MetaPlanet, Bond Chaos, and Bitcoin’s Ascent with Mark Yusko

Jackson Mikalic (00:01.593) All right, we're live. Last trade, five people, special guest Mark Yusko. And then we have the usual suspects, Brian, Michael, and Tim. Brian Cubellis (00:03.847) We're back. Jackson Mikalic (00:11.867) Tim has not been on the podcast for a couple weeks. I said this on Scarce Assets, but I was actually concerned. The audience was concerned, Mark, that Tim was in jail. And I'll give you the context as Mark W. Yusko (00:38.978) Wow, wow, wow. The only thing that I can come close to similar on that is, so I was doing a show a while back when the whole FTX thing was going down. And I was pretty outspoken about the whole FTX debacle and all the ties to everything from Epstein to Ukraine. And literally while I'm talking, Tim (00:39.335) Ha ha ha! Mark W. Yusko (01:07.768) Power went out, the lights went down, and I found out later that the guy was still live streaming and he's like, I think the black cats showed up and took him because, you know, I was saying stuff that they wouldn't like, but anyway, so I'm still around, all good. Jackson Mikalic (01:26.373) Well, we like it, Mark. Maybe we'll get into some of these topics on the show today. But one of the things we like to do, and thank you, Mark, I didn't actually thank you for joining, so very apprecia Mark W. Yusko (01:44.35) Absolutely. And look how perfect on Bitcoin Pizza Day. And again, I shouldn't do this, but I will. I am wearing, well, not only wearing the orange pants, but I'm wearing the Bitcoin Pizza socks. Brian Cubellis (01:58.344) Let's go. A true professional. Jackson Mikalic (02:03.328) Wow, look at that. And the orange pants. Wow. Mark W. Yusko (02:06.857) So Mount Socks are my good friends and they send me some special gifts every now and then. And somebody asked me, they said, do you wear those for satire? Like, no, for lifestyle. In fact, I coined a Brian Cubellis (02:10.661) You Michael Tanguma (02:19.933) No, for lifestyle. Like, in fact, I co- Jackson Mikalic (02:30.212) Yes. Mark W. Yusko (02:34.082) So I actually created a logo for SatLife that I'm gonna try to get out there, but I'm sure someone already did it. Brian Cubellis (02:35.089) like it. Brian Cubellis (02:42.225) Not only are we at new all-time highs, Mike, you got a little echo going on. Not only are we at new all-time highs, I did want to point out that this is actually the 100th episode of The Last Trade. S Jackson Mikalic (02:42.437) What? Michael Tanguma (02:42.549) Not only are we at... you all have time. Mark W. Yusko (03:09.294) Well, no, look, thank you for having me on. That is a momentous number, congratulations. You know, they say 18 days of anything is a habit, right? So if you can do anything for 18 days or 18 consecuti Jackson Mikalic (03:34.074) Thank you, Mark. And you know what's funny about all this is we're 100 episodes in and Michael still can't figure out how to work his speakers and his headphone. That's the craziest part about it all. Michael Tanguma (03:46.349) It's so sad because I'm assuming I have audio right now and like I want to talk about pizza day and 100 Deal and then mark my thing clipped out But he was talking about his conspiracies and it brought Mark W. Yusko (04:04.04) I know look absolutely it's you know look it's everything's tied together and we know that right and but we don't realize how tied together things are until you really step back and I mean come on it's I digress. Jackson Mikalic (04:35.866) Well, I think the audience would enjoy if we get into some of these topics maybe later in the show. And that's an incentive for them to stick around the whole time. you know, I guess we'll get it ripp Michael Tanguma (04:36.373) I think it's Mark W. Yusko (04:43.406) There you go, lip hanger. Mark W. Yusko (05:00.728) Well, know, it's funny, right? I wear, and no, I mean, so you can see him. So I wear the orange pants every Friday for Bitcoin Friday. So it's like, market, it's Thursday. Like, yes, I know it's Thurs And so I wear my orange pants and I do a soccer reveal every Friday, but he's going on vacation tomorrow. So we recorded yesterday. And so I forgot the whole, didn't remember we were, long story short gave away 10,000 Bitcoin for two pizzas. If he would have kept them, he'd have a billion won. Yeah, sure. But that transaction is one of, and it's not the only, but it's one of the key points that all or even a thousand to 10,000. The miracle is it went from 0.0003 to a dollar. That's the miracle. The fact that it actually caught, that the technology actually caught on and doing a transaction was w So it's pretty important. And he did create also the first GPU miner, which pretty big deal. So lots of contributions to our stacks. Michael Tanguma (07:05.781) Mark, I don't even know where to begin there, so I'm gonna work backwards. The zero to one, yes, everything there. We talked a little bit about our Bitcoin Denominated Venture Fund. You'll be happy to It Bolido and you guys had a you know bow out so we had a you know step in to hopefully fill a little bit of that void but that was a very high signal Saturday morning mix of crypto and TradFi Mark W. Yusko (07:41.678) Well, I appreciate that. I say, you can still listen. Every Saturday morning, I tweet out digital currents now. So it's not Mike and I anymore, but it's my partner, Xavier. And X is a little older tha because it's not just digital asset focus because we do talk about boring stuff like chips, although to me chips are beautiful right now. They're one of the most important things on the planet. But th Jackson Mikalic (08:31.768) I was grinning, Mark, because Tim was just standing there in front of Trump Tower for