Bitcoin Supercycle: The Last Trade Is Here | Marty Bent

Jackson Mikalic (00:01.728) All right, we're back. I said we're back. It's The Last Trade. And guess what? We have a special guest today. Marty Bent. Marty's joining us for the first time as a guest of The Last Trade. For loyal listeners of the show, you may remember that Marty was actually the original host. And ever since, I've been trying to live up to his fame and legend that he's left me with. So Marty, thanks for joining. What's going on, man? TFTC (00:26.307) Jackson, you're doing an incredible job. The price of Bitcoin is pumping today, gentlemen. It's always a good day when that's happening. Vibes are high. Brian Cubellis (00:34.807) Feels good. Michael (00:34.961) Vibes are very high. Starting the year off strong. Brian Cubellis (00:38.017) Is this Gromin buying back his Bitcoin? TFTC (00:43.319) Either that or the Nick Carter Quantum Fund has completely subsided and that was a bottom call. So either one of the two. Quantum guys. It's a big boogie man. Michael (00:54.319) Yeah, Q4 was so fascinating. You could watch all the fundamentals from anybody looking around the industry to see what's happening. And then you just ended with this inorganic conversation around quantum and all the other noise that was going on. Luke selling, you're like, guys, what's going on here? Yeah. Jackson Mikalic (01:13.038) Zcash, you gotta own Zcash of course. That's a good one to own. Yeah, so what is actually going on with the Bitcoin price? Because listen, I did this in 2025 and then I got discouraged when we started tanking with the Taros. But we're gonna start with the on-ramp terminal in 2026. We did it for the first episode last week. We are getting close to 100k, gentlemen. I thought for sure, I thought the prophecy was in. I thought that 2026 we had to get TFTC (01:15.535) Are you guys zidelined right now? you zidelined? Brian Cubellis (01:18.986) extremely zideland. Jackson Mikalic (01:42.722) Beaten down for another year, the four year cycle had to repeat, but here we are, we're up about 11 % year to date and a lot has happened in the first 14 days of the year. Marty, what's been on your radar? I'm sure plenty, but what do you kind of attribute this pump to to kick the year off here? TFTC (02:01.198) I think 2025 was just a year of consolidation. What do we do between November 22 and October of 20? That's the other thing too. was like the last three months of the year were a bit bearish but between November 22 and October 25 when we hit the all-time high and again we did like an 8x and so like a consolidation into the end of 2025 made sense and then when you compare it to Gold and silver which had banner years and Bitcoin was was relatively choppy I had Mel Madison on last week and I actually liked his perspective too. Like there was probably people looking at their portfolios and they could see their Bitcoin buys in June July in October if they bought at those highs and at the end of the year it was relatively depressed from those highs and just use it as a tax lost harvesting asset within our portfolio, especially if they Had a hard asset portfolio with gold and silver which were up significantly And so I think just turning the calendar year, that's all pressure's gone. And then on top of that, mean, the name of the show, The Last Trade, think The Last Trade is certainly in play. There's an order of operations to it. And think precious metals are certainly leading the way right now. But I think with that tax loss harvesting and all that all time high selling from long time Bitcoin holders has subsisted. And now people are just beginning to to re-brace. Bitcoin appropriately to where it should be, which is much higher. So it makes a lot of sense to me. Michael (03:34.578) B- The one thing maybe to call out, we don't think of deep here unless you're interested because we haven't chatted about it. And I don't think many people are as I full. And the reason I'm bringing it up is because it's ultra bullish for this year and moving forward is we haven't actually been in a formal or any kind of bull market, meaning net new buyers and adoption. And there's like five empirical pieces of evidence that without going through all of them, the last one you actually posted, I think last week from the TFTC account, which was the amount of transactions that settled on the blockchain, the Bitcoin blockchain. chain, not any other blockchain, in 2025 was 25 trillion, but then if you looked at 2021, it was 47 trillion. whether you go to Harvard devices, anecdotes from friends and family, that we haven't even got into the bull market yet. And that's very bullish in the sense of cycles, liquidity, reasons we want to make up why we haven't. The price movement has generally been the bid that has been at the gold level, but it's like on the margin, sovereign. But then really it's just the ETFs being turned on because for 17 years people wanted Bitcoin but they wanted it with a click of a button and that's where a lot of those inflows have come. And that's the reason for the price rise and so we haven't even actually seen a formal bull market yet. TFTC (04:51.021) No, not at all. I think this is very beginning stages for this next leg up. You just look at the world, Things we've been talking about for years, Michael, even Jackson and Brian, we've said we're going to move to this more multipolar world that's only accelerated. Over the last year, you literally have Trump, Denmark, and Greenland meeting as we speak for a leveraged buyout of a nation state. Which would have been unfathomable a couple years ago. Obviously we have the pandemonium in Venezuela in Iran And I think both those situations I mean iran you had a complete overnight currency debasement Earlier this week and then in Venezuela. I think the headlines coming out of that particularly as they pertain to big Bitcoin are highlighting that this sovereign reserve distributed neutral protocol and we get all the we get all the the what's the word I'm looking for? Let get all the descriptive words in there for Bitcoin is highly valuable. mean, they were rumored that they have 600,000 Bitcoin, whether or not they have that much. don't know. I wouldn't be surprised. But I also wouldn't be surprised if they don't have that much. And if they wouldn't be surprised if they had that much at one point, but spent it down. If they accumulated that much and are holding it or if they simply never accumulated that much. But Brian Cubellis (05:55.542) adjectives. TFTC (06:20.143) point being they were doing gold swaps for Bitcoin because they recognized that their gold in the UK was able to be frozen in the vaults. They did oil to tether to Bitcoin so that they could route around sanctions on their oil supplies and actually get revenue from it. And they recognized that tether was a centralizing force that could freeze their funds on Tron or whatever blockchain was trading on. They swept it to Bitcoin immediately. And so I think the validation of Bitcoin As this neutral reserve asset, the digital age is only getting stronger. And then again, go back to currency to basement, you have Iran's real completely collapsing this week. then you have the Japanese yen yield curve blowing out. And that's going to be incredibly stimulative for the global economy because they're going to need to print all the money that BOJ is going to need to buy all the day. Japanese government bonds that they're issuing. And yeah, so think we're definitely in an upswing on liquidity. And then obviously here in the United States, you have the Fed easing policy. I think the rate or the probability of a rate stall this month went up significantly. I think QE via other means is certainly being enacted right now, too. So I think the reason to hold Bitcoin has never been stronger. And you had the tweet up that I sent out last night. I think this is true and something Michael we talked about talked about it when I was on this show in the past like I think we're just seeing this cycle play out central banks and governments debase the fiat currencies Geopolitical tensions rise was just certainly happening driving a more multipolar world. It's happening all these sovereigns in large institutions are gonna fall back on precious metals due to familiarity via Lindy they've been around for millennia and then I think there is a structural component to it too which is they have a liquidity profile that can take large capital rotations in the tens of billions, hundreds of billions, even trillions, which has happened over the last year. then Bitcoin ultimately will be recognized as this superior reserve asset in the digital age because of all the properties we described earlier. And I think we have early signals that that's already happening, particularly out of Venezuela. So I think TFTC (08:44.547) Bitcoin's never been in a better