Why Bitcoin Will Take Over the World - Prepare Now In 2025 To Build Wealth | Arthur Hayes

Arthur Hayes, welcome back. Thanks for having me. Glad to be here. Dude, always a pleasure, especially at this point in the cycle. I think today's episode is going to be a lot of fun. And I want to start with why are you predicting that the Trump presidency could potentially print up to 10 trillion dollars, possibly taking Bitcoin as high as a million? So, I think it goes back to very simply, and I don't really think this is a Trump thing. If Harris had won, her team would have done something similar. It may have looked a bit different, but the effect would have been the same. At the end of the day, Trump campaigned on a pro-growth policy. He wants to bring back industry to America. He wants to reinvigorate the military. And none of this can happen if the majority of, you know, goods produced in America were intermediate supplies are coming from China. Not to say there's anything wrong with China. It's just that the entire American industrial base depends on stuff coming out of China, whether that's refined rare earths, whether that's, you know, you know, supply parts, or whether that's finished products in and of themselves. And so, you've seen sort of a decline in American industry starting in 1971 when Nixon took the US off of gold standard, sort of went into hyper drive in 1994 when China devalued the yuan and started a very concerted mercantilist trade policy. And then 2000 was the coup de grâce when the US allowed China to join the World Trade Organization and gave them essentially tariff-free access to the largest consumer market in the world. And China, to their credit, was very, um, diligent and built up an industrial base that at the present moment has the highest quality goods at the lowest price. And we've seen that in the automotive industry. I saw a chart the the day. It was, um, percentage of China Chinese cars in the global sold globally I think about 20 years ago was 1%. Today it's 40%. If you go and I live in Asia and so you you go around the major cities you see the BYD cars they're excellent. They're beautiful. They run well and they're cheap. And so even if you have a massive tariff on a Chinese automobile it's still the best price car at that price point for that particular amount of quality. And so they're they're the country to beat and so Trump is campaigning on we want America to have the type of manufacturing jobs that probably people on this program or their parents or grandparents had in sort of like 1950s to you know early 1980s sort of thing. Okay, so why does that lead though to the need to do 10 trillion? Is that he is he going to do things like the Chips Act where he's going to specifically pay companies to build manufacturing here in the US via tax breaks and things like that? Yeah, so essentially US is going to copy the Chinese model which is uh state sanction either cheap credit through the banking system or tax credits or direct subsidies. So Trump needs to make it economically feasible for an American a European or even a Chinese manufacturer to say okay instead of building my factory in China Vietnam Mexico whatever I can build it here in America and this good is going to be price competitive with anything globally because I'm getting these massive government tax breaks or subsidies or I'm getting extremely cheap credit. And so I wrote an essay about this and I went through the how the money moves through the banking system to basically show that what Trump was going to do was allow the US commercial banks to issue credit which is essentially creates money and they'll do this because it's profitable because companies have the simplistic government backstop of subsidies, tax breaks, even tariff protection. So, it's exactly the same thing that Japan and China did to elevate their economies post World War II. And so, if you take a look at the amount of money that is needed just to reduce sort of the American debt to GDP down I I think I forecast on the similar 80% from the 130 that it is today, I estimate it could be in the magnitude of 10 trillion. Obviously, I don't know the exact number, but that's the direction of travel. If you think about the amount of implicit credit that needs to be created, that needs to be given to American or American, you know, owned factories in America to do the things that Trump wants them to do, which is make goods in America, decouple the supply chains from China. All right, given that they'll be using the money theoretically on productive things like manufacturing infrastructure here in the US, do you still think that it's going to have the kind of inflationary impact that a million-dollar Bitcoin would predict? Absolutely, because at the end of the day, the first amount of money that goes into doing these sorts of things is used productively. And then it gets out of hand because the company goes, "Oh, I have I'm the only one who could get cheap credit. I've done all the things I can do to bring all the production that makes sense economically on shore and to America, but because I have this special and credit arrangement with the US government and its banking system, I'm going to start going into the financial sphere. So, whether it's property or it's trading stocks or it's stock buybacks, and so the credit is always misallocated. You could take a look at China as a poster child. You know, the credit was absorbed in a profitable way, you know, probably from the 1990s up until, you know, mid-2010s, but then that was the development model. They didn't know how to change from something else. The credit kept coming. The banks kept giving, you know, state-owned companies and those were in the in the approved industries credit. And what do they do? They bought apartments. They became, you know, real estate developers. They were putting their stock in the stock market. Um and doing all these sorts of things, buying trophy assets in the United States and Europe, wineries, like, you know, large buildings, all these sorts of things. These companies had no business doing that, but they had the cheapest credit in the world and therefore they were going to use it. And their investors expected them to use it. And the same thing will happen in the US. The first amount of credit will be used productively and then it'll be misallocated. I like to think that a 100K Bitcoin is the demarcation point of where any naysayers it's just dead. Like that conversation is over. You've got your straggler in Peter Schiff who's just not going to let it go. Uh but it it really seems like that argument just doesn't make sense anymore with the level of institutional adoption that we have, uh the height of the the amount. Um so for it to get to a million dollars, where is the the capital flowing? Is it purely from people that are aware that inflation is happening or is this a continued cultural momentum of adopting a new asset class? So the first thing people need to understand is that the the price on the screen is the marginal price of the last trade. It's not every trade that's happened. And so it's the simple example is how do you become a trillionaire? Well, you create some fictitious company with a trillion shares and then you sell one of them to your friend for a dollar. Now you're a trillionaire, right? The marginal price is a dollar on a trillion shares, therefore you're a trillionaire. So I'm not saying that there needs to be, you know, a million dollars traded every day at that Bitcoin price. I guess it's one dollar to trade at a million dollars and that's a billion dollar Bitcoin. And that informs our psychological perspective on what we think Bitcoin is worth. So with that in mind, what I'm talking about is the marginal flows into Bitcoin. Well, the supply of Bitcoin is fixed. We know 21 million will ever be produced. However, as you have people like BlackRock, Michael Saylor at MicroStrategy, long-time holders like myself and others, people who are just getting into the the game now and, you know, believe in a future path of Bitcoin over the next 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 years, are they going to sell? Why would you sell Bitcoin for fiat currency if you implicitly believe that the US government and every other major government is going to increase the amount of that fiat currency ad infinitum? That's the reason why you got into Bitcoin. So, as the price rises, there's less people who want to sell it. And if we have this institutional adoption through the ETFs and other sort of corporate uh finance and vehicles, those are sticky uh forms of holding, which takes supply out of the market, which means it's very easy to have a very exponential rise in the marginal price of Bitcoin, the last traded price of Bitcoin. And so, I think that's one facet of just how a microstructure of a market works when you have a fixed supply and a holding base that doesn't want to sell it against an asset that can be infinitely debased. And then the other side, you have the the United States trying to reshor- reshore industry issuing credit. You have China has a property bust and they want to protect their industry and they're starting down the path of quantitative easing. They just recently announced that they're okay with allowing their currency to depreciate because they believe it's going to help them in their fight against the the new Trump 2.0 tariffs. You have the European Union statesmen like Mario Draghi and Emmanuel Macron openly saying that we need to print more money to revitalize the European industrial base. And you have Japan which continues to run the easiest monetary policy of any major developed nation. So, if you take a look at the entire world in terms of the largest four countries and economic blocks, they all are printing money for various different reasons. That's only going to continue. It's accelerating, in fact. And so, we have a supply diminishing supply of freely traded Bitcoin with an expanding supply of fiat currency looking for a home. And if we believe that more people are changing their mindset to say, "Okay, crypto, it's survived 15 years. It's going to be here for another 15, 20, 100 years, whatever. I feel okay thinking that this is going to be a store value. I can use it to pay for things when I need. Therefore, I'm going to take two, three, four, five, 10% of my retirement income or savings and I'll start buying this asset. And so, all these things come together and that's what creates a marginal price of a million dollars per Bitcoin. How fast do you think we get there? I I don't know. Three, three to five years. Now, uh you had called in one of our earlier conversations, you had called a 100K Bitcoin which at the time I remember seemed very aggressive. Do you feel like you were pretty bang on with the timing to get to 100K? Yeah, roughly. You know, December-ish where here it's 100 104,000 or whatever it is. We'll see what it ends at the end of the end of the year when people do their sort of tax optimization sort of things. But, I think, you know, out of the many predictions that I've gotten wrong, I got this one right. Well, yeah. I mean, look. I don't think anybody's going to get them all right. But, directionally this one seems like you've had your eye on it for a while. Uh so, when I talked to Michael Saylor, he really looks at Bitcoin as like a physical law of nature certainty that money wants to go from high entropy where it can be inflated, there's all kinds of chaos happening to effectively the price. I don't know if he'd use that word, but certainly he uses entropy and that it just naturally wants to go to a low energy state where there's less manipulation of the currency where it's it's going to be more static from a buying power perspective. Do you see that same inevitability? Do you look at this as a physics problem or is this the inflation cultural problem from your perspective? Well, there's a I think the economic economist who made it's a Gresham's law. You spend bad money, you save it, you hoard good money, right? So what's the bad money? The bad money is fiat currency, US dollar, euro, yen, Chinese yuan. What's the good money? Bitcoin, gold to some extent. And so what are people doing? They're spending the fiat. They're saving, they're hoarding the Bitcoin, the gold, right? So I think that's called it Gresham's law. Could be mistaken on that. So yeah, you could put in a physics term, you can put it in sort of an economics term. You can take a look what happened in sort of like Weimar Germany during their hyperinflation during the 