The Bitcoin Expert: America’s $40 Trillion Financial Reset Has Begun - Do This Now!

This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed Sponsored Jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. I watched Bitcoin fall 50% in a 10 hour period and I was on the couch curled up in a ball and like saying to my now wife, I think our net worth might go to zero today. Bitcoin is a resilient asset that is really serving as global insurance. And so anytime that there's chaos in the world, there's going to be people who run to Bitcoin. There's two assets you need for the future we're headed towards, Bitcoin and AI. Is it too late to buy Bitcoin? Bitcoin is going to continue to go up for the rest of our lives because the politicians are going to print money for the rest of our lives. We have a public company with hundreds of millions of dollars in the balance sheet. We have more bots and agents that work at the company than humans. Well, where is the world going? The world is going to start to morph to accommodate for the bots and agents, not for humans. Do you think AI is going to make most people richer or just the top few? The pump. Thank you so much for coming on the iced coffee hour. I'm very excited to do this. You guys got a beautiful place here. So excited to talk. Thank you. So I did a bunch of research. I used every LLM imaginable trying to figure out what is your net worth? Because it's very mysterious. They all estimated between 100 and $200 million. Is that accurate? I have no clue. You don't know? No, I have a good sense for liquid assets. And then on the private investing side, you know, one of the benefits of investing in private companies is you can't sell. So I've been an investor in companies and they go from zero to billions of dollars very quickly. And you're like, wow, I'm rich. And then they go to zero and you're like, okay, well, that was kind of fake money. And then there's been other ones that have kind of petered along for years and years and years. And then all of a sudden they sell for some big number and you're like, okay, that's not the outcome I expected. So my portfolio historically has been Bitcoin and then tons of private companies. I've invested over 300 private companies, either directly or through funds that I've managed. And the reason why I like that Bitcoin, I think of as an illiquid asset, even though it's liquid, but the private companies, I can't sell. And I think that I'm actually a pretty bad public market investor because I am, if I get new information, I like to think about it. And that is not very good. I feel like I'd be a long-term investor with something that's liquid in trade on a day-to-day basis. And so I tend to just, when I buy assets, I say, I'm not going to touch them. So I mainly know you for Bitcoin. I think I started following you many years ago. And I am curious, when did you first buy Bitcoin? At what price? And what convinced you, that this was going to go a lot higher? Two different times people tried to convince me, 2012 and 2015. 2012 was a guy on Twitter DMing me. And I was like, this is stupid. 2015, we hired David Marcus from PayPal into Facebook to run Messenger. He sat a hundred feet away from me and wouldn't stop talking about Bitcoin. I turned to an engineer and I said, what do you think? It's stupid. Didn't buy. 2016, I started with ETH. Mine goes up. I saw it 150 bucks. ETH goes to $1,400 that year. I feel like a complete idiot. And I say, I gotta, I gotta learn. I gotta sit down and I gotta study this stuff. And my wife now, wife would tell you, I literally had textbooks, articles printed out. I was like almost in school studying this stuff. And I built incredible conviction around Bitcoin. And when Bitcoin dropped in 2018, I pretty much took 90 to 95% of all the money I had to my name. And I put in Bitcoin at $3,200. How much money did you put in Bitcoin at $3,200? Initially it was. Uh, hundreds of thousands of dollars. But then I had at that point met a gentleman named Mark Yusko who had partnered with, and we'd started to raise a lot of money, um, from a professional standpoint. And when I first met Mark, Mark was very unique in that he had invested in, uh, he was one of the first checks into Chase Coleman's Tiger Global. He had backed Howard Marks and Oak Tree and a ton of different funds. He knew Julian Robertson. Like he was really well connected in the institutional finance world. And one of the questions I asked Mark when I first met him was, I said, what separates the top three guys from the top 1%? So not the top 1% to the top 50%, but with the top three guys for the top 1%. And without hesitation, he said to me, they press their winners harder than anyone. And they cut their losers faster than anyone. And for whatever reason that was seared in my brain, when I bought the Bitcoin at $3,200, I then said to myself, Mark told me they pressed their winners harder than anyone. And I had immense conviction in Bitcoin and I took every single dollar I could possibly make. And just kept buying and buying and buying and buying. And I did that all through the 2018-2019 bear market. And I ended up with a lot more Bitcoin than that initial purchase because it went from $32, $33, $34, $35. And so I was essentially just dollar cost averaging in that entire bear market. And I credit Mark a lot with that one lesson probably, you know, completely changed my life. But you know what? Your entire life could have been different because had you invested six months earlier, it was $20,000. And so who's to say you didn't hear press your winners harder when you went in Bitcoin at, let's say, $18,000. It goes to $20,000 and then you cut your loser when it drops to $15,000 and you never invest again. If you bought at $20,000 and you sold, you obviously wouldn't make money. If you bought at $20,000 and you held today, a long time, a decade or so, right? You would be up, but not necessarily nearly as much as if you bought at $3,000. If you had bought at $20,000 and dollar cost averaged all the way to $3,000, you would be up. All the way down and back up. So you just kept buying as much as you possibly could. You would have made a lot of money because your blended price would be closer to like $5,000. I wasn't a very good student at all. But Bitcoin really gave me an education, not only in behavioral finance, investing, economics, history, you know, philosophy, all this stuff. But the thing it probably taught me more than anything is you want to find volatility when you are investing, which is kind of counterintuitive because that volatility will present you opportunities to buy more. But it also is how you drive. So for people uneducated in the markets, what's going on with crypto today? I think that there are three different groups that are interested in crypto. There's the hardcore believers. I would put them as like the religious zealots that no matter what happens, they're never selling. I would put there being people who have traditional backgrounds but became crypto people. And then there are people in the traditional world who they don't care if they're trading oil, gold, Bitcoin stocks. They're just looking to make money. And what are you? I would put myself in the middle. And what is Michael Saylor? I think that Michael Saylor is one of the hardcore. Bitcoin is his religion. I don't want to go that far. I just think that one of Michael Saylor's superpowers is that he has an incredible ability to focus and say no to a lot of things. As I've written about in the past, that also can be blinding at times to certain things. That's kind of the purpose of focus is that you are intentionally saying I'm not going to pay attention to anything else. And so with Bitcoin in particular, it is highly volatile and it has been a great thing to do. For a number of years is to just focus on buy as much Bitcoin as you possibly can. I think that now we are entering a world where there's a lot of things that are going on. For example, when Bitcoin starts to infiltrate more than traditional portfolios, you now need to pay attention to, well, what is going to happen in interest rates, inflation, etc. Not because you're going to sell, but because it's going to have an impact on Bitcoin. And so the reason why I like being in the middle is there was a long period of time where I would go and I would talk to the hardcore crypto people and they would be like, why do you own Bitcoin? Bitcoin, that's the boomer coin. That is like the least interesting crypto coin I hold. And they would tell me some crazy coin that I never heard of before. And that was what they were investing in. But then I would go and I would talk to people on Wall Street and they would be like, what? You own Bitcoin? That is so risky. And what I learned was I want to hold the thing that is the riskiest asset in the most conservative people's portfolio. But it is the most conservative thing in the highest risk takers people's portfolio. And Bitcoin has kind of found a home there where to the crypto people, they're very uninterested in it for the most part, because they think that it's not going to perform 20 years. 20 X in a year. But to the Wall Street people, they've never seen an asset that goes up 60 percent compounded for a decade. So what do you think then are the biggest risks to Bitcoin? I think that there is much less of a risk of some sort of regulatory capture. But I do think that you could still see a situation where if all of a sudden certain people got into political positions and they wanted to really become adversarial to Bitcoin again, that could potentially be a headwind. I don't think they could shut down Bitcoin. I don't think they could stop Bitcoin. But I definitely think they could create. A lot of problems. I also think that there are some technical things that the Bitcoin community is trying to figure out how to address. I am not a big believer that quantum is like an imminent major threat to Bitcoin. But I understand that quantum is an industry that is changing very quickly and it is advancing. And so we need to pay attention to what those advancements are, because ultimately Bitcoin's value is tied to the cryptography. And so if something came along that could break Bitcoin's cryptography, that would be a problem. I also think that AI. Is not so much a problem for Bitcoin, the blockchain or Bitcoin, the asset, as much as AI is now creating a very big kind of vector threat for individuals who hold Bitcoin. If you get a call and you think it's your wife saying, hey, will you send this to me and you do it? If you get an email, it's a phishing email, but it looks realistic. If you're somehow socially engineered using AI or a fake ID or something like that, that's a huge problem. If you look at, for example, there was a recent incident with a hardware. hardware provider where somebody, it looks like, was able to use AI to basically reverse engineer a very technical component of that wallet. Now, these are people who were using that product who were kind of the hardest core Bitcoiners. It's kind of like a strike to the heart or the headquarters of the true believers. And most of these people were very upset because they're like, look, I didn't leave my Bitcoin on an exchange. I didn't own the ETF. I had self custody. My Bitcoin never had touched the Internet. I was in this great position. If that happens more often, then the foundational belief of self custody and Bitcoin could be at risk. I don't think we're there now, but I think that's where AI could be an attack surface is the ability to use AI to actually hurt philosophically or intellectually the Bitcoiners themselves. And so all of those threats are things that could wound Bitcoin, but I don't see anything on the horizon outside of quantum getting to a certain position. So what did you read that convinced you to go all in on Bitcoin? Everything. Literally anything and everything I could find. What stands out to you? I think that Saifedean Amoose's book, The Bitcoin Standard, probably the most important thing was actually not what I read because a lot of it was technical. It's like you sit down, you're like, I'm going to read the Bitcoin white paper. I'm going to learn about Bitcoin. You get like a page in and you're like, dude, I am way too dumb for this. Like, what does this thing mean? I don't know. There's equations, there's letters and numbers like this is hard. Talking to people was incredibly valuable. And this is about a year and a half after this. But I remember going, Mark Yusko took me to meet one of these legends of finance. And we went and we saw Julian Robertson. We saw Howard Marks and a couple of other people all in one single day. And to varying degrees, they were open to listening. But none of them were like, great idea. I'm going to go buy Bitcoin. And some of them were like, this is a courtesy meeting. It's 15 minutes. Like, nice to see you guys. Thanks, but no thanks. And I remember at the end of the day, Mark was very frustrated. And I think that he probably felt a little bit like, hey, I invested in all these guys funds for a long time. None of them are interested in the idea I have. I think some of it was frankly, like, well, if the smart people aren't into this, you know, am I making a mistake? And I said to him, I said, Mark, the fact they're not interested is the opportunity. If all of the people were convinced, that would mean that it was consensus. And that would mean that most of the value would already be kind of captured. This is something that I believe is early and will become consensus. Thankfully, we were right on that. But like, to me, actually, that day was very formidable, because I got to see these people who I really respected and thought highly of, and they were not interested at all. And so it was clear, either we're idiots, or we're early. We're going to get paid if we're early. If we're idiots, we're gonna lose all our money. So is it too late to buy Bitcoin? No. Bitcoin is going to continue to go up for the rest of our lives, because the politicians are going to print money for the rest of our lives. So if you look at the stock market, the stock market, the S&P over the last five years is about 70%. Sounds like an amazing return. If you look at Bitcoin, gold and land, you're going to see that the S&P over the last five years is up about 70%. And as equal sleeves of a portfolio, that portfolio is about 170% over the same five-year period. During that five years, the reason why that period is really important is the dollar has lost 30% of its purchasing power over five years. So stocks, which are supposed to be productive assets, outperform things