like a minute or two, hoping someone would notice. But Mark, I actually was a listener to that show as well. Brian Cubellis (08:38.535) You Tim (08:42.851) Great job, Jackson. Great job. Mark W. Yusko (08:43.726) I'm sure Tim is just there to pick up his stack from the Dominarious Bank or Dominus Bank or whatever it is that Eric started down in the basement of Trump Tower. Tim (08:56.131) Exactly. Jackson Mikalic (08:58.672) Well, yeah, Mark, I was a listener to that show as well. So I did enjoy it and then I will have to check out digital currents. So I would love to talk about, let's talk about the bond market real quic Mark W. Yusko (09:09.954) Ha! Jackson Mikalic (09:13.198) what maybe one of the craziest things happening right now is the divergence between the JGB market, the Japanese government bonds and the yield spiking there. And then of course, meta planets price ac and what's going on there. Mark W. Yusko (09:44.814) It's a classic case of supply and demand and some unwinding of some very large leverage in the global system. most people don't think about government bonds like ever. Most people just don't until the but the average young person doesn't think about bonds ever. So the thing about it that's interesting, like if you ask someone in college, you know, what do want to be? I want to be an equity manager. The currency market is orders of magnitude bigger than that. you know, the equity market, which is what everybody says they want to be, you know, want to be a hedge fund manager or portfolio manager, central bank bonds or government bonds. It's a little trickier over there because they kind of a confederation without a union but or a union without a confederation but anyway. So the U.S. is importa We remember a past that never was. Like you ask any Notre Dame football fan, you know, how often you win a we win every year. We haven't won since 1988, but people remember the 40s when we did win eve Mark W. Yusko (12:08.93) They don't know history. mean, the Royal Reserve currency used to be the little Portuguese currency for about 75 years in the 1500s. And then it passed to the Spanish when they took over the Portugues They invented the problem we have and the reason that Bitcoin is so awesome. They invented central banking. 1607, the first central bank. Well, what's a central bank? Well, a bank was invented by lite not such nice task, but while they're out looting and pillaging, they can be robbed. So they would leave the gold in the bank and they would have notes, paper notes, that allowed them to have a claim So, but the thing about fractional reserve banking that's actually a good thing, even though Maxis hate it, is there actually is some there there at the bottom of the, you know, re-hypothicated stack. and they passed it out to mercenaries and they built a mercenary force that conquered the most powerful fighting force in the world at that time. So the Netherlands became the global power, they had t Mark W. Yusko (14:34.924) They set up the Bank of England and they financed steam ships and then they became the most powerful Navy. And then we invented nuclear ships and we became the most powerful Navy. So that's where we a And we've only seen that one other time in modern history, and that was right during the gold financial crisis. People owned stuff and they would try to sell it and there were literally no bids. Now t you would be in trouble. You'd basically be bankrupt, right? You have this asset, you want to sell it, nobody wants to buy it, you're done. Well, with the central bank and the US and Japan and Europe, their interest rates collapsed to zero. They had no economic growth. They had deflation, the opposite of inflation. Yet their money supply was, I mean, the Japanese make American money printers look l The Japanese money printers, particularly the last central banker before the newest central banker. So, Kuroda-san printed so much yen that the yen went from 80 yen to a dollar in 2011 to 160. Literal Mark W. Yusko (16:59.95) Well, because the central bank bought up everything. They bought up all the government bonds. They bought up all the ETFs. They own like 54 % of the ETFs and 70 some odd percent of the government bond I can borrow at zero and I can buy assets that yield positive and I can borrow a lot. So can lever up 10, 20, 30, 50, 100 times if it's in the bond market. You could do it 100 to one leverage, 1 % col I am an academic and I think we need to let the yield curve determine the normal price. So no more yield curve control, no more fixing of rates, no more stepping in to buy all the bonds. Boom. So now you have to unwind all this leverage. And so now people are selling not only Japanese government bonds, but US Treasury bonds. So remember the rumor when Trump started the tariff nonsense but that was the last two times. Tariffs are bad. They're dumb. They've always been dumb. They're never a good idea. There are attacks on your local citizens. Trump keeps saying, well, you know, for a Mark W. Yusko (19:10.488) But what happens with tariffs is you've got this decrease of global activity. Well, if you have a decrease of global activity and global growth, what does that do for your economy? Well, it makes it w and interest rates went down. So it was like, okay, so you want to literally intentionally crash the economy to lower interest rates. Okay, dumb idea, but fine, we got to refinance the debt. Here's th Okay, interest rates, you want to go down. Great. But what's happened? Boom, straight up. Why? One, unwinding of Japanese carry trade. So they're having to pay back their yen based loans, sell bonds. 