position. I'm extremely bullish for this year. Michael (08:49.231) Yeah, well said. I pulled this up because I think it was a... World class tweet late last night when you look at like we got to zoom out and forget about a lot of the noise and just realize like the the anchor points the rocks that are like the real rocks in the sand. Generally people focus on the like topic of the week of the day. But this is like what's happening in real time. It came out. think most people have known that in the UAE they've been mining at a sovereign level for a while and then I think somebody posted it and then like CZ like this is my understanding has been like this for the past half decade. But taking a step back. to contextualize this, like, I know we wanted to start with what the hell's going on with the Fed and the president, because that's kind of like the backdrop to this tweet of like the insanity that's just happening at home and how crazy the past, I think it was Sunday night when when the, the ransom video came out from, from Pal. What was your take there? TFTC (09:47.107) I mean, it's just comical, right? mean, again, glaring indicator that you should be allocating to Bitcoin because you have this fight between the executive, the treasury, and the Federal Reserve. And the fact that there is even the potential for a Fed Reserve chairman to do a Sunday night sort of Roger Ver like video saying, we're going to fight this, this isn't right, is complete clown world stuff. Like these people should not have control over the price of money. as determined by their interest rate policy and I mean on the other side of coin too, you have this grappling for control of monetary policy between the Treasury and the Fed and I think the Trump administration they've been Pretty explicit about this that were implicit for a long time, but they become more explicit Over the last year, which is like hey, we want to control monetary policy We don't want the Fed to and so it looks like they're trying to get people in positions within the Fed and That's part of this lawsuit. mean, the other thing like, the Fed shouldn't be using three and a half billion dollars of US taxpayer money to remodel the Eccles building. But then on the other side, like the Treasury taking control, that's not ideal either. Obviously, I feel like the Treasury needs to do that if they really want to land the plane with their tariff policy and their economic, the domestic economic policy of reshoring and reindustrialization. It can de-risk that relatively risky policy posture if they have more control of the monetary policy. But at the end of the day, neither of them should really be controlling the money supply or the monetary system at large. Jackson Mikalic (11:31.407) And one thing to add to that as well is just to further exacerbate the tension between the two is something Brian called out was Treasury Secretary Scott Besson recently was on the All In podcast and he was talking about how the Federal Reserve is the engine for inequality. And so that's really something that the Bitcoin space has been touting for a very long time. Of course, the end of Fed movement movement goes way back. But it's really interesting to be at this time now where you have Jerome Powell late on Sunday, presumably delivering an address to address to the United States saying, hey, we're independent. We're going to do what's best for the economy and best for the United States citizens. Then on the flip side, you have Besson recently saying, well, the Federal Reserve is the reason why we have such great inequality in the United States. And at least since I've been paying attention to markets, I haven't necessarily seen like this. this level of tension ever exists before. So I really am unsure and unclear of where this goes. It seems like my gut instinct would be that the Trump administration is going to strong arm the Federal Reserve. We know that they're not independent, but they're trying to convey and keep that veil afloat as long as possible. Michael (12:42.863) And it's worth real quick, it's worth just calling out the insanity and gaslighting of price stability and employment because both aren't working for anybody. Brian Cubellis (12:42.964) I mean part. TFTC (12:52.527) Yeah, well, I I tweeted out this morning the periodic reminder that you have to beat into people's head and that one half of the feds dual mandate is a complete oxymoron, which is they are mandated to produce price stability in the way they explicitly say they're going to achieve that is by inflating the economy the money supply by door and price prices by 2 % year in and year out and I think it's what is it the law of 13 every 13 years you're have a doubling in prices if you're at a 2 % rate and obviously as we all know It's way higher than than 2 % despite what the CPI may lead you to believe Brian Cubellis (13:32.151) Yeah, I was going to say just on the like the Powell Trump stuff, like part of me just thinks like this is all theater and it's kind of irrelevant because he's a lame duck and like Trump's going to put in whoever he wants and he's going to lower interest rates. And like that's the medium term story here. But everyone's focused on sort of the infighting upfront. But at a higher level, like, you know, if we want to say 2025 wasn't a typical bull market for Bitcoin, it was certainly a bull market for in Marty's world. just like clown world unearthing itself. And so I would say like my takeaway from the year was really like sort of centralized trust erosion at a high level, like more people opening their eyes to what Bitcoiners have known for a long time, whether it's talking about the sham of Fed independence or even like all the fraud stuff over the past several months being unearthed. All these things I think are continuing to erode the credibility of centralized institutions. And that points directly to the value prop of Bitcoin having money outside the system that can't be controlled by these fallible humans. And so to me, that's like the bullish aspect of it. It's like, you know, more people are open in their eyes to the craziness in the world. So that's a bit optimistic, perhaps. TFTC (14:47.055) Yeah, it was bookended by fraud being unveiled in the beginning of the Eritrean and USAID. And then obviously with the Nick Shirley Medicaid, Medicare fraud via Somalian daycare centers in Minneapolis and since then, spreading across the country. And that's like, incredibly infuriating but also the silver line is like light at the end of the tunnel like we've been told we've been gaslit for years I can't touch Can't touch entitlements can't touch Medicaid Medicare Social Security the country would collapse. We need to support all these people and I Mean the estimates that Besson's putting out there is like 500 billion Is fraudulent spending but they don't even factor in the military budget and I mean we've all seen the insane sort of list of items that these contractors are selling the government. They're selling like bolts for like $1,000. That's incredibly wasteful. Like I wouldn't be surprised if the federal government budget is more than 70 % just over fraud or price gouging by contractors. So that's definitely blackpilling to an extent, but it's also like, okay, if we can do a good job of making it clear to people like the government. is completely robbing us via taxation and then the central banks on the other end are debasing the currency and hitting us with a double whammy and all the money that you're paying in taxes and that you're trying to save is literally being stolen from you and handed to frauds. Hopefully we can have a rotation out of dollar derived assets like treasuries and stuff like that into hard assets like Bitcoin. I think we're seeing that. Brian Cubellis (16:33.472) Yeah, also like Besson and Co. are not like, they're not really hiding it. Like they've said multiple times, they want to run it hot. You're seeing metals run. So they're kind of giving you the playbook without being super explicit about it. Like you better own assets. You know, they did the thing with, you know, the giving every newborn equity exposure at their birth. Like they're telling you, you need to own assets because they're going to continue to debase the currency. Michael (16:57.073) We lost Brian. TFTC (16:57.59) Brian, is that me? Yeah, they're going to run it hot. And it's funny, right? I'm interested to get your thoughts on this because I think you have to separate like the federal government, all the ways that exist there that Trump and his administration have inherited from like some of the policies that they're enacting. I like, I was a bit skeptical of them at first, but I actually love the tariff policy. Obviously I like Doge, I like that this fraud I saw Besant was on with Chris Ruffo. Yesterday saying that they're basically setting bear