1930s in terms of people got their their their marks, they spent them as quickly as possible, but they were also hoarding gold because they knew that it was a real that was a real money at that time. So we're seeing the similar sort of thing just starting today. And yeah, Sailor can put it in sort of a physics terms, but I think it's sort of a a social cultural norm. We've seen this before. Every time any major civilization has failed and they always print money, they always debase the currency whether you're in a gold standard or not. It's the same thing over and over again. If you read enough history, it looks the same, it feels the same. Mhm. The reason I delineate that is if this is a physics question, then Sailor's idea of getting cuz he puts the base case over the next 21 years that Bitcoin's going to hit 13 million. I don't know how you feel about that number, but for him it's you can create inputs and outputs and see how rapidly the money is going to go from sort of that bad state of fiat into the more sound physics money of Bitcoin. So, he likened it to a waterfall and it's like once the water starts pouring over the edge, you know, as long as the water line is above the channel for the waterfall, it is going to drain out back to a equilibrium. It is a matter of physics for him. Whereas if it's cultural, then we are still open to what I heard Raoul Pal refer to as the path of most pain because this is the the thing that scares me when I look at this. Saylor is it's ballsy, man. Don't get me wrong and I'm as inspired as anybody else seeing what he's done, but nothing seems guaranteed in the future. And so to treat it like a physical certainty, I don't know, man. I just I don't have the cojones, I guess. I I mean, I think you have to take Saylor with a pinch of salt and understand where his position is coming from. He is essentially issuing dollar denominated bonds and, you know, I guess the infinite supply if he can, and and buying Bitcoin and every 3 to 5 years he needs to roll over a certain portion of his debt. And if his stock price is below the conversion price of his convertible bonds, he might have an issue. So, yes, he wants the market to believe it's a physical certainty because then you're not going to question the ridiculous price that you're paying for his stock. I'm more in sort of the the cultural phenomenon sort of camp. We're humans. We're going to over in the short term we're going to say, "Oh, wow, you know, Bitcoin's a million, 100 million, whatever the number is. This is a physical certainty. This is the last cycle ever." You know, you hear these sorts of things on on the internet. But the at the end of the day we'll get ahead of ourselves. We'll we'll forecast some crazy dystopian scenario, some crazy hyperinflation, and then if you start to underperform the craziness, then the price of Bitcoin looks a little bit high. Maybe it comes down a bit. And so, I think that um markets go up, markets go down. We as humans were over-optimistic and over-pessimistic. We're not at that stage yet, but I definitely could see it at a point in the cycle where there we believe that there is no way that fiat currency could ever fix any of these problems, therefore Bitcoin is going to infinity. You'll hear people saying this is the last cycle and all this kind of nonsense. And then the price will dump 90%. So, I am more in the sort of cyclical nature of of markets. That's the physical certainty in my respect based on human nature. Yeah, I uh I think the safer bet is definitely on the human nature side. But I mean, look, shout out to Saylor. Obviously, at at this moment in time, he looks phenomenal. It's unbelievable what he's done. So, I'll use my words. I I have a feeling he wouldn't love this description, but the way that I look at what he's done with the MicroStrategy stock, to what you were saying, is he's basically taking taken a normal stock with a treasury and Bitcoin, layered a casino on top of it so that people can come in and play whatever risk game they want to play. If they want the ultra-high vol, he's got stuff on leverage. And so, the the volatility there is just absolutely whiplash manic. And so, for people that want that extreme volatility, they can be in there. also got things where he's stripped out a lot of the upside, but also a lot of the downside, and people can get into that. And so, it's I mean, that move alone, almost regardless of what happens to Bitcoin in the long run, the genius of being the first Bitcoin treasury mover, layering that equity's component on top of it, which is what I refer to as the the casino, uh brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. Yeah, absolutely. I think from a as somebody who loves, you know, finance, what he's done in sort of a corporate finance situation with his convertible debt, how he's termed it out, how he used his access to the, you know, corporate debt markets in, you know, the United States to be able to issue 0% uh coupon convertible debt is genius move. Uh he needs volatility. That's what you're trading. So, go up, go down, Bitcoin needs to move. If Bitcoin stops moving a lot, then the MicroStrategy trade might get into a bit of trouble, but again, I wouldn't worry about that now. That's 3 to 5 years sort of down the road situation. Right now it's it's a bull market, so, you know, when the when the music's playing, you got to dance. No doubt. All right, talk to me about the dance. So, high volatility. This was something that I didn't really uh appreciate nearly enough. Volatility seemed bad. I liked that the government was stripping volatility out of everything, but the more that I listened to you, the more I realized that volatility is the game. Uh that if you're trading, that volatility is the light around which all the moths gather. Explain volatility to us. Why is it good? So, at the end of the day, what is life? Life is risk, right? Every moment that we exist in this universe, you know, I wouldn't go so far as to say this, but some people say the universe is trying to kill you, right? You enter this world, We all we all lose, man. Whether it's trying or not, it gets us. It gets us in the end, right? And so, at the end of the day, we're trying to make these calculations all the time about how do I structure my life so that I can survive longer in this universe. And so, at the end of the day, I'm I want to have a strip of bets that where the upside when I'm right is, you know, greater than what I pay to take that bet intrinsically. So, our life is a strip of options. And so, the more volatile the situation, the more valuable the option. But, the game name of the game is how do I pay the least amount of premium as possible in life so that I make decisions where my, you know, getting it right pays me more and sort of, you know, feel good things versus what it cost me to to take that bet. So, we live in a volatile universe. Volatility is our friend. Suppressing volatility is not natural. And so, a government says, "Hey, I, through my ability to have, you know, legalized violence and kill people because they don't follow my rules, I'm going to protect you. And so, let me smooth out that life curve for you. Do what I say." Is is is essentially the name of the game for for any type of government. And there is some benefit to that, but take it to the extreme, which is what, you know, central banks have done over the past, you know, 50 years or whatever it is, then you start to get into this unnatural state where the volatility is so low relative to what the natural just ebbs and flows of life in this universe are. And then things just blow up, right? And so, you think you're safe, and then you get a 2008 housing crisis, or you get, you know, the European crisis of 2011, or you get the regional banking crisis in the US in 2023. And these are all symptomatic of governments saying, "We're just going to print a bunch of money and suppress volatility." But, volatility is natural. We want volatility. We want to construct a situation where we have volatile upside outcomes with capped downside. And that's really the goal. And so, that's what, you know, Bitcoin and crypto really represents is there's this outcome where all the fiat money in the world needs to come into Bitcoin. Obviously, that's not going to happen, but I think you can think of that as sort of the extreme example. And your cost is the price that you pay today for Bitcoin. So, some people paid a dollar for Bitcoin back in, you know, 2010, and if they held on, now it's worth 104,000, right? But the most they could ever lose was a dollar. And so, why wouldn't you take that bet? You You know how much you're going to lose. It's the amount of fiat currency that you sold to buy Bitcoin. And so, you can sort of self-select your risk profile based on your own situation. But there's always an amount of money that you can really to lose to earn the 10,000, 100,000, million dollar X return on something like Bitcoin. Let's take a quick break from my conversation with Arthur Hayes to discuss something every business owner needs to hear. 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Where people go wrong is when they hear volatility, they think it's a one-shot. As in, "Oh, either this goes to zero or it goes up to 104,000." But that's not the volatility that traders seek. The volatility traders seek is, "I want high vol in a day. I want it to whiplash up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down rapidly." And that way, here's how I read volatility. I want that rapid whipsaw up and down because I'm smarter than the [ __ ] that panic sold when it went down, and so I know I'm going to buy low and sell high. And the reality is that um most people are the buy high and sell low guy. So, given that hard fact of life, are people foolish to like the high volatility? Well, people are foolish to like the high volatility and have a high frequency of trading. So, what you described is somebody who is actively trading in a very volatile situation. I'll make an There's a very simple example. It's called volatility drift. This is why you should never ever ever buy any leveraged ETF. They're terrible products. I should know, I've structured many of them. So, you essentially If I take something that's 100 So, that's a nominal price of 100 and it goes down 10% goes down to 90. And then I go up 10% I go up to 99. So, I've on an arithmetic basis gone down 10% gone up 10%, but I'm down $1. Right? That's volatility drift. And so, when you're day trading in and out in and out in and out or using these products that are sort of these daily volatility resetting products, you're exposing yourself to what we call negative gamma or volatility drift. And that's not good. But, if you say I'm a buy and hold type of person, you're the the Warren Buffett type of person, and you're going to compound over time by systematically trying to reduce your total your your expected loss if you get it wrong, but just keep keep staying in the game. If you stay in the game, then over time you should do well. But, the more you trade, the more money you lose. And that's just a fact. And so, I think the fallacy is, "Oh, I like high volatility. I want to go to the financial markets casino and start trading." And then obviously, you fall prey to the simple nature of like, you know, as humans we have no idea what the future holds. And so, trying to trade on sort of like a very short time frame is a recipe to lose all your money. Of course, there are these few traders out there who are the stand out exceptions to that. And then they're sort of paraded across the financial mainstream media as, "Oh, look what this guy did, you know, he turned $1,000 into a million dollars day trading every day. Here's his system. Do this. Do that. pay me a bunch of fees, right? So, day trading, unless you're very, very good at it, you will lose all your money. And yes, the volatility is makes it fun. So, if you approach it as an entertainment situation, like you go to the casino, you're going to play craps, you know you're going to lose money, but it's fun. I'm going to have some drinks, hang out with my friends. Approach financial markets and go, "Okay, I'm going to go trade on my on my brokerage account, on my crypto account, or whatever trades the meme coins. I'm having fun. My price of fun is the thousand dollars that I'm going to lose over time, but it's fun because I know, yeah, maybe if I get really lucky, it could turn into a million dollars. But over time, I'm going to lose a thousand dollars." Yeah. Uh I think that's actually the accurate