16 when Trump got elected the first time. Remember he wanted to do tariffs. And we did tariffs because he was going to save American jobs and reduce the US trade deficit, right? What happened to both? gone, it's never coming back. You could retrain her and get her another job, but her job's never coming back. So we're supposedly going to lower the trade deficit. It actually doubled. I'm no, it went Mark W. Yusko (21:40.654) We like cheap stuff because we are a service-based economy. We're not a manufacturing-based economy. So if you print money to buy stuff, no matter how much more of a tax you put on that stuff, you're not a strong currency. Because if you're a mercantilist, if you sell stuff, you want a weak currency, not a strong currency. So they're like, come on. You know the angler fish? You know the thing at t on, do you remember the trade? There was, when oil was collapsing, it was going from a hundred bucks down to 26, and there was this trader, this big hedge fund that was losing his ass, and he kept thi What do mean? What do mean the happiest day of your life? says, you know, the anglerfish says, that's me. I'm just sitting here with my little thing and there's this guy and he's just coming closer an Our beloved Bitcoin becomes more valuable. So that's a long ass answer to your simple question. Jackson Mikalic (23:47.694) I love it. History, we got some history lessons, we got some reasons why you shouldn't be an academic and maybe you should be a student of a market. Mark W. Yusko (23:54.164) amen to that. Amen to that, real world, better. Michael Tanguma (23:58.032) One, like before we transition, I think something that I didn't necessarily know and I felt a little naive because I was previously Merck at WeWork pre the SoftBank investment. So my story in Bitcoin Mark W. Yusko (24:30.42) for sure. For sure. look, Masa mad genius. One of the things that he does super well, it's actually, he would bristle at this, but it's kind of more of a Chinese trait. The Chinese plan in decades, li I got to know him a hundred years ago, I'm old, so a hundred years ago when they had a very small venture fund and before they began the big vision fund, but they had this very small venture fund and an amazing capacity to do was kind of see the future, not in the sense of exactly what was going to happen, but the trends. And that's a skill that not that many people have. And I think a lot of it c and you were supposed to every once in while, you know, put your feet up on the desk and just think, not be doing stuff that distracts you, but think. so my very first pitch when I started Morgan Cree And we're like, you know, we'd love to know the story of how you made your fortune. He says, well, you see that map on the wall? Right, yeah, it's like this tattered kind of yellowing map. It had thes Mark W. Yusko (26:55.214) million dollars doing that. That's OK. It's pretty good. So if you can intuit just the direction, you don't have to be exactly right, but you should get ahead of the direction. So what Masa is very go Solomo social local mobile in that period. And then, you know, there's the famous Alibaba trade and we did that with them. And so we did a bunch of things, Tencent and other things. fast forward to to Now, my only criticism, and it's not of him, because it's probably not him personally, but it's true of pretty much every organization I've ever seen, size is the enemy of alpha. Every financial organ a dookie and I don't really like the dookies but he's a dookie and he's a smart guy and he had a venture fund out in California and he gave me this and I've told the story I don't know 100 200 times h It lasts four hours and it is glorious. When you get a little wealthier, and the reason is because you don't have any money, right? So you have to budget, you have to plan. When you get a little wealt Mark W. Yusko (29:23.822) The idea of selling fractional pieces of undersea cables is a good idea, but to then extrapolate that to the extreme and say, no, that's square inch real estate, so we should get this big multiple. No And so you looked at the other companies that were similar, where they took buildings and fractionalized them and sold them, and the multiples were off. So my argument is that when you have too much c That's my philosophy on that. But now you go to today with 21 cap. So he has some Bitcoin, right? He owns some Bitcoin and Tether owns a bunch of Bitcoin. And there's this relationship between Cantor There's a reason that the banks they utilize are the same banks that got in trouble infinite time. Go just look at the banks and look at their history. It's not good. There's a reason that FTX was in That strategy, right, Bitcoin treasury strategy, that's a good strategy. Now, how good is it? Like we know it worked for micro strategy, now strategy B, which will eventually be strategy bank, because Mark W. Yusko (31:47.566) I always love it. they're we're going to buy way more Bitcoin than strategy. Why are you comparing yourself to them? I mean, because it's, the model is pretty simple, right? Issue stock, dilute yourse But look, Simon has executed Simon, team have executed flawlessly. mean, Michael, sailor, he's the new Michael, right? Michael, you think Jordan, but now it's sailor. It's like you want to be known by I think there's a reason Tether and Cantor are involved. There's a reason Massa is involved and there's reason Trump is always trotting Massa in to announce all this big money. Remember when he said t Cause like, know, Jack Mollers is a good, pick for the CEO. Although what is it about the name Jack that they think they can be CEO of two companies? Like I'm an owner of Strike and I'm kind of confli Brian Cubellis (33:41.488) Mark, one thing. Yeah, I just wanted to go back to pull out something you said in there that, you