Transcript 0:00 How are you going to not hold assets when the money supply is just consistently and then parabolically going up? 0:05 You have a mortgage crisis in two thousand and nine because there were just-- there wasn't enough regulation in TradFi, so they messed up. Twenty twenty, twenty twenty-one, you have COVID, right? 0:14 So you have a literal global pandemic, a once in a hundred year thing, and then we printed an outrageous amount of money. I think it was like three trillion dollars. 0:21 It was like forty percent of the entire money supply got printed during that period. So you have an extreme situation. 0:26 They have to dial things back, so you get the historic rate hike cycle to try to undo the insane damage so you don't turn into Venezuela, so you don't turn into Argentina, you don't turn into Weimar Germany, right? 0:37 But now here we are. We just came out of that. We're, we're doing a hundred to a hundred and seventy-five billion dollars in money printing a month. 0:43 And you have a president that looks at the stock market as his KPI and the crypto markets as his other KPI. So I just think things go up. 0:52 I don't really see a reason for Bitcoin to blow up like a previous bull cycle, but I also don't see a reason for it to go down. 0:59 But, like, if you're just gonna sell all your Bitcoin and you're like, "I'm going to buy it back cheaper," I think that's going to go down as, like, some insanely horrible mistake that people think about for the rest of their lives. 1:10 And I've seen it. Like, one of our investors had a thousand bitcoins at one point, and it's just so hard to outperform the actual Bitcoin. He does not have a thousand bitcoins now. 1:18 [upbeat music] Welcome back to Bitcoin Season two. I've got Pio Vincenzo on the line today. Content creator, talks about Bitcoin. You may know him as, uh, co-founder of Bodoggoz. 1:34 Um, we're gonna rip about Bitcoin and markets around Bitcoin. Pio, welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. So Pio, you popped up on my radar like a couple years ago. 1:45 I think it was like bear market, early twenty-three, and you were doing these, like, Bitcoin talks, Bitcoin spaces, and in my head I was like, "Who's this NFT guy? 1:56 He's leading some of the best quality like Bitcoin conversations." 1:59 I think you had like Nick Carter on there and you had some fascinating good content around it and, um, I kinda noticed is like you seem to be part of this like new wave of crypto content creators who have been talking and looking a lot more about Bitcoin. 2:17 You talk a lot about culture-driven assets. Um, is it like a fair characterization that, like, you could be like a good example of, like, this new, more Bitcoin-focused, like, crypto content creator? 2:31 Am I, like, reading into this or how do you frame, like, your outlook on just Bitcoin and the other assets? Uh, well, I just got into Bitcoin. I didn't get into crypto. 2:39 So in twenty twenty, that was when I got into Bitcoin, and it was just Bitcoin. Like, crypto wasn't really on my radar. I-- yeah, like, I just didn't really think about it. I was, like, really hyper-focused on Bitcoin. 2:51 And then when NFT stuff came out in late twenty twenty, early twenty twenty-one, I sort of got it and I still get it. Like, the concept of it works. 3:00 That doesn't mean that you should go and spend a hundred thousand dollars on NFTs that exist today, right? But the idea of tokenized digital art, it just went along with my Bitcoin understanding, right? 3:12 It's like they're not the same thing, right? 3:14 If one is gold and one is going to have a two hundred trillion dollar market cap, um, but that, you know, it's not the same thing as like Pokemon cards that are on a blockchain, you know, uh, based kinda structure. 3:28 But, uh, but yeah, they just both made sense to me. So I'm really just a Bitcoiner first, uh, and I learned about Bitcoin, and I never got into crypto. I got into, like, NFTs. 3:37 Um, and to this day, I don't own any crypto stuff. I just-- I have Bitcoin. That's it. And then I, like, am an NFT project founder, so I own NFTs obviously, but I'm just a Bitcoin guy. I do not, like, own Ethereum. Yeah. 3:48 Which is interesting, and I think that's, like, a good-- I'll, I'll kinda double tap on this, on this line of thought here, which is, like, I'm noticing a lot of these, like-- There's a lot of folks who, like, really ma-made their name in, uh, general crypto or, like, culture content. 4:01 I, I call it, like, the Thread Guy effect. Like, I've been watching, like, Thread Guy's streams, and he's, like, talking about Bitcoin more. And you wouldn't have seen that maybe two or three years ago. 4:09 You've got your finger on the pulse of, like, this type of crowd, at least more than I. Are you seeing a lot of, like, that type of trader start to value Bitcoin more in their portfolio? I don't know. 4:20 What's your assessment on this, on this idea that I'm throwing at you? Maybe a tiny bit. Um, there's two things. There's people that are actually, like, quasi-smart, and then there's people that are gambling addicts. 4:30 And the gambling addicts will not get to Bitcoin. It's just not gonna happen. Forget it. They'll get to it with fifty X leverage on hyperliquid. 4:38 If someone tells them, "Hey, you should, you know, open this long, you know, hundred X leverage on hyperliquid on Bitcoin 'cause it's gonna go up," yeah, they'll do a quick gamble on that and probably get their faces ripped off, right? 