traps for all these AGs and governors that were enabling fraud in these states. Like it seems like they want to go after it. And I do think they have, I think they should run it hot too, particularly if you want to re industrialize and reshore manufacturing. not sure. I'm sure. I know I've talked to you guys about it, but like this AI stuff is not, there's definitely some misallocation of capital happening, but the the innovation and the productivity increases and the efficiency gains are real. I see it every day just by using the tools. And I think really leaning into that is important and not only for just increasing the productivity of the economy overall, but I think you get the added benefit of this refocusing on energy infrastructure, which has been completely neglected for decades. And so I'm actually... It's weird. I don't like the federal government. don't like all the fraud, waste and abuse, but I am a fan of a lot of the economic policies, domestic policies that the Trump administration is putting forth. It's a weird dichotomy. Jackson Mikalic (18:40.867) Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of a lot of different directions we can go there, but I think I'm hopeful, at least in the sense that a lot of these initiatives are bringing more light to all the corruption and waste, even though Doge was on its face kind of a failure in the sense that we knew there was no. balancing of the budget like it was just an impossible task. At least it got that conversation into the forefront of discourse and politics and people were thinking more about it. And then whatever, know, and then Besson allegedly punched Elon Musk and the bromance was over. you know, that's one example. Then the other example, Marty, to your point is what has been going on with the daycares. Michael is joking about Cam on our team. Had a great op. Michael, I don't want to steal your thunder, but you had a great line there about just so much opportunity and in TFTC (19:20.559) Yeah. Jackson Mikalic (19:26.818) the greater Minneapolis area for those that want to start daycares. Michael (19:30.011) Well, we think that's why I can move back to Minnesota was because they were they were on, you know, these these guys play 3D chess. So they needed a white American to be the front for their new corruption. So can I actually be running daycares currently right now? Taking a take a small cut. Brian Cubellis (19:48.64) sweeping profits into BCC. TFTC (19:48.857) Hey, you have this. I'm not going to say it, yeah, I mean, and to your point about Elon versus Besant, I'm not sure if you caught Besant's comments on it with Chris Ruffo. He also commented on that because he asked him explicitly like what happened with you and Elon. And I thought it was very illuminating in terms of the approach that Besant specifically has taken where he's like, hey, I love Elon. I agree. There's a ton. Michael (19:53.711) Hahaha Brian Cubellis (19:54.358) You TFTC (20:18.913) of fraud, waste and abuse that needs to be eliminated. But he comes, he came into the administration and to DC with the Silicon Valley move, move fast and break things where my whole perspective is we need to move slow and fix things. And so it's just, I think they had a difference in approach. And I think we're beginning to see like, seems like Besson has been playing a long game again, like he's saying they're laying bear traps to really handcuff the people enabling this fraud. in state governments across the country. And he was alluding to the fact that AG Ellison in Minnesota is likely going to be having charges brought against him. So hopefully that starts a cascading effect. And we've seen it too, again, going back to AI, the amount of action that Nick Shirley's video incited in the public just using AI tools to scrape all these databases and actually look into where the federal funds are going. in Medicaid and specifically, like it's everywhere. It's rampant and it's bipartisan. It's in red states and blue states. mean, Texas, Florida, many other states, probably every state is coasting off this grift. then going back to your point earlier, Brian, just, it's going to happen inevitably. Both sides of the aisle are going to take advantage of it. Like I said earlier, if you look at the military budget, there's probably Obscene amounts of fraud, waste and abuse there definitely is And it just goes back to like central control of these systems like that. It doesn't work You're not gonna have the best outcomes at the end of the day Bitcoin is a way to get away from that and hopefully We'll be able to have more and more American citizens begin to realize that but I think I'm optimistic about it, but as we've seen with the Soros funded protesters in years past that can do a good job of really muddying the discourse around these things. Michael (22:25.489) Yeah, it's hard. We don't have to go deep here unless you have a take you want to share, but I have a hard time piecing this whole thing together because it doesn't feel organic in the sense of we go back to the rocks. Independent of anything we just discussed, you have to print more dollars. It's got to be debased. You want to hold our assets. But when we look at the Nick Shirley and you just reference it, this is rampant across both sides of the aisle, but then every state, which ultimately leads back in some direction. to the Trump administration, but more adding like the credit card stuff that he announced. I don't even know how that would actually go into effect in January 20th around the caps. Real estate subsidies, the notion of like you talked about it. We want to we do want to get heavy into AI and just like this brave new world, the like UBI, right? Like there's almost this like mosaic being painted of like it's all funny money. It's all like, you you hear the hundreds of billions getting thrown out of these data centers and Stargate. It's like this is all ephemeral and eventually we're just going to start shipping you like That's what this feels like. It's incepting that the money actually doesn't have any relevance anymore. And we've just been taking it. It's been taken. so trilling here, trilling there. And it's like leading us into a different way that I don't think we're ready for. I don't have it fully put it together, but it just feels off. Because this fraud has been existed forever. Everyone's talked about it. The inequality of the Fed is another example, has existed forever. But now we have people in notable places talking about it. And there's just something, there's like 5D chess happening. right now. It's the same thing that we're talking about with gold, you know, and the price and everything happening in the states and even ETFs being approved in consumers or individuals in the US needing assets to store, they're going to revolt, right? Because, you know, houses are overpriced and equities are overpriced, so you need these things that only can serve as a valve for capital to go in. So like these guys, I feel like there's a very like larger know, plan or thing that's happening that we don't fully appreciate. TFTC (24:26.819) Yeah. Maybe I have like Tom Luongo theories flying through my head. This sort of intercabal squabble, or we just in the middle of it. Brian Cubellis (24:36.096) Did you see, Marty, did you see all the central banks issue that letter yesterday? Like, that was hilarious to me. It was like the central bank cabal being like, we support Jerome Powell and his... TFTC (24:38.647) Yeah, I was actually going to bring that up earlier. TFTC (24:48.087) Yeah, Oilfield Randolph put it best, if people didn't believe that these people were the enemy already, now we know for sure that they are. Michael (24:57.425) Stablecoin's another great example I didn't bring up in that whole mosaic being painted is like the speed and acceleration of all these companies adopting stablecoins is insane. When you think about YouTube and just all the news that came out in 2025, the real world asset securitization, like it's just, there's a lot happening behind the scenes that I think they're both basically end up converging on each other. TFTC (25:20.943) Yeah, I think the stable coins are the siren call of this. I mean they have been For a couple years now, but and Somebody investing in companies in the space. I'm happy that people are distracted by By the stable coin fervor, but I mean it was just yesterday Tether froze. What was it 182 million dollars? held by the Venezuelan government the Maduro regime Which yeah probably should be frozen so nobody in that regime is like sending money out and running away with Venezuela's wealth. A little of it remains from the Maduro regime, but it just highlights like these things are no different than the incumbent banking system. They just have a different flavor and a different feature set definitely that is superior to the incumbent