know, how much room is there for all of this? This is something we've talked about on the show the pas arguably very different than like a bunch of companies in the US doing this and just copying Sailor and maybe just speak to some of the sort of more nuanced differences with MetaBlend. Mark W. Yusko (34:19.448) So, great question, Brian. So, look, MetaPlanet had a huge advantage in a number of different ways, and the jurisdictional one and the regional one is a really important one. So, they were first in As Michael Tanguma (34:22.198) Okay. Mark W. Yusko (34:49.966) Well, why Japan? Well, Japan had a very interesting arbitrage in that if you held Bitcoin individually, 52 % tax, if you own it in the ETF wrapper, which were illegal or in the meta planet wrapper, 20 It's part of the reason why someone like Masa, who's a little bit of a maverick, can do so well because the rest of the country, the rest of the society, so rules fine. my son is super, he's 14, so I And, there's a kid who literally he would eat sushi every day of his life if he could. So, for spring break, we go to Japan, not where most people would pick to go to spring break, but we went. And my They don't cross the street when the light is red. They never litter. It's unbelievably clean. It's orderly. It's beautiful. This is amazing. And so culturally, Mavericks have an advantage because the and look at their engineering and look at their innovation and look at Sony and I mean, just look at history. Japan is pretty good at stuff. So Simon who is, people, like, he's just that guy behind th Mark W. Yusko (37:09.644) very very Harvard ed smart and super smart like crazy smart. Harvard educated Goldman equity derivatives trader who then decided to get into hotel management and that didn't go the way he wanted. So h I mean, he's like, stuff that the five of us could never do. Like you need to get a document that's 117 pages. It has to be done by nine o'clock in the morning, not a minute later, this guy gets this And so they befriended and there's always luck, right? In every great story, there's luck. One of the lucky things, the regulator at the stock exchange that was assigned to them was a Bitcoin. Like yo I have lots of experience as an RIA with the SEC coming in and when Genzer was in charge, they were not Bitcoiners and they were not friendly and they were not open to new ideas. So anything we did, w He won't say, guess, like the famous joke about taxes. The IRS says, you owe me money. I'm like, okay, how much do I owe you? Guess. I don't know, 10,000. Wrong, jail. If you know how much I owe you, Mark W. Yusko (39:28.684) MetaPlanet also was early in the Me Too, and so they had a head start. And we all know people like this. There are certain people, when you meet them, you're drawn to them, right? They have a charisma influencers were drawn to him and so he got lots of great press and then he hired some really smart marketing people to foment that and so if you think about just the amount of coverage, this is a lit So that's again, a lot of things about it, but it started with Brian, your point on, regularly, there was an arbitrage. It's better to own Bitcoin in this wrapper than to own it directly. As crazy as But that's the second difference. They had all the advantages of Japan and taxation, but they didn't have Simon. leadership matters. Like, microstrategy without Sailor? I don't know if you've ever wat Brian Cubellis (41:18.949) Yep. Yep. Mark W. Yusko (41:22.774) his brain works differently, right? I mean, everything he said was so logical now, but 13 years ago, people said, no, he wrote a book. He wrote a book 15 years ago predicting Feng. he's like, I mean, There's, so long went away again, saying, Julian Robertson, very famous hedge fund manager, was a mentor for me for many, many years, God rest his soul, mean, changed my life in so many ways. When peo Why was he so much better at identifying talent, training talent, backing talent? It's a gift. In fact, if people care, there's a book called Hedge Hunters, which talks about it, and I'm in there actu Great advice, hard to follow. So the luck piece matters. But Thomas Jefferson said it best. I'm rather fond of luck. It seems the harder I work, the more of it I have. so, and you know, we've all hear Not everybody that goes to Goldman is charismatic. We all met, you know, assholes. But that's true of all kinds of places. having great leaders with charisma who can articulate a vision and articulate Mark W. Yusko (43:43.124) or is real and or draws people to those people. And there's tens of examples in history. Michael Tanguma (43:48.653) You're dripping with the aura. So don't worry. We feel the aura. The one thing that I want to share to the know Jackson, Jackson has his hands full to navigate us today. But one thing before we jump t Brian Cubellis (43:52.995) You Michael Tanguma (44:10.989) It reminds me of a margin call when whatever his name is talks about he goes, you know, order to succeed in this business, you either got to be first, you got to be smart, or you got to cheat. And he' Mark W. Yusko (44:23.887) my God, so good. Mark W. Yusko (44:37.868) Michael, that is such a brilliant synopsis of everything we just talking about. And the rebounding is perfect. Dennis Rodman, right? The Bulls, when Michael was the only player on the Bulls, they suck when Horace and ultimately Rodman came, they won championships because you needed the rebounder. And Rodman, you look at Rodman, you're like, wow, he's not basketball player. He looks like a thug. He Tim (45:23.696) Ha Mark W. Yusko (45:35.598) I know the moment the guy releases where it's going to bounce. That was not the answer anyone was expecting. Right? No one was