4:48 But you're not going to convince, like, a gambling addict to own anything. Like, that, that's not how it works. 4:54 But someone like Thread Guy, who's been around now for, like, four years and is, like, you know, pretty smart, um, he's figuring out, taking a long time, I mean, I'm not trying to throw shade here, but it's [chuckles] taken a long time. 5:06 [laughs] But he's figuring out that all the value's in Bitcoin, so you're sorta watching that gradually happen. Um, and he's also learning how to own things, and, like, just own them. 5:16 And I was having a conversation with someone about this last night that was basically like, "I will not own anything." 5:21 And I'm like, "Well, you should really own things if you wanna not be poor because, uh, you know, the money printer's going at one hundred to a hundred and seventy-five billion dollars per month right now, which used to be, you know, considered this, like, historic level of currency debasement. 5:37 It's now a monthly occurrence. So people that don't own things will not have a choice. They're just going to become poor because the wealth gap is getting completely destroyed." Yeah. 5:45 And that presents a lot of interesting opportunities, um, 'cause Bitcoin obviously go up. That's the easy, no-brain, turn your brain off, DCA play, own Bitcoin. 5:54 But, like, there's a lot of other interesting things happening. There's MicroStrategy, there's the AI HPC, Bitcoin miners. 6:00 We'll get into it, but, like, okay, so for context, the listener, we're recording this early Monday morning.And if you're re-listening to this like twenty-four, forty hours, forty-eight hours later, anything can happen in the markets. 6:12 But we just had a crazy historic crypto pullback, crash if you will, Friday afternoon. Trump tweeted something about China, as usual, on Friday afternoon, sent markets tumbling. 6:27 D- Bitcoin down 20K, not even, not even crossing 100. But, uh, uh, you know, I wanna like jump into, I would say, rumor mill speculation a bit. I'll throw this at you. 6:37 People, uh, over the weekend, there's some, uh, speculation that there's an insider, some Trump insider sells some World Liberty FI, shorts Bitcoin on hyper liquid, knows ahead of time, um, but then we had on Sunday that, you know, perhaps the same whale also be offsides by shorting Bitcoin, and Bitcoin went up. 6:57 I don't know. Are you dialed into this narrative? I'm curious like what you think about this, uh, this insider narrative or like somebody who's like front-running Trump tweets. What, what are your thoughts here? 7:08 I generally don't pay attention or care, and I learned, um, I, I always had like a sort of a hunch, but I think the, the rise of Polymarket and prediction market platforms, which is so fascinating, man, it's so cool that those are, uh, you know, crypto-based, like blockchain-based, right? 7:25 That's like a, basically the killer breakout consumer app that we've actually, you know, kind of, uh, seen manifest are those prediction markets. 7:33 But when the election stuff was going on and, uh, you know, news broke first on Polymarket, that showed me how pr- uh, like how insiders always will exist and will always take advantage. 7:47 And obviously everybody knows about like Nancy Pelosi and politicians with the way that they've operated with insider trading. But it's just, it's, uh, kinda like Lord of the Rings. 7:56 It's like, uh, you know, no one c-- uh, is, is qualified to have that kind of power where you know a half hour before everybody else that there's like gonna be a ceasefire or something, and then all of a sudden you can just rip an infinite bet on Polymarket and, and make as much money as you want. 8:11 And then once you've done it like two times, you know, you, you become a complete addict, and you're just doing it every single time. So I do think that that completely exists. 8:18 I did see that that person, um, you know, shorted it before the big crash, which is obviously like probably an insider thing. But then I saw that they were shorting it again yesterday. Yeah. That's interesting. 8:28 Like Tom Lee said, markets rarely bottom on Fridays, and it's more likely for, for it to bottom on Monday. Um, but I don't know. 8:35 I think with the exchange of information and, and the access to markets where I can trade on Robinhood, I can trade traditional equities from like I think it's seven AM to midnight, uh, with limit orders. 8:46 I, I might be mistaken by a few hours on that, but it, it is certainly not nine thirty to four. It is more than nine thirty AM to four PM Eastern. 8:55 And then with, uh, Bitcoin and crypto, obviously you can just do that twenty-four/seven. So I think you're gonna see an evolution of markets, um, and it's only going to continue. 9:04 So maybe we do bottom on Fridays now, and, uh, you don't get that double, that double dump. Uh, that is interesting. 9:10 I mean, you saw like over the past couple years as Bitcoin became more correlated to traditional markets, Bitcoin would be the first to crash if somebody somewhere in the world was, you know, attacking another country or, you know, it'd be like Bitcoin was like the leading indicator of like, you know, uh, you know, fear, uh, in the markets. 