like Bitcoin and gold, have actually lagged, because almost all investment returns right now are being driven by money printing. The stock market is all money printing. If they shut off the money printer, the stock market will stop going up. But how do we know is going to keep going up? How do we know that? I mean, we could all say that, oh, they're going to print more money, and therefore printing more money is going to cause the price to go up. But how do we know that is the case? Because they printed a lot of money over the last year, and Bitcoin has not gone up in price. Well, you can quantify it. And if you look, you can measure the sensitivity of an asset to money printing or global liquidity. Bitcoin is the most sensitive asset to money printing globally. So if you look over all these years, every time they print money, what is the asset that responds most? To that money printing. So it's not like, oh, I think it is. It is a quantifiable metric that you can go. There's plenty of studies that have been put out there. Sam Callahan and Lynn Alden probably have like the quintessential study that shows Bitcoin is the single most sensitive asset to money printing. So when you look at that now, that's in the past. That doesn't mean it has to be true in the future. But if you just look and say, OK, I don't think that's going to change, then going forward, a great way to essentially insulate yourself from money printing is by Bitcoin. Now, if you notice, I didn't say, hey, just put all your money in Bitcoin. Bitcoin, gold, land. I think that there's multiple asset classes that all benefit from this. I tend to think that either Bitcoin or some combination of them is the way that most people should look at it, because I actually don't think that it's so much about the return as much as I don't think a lot of people can handle the volatility. You know, buying Bitcoin was great in 2018 at three thousand thirty five hundred bucks. I lived through multiple 50 plus percent drawdowns. On March 12th, I believe it was of 2020, I watched Bitcoin go from eight thousand dollars to under four thousand dollars in a year. And I think that's a great way to look at it. In a single trading session that day, I literally wrote a letter to a bunch of investors and I said, we are in a global liquidity crisis. And I had a chart that showed what happened in 2008 with gold and over six months, gold's price had drawn down on the global liquidity and then it had basically recovered. So I clearly articulated in the morning when I was emotionally sober what was happening. We're in a liquidity crisis. Assets are going to go down. And then I watched Bitcoin fall 50 percent in a 10 hour period. And I was on the counter. I was on the counter. I was on the couch curled up in a ball and like saying to my now wife, I think our net worth might go to zero today. You can be prepared. You can be mentally sober, understand what's happening when you watch that asset fall. Thank God she was there because she looks at me and she goes, you're already all in. Just buy more. I didn't have the emotional control nor the ability to think that clearly. But her, who pretty much was like, my boyfriend is an idiot and is like all in, well, you might as well just stay all in. What if she was being sarcastic to you? Like you're already all in. What's a little more? Guys, let's be honest. Thinking clearly is a huge part of success in business and investing. But as we just heard, knowing the numbers does not mean that your emotions won't get in the way. A lot of the time, all you need to do is step back, question your assumptions and look at things from another angle. Yeah. And we found that incredibly useful in our own business. Like having something to help us work through a decision instead of just going with the first instinct is a big part of why we use our partner, Claude. Claude is the AI for problem solvers. 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And it's edited literally better than what we would have been able to do just manually. Like, this is serious. If you're not using Claude, you absolutely need to be using it. Plus, it connects with Google Drive Gmail and Slack, so it could work with the context you already have. For problems worth solving, get started with Claude at claude.ai slash iced coffee. That's claude.ai slash iced coffee. And check out Claude Pro, by the way, which includes access to all of the features mentioned in today's episode. claude.ai slash iced coffee. Like, you're already all in. You know, just like an offhand remark. If it had gone to zero, I would have told her you better be being sarcastic. Look, it is this weird dynamic of, I think a lot of people like to pretend, oh, I knew. I had a lot of conviction. I put my money where my mouth was. There are multiple times where I've been like, am I right? And I think it's healthy. I don't think people should hide that. That day, when I watched Bitcoin fall 50%, I remember saying to myself, this could go to zero today. That is not a fun feeling. But that's why I say, like, I don't think the average person should go put majority of their money, most of their money in Bitcoin. Because I don't think that most people, one, want to live that way. Two, can. And then three, I also think that it's not good for you. You know, I've told a story before that in 2019, my wife and I moved into an apartment. It's the first apartment we got together. And when we moved in, we went from her not so great studio apartment in New York to a one bedroom. And we thought like, wow, this is amazing. But we didn't have a couch. And I remember explaining to her the economics in a very rational way of, you know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, if I buy the couch, we can buy one less Bitcoin. But I think this Bitcoin thing is going to appreciate and the couch is going to depreciate. So like, what if we wait a couple of months? And there's this famous photo of my wife sitting on the floor on a yoga mat, almost like the Steve Jobs famous thing with like the lamp next to him. And I think a huge part of what I attribute a lot of my success to is having a woman who, frankly, was just as insane as I was. That's not a rational, normal thing. But I think that she kind of believed in the dream or the vision right alongside me. So when it drops 50%, she says, buy more. It's not very rational. But there was just something about we've done the work, we understand this thing. And I think that having kind of a thought partner there was really helpful. So how do you like Bitcoin at its current price around 80 ish $1,000? I like Bitcoin always. And not because I'm some like super religious Luddite about it. I think that Bitcoin is just the most sensitive asset to government printing. I was maybe to check myself intellectually. I was very excited about the whole doge effort. I was like, wow, I used to tweet. all the time. Why does no president even pretend to want to cut expenses? If you look in 2010 to like 2020, pretty much nobody even talked about, we're going to balance the budget. It was just like, we spend, that's what we do. Trump in the second term came in and he said, we're going to create Doge and we're going to cut and we're going to balance the budget. And I think for a moment, even if it, for everybody, it was like for one hour or for me, it was probably like two months was like, it would be amazing if they balanced the budget. But then once it became clear, it's not, you know, Besson had this famous, like, we're going to run it hot, essentially speech where he was just like, that's no longer the story. Now we're just going to grow our way out of it. Bitcoin took off, everything took off. So you would say to someone like me who has probably 1% of my entire portfolio in Bitcoin, that buy in more at 77,000, around 80,000, whenever would probably be a good idea because 1% of your portfolio is not enough. If you are not into Bitcoin whatsoever, and you look at it from a pure portfolio, you're not going to be able to build a portfolio. You're going to be able to build a portfolio from a portfolio construction standpoint. Portfolio construction theory would tell you, you want to put as many non-correlated assets into a portfolio as possible because it should increase the Sharpe ratio and decrease the correlation. So just like if you're like an endowment and you're like, well, we have no religious view. We have no, you know, kind of loyalty to any asset. We're just trying to create a great portfolio from a math standpoint. Bitcoin historically has been non-correlated, not inversely correlated, but also not correlated. Now there have been times, especially over the stocks or the stock market has spiked significantly. Myself, other people in Bitcoin community, well, that's not really what Bitcoin is supposed to be. Bitcoin is supposed to be an asset that is non-correlated. One of my theories, which is very hard to prove, is that the reason why Bitcoin historically was non-correlated is because it wasn't held by the traditional investor. So it was held by a bunch of retail people who like the average guy on the internet who helped Bitcoin didn't care what interest rates were. It didn't care what the national debt necessarily, like the exact number. It didn't care what the inflation reading was. They were like, I believe in Bitcoin. I buy it every day and I'm just going to hold Bitcoin. Today, a lot of Bitcoin, especially through the ETFs are held by institutional investors, sovereign wealth type funds, hedge funds, endowments, et cetera. You can see the filings where they're holding hundreds of millions of dollars of Bitcoin. Those people really care about interest rates, inflation, et cetera. And they make changes in their portfolio holistically. So if they think that interest rates are going to rise, they will sell their Bitcoin. They will sell their tech stocks. They will sell the assets that are rate sensitive, and then they will go buy assets they think are insulated. So naturally, if I'm one of those investors and I think interest rates are going to rise, well, if I go sell my things, I deem to be sensitive to rates, I'm selling my tech stocks and my Bitcoin together. That's correlation. I'm doing both of them at the same time. And so that's why the correlation I think has ticked up. And so if you go back to this idea of 1%, I actually think Bitcoin is a diversifier. So what you see is if you take a 60, 40 portfolio and you put Bitcoin into the portfolio, ratio goes up, correlations go down, and actually the risk return becomes more attractive. So it's a little weird because you're putting a high risk asset into the portfolio, but it reduces the risk by doing that. So for portfolio theory, then what is the mathematically correct percent of Bitcoin that should be reflected in a portfolio? It's very personalized. So if you are a 75-year-old person who is not working and needs cashflow, your Bitcoin allocation should be low to almost zero because you don't have the benefit of holding this thing for years if there's lots of volatility to it. If you're a 21-year-old kid, you should probably have a much higher allocation. There are people like very famous financial advisors, this guy Rick Edelman. Hold on. What is very high allocation to Bitcoin? What does that mean? Rick Edelman is in the Financial Advisor Hall of Fame, which I didn't even know existed. He's in the Financial Advisor Hall of Fame. He says that young people should have up to 40% of their portfolio in crypto. 40? 40, 4-0%. He says 10 to 40%, the younger you are, the closer to 40, the older you are, the closer to 10. Again, that is a very big number. But I look at that as that is somebody who built a massive financial advisory firm doing traditional stuff, has done a lot of work on crypto more generally, and that is his kind of band. When did he say this? In the last two years. I mean, you can always cherry pick and say, oh, this person with all these accreditations said this, and then Warren Buffett says this. Fidelity, I believe, did a study and they recommended 3%. Okay, so I'm at 1, Graham. Life insurance is one of those things that's really easy to keep putting off indefinitely, especially when you're young and healthy, but that's actually when you could lock in the best rates. 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Were you bought some and it went up and it just became a bigger percentage? I've just been dollar cost averaging, and that turned into 8 to 12. Are you up on Bitcoin? Depends on the allocation. I would say- Like a blended average cost. I bet I'm pretty much even. The Bitcoin that I bought initially, I think I'm up triple. So what percent of your portfolio is Bitcoin? Pure Bitcoin is probably somewhere in the 40 to 50% range now. Related in some form or fashion to Bitcoin. We have a public company that's got hundreds of dollars of Bitcoin on its balance sheet. It's technically not Bitcoin, but we have a operating business with Bitcoin. And so it's like related. It's a very high percentage, right? But again, it goes back to what is my conviction percentage that Bitcoin is going to be much higher in the future? It's definitely over 50%. So if you're willing to say that you're highly convicted in that way, what price targets do you see for Bitcoin? It doesn't really matter because one of the psychological tricks I've come across is that if you're willing to say that you're highly convicted in that way, you're likely to be convicted. So if you're willing to say that you're highly convicted in that way, you're likely to be convicted. So if you're willing to say that you're I've said Bitcoin, I'm going to hand to my grandchildren. And the reason why I've done that is that's how I deal with the volatility is I'm going to hand them the Bitcoin. And if it's worth a lot, I'll be a genius. If it's not worth a lot, I'm going to be an idiot because I'm basically going to hand them air. But I psychologically have convinced myself no matter what happens to the price, I'm never going to sell it because it's their Bitcoin. But if there's a chance even that it could be air, why not just take 10% of it and throw it in VOO or something? Well, what I said was, let's say 50% of my money. Portfolio is Bitcoin pure and then 50%. So go back to 2023. I basically had private companies and I had Bitcoin, but I explicitly said to myself, I basically read need to rebuild my entire financial life. Bitcoin had drawn down a lot, right? I had a lot of volatility. I was starting to build a family. There was a lot of things happening in my life. And so I said to myself, I'm not going to touch this, but basically if I did it once, can I do it a second time? Do I an entirely new financial life, not touching the Bitcoin, but I went and I built a bunch of companies. I built an investment firm, I built a public company, et cetera. And the whole idea was that's my diversification. I was super concentrated here, put that to the side. Now I'm going to go be super concentrated all over again and do something different. And by doing that, I created diversity in my finances by actually balancing it out. All right. So what would it take for Bitcoin to hit a million dollars? Government to keep printing money. For how long? Nothing needs to change for Bitcoin to hit a million dollars. Bitcoin will hit a million dollars in our lifetime, given enough time, because the same reason why people said gold will never go to 5,000 or the S and P will never hit pick a price target. They just kept printing money and it's accelerating. We have a $40 trillion national debt. We have a trillion dollar annual interest expense on that debt. They are only going to devalue the currency in order to deal with that. Because if they don't, they're going to default and it is going to be disastrous. How could you be wrong if they start printing money? Isn't there a chance AI gets so advanced that we grow into the national debt? We become very efficient. We're able to scale back our spending. We're able to run a surplus. And all of a sudden there's no need necessarily for Bitcoin because we got a digital dollar that's tracked and become, uh, you know, Bitcoin just becomes obsolete. 