The Last Trade E073: The Orange Wave with Larry Lepard & David Foley

Jackson Mikalic (00:00.974) All right, everyone. Well, welcome back to The Last Trade. This week we have Michael Tanguma and Jesse Meyers, my co-hosts. Just a quick admin update. So Jesse is going to be stepping back from the weekly cadence and we'll be doing more of a monthly cadence on the show so he can focus more on producing research and content, which I'll speak for the team we're really excited about because as someone who's been following the Bitcoin space a long time, Jesse is one of the people who has really put out the top tier. content, research, educational material. So excited for Jesse to be ramping that up. And this week we have Larry Lepard and Dave Foley joining us. Gentlemen, how are you doing? Thanks for making the time. Lawrence Lepard (00:39.65) Thanks, Jax. I'm doing great. How about you guys? David Foley (00:42.314) Yeah, good to be with you all. Michael (00:44.935) It's an week. Couldn't think of two better guys to have on the pod to talk about what is going on right now. Jackson Mikalic (00:46.872) it to you. Jackson Mikalic (00:51.824) Yeah, it's been it's been really exciting. And I actually had a dream last night that Bitcoin was ripping 300,000, 400,000, 500,000. And when I woke up, I wasn't sure if it had actually happened or not, because the price action, while it hasn't been that bullish just yet, it has been really exciting to see, you know, breaking through the previous all time high from earlier this year. And I think we're still a little bit short of the CPI adjusted all time high. We might have another couple of thousand to go before we break through that. But anyways, Larry, Dave, thanks for joining us. Maybe we could just start with any initial thoughts on election results, specifically as it relates to financial markets or the economy, just what are the implications of Trump winning this week and how are you guys thinking about it as investors? Lawrence Lepard (01:38.968) Go ahead Dave. David Foley (01:40.214) I was going to say I was going let you go ahead so I could think. I think, yeah, I guess quick thoughts rumbling around my head. Larry and I were talking earlier yesterday and obviously this morning too. I thought that David Brooks had a good article in the New York Times today. Someone had forwarded to me and, you know, I think he's kind of calling attention to just basically, look, you know, clearly America has spoken. There's a lot of people that are left behind. just saw the St. Louis Fed. Lawrence Lepard (01:41.911) Yeah David Foley (02:08.758) Palm Valley Capital had a good piece in their letter, Q3 letter of showing that the top 1 % of Americans have an average net worth, according to the St. Louis Fed, of $35 trillion in total. And the bottom 50%, I think I'm getting my data right, the bottom 50 % have, yeah, sorry, $35 million. The average net worth is $35 million for the top 1%. And the bottom 50 % average net worth is only $57,000. And so clearly people are feeling pain from inflation. And as David Brooks points out, like it's time for people to realize this wasn't about Trump and Kamala. This was about there's a bunch of disenfranchised people in this country and they have a vote too and they have a voice and you got to respect that. so Larry and I have talked a lot about this. It's about broken money and it's a broken system. And that's why we all know this here in the Bitcoin space and gold and silver bugs know it too. And I think you just saw that. I think that that's the reaction. So I guess that's kind of Lawrence Lepard (03:09.294) That David Brooks for people who are curious that David Brooks article I retweeted that so that's on Lawrence Park Twitter feed and it's a I've got the free share guess so it's not behind a paywall so you can actually go read it it was quite thoughtful Jesse Myers (Croesus) (03:22.791) It's a hell of a headline here. says, voters to elites. Do you see me now? Lawrence Lepard (03:28.62) Right. And it was a great headline in my opinion. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's the story. mean, it's... And a lot of people in the political trenches are trying to say it's something else. But I think it's as simple as what Dave just said. You have a 40 % inflation. People are hurting badly in this country, all except for the people at the very top. And they're gonna throw the bums out. And the problem... I don't think the problem is going to be solved in two years or four years. guess is, mean, if you look at the last several elections, they've thrown the bums out. And I think they probably will again in two years and they will again in four years as well. So, the money's broken. That's the core issue. And I hope that the team that's been picked here addresses that issue because I think it's going to come to a head in the next couple of years. That's my timing on it. David Foley (04:24.256) But just come and bounce