9:29 It, it was kinda crazy to see like Bitcoin crash over the weekend and then be like, "Oh, this country is invading that country," or something like that. [chuckles] It's kind of funny to like watch that. 9:38 Um, you brought up, uh, you know, the, the, you know, traditional markets, and this is not really my specialty, but I see you tweeting. I think maybe let's start with the big one, which is MicroStrategy. 9:50 Uh, I heard you say on a podcast a month or two ago something like, "MicroStrategy might be the first trillion-dollar company." What do you think about this line? Or do you still think that? Why? Why do you think that? 10:02 Uh, I mean, I've heard other like MicroStrategy bulls talk about this, but what is your like bull case for MicroStrategy or strategy now? I've got the cup. [chuckles] Well, there are several... Yeah, you got the cup. 10:14 I, I... There are several trillion dollar companies, so I didn't say it would be the first trillion dollar company. Oh, yeah. I probably said that it was gonna be a ten trillion dollar company. 10:21 I don't know if it'll be the first one, but that was just based on the math. 10:24 I think a lot of people aren't, um, taking a good look at the math, and maybe it's that they don't-- they're not as bullish on Bitcoin long term as I am, which I just don't understand at this point how people can watch the thing go from a dollar to a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars and then still say, "Yeah, I don't know if it'll get to a million though." 10:42 It's just so wild to me. Like, o- of course it's going to get to a million. At this point, that is such a foregone conclusion. 10:48 You just have to think about time and, and you know, how time is on your side with an asset like Bitcoin. Why do I like MicroStrategy? 10:55 I like MicroStrategy because they own like six hundred something thousand Bitcoins, and no other corporation will catch up. 11:03 The only global entities that will be able to catch up are governments, like literally the United States government, the Chinese government, maybe some Middle Eastern governments perhaps, right? 11:17 Well, no, I mean, t- those two. Yeah, basically those are the three, right? I don't even know if Russia can. Doesn't seem like Russia [chuckles] would be able to. Yeah. I don't know. Mayb- maybe they can. 11:24 Maybe I'm wrong. Um, but the point is, it's major, major global superpowers that are super rich. 11:30 And then right now, if Mag Seven companies, if Apple, Microsoft, uh, Google, you know, Meta, if those companies rolled out of bed today and they said, "We wanna catch up to MicroStrategy," they could if they started right now and adopted the most hyper-aggressive Bitcoin strategy that you've ever seen ever, and they're just not going to do that. 11:50 They're not... Like, you're not going to see Mark Zuckerberg say that we're gonna buy six hundred thousand Bitcoins tomorrow. It's just not gonna happen. Like, absolutely not, right? 11:57 So they're gonna be-- MicroStrategy will be the winner of, uh, companies that own a ton of Bitcoin. 12:02 I don't wanna call them Bitcoin treasury companies because what you saw was you saw a trend earlier this year where a bunch of people, you know, woke up one morning and they decided, like, "Hey, we're going to try to, you know, play..." 12:13 It wa- it was actually very similar to like a crypto, uh, trend where all of a sudden everybody launches a new project o- only this was with publicly traded, uh, traded companies. 12:23 Everybody adopted a Bitcoin strategy or a crypto, uh, strategy when it came to their treasury.And it, it, I think the result is that because obviously that pumped and then dumped, I mean, it started a little bit legit. 12:36 You know, you have guys- Yeah... like Tom Lee doing it and stuff like that, but then you just saw like a bunch of BS happening there. But no surprise. I di- I obviously didn't touch any of that. 12:44 It's just not interesting. Um, and then now what you're seeing is the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater, as markets do all the time, as they do all the time, just like how Facebook was thrown out. 12:55 The baby was thrown out with the bathwater when the crypto market crashed in twenty twenty-two because Zuckerberg had said that they were, uh, you know, betting big on the Metaverse and they rebranded to Meta, threw the baby out with the bathwater on a mag seven company, and obviously Facebook has been one of the best performers since then. 13:12 Same thing's happening with MicroStrategy right now. 13:14 So you're seeing people not-- the market not favor MicroStrategy as much, and you're seeing a shift in the market's perception, where the market's trying to figure out the new structure for, you know, fundraising that, uh, Strategy has implemented, which they've im-implemented this year, which is preferred equity instead of convertible debt. 13:34 So a big, a big shift there. Um, a much chiller, uh, you know, format to raising, uh, capital is the preferred... 13:43 I mean, obviously it's, uh, debatable, but it-- to me it seems like the preferred equity is a little bit more chill. 13:49 And, uh, if you ask Michael Saylor, he'll say that you can have more leverage with the preferred equity than you can with convertible debt. Closer to, I think he said thirty percent leverage. 13:57 So you're just seeing some adjustments in the stock. For me, I own a bunch of MicroStrategy, almost two thousand shares. 