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And we have two options, inflate or grow. I'm cool either way. Our public company owns probably one of the leading AI fintech products in the country in Sylvia. And if AI becomes a thing, we're going to do very well. If the government decides to keep printing money and flitting our way out, we're gonna make money on Bitcoin. So it's kind of my way of saying, like, I don't know what they're going to do. I think that they're going to keep printing money. I don't know what they're going to do. I think they're going to keep printing money. But also I could see a world where like, I don't know, we've never seen super intelligence, like true artificial, you know, super intelligence that could show up tomorrow. And all of a sudden, like, Elon's right. No one's working for money. And like, yeah, growing so fast. What's concerning to me, because I tend to agree with you on the premise of the government's going to keep printing money. But I remember 2021 2022. There were some really smart people who were saying, it doesn't make sense to lock in, a big mortgage, and not get an arm. Because in the future, interest rates are going to be lower than where they are today. Inflation is going to be under control. And so I'm not going to lock in for 30. I'm going to lock in for five and even lower interest rate, because interest rates for sure will be lower. And then somehow, they're substantially higher, because inflation is back. And so it's like the certainty that it's like, oh, man, I've been wrong so many times that you can't. I think that there's a, there's a couple of different, nuances around inflation and interest rates are related, but different. So for example, I think that the current administration going into December of 2025, kind of had like the perfect situation. They had a high growth economy with relatively low inflation. And I think a lot of people were like, this is kind of a central banker's dream is you are getting the productivity growth from all the AI robotics, etc. And then you almost had this deflationary pressure coming from those same AI robots. And so I think that's kind of the perfect situation. And I think a lot of people were like, this is kind of a central banker's dream is you are getting the productivity growth from all the AI robotics, but also deportations were very deflationary. And I was probably one of the loudest proponents in the entire country that tariffs were going to be deflationary as well. And so if you have high growth and low inflation, you kind of don't want to do anything. Like just let that run because you're not destroying your currency and you're can make up room on the debt. Now, I don't know this for sure. But my analysis is we went we did the Venezuela thing. And when we got Maduro, there was a little bit of like, we got the hot hand. You know, if you remember, we dropped the Iran the first time like down like a little air conditioner tube or something. And we were all like, that sounds awesome. The military is like really skilled. And then we got Maduro and no one got, you know, on the American side. And we were like, wow. And it was kind of like feed the hot hand. And then we went into the Iran thing. And then all of a sudden, we're like, oh, we're in Middle Eastern, that is much longer than we thought it was going to be. Iran was much more aggressive in their response, gas prices spiked, like, here comes the inflation, you know, warning again. Now, I have tried my best to talk nuance about inflation, gas and the Iran thing. My thought has been the longer the goes on, the more the inflation risk comes. But we are all underestimating how deflationary the AI stuff is. So it's a little bit of like, you can't just be like, Iran, high inflation. And I think that's kind of what we've seen, where like inflation definitely ticked up. But it didn't skyrocket to five, 6%. It kind of went to like three and a half ish percent. And it's kind of like hung out there. So it's elevated from where it was in December. But it is still not the explosive, like, you know, 9%, obviously, from COVID or something like that. With that said, I also think that people assign a lot of the inflation problem to Biden. And rightfully so, like he did contribute a lot to it. Definitely, when we already had high inflation, they were still printing lots of money, etc. But I think that all throughout the 2010s, and then definitely the COVID response under the Trump administration, like they all contributed to it, Republicans and Democrats. And so it's kind of this weird dynamic where like, you know, we're not going to be able to do anything about it. We're not going to be able to do anything about it. We always want like, who's the culprit? But it's really all of them. Congress, Senate, President, Treasury, Fed, like they're all part of this. Because I think that an unspoken part of the problem is that the boomer generation doesn't want some things to get better. They are financially incentivized for things to continue how they are. So the example I always use is housing. If you're over the age of 60, you don't want house prices to go down in this country. You don't care that the 22 year old can't afford a home. You're like, dude, 60% of my net worth is tied up in my primary residence. I need this to keep going up. So the fact that these kids are like, I can't afford a home and I'm into socialism. They're like, oh, you guys are stupid. But if that 60 year old was 22, they'd be yelling and screaming and doing the same thing. It's just that they need their home price to keep going up or their net worth comes down. Trump himself has said this. We're not going to hurt the boomer home prices. So you get this weird dynamic of like, who are we serving? Are we serving the older people or we're serving the younger people? It's a hard decision. So when is the last time you bought Bitcoin in your personal portfolio? We have been buying more Bitcoin exposure through our public company. Basically, we've been able to buy back shares of the company to get everyone more exposure. I have a lot of ownership of the company. Personally, this year, I don't know the last date, but this year, and I kind of made a decision at some point, like I got the Bitcoin I got. And that position is a pretty good position. I need to go focus all my time, energy and effort on rebuilding an entirely second life, essentially, financially. And so it's not that I lost any interest in Bitcoin or anything like that. It was just like, I kind of like did what I thought I needed to do. And then on the other side, it was like, let me go build a bunch of diversification over here. So if you're still buying Bitcoin, though, broadly speaking, why are you selling Bitcoin also to then buy shares of your company? The public company that we have has an AI product called Sylvia, so sylvia.com. And the way that that product works is you come in, you attach all your accounts, and then you can start talking to an AI. We can talk about details of that. But as part of that business, we have a lot of Bitcoin sitting on the balance sheet, probably $400 million or so. The market currently, because Bitcoin had drawn down, Bitcoin went out of favor. All of the capital rotated to AI. People were investing in data centers and all the latest companies, whatever. So these Bitcoin companies started to trade, for the most part, below the value of the Bitcoin. So if we had $400 million of Bitcoin, we'd be at $250, $300 million of value. So if Finance 101 would tell you, if your stock is trading below the cash on your balance sheet or the liquid assets of your balance sheet, you should take those assets and buy back your shares because you're basically using $1 to buy $0.70. And so that's what we've been doing. Now, when you do that, the shareholders of the company that remain, they own more Bitcoin at the end of that transaction. So it's a very accretive type of transaction. And if all of a sudden the stock started to trade above the Bitcoin value, we have a decision to make. How much value do we ascribe to our AI business? And if you had the AI business plus the Bitcoin, if we're trading above that, then Finance 101 would tell you, you should be selling your shares. You should be raising capital because the market is valuing more than you think you're worth. So when you're trading too high, you want to be raising capital because it's less dilutive. When you're trading too low, you want to be buying back shares because you're basically increasing your ownership of the business. So why would I buy Bitcoin right now instead of just buying? discounted Bitcoin by buying BRR? Well, it depends on who you are. If you have no Bitcoin exposure, what I always tell people is for years I've said, get off zero. Just give zero percent exposure, buy $5 of Bitcoin. The second you buy any amount, you start to pay attention to it. That's how I learned, right? Was I started reading, learning, paying attention. If you don't own Bitcoin directly, then that's kind of your entry place is you should go and buy some Bitcoin directly. You should figure out how it works. One of the things I usually tell people is you should move it between wallets. You should send it to someone, get it sent back, right? Figure out how does Bitcoin work so you know what you own. Once you have Bitcoin exposure directly, then you can kind of move to level 201 or 301. Now, if you buy our company or any other company that owns Bitcoin on its balance sheet, and we are trading below the Bitcoin value, there's still execution risk. We don't have a profitable company. So you have to start to calculate, okay, well, how long is it going to take them to get profitable? How much cash could they potentially burn till then? That is a much more advanced analysis than simply just buying Bitcoin. And so you sold Bitcoin. You sold Bitcoin in order to buy more of your company, which increased the ownership of Bitcoin for everyone at the company, correct? When do these funds fail? Is there a chance that somehow the fund goes out of business? So any company that is in the public markets basically has regulatory risk, execution risk, financing risk, right? I mean, it's just like any other business. There's more scrutiny. There's more oversight. There's more cost associated with the public company. In our case, I speak to our, we have hundreds of millions of dollars on our balance sheet. From Bitcoin and cash. And we have a relatively small team. We have less than 15 people or so that work at the company. We have an AI product that we have a lot of conviction in and we think is going to grow very quickly. But if for some reason, all of a sudden costs exploded and we were using the balance sheet to fund those losses and we just bled out the balance sheet, we would have no money. Now, at the current burn rate, we have like, I forget the latest numbers, but something like, you know, 15 or 20 years of runway. So it's a significant amount of time. And that's without doubt. Bitcoin increasing in price or kind of anything happening. So you have basically a well-funded public company with this AI product. If we did not have the AI product, then you would basically look at the Bitcoin and you'd say, well, if Bitcoin goes to zero, the company is going to go to zero, right? Or is at least going to lose a lot of value. If the team makes bad decisions in capital allocation, then you have the potential to make a lot of errors. So, for example, if you're selling the Bitcoin to buy back more shares, but your shares are trading at too high of a price, the reverse is happening, right? You're actually like losing value. But ultimately. It comes back to if a company just has Bitcoin on its balance sheet, as long as they don't take out enormous amount of debt or do something from a capital markets perspective that is stupid, they just have to wait. Now, the question for a lot of people, I think, who are investing in just pure play public company with Bitcoin on its balance sheet, no AI product, no anything is your question earlier, Jack, of should I buy Bitcoin or should I buy this thing? And it's so case by case, depending on what is the discount, what is your sophistication level, et cetera. It's nearly impossible for me to. You know, Kind of tell them what they should do. What do you think the chances are as a percentage that Bitcoin goes to zero? Less than one percent. What makes you so confident that it's that low? Lindy effect. The longer that something exists, the higher the probability that exists in the future. What is the difference between the life of Bitcoin and the life of the current U.S. dollar? The current U.S. dollar has been around for ballpark 55 years. Bitcoin has been around for ballpark about 17 years. To somebody who is 18 years old or younger in the United States, that's the same thing. Their entire life, Bitcoin and the current version of the U.S. dollar have been around their whole life. What's the strongest argument you have against Bitcoin? If they stop printing money. And what do you think could happen to