way to think about most of the uh certainly the stock market, most of finance in general is that and the more I study finance, the more I become convinced that this is all a game of gambling. Uh and it's just a level of sophisticated gambling. I won't derail us on that cuz I really get soap boxy about this. Ha. Uh but I would just like to quote what you just said a second ago. The more you trade, the more you lose. Now, I don't know how much trouble that's going to get you uh for distilling it down like that, but I think it's really important for people to understand that. All right, I want to keep going on volatility. So, what is it that makes for volatility? Is it somebody panics and sells? Is that the only thing that pulls the price down? Well, the price can go up, too. So, I think people associate volatility more people wanting to a finite thing. But what I want to understand is to the downside, what what makes something cuz when somebody says high volatility, you're never going to get an only up. Obviously, everybody wants that. They want the only up volatility. I get it, that's the fantasy, but that's not the reality. So, high vol traders are all for something that whipsaws up and down. So, I want to know, what causes the down? Cuz I think it's someone losing. Yeah, so uh it's it's basically the the fear of loss and how you feel about losing money is more is stronger than the amazing feeling when you make money, right? So, I'm more afraid of losing the $100 than making it than the the joy I feel when I make the $1,000. And so, as the fear of loss kicks in, oh [ __ ] I need to make sure that I have this capital. Oh, that was my car payment. That was my mortgage. That was my kids' college fund. Maybe I shouldn't have been yoloing on on that meme stock. Let me just get out of this right now to like make sure that I have that these some of that capital left. And that's the natural human reaction which causes you to just like jam that sell button as soon as you see things aren't going your way. Which is obviously not what you should be doing. You should be able to wear the up and the down volatility and equanimity, but that's not human nature at the end of the day. Yeah, so this is why anybody in my community that can hear me speaking, as long as you understand that high volatility means when it goes down that's somebody losing. It's somebody panicking that they've already actually lost or they are actively losing or even worse they've been liquidated and so it all goes to absolutely zero if they were trading on leverage. So, seeking out high volatility is to seek out maximum pain. Someone in there in in the high volatility there are people losing and running for the exit. And as long as you understand the more you trade, the more you lose, great. If you see yourself as somebody playing craps, I love it. But man, when I talk to my own employees, uh which gearing up for this episode I had people walking in because they were listening to us prep uh for our time together. And so, once we started talking about altcoins, all of a sudden people are here. they're like, "What's that alpha man? You talking to Arthur? We want to hear about it." And I'm just like, "Guys, I need to know that you know the game that you're playing." And as long as you're treating this like a weekend in Vegas, I'm here for it. Uh but if you're not, I get scared. Um two things. Do you know Have you heard the Bruno Mars story? No. So, the story goes, I cannot verify this, but there are people online verifying it saying they were there. So, he's doing uh a stint at uh MGM performing. And basically people are saying he's an indentured servant because he lost I think 52 or 53 million dollars at the casino. And then when they called him, he said, "I I can't pay it." So, they said, "Well, guess what?" Yes, you can. Yeah. So, I mean, look, it it's rumor. I can't verify it, but it's one of those where people are talking pretty openly about, "I was there. This is what happened." Uh that that's the kind of thing that you can end up in real trouble. These these losses can stack super fast. Um okay, so that was just a a fun bit of uh info. But, now I want to talk about um uh Murad. Do you know him? Yes, so I We We're on a podcast together maybe a few weeks ago or a month ago. Yeah, so I'm familiar with him. We We uh chatted for a bit. It was very entertaining um chitchat. Okay, so he's got a new theory on meme coins and how they really do offer utility. And he has a very interesting take on what they are. Um before we get to that, what's your take on meme coins and altcoins? Uh what do you think is going on? And are they heating back up right now? So, number one, the authorities globally are trying to restrict volatility and channel you into their preferred investment products, which are government bonds, which you know, we can talk of ad nauseam about this, are intrinsically going to be debased insanely amounts. They want you to go into the, you know, super safe, you know, bond fund that's going to get crushed by inflation that they have to use to write their balance sheet. So, that's what they want you to do. But, people are like, "Fuck this. I I want to be exci- I want something exciting. I want something where I believe that the game isn't rigged." And so, you get the GameStop situation that started to kick off in, what was it, 2021 in January. Now, we have meme coins, which are intrinsically all worthless. No one's out there saying they're worth anything. They don't have no utility. They do nothing. They literally are just a manifestation of human culture that we can trade. And so, what is the most important part of human culture? The parts of human culture that everybody is participating in. Has the most attention. So, when you're trading meme coins and a lot of altcoins, you're trading attention. Is this community able to grab more and more attention of the world, of the investing public? Is there their joke, their video, their image, their tagline, is it catchy? Do I hear more and more people saying, viewing these memes? If so, okay, I'm going to buy this particular meme coin, and it'll go up in price as the attention that it garners increases. And then, obviously, all cultural things diminish over time. At some point, that cultural artifact becomes irrelevant as the zeitgeist changes, and then it falls precipitously in price. And so, what meme coins are are it's essentially humanity, human culture, attention economy encapsulated in this 24/7 trading market that anyone with an internet connection can access. And that's what they are. And that's why they're so much fun to trade because it's the first time in human history where literally, oh, I saw that on social media, my friend was talking about it. I think more people will talk about it in the future. Therefore, I will buy this meme coin today because I know others will buy more of it tomorrow. The very succinct summation and I think that that is really an orienting mechanism for people. Meme coins are useless. It's tradeable culture. What I want to make sure people don't miss in what you said is that while they may not have utility, it doesn't mean that it's not fun to get in and trade. It doesn't mean that this isn't a huge moment with billions of dollars flowing in and out of it. That's what I think Murad, I think that's how you pronounce his name, has really summed up. He's got this idea of PvP meme coins, aka hyper gambling versus PvE meme coins, aka cults. And just the idea of using gamer technology to speak to the people that are really playing this game. And I think that is it's very important if you want to understand this moment. So, I will research with my producer or build out an interview with my producer often times here on set, which means that the team can hear us. And it's pretty rare that people will walk up and want to listen in. As soon as we started talking about meme coins specifically as it relates to you as sort of the king of meme coins, we had people come in. And so I went around to each of the people here at my company and was just like, you know, do you trade meme coins? Do you trade meme coins? And most of them were yes. One or two were like, I don't even know what that means. Um They could play in the stock market. They could go to the casino. What is it about meme coins? Is is it the sense that they can win the game? That they can outsmart people? Like why are meme coins supercharged? They were in the last cycle. I can feel it building up again in this cycle. There's something that really grips people. Well, the first thing is that true meme coins you know, the are non-PVP, meaning there's a a team anonymous team, whatever. They in this cycle it's pumped.fun on Solana, which is the main conduit which you launch any thing. They put out 100% of the supply on day one. They launch a pool on radium or one of these decentralized exchanges. And anyone can get in at ground level. There's nobody who got in before you who has a whole entire financial services system set up to dump on you, which is what the stock market is. You know, the people who capital formate in the private rounds for the most promising technology companies in the in the least in the last 30 years are the ones selling to you on IPO day. And obviously they're going to do whatever they can to get you to buy at an inflated valuation. Now, sometimes you get a Facebook. And sometimes you get a pets.com. Right? But at the end of the day you will never become Marc Andreessen. You will never become Peter Thiel. Because those guys got in when Facebook's or the type of companies when they were selling at, you know, $10 million valuations, $20 million valuations. You will never get that deal as a retail investor. You get the $10 billion Facebook deal. Well, now maybe $10 billion goes to a trillion. But imagine if you got it at $10 million to a trillion. Obviously there's a lot of risk. I'm glossing over that like VCs are taking a lot of risk uh in the early stages. But they've got an entire ecosystem of laws, regulations, intermediaries set up to make sure that they're as successful as possible because they're going to make sure that retail cannot participate in the most promising companies early. They can only do it late. And so everybody intrinsically understands this. This is what This was the whole angst about why are these, you know, hedge funds able to short these stocks and do what's essentially possibly illegal things and that, you know, Ken Griffin calling the exchange, you know, I'm I'm sure he didn't do that, but, you know, shutting down the trading of these stocks because they're too volatile, because there's a bunch of these legacy institutions are going to lose a lot of money. Like, people intrinsically understood the stock market is was rigged. They saw it explicitly in action in 2021. And now you have this crypto thing where the best meme coin projects are ones where everyone could have gotten in on the ground level. There is no There's no insider who got a better deal than you. If you saw it first and you were able to act quickly, you got in to, you know, dog with hat at a very low valuation or Pepe or um Harambe or some of these other um very successful meme coins. You could have gotten the 10,000 X return. You will never get that return on the next Facebook as a retail investor. And that is the meta narrative that's powering people to say, "Well, [ __ ] the stock market, [ __ ] the bond market, [ __ ] all these coins that I wasn't able to get in early if I was willing to take that risk." I want to take the risk. I want to try to hit the 10,000 X return. Because if you look at it on a mathematical basis, it's actually um expected value positive. Because you're investing in Facebook at the IPO, the stock dumped like in the 75, 80% over the last in the next 2 years after the IPO. You're already down 80%. The meme coin you bought, the, you know, that has is intrinsically worthless, could also go down 80%. But, Facebook will never return you 10,000 times. The meme coin can. And so, you actually are from an expected value perspective better off punting extremely risky meme coins than in buying at the top of the market extremely risky from a market perspective new technology companies. So, that's why meme coins are a thing. They're going to continue to be a thing as more people learn about decentralized exchanges, about browser-based wallets, about how to move their fiat dollars into a token that represents those fiat dollars like an Athena, Tether, or a USDC on Circle on chain. They're going to be doing more of this