14:03 The reason that I own that much is because, uh, if you go to a bank and you try to b-- get a mortgage on a house with just Bitcoin, they, they acknowledge your Bitcoin. 14:12 I don't, I don't care if you have fifty Bitcoins, they acknowledge it as zero dollars. 14:16 And so for me it's good to have traditional assets, um, and not just be a hundred percent Bitcoin, 'cause for a while I was basically a hundred percent Bitcoin and, and crypto assets. 14:25 Um, and because I just love MicroStrategy, I do think it'll be a ten trillion dollar company. I think Michael Saylor's an animal. [upbeat music] Hey. Will here with Blockspace Media. 14:35 Did you know that we have individual feeds for all our shows? If you're watching the Mining Pod, Bitcoin Season Two, or the Court Show, be sure to check out the individual feeds. 14:44 You can find them on your podcast player of choice, whether that be Spotify, Apple, YouTube, et cetera. Just type in Blockspace Media, and you'll find all our shows pop up. 14:53 Or just type in the individual show name, like the Mining Pod or Bitcoin Season Two. Be sure to hit that subscribe and give us a five-star rating so we can continue to bring you the best content in Bitcoin. 15:07 We've got this whole DAT trend. As you said, market's trying to figure this out. Um, but one thing that seems to be, you know... I've, I've, I've floated this idea before. Maybe this is not novel. 15:18 But, like, maybe MicroStrategy's, like, the only survivor of all these DATs. Maybe there's, like, an ETH DAT or s- you know, that survives. But, like, does MicroStrategy make it out okay? 15:29 Uh, is the DAT trade mostly empty and is just the MicroStrategy trade? Is this... Y-you know, do you think this might be the, the right way to think about this? 15:36 The only other one of these companies that I own is MetaPlanet, but MetaPlanet was not a part of that trend. Yeah. MetaPlanet was effectively the second, you know, the second MicroStrategy. 15:46 And MetaPlanet's in a unique position because they are in the Japanese market, and in Japan the regulations are so strict. I mean, if you've ever been to Japan, you know rules are rules. 15:55 And so, um, you know, they, they don't have e-easy access to Bitcoin. There's also layers. 16:00 If you just study the Japanese stock market, the bond market, there's layers of reasons why it's interesting to, um, you know, have a small position in MetaPlanet. 16:11 It's also been, you know, baby has been thrown out with the bathwater. 16:14 Um, i- MetaPlanet's actually, I think, a big reason why this trend started was because the market woke up to MetaPlanet and it started pumping, and that showed grifters, uh, basic- you know, people that are interested in just extracting that, "Oh, it's not just MicroStrategy that can pull this off." 16:31 So everything is going to be okay with MicroStrategy. I also believe everything is going to be okay with, uh, MetaPlanet. Everything will probably not be okay with the dozens of BS companies. 16:41 Well, you also just can't do this with crypto tokens because time is against you with crypto tokens, whereas time is on your side with Bitcoin. 16:50 And so maybe Tom Lee's ETH one maybe works out, 'cause I like Tom Lee and I think he's smart and I think he's quasi-legit, but he's also done stuff in the past that just didn't work out. 17:00 Like, people have to realize that over, like, eight or nine years a lot of these people just have a bunch of failed, um, you know, ventures, and that's totally on the table. 17:09 So I would not be, like, holding any of those things long term. It's really just MicroStrategy. 17:14 And then the one, the one unspoken thing is that, um, you know, being a, quote, "Bitcoin treasury company" just means that you have Bitcoin on your balance sheet, which every single company, including the entire Mag Seven, is going to do. 17:26 Tesla's been doing that for three, four years at this point. Yeah. 17:28 Uh, people don't know, but Figma, company that IPO'd this year, after they IPO'd they, uh, you know, filed and, and it came out in their filings that they have I think it's something like a hundred, hundred fifty million dollars of Bitcoin. 17:40 Uh, no one talks about that. No one's like, "Oh, it's a Bitcoin treasury company." It's just a normal company that happens to have a smart CFO that is like, "Yeah, we're gonna use... 17:49 We're gonna have Bitcoin on this balance sheet because US dollars are getting debased. 17:53 We're not gonna own stock in another company 'cause that's a whole different can of worms, but we'll take the best commodity available, you know, today." Yeah. 18:00 I had, uh, Tim Copson of Bitcoin Treasuries on, uh, a month ago, and I was like- I like that guy. Yeah, smart guy. And I was like, "Okay, what's-- what do you think the next meta for these might be?" 18:09 And he said, "Well, I would like to see growth companies, not like... Like, I'd, I'd like to see growth companies put Bitcoin on the balance sheet. Tesla's big. Figma's a great example." 18:18 You know, you couple the Bitcoin balance sheet with the hot IPO season. Um, isn't that... That's kinda like the whole point. 18:25 Like, that's, like, that's pretty much the Bitcoiner thesis, which is you take a real company, not just k- some kinda, like, Bitcoin wrapper company, but you take a real company with a real business model, real revenues, add Bitcoin in the mix, and that's supercharged. 