the price of Bitcoin if they stop printing money? It would go down. I think down, but like down is, you know. How much, you know, can they actually get to a balance? But if all of a sudden they were like, not only we're not going to print any money, but actually like we're going to get into this super deflationary. Environment and Bitcoin is going to fall 30%. Okay, well, like if we have a lot of deflation like that, it's definitely what could happen. If you go back and you look, why did Bitcoin go down in October of last year? Bitcoin was the canary in the coal mine. We started to see inflation really start to fall aggressively in the second half of last year. And Bitcoin being the most sensitive, right, started to really lead all of the other assets. We eventually got stocks and everything kind of turned over there for a while. But it goes back to like, if that's the case, then it's going to fall. If that was a prolonged thing where we have like true deflation, Bitcoin would go down. So would tech stocks. So would other things that are sensitive to money printing, right? And so it comes back to this weird thing of, I don't think a lot of investors want to think of inflation and deflation and interest rates and, you know, kind of all these like nuanced economic details. What they really care about is like, how do I just put my finances kind of on like autopilot? And what I always tell people is right now you have a brokerage account. You have a checking account and you've got a savings account. I look at stable coins as the equivalent of your checking account. That's the money you use to buy things, et cetera, in the digital world. I look at Bitcoin as your savings account. You put your money in your savings account in the traditional world, you're not supposed to touch it. Put six months in a rainy day fund, leave it there, don't touch it. Go in your brokerage account, go in your checking account. Like that's the money that you use on a day-to-day basis. Don't touch your savings. In the digital world, I think that there's tokenization and like all this stuff happening in brokerage. I think stable coins are the checking account. But I just think Bitcoin is a savings account. Put your money in there. Don't think about it. Don't count on it, right? So don't go put 90% of your money in Bitcoin. Put whatever percent, you know, 10%, whatever the number is that you want to put in Bitcoin, whatever is the right thing for you. And then don't think about it. And go spend your time productively trying to create value at your job or building a business. And I think you'll end up pretty well. I could probably have more Bitcoin than 1%. You're ready to level up your business. But the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Hiring now? I have. What are you scared of? You wouldn't be buying at a bad time, relatively speaking, hopefully. True. Relative to someone that I know. Yeah. Well, I. It's been dollar cost averaging. You got to take the highs and the lows. So let me ask this question. Why do you only have 1% right now? Is there a reason that you're worried about? Yeah. I happen to buy a lot of iBit when it was like $110,000. And then it just kept going down and down and down and down and down and down. And I had a bunch of margin on the account. At the time, I'm like, you know what? If I'm going to prune anything, then it's the thing that doesn't really have a business backing it. And so I'm going to sell, you know, my iBit. You know what's interesting? He kind of looks like Vitaly from that angle. Yeah. You know what's new? It's interesting. No, Vitaly. And he looks like Chris Camillo. Yes. It's the face that you do when you kind of like this. Yeah. This thing. You look just like Chris Camillo when you do that. And Vitaly on this side, dude, that's hilarious. If you had the glasses, the Chris Camillo glasses with a deeper voice. Yeah. They both all of a sudden, your two faces changed. It's so funny. Because I've been noticing. Yeah. It's when he does that kind of like, that kind of face. You look just like Chris Camillo. Which face? It's like a, like a, that kind of. I don't really know, but it's when you're kind of explaining something. I just see Chris Camillo doing that exact same face. Well, he's a good investor, so I'm cool. He's a great investor. And then from the side, you almost look like Vitaly. Who is Vitaly? Vitaly ZDTV. Yeah. Oh, he's the guy who like goes and like surprises. He's the prankster. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny. Yeah. I like them both. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Vitaly. We'd love to have you on the podcast. And Fousey. But anyways. Go ahead. I would love to know, in one sentence, what is your strongest argument for Bitcoin? They will never, ever stop printing money. If they never stop printing money, the dollar loses value. If you hold cash as a saver, they will ruin your financial health. If you hold investment assets when they do that, they will enrich you. The asset that will benefit the most from dollar printing is Bitcoin. And why Bitcoin as opposed to other assets? Because it's the most sensitive to money printing. So why is it the most sensitive? Because it is a digital, scarce, decentralized asset that when people see money printing, the first asset they go buy is Bitcoin. Recently, Scott Bess at the Treasury Secretary said, we're going to double the amount of purchases of long-dated treasuries. Within seconds of him saying that, Bitcoin immediately jumped about $5,000. Gold went up, lagged. Stocks went up, lagged. But the asset that is most sensitive, that moves first, and that moves most violently on that announcement is Bitcoin. And why Bitcoin instead of Ethereum, instead of Dogecoin, instead of a laptop coin? How do you know? How do you know Bitcoin is the one? Well, Bitcoin is very unique. It is the only one that is digital, decentralized, non-sovereign, and has proof of work. All of the other coins have some different version. The reason why they were created was because they wanted to do something different than Bitcoin. They may use a blockchain, but then they have proof of stake, or they have some twist to it. But ultimately, the thing that Bitcoin was built for is to insulate yourself from the money printing. Bitcoin was built specifically for money printing. Bitcoin was built specifically to insulate people from the money printing. How do you know that? In the initial launch, it talks about money printing and central banking. In the white paper, it talks about this. Satoshi talked about it ad nauseum, how the role of a central banker is to not debase the currency, yet there are histories littered with violations of that trust. If you were to take one guess at who Satoshi is, who would you say? You. How did you know? First, I don't want to know who Satoshi is. I think that a lot of Bitcoin's value is ascribed to the fact that nobody knows who Satoshi is. It's very hard to critique the founder or the creator of Bitcoin because we don't know. My guess is that Satoshi is no longer alive. My guess is that Satoshi was one of the four or five people that was probably involved early on. My wife has a great theory that Satoshi was a woman because she says that no man could create Bitcoin and keep his mouth shut. And so she thinks that it has to be a woman. Peter Thiel has a very interesting theory. Peter believes that Satoshi in the late 1990s, there was a conference in Antigua where there was a bunch of cryptography folks and a bunch of like payment and finance folks. And they were all on this island. It was about 250 people, I believe. He thinks that Satoshi was probably there. On the island. I don't know if that's true or not. I wasn't there. We don't like islands. No. Yeah. For good reason. They have a bad connection. Yeah. So what happened with the Crypto Clarity Act? The Clarity Act is quite funny to me because everyone is so worried about will it get passed or will it not? I continue to say that Bitcoin doesn't need the Clarity Act because Bitcoin already has clarity. It's legal in the United States. There's a regulatory framework that oversees it. And no one is worried about any sort of regulatory issues with Bitcoin. I thought the regulatory is such a gray area between the SEC and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The SEC and CFTC have actually signed agreements that they are fully on board, same page, same team in working with that. That's new for this administration. The past administration, that was not the case. There was quite a bit of infighting. But the Clarity Act is ultimately not really making a judgment on individual cryptos or even the technology itself. What the Clarity Act really is doing, if you boil it down, is it's saying who can benefit or who can profit from this industry. So you have a bunch of crypto companies who would like to take on the large financial institutions, the banks, et cetera. And you have the banks who are saying, wait a minute, we don't want them to get a piece of the profits. And so you have these two groups that are basically fighting with each other. The banks would argue, well, if you have stable coins and deposits and you're paying interest, you're a bank, so you should get a piece of the profits. You should get regulated like a bank. You should go get a banking license. The crypto companies would say, well, the stable coins are something different and we're paying rewards. We're not paying interest. And that is ultimately the debate. It's not so much, are we going to have stable coins? Are we going to have Bitcoin? It is who is going to have the regulatory right to profit and serve the customer. I personally am of the belief that the government shouldn't be in the business of picking winners and losers. We should let the free market figure it out. So let as many people compete as possible and then allow the free market to determine who the winner is. But there's a lot of people in Washington, D.C. with a lot of different interests. And I think that there's a lot of companies that are all jockeying for what the exact language is, and they all have a lot of money. And so whenever you throw a lot of interest, a lot of money and a lot of companies all at a problem, you kind of get what we got, which is like essentially a stalemate. No one can agree on anything. And so just kind of Peter's long sideways. Are there any other regulatory risks that you see in the near future with Bitcoin? No, I do think there's still quite a number of questions around. For example, there's a project called Hyperliquid, which is essentially trying to tokenize a lot of kind of nuanced types assets. Should that be allowed in the United States? How should it be allowed? Who should be able to participate? Where do those profits go? What are their guardrails? All of that stuff is above my pay grade. I really spend my time focused on Bitcoin in particular. And I think that the regulatory apparatus and oversight of Bitcoin is very clear. And so Bitcoin doesn't need the Clarity Act because Bitcoin already has clarity. And so I think that Bitcoin's in a great position there. How much have ETFs and other ETFs and other ETFs and other ETFs invested in Bitcoin distorted the Bitcoin market? Because a lot of people now say that the four-year Bitcoin cycle doesn't really matter anymore because ETFs have commoditized this to such a high degree. And now there's leverage on top of that, that like everything at this point is kind of balanced out. The ETFs to me are not the culprit of positive or negative impact to the Bitcoin market. The ETFs empowered the Wall Street kind of crowd to participate in Bitcoin, because historically, if you want to participate in Bitcoin, you had to go and get a Coinbase account or figure out, you know, what you how you were going to get Bitcoin or what you were going to trade Bitcoin. When the ETFs got created, it was now a very easy thing for them to buy that was already approved on their platform that they understood. And it was a wrapper that they liked. And so now you basically opened up who can participate in Bitcoin in a significant way. Now, be careful what you wish for is something that I tweeted many, many times leading up to the ETF approval, because these individuals, they are not hardcore Bitcoiners. They are hardcore capitalists. And so that means that they may want to go long Bitcoin, they may want to go short Bitcoin, they may want to be hedged to Bitcoin, they may want to do some sort of intricate trade with Bitcoin, they may want to put leverage on top of it. All of these things take Bitcoin from a thing that was kind of a pure asset used to not even be able to short Bitcoin was a long only asset that people just bought. And of course it went up. But when you start to introduce all these financial instruments, what you're doing is you're tampering the volatility. And you can see it in the numbers, Bitcoin went from an 80 ball asset to a 40 ball asset. So if you tamper that volatility, that means Bitcoin is not going to go up as much in the bull markets, but it's also not going to go down as much in the bear market. So Bitcoin used to draw down 85%. Now it drew down about 50, 55%. What that tells me is if that was the bottom, which I believe it was, Bitcoin is not going to go up 2000% in the next bull market, it is likely to appreciate in a significant way, but it's going to have tampered volatility. And I think that there's a lot of people in the Wall Street world who like that. Bitcoin's volatility shrinking makes it more attractive to them, because they don't want to buy an 80 ball asset, but they love a 40 ball asset because it's more volatile than other things in their portfolio. But it's not so crazy that they think it's too risky. What do you think about buying Bitcoin itself versus the ETF? I am personally a fan of the ETF. I only buy the ETF anymore. Buying Bitcoin itself was such a pain. I recently had to find my cost basis from Bitcoin back from 2017. And I printed out records. Why did you have to find that? Because I claimed a loss from Celsius, and they paid me back Bitcoin, but I had to find my original cost basis to determine if I made money on the Bitcoin or I lost. And there was some sort of a gain, but I had to prove to the IRS where I bought the Bitcoin at the average price. So you have to track every single purchase. And it's not just as easy as like tracking it. It was horrible, horrible. Hours upon hours of research. The exchanges also for a long time were not required to give certain filings or kind of issue the equivalent of like a K-1, but for an exchange, they now have to do that from a