style trading and they're going to demand from teams that they reduce or eliminate the ability for insiders to get a deal better than them. If you want my participation in your community, if you want me to talk about your product, if you want my attention, then you need to give me the same deal that everybody else gets and I'm going to take the same risk. And I could lose all my money, but I also can make 10,000x. So, that's meme coins what it encapsulates to me as a as a movement as we sort of get more comfortable being completely on chain and sort of disintermediating all of the financial intermediaries that take a cut and restrict access only up until the time when they want to dump on you. All right. So, the question becomes then is this a child's tantrum and these are just people annoyed with the current system or is this a new system that the the youth is building from the ground up? I think it's a new system that the youth is building from the ground up. Once you start trading meme coins and having 24/7 access to your money, it's very difficult to go back to trading stocks at, you know, 9:00 to 5:00. And you see that the stock markets are realizing, "Oh [ __ ] okay. We didn't want to do 24/7 trading, but it's happening. We need to get there cuz our competition is this crypto thing where they could people can trade things when they get off of work, when they're on the subway, when they wake up in the morning, wherever they feel like trading there's a market. We as the legacy stock and bond markets need to meet the customer, the Gen Zs, where they're at. They want 24/7 trading. They want app-based trading. They want intuitive UI UX. We need to give it to them or they're never going to trade this my stock again. And so yes, you're going to see 24/7 trading. You're going to see more Robinhood type interfaces that are going to allow retail traders to get the sort of look and feel that they get on a sort of a a DEX in crypto or, you know, how you're trading on pump.fun in in meme coins. So, we're going to start seeing legacy finance mirroring what's going on in the in the crypto and decentralized finance space because the youth wants to trade and invest differently than, you know, the boomers. That is really interesting. So, I'm going to start putting a couple pieces together. So, here's what I just heard. Meme coins are worthless. They're not real. Yet, they're very real because they are capturing cultural energy of the youth who have realized the system that they have stepped into is rigged. Um I want to put a point on the way it's rigged. This was when I first began to realize that the system had such deep flaws that people should be very angry. I became accredited investor when I made a ton of money and I was like, but I don't know anything about investing. So, this seems now unfair to me that I now have access to deal flow and opportunities that the average person doesn't have who may know 10 times 100 times more than me about investing. So, to your point, the traditional system has like all this before it IPOs thing, which is where I I shudder to think the percentage of the upside that is captured before it IPOs. Like if you took all of the market over the last 100 years, uh it's going it's so wildly disproportionate to the people that are in before the IPO, which the average person cannot be a part of. Uh so, now you see see youth sort of do these start and stop movements. So, first they try Occupy Wall Street. They don't really know what they want. It doesn't go anywhere, but you can feel the rage against the machine. Then you get uh the GameStop movement where they realize, "Oh, wait a second. We can actually use this against these guys, and we can make money." But like there was such an ethos of don't sell that the one hero to come out of GameStop was the guy that didn't sell, right? So, even though he wrote it all the way up and all the way back down, he was a hero because it was like this this real bottom-up youth movement. But then that becomes and I know that meme coins were happening at the same time, but that becomes the meme coin movement, which I think now was really gaining legitimacy in the youth culture via the mechanisms you're talking about, which is we're not going to let people in before us cuz originally meme coins were still like that same sort of corrupted system of there's a layer of people that are getting access to this before you, literally VCs, driving the price up through a bunch of hype, and then it would just stair-step down from there. Not stair-step, it would sort of spike up and down as people would pump and dump as they say. Uh but all the value was captured before it went live. And so, now seeing the movement become not the distracted movement of Occupy Wall Street, but the very concentrated movement of I see an opportunity to build a new system, and that new system is going to be totally equal. The the token gets launched to everybody. If you're a VC and you want in, you got to buy in the market just like everybody else. Um that's very interesting. But the thing that matters most to me is the way that it it is the emperor's new clothes, where finally the nature of trading is revealed as gambling, full stop. And that's been something I've had a really hard time convincing people they want to layer narrative and all this on the top of it. The market is gambling in in a very refined fashion cuz I'll grant you that all of life is gambling. You once said to me walking up the stairs taking the elevator versus walking up the stairs is gambling. Fair. But it's not refined gambling in the way that the stock market is. This new system, meme coins, is like the the cut pure cocaine of gambling. I mean, this this is a shot right up the nose, man. Uh it is really really fascinating. What do you think is going to happen with all of that explanation? What's going to happen this cycle, Crypto Haz? People turn to you. You've got a good read on this stuff. What's going to play out? Everyone knows you can't predict the future, but you've got a a good ability to read the room. What's going to happen? Well, meme coins is an asset class, you know, the all the VCs are starting You know, I get all these you know, deal with it. They get messages. I got one overnight. Hey, we've got all the major KOLs, you know, do you want to like invest in this particular meme coin? X and X and Y market makers on board. X and Y, you know, high-profile VCs are on board. And we're going to launch launch this coin. So, we're starting to see that because we as traders we've got, you know, a large capital base. We need to be where the market's at. The market is meme coins in this particular type of capital formation. And so, now you're seeing starting to see people to to ape these particular type of things. Now, the problem with that is when people like me are launching a meme coin, I know it's going to fail cuz I'm not the culture. The culture is the man or woman who's sitting in their basement angry or sad or happy or some sort of emotion about something talking about it with their friends on Discord or Twitch or whatever and coming up with the culture. I am not the culture. I'm a consumer of the culture. I cannot dictate what the culture is. And if people like me with money are trying to dictate the culture, I guess that that's going to go to zero immediately. Not that Not that the other one's not going to go to zero, too, but at least that's grassroots bottom up and has a little bit more authenticity than a bunch of rich people saying I'm going to create a meme coin and yeah, it's going to go up in price. So, all I All that is to say that this is a thing now. People realize that there's money to be made. One of the most profitable decentralized applications this cycle is pump.fun. They make something like, I don't know, 5 to 20 million dollars in fees every every day uh in terms of when you're launching these six. And so, we in the investor community, we know this is a thing. We know this is how the market is going to evolve. There are going to be, you know, meme coins that are going to approach the valuation of Dogecoin, right? Dogecoin's the original meme. It does nothing stated by the founder of the thing. And now you have, you know, a a potential department in the United States government with the acronym of of DOGE just cuz it's funny and and memeable, right? And so, if you have government officials getting into this game, then it's only going to get bigger. That doesn't mean the meme coin that you own is going to go up in price. There's going to be a a system, I don't know what that is. You know, I I'm just a punter. I'm just a gambler. I guess like you when I trade these things. But there will be a few standout success meme coins that are, you know, 50 to 100 billion dollar market cap things. There'll be a few of those. And then, people will be chasing those and most of them will By the next cycle, they'll still be meme coins, but the memes that were around this cycle will be cents on the dollar and worthless. So, again, it's going to It's going to get more silly. I don't know what the the most silliest meme coin thing is going to be this cycle, but it'll be pretty obvious in hindsight, but we won't know what it is when we're in the moment. And how would you advise somebody if they were going to come to you and say, "Look, uh Arthur, I know that this is just gambling. I'm just having fun. I'm probably going to end up on the negative side of this, but I want to have a great time. But I I do want to do this with a thesis. Um what thesis would you give him? Just like Blackjack has like rules, you hit on this, you don't hit on that. You can obviously ignore them, but what rules would you give uh a meme coin lord? How should they How should So how do I mean this is how I approach when I start trading these things. So number one, I'm always late. I don't ever want to be early. I'm not trying to be early. Do you guys there are the the people that are early, meaning they get something really cheap, and it does the 10,000 X. But you've got to invest in a lot of things to hit those because you're not you're not sure what, you know, what $10 million market cap meme coin is going to grow to a billion. Very, very difficult. So if you look at the stats from pump.fun, and I might be getting these things off by order of magnitude, but the number of meme coins that are between 100 million to 1 billion dollar market cap is something like 0. 01% of all launched meme coins this cycle. The ones that get from 1 billion plus, there's probably less than 10. Right? Of all the I don't know, it's probably 10,000 or so, 100,000, whatever, a number of meme coins that have launched between, you know, where the pump.fun has been around, the last what, 18 months, something like that. So the meme coin market is very Lindy in to talk about Nassim Taleb's terms, right? What has been successful What's valuable in the past is more likely to be valuable in the future. So I want to play in the $100 million to $500 million market cap coin. If your coin can get enough attention to get to that market cap, then I'm going to bet that you go to a billion dollar plus, right? So I'm looking at a, you know, two to 10 X return, but it's very unlikely that the 100 million 100 to 500 million dollar market cap meme coin goes down 95% very, very quickly because it's already got this inbuilt community and the momentum building. So, it's it's Lindy in the in the meme coin space. So, that's when I want to place my bets. Tell me when something's above a $100 million market cap, where am I hearing about it? Who's telling me about it? Which sort types of influencers on Twitter or in the certain chat rooms? Okay, I look at the chart. I like I like things that have made higher highs. It doesn't matter if it dumps, but did it dump? Did it retake the high or did it get in a smidgen did it get close but then fell fell again. So, I want to look at the chart and through charts I can read human emotions. Is this emotional roller coaster petering out or is it a healthy expansion in the future? And that's how I view sort of meme coin trading and I'm okay losing money. Cuz again, what am I trying to hit? I'm trying to hit a two to 10x. That's my goal. I want a $100 million meme coin to a billion dollars. If it goes from $100 million to $50 million, I'm probably just going to cut it. Fine. If it goes from 100 to 250 to 500, I'm adding. I'm adding to winners. I'm cutting losers. And so then I'm building a position as it goes up. I see it get to a billion. Do I think it's going to go to 10 