18:37 Like-That's a pretty compelling idea. I like that thesis. Yeah. I mean, it's just, it's simple. Yeah. It's just- Yeah... you're owning a good asset as a company. N-nothing crazy about that. That's been happening forever. 18:46 Um, you, y-y-- Well, so if we look at the companies with the, the biggest, uh, Bitcoin positions on their balance sheet, one of the kind of hilarious for the past two years, like Bitcoin miners have not really gotten the bid for being Bitcoin Treasury companies, even though companies like Mara, I mean, I'm looking at it, it's like, it's the second largest Bitcoin treasury of any known company. 19:09 Mara Holdings, fifty-three thousand Bitcoin, number two right behind MicroStrategy. And yet, Mara is not really in this conversation of like hot Bitcoin treasury companies. 19:20 Uh, do you think the Bit-- Let, let's talk a little about Bitcoin miners. Do you think the Bitcoin miners treasury companies play works? Uh, do you think it looks a little bit different? 19:29 Uh, let's talk about Bitcoin miners. What are your thoughts? I think it just depends on how good their business is. The reason that the market did not recognize them is 'cause, again, like Mr. 19:38 Market is manic depressed and, you know, the market is not always right. I know people say like, markets are efficient, this, that, and the other thing. Not when there's like trends. They're, they're not very efficient. 19:47 In fact, they pump trends super high. Look at the SPAC trend of twenty twenty-one. I find it hard to believe for you to say that like, you know, for anybody to say that markets are always efficient when you've seen so... 19:57 L-look at the NFT market in twenty twenty-one and twenty twenty-two. Was that an efficient market? Should Board Ape Yacht Club pictures have been five hundred thousand dollars? 20:04 I don't think- It was efficient for some people. [chuckles] Y-yeah, exactly. Yeah. 20:08 So, uh, with companies like Bitcoin Miners, if you go ask your average Tradfi person, because Bitcoin miners have been around for a long time, so it's not like if you're going to like a-- You know, if you ask someone about a prediction markets company, like a normal person, they, they probably don't have a whole book, uh, you know, written in their mind on, you know, their commentary on a prediction market 'cause that's a new thing. 20:30 But Bitcoin miners has been around for a long time. It's-- they've been around for, you know, pretty much as long as Bitcoin, right? 20:35 So, uh, I actually talked to a friend of mine that works in Tradfi about Bitcoin mining companies 'cause I brought up Iron and Cipher, and I brought up the deals that Nebius and TeraWulf, uh, you know, just got across the line. 20:46 And he, like, if you ask him about a Bitcoin miner, he's just gonna say, "Well, isn't it too expensive at this point? 20:51 Like the cost of the energy is more than the cost of the Bitcoin, and it's just a really hard company to make work." Which by the way, there's some like, truth to what he's saying. You would know better than me, right? 21:00 Yeah. But the point is, um, there-- the, the common reputation of United States-based, uh, Bitcoin mining companies, I think from Tradfi people, is that they aren't the best, uh, companies to invest in. 21:13 And really over the past two years, th-they didn't catch fire until four months ago. 21:18 Th-they grinded up, they grinded up slowly, but there were also really like heinous moments of volatility where they, you know, uh, kind of, they corrected by fifty percent i-in some cases, right? 21:29 So it was a tough hold over multiple years, especially when you're watching MicroStrategy pop off and you're watching Bitcoin itself pop off, but then now all of a sudden the thesis is fully manifested and you have Iron at sixty-five dollars, Cipher at whatever it is, twenty-seven dollars or seventeen dollars, I think. 21:44 Um- Yeah... it's been, been a run. Yeah, both, yeah, Iron and Cipher. Uh, I talked... We were in, uh, Dallas this past week for the North American Blockchain Summit. It's a big energy and Bitcoin mining conference. 21:55 Interviewed the CEO of Cipher, Tyler Page, talked to Jason Les of Riot, talked to other large private, you know, mining companies dealing with hyperscalers. 22:05 Like it is a bull market, and it, it didn't seem like people really caught on to the miner trade until about a month ago. Like, it, yeah, as you said, been grinding up. 22:15 You could tell you had some people like, uh, Mike Alfred, Mike some- Mike. Yeah. Mike was, Mike was-- We had Mike on our mining pod, our sister podcast, uh, last month. Obviously, great spicy takes as always. Yeah. 22:29 Um, yeah, I wanna double tap on Iron and Cipher 'cause I really enjoyed chatting with Tyler Page. He's a really sharp guy. 22:37 It, y-you know, sometimes it can like be difficult to separate like stock ticker from the actual business. Mm-hmm. And, you know, talking to like the Cipher guys, I was like, "Oh, you guys are adults. 22:46 You guys aren't just like trying to pump some meme stock. You've got real massive like power pipelines. You're doing these like, these big plans for these like partnered AI, uh, hyperscalers." 22:59 PO, what are your, like what are your thoughts? W-are we, are we, are we at the top or do these things like, is this just the market getting started on these assets? Has to be just getting started. 