, I don't see any big milestones in that
sense personally.
And you know, Bitcoin doesn't care, right?
It's just still producing blocks every 10 minutes doing its thing, right?
Exactly right.
I mean, the future is unpredictable and you never know what's going to happen.
But as the world sits right now, I think the die is cast and it's pretty clear that Bitcoin
is the winning digital store of value.
And it's hard to envision with what's known right now that that gets threatened in any
material way.
Quite the opposite.
It seems like, you know, that all the headwinds that we had are now tailwinds.
It's kind of a, it's almost a strange thing where you're like you're fighting, you know,
so used to fighting against something and then all of a sudden it's like the detractors
become proponents as well.
Like it's weird.
It feels like it's like some sort of a trick, you know, but you're like, I guess it's
very unsettling.
It's very unsettling.
Yeah, that's a good word for it.
It just, it feels wrong.
Like you need, you want something to kind of buck against.
I mean, luckily there are still plenty of people out there who are repeating the same
old tropes ad nauseam.
When you have something to fight, when you have an opponent, your mission is clear.
When your opponent goes away, it's kind of like, well, what do we do now?
We're just kind of sailing with the wind at our back.
This feels a little strange.
We should be paddling.
You know, we should be like, you know, so yeah, I mean, I certainly not complacent in
any way.
Nothing is guaranteed in life and Bitcoin, Bitcoin will always seem to take the path that's
most interesting and most anxiety inducing.
But if you zoom out, we're doing pretty well.
Yeah, it feels nice to, you know, I know Trump said you're going to get tired of winning,
but winning does feel pretty good.
But I agree.
It's not, you don't want to get complacent.
Don't want to, you know, I trust governments as far as I can throw them and they're pretty
big so I can't throw them very far at all.
But that's the, you know, the beauty of Bitcoin is that, hey, you've got optionality.
You can trust a bank or trust a government or not.
You don't have to trust anyone at all.
It's kind of the whole thing, right?
Exactly right.
So, Aaron, I want to be conscious of your time here because we're coming up on an hour.
One thing I wanted to ask you that's just basically you are, you know, you were able
to orange pill, I think what most would argue Michael Saylor as the basically the biggest,
who is now the biggest Bitcoin bull probably, you know, in the world, like clearly is put
his money where his mouth is and then some and is doing everything he can to acquire
as much Bitcoin as possible.
You were part of that orange pilling journey, like a pretty vital part.
And I think there are a lot of people out there who are like, wow, you know, Eric orange
pilled Michael Saylor, like I can't even orange pill my family.
I can't even orange pill my girlfriend, my wife, whatever.
So I'm just, I'm just curious, do you have any, any advice for people who are trying
to maybe bring family members, significant others, whatever they might be around to Bitcoin
and are finding it challenging?
Yeah, it is challenging, right?
Because, you know, if you look back at the last hour of what we discussed, you know,
there's the Bitcoin cliches, people get Bitcoin at the price they deserve.
But the reality is people get Bitcoin when they need to get Bitcoin or when they're in
the right mental state to get Bitcoin.
I brought up Bitcoin to Michael for years and years prior and she was not at all receptive
to hearing about Bitcoin, right?
He was running a company with 2000 people.
It's like he didn't, he didn't need this stuff.
He had enough on his plate.
And so, you know, the lesson there is be polite, be cheerful, be constructive, be persistent.
And when someone says they're not interested in hearing about it, respect that.
Don't beat him over the head with it.
You don't want to create an adversarial relationship.
And when the time comes that you bring it up one day like I did with Michael and instead
of, you know, changing the subject, he just said, okay, tell me more about this Bitcoin
stuff.
And, you know, that set off a multi-week conversation.
But, you know, be there, be prepared so that when the person that you're trying to orange
pill is ready to see it, that you can provide them all the information you've got, you can
provide them resources to get more information and help them orange pill themselves, you
know, but you got to just, you got to be constructive, polite, persistent and respectful.
People are not idiots because they don't get it.
You know, they just, people have stuff going on in their lives and people get things, you
know, when it's time for them to get it.
If everybody has a little bit of humility, you'll realize that you didn't get Bitcoin
the first time you heard about it either most likely.
So, you know, give people some praise.
And, amen to that.
I certainly did not get Bitcoin the first or the second time I heard about it.
And I think it's a good point too about like people need to be in a place where maybe there
is a little bit of necessity.
You know, they're starting to realize that they have a problem or they've identified
the problem and that they're looking for a solution and that they haven't found it yet.
And maybe that's where it's going.
Certainly in a first world country, you know.
Yeah.
I mean, Mike and I have some very wealthy friends who are a little bit like Apple, you
know, in the sense that we talked about, they're going to be fine whether they buy Bitcoin
or not, you know.
They may be less fine than their peers and, you know, but they're going to be fine.
You know, I had lunch with a friend earlier this week who had sold his company for an
awful lot of money and he doesn't invest in anything.
He literally just leaves his money in cash and his attitude is, I don't want the anxiety
of something going up or going down or needing to think about it and I'm going to be fine
either way.
I pointed out to him that, you know, it's going down.
Your money is going down and if you're okay with that, that's fine, but make no mistake,
your purchasing power is going down.
So but yeah, you just got to respect people and let them get there when they get there.
Ultimately they will get there.
Ultimately they will.
Easier said than done for many of us Bitcoiners who can't help but to talk about it.
But I do find that the longer, long I get in the journey, the more I realize, you know
what, you're like, you trying to be a come in as a savior with Bitcoin is not perceived
the way you think it's perceived most of the time and you've got to give people a chance
to come around.
Totally.
And I'll give you another angle too.
At this stage, there are no shortage of people who genuinely want to learn about Bitcoin.
We don't need to convince the people who are opposed.
Spend your time educating the people who want the education.
There's plenty of them.
Yeah, that's honestly a good point.
That's why we need ever more Bitcoin podcasts also until we have more Bitcoin podcasts than
Treadfy podcasts.
We don't have enough.
Even though there are quite a few already.
Keep kicking ass Walker.
Eric, thanks.
Do you want to send people anywhere?
I'll put your links in the show notes.
No.
No, not selling anything, man.
Just a good time.
You can follow me on Twitter if you like or X, whatever my handle is there.
I don't know.
Anyway, whatever it is, you can put up there.
But yeah, just keep fighting the good fight and educating people on Bitcoin.
Man, well, appreciate your time very much and the wisdom and looking for it.
It's cold up here up north.
I'm going to have to make it back to Miami again soon, I think.
Come on back down, man.
Be good to see you in Carla.
All right, man.
Cheers.
All right, brother.
Take care.
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