expecting that he was watching the spin of the ball coming off the guy's If you watch Gretzky play or any great hockey player, they're always in that spot. How did that happen? It's because in chess, it's called, I can't remember the German word for it, but it's the move b a great example because people don't think of rebounding as the most important skill. They like shooting. They like dribbling. But it's getting possession. I watched this. You someone said, what am I Face off, get off. And like, what do you mean? Like you have a guy who does the face off and then he runs off the field. That's all he does. Because if you can win possession, you control. And so, and Michael Tanguma (47:17.581) It's funny you talk about possession because there's a funny anecdote. We had that dinner, we were talking about what we do and you're interested in the multi-institution. And I look back when we inco Mark W. Yusko (47:45.516) No, and again, and so you and I had the similar bonding experience that I had with Simon. I I haven't known Simon my whole life. I've known him for a little more than a year. We met literally because Michael Tanguma (48:14.593) It was the Epstein stuff that really got me, but that's a different, that's a different. Brian Cubellis (48:16.432) You Mark W. Yusko (48:17.248) No, but that's, but it's, and I wouldn't bring that up with most people, right? But when you feel comfortable with somebody, then you can have that conversation because a lot of times people are afrai They do what they think everyone else thinks they should do. there's actually, Barton Biggs was a famous strategist in Morgan Stanley, again, God rest his soul. He wrote the best two pages on this eve There's a line and they attribute it to Buffett, but I don't think Buffett really said it, but that an investment committee should be an odd number and three is too many. Means, yeah, one. Because ind Why don't you give me what you really like? I don't want to say that because other people might not like Indian food or someone might not like my shawarma. No, give me what you like. But groups, they Jackson Mikalic (50:06.692) I did see that. Mark W. Yusko (50:08.972) Here's our recommended asset allocation for rich people, not for the average person, but for rich people. Less than 1 % commodities, less than 2 % gold and precious metals. Are you joking? It's like 6 Jackson Mikalic (50:13.2) you Michael Tanguma (50:32.193) Yeah, and this basically ties down to something that most people don't talk about. We haven't shared it, but we shared a lot on this pod is this is effectively why most of the Bitcoin is held by indiv So it's like a whole flipping of the traditional archetype of like, know, a TradFi Wall Street smart money is gonna drive this industry. It's actually gonna be the opposite. And nobody really talks ab Mark W. Yusko (51:09.612) No, again, it's such a fantastic insight. And again. The nice thing about the age in which we live, right, the internet age, in the olden days when I was growing up, that information existed, but it wasn't in a nice form like that. And in fact, if it wa either have to be first, you have to cheat, which remember Wall Street, right? How did Bud Fox get his information? He cheated, right? He would go in people's office and look, or he would follow the g It was like single digits back then. And his thesis was they're gonna sell a million iPods this year. Right? You know, the iPod, the little music thing. And the street was like at a couple hundred K. You ask a minimum wage person their opinion, they give you everything. They're like pulling out the books, they're giving you all the info. Like, my God. And then they passed regulation FD, as my frie Mark W. Yusko (53:06.23) And so today you're not even allowed to ask a CFO a question unless everyone else can ask the question. It's like, no, that's stupid. Anyway, but the point about that is that information access used t a curve that makes a smile and size, no size like this and success like this. Every industry, whether it's oil companies, restaurants, asset management firms, there are great small firms and a few gre But then you start to grow and you got offices and you have people and the problem is 85 % literally fall off the bottom of the smile. They just vanish, they disappear. A small number get to become Ci travel around the world and talk to the smartest people in the world. That was my job. It was awesome. mean, Nobel laureates and every hedge fund manager, every real estate manager, every everyone you He's just better at everything. I mean, I asked him a question one day, I was in his office, and I asked him question, you know, you have this reputation for having amazing talent. And part of the rea Mark W. Yusko (55:33.174) So, but more importantly, says, you don't get a performance with B players. So you have to hire A players. In fact, you have to hire A plus players. And then he went through and he wrote out on the bo The only other person I've ever seen close to mental acuity of that was Bill Clinton, who I don't really like as a person, but as a brain. This is amazing. He was the headliner for UBS. It was actuall We were best friends. It was unbelievable, the power. I was like texting my wife, I'm gonna leave my job and go work for the Clinton Foundation, which I'm glad I didn't, because it's bad. But he was i Michael Tanguma (56:42.325) I heard there's a body count, Mark. I heard there's a body count around there. That's a... Mark, real quick, before transitioning, because you were on the Ken Griffin note, there's something notable t Mark W. Yusko (56:45.346) There is a body count, and it's bad. But that's Hillary, it's not Bill, it's Hillary. It's all Hillary. It's all