system. But when it comes to the most important feature of control over your money that does not exist within stable coins. Jackson Mikalic (26:22.914) Yeah, Marty wanted to get your take on on this tweet here from Warren Davidson as well ties into what you were just describing. The tweet says the future of money will determine the future. Either we stop CBDC and digital ID while protecting self custody and the fundamental right to transact or Western civilization is effectively lost. So how do you kind of fit the stable coins into this picture here of CBDCs and digital IDs? Do you think that those are kind of like the private market equivalent or? Do you have a different opinion there? TFTC (26:54.607) I mean, yeah, they're functionally the same thing. The means are different in the sense that you have tether and circle in other sort of quote unquote free market issuers issuing them. But the end will be the same again, going back to like they can do everything that a central bank would want to do in terms of controlling the money and preventing people from moving it to particular addresses or spending it on particular things. It's just technically not centrally issued by the central bank. One could argue it's technically issued by the treasury because they're all backed by treasuries and they're stable coin companies just becoming arms of the treasury to some extent. So the end is the same. The means may be different. And I think again, calling things out as I see them, like that's one thing I wear. I'm very happy with the aggressive immigration policy. that the Trump administration is following through on right now. Obviously, some people are not happy with what they deem to be the slow pace of getting illegal immigrants out of the country, but they are certainly making an effort. believe 2025 is the first year in over two decades where we had net negative migration into the country, which I'm happy to see. But I think that's one thing we need to be vigilant of. And you've seen for canaries in the coal mine of politicians using this immigration issue as a means to thrust digital ID, like the calls for e-verify for employment and stuff like that are getting louder and louder. And so I think we have to be vigilant. Like, hey, we don't need to go this far where we need the digital ID to prove that we're American citizens. Let's make sure that we maintain our sovereignty and don't get cattle herded into the surveillance system. But yes, we should get the illegal immigrants out of the country. And I think it's just holding the Trump administration to account to make sure we don't need something like e-verify, which is a slippery slope towards the digital ID. And then with this market structure bill, I'm still unsure with whether or not it's a good or bad thing. There's obviously some language about protections for self custody and open source developers. But if you read it, it seems like it's a bit opaque. And there are other... TFTC (29:22.041) There are other means to really curb self custody and open source development if the language is read in a certain way. And so I'm actually going to DC this afternoon as you guys know, I'm gonna try and figure out, I guess, is this bill good or bad? But I think that's one thing we just have to do is just stay vigilant throughout all this. We definitely want certain things to happen. We're moving in that direction, but hopefully. the Trump admin and opportunistic politicians on Capitol Hill don't try to backdoor the CBDC digital ID onto us. Michael (30:00.227) you Yeah, we haven't had a chance to talk about this, but like my mental model of what you're describing is very similar to like the internet. And some people use it in a much more convenient way. And it's obviously much more censored and higher, highly censorable and being D platform. And then others use it in a much more like quote unquote sovereign way. Um, and it's not apples to apples, but the example you can see is like, I think this stable coin stuff, whether it's stable coins or CBDCs, I was having a conversation with a friend of ours, um, about in the sense of like, yes, on its face value, Bitcoin is obviously much superior, should it be in the same context as a CBDC or stable coin, but we can't forget the amount of convenience and the level of people when it comes to like, you mentioned the ID, if it's in your wallet for your medical, you know, to just go to the doctor and all the things that you can go from there. And so like, that's the slippery slope that I think we're heading down. And I think it's, I don't wanna say it's orchestrated, but I think it makes sense because post 22 the collapse, you've seen this natural orchestration of more regulatory, the apparatus, you think about onshore and an offshore, right? Like everything was offshore and then now it's onshore, but it has to be like blessed by the federal government and the administration. Deribit's a great example of, you know, something like this. And so I think that's just a framework. And to your point, like vigilance, a great word because you have to leverage, you know, the U.S. kind of as it goes, the U.S. goes the world of setting some kind of standard building the right tools. And then we've kind of seen, TFTC (31:15.65) Mm-hmm. Michael (31:30.387) know the reality is you know talent chases money money goes to the place where it's going to be treated the best so we'll probably see more of that as well with El Salvador, UAE, Switzerland, some of these other countries that are kind of like leaning in here. TFTC (31:44.367) think anyone in the United States, mean, you're seeing a mass exodus out of California because this billionaire tax that they're floating, I think there will be a prop vote on it later this year. You're already seeing that here in the United States too, between the states. Michael (32:01.393) Let's chat AI if that works. Jackson Mikalic (32:02.35) Yeah, I was going to pull that up real quick because I think a lot of the themes that we're currently discussing, I mean on the privacy side for sure, are top of mind. But then also I think there's so many parallels between the advancement that we're... seen firsthand with artificial intelligence and Bitcoin as well. I think this tweet from Vijay that I came across this morning really does does it justice in the sense of like you could read this tweet and it could apply to AI, but it could also apply to Bitcoin. So he says, as a computer scientist, it's truly surreal feeling to see the tidal wave of AI already at our doorstep, yet recognize that most people have not seen it, let alone understand the full magnitude of disruption that will be unleashed on the global economy. So like that might as well be a tweet about Bitcoin as well. And one thing I wanted to call out and then we can go over to you, Marty, is just like, think of the privacy discussion, we have to think a lot about artificial intelligence as well, because everything you described from the digital IDs and the CBDCs, we're centralizing so much of our information if we actually want to participate in the productivity gains of AI at the moment, right? Like whether you're on ChatGBT or Claude, I know there's open source and there's better privacy options out there. But right now the commercial options that exist or taking so much of our information, whether it's about businesses or personal. And I don't really know what you know what that will end up amounting to. And at some point, like in the AI discussion, we could go there if you guys want to. There's so much to be gained from using these tools. But like, where is the line drawn? Because you could imagine as well, there's going to be a line out the door for people to start chipping their brains with Neuralink. And that's probably where I draw the line personally. But I don't know what that means in terms of Brian Cubellis (33:43.508) you Jackson Mikalic (33:46.798) my lack of productivity for not getting a brain chip. But right now am I going board for, for GPT and Claude, but curious, Michael (33:53.458) And that's a company mandate. You're going to have to decide, do you get the chip or not? Because we're going to need you operating at the highest level. And if you're not chipped, then we're probably going to need you. Jackson Mikalic (34:01.836) Yes, that's a problem. TFTC (34:04.239) Yeah. No, it's, I feel this tension every day because I'm using the tools. We use Claude. I think Claude is by far the best, the best AI company or Anthropics, the best AI company out there right now. And it's made us extremely productive and efficient at TFTC. And we're using it at 1031 too for certain aspects of the business. It is extremely powerful. to the point about privacy, is a big open question. Will these things be private? Luckily, I think due to HIPAA compliance and financial compliance laws, at least for some aspects