regulatory or tax purpose. In terms of Bitcoin versus the ETF, Bitcoin is kind of the pure play exposure to the asset, but there's challenges. You have to figure out how to custody it. You have to figure out how to measure. Am I up? Am I down? What's my cost basis? All these different things. The ETF, the reason why people like ETF wrappers is because it's easy. I'm willing to pay 10, 20, 25 basis points for somebody else to deal with a bunch of this stuff. So somebody is doing work for you. You're paying that management fee. For the S&P 500, it's really simple. You pay eight basis points, give or take, and they handle everything for you. They buy 500 stocks, they do the rebalancing, they do everything that they're supposed to do. If you were to go and buy the 500 stocks yourself, that would be pretty painful. And so what do people do? They're willing to buy the ETF because it's easy. There's convenience. I think the same thing with Bitcoin ETS. There are some people who couldn't buy Bitcoin, but for the average person, they find it easier. They think it's more secure. They think that they have better access to information. And frankly, I think that they give some peace of mind in many cases. One of the things that Bitcoin needs to make sure is that it preserves the Bitcoin ethos and what I would call the Bitcoin values of self-custody, decentralization, sovereignty. But at the same time, we need to expand access to Bitcoin and the ETFs have done a great job of doing that too. So if I'm going to buy some Bitcoin, where should I buy it? If you're going to buy actual Bitcoin, I would use one of the top American brand exchanges. If you're outside of the United States, then I would use one of the top global exchanges. I do not think that buying cryptocurrency in general is somewhere where you want to take risk on a no-name company. And you can see it in, if you plot out what are all the things that they use to induce you to use an exchange that you haven't heard of before. The more that they offer, they're doing that because you're taking more risk. So if you look at Coinbase, you can sign up for an account. Maybe every once in a while, they run some sort of offer. Hey, we'll give you 50 bucks if you open an account or something. There are crypto exchanges that used to offer like, we'll give you $10,000 or some crazy offer. And a lot of people would do it. But the reason why they did that is because they had to get people comfortable with opening an account on an exchange they never heard of before. So I think that when you're first starting, just go to the things that people know, have trusted. A hundred plus million people, I think, use Coinbase now. I think that there's a couple of other American exchanges that are pretty. So where do you buy Bitcoin? You can't say? I don't want to talk about security either. It could, I think it's probably private transactions. Because when you buy a significant amount, a lot of them, private transactions, or it's also you give away the exchange, the brokerage, and then you kind of know where to sneak around. But overall, though, how do wealthy Bitcoiners actually lose their Bitcoin? I would say that most people I know who have ever lost Bitcoin, one of two things have happened. They have trusted a custody provider or some sort of company, and that company has gone bankrupt. And so Celsius, FTX, a bunch of these guys. Or there is some sort of hacking. Now, the hacking can be SIM swapping and more kind of technical things, or it could be as simple as some sort of social engineering. And so what I always tell folks is, if you are going to self-custody your Bitcoin, sure that you create a number of different security protocols so that you are not susceptible to those things. How individual people do that is kind of up to their technical abilities or what their, you know, kind of risk profile looks like. But I think that generally, if you're like an average down the fairway person, who's like, I want to put 1% of my assets in Bitcoin, just buy a little bit of Bitcoin. So you learn about it, use it, move it, etc. But most of those people are going to end up just buying an ETF. Could quantum computing hack Bitcoin? Quantum computing could hack the banks, it could hack the military, it could hack the nuclear codes, it could do lots of things. If a quantum computer got to the point where it actually was effective. Today, I think that there's a lot of debate as to what is the current state of quantum technology. And there are like many industries that are early, new and promising, lots of hype, lots of, hey, this is what's going to be possible. But if you actually look at like, where are we today? I think that most people who are rational say, it's interesting, let's see where it goes. And so today, I don't think quantum can hack bank accounts, cryptography, Bitcoin, national secrets, etc. I think what a lot of people are paying attention to is if quantum continues to advance at a fast rate, then we're going to have to figure out how exactly does Bitcoin and all cryptographic systems upgrade to make sure that they're quantum resistant. Speaking of safety, what is the safest way for someone to hold $10,000 of Bitcoin, $100,000, a million, and $10 million? Whether you're holding $10,000, or $10 million, you want to trust the platform that you're using. And the same can be said about running an online business, especially as we're heading into Black Friday. 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If you simply are optimizing for security, you're not worried about sovereignty, control, anything else, then putting it with the ETF is probably the single safest thing. It is the least inexpensive. It has insurance. If somebody was to take your stock shares, they can be reissued. So that is like from a pure safety standpoint, the ETF, but there's trade-offs. There's a lot of people who say, well, I don't actually own Bitcoin. I own a claim on Bitcoin via the ETF. I worry about. Multitude of other things and doing that. But if you're just optimizing for security, probably the ETF is the single most secure thing for people to do. Why not a ledger, trezor, holding it on something like Robinhood? I think that all of those are good options depending on who you are, how much Bitcoin you have. But if you look at the hardware wallets as an example, I think they do a fantastic job of securing Bitcoin. I think that they are very much trying to educate more people on how self custody works, how do their products work. But those are, to me, kind of 201, 301, level products. The first Bitcoin you buy, take it and move it to a hardware wallet, move it to a software wallet, put it onto an exchange, take it off, put it into another exchange, take it into a hardware wallet. Moving Bitcoin around, I think is really effective. But I do think that the Bitcoin community overestimates the average person's attention span and technical ability to learn self custody versus the convenience of, well, I'm already in my brokerage account. Rather than me wire money out and put it somewhere else to go buy Bitcoin, I'll just buy the stock that gives me Bitcoin exposure as the ETF. See, I spoke with someone recently who was saying that they keep all of it on a, like an external wallet. And I said, man, it's so much easier to just buy the ETF. And they said, well, listen, imagine we go through something catastrophic. I like to be able to take this little device and I could go anywhere with it and it fits in my pocket. And I could go anywhere in the world with, let's just, I'm just making up a number, 10 million. And it's mine. And I could plug this in across the other side of the world. And I got 10 million bucks instantly. So if anything happens, this is here. Makes sense to me, but it's, you know, you're, you're banking for the worst, basically, that you would need that. Bitcoin is one of the only assets in the world that can do that. I think it is an incredibly valuable aspect of Bitcoin. The average person is not worried about that scenario. Maybe they should be, but the average person is trying to solve their problems in front of their face. And for the average person, they have zero or 1% allocation to Bitcoin. And they're saying, how do I buy more? Not how do I prepare for the electrical grid to go down, my government to fail and people to show up to my house. And so I think that it again, goes back to Bitcoin is a teaching tool, in my opinion, as you start to learn about Bitcoin, you learn about the world. I credit Bitcoin with teaching me things about geopolitics, about national defense, about monetary policy. And so as you kind of go down this rabbit hole, you start to learn about all these things. And then all of a sudden, you're like, oh, well, what would I do if the electrical grid went down? What would I do if I was in XYZ situation? But to the average person, they're scrolling on Instagram or TikTok, they're drinking Starbucks, and they're worried about what are they going to do on Friday night? And oh, by the way, maybe I should become an investor. Like I've listened to this podcast. It's pretty cool. What, what, you know, what do I do? That person is so far removed from like what happens if the grid fails, that they're literally like, should I buy a stock or should I buy some Bitcoin? How do I open an account? Where do I go? What's an ETF? If that's the average person, like there's a big gap between that and like $10 million of Bitcoin on a ledger that you're running around the world as a fugitive with, which by the way, John McAfee was doing. And I went onto his boat in the Bahamas when he was a fugitive. What year was this? Probably 2019, I think. How'd you get invited on his boat? I messaged him. I said, John, it looks like you are somewhere in the Western world. I'm not sure if you're in the Western world. I'm not sure if you're in the Western hemisphere. I want to do a podcast with you. Where are you going to be next? And he kept posting these pictures and it looked like he was somewhere like in the Caribbean. And I was willing to go anywhere in the world. I really thought it would be a fascinating conversation. And he introduced me to his wife and she said, we're going to be in the Bahamas in two days. Meet us there. Okay. I turned to my brother. So you want to go? He said, yep. Got flights, flew there. They gave us an address and we showed up and they were parked in a, um, uh, on dock. And there's a bunch of boats there. And John was on his boat. He was still hung over from the night before he'd completely lost his voice, which is not good if you're trying to do a podcast. And there was everywhere, like not one, not three, not five, like a hundred all over the boat. And I was very nervous because I said, you don't look sober. You have a reputation for being a little volatile. There may or may not be a rumor that you might have potentially your neighbor. And now there's everywhere. So we expertly tried to navigate the situation to do an interview with John with all over the boat and not touch any of them, nor, uh, upset him in a way that could potentially put ourselves in danger. He turned out to be the nicest guy in the world. He was incredibly accommodative. Uh, he did the interview. Uh, it was hilarious. He had incredible insights. He's very intelligent. Um, and at the very end, he was like, thank you so much for coming. Do you want to take a picture together? Well, of course I do. And so then he tried to hand me multiple. And after I politely refused, I have a picture with John McAfee where him and his wife were holding. I'm standing. Why wouldn't you grab it? I don't want my fingerprints on the gun. Yeah. But there's photo evidence that like, you know, you just did it for a photo. Maybe I wasn't going to take that chance, but it's John McAfee. I don't know. That's a, it was an amazing life experience. AI yourself now holding it in hindsight. I probably should have been more worried about, uh, being on a boat with a fugitive of the U S government in the Bahamas with, but, um, I was not thinking about it. I was like, I don't know. I don't know. I don't at the time. Uh, I was there as a, maybe a pseudo journalist. Um, and, uh, it was awesome. I learned a lot and found him incredibly engaging, but, um, was not a scene where I was like, this guy's probably going to be around for a long time. What's the most valuable lesson you learned from John McAfee? I think there's three things. I don't think he really cared when anybody else thought. I think that he embodied the idea of having no fear. And I think that he was much more intelligent because he questioned everything around him. And so people, took that as like, he's a conspiracy theorist, but I think he had a pretty rational view as to, I'm being told a piece of information. Is this true? How do I know what evidence can I go find? It was almost like applying the scientific method to information that he received. And so in conversation with him, you go in expecting kind of a wild, crazy fugitive man that has lost his mind and is, uh, uh, kind of close to his death. Instead, I found somebody who definitely drank a lot, who definitely partied a lot, but also was still incredibly sharp. And it was very obvious why he had built such a big business. Going back to the price of Bitcoin, how manipulated is the price? You'd have to ask the manipulators. I don't know. It's very hard to tell. Bitcoin goes up, it goes down. The stock market goes up, stock market goes down. So a good maybe counter argument would be, is Bitcoin more or less manipulated in the stock market? More. Maybe. I don't think it's a maybe. I mean, we see the price like shoot up like 2% instantly, and then it immediately just like crashes 3% and then it goes back to normal. Is there something going on there? Well, is that manipulation or is it just a lack of sophistication in people who are buying Bitcoin because you don't have kind of the traditional channels buying? it. So for example, if I go to a large bank and I say, hey, I would like to buy $20 million of a stock, they will VWAP it over some period of time. They will be intentional about how do I acquire this stock without moving the price. And they're very good at doing this. They have years and years of experience. They have entire teams, they have technology, et cetera. There are people in the Bitcoin world who are just like, I want $20 million of Bitcoin. And they'll just press the button and all of a sudden it'll shoot up and it'll come right back down. And it wasn't manipulation. It was kind of lack of sophistication. So whenever I see this stuff, I always say to myself, is there