Hillary. Brian Cubellis (56:46.585) You Michael Tanguma (57:10.187) which I think is like summarizes kind of what you're describing when it comes to competition. And if you to go to cultural parallels, if anybody's watched the movie Rounders and there's a there's this Mark W. Yusko (57:19.298) Yes. Michael Tanguma (57:37.685) and it forces them to either get better or die. And that's how we move. And that's effectively what's embodied like him being the best in all of those things. Randomly, you can't find that book and it Mark W. Yusko (57:38.542) 100%. Mark W. Yusko (57:44.759) No, it's- It's so important and such, and it is genius. And I ask people all the time, right? Like I just think, so my wife and I endowed a scholarship at Notre Dame where we went that copies, because, you know And the whole idea is to identify the very best people, because if you bring the very best people to your school, then you'll have a better school because the best teachers want to teach the best kids is going to be the type of iconoclastic rule breaker, not rule follower. And long story short, I love, I still remember it. Like it was yesterday, the very first one application I ever read, the, the Second one is Beowulfian. my gosh, like the lead character, I'm not afraid to go outside my comfort zone because no growth occurs out inside your comfort zone. If you stay comfortable, you die. So awe Mark W. Yusko (59:41.966) which is good, you you gotta have something in there. But then the last one was happy. And I love that one because happy people, optimistic people are just better. And it's not that pessimism isn't wa Michael Tanguma (01:00:12.013) I hate to lose. I hate to lose. Mark W. Yusko (01:00:12.174) do. Yeah, and there's a difference. And there's not a right or wrong, but those are different characteristics. you know, making mistakes is part of life. And it's called the next trade, right? It's th Brian Cubellis (01:00:29.671) the last. Michael Tanguma (01:00:29.715) It's the last trade. Michael Tanguma (01:00:34.827) Mediflana was your next trade. is your last trade when you cycle out of those gains into the last trade. Mark W. Yusko (01:00:38.638) No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, Brian Cubellis (01:00:39.217) Hahaha Mark W. Yusko (01:01:08.162) Dean Smith, famous coach from here, has the great line that, you know, when you make a mistake, you gotta Ralph. You gotta recognize it, admit it, learn from it, forget it. Okay? And that's the most i Help me understand what I have in common with like one of the greatest coaches of all times, because I'm not seeing it. He said, well, look, we both identify talent. We recruit that talent. We build players from the average players. And it's true for investing the same. What separates the average from the great is the average player always thinks about the last play or the last investment. And so goes back, plays good defense, steals the ball, makes a layup. Michael Jordan said it, says, I missed 19,964 shots or whatever. I don't even remember taking them. I'm like, my God, that's so perfect. Paul Tudor Jones in his dorm room at UVA and behind him is the little sign that says losers, average losers. And the reason humans do that is we want to prove we're right. So we make a decision, we bu Mark W. Yusko (01:03:31.342) But again, I interviewed all these guys that worked for him and I have these notebooks full of these notes and I probably write a book about it. But I said, what makes Julian great? And they said, oh, It's the hardest thing in this business to do. Most people are taught, I need to rebalance. need to sell my winners and buy my losers. Peter Lynch said, you wanna pull your flowers and water your weed Michael Tanguma (01:04:14.829) You know what they call that run from? Texas hedging. Have you ever heard the Texas hedge? Yeah. Mark, on that note, because we gotta get our buddy Tim, I don't wanna put my neck out there because I h Mark W. Yusko (01:04:18.284) Yeah, absolutely. Michael Tanguma (01:04:41.613) You know, our buddy Tim here has a call that Bitcoin will hit a million dollars. We won't say this year. Let's just call it within the next 24 months. And after thinking deeply about how Tether's liqu proliferate in the US, but curious what your thoughts are on all. Mark W. Yusko (01:05:13.464) Look, mean, stable coins are the future of payment rails. May I talk about this all the time? The first time I bought an NFT sitting on my couch in my pajamas on a Sunday using Metamask was glorious. So the construct of payment rails being unleashed from Swift, ACH, Fedwire, yes. So stablecoins as a bridge to the ultimate answer, talk about the last trade, we're gonna have C-Fi. So we have TradFi, Stablecoin is really just a better fiat and fiat sucks for many different reasons. But it's way better than central bank digital currency, which could be programmed and they could tell you how and whe Do I think that has impact for Bitcoin? Yes and no. See, to me Bitcoin is digital gold. It's the new base layer of money. Gold has been the base layer of money for 5,000 years. Gold will be for the ne and the Visa MasterCard Networks. I don't actually use physical money anymore. I just use my credit card and I settle up once a month. And so those rails are supported by the banking industry and it's Mark W. Yusko (01:07:35.97) You know, if I want to send money to my mythical mother-in-law in El Salvador, my mother-in-law is in Tulsa, but if she was in El Salvador and I sent her money, it would cost 30 cents on the dollar to of stable coins and I think all transactions will run on digital rails. To me the difference is I still live in a fiat world. I can't pay my taxes in Bitcoin. I mean can buy Steak and Shake I guess bu my fiat, I don't want it in cash because that gets devalued. I'd rather it be in a stable form and that is a good thing. But ultimately, and Murray Stahl says this better than I do, he runs Horizon Ki Which is crazy, but I think Bitcoin displacing gold and having the monetary value and you know, I say it's You know half of the monetary value which today is 25 so that's 12 and a half something like I'll tell you exactly how many months it is. May, June, July, August, September. 