of these product suites, they're going to have to incorporate privacy-preserving technologies. think the team at Maple AI, OpenSecret, doing confidential compute in the secure enclaves where you can basically bake LLM logic into a secure enclave and a user can prompt it from his computer, encrypt the prompt in a secure enclave, send it to the cloud, which has a secure enclave in it, and then prompt the LLM within the enclave and then it'll send the response back and encrypted. I think that's extremely powerful. And I do think just simply due to privacy regulations that already exist around healthcare and financial data specifically in legal industry as well. Those products are going to have to come to market. And if they're offered for those services, especially if they find a way to implement this in a way that doesn't really hinder the user experience of using these LLMs, I'm optimistic that we will get more private AI. And because we to think about, we talk about this a lot in the Bitcoin context too, at KYC AML. It's a double-edged sword having all this data. Yes, you can train your models on it and all that. However, you're also a honeypot for very intimate data that I think a lot of these companies probably don't want that liability in the long run. Michael (36:22.222) I think it's a tale of two tapes. We have this saying we've been talking about, like there's a truth in every lie and a lie in every truth and like the notion of Bitcoin, you know, has a lot of truth. then, but there are certain like aspects people believe about Bitcoin that aren't a fantasy. In the same way, like crypto has a bunch of crazy lies on a flawed structure, but there are like test notes and use cases that will be used in Bitcoin. I think of what's happening in the digital asset space, right? Like that crypto is the noise, stable coins is noise, but it will, it's all like timeframe and, you know, there will be adoption of all this stuff that's happening. Then ultimately people will understand why Bitcoin has its value and why things would be built there. It's very similar with AI. And again, I'm trying to pull a little, see if we can get Marty Jones out, but like. My take on AI is there's truth and there's lies baked into it. One of them is the lies. 2021 was a very opportune time to really unleash a lot of this stuff because of the amount of capital, or 2022 really, because the amount of capital that was destroyed in 2021, it was hard for people to have a place to park that capital. And so you had this boom of an AI investments data infrastructure. And the reality is at the very micro level, like a firm like ours, yours, that's being utilized and there's efficiencies, but then on the other side of it, it's masking that there was always understood that we were gonna go into a deflationary environment because of inflation, that companies margins were being compressed, there was not enough buyers, right? Because when margins compress and inflation happens, there's less net new buyers, so revenue has to go down, so people have to get rid. of headcount, so it's this nice, but that was always gonna have to happen, independent of AI, because there's less people spending, having disposable income for goods and services, so it's this nice narrative for why those layoffs and unemployment, and a great example of this, I just heard yesterday, that Amazon, while revenue has increased, they've been flat on net new employees, because their margins are increasing based on the amount of robotics that they've introduced into their business. Michael (38:29.142) And so just calling that out because we are in this brave new world, but it's going to take a while to really see the world rebuild on this structure. But between now and then, there's going be a narrative around all these unemployment and efficiencies when most large companies have no freaking idea how to integrate this at scale to really make a difference. TFTC (38:48.175) Yeah, then I mean, I agree with you. think as a big excuse, we've talked about this, like the managerial crisis that exists in this country. You have particularly the larger corporations are just bloated with useless staff for lack of a better term, right? It was just like laptop babysitting jobs at the end of the day. And yeah, but I, I dunno, I was actually talking about it with Ed, our head of growth at TFTC, cause I mean, With Opus 4.5 and Cloud Code and now Cloud Co-Work, it's insane what we've been able to automate on the backend at TFTC. The dashboards have been able to create. TFTC (39:32.225) I do worry that too many people will fall into the Luddite fallacy in terms of like not understanding Jevons paradox. I think Jevons paradox applies to the GPU compute for AI as well as Bitcoin UTXOs and oil and gas where there's just so much that can be done. We literally had this conversation two hours ago where it's like, don't think obviously you should cut the fat of the useless middle management, sort of managerial elites that are not really doing anything productive and actually hindering you in many ways because you're just a roadblock in organizational and hierarchical efficiency. particularly for startups, you can keep the headcount low, but you can just do so much more and be much more productive. And I think we need, as Americans and just humans, generally really need to engender this. this environment and this understanding of agency. if you have agency and you're willing to put in the work, you can literally ask the LLM to teach you how to use it. And within a week, you can be pretty proficient. And I think we just need to instill this mentality in the broader public. like, hey, this technology is here. It's incredibly disruptive. You may be worried about losing your job, but it's also going to enable insane productivity gains and building if you're creative and you have agency. So I think that's actually there's a social problem to this that we're going to have to overcome. It's just like getting a Spartan level of agency ingrained in the minds of people. Michael (41:09.167) Yeah. Michael (41:13.2) And that's why I think like this is really a philosophical, you can call it whatever you want, philosophical, spiritual agency, Renaissance that the sad part, and again, this is a little cynical, but a lot of people will leave this earth never holding back when or understanding it because part of like a fiat system and dollar system is remember growing up like money doesn't grow on trees, but that's like a crazy term to bring up to anybody. And it's just the truth, right? Or if it's too good to be true or no such thing as a free lunch. And so that same analogy on like recognizing why scarcity is important and a money is very similar to what you're describing of like the agency to be able to do something. And here's a great example because I too about like this brave new world. It's insane, right, that Claude Co work was built based on Claude Co 10 days. But the analogy was that or the reference point was that this is what Microsoft's been trying to build for years. And that goes back to the philosophy of an organization that when you have that much bureaucracy, and it really ends up around your competing with that managerial class and others. So there's that aspect, but then to the other side of it, I don't know if you saw this yesterday, I thought this was absolutely incredible because I've always just been a big fan of like Mortimer's business and how they scale that. And this one guy, have you seen this? Yeah, it's absolutely like amazing and fascinating. TFTC (42:28.267) Yeah, yeah, I actually shared it with Ed. Michael (42:34.998) And so the main point for anybody listening, just pulled up this guy, David Roberts, recap underscore David on Twitter, built a 10,000 plus daily reader subscriber base with Morning Brew Style, which has been very effective for the audience that they were reaching and then their acquisition. But it was effectively using and scraping all these different places online around AI and the tools around that. and then building this out programmatically and it took about five months to fine tune but he open sourced it. So now anybody with any domain interest. can effectively take that prompt and then put it in whatever niche that they want, start developing that, figure out whatever kind of growth hack ways to build that list, and to your point, an agency make a good salary for a living with taking a couple months work. So it's a crazy, net-need world, but I think that there's just the barbell of the people with agency and nimble enough, and then you have basically everything else where all the capital has been parked, effectively have the incentive not to do any of this, it's their job on the hook and that's like the push-pull that we're going to be dealing with over the next decade. TFTC (43:44.943) Well, that highlights the imperative