back on that too, is like, it feels like 2016, this was the exact same referendum that sent Trump into Washington, right? Hell, JD Vance wrote a book about it that created his famousness of Hillbilly Elegy. And so, you know, you could argue it's the same thing, but there's a lesson in that. Like, this is not an easy fix. It's not so simple to come in and snap your fingers. And I know that it sounds like John Paulson is one of the leading candidates to be treasurer secretary. And it sounds like he might be Lawrence Lepard (04:44.696) No. David Foley (04:54.23) one of the more highly probable ones because he and Musk have been spending a lot of time talking about the cuts that they're going to make. And they think they can cut one and a half to $2 trillion off of expenditures. That'll be interesting to watch and see what that looks like and how you do that when Medicare, Social Security, defense and interest are all upwards of one to $1.5 trillion of that. So I'm sure there's waste. mean, sure, it begins with Ukraine. Probably that's the best hope. mean, I think Trump can kind of hopefully quiet down some of the Mideast and Ukraine stuff. That will save some money. And then it's a matter of, do they peel back the Inflation Reduction Act stuff? But now your brain should be going to the Lin-Aldin point. Like, that's incredibly important stimulus that kind of kept this economy going. So what happens when you do that? Does that tip us into recession? Does that force things like the commercial real estate loan issues, the CMBS default rates continue to jack? They were up another 1 % on the delinquencies. I should say delinquencies, not default. They were up another 1 % last month. up from 4.5 % to 9.5 % essentially over the last nine months or so. So what happens? Do we cause a recession and you don't stem, in which case the deficits only get bigger? because now you've cut taxes, they'll probably do that. So I don't want to, I'm sure we'll talk about a lot of these things, but you know, that's where our heads are at now is we're trying to figure out where the puck's going on the fiscal policy front and what that means. But I think, I think all of us, I'm guessing. Lawrence Lepard (06:31.662) I think it's a very important point that people who think that they're going to be able to just easily take two trillion dollars out of the, bucket are just, dreaming. mean, 80 % of it. You know, it's social security, Medicare, you know, defense and interest. Now they can maybe get the interest down if they lean on the Fed to keep cutting rates. I saw some tweets suggesting that, you know, I'm sure Trump will do that and the Fed will continue to tilt towards short term funding versus long term. I mean, we find it very interesting that it looks like in my opinion, they're slowly in the process of losing the long bond market. just aren't a lot of, you know, there aren't a lot of people who want to own 10, 20 and 30 year debt securities in a country that's this unbalanced fiscal And we've got the 10 year mid-fours. The last time that created a problem was when it went over five in the fall of 2023. And that's when they said they were going to stop raising rates in order to kind of stop that. But we know kind of five, five and a half is kind of a danger level for the, for the 10 year, you know, that higher 10 year, by the way, has affected the mortgage market, right? mean, David has exact numbers, but you know, the long mortgage has got cheaper there for a while, but that's going in the wrong direction. That's not going to be good for housing. Housing is a big part of the economy. So. You know, mean, look, Trump's going to have his hands full here, no doubt. you know, they, I mean, hopefully they will do the right things, but, you know, it's going to, no matter who would, no matter who's in this role, they've got, they've been dealt a very bad hand in terms of the mathematics of the government, you know, financial condition. Michael (08:07.603) I think one thing to add though, or just to maybe take a step back to election and it really feels like a renaissance is upon us, at least from the millennial side. think there's a lot of excitement from this notion of, we've had a lot of calls as maybe you guys have this week from folks overseas. And as much as some people were surprised here, it's like 2X in other countries like the UK, Ireland. because the level of just effective propaganda is so heavy. And the Renaissance goes back to whether it's Twitter or any kind of quote unquote alternative media where you cannot anymore hide the truth. If you are a truth seeker, you will find it in this notion of this new administration, kind of at least embody or is open to it. And that ties into Larry and Dave and the teams like. there is a lot of pain and there's a lot of problems, but the reality is the first step in fixing them is you have to be knowledgeable and awareness of them and what the problem is. And it