23:10 Uh, I wanna, you know, lay out the caveat. I'm not going to offer any insight that you could not get from Mike Alfred times a hundred. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? So this is not... I am out of my depth with this. 23:22 I look to much smarter people like him and others when it comes to this. My thoughts on, on the miners, um, you know, is that these businesses are insane. 23:31 Like to-- You know better than me 'cause you've tried to do it or you have done it. I'm, yeah, I've s- I've still got my own mines, but like I'm not... 23:38 Yeah, it's, it's a difficult business, so I like appreciate, I respect the hustle. Yeah. Insane business. 23:43 You know, these companies are owning the land, they're owning, you know, all of the equipment, the buildings, everything, right? 23:48 So there's a lot going on here on why these businesses absolutely kick ass just from a traditional business perspective. 23:53 The market's waking up to them now, which is giving them even more, uh, you know, power because, you know, they're able to kinda raise more capital for their initiatives. It's incredible stuff. 24:01 My thoughts on it, maybe some insight that I can share that you m- you might not get from every guest is, so if you listen to Lyn Alden, who I'm a big fan of Lyn Alden, right? 24:09 Like Lyn Alden's been not only on the economics side, but also on the money side. She has a book called Broken Money, for example, right? 24:16 If you read that book, you know, she kinda goes through the history of money and how we got to where we're at now. 24:21 And if you're on a hard money standard, which for significant portions of human history, humans were on a hard money standard of some sort, like a gold standard, for example, then investing is actually like a niche thing.It's not something that everybody has to do because you're-- y-it's very hard to outperform the money itself. 24:39 So if you plug Bitcoin in as our hard money today, and you hear guys say, "Bitcoin's the hurdle rate," that's what you hear like the MSTR True North guys say, that's what you hear Michael Saylor say now, Bitcoin is the hurdle rate. 24:52 Meaning that Bitcoin is the baseline rate that you have to outperform for it to be worth it for you to do anything besides just hold Bitcoin, right? 25:00 And so when you think about it like that, investing is really hard because you gotta outperform Bitcoin. You gotta outperform your hard money. So I'm an investor. Yeah, I'm, I'm an investment guy. 25:10 I-- like, I've been doing this now almost full-time for, like, four years, right? So I'm, I'm an investor. Like, for better or for worse, I'm doing it, right? 25:16 When I look at the market right now, there's only, for me, like, two things that are-- or three things that are gonna outperform Bitcoin. Literally MicroStrategy because it has outperformed Bitcoin forever. 25:27 I know it hasn't outperformed it for six months, and everyone's like, you know, pointing to that single metric, even though everybody knows in investing you have to have long time, you know, l-long timef-uh, frames for analysis. 25:38 So MicroStrategy, because it's levered Bitcoin, Saylor can accumulate more Bitcoin than you can, so in theory, holding MicroStrategy is going to outperform Bitcoin. It, it's the Bitcoin nuclear reactor. 25:47 What's worth more money, Standard Oil or the oil itself? Standard Oil was, right? So, okay. 25:52 Then moving on to Bitcoin miners, I think these things outperform Bitcoin because these businesses are insane, and the businesses that they've built for Bitcoin happen to have enough juice, enough power, enough, uh, you know, uh, applicability that AI companies need them. 26:10 Now, that's just wild. That's a goldmine right there. That's incredible. So I can't wait to see where these things go. 26:17 That's actually the strongest sector to me for sure is, like, these mining companies being repositioned for AI. Can't wait to see where it goes. These could be enormous stocks. Like, IRON could be... 26:27 People call for it to be, like, a nine hundred dollar stock. I-i-it's crazy. It's actually nuts. Can't wait to see where they're at in, like, eight years. It's really something. 26:35 This is not BS, this is a real company that owns everything in their business. So cool. And then the last thing for me is, and this is sort of my pet stock that I think is super cool, is Opendoor Technologies. 26:47 That was, like, a trendy one. I th-- uh, it was trendy, but now it's consolidating, so a lot of people are starting to, you know, uh, leave, which is good, and it's what you want. 26:56 You don't want the gambling addicts in your stock. You want them to just get out. 26:59 And, uh, it's just because it's a, a tech company that has the potential to be another tech giant similar to, um, you know, Robinhood now is, is doing quite well. 27:08 I, I like looking at it as a Robinhood comp, and it's kinda the last nut or one of the last nuts that, that hasn't, uh, been cracked by technology, which is housing. So that-that's the other area that I'm looking at. 27:20 There's not really other companies. My friend was, like, texting me about, like, a electric helicopter company. I was like, "What are you talking about, man? Like, d-do not send me this. 27:28 I don't know what you're talking about." Yeah, you're not gonna buy an electric helicopter. People wanna buy houses. Yes, exactly. So we already try to buy houses, so, um, yeah. 27:36 You had a really interesting Opendoor interview, uh, the other day. I thought that was fantastic. I recommend everybody go listen to that. You brought up prediction markets as well. That's hot this week. That's crazy. 