or 20 or 30? Maybe, but I had a plan. I executed on my plan. I'm probably going to exit the market. Again, I'm not trying to hit a 10,000x. I'm trying to hit a two to 10x with cap downside in terms of how I'm going to close my positions. So, I'm very methodical about it. And I know that I have no intrinsic skill at this because again, I'm late. This isn't what I do for a living. I'm not in the chat rooms all day. And so, it needs to be something that comes up through just my general living and talking to people within the industry, but something that's hot. And when you talk about the Lindy idea, which I can't remember if you defined it, but Lindy is the longer something has existed the the likely it is to exist into the future. Um but does that cross cycles or given what you said about last cycles ones being sort of pennies on the dollar this cycle, is this all sort of tied up in we have the this goes in cycles for anybody hearing about this the first time. So it'll go in a cycle where it's like up up up only up. Oh my god, it's going to go on forever crash and then there's like some period of time often measured in years before we get back and the energy builds up again and and that's very much where we are now. I can feel the energy building back up. Does the Lindy cross or would you say eh, if it was big in the last cycle ignore it is not going to be big again look for the new stuff. So I am on the opinion of look for the new stuff and I only want to I only trade meme coins when I like the macro situation. When I like the money printing situation, the the pace of it, the feeling about it, the talk about it. But then okay, it's time to trade meme coins because again I'm very risk averse. I want to make my 10x return in a matter of weeks. I don't want to be sitting there with this coin that I know is intrinsically worthless that will just naturally lose attention because we're humans. We want to know what's the new thing? Where's the culture moving? I don't want to be, you know, stuck in the 90s and the naughts, right? And so at the end of the day, I want to make sure that the market's in a going up mood. So I I wake up in the morning and oh great, my thing's up 20%. Oh great, it's up 20%. I'm in going up mode. I do not want to be in going down mode or sideways mode cuz at that point in time, there's better uses of my capital. Now it's time to look for value. Okay, who's building something, you know, real where I know that the price that they're selling it at is very cheap relative where it's going to be when we're in going up mode. I I shouldn't be trading meme coins. You shouldn't be trading meme coins at least in my perspective, you know, in 2022 or 2023. Reason why Maelstrom my fund has done so well is because we were investing in the depths of the bear boring market. Now we do very little early stage deals. It's all what's going up. Tell me what's going up. Tell me where the culture is. We're in going up mode. I want to be on that. I don't care about the fundamentals of what I'm buying. I know most of this stuff will not last in the next cycle, but the liquidity is at my back. We're in going up mode, so I need to dance. So let's buy stuff. So that's how I view the trading landscape, but again, I'm very loss averse. I don't want to lose money to a large extent, and so I limit my bets to things and I limit my time frame to something I'm comfortable with. And every that's different for everybody. This is like anti-value investing. I love it. This is uh absolutely fascinating. Uh so you said that you're not in the chat rooms. The people that you see be successful with meme coins are I'll say it as a statement from my side, you tell me if you've seen the same. The people that I know that have done well-ish, obviously there's no guarantees here, but that have done well-ish in the last two cycles with meme coins, live in the chat rooms. For them it's all about that sort of backroom energy, what's hyped, what's that early alpha, uh who gets the sense that there's cracks in the narrative that maybe this isn't going to play out, and so they know when to take their chips off the table. I've been in groups where people will literally say, "Okay, are we we buying now? We selling now? Like what are we doing?" And they're trying to coordinate in blocks. I think partly to It actually doesn't feel like they're trying to pump and dump. What it feels like is they don't want to be the last man standing. They don't want to be the last one to realize that we're going to sell. They don't want to make a dumb decision. If everybody gets out together, then they feel less dumb if it goes up, and if um everybody stays, they feel less dumb if it goes down. And then if there's wisdom in the crowd, then they're able to take advantage of it. But it feels like if you're not doing that, odds of you keeping your finger on the pulse are very low. Would you agree with that? Absolutely. I mean, to be a crypto day trader, if you want to be a stock day trader, a forex day trader, options day trader, pick your financial asset class. If you If this isn't your full-time job, you will lose all your money. It just period. If you're not putting in the work, then you will not get the reward. If you can't do that because of your mental predilection or your full-time job, then be more of a buy and hold type person. Doesn't mean you can't trade meme coins, but you know, maybe you want to trade something with a little bit more Lindy. Maybe you're not in the chat rooms buying the $1 million $10 million market cap coin thinking it's going to go to a billion. You're buying the $500 million market cap coin that goes to a billion. Yes, it returns less, but it's less likely for you to lose all your money very quickly. But a $10 million market cap meme coin could go nowhere very quick. It can go down to one very quickly as well. So, I think people need to like self-select their lifestyle for what they want to achieve in trading. If you're not If you do not have the lifestyle to sit in front of a computer screen all your waking hours, have alerts on your phone, and all this kind of stuff, which is fine. I don't do it. I don't think that's fulfilling, at least for me. Then don't do it. And then change your trading strategy. But don't think you're going to be, you know, I got on the subway in my 45-minute, you know, commute home, I'm going to trade some meme coins, I'm going to quit my job next week. Like that ain't happening. Mhm. All right, I want to read some of um the things that were listed, I think by Murad, that were listed as the utility of meme coins because I really um I'm finding this narrative that you're talking about very realistic, very compelling, very revelatory of the flip in the system that I can feel coming. I knew eventually the youth would take over, and this might be the way that they do it. Uh so, here is the the meme coins offer a lot of utility slide. I'm just going to read a few of these. Uh having fun, loneliness reduction, identity, finding a similar crew, hope provisioning, friendships, being a part of a cutting-edge culture, a sense of belonging, uh a guild in the MMORPG that is crypto, and on and on it goes. That's That's less than half of them. But, it's a pretty interesting idea because that reads like a cultural phenomenon. It does not read like a financial phenomenon. Uh, and that feels right for the youth today in terms of how socially connected they are, how they feel rejected by the system, how it's it is inevitable that they're going to inherit and thusly take over the system. Now, do you think that this is going to um happen under Trump? Is he going to accelerate this? Is he going to block this? Uh, what does that look like? Are meme coins going to get crushed out of existence? I think Trump is just a representative of the times. So, more like a I take more like a a Hari Seldon sort of approach to things, if you're familiar with the Foundation series by Asimov and and psychohistory, which is like individual people don't have that much of an effect based on just the way that history is moving, right? People think that Trump is the one causing all these, you know, terrors and changing American economic policy and all these sorts of things. And my my belief is that Trump is just a representation of something that would have happened anyways. He might be a very bombastic representation of that, but the America that he's inheriting is because of things that happened 80 years ago or 50 years ago or decades in the making or whatever countries have done with their particular set of policies decades ago up until the present. Trump's just a very loud voice box of things that are already happening. And so, I think that what Murad describes has nothing to do with politics. It's If we're going If we educated a whole generation on their smartphone, and I know there's been pushbacks on that, and you know, we have pre-teens on social media. Obviously, people are saying that's a really bad thing. Doesn't really matter. They're connected in this way. Okay, well, are they going to express themselves financially in the same way that a boomer who didn't get a mobile phone until the, you know, late 1990s cuz they were so expensive? Um, had to, you know, call their friends on a landline back in the day. Didn't have email. I I think they can express themselves financially different than the generation that's running things. Of course. That's that's that's human nature. If you read Was it Howe and Strauss and the Fourth Turning and sort of how generational cohorts move throughout history together? You know, every 80 years we have sort of a reset because, you know, the people die out. There's a new generation. They have a new technological software that governs how they how they act interact with each other. And that manifests itself through the culture, through financial services, and and all these sorts of things. And so, I don't think Trump Trump is irrelevant to this whole phenomenon of a social media connected generation, whether you think it's good or bad, who lives on their smartphones, whose best friend might be, you know, 1,000 km away, and they communicate in chat rooms and Twitch and video games and all these sorts of things. They're not going out into the park and communicating that way. Or to restaurants or to a bar in the same ways that I may have or uh, my mom or my dad may have, right? So, I think this isn't a Republican, Democrat, or pick your left, right political sort of sort of thing. This is how have we brought up this generation, Gen Z? How are they going to express themselves financially? And now, what do we have? We have sort of this We have boomers with all this wealth. They need to sell it at some point. Does the youth want to buy what the boomers are selling? That's the question. Yeah, I think the aggressive answer that we're seeing from them is no, they don't. Uh there's just too much financial isolation. They they have been iced out of a system that through the mechanism that that you've written about a lot and you touched on briefly here of the way that money gets into the system, how it side steps people. In fact, I think it's worth going into. You wrote an article about how a dollar gets into the system when the Fed is buying assets, when they're injecting capital into the system. Uh if you don't mind, walk us through how does money get to the rich and make the rich richer and what would it need to look like for the money to get to the the plebs, uh as you lovingly call them, so that people can understand a bad system when they see it. Yeah, so quantitative easing, I know we have these new terms for it, but it's been around for a very very long time. The first quantitative easing episode happened with the Bank of England, I don't know, like I forget the particular financial crisis. It might have been the um collapse, it was a collapse of the one of the major trading companies. They got overextended the few wars over in in the in the colonial period. The Bank of England stepped in and printed money to bail out this this company and that was some maybe 17th century, something like that. But quantitative easing, printing money to right size a financial ecosystem is not a new concept. We just have new terms for it. But at the end of the day, what is fiat money? Fiat money is created either by the government spending it to an existence or the banking system creating a loan which creates a corresponding deposit. So with that framework in mind, what happens when the Federal Reserve buys bonds? It's quantitative easing. Essentially, what the