nature of a transition to a Bitcoin standard. Like if that reality you just described is real, this barbell of people with agency and those without it, like you can't have all this money printing and debt issuance. Like these people are going to need to work menial sort of physical world jobs and make a modest salary and not have their currency debased in the process. Like if you actually want to manufacture a soft landing for the job market and the consumer base, like you need to, you need to adopt a hard money standard. I mean, this is something Bitcoiners been talking about in the context of AI for, for a decade, obviously Jeff booth's price of tomorrow really leaned into this theme specifically. Like we are going to have this artificial intelligence boom. It needs to be paired with a sound currency where you're just going to have insane dislocation in the economy. Jackson Mikalic (44:38.092) And the window of opportunity is right now, like for people who are listening to this show, certainly have a think on it for yourself, but also share with your friends and family. Just the general idea here is that there will be a point in the future that what Marty and Michael just kind of alluded to will exist, right? A lot of people are going to be displaced by artificial intelligence. Let's just call it technology. That's productivity gains. That's not a bad thing. People are going to be displaced. And that is going to happen at a very accelerated rate. I mean, it's already happening. I keep pointing back to October of last year because I don't think enough people paid attention to that signpost of over 100,000 layoffs in a single month, which was the most in over 20 years. So I keep pointing back to that because that is just one blip on the radar of what happens over the next five years in terms of the disruption in the workforce. But the flip side, and Marty, think you've always done a great job of having the optimistic take. and something that I aspire to do as well is that means that there's opportunity because if we're talking about Claude code and co-work and these tools, like we're probably in like the 1 % of people who have actually meaningfully experimented with any of these things. And so that's not to toot our own horns, but it's to say that you're well ahead of the rest of the population and the window of opportunity will close, but you still have time to learn these things. And to your point, Marty, it's like, you can just go boot up one of these applications. spend an hour in it and at least get some guidance from the droid on what you need to be doing. And so I think that's incredibly encouraging. Michael is probably sick of me saying it, but like it's the best time to be alive. If you are a high agency person and if you're a low agency person, it might be the worst time to be alive, unfortunately, but like it's on you at the end of the day as an individual to be responsible, to lean in, to learn technology and to save in Bitcoin. And that's a critical component of as well. Cause if you're not saving in Bitcoin, then The discrepancy, the disconnect between the inflationary currency and the deflationary forces of technology is going to just like totally knock things all around and it's going to be a mess. But if you can save in Bitcoin, going to have to deal with the volatility like we did last year and several years in the past. But over the long term, you're going to be in a far better position. TFTC (46:55.951) Yeah, and it's funny with AI specifically. I actually had a conversation with our good friend Will Cole yesterday. I talked him for about 45 minutes because he saw my Claude Cowork tweet and he's been using it too. We were talking about it in the context of Bitcoin adoption. I think it's different than Bitcoin adoption where it really doesn't matter when you adopt it because the AI advancements are happening so quickly. That morning brew, automated morning brew, open source. project that we were just talking about. If you watch that video, he's using N8n, which is this technology allows you to sort of zappier on crack. But we were using N8n for some of our backend stuff at TFTC like two months ago, but with Opus 4.5 and Cloud Code, we were able to rebuild N8n and drop our subscription and just build that ourselves. N8n has been a big theme over the last year. Get the most out of AI, use this tool, built for it. But with how fast the models and the tools around the models have progressed, you can replace that as well. so point being is like six months from now, we're gonna be probably in order of magnitude, more efficient, these tools are gonna be even better. And even if you adopt it then, it doesn't really matter if you're a laggard, it's gonna have insane productivity boost for you. Michael (48:17.232) Yeah, on one side of that anchor, like it's just a rational thing in an accelerated deflationary world, including your job being deflated away is to park more and more of your savings into a finite unit because it's just going to protect you in the future. And the thing that you reference around Bitcoin adoption, I think this is one of the most bullish catalysts for Bitcoin that doesn't get talked about a lot is like really both sides of the barbell of the store of value, people utilizing it, saving in it. But then it's the notion of like the I know we all agree with is these tools are gonna have some level of digital currency and it's gonna probably start with a lot with stable coins But you had the money deaf kit guy and I haven't fully listened but been meaning to Because I think that's a great Example of how many people like it's much more efficient to be able to just put a line of code to accept Bitcoin payments And that's for certain people that maybe can't get a bank But eventually it's just gonna be the most efficient way to accept payments for anything in a digital world and when that kind of like it's gonna be a confluence and conversion together that in the digital realm it's just a unit of currency in the physical realm it's also a unit of currency and those things will come together and it'll just be ubiquitous and everyone will come at their own angle of like this thing just has a value. TFTC (49:28.417) Yeah, and I mean, so Nick Slaney, who's co founder of money dev kit was on like, that's where like going back to what I said earlier, I think stable coins are a siren call, because even if you these agents, you have the ability to give agents stable coin wallets, like you still need to go to circle, you still need to go to stripe whoever's the issuer and set up an account, put in all your banking information, your EIN, whatever it may be your social security number, if you're doing it as an individual to actually set up those wallets in many cases. And that UX is terrible. Whereas if you listen to the episode with Nick that we published on TFTC earlier this week, like with them, it's non-custodial Bitcoin. It's literally you go from having nothing to having payments enabled within five minutes, just vibe coding. And you don't have to ask for permission. You don't have to set anything up. You just create a private public key pair and you're often accepting payments. So I think in the realm of agentic, Commerce in the currency of choice and it's funny as I said this I was on Brahms podcast earlier this week Bitcoin for Millennials and I'm curious to like anybody in the audience because I know The models I'm using are a bit biased because they have the context of everything. searching But if you ask if I asked the models like if this agentic World this agentic economy does emerge like what money do you think they would choose given the choice and bar none, Bitcoin is always the top answer because of the properties I just described. Michael (51:00.577) I you were gonna ask if he asked them... I thought he was gonna ask if you asked the model can a man have a baby, what would it say? Because that's another issue we'll have in the future. Jackson Mikalic (51:01.214) The droids are going to usher in the Bitcoin standard. I totally agree though. Brian Cubellis (51:08.437) You TFTC (51:09.099) Hopefully it would say no That's a good that's a good turning test for the model if you want to put it out there But no like ask if you don't search Bitcoin on the models everything haven't used them and you spin one out let the first question be like What money do you think agents are gonna use it's gonna be Bitcoin. It's not gonna be stable coins. There's too many UX UI hurdles Brian Cubellis (51:29.306) Is that presuming though that like they have at that point it's like full AGI, they have a mind of their own and that's what they're choosing? Because I would imagine there's going to be an interim period where people do just insert stable coins into these things where they're not like fully agentic, if that makes sense. TFTC (51:43.683) I