52 months will hit a million because every halving we add a zero. So this having we added a zero to 100K next having we Mark W. Yusko (01:10:04.238) have the crash, then we'll have to come back, then we'll have the halving, and then we'll have the ramp into 2029. So 2029 September, we'll hit a million to put a number on it. And I know as little as Michael Tanguma (01:10:23.469) Thank Mark W. Yusko (01:10:31.53) I love stable coins. love everything they represent. think they're a stepping stone to ultimately. So Murray's point is that, okay, yeah, fine. You're talking about gold as the base layer of money, bu bottom pyramid's gonna look like this, and it's all gonna be orange, and all the green's gonna go away. So he's like, it's 100 trillion, which is, you know, meaningfully higher than a million dollars. Brian Cubellis (01:11:12.775) Well, yeah, it's not just the fiat money too, right? It's all the monetary premium that's baked into the real estate market and other assets as well. And so, you we often pull up the sort of global as Mark W. Yusko (01:11:30.946) Yeah, yeah, I love this. No, you got to send me this because I have one that it's I'm still on 750 billion. So a trillion is better. Jackson Mikalic (01:11:44.889) Yeah, one thing, Mark wanted to tie it back to some of the things you said before. So I like the map you had mentioned. I forget whose office it was, but you mentioned the map of the United States. Ri Mark W. Yusko (01:11:55.082) yeah, just the first client I pitched, yeah. Jackson Mikalic (01:12:07.248) River, Bitcoin-only company, appeared in the space, put out a great chart earlier this week, actually a full research report, and I really do think it ties into a lot of the themes that we've been tal battle for power, right? Global dominance, United States versus China and then the BRICS nations. And certainly over the past decade, but even more so in the past couple of years with the sanctions of Michael Tanguma (01:12:38.486) Okay. Jackson Mikalic (01:12:47.862) Ultimately, Bitcoin is kind of leapfrogging gold, right? You just kind of described that. said Bitcoin may reach gold parity in the next called five years or so or four years. And I'm just curious you Michael Tanguma (01:12:51.565) . Jackson Mikalic (01:13:17.746) shifted right with the administration and call it six months or so, where now there's at least a recognition that Bitcoin and stable coins together could prolong US dollar hegemony and push the US dol Mark W. Yusko (01:13:38.862) Yeah, again, again, really, really good sequence of links there. Jackson, I like it in the sense that, you know, one thing about the Donald is he's an incredible opportunist. And he does surround hims On occasion, he gets some really smart people around him. And so it's amazing. We are one year away. I mean, about to do Bitcoin 2025 in Vegas next week. We're only one year away from Nashville, where He got up on stage and my favorite part was, you know, he does the free Ross and everybody's happy, but my favorite part was when he said, and on day one, I will fire Gary Gensler. And the crowd went was like a drug that was that was awesome I'm gonna say that again and he said it again and the crowd went even more batshit crazy and so he didn't believe any of this stuff but David Bailey and other Donald's walking around with a Bitcoin account that he's going to pay stuff. He tried doing it at the PubKey one time and it didn't work. But whatever. but he, his level of education did rise, which t Mark W. Yusko (01:15:46.324) There's been a lot of people who they were willing to be courageous and look at the end of the day, all great investments, all great fortunes come from courage. And it's my pin tweet on Twitter, right That's not just drivel. mean that that's truth. Everyone who's ever created anything really big was labeled as a heretic because if you do what everyone else does it's already in the price and you don first got exposed to this in 2013, I did what every red blood American would do, I oh, who's Satoshi Nakamoto? Into Google. And it pops up, intelligence, central. The word Satoshi translates to intell to suck in all the bad money and then they're gonna steal it out the back door. And I was pretty freaked out about this for a while. And Scott Stornetta, who is in the white paper, right? If you go to Walk me through this. What if this is what? I've actually never thought about that. No. You didn't even think about it. It's like, no, the way you're, he says everything you say is plausible. mean, it Mark W. Yusko (01:18:11.737) Cybersecurity at NTT, Docomo in Japan back to masa and maybe the friends Literally his name is notoshi Sakamoto. I mean I could not make that up So he said yeah that that all could could be true But t Ultimately, I think the technology is here to stay. I think it is the future of money. I think it is digital gold, even though people don't like that. They want to be a peer to peer electronic, but it the linkages necessary for that to become ubiquitous. Well, you need to make the UIUX better. Right? You can't have people losing their password and losing control. mean, that's just, that's a tough s And he was, not your keys, not your coins. Fine, tell my daddy he