27:46 I mean, um, these things have been kind of, like, sidelined into, like, just weird crypto people for a while. Mm-hmm. Obviously, Polymarket heats up during, uh, the election. 27:55 You talked about how, you know, maybe some Polymarket insider. But, like, I've personally been bullish on prediction markets for a long time. 28:02 I feel like this actually goes into, like, old school, like, um, cypherpunk theory because this was the stuff that a lot of the, you know, futurists back in the day during early Bitcoin days would talk about. 28:14 Well, we, you know, markets for everything. That's kind of a... Uh, it's, it's crazy to see it happen. Now we're seeing Kalshi get valued. 28:21 What they raised, several hundred million Polymarket, uh, integrating with the New York Stock Exchange. What's going on with prediction markets, PO? Uh, where are they headed? 28:31 Like, are these, are we-- Again, it's a tired question, but are we just getting started with, with prediction markets? Yeah. 28:38 So I think the valuations were, like, eight billion for Polymarket and five billion for Kalshi, so these are both huge companies now. Um, I think that we're obviously just getting started. 28:46 For the news, it's so interesting for the news, like that ceasefire, that broke on Polymarket first. It's just how humans work. There's nothing you can do about it. Humans are going to insider trade. 28:56 It's just how we work, and it's better to accept it and not think that humans are qualified to hold the ring in Lord of the Rings, right? You can't hold the ring. 29:04 Like, that-- Tolkien or whoever wrote, uh, Lord of the Rings tried to tell us that, right? And that's just what it is, and it's super cool to see it based on blockchain. 29:12 Obviously, it makes perfect sense that it would be based on blockchain, a hundred percent. I think Polymarket will be a huge company. Um, maybe Kalshi will too, I don't know. 29:22 Uh, but I, I know Polymarket will be a huge company. And, uh, I think that, yeah, you're just gonna see these things get involved with more and more sectors. You're seeing it involved with, like, sports betting. 29:33 You're seeing it involved with news. You're seeing it involved with culture, like, will Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift, like, have a baby this year? Like, stuff like that. People wanna bet on stuff. 29:42 You know, who's gonna win the Academy Award for be-uh, Best Actor? It's just interesting to have markets for everything. It was inevitable. The cypherpunks called it a long time ago. 29:49 Like you said, futurists called it, so let's see what the futurists call next. Let's wrap this conversation up with, uh, some bull fuel. 29:58 Um, you, uh, I believe retweeted or maybe brought up, uh, Anthony Pompliano, one of my favorite bull post, bull posters over the past decade. Um, he said, Paul Tudor Jones, this is last week. 30:12 Paul Tudor Jones on CNBC right now predicting a blow-off top in stock market performance even more explosive than nineteen ninety-nine, higher. 30:20 Uh, we haven't really seen a true, like, pop off in, like, a Bitcoin-led crypto run. It's kinda been this, like, grind up with, like, little mini narratives spinning out underneath.This is a cycle question. 30:37 Is the four-year cycle broken? Do we see these blow-off tops? Is Paul Tudor Jones directionally right? What are your thoughts? You know, I think I have to think that the cycle, um, doesn't exist anymore in the same way. 30:51 It, it just-- Like, I feel like being obsessed with the idea that it's exactly the same as it always was would be strange, and I think when you look at the previous cyc-cycles, where we are now in terms of Bitcoin acceptance by, you know, the government, by traditional finance, by people in general, we're just way further along. 31:11 So, like, twenty seventeen and before, you just have to throw that out, right? 'Cause it's like, I didn't even-- I w-- It wasn't even on my radar. I had no clue what was going on. 31:19 It was essentially something that people considered a gamble. 31:23 Then twenty twenty, twenty twenty-one, when I got in, you know, that first rip, um, it was after Michael Saylor started buying, and that's definitely a factor, right? 31:33 'Cause that was, like, a big, you know, kinda corporate finance, uh, validation for Bitcoin. 31:39 Um, but it's still re-- Like, it was really-- You know, I was having conversations with friends, and they were trying to poke holes, like basic holes in Bitcoin like they knew nothing, and then it just rips to fifty thousand dollars in, like, a month and a half, and it's like, do you still wanna, you know, have that position? 31:53 Then they started learning about it. We had the kinda pullback. My thoughts are, I don't know if there's gonna be a blow-off top. I don't know. 31:59 Like, Paul Tudor Jones, I think, is speaking actually more from the stock market perspective. He's a Bitcoin guy, but he's looking at it from a stock market pers-- uh, perspective. The way that I look at it is like this: 32:10 I'm now thinking about what things would've looked like if the other candidate, like not Trump, had won. I think it would've been worse for, quote, "crypto", but the Bitcoin ETF was already around. 