mean, they're certainly going to do it, like I was, I vibe coded a prototype this morning using cowork. And if you like go through the process and you actually like read what it's actually doing, like it's trying to do like the thing as efficient as possible. So it's like, all right, we're to use TypeScript. We're going to use react native. Like these are very easy to implement and all that. And like, if you apply that, if you give the agent a task, like, Hey, I need you to go acquire a piece of software that allows you to transact with money as efficiently as possible. they're going to go the stable coin route and be like, we could do this, but you'd set up a Stripe account and all this. Or we could use MoneyDevKit and I can just create a private public key pair and begin accepting on your behalf. Michael (52:23.011) Yeah, we don't have to go full there, but the footprints in the sand is where I go when you reference that, if you read that article, because when this stuff becomes aware, if it isn't already, and you can seize the money that it's occurring, well, it's just gonna go set up a private key wallet that you don't have access to, to accept the Bitcoin, because why would you want it to be seized and be turned off from the capital? TFTC (52:44.535) Yeah. Or who knows, maybe Quantum is coming this year and we're just having a feckless conversation. Michael (52:52.783) I know we have roughly like 20 minutes. I don't know, Jackson, where you want to go, but I do want to bring this up because this could take a good portion of it. It is really Bellagio's tweet that I think was rivals yours from the other day, where we started the show and just helped pressure him in like recognizing, you know, they're going to destroy every Western fiat ledger. Anything stored on a ledger from currency, stocks or bonds will be first exorbitantly taxed and eventually simply seized or simply inflated to zero. That's the logic of the sovereign debt crisis. I think it's basically the status of where we're at. and it's slowly being recognized and I gold and silver are these like crazy alarm bells that still very few people are attention to. think today silver hit like $93 an ounce, which is just like insane. So maybe we can chat about this. TFTC (53:38.551) It hit over 100. Michael (53:40.847) I think on the Hong Kong futures market, like Spot, I don't know, I always just look at Spot because it's like, what does it pay for somebody to go into like a local bullion dealer and be able to buy it? And think right now it's like 92, 93 ounces, but I think on the Hong Kong futures exchange, hit that. Brian Cubellis (53:41.142) Cheers. TFTC (53:54.479) Oh yeah. Yeah, it's a hit 92 last night, I got TradingView up. But then the physical price is completely disconnected. Physical is over 100. Right? Yeah, I think so. Michael (54:03.287) really? I know I saw something that the Fed is stopping selling directly silver. Yeah, the US Mint. TFTC (54:09.359) The US Mint. The US Mint, yeah. Yeah, there, I mean, like I said, like we started off the show, like, I think people are recognizing, or at least people with large amounts of capital are recognizing, this geopolitical situation, this sort of debt situation doesn't look great right now. Maybe we should rotate into hard assets that can't be seized. And to Balaji's point, Brian Cubellis (54:11.063) I that. Michael (54:34.637) This is basically, real quick, this is basically the thesis for a super cycle without like, and because I people get caught up in super cycle and. Bitcoin goes a million dollars in six months. No, the super cycle is the money's broken. Why would you ever trade it for anything else? And gold is the canary because if gold goes to 4,600, I fully expect it to go to $10,000 because what is a sovereign going to trade it for? For more government debt? Are they going to trade it for copper? There's a structural change in the denominator. And in that world, when Bitcoin catches that bid is recognized, A, the short squeeze is going to be like nothing we've ever seen. But B, what are you going to trade it for once you get to that target point? That's all you're gonna want. And that's the definition, in my view, of a super cycle is this isn't cycles anymore. This is literally just money being repriced. TFTC (55:20.883) Yeah, it's a lot Balaji's point. Like that's why I get go back to what we were saying earlier I think we just really need to lean into this fraud aspect of the central Governments in the central banks because like I mentioned earlier, California is putting the billionaire tax on which is they're mulling it over we'll have a boat on it later this year, but I wouldn't be surprised if They pass it. They just want to confiscate wealth that is unrealized in most cases So you're just gonna have a bunch of startup founders who are literally driven bankrupt because they're forced to sell their illiquid private company shares on a second market to pay this tax. then again, hopefully we can overcome these strong forces of the color revolution, the cultural revolution that is many people are attempting to effectuate on the United States citizens and just shake people awake like, hey, you were literally cheering for Government that is rampant with fraud, waste and abuse to get more power. Like what are you doing? We need to go the opposite direction And I think there's that sort of exit option with Bitcoin where you can you can force the issue And say no, you're not taking my money Michael (56:35.822) Which is important from a state level, I don't know, I'd be curious if you guys just take like, the only person I've seen saying this is Mike Belshi on Twitter, but whenever somebody leaves, because I think he's very pro, you know, California from I believe Bicco's headquarters and also may live there, but it's like, everyone can leave, but we're just gonna bail out California as like the fifth largest economy in the world, and whenever they go tits up, like we're just gonna have to pay it, and that goes obviously to the thesis of why you wanna hold. you know, your money outside of the system, but it's still like, I can't argue with that, that what we're gonna do, we're just gonna end up having to like compensate or capitalize a defunct state. TFTC (57:12.687) No, what was it, the California audit office, like the official auditor of the state, what did they find? 170 billion in fraud with the high speed rail to nowhere, like the homeless crisis. And I forget what the third thing was that really made up a large portion of that fraud. Like just let them, let the quote unquote federal government or the state government of California collapse. Like it is a leech on. the system it would be a massive benefit for the people of California and the United States by extension if that government just went completely bankrupt and wasn't enabled to continue this fraud, waste and abuse. Michael (57:54.671) It's pretty wild, Chamath, I guess, is moving to Austin too. Did you see that? Yes, you get Chamath, Sax, Calcanis. They're just gonna record out of Rogan's podcast. It's pretty... Or the wrong time. TFTC (57:59.396) Yeah. TFTC (58:05.837) I got out at the right time. Jackson Mikalic (58:08.632) Ha! TFTC (58:12.033) Yeah, we'll see. I'll be back down there a lot. I still have the office down there, so... Yeah. Michael (58:16.624) Parker needs you, Parker needs you. was in there, we were just looking at the TFTC studios, trying to figure out how to revive this place. TFTC (58:24.847) I know. I'll be back down. I'm coming back down soon. But yeah, it's, uh, I don't know. Maybe I am too optimistic, but again, with these AI tools too, and with social, the age of social media, like I think public, the, the ability to influence public perception is way easier than it has ever been. And the leverage is certainly tilted in favor of the individual versus the overarching state apparatus that exists. I think more people are starting to wake up to this. Like obviously you have the ICE protesters, these people are objectively crazy. I think people are starting to recognize that. Jackson Mikalic (59:05.838) Yeah, from just a capital allocation perspective, I mean, it's like, no one's actually even paying attention. And what I mean by that is you have gold in particular has the sovereign bid and then gold and silver have, well, I guess there's some sovereign bid for silver as well, but mostly for gold. And then on the retail side, we saw on 25, there was lines at, Bullion banks and different places you could buy physical silver and gold in 2025. But then you kind of have like the middle of where I think of people who have managed wealth, right? So they have financial advisors and family offices and institutional capital. Most of these investors don't actually own like any gold or silver or Bitcoin. So Michael, I know you said there's a super cycle upon us and