Fed does is they say, "Hey, JP Morgan," and that was the example that I used, "I'm going to credit you a deposit on my ledger and I'm going to take this bond from you or one of your clients. In the example I use BlackRock. BlackRock sells a bond to the Fed. The Fed uses JP Morgan as an intermediary and now JP Morgan has a corresponding deposit at the Fed. BlackRock now has a corresponding deposit at JP Morgan and the question is what does BlackRock do with this new money, right? If all the government is doing is printing money to buy financial assets, does that inspire confidence that there is an underlying demand for money from the people? The people who are with the most propensity to spend? Of course not. We know that rich people have are rich because they've satisfied their shorts in life. They have a house, they have a car, they have food to eat. They don't need to buy any more stuff. What do they buy? They buy financial assets, stocks, bonds, more real estate or they buy trophy assets, nice watches, expensive art, all these sorts of things. And so the example that I illustrated in the essay was taking a dollar, I've taken a safe financial a government bond that pays an interest rate, I've taken that from the financial from a rich person. I've given them money. What does a rich person do? Okay, well I don't have the bond anymore that paid me two or three percent or whatever it is. I need something else. I go out and I buy stocks. Or from a company, I do a stock buyback. Why would I increase production and take operational risk when my when my my base customer didn't get any wealthier because the government printed this money and bought these bonds. And so what I go out through the show is that quantitative easing creates no or very little real economic activity. No one's going out and buying stuff. What happens is you give rich people more funny money and what do they do? They go and they buy more stuff that they think they want. Watches, cars, art. If you give it to a company, their end customer didn't get any wealthier so they're not hiring any more people because why would you hire more people when they don't have any more money? You buy back your stock because that enriches your very wealthy shareholders better than you taking risk and trying to offer a new product. And so quantitative easing doesn't increase the growth potential of an economy, it just increases its indebtedness. And so if you take a look in the United States for example, 2008 until 2020 the the QE period, the debt to GDP rose to something like I want to say 30 or 40% to 120% or whatever it is, but it's that sort of magnitude of you increase the debt and you did nothing for the underlying economy. That's what I call QE for rich people. So, uh QE for poor people means that okay, well instead of giving this money to rich people to buy stuff, how do we incentivize those who want to consume, I mean you know, the 99% of the economy or 90% of of the workforce to do that. Well, the government needs to spend the money into stuff. So, in 2020 what happened, right? There was the COVID thing. Um and Trump was called cautioned by his advisers, maybe erroneously so, that he needed to shut down the economy. And so he said, "Well okay, that's really bad." He's a business person obviously. Shutting down the economy is not good. People lose their jobs, blah blah blah. How do we get people not to revolt? Okay, we're going to hand them money. So, Trump did helicopter money. Probably the most redistributive financial policy since uh Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s with the New Deal in terms of what he did for people in America in terms of how printed money was handed out. So, the Treasury mailed everybody a check. As a lot of you listeners know, they got the the stimulus check of a few thousand dollars in the mail, whatever it was. And so it wasn't means tested. If you had a job, if you didn't have a job, you got a check, right? And so what did you what what did you do? You went out and you bought stuff that you wanted. Cars, washing machines, you know, got a fancier haircut, whatever, right? Went on a nice foreign vacation, okay? Meme coins. So Exactly. Meme coins, Bitcoin, if you had if you were if you had enough of that stuff. But at the end of the you gave money to people who needed to buy stuff. And so they increased the consumption of goods. What happened? Cars were sold out. You went to you know, I don't know. Is Sears still a thing? Went to the department store and you bought a washing machine. Oh, [ __ ] The one I wanted isn't here because everybody else in the country now is able to upgrade their lifestyle and buying these things that they want. Oh, guess what happened? Now that there's all this demand, you actually saw loans to small businesses by non-too-big-to-fail banks, so the regional banks, their the amount of loans they issued in the 2020 to 2022 period was above trend. Because the businesses had customers who had money to spend and they were out of product, so they needed increased production. And the bank was like, of course, I will lend you money to go and increase your production, hire more people, pay your staff more. And so we saw all this economic growth because the Fed printed money, the Treasury spent it into the economy, and instead of it going to very very rich people in terms of the the money, it went to everybody in America, and then they all decided, I want to buy something, whether it's a good or a service. And obviously there wasn't enough capacity in the system. The capacity expanded. So you saw nominal GDP growth accelerate rapidly. And from 2020 to 2023, you saw a debt-to-GDP actually decline by I think 10 or 15 percentage points. So QE for poor people is inflationary, as we know. Inflation went up. However, from the government's perspective, it deleverages their balance sheet and it allows everyone to participate in buying stuff. Except, rather than just, you know, the top 1% of rich people who own financial assets, who get richer, you know, trading stocks between themselves or, you know, expensive houses. So, these are the two systems and the way that a money is created. The bank created money because it lent money to businesses to expand. It gave you a personal loan because you had a solid job because employment was up because there were people were buying more stuff, right? So, QE for poor people gives the banks the ability to profitably issue more credit, which increases the money supply. It decreases the velocity of money. It increases growth gross domestic product. So, it's very good for the government. The bad thing is obviously inflation, which we're experiencing in the United States and in other places around the world. But, these are the two ways that the Fed can print money and the the the government can spend it, or they can hand it out to rich people via stock buybacks and, you know, other other things. And so, that's what I sort of illustrated in a very technical way with accounting T-charts. And so, back to our your original discussion at the beginning, why is there going to be 10 trillion dollars of credit created? Well, Trump saw what happened when he did the stimulus checks, and Biden followed with a stimulus check of his own. It was successful. The US government is over leveraged. Scott Bessent, the new Treasury Secretary, should he be confirmed, understands this to a very deep degree. The US government must deleverage if they're going to accomplish any of their goals. This is the way to do it. And it makes the banks profitable. It makes everybody in the United States feel wealthier. Yes, there is a bit of inflation. Everyone has a job. Businesses come back to build more production inside of America because there's the customer there willing to buy stuff. And so, that's why I believe this is going to be the government policy, QE for poor people, because they did they did QE for rich people, and there's obviously the you know, the bad effects to that, and you have sort of social strife and this contagion effect of you know, the the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. All that sort of stuff happens. And worst off, the government balance sheet deteriorates, which is not good. So, it's in the government's best interest to pursue this policy of encouraging bank credit growth by spending this money and giving it to everyone versus just the top 1%. So, that's kind of in a very high level way what I was talking about with that example. Okay, so government's going to print, they're going to hand out stimmy checks because that works to reduce the debt to GDP burden. Now, one thing that may have been just correlated and not so I don't know if they're going to hand out stimulus checks in the way they did during COVID. But the other way they do this is as a okay, the the chips act, the green new deal, all these sort of industrial policy. Hey, I'm going to hand you some money, build a chip factory, hire Americans. Build a new car factory, hire Americans. Build more natural gas, oil, hydrocarbon productive capacity, hire Americans. That's the That's going to be the way they do it this time. It won't be hey, everybody gets a $1,000 check in the mail. That was very inflationary. I don't think they're going to repeat that again. Got it, got it. That I That's where I thought you were going and I was like, "Whoa." Cuz that had some some knock-on consequences. Okay, that's really interesting. I didn't know that about the um how that when you're doing it the rich people way that it actually worsens your debt to GDP. That is horrible and should be avoided at all costs. So, that's really interesting. Now, I'm not a money printer guy, but at least if there's a path to using money printing to do what Ray Dalio calls the beautiful deleveraging, it's got to be done. So, that's certainly better than open warfare, but it does beg a question of government control. Now, you wrote another article, very very impressive article as yours always are, and in it you I'm not going to be able to get the words perfect, but it it's this idea that a regime like the incoming Trump administration could use fiscal policy as a way to make the populace dependent on them or their financial success dependent on them such that they get reelected. Do you see that as a um a problem incoming? I mean, I think Let's put Let's put Let's Let's not put a moralistic term on it. It's neither good nor bad. If you're a politician in a representative democracy like the United States, you know, in the US Congress you're elected every 2 years and the Senate it's every 6. Trump's got a problem, okay? So we he won a landslide victory. His edge in the House and the Senate, I think it's one one person in the House and maybe two or three senators in the Senate. And there's going to be another election in 2026. Now, everybody's human. They said, "Okay, Biden bad because you know, inflation, I don't like my job. Okay, there's this other guy over here, Trump. I'll vote for him." You could reverse it. If Trump was the president and whoever his vice president was ready for reelection and he had the same economy that that Biden presided over and then you had Kamala Harris as the challenger, they would have voted for Harris. It doesn't matter. The party is irrelevant. I think people need to get out of this blue versus red, Republican, Democrat. Like, if I'm the median voter, Biden [ __ ] me. Okay, I'm going to go with Trump. Okay, it's 2026 or 2025. Which congressman am I voting for? Did I All these problems that Trump said he's going to solve, why aren't they solved yet? Oh, they're not solved yet? Okay, I'm going back to the Democrats. That's what Trump has to counter. And obviously Trump is not getting reelected, but he wants J.D. Vance and all these other people that he that are riding on his coattails to be in government positions long after he's gone. And so he's got to be very conscious of like how do Republican congressmen and senators get reelected in 2026? Which means I think that this policy that I've outlined, which Scott Bessent and some of the other other advisors have hinted at, is the way to go. Congressperson can say, "I brought that factory back to my district. Look, there's 10,000 new jobs created because of this bill that, you know, I voted on, sponsored by whoever, right?" So they need to be able to point back to things that happen immediately. Next one to eight to 12 to 18 months in their district. And so these are things that can be voted on very quickly that every elected representative wants to champion, whether they're Republican