doesn't own Bitcoin. And the people said, why do you hold his keys? I'm like, I'm not holding his keys, no way. Because if I lose them Jackson Mikalic (01:19:59.439) No, it's all good. How are we on time, by the way? Mark W. Yusko (01:20:02.706) I have to run in four minutes. This was super fun. I could talk to you guys all afternoon after, but it'd probably be. Michael Tanguma (01:20:06.167) Okay, we're gonna, we'll wrap it. We could, this is why you gotta keep your father off of Coinbase and we will take care of him because I'm pulling up for anybody listening to the Wall Street Journal, It wasn't just Philippines, it's people in the US. Like if you're making, even if it's 150 to 250K at Coinbase and you can download a CSV with customer data and send, sell it on the dark web for milli Mark W. Yusko (01:20:46.968) Well, no, let's take this. But on that point, let's take it to its logical kind of conclusion, which is we all had money in the early days, our ancestors, and they'd keep it in their house and people Zero dollars. much money has been stolen from Bank of America's main office in New York? Zero dollars. How about Bank of America El Paso, Texas? More than zero dollars. How about people's wall saves? to give them information. And you know, someone asked me this about the severed fingers this morning. They said, don't you worry about this? I'm like, I don't only because one, I don't talk about, you That's getting clicks right now. Every single day, every single day, rich people get victimized by poor people. I mean, and I don't mean that in a derogatory, it's just, that's how it works. That's wh hell's the name of that song where the guy puts the gun to his head and said why did you do that you know ain't no rest for the wicked right so this this is a big deal but you know Eddie Lampert you k Mark W. Yusko (01:23:11.246) But yes, severed fingers are bad, wrench of text are bad, but it's not just crypto people that are being targeted. Now, the ones that make themselves known to be super rich, I've never really got that He was given a speech at an academic conference in South Africa, and he didn't even have a Rolex. He just had a nice watch. And he got whacked, and he wasn't even super rich. I he was a professor. So Michael Tanguma (01:23:53.855) As we, yeah, for sure. We'll set up, I have a really great answer to share with you that you'll be like, shit, but that's a different pod, different call. Well, for re-wrap, because I feel like the th Mark W. Yusko (01:24:18.466) Yeah. So look, think in the area we've been talking about, digital and digital assets and Bitcoin, I really do think there's huge opportunity in service-based businesses that provide custody and trans You guys probably know something about that. I think that that's a huge growth business. In terms of what no one I think is paying attention to is kind of what's going on under the hood. You our world process it, distribute it, refine it, then it becomes valuable. Same thing with data. You gotta organize it and store it. That's what blockchains do. You gotta process it. That's what chips and comput AI on this phone supposedly according to Apple, it's done nothing for me. Zero, nothing. mean, totally useless. So there are good uses of AI, there are bad uses of AI. And the thing about AI, it's a 7 Open AI at 160 billion, make my head hurt. So we're down one level. We like to arm the combatants. So we focus on the chips. We own a little piece of grok that sells the chips that make inference poss Mark W. Yusko (01:26:44.462) Kenny's from that school down the road, Duke. So he had a lab in college, he's a material science guy, and we've all experienced that our phone gets hot, and you know, can't see it, but my computer ac You know why it gets hot is to get memory here and processor here and the electrons have to go back and forth and the faster they go the more friction, the more heat. So what if we use photons instead I mean, the exponential-ness of processing power and the expensive-ness of... So that's one that I'm, know, photonic switching and photonic... Like the other one that just kills me is math, right? Two three dimensional matrix multiplication, which I kind of only remember. He's like, you know, I could do that. I'm like, what do mean? I could shine the laser and I could spread it and I could paint th So the other one that's really cool is something called in-memory processing, which is again, processor memory, it's gotta go back and forth. So one way is let's use photons. The other is this profess Mark W. Yusko (01:29:04.322) that will allow you to full-size LLMs locally with no heat. Again, total game changer. So that's the layer that I think the biggest innovation is gonna happen right now because of Moore's Law and All Center. Michael Tanguma (01:29:22.933) Awesome. Love it. Brian Cubellis (01:29:24.647) fascinating. Jackson Mikalic (01:29:26.532) Well, we'll get to the upscene stuff on the next episode. Brian Cubellis (01:29:28.935) Yeah, we'll have to have you back. Mark W. Yusko (01:29:29.516) Ha ha ha. Awesome. Well, if I get invited back, even though I did talk too much, but happy to do it. Really, you know, enjoy partnering with you guys and what we're starting to build and what you guys Michael Tanguma (01:29:49.517) Yeah, we'll set up some time to chat. We don't want to talk you through the Coinbase stuff and the logical progression. It's going to be a little bit different, but I'll shine that light privately. Ap Mark W. Yusko (01:29:58.254) Alright, good, right? Mark W. Yusko (01:30:04.184) Thanks guys, be well. Jackson Mikalic (01:30:04.305) Thank you, Mark. Brian Cubellis (01:30:04.914) Thanks Mark. Take care. Michael Tanguma (01:30:05.389) Thanks guys.