manipulation? Well, financial instruments, leverage, all of these things can definitely manipulate price. I tend to be like an Occam's razor, like the most likely explanation is the simplest, which is like, just people are not as sophisticated in the Bitcoin world as they are in the traditional finance world. What do you think about meme coins? Would you buy them? The best investment I have ever had is Dogecoin. So if you were to channel Howard Marks, Howard Marks would tell you that that is a dumb idea. Because if you were to channel Howard Marks, Howard Marks would potentially be your best investment ever. It means you had to take enough risk where it could have been your worst investment ever. So Howard Marks' entire strategy is best in terms reflected as a percentage, not in terms of gross amounts. Howard Marks' entire view on taking risk and driving returns is you should never want to be the number one asset manager in a given year based on your return, because that meant that you had to take so much risk to drive that return that if you had been wrong, you would end up being one of the worst asset managers that year. So instead, what Howard Marks believes and his strategy has been for decades is he simply wants to be above average. And if he's consistently above average decade after decade, then he ends up being one of the top five asset managers of all time, because he basically, everyone else took so much risk and blew themselves up. Dogecoin is kind of the same thing. Has Howard Marks ever turned $100 into $16,000 in Dogecoin? Howard Marks turned $100 into way more than $16,000 in his life. In Dogecoin? Not in Dogecoin. Howard Marks was not interested in Bitcoin, nor Dogecoin. Howard Marks has a son who is incredibly intelligent, had the pleasure of meeting and talking to. And one of the nice things that I think a lot of these legends of finance or legendary investors, they understand when their mind is becoming like concrete, it's no longer wet cement. And so they tend to then say to a young person, either on their team, a family member, et cetera, like, why don't you take the risk? One of my favorite stories in finance is Stanley Druckenmiller was the head of research at a firm, and he was like 32 years old. And the head of the firm came to him and said, Stan, you're going to be in charge of the investment team now. And Stanley was shocked because he was like, well, there's a bunch of guys who are older and more senior than me. Why are you not putting them in charge of the investment team? And the guy said to him, he goes, because they all live through the bear market. They're going to be scared of taking risk. And right now we're heading into a bull market and we need basically somebody young and dumb enough to just take max risk. And so you're going to be in charge. And Stan has told the story in public before, but basically what he describes is like, that's sometimes why we send 17, 18 year olds on the front lines of the army is that are almost like, oblivious to the risk that they're taking. The guy who is 35 years old, you know, the saying, be scared of the old man and a young man's game. Same thing kind of in finance is like the guy who's lived through multiple bear markets is much less likely to take just ungoverned risk. You probably were ready to take ungoverned risk in Dogecoin. It was a hundred dollars. Yeah. And actually, I mean, it turned into like, so you were risk mitigating. Yeah. Whatever that was, I think it was a Reddit thing. And I was like, yeah, a hundred bucks. Graham, you try it too, Graham. Oh gosh. I hate this. Oh, he now admits that he had some Dogecoin. No, what happened is that Jack is a joke, told me to buy a thousand dollars of Dogecoin in 2020. And it was a fraction of a penny. I'm like 0.02, like, you know, of a penny. Like, and I got, I think it was 230,000 Dogecoin. Okay. And I thought it was dumb. And the next day I sold it. And what did it go to? At the peak, that would have been worth about a hundred and $40,000 from a thousand dollars. I have an individual who worked in our office that came in the office. He's very kind of bubbly, enthusiastic, energetic person. And he was very depressed. And this went on for three or four days. I eventually asked him, I said, what happened? And he told me that he took a very large portion of the money in his bank account and he bought ski mask Dogecoin. Hiring now, then this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. And I, before I laughed, asked him if he was serious. He said, yes. And I said, what happened? He said, went down 99%. I said, okay, that's not going to happen. I'm going to not good. Do you have enough money for food? He said, I do. I said, okay, that was dumb. Now you learned your lesson. Don't do that again. Two weeks go by and he started to come out of his funk. And all of a sudden he comes to the office, he's bouncing off the walls. And he says, well, remember that ski mask Dogecoin that I had? I never sold them. It came back. I'm now up like $100,000. I said, dude, go sell that immediately. And he ran over to his computer and he immediately sold all of it. I said, great. You made money. You escaped your problem unscathed. Don't do that again. And then, three or four weeks later, he came in and he was depressed again. I said, what happened? And he said, remember that ski mask coin? I would have had $11 million if I'd held it. And so now he had the pain of regret, the pain of, you know, averted wind. And so I told him, we're no longer allowed to talk about ski mask Dogecoin in our office anymore. And I think that that's a perfect encapsulation of the experience of trading is that most people, myself included, not a good trader. And so you're much better off just buying long-term assets, holding them. And when he said he turned $100 into $16,000, I thought you were going to tell me you turned $16,000 into $100. And so you guys were even. That guy is exactly me. Not with dog ski mask coin, but I tell Jack all the time, I'm like, dude, if I had kept this, it would be worth this. Or I didn't buy this. I was about to buy it and I didn't. And now it's this. No matter what it is. Imagine if we had all bought NVIDIA. In 2016, I have a tweet that says the world runs on CPUs. Eventually it'll run on GPUs. I'm a genius. I didn't buy NVIDIA. What am I doing? And so that was a great lesson of the reason I knew that was because I was mining Ethereum, which at the time used GPUs. And so I had done a bunch of research on what am I buying? How do these work? What else can you do with them? The graphics card can be used for self-driving and DNA sequencing. And it was just very obvious that there's going to be a bunch of use cases of future technology on GPUs. And I was smart enough to tweet it or maybe arrogant enough to tweet it, but didn't do anything. And so I could sit there and be like, oh, if I bought NVIDIA, I wouldn't have to spend that much money. I would have. But like, you're going to waste your time doing that. There's always a little bit of pain in every single trade, even successful ones, because you don't ever buy it perfectly at the bottom and then sell perfectly at the top. Because if it continues to go, I bought perfectly at the bottom. But you don't. 108. 108. We'll see how you feel when you exit it or don't. I haven't. I have not exited. That's the problem is I'm really good at buying. I'm really bad at selling. Well, you're not unique in that. I used to think that buying was the hard part. So whether it's in the private markets or in the public markets, it's like, oh, can I find the best company? Can I get access to the private company? Can I go and find the right stock? I am now convinced after having done this for over a decade, buying is not the hard part. Selling is way harder. And I have spent maybe the last five years asking every smart person that I know in the investment world, how do you sell? And that is a question that I'm fascinated with now as to how do you do it? The best answer I've ever gotten is from a guy named Fred Wilson, who's at Union Square Ventures. He's a very famous venture capitalist. And he told me that when he's a private investor and a company is going public, he does a third, a third, a third. So when the company is going public, he sells a third into the IPO. 18 months later, he sells another third. And then he last third, he never sells. And he's basically like, if it goes down after the IPO, I sold a third. So I made some money. If it went up 18 months later, I sell a third. And then he goes, I hold a third just in case it ever turns into something crazy, then I'm fine there too. And I think that selling in a rules-based way like that is probably a much better approach than like us all waking up, licking our finger and being like, you know, I think it's going down tomorrow. Let me sell. Chris Camillo has a really good exit strategy, which is he enters a stock when he thinks that the general sentiment of a company is missing some big transformational aspect that could, that could affect the company. And then as soon as the general market sentiment understands that Delta, that's when he exits. So it's like, as soon as people, enough people are talking about it on social media, it's like, okay, well, I'm done. Investing, in my opinion, is really about finding things that are not popular, and then hoping that they become popular, finding things that are not consensus and they become consensus. Same thing. They're not being talked about and they become talked about a lot. And ultimately that is how you get appreciation or asymmetry. And so it's very hard to measure, like when is enough? When are people talking about it enough? I don't think people put enough credit on somebody like Chris probably has developed a personal algorithm. He has consumed so much information. He's seen the pattern so many times that he has a feel for it. His personal rhythm is tuned to understanding. Nobody's talking about this or somebody's talking about it. And if you were to ask him, define when the right time is to sell, he probably couldn't do it, but he could tell you this stock has reached the point. I'm going to sell it now. And I think that we all have that to some varying degree. Somebody could be a real estate investor. They've looked at enough deals. They're like, oh, this one's not a good one. Why? The front facade is not going to be very attractive to buyers. Why not? They're like, I just know. And a lot of times we will discount that and say, like, that's not a very scientific approach. But it is something about this human algorithm that we've been able to train over time that I think we should put a lot more weight on is because ultimately it is intuition that is driven by pattern recognition. So do you think then meme coins are bad for the overall market of Bitcoin? If you view it through an entertainment lens, let people knock themselves out. They can play video games, they can gamble, they can do whatever they want. If you think about it from a financial investing standpoint, it's incredibly stupid. And I think people know that, but they feel like they have no hope. They feel like they have no path to financial security. And so as that occurs, they are willing to take outsized risk. They need to get $100 turned into $16,000. You can't do that in the traditional stock market. So what do you do? You push out on the risk curve. They're willing to take more risk because they have less hope. They have less confidence in their skill to invest or build a business. And this is a story as true as time. If you go back to Weimar, Germany, or if you go back to Germany, or many other times in history, when you devalue a currency, you are punishing people financially. When they get punished, they lose hope. When they lose hope, gambling increases. If you just zoom out for a second, look at the United States of America, gambling is a massive problem. Not sports gambling, not just prediction markets, not just meme coins, not just in the stock market. Holistically, gambling is an absolute national crisis. And so we think it is such a big deal that we've actually went and we acquired a minority stake in what I think is probably the leading platform that is trying to tell the stories of the people who get to the other side of gambling addiction. But what ends up happening is this is very well documented in drinking and drugs. So there's lots of podcasts, there's lots of rehab centers. There's lots of like infrastructure where if you have a drinking problem, there's a path to getting sober. And I think that it's somewhat been normalized. It's like, Hey, some people get alcoholic and then they go to rehab. They come out, their life is fine. Everyone celebrates and it's good to go. Gambling is still like on the edge of society. You don't really hear about a lot of people being like, Oh, he's addicted to gambling, but I think that over time, over the next 10 years, that's going to become a major theme is that we're going to have tons of, especially young men who are addicted to gambling. And there are going to be parents, loved ones, fiancees, spouses, sisters, brothers, cousins, kids that are all trying to figure out what do I do to help my loved one who's addicted to gambling. There's not a lot of infrastructure. And so we think that that is a major theme for the next decade. That is going to significantly improve people's lives. If someone figures it out. Well, what do you think about tokenization? I think tokenization is just stocks in a different form. I wrote a piece back in 2018, I think, where I created a framework where I said, we used to live in the analog age of securities. What that meant was everything was physical. You got a physical stock certificate, you got a physical deed to your home, the bond certificate showed up and you literally put it in a filing cabinet in your home. At some point we transitioned to an electronic age, which was basically these electronic Q-SIPS that sat in a centralized database. And when I own Apple stock, I don't get a physical certificate anymore. I just own the Q-SIPS inside of my account. We are now transitioning to a digital age of securities, which is now instead of that Q-SIPS, there's a token and that token I can take custody of, or I can leave it with some sort of custodian provider. And so if you look at that transition, it was still the same Apple stock. It was still the same deed to a home. It's just a new technology form factor. And so I don't think it'll have a profound impact on individual investors as much as the finance firms are going to like it because it's going to drive down cost, increase efficiency