or Democrat. If you are in office today and you're going to vote against a factory coming into your district, you are not getting reelected. And so it doesn't matter. I think there will be a lot of bipartisan support for these sorts of policies because the voter doesn't care if they're Republican Republican or Democrat. They care that they have a job and that their wages went up 10% or whatever. And then you as a politician in power can claim that you were responsible. Whether that's true or not is irrelevant. But for the median voter, that's what they see. And so that's why I think that this is the only way for them to really maintain the marginal lead that they have in the House and the Senate past 2026. They need to create jobs yesterday because they only have a year, year and a half before people start campaigning and Congress becomes completely dysfunctional because all they care about is, you know, what are the polls saying about my reelection chances. And yeah, maybe this radical policy that Trump or one of his advisors put through might benefit, you know, America in the long term, but I need to get reelected in a year and there's a bunch of people who are going to be disenfranchised by this change change uh travel direction. Therefore, I can't vote for this. Even if they are Republican. And so, Trump's ability to govern is about 12 months. Yeah, it is uh going to be very interesting to see. Now, in that 12 months, he is talking about uh all kinds of aggressive tariffs. At a minimum as a negotiating tool, what do you think is going to be the ramifications of Trump and tariffs? I think again, it's a negotiating tool. I subscribe to the Scott Bessent sort of quips about, "Okay, if you start at 60%, maybe it goes to 5%, right?" Just standard business negotiation. Or, "Yeah, I'll slap a 100% tariff on you over the next 4 years. I'll slowly increase the temperature of the water as it gets close to boiling. Do you Do you want to make a deal here, right?" I think it's a negotiating in tactic. Because at the end of the day, high tariffs in the short run could be net very negative for growth in in America. Because if you think about America, it's a financialized economy. Most of the companies in the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq 100 are international companies that make the majority of their revenue outside of the United States. And so, if you start slapping tariffs on all, you know, especially China, all these countries, the China goes, "Oh, okay, you want a 25% tariff? Well, absolutely no iPhones are sold in my country anymore. Go [ __ ] yourself, Apple." There goes the everyone's eat, you know, Magnificent Seven and Nasdaq 100, QQQ's, and S&P 500 pushing Apple's down 30%. How do you like those capital gains taxes in California? Ain't none to go around, right? And so, that's This is an interlocked economy. I think tariffs are a threat. I think we can see that they're He's inviting Xi Jinping to come to the inauguration. Trump is inviting Xi Jinping, the president of China, to the inauguration. This is negotiation. He started out of of extreme maximalism and he'll dial it back to get the things that him and his team want to get. And so that's where I come down on on the tariff issue. And look, if they go, you know, go ham on tariffs, it's going to be so negative for growth, you can basically assure a Democrat uh House and Senate in 2026. And I think they know that. Yeah, it's going to be a wild ride. I uh we certainly have a front-row seat to it. Um so, speaking of a front-row seat to all of the changes that are happening in the financial markets, talk to me about stablecoins. So, the idea that basically money is bifurcated into two things, it's an idea that I heard first from Saylor, at least put like this, I think it's really insightful, and that is you've got money as currency and money as capital. And capital flows, obviously, to Saylor, it all boils down to Bitcoin. Uh anybody that wants their uh capital preserved in the most efficient way possible is going to be going into Bitcoin. But, capital flow into currency is not going to be going into Bitcoin. Bitcoin's just not optimized for that. And so, now you start getting into stablecoins not being controlled by uh the government. What do you think is going to happen to stablecoins? Is this going to be Do we need a regulatory environment that invites stablecoins into the US? Uh will the government try to use that as a moment to slide in CBDCs? What What is this going to play out as? So, first and foremost, stablecoins and, you know, the most successful one is Tether, USDT is essentially a a dollar credit that moves on a blockchain. And Tether has bank accounts and holds treasuries in the tune of like 130 billion US dollars. Now, there's other ways to do stablecoins. I'm a big big investor in one called Afina, but it doesn't really germane to this conversation. They're very useful outside of the West. Let's put it that way, right? If you are an American viewer of this program, you probably have a bank account and what's it like Zelle and Cash App and all these sorts of things, right? It's It's decently easy to pay somebody in the United States. You go to Western Europe, they have banks that work. Now, you go to where I live and spend most of my time, which is the other parts of the world, and some banking systems work. Singapore, Hong Kong. Some non-existent or completely clunky for a tourist. I spend a lot of time in Argentina, right? Very difficult. You know, the first time I went to Argentina, I think dollar peso was at 30 or 50. Uh last year when I went, it was at 1,000, right? Oh, okay. And And then the funny thing is, the bank will only let you The bank hasn't adjusted the amount of cash that you can pull out of the ATM. So, now what was like a few hundred dollars maximum you could pull out of the ATM equivalent is now like 30 bucks. And they charge you $10 fee on top to to move to take your money out, right? So, it's [ __ ] up. And as a tourist, you're like, "Well, how am I going to pay these bills?" Things have obviously not stayed that cheap. Stuff costs money. So, I use stablecoins. They're easy. I can pay my ski instructor. I can pay my driver. I can pay the restaurant bill. And everyone has got a phone, everyone has an internet, and we can transact this dollar thing on a blockchain because, you know, the dollar is still the reserve currency world, it's the most used currency. And, you know, back to Gresham's law, I spend bad money, I spend fiat, I save good money, I save Bitcoin. So, I don't want to spend Bitcoin when I'm paying people or going to a restaurant. I want to spend dollars. And this is allows me to use the beauty of decentralized finance and these blockchains to bypass a banking system that wouldn't allow me or take a very long time for me to move money from where I have it to where I am. And so that's the beauty of stablecoins. I don't think they're that useful in in the West. And if you take a look at where Tether has been very successful, it's been in emerging economies, especially in sort of like Asia and Latin America. And their chief competitor in sort of the dollars in a bank account with a credit on the blockchain is Circle, which is very tied in with Coinbase. And yes, they they are successful, but they're nowhere near as successful as Tether because they're concentrating on a market that doesn't need their product, right? Americans and Western Europeans don't need a dollar stablecoin. Their stuff kind of works. Whereas the rest of the world, [ __ ] does not work. And this is a leapfrogging improvement over how you can move a stable currency in their mind and pay for goods and services in a way that bypasses the the banking system. And so I think stablecoins are great. It's a great UK use case of the technology, has a product market fit, and yeah, I'm I don't On the regulatory front, I mean, they work. I don't know if you need any to have any more things, you know, present to make them work any better because they're used by people all all around the world to solve real-world problems. Mhm. Now, an idea that I've heard that I think is really interesting is that Bitcoin is not great for US Treasuries cuz people are not going to be storing their money in Treasuries if they can get their money stored into something like Bitcoin. But stablecoins are great for dollar dominance because so many of them are backed by US securities. So, uh sorry, US Treasuries. Do you think that stablecoins are good for the dollar? Like does this help? Absolutely. I mean, Tether is the top 20 holder of US Treasuries. Uh the the the fact the notion that they're not regulated is pure hocus pocus. Tether complies with, you know, KYC, AML, all all that sort of stuff. They give information to federal US federal authorities on whatever people they want to get information on. Right? So, if you if you're like, "Oh, I'm going to avoid, you know, I'm I'm not being seen in the financial system by using Tether, you're an idiot. They They're completely They're building They can freeze your wallets. They can report you to financial authorities. So, like, don't think that using Tether is somehow allowing you to do some sort of illicit financial activities. That's that's just pure pure comedy in my view. So, at the end of the day, right? This is a dollar. It might not be the dollar that benefits Jamie Dimon or, you know, David Solomon at JPMorgan or Goldman Sachs, but it benefits the dollar's role as the global reserve currency, you know, the US Treasury and the government in and of itself. So, why are stablecoins being demonized so much? Because the people who run the dollar for the government, the large money center banks like JPMorgan, Citi, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, don't own Tether. And Tether is the most profitable financial services company in the world per employee. Something I've I forgot the number. Like $60 million per per employee or something crazy. Uh whatever it is. Their revenue So, their their net income per employee. And so, that's why the banks hate them. The US government should have didn't have a view either way. If the dollar is getting used, whether it's JPMorgan making the money or you know, the Tether owners making the money, as long as it's a dollar, I should be cool with it. And you're starting to see that change in the most recent quarterly refunding announcement by the US Treasury, they had a supplementary presentation all about stablecoins and about how stablecoins, especially like Tether-like stablecoins, are accumulating US short-term US Treasuries. And you know, the tone of the article was, "They're not bad things. We should learn to live with them. Uh they're still expanding the use and the role of the dollar. Uh, and so I think there's been a bit of a change in terms of the mindset of, "Okay, well, who cares if Jamie Dimon is not making money on this? As long as me, the government, my currency is being used around the world, it's good for me." Yeah, that this one strikes me as a no-brainer. If you can get the digital stablecoin backed by a US dollar product, then you're back in the position of being able to export your uh inflation around the world even more, even harder. Now, look, I'm an anti-inflation guy, but I'm saying if you've got the system and that's how it's working and you've got people out there who would be way better off with our level of inflation than their own hometown. Like, think about Argentina 5 years ago uh or Zimbabwe, they would be killing to have access to uh USD backed stablecoin. Um, great for us, great for them. So, yeah, this one seems like I I'd be very shocked if our own government continues to stand in the way. Bitcoin, which actually seems to be getting better adoption, uh strikes me as I would get why they were anti that. Which speaking of, by the way, Trump being um nudged, certainly by Michael Saylor if nobody else, to build a strategic Bitcoin reserve. What do you think about that? Wise? Going to happen? Not going to happen? I don't think it's going to happen, but I think the discussion of it is very instructive to how I believe Trump, and especially and well, Scott Bessent will be the one doing it, will very rapidly devalue the dollar. So, again, to bring jobs home to the United States, to make a company on the margin want to locate a productive facility in the United States, the cost of doing business globally, the dollar is too strong. And so, how does the US devalue very quickly without having to do a lot of these bilateral currency negotiations. So, many