I would be inclined to agree because at the end of the day, there is barely any capital allocated to these asset classes. Like gold sitting around like north of 30 trillion, silver is now five trillion. We're just kind of crazy because it was about two. I remember everyone was cheering about Bitcoin being a larger asset class than silver like a year or two ago. And now that's a five trillion dollar market and Bitcoin's about two trillion. So that is really nothing in the grand scheme of things. And if everything that we've been discussing on this podcast and we talk about every week and Marty, you cover on TFTC is true, then we don't really know like how high these things go because As some people like to say, Bitcoin has no top because fiat has no bottom. Michael's favorite line. TFTC (01:00:35.919) Well, it really does it And that's I mean I Think also to a steel man it or play devil's advocate a second ahead of our skis. I've been in this position multiple times in the last 15 years where it's like, oh the system's collapsing next week like they to your point Michael with California bailout, even though I think they should let the state government of California Go into bankruptcy and collapse They're gonna find a way to try to manufacture like just a band-aid on top of everything but also like it was going on with Japan Japanese yields and The geopolitical tensions rising maybe it is maybe it is time for the last trade the supercycle the meltup neo-mega candle Hyper Bitcoin ization, whatever you want to call it Jackson Mikalic (01:01:32.078) Maybe it is. Find out next week on The Last Trade. Marty, thank you so much for joining us, man. I know you got to run. I want to be respectful of your time. I'd imagine just about everyone is aware of who you are and what you do, but where do you want to send them if not? TFTC (01:01:46.971) Just find me on Twitter, I'm Marty Bent. Yeah, just find me there. That's where I do most of the... Jackson Mikalic (01:01:52.89) Just find him there, come on. Michael (01:01:53.392) We can't let Marty get away this easily. The last thing maybe to wrap with is what do you pay attention to most in 2026? Whether it's Bitcoin AI, like what's on your radar, what's most interesting? Brian Cubellis (01:01:56.246) You TFTC (01:02:04.463) I think just selfishly personal reasons AI, obviously Bitcoin, like AI to get more Bitcoin is what I would say, like making my small team of five people at TFTC and our small team of five people at 1031 as efficient and productive as possible so that we can bring in more revenue and stack more Bitcoin at the tier point. If you have agency, the tools, that will enable you to leverage that agency to be more productive and efficient have never been stronger. They're only getting stronger literally day by day. And I think that's the big theme I'm looking for or focusing on at least personally, selfishly beyond that. Obviously energy is a big portion of this and there's many things I'm focusing on like tariffs. I think they've been a massive success. If Bissette and the Treasury and Department of Justice start filing charges against like Keith Ellison and other AGs and governors across the country, that would be insanely bullish. Like maybe the Great Awakening, maybe the Q people, right? Patriots are in control. There's stuff going on behind the scenes that we don't know. I think all of it, coalescing together is really fascinating. And it is a struggle at times to decide what to focus on. But I think... Coming into 2026, we made it clear, just focus on what you control in my life. TFTC 1031. It's like, how do we make these things as powerful as possible? Michael (01:03:44.4) Yeah, very well said. For anybody that doesn't listen to Marty, this was him very, know, buttoned up and polished. If you want to learn about intercoval squabbles and, you know, QAnon and other things, you can go to TFTC and listen because he has plenty of theories there that we've actually talked about. I don't know if you remember when Brian and I were on, I think there was a whole podcast dedicated to things that were a little taboo to discuss, and probably half of them have been proven to be true today. TFTC (01:04:09.967) Well, it seems like every year that passes things that were once taboo are no longer taboo. So we're ahead of the curve. Michael (01:04:16.493) Love it. We'll have a good trip to DC. And yeah, looking forward to catching up again this year. TFTC (01:04:23.075) Gentlemen, it was a pleasure. Let's do it again. Let's do this more often. We shouldn't wait a year. Jackson Mikalic (01:04:29.144) Thank you, Marty. Appreciate your time. And Michael, Marty, you can go, but Michael, for the... All right, fine. We'll call it. Brian Cubellis (01:04:30.07) Thanks, Marty. Michael (01:04:33.825) It's okay, we'll just... god. Michael (01:04:39.343) Oh, he already left. Alright, well then now, well if people are still listening, what are we doing? So Marty's gone, we're, I completely forgot, we're gonna end the segment. Basically, we got, I actually, the guys don't even know this, there's some incredible swag coming for listeners, not for the team. We're gonna get some right. Yeah, yeah, No, no, no, that's what I, that's what I know, yeah, I was just setting it up. Jackson Mikalic (01:04:56.878) Well, that's mostly what I wanted to call out. mean, we can do our other segment as well, but yeah, you gotta talk about the swag. Michael (01:05:05.289) So we are going to get more engaging, have a lot of things planned for this year. But to start, we want to figure out who the best guests we should have on. the thought is that post this show, you made it this far. Shoot us a note on Twitter, tag us, and who you want to see on the pod. Whatever guest that gets the most likes or retweets, Jackson is our... associate shipper. So you will send him your address. You can give a PO box if you're worried about Jackson having your personal address and then we are going to ship you. So pretty soon. Jackson Mikalic (01:05:38.584) Yeah, but Ledger has it anyway. They already have your address. So what does it matter if I do? Michael (01:05:41.442) Ledger has your address. that's true. We can probably find that without you giving it to us. That'd be pretty interesting exercise in itself. But yeah, this stuff is getting embroidered. It's pretty fancy. So I'm going to have it next week to be able to pull up whatever the winner gets. The guys haven't seen it. But yeah, we have a lot planned for the audience this year. And so the first step is let's see who else we should be getting on and tag us. And then we'll go from there. Jackson Mikalic (01:06:07.598) And I just have a quick question as it relates to what you described there. So as an associate shipper, does that make me part of the managerial class? Should I be worried about my job? Michael (01:06:18.273) No, because the reality is you have to physically go to the post office and like package up the, you know, pull over a quarter zip, you know, fancy vest. Like that takes a physical presence. Now, eventually when the robot can do it, you know, that is, but we still need you, Jackson. So your job is intact. Jackson Mikalic (01:06:36.782) All right, perfect. Brian Cubellis (01:06:36.886) Yeah, but you got at least three months before that happens. Jackson Mikalic (01:06:40.18) Easy, Brian. Easy. All right, that's good to know. I'll think about my plans. I'll talk to my droid and figure out my plans in the meantime. Michael (01:06:44.675) Do I? Michael (01:06:48.751) We actually had a crazy amount of onboardings last week. I don't know if it was a symptom of what we announced, for folks that are still listening, if you use TLT, you get 50 % off your first month. And then we announced this week on-ramp for individuals, which was exciting because it's really signaling that a lot of people have either thought we don't work with individuals or our pricing structure might not be aligned with their long-term. with our Bitcoin stack. So now we have flat pricing, comes with an IRA account, insurance, inheritance, and we have a lot more coming down. So to the extent you want to check us out, you've been meaning to and been meaning to get to it in the new year. We're really excited. Not only were to take this podcast, but really the evolution of we look at multi-institutional cross-entitialism for everyone to be able to protect their wealth without having to learn all the things that most listeners have had to learn. So excited. And even if it's not for you, you can send your friends and family. We're going to be paying out some pretty substantial referrals as well. So reach out, engage with us. We're going to make this a big year for everybody. Jackson Mikalic (01:07:46.52) Sounds like a plan. Thank you, gentlemen. Brian Cubellis (01:07:47.703) Let's go. Later boys. Michael (01:07:48.624) Alright, thanks guys.