and help them make more money. Now, in terms of the big economic picture, are you bullish or bearish for the future? How could you not be bullish? There is nothing that you can show me that is bearish about the U.S. economy, about technology or about humans. I would say, well, to be devil's advocate here, they're printing a lot of money. AI could disrupt a lot of people's jobs. We could see mass unemployment and we could enter an age where people can't adapt as fast as AI advances. AI is creating jobs. AI is boosting the U.S. economy and printing money will enrich you as long as you own investment assets. Things happen in the world. They're neither good nor bad. In the first book I wrote, one of the chapters that I think people very worked up was I said, luck is not real. And the example I use is if you're walking across the street with me and we both get hit by a bus and when we get hit by a bus, we lose our leg. Somebody comes to the hospital and visits us and they ask you, what happened, Graham? You say, well, I was really unlucky today. I walked across the street, I got hit by a bus and I lost my leg. If somebody then comes to the hospital and visits us and they ask you, what happened, you say, well, I was really unlucky today. If somebody then comes to my bed and says, what happened? And I say, man, I am so lucky. I got hit by a bus, lost my leg and I didn't die. Same event, same outcome, two different mindsets. Same thing about money printing. You can sit and have a victim mindset and say, they're printing so much money, they're going to hurt me. Or you can say, they're going to print so much money, they are going to make everyone who owns an investment asset rich. Same outcome, same thing, but two different perspectives. And so my whole message, I think, to people in the books I've written and a lot of things that I tweet and talk about is you have agency. You cannot change whether they print money or not. No vote, no demonstration, no protest, no politics, nothing is going to change what they do. So you have to decide, if they do that, am I going to get hurt by it or am I going to benefit from it? Same thing with AI. We can yell and scream all we want how dumb we think these people are saying that AI is going to kill everybody or how smart and how much we agree with them. They're going to do what they do. You have to decide, am I going to use AI or am I not? Am I going to sit in a job where I think AI could displace me or am I going to be the guy at the company who becomes the AI guy? Am I going to learn how to use it and I become indispensable? The technology is the same. It's just what do you do? What is the agency that you exert into the world? And I think that in my life, across all of these different kind of life experiences I've had, I know people who work at Blue Collar. I know people who are some of the richest people in the world. All of them that are successful in any form or fashion exert agency on the world. And so I just think that's what it ultimately is going to come down to. So what do you think the average person watching should be doing as soon as they finish this podcast? I think the average person should be doing as soon as they finish this podcast. I think the single most important thing for most investors is to be educated. And I talk a lot about why is it that half of the country sits in cash? Because they don't know that if there is any degree of money printing, they're going to be hurt. I'm in tax-free muni bonds, Jack. Jack keeps looking at me. Why? He keeps looking at me, insinuating that I'm sitting on a cash. I'm not trying to look at you. It's a tax-free yield. I didn't say anything. You're losing money. Equivalent to like 7%. You're losing money. He said it, not me. 7%? Yeah. I'm not losing money when you account for the risk-adjusted return. Sure, if I want to take more risk, I would make more money. Yes. And no one's technically losing money on a risk-adjusted return. Yes. So. Congratulations. The single most important thing I think for people to do is go to sylvia.com. Go to the bathroom, Jack. Come on, the bathroom break. No. The single most important thing I think for people in the world is to make sure that they're educated. If they're educated, then they can exert. They're an agency in the world. There is a long list of amazing organizations that are trying to put financial education into schools. I do not think that that is going to succeed. Because the problem is that they are teaching generic information to people who do not care. If you go back and you think about when you were 15, 16, 17, 18 years old, did you care whatsoever when the teacher was sitting there talking? Uh, about finance, yeah. But about virtually everything else, no. So, I believe that the best way to teach people is to teach them on a personalized level. The power of AI now. is that we can personalize everything. We can personalize education. We can personalize healthcare. We can personalize financial insights, etc. And so, I'm spending an immense amount of my time focused on how do we take artificial intelligence technology and deliver personalized insights to you and everyone else in the world, but use superhuman intelligence to give you that financial insight. And to me, the single most important thing for Sylvia is the more people use Sylvia, the faster their net worth grows. If there's a product in the world that the more you use it, the faster your net worth grows, the faster your net worth grows, why would you not try it? How is it able to grow your net worth? If you want a child to learn, what do you do? You give them one-on-one tutoring. And the teacher sits there and says, Jack, I want you to learn this information. They go over it, they test you, you don't know it, they then teach you more, and it's just one-on-one tutoring. If you want the best healthcare in the world, what do the richest people in the world do? One-on-one personal healthcare. In finance, that does not exist. And so, with the power of AI, what we can now do is, if you give a product context on your personality, personal finances, and then you begin talking to it about what your goals are, it can help you become informed to actually go after those goals. So, when we built Sylvia, we never thought we were going to release it publicly. We built it for me personally. And what I had been doing was I was taking screenshots of my accounts, and I was putting them into ChatGBT, and I was talking to ChatGBT. And to be honest, it was okay, because I was giving it context. The problem was, then I came back the next day and I had to redo it all over again. So I'd have to go and get the amounts and go through this. When we started to build the product, initially, it was just, I want to attach all of my accounts, and I want to then talk to an AI with the exact real-time numbers in my accounts. We then started to add private investments, real estate cars, collectibles, et cetera. And then we said, well, what if I could upload my tax returns and just give this machine as much context as I can? Over time, we realized that the existing legacy frontier models were not effective at answering these questions. And so, what we've had to do is build an immense amount of proprietary technology to answer finance questions. ChatGBT, Claude, et cetera, are very good at being smart. They can answer physics, history, math, all these different topics. They are really bad at answering very specific finance questions. So if you go to Google and you say, how do I get my tax rate down? It cannot help you, because it doesn't know anything about your finances. If you go to ChatGBT and say, how do I get my finances down? They'll hit you with a modal that says, well, connect your brokerage account. Well, what about my private investments, my real estate, all of the funds I've invested in, the collectibles, et cetera, that I own? It doesn't have your full financial picture. So what we did was, Sylvia is, when somebody comes to sylvia.com, you come in, you attach your accounts, you upload your private investments. And when you ask that exact question, same question to Sylvia. What she will do is she will go asset by asset in your portfolio and walk you through and say, you know, hey, you guys own a piece of real estate. This is the address that's in an opportunity zone. You should look at and make sure that you're actually getting the benefit of the opportunity zone because I don't see it on your tax return that you uploaded. Oh, by the way, this stock right here is up. You shouldn't sell it, but this stock is down. You should tax loss harvest it. Oh, by the way, this exact asset right here, this company you own, it doesn't look like you have a 401k or a defined benefit plan in place. If you put that in place and you put a hundred thousand dollars per year in that off of your company balance sheet, that'll actually lead to a hundred thousand dollar tax savings for you. And it'll compound and build equity over the next five years. That level of personalized insight usually would cost tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year because you have to go to an accountant, a tax expert and all these different people. Well, now what you can do is you can use AI to do it. And so what we see people doing is they come in and when they use this product, the more they use it, the faster the net worth grows. But a huge reason for that is we have been able to build technology that when you go head to head, if you ask us a question versus Claude, us a question versus open AI, we on objective measures that we have open source. So anyone can go run the test themselves. Sylvia is more accurate in tax mortgage and credit cards, which means that we have been able to build technology that is better than open AI and anthropic. These are multi trillion dollar companies that have not been able to compete with us because is very specific. Applied AI is going to outperform generic AI in these different verticals. Is it safe to upload your tax return to chat GPT? It depends on what you're worried about. If you are using the product to get you answers, there are certain things that you can do. You can use zero data retention policies, etc. But I think one of the problems right now is that people have a lot of questions about how do these large language models operate from a security standpoint. There's a recent case where there was two mathematicians that were trying to solve a very hard math problem. And all of a sudden, open AI called them right before they solved it and said, hey, we solved the problem. And they said, well, how did you do that? And they said, well, we're doing your product and we're uploading all the information. And open AI said, yeah, we know you were doing that. But like, we didn't look at what you were doing. We just went over here and we ran our models against the problem. We solved it in 88 hours. There's a problem that no one has solved for like a century. And so what they are being accused of, which I don't know if it's true or not, but they were being accused that they were actually training their models on the data of those mathematicians were putting into the system. And that made the model much more likely to be able to solve this problem. Open AI knew the problem was about to be solved. And so then they went and solved it themselves. And then they took credit for having solved some of it. I don't know what is true or what is not there. But what I think it brings up is, are you comfortable putting your data into a system where they are explicitly saying they are going to take your data, they're going to train on it, and they're going to use it for all these other purposes. What we do today is we don't actually train on the actual individual data that people are uploading. And we have immense amount of security in terms of SOC 2. We encrypt the PII, do all of these things that make me comfortable to use the product. And I think that a lot of the data that we're using is going to be used to to use the product and i think that a lot of wealthy self-directed investors that's what they're looking for in a product is the ability to use it for the power of ai but not have to give up on some of the security or privacy concerns that they have see imagine there's a hacker who hacks into your like let's just say chat gbt and threatens to extort you and say hey i'm gonna i'm gonna post all the people ideas man i'm just saying i think that's a personal assistants the personal assistants i think are actually the bigger uh attack vector so i don't know about you guys but um i have now used uh three different personal assistants that i think are relatively good grokbot instinct and muse from uh from meta yeah and all three of these products um i have actually been surprised in hindsight how quickly i gave them access to my email calendar you know various things that two or three years ago there was zero percent chance i was going to give context to these systems. Because of our work with Sylvia and my firsthand view of how much context can improve these products and your experience, I'm now much more open to, yeah, if you have access to my calendar, you can help me send calendar invites, make changes, call out conflicts, do all these things. To me, the personal assistants are actually like the attack vector that have maybe the highest risk. Meta obviously has a great security team and is kind of in a different category. But some of these startups where they have access to lots of people things and they're just getting started, that to me feels like maybe something that we need to pay more attention to. What do you think right now is the best LLM? For finance, I think Sylvia is great. I use all the products. I always say that I think ChatGPT does a fantastic job for very specific things. ChatGPT, I used when it first came out, I thought it was fantastic. Then all of a sudden Claude showed up and I thought that Claude Code, Claude Cowork, all of those types of kind of like execute work became really big and i would only use chat gpt as like basically a better google and then gemini's nano banana came out i started using that for a lot of image generation etc and then chat gpt came out with a better model and all of a sudden i was then using it for a lot more including image generation and so i tend to go back and forth between a lot of the different models for different uses and the way i think about it is i use slack to communicate internally with our team i don't think i've ever been like let me find someone on slack at a different company. It's an internal tool. My email, I don't send that many emails to other