32:21 The Bitcoin ETF happened during Joe Biden's presidency, so, like, Bitcoin was going to happen. I think it would've been a pain in the ass to be a crypto entrepreneur. 32:28 But, um, so all you get really from Trump in terms of a difference is that you get a friendlier crypto environment, which is great. That's awesome. That's really super cool, right? 32:37 Um, but either way, we were gonna be printing a ton of money, and when you look at the last call at fifteen years, w-what do you have? You have bull market only pretty much because of money printing. 32:49 Because w-how are you gonna not hold assets when the money supply is just consistently and then parabolically going up? 32:56 You have a mortgage crisis in two thousand and nine because there were just n-- there wasn't enough regulation in TradFi. So they messed up. That was bad. They, they lent out money. You can't do that. 33:05 Even if you're printing money, you can't do that. That's a, a messed up structure. It doesn't work, right? So you have that. So you have a bear market there. That's a bad one. 33:12 If you go twenty-five years back, uh, before that, the previous one was the dot-com bust, which is the market being irrational and thinking pets.com should be worth a ton of money when no one buys things online yet, right? 33:22 So it's just too early. Then you have twenty twenty, twenty twenty-one, you have COVID, right? 33:26 So you have a literal global pandemic, a once in a hundred year thing, whether it's a naturally occurring thing, whether it's in a lab, whether it was intentional, who knows? Who cares? It happened, right? 33:35 We shut down the economy literally, and then we printed an outrageous amount of money. I think it was like three trillion dollars. 33:40 It was like forty percent of the entire money supply got printed during that period, so you have an extreme situation. So then they have to dial things back, so you get the historic rate hike cycle, right? 33:51 His-- Like, just crazy, aggressive rate hike cycle to try to undo the insane damage so you don't turn into Venezuela, so you don't turn into Argentina, you don't turn into Weimar Germany, right? But now here we are. 34:03 We just came out of that, and now we're starting our historic rate cut cycle. 34:07 It's chiller in the sense that we're not gonna shut the economy down and then pump three trillion dollars, but we're, we're doing a hundred to a hundred and seventy-five billion dollars of money printing a month, and you have a president that looks at the stock market as his, uh, like, you know, um, 34:21 his KPI and the crypto markets as his other KPI. So I just think things go up. 34:27 I think AI is a huge thing, and I think I don't really see a reason for Bitcoin to blow up, like, you know, to go up i-in an insane way at, at like a previous bull cycle, but I also don't see a reason for it to go down in an insane way, right? 34:42 And I think you're gonna see... And I also have a, a... This is my last thing 'cause I know I'm rambling. Last point on this. I have a belief that crypto Twitter has to always lose. That's my... I, I have that belief. 34:53 Crypto Twitter must lose because if crypto, crypto Twitter doesn't lose, then the Hamptons is just owned by crypto guys, and that's not the case, right? 35:01 When you go to the Hamptons- [laughs]...it's dentists, it's doctors, it's bankers, it's, you know, all these other tech people. The crypto guys don't own the Hamptons. 35:09 And so I think the gamblers have to lose, and I think everyone's gonna be like, "Take profits, take profits, take profits," like on, on Bitcoin. You should take profits on random BS that's gonna go to zero. 35:20 But, like, if you're just gonna sell all your Bitcoin and you're like, "I'm going to buy it back cheaper," I think that's going to go down as, like, some insanely horrible mistake that people think about for the rest of their lives. 35:31 And I've seen it. Like, one of our investors had a thousand Bitcoins at one point, and he invested into his companies, and it's just so hard to outperform the actual Bitcoin. 35:39 He does not have a thousand Bitcoins now, right? 35:41 So I think when you look at all those things, the current administration, the money printing situation, AI, and that crypto Twitter must lose, I don't really see a world where, uh, you know, the four-year cycle looks the same. 35:54 I'm gonna be talking to Plan C, if you know who that is. Yeah, yeah. Um, yeah, in a few weeks. I'm really excited about that conversation. 36:00 I wanna see what he thinks 'cause I feel like he's one of the-- He's, like, just obsessed with that. Like, that's what he's, like, looking at, you know? So we'll, we'll see. Yeah. 36:08 He actually-- I actually brought up, I think, his, uh, chart a couple months ago. We call it, like, the institutional bid or something. Mm-hmm. I kinda share that view. That makes sense to me. 36:17 It's the one that would catch the most people off sides and create the most pain on crypto- Yeah...Twitter, which again, also a heuristic of mine to see what's gonna happen. 36:26 PO, thank you so much for coming on Bitcoin Seeds today. I really appreciate this rip, and I'll see you at a million-dollar Bitcoin sometime in the future. We'll run it back when Bitcoin crosses over a million. 36:35 Sounds great. [outro music]