older listeners who are American or Western European will be familiar with the Louvre Accord Plaza Accord that happened in the 1980s, which were very unilateral discussions. The Treasury Secretary at the time said, "We are doing this and, you know, Japan, you will allow your currency to appreciate and Germany, you will do this and France, you will do that." Now, I don't think the US has that sort of gravitas and military and economic position to sort of dictate to all these other countries where their exchange rate is going to be. Maybe they will, but it it it takes time. They Again, Trump has 12 months. He needs to get something done yesterday. Uh and so, how do I devalue the dollar quickly? Well, what does the US have and more so than any other country in the world? Supposedly, if you believe the figures, the United States has These are Fed and the Treasury have the most amount of gold of any other sovereign nation, even China. Again, if you believe the the World Gold Council figures, um I've done the math cuz I'm writing about this right now. US is about 8,100 tons of gold that are supposedly stored in Fort Knox. And because of how the accounting has transpired, the uh US Treasury I'm sorry, the Fed holds gold at $42.22 per ounce on its balance sheet. That was a level I think that the last level uh I think it was Gerald Ford or Nixon devalued the dollar to that level in the 1970s. That's where they hold gold on the balance sheet, right? So, the theory goes and this is not something I came up with. This has been talked about by very senior and seasoned um you know, financial markets analysts. Scott Bessent is absolutely aware of of how this works. And to the point about Bitcoin strategic reserve, if you if you read the bill by Senator Lummis, she explicitly states, "Okay, how do I pay for this Bitcoin I want to buy? Well, I use the gold, I revalue at a different level, and I spend the money." And I'll describe how that's done in a second. So, everyone's kind of talking about the same thing. We United States has all this gold. It's held at an artificially low price. And so, on an on an accounting basis, the US Treasury unilaterally can decide what the value of gold is on the Fed's balance sheet. So, Scott Bessent wakes up on January 21st, and he says, "Okay, I need to devalue the dollar by a lot. Okay, I'm going to say that gold is now worth $5,000 an ounce on my balance sheet. Now, for every things about $3,800 of revaluation of gold on the balance sheet creates a uh a debt a credit in the Treasury's general account at the Fed of $1 trillion. So, tell me the amount of spending that you want to have without having to go to Congress, and I'll tell you the gold price. And that is what the Treasury can do without input from anyone else because the value of gold on the Fed's balance sheet is under the complete purview of the Secretary of the Treasury. And so, what happens? The US says, "Okay, well, the the gold is now, I don't know, let's go to $10,000 an ounce. And so, now I've created a few trillion dollars of dollars that I can spend on whatever it is that Trump and his team want to to spend money on. So, what have I done? I've taken The amount of gold hasn't changed, but I've created a bunch of more dollars in an accounting fashion, and I'm spending them into the global economy. So, I've increased the amount of dollars in the world, gold price is the same as the the gold quantity is the same, therefore I've devalued the dollar. Now, versus every other country in the world, now the dollar is much weaker through this gold channel. It's weaker than the Yuan, it's weaker than the Yen, it's weaker than the Euro. Those are the three, you know, China, Japan, Germany, three largest exporting countries. So, if I am a manufacturer and now you know, the three major places where I would have located a facility, it's way more expensive to do so to export to the world, I guess I got to come to America and deal with Trump and his team because the dollar has now been devalued. And guess what? Bessette didn't have to call a single foreign finance secretary or minister and discuss with them what he's going to do or get them to agree. It happens automatically because now the US government says gold is worth you know, 5, 10,000, 15,000 dollars an ounce. How high could it go? Who knows? Uh, Luke Gromen, another financial analyst, he has a chart I don't know where it is. Uh, and it's the percentage of gold as a the amount of gold as a percentage of the amount of liabilities of the Fed in the 1980s versus today. And so, they went back to where gold was as a percentage of the overall liability base. As gold is the asset, liabilities are the amount of dollars in in in existence. You would do about a 14x rise in gold. So, that's like 40,000 dollars an ounce in gold. Do I think that's going to happen? I don't know. Who knows? Probably not. But, that's just instructive of the of where we're going from 2600, 2700 dollars an ounce to 5, 10, 15, 20,000 dollars an ounce. And now with these trillions of dollars, okay, if Trump really believes in Bitcoin and Bitcoin is the new hardest currency and he wants to set up the United States to have, you know, the best balance sheet of any sovereign nation, then yes, he can use some of those trillions of dollars and go in the market and buy gold. But, he could also use it as tax breaks or, you know, cheaper health care, whatever it is they decide to do. But, the best point the best part is it happens immediately. You don't need congressional approval. Your boys who are in charge of these departments can do this stuff unilaterally without talking to any foreign counterparts or anyone in the deep state who would sort of oppose oppose what they're doing. So, that's why this talk about strategic Bitcoin reserve is nice, but what you really should be talking about is how and I this is a theory that I have and you know, I have my portfolio geared toward they will be a massive devaluation of the dollar versus gold in the first half of 2025. Okay, and as an individual, if that happens, um do I similarly benefit from that? Does gold as it's traded to a So there's no there's no impact. The dollar is weakened. Okay, but it wasn't like they did some crazy tariff or something else that to get it there vis-a-vis another country. It's an accounting thing versus gold. So, if you own gold, great. You've you've made you've made a gain in fiat in terms. If you don't own gold, uh you know, sorry, out of luck you you didn't participate, but it's not like your life has changed in any way shape or form, Right, right. But that the way that you're talking about it $10 a pound of beef is still $10 a pound of beef. Right, right, right. So, beef priced in dollars, no change, but I do hold gold, so uh if this were to happen, then that it's not just a magic trick on their balance sheet, this actually does impact the world. It would impact uh the amount of dollars I have in gold. Correct. Got it. Very interesting. Uh would if they do this, will they just borrow against the gold that they have or will they actually sell the gold to create the dollars? No, there's there's no That's the beauty of it. There's nothing. It's literally because of how the economics work or the the accounting flows in the government, gold is at $42 an ounce now. Now, obviously, it's about $2,700 in the free free market. So, just going to where the spot price of gold is, that gets the government I think about $700 of a credit. So, now the Treasury has a an account at the Federal Reserve called the the Treasury General Account. That's where government spending occurs. So, when you need to pay the government salaries or they hand out your, you know, social security check or whatever, it comes from the Fed's account, the the Treasury account at the Fed, then it goes to the banking system like JP Morgan and, you know, those sorts of banks. That's how that's how it flows. So, number one, the US government doesn't need to sell any gold. All it says is, I was saying gold is worth $42 an ounce. I now say it's worth X. X could be 5,000, 10,000, 15,000 dollars an ounce. And because I've now created all these dollars accounting basis, because now I have this bad massive credit with the Fed, I've just created a bunch of dollars, and I can spend them on whatever I want to spend them on. So, I've just created all these dollars out of thin air. So, that's why this is beautiful, because it requires no input from anyone else other than Scott Bessent at the Treasury, who does what his Trump says, I need weaker dollar, I need businesses coming back to America. He says, got you, buddy. Let me just do this real quick. And now the dollar is a weakest currency out of all of our trading compet- um competitors. And so, now companies on the margin are going to want to put their factory here and export either sell stuff in America or export it around the world from America. And so, when they say that they're weakening the dollar, they specifically mean against gold as the benchmark. Yes. And so, by transitive properties, it'll weaken against the yuan, the euro, and the yen. Because they have not moved their peg. Well, they're not not not the peg. I've just created a bunch of dollars. wrong word. They they also have uh a an amount that they say uh an ounce of gold is this many yuan. And they're and they're not going to create more based on whatever it is they're what they think the price of gold should be because they don't have the reserve currency. So Right. China could do the same thing. They say, "Okay, well, we think gold's worth 100 million yuan an ounce. We have all this yuan and we can go spend it." Great, but you're not you don't have an inbuilt demand for your currency as much as you're trying to do more trade bilaterally in your own currency. Great, but at the end of the day, the dollar still what, 60-something percent of world trade or 70% whatever it is. So, they have that have that demand that demand for the currency. So, the US can devalue more than any other country without suffering hyperinflation. And if you think about the major trading partners of the US, Germany, Japan, China, none of them are self-sufficient in hydrocarbons. The US can be if it wants to be. None of them are self-sufficient in food. The US can be if it wants to be. So, the US can go [ __ ] nuts with very hyperinflationary policies with very inflationary policies that would be hyperinflationary in China, Japan, and Germany. They cannot do what the US can do because they don't have the same natural blessings as this fictional area we call America has. Very fair. Uh okay. Talk to me about Bitcoin security. Do you have any concerns? Google Willow announcement comes out. I talked to Saylor about it. He's not worried in the slightest. Almost like, "Why are you bothering me with this question?" kind of energy. Um what do you think? Is Is there I'm again, I am not a I'm not a cryptographer. The little bit that I've read about this from people who are way smarter than me and who know this stuff is that the type of calculations that Google Willow can do is not does not translate into being able to break SHA-256, which is the encryption algorithm of of Bitcoin. And so, until that happens, then we don't have anything to worry about. Obviously, you can always up and change things with the network. This has been a perennial concern of oh, if quantum computing, therefore Bitcoin is broken kind of thing. And I am not qualified to sit here and give all the retorts to that, but I think Andreas Antonopoulos and some of very smart people who understand this issue very deeply have very easily debunked that sort of line of thinking. So, Google Willow is great. We're upgrading our ability to do calculations um in a quantum way. Does that affect the Bitcoin encryption algorithm? No. Love it. Arthur, this has been wonderful. Where can people follow along with you? So, on X @CryptoHustle, uh Substack CryptoHustle as well, and then come to the various conferences around the world where I speak. I love it, man. Well, enjoy this alt season. I'm sure it is going to be a lot of fun. And everybody at home, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And then until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace. If you like this conversation, check out this episode to learn more. At the time of recording, Bitcoin is over 100k and has been for quite a while at this point. So, I think the question of is Bitcoin real is dead. Uh but now the question becomes how does Bitcoin go from where we're at it a little over 100k to the 13 million