people on our team unless I'm like CCing them. I usually use email for like external communication. X, I use to communicate with people I never met before. And it's kind of like a one-to-many broadcast. So I have three communication channels for anyone in my professional life. Then text, I have really for my family, friends, et cetera. So it's four different communication platforms, that have different use cases. AI is very similar to me. I want to use Sylvia for finance. I want to use Cloud for things like Cloud Code. I want to use ChatGPT to get information, do research, et cetera. I want to use Instinct for personal use. I want to use Grokbot to do a lot more in terms of our companies. And this is like TV channels where it's like you need this subscription and this one and this one and this one. That's a lot. Ultimately, I think that we are going to find you are getting way more productivity than the cost of doing it. So a great example is I recently was going to hire an in-house recruiter for one of our companies. We need to hire a lot of people. And so I was like, wouldn't it be great to have somebody dedicated to just all day going through LinkedIn and trying to find people, doing an initial call, figuring out who's a potential fit, who's not, help me manage the process and such. and I set up a bot on GrokBot to be a recruiter. And I started to describe to it, here's the types of roles that I need. Here's what I'm looking for. Here's what I'm not looking for. Go build me a list of 25 people. And it would come back and do it very quickly. And then as I would get on the phone with some of these people and I would do an interview, I would then go back to GrokBot and I would say, hey, by the way, I like that person. Here's the three things that they were really strong on. Here's two things I think that we need to dig more on. And here's one thing that I thought was a little bit of a red flag. By the way, if we go and move towards an offer with this person, they told me they're looking for this type of compensation. And I would just keep doing that over and over. And then towards the end of this process, I would just ask the bot, I'd say, based on everything that I've told you so far, where do you think we're at? And it would say, hey, well, I think this person is most likely to take the job, but it seems like this concern would be, you know, potential issue. This person needs more convincing, but they're, you know, the most inexpensive or whatever the analysis was. That replaced a person. It wasn't a person on our team that we like got rid of because of the technology, but we didn't hire someone because of the technology. And so I think that is just going to keep happening over time. We have a public company with hundreds of millions of dollars on the balance sheet. And it's only going to grow a wider gap over time. So when you look at that, you say to yourself, well, where's the world going? The world is going to start to morph to accommodate for the bots and the agents, not for humans. Already companies are reporting that their technical documentation is being read by more bots and agents than by humans. So you start to write the technical documentation for the agents, not for the humans. Well, what happens when a website all of a sudden gets more traffic from agents than humans? Do you start to actually change the way the website looks, how it's constructed, what the site map is? We did this with SEO. There's a lot of websites that are built for how do the Google crawlers work. But I think that we're just on the precipice of figuring out what does an agent agent-oriented internet look like? What does agent-oriented products look like? I don't have the answers, but it's going to be a lot of fun to figure that out over the next, you know, 10 years or so. So we're going to do a little change of pace here because we do need to wrap. But what is the best investing advice you've ever received? Hiring now? Holiday drinks are now at McDonald's. Like the new Red Bull Frosted Cranberry Energizer. It's Red Bull meets cranberry flavors topped with cold foam and sprinkles made to charge your holiday spirit now at mcdonald's you kind of also like like bradley cooper i said you kind of also look like bradley cooper you know it's also interesting i got a little sometimes for a brief second tony robbins and then also got alex becker it's a it's a mix of don't know who you look like tom cruise yeah yeah channing tatum thank you i'll give you two pieces of advice i think one is Mark Yusko telling me pressure winners harder than everybody, cut your losers faster than everyone. But I also think that there's a great piece of advice of invest your portfolio like it's your children's, not your own. And there's a great not your own and there's a great a watch brand, one of their famous ads is basically like, it's not your watch. You're just taking care of it for the next generation. And I genuinely believe that that is probably the best advice for your investment portfolio. That's Patek Philippe. It's not your portfolio. Because guess what? You're not going to buy Dogecoin. You're not going to do all the crazy stuff. You're going to say, my kid's money can't go into that thing. And I think you'll end up with better return. I want to ask you some fun scenarios. These are meant to be somewhat rapid fire. So each answer should be 15 seconds. Perfect. Bitcoin hits a million dollars. What happened? They kept printing money. Bitcoin hits $10,000. What happened? Satoshi came back. Do you think that's the most likely if Bitcoin? No. If Bitcoin hit $10,000, it's probably some sort of technical issue or threat where people panic and it's kind of a wick down and then it comes back. What's the biggest threat to Bitcoin? Them stop printing money. What would make you sell all the Bitcoin that you own? I will never sell it all. Is there anything that could change your mind where you say, I'm going to sell? If it was the last money I had to my name and my children weren't going to eat unless I sold it, I would consider. If you could not own Bitcoin, what other asset would you own in its place? For long-term capital appreciation, I think Bitcoin, gold, and land are the three things that will benefit the most from money printing. So if you're going to sell it, you're going to If I couldn't own Bitcoin, it'd be gold and land. If I want to create an enormous amount of wealth over a relatively short period of time, it would be a business that I was in control of. What's the next financial bubble? Financial bubbles are the next bubble. What I mean by that is I do not believe that we will see a prolonged 18-month or longer financial crisis during the rest of our lifetime because I believe that central banks have perfected the playbook on how to address any sort of market weakness where they just hit it with a monologue. I don't think that's going to happen. And so they will continue to distort the market, but I think that there will be ebbs and flows, volatility, 10, 15% drawdowns. I just don't see us 50% down for 18 months in the stock market. And we're going to get some predictions here. Where do you predict the price of Bitcoin to be at the end of 2026? Higher. What about the end of 2030? Much higher. What target do you have in mind where if you say Bitcoin's price, I think is going to be here, I have the highest confidence that of that price. I don't know where Bitcoin's price is going on any given timeframe. I think I have been humbled over the years by my inability to predict the exact price on a given timeline. What I do believe is that Bitcoin will go to a million dollars during our lifetime. I think that there are a number of converging forces that are driving it higher. What I am very fascinated by and wish I had an answer to is how many more cycles will we go through to get to a million? If Bitcoin goes from $75,000 to $250,000 down, then it goes to $700,000 and then it goes to a million, that would be three cycles. Or is it something where we need like six, seven, eight different cycles to get there? And so you and I are old, decrepit men who are just holding on until Bitcoin hits a million. What do you think Bitcoins are going to be at 2030? Yeah, I just, I wanted to predict both. So end of 2026, I'm going to say $65,000. I think it's going to go down a little bit. 2030, I'm going to say. $174,000 in 2030. That's my, just get, I'm going to throw it out there and we'll see what happens. Why so bearish? You think $174,000 is bearish? If you just look at the four-year cycles, it's probably. Yeah, but if it goes down to $65,000, that's pretty good. The difference between $65,000 and $75,000 to me is minuscule. I think that's triple in three years. If it goes to $65,000 to $174,000, I think that's fantastic. Hold on. What a boomer. What about the S&P? The S&P 500 price by the end of next year. I think the S&P will continue to compound at 10% to 12% for the foreseeable future. Historically, it's been 8% or so, but I do think that the accelerated money printing plus. One of the aspects of the S&P that I don't think gets enough credit is the companies have actually seen their multiples compress because they are making so much more money. And so naturally, if you see earnings per share going up, if you see company revenue growing, profits growing, index should actually accelerate. And so I think that 10% to 12% for the next decade or so is probably a good target for the S&P. Do you think Michael Saylor is positive or negative for the Bitcoin market? I don't think that anyone is positive or negative. I think that everyone is a market participant and the market is great at ingesting information and figuring out a price. Michael Saylor has done a fantastic job of spreading the education of Bitcoin. I think that there are plenty of people who critique him for various things, but there's plenty of people who critique me, you, everybody else. I don't think so much about positive or negative for a market as much as Michael Saylor has bought a lot of Bitcoin and generally people buying Bitcoin means that the price is going to be higher, not lower as long as they don't sell it. I think that artificial intelligence is probably one of the most powerful technologies that we will ever see introduced. And what I know is that the world has been seeking intelligence for literally centuries. They've been willing to scour the earth, pay as much money, do whatever it takes to find the most intelligent people. And now you have that intelligence in your pocket. And so my guess is that most people are going to be able to figure out how to make more money because technology historically has made everyone much, much wealthier. If you think about the average person in America today compared to the average person in America a hundred years ago, we are incredibly fortunate. It is very hard to think that way when you look on Instagram and you see people on vacation or in a Ferrari or a yacht, but ultimately the direction of progress for humanity is going to be very, very different. And I think that's going to be very, very important. And I think for Americans in particular is only in one direction. And I think technology is the bulk of why that's happening. Altman or Musk? I would never, ever, ever bet against Elon Musk. No. Would you? I'm going to get your head checked out. I've never, I've never bet against him and I've never regretted betting with him. Yeah. I feel the same way. Look, there are certain people who have an it factor. There is almost no one I know who can go into different industries and build large companies. And there's never been a person in human history who has built six different multi-billion dollar companies over a 35 year period. What do you think makes him able to do that? Autism. Then why can't you do it? Name, man. I'm not that autistic. Or too autistic. I think that Elon understands risk is drastically overestimated. He understands stories are more powerful than most people believe. And he has a lot of knowledge. And he has a lot of experience. And there's just not a lot of people who put those things together. I wouldn't bet against Elon or Vlad Tenev. Yeah. Those are the two people who I think are going to change the world. I do think that Vlad has changed the world, right? Like he pretty much forced many of the brokers to go no fee. And it was because he had an idea. He brought it to the world. It's down right now. Uh, quite a bit after hours. So, oh, really? Yeah. Great. Because the Clarity Act failed. Well, let's see. Because if they hike rates. Let's see if it ends up going up or down. And then we'll know if it was or wasn't a buying opportunity. Well, I think, I think in the 60s and 70s, that's a really, really, really good opportunity. And how many years will you think that for? What? How many years? Because you've been saying that for a few years. Yeah. And it was, and then it spiked up. Right. But as time goes on, generally speaking, markets increase and like 60, 60 to 70, obviously will be a great deal. How, how, how are those call options? Go on, Jack. Uh, I actually have no options. I have no options on Robinhood right now. Better for worse. Well, maybe you got to sell covered calls. Selling covered calls is actually, I'm kidding. We don't need to get into that. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you guys for having me. We'll link to all of your info down below in the description. And for the members who want access to our next episode early, feel free to join. The next episode is already live. And if you want to join, you'll be able to see that as well. Thank you so much for watching. And until next time, I want you to describe the housing market in one word. Crap. If you're buying your first home, that door is closing and it's getting harder to open. When it comes to rents, we're actually not in an affordability crisis at all. So why does there appear to be so much outrage about the affordability crisis now? The media loves to amplify any kind of negative. I mean, we're basically built to be attracted to negative news, to be attracted to attracted to fear. This is a chart of the average 30 year mortgage rate, which hit seven percent this week. Who's even buying right now? Only people who need to buy. Is now maybe actually the good time to buy when no one else wants to buy real estate. You could have made that same argument, you know, two or three years ago, and you'd be sitting on a home that was equal to a lower value. What would it take for housing values then to fall 20 percent? Flavours topped with cold foam and sprinkles. Made to charge your holiday spirit, now at McDonald's.