feels like that's the silver lining, at least with some of this stuff, is that now these pipes are opening. We're talking about strategic reserves. We're talking about a lot of things that had never been in the Overton window. How do you solve for this? And we all know once you kind of like have a solution, you ultimately can change the power structure that had been historically not able to be changed because the market didn't know. Lawrence Lepard (09:28.174) I think that's absolutely right. mean, you're seeing a lot of very high level people who understand what the problem is or coming to understand it more. And you got brilliant investors like Paul Tudor Jones who realize that inflation is the way out. mean, as a practical matter, unless they want to take a depression, and when this bubble burst, if the stock market bubble were to burst, it'd look like 1929. The market's more overvalued than it was in 29. So as a practical matter, if they want to keep the economy running, they've got to inflate. They just absolutely have to, right? And they will, it's only in my opinion. Jackson Mikalic (09:58.416) absolutely have to. David Foley (09:59.903) One thing, you just triggered in my head is, I'm surprised at how shocked everyone is that Trump did this. Now, I don't know if it's because, look, let's look at our own biases. We're in the Bitcoin space. We're paying attention to sound money and inflation issues. And maybe we've traveled a lot. So going to things like Nashville conferences, you meet with a lot of people throughout the cross-sections of America and you saw kind of, hey, there's a wave here. But like step back for a second. Like I think it's some whenever that first debate was in May or June, like we all sit there on our couches like, my God, Biden literally is out of it. And Trump gave that famous funny punch line that night in what was a really well debate, a good debate by Trump where he held back. But he says, I don't know what he just said. And I'm not sure he knows what the hell he just said. You know, it was a brilliant line. It was the right one punch that he gave. Lawrence Lepard (10:53.452) Hahaha David Foley (10:58.794) And that was it. He was very disciplined. He was not so good in the Kamala debate. So that was the opening. And then it began then with, you know, assassination attempts. And then she's appointed without running a process. And then they wouldn't put her up for interviews. And the last points I'll make is, look to... What Larry and I and James had talked a lot about was the Call Her Daddy podcast. The views on that were like low hundreds, thousands. which means she was not resonating with the 24 through, call it 40 year old women. And then the Oprah ratings were like a few hundred thousand, a little more than Call Her Daddy, I believe. And so therefore she wasn't resonating with the soccer mom slash 60 year olds. And so they wouldn't put her even on Joe Rogan. Like she was a terrible candidate and it was a terrible campaign by the Dems. I often wonder like maybe they knew after that first debate they were screwed and they were just like, let's just run down ballot. and not put her out there. I don't know. So I'm an independent. I don't have a dog in the fight. I kind of feel like my party is Bitcoin. We're just independent people that want health and happiness for our families and freedom. So the last point I'll make is, some of this was about freedom too, of people feeling like they're lied to by their government and they're treated like fools and they don't like the direction of the country and they just want some of that back. And so I'll pause there, but... I think that's my only last thought on the election is it's about the money, but I also think there's some of that wanting the country to get back. Jackson Mikalic (12:27.395) Thank you. the money. Lawrence Lepard (12:32.844) I think that's right. That's back to Michael's point. know, the Overton window has shifted. know, Joe Rogan is better than the New York Times. know, the mainstream media, if they're not completely and totally dead, if they weren't dead before, they ought to be dead now. Even these famous forecasters who miscalled the election. mean, know, Polly Markets is a better predictor of the outcome than anything else. I mean, and this is the beauty of the Internet. open communication, distributed networks. And it's just gonna have such a huge impact on the world. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (13:08.307) Yeah. Yeah. David, I'd say I'm also I'm a Bitcoiner. That's my party and has been for a number of years now. But before that, I was a coastal elite liberal and and I have a kind of a tale of two worlds on social media. My Twitter is is Bitcoin and and I get that echo chamber. And then, you know, my Instagram and Facebook, that's that's that's all this Lawrence Lepard (13:20.14) Ha ha ha! Jesse Myers (Croesus) (13:37.461) time capsule from that old life. And it's been amazing to see that the total disbelief again from my old Stanford classmates who went canvassing for the last two weeks. And they're just as shocked as they were in 2016. Side note, I guess that's how long it takes to forget that you're making the same mistakes again. I remember looking at the the in detail maps after the 2016 election showing the red shift and the rust belt and just like how did the pollsters miss this stuff? And now this time around, it's the polymarket. There's that French guy who made $40 million betting on Trump in polymarket. learning a little bit more about that, he's been talking about it in the last few days of he was smart enough to realize that there were some polls that were asking the neighbor question of who will your neighbor vote for? And that that represented a few percent of a Delta from what all the other pollsters were getting by asking who are you gonna vote for? And so that right there is enough to, that's a few percent, that's the election, that explains the like 3 % bigger numbers that Trump got than all the pollsters thought he was gonna get. And it was just because there's some sort of. Lawrence Lepard (14:36.588) Ha ha ha. David Foley (14:46.356) Interesting. Lawrence Lepard (14:46.702) interesting. Jackson Mikalic (14:55.606) that David Foley (14:59.604) Yeah. Jackson Mikalic (15:00.002) you. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (15:01.533) stigma, there's some shame still of like people aren't willing to come out and say like, yeah, I agree with Trump and the liberals have gone too far. David Foley (15:09.398) Well, Larry and I were talking about that famous Dwight David Eisenhower quote, right? That I think you said, despise people in the gutter on the right and the left that hurl rocks at people in the middle. Meaning Eisenhower not only warned about the military industrial complex, he warned about partisan politics that divides us. And so I'll pick on both the Fox News and the MSNBC crowd. I think these people are so out of touch with America and these issues. Jackson Mikalic (15:09.955) Yeah. David Foley (15:36.96) that it makes me realize how early we are in Bitcoin and how early we are in this whole inflation trend that these people have no idea what this fiscal financial crisis will look like whenever that happens. I have no idea if that's six months or six years or somewhere in between, but it's not far off and I don't want to be a doomsday or whatever, but there's massive risk out there. I guess that's one last thing that opened up for me this last two days is Man, people's heads are in the sand. completely don't get it. They think this is about Trump and Kamala when it's completely about something else. Jackson Mikalic (16:04.879) we don't Jesse Myers (Croesus) (16:06.777) Yeah. So David, you disagree with Kamala's ads saying that we're going to stop corporate price gouging and that's the root cause of inflation? Lawrence Lepard (16:16.439) Yeah. David Foley (16:17.044) Well, I mean, it's gotta be the grocery stores that are to blame for sure with their razor thin margins. mean, the whole thing's just, it's just so stupid. to watch AOC last night on some tweet that she ranted on, I mean, just, it's nuts. It's, we're hiding, and it's both, it's both sides of the aisle. We're hijacked by these morons on the extremes. And with all due respect, I should be careful with using that word moron to anyone, but it's annoying, right? Because we're, we're forced to deal with all this crap, but Lawrence Lepard (16:21.006) Yeah. Jackson Mikalic (16:21.519) with their. David Foley (16:46.346) Look, I think we're all hedged for this. you know, but most people aren't and it's sad because I, you know, we all have these text groups, I'm sure with our college friends or high school friends and, you know, I think in my high school friend one, there's like only a couple of us that are Bitcoiners and I feel bad. You know, I think some of these guys think that we're kind of outlandish. They just don't understand yet. And yet I think they're starting to slowly learn. Jackson Mikalic (16:52.345) We are. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (17:08.521) Yeah, I go ahead Jackson. Jackson Mikalic (17:08.649) Yeah, I'm hopeful that now that we have this unity party and we have both Republicans, Democrats, independents kind of joining forces and it's tough to say if Trump actually understands Bitcoin. I would err on the side that he doesn't quite yet, but certainly RFK Jr. seems to have a very deep understanding of Bitcoin and then those that were advising his campaign. seem to be Bitcoiners as well. I'm curious then, if this is really the first Bitcoin administration, Trump's made some bold claims that he wants Bitcoin to be made in the USA. So what is, there's obviously a lot of doom and gloom out there as it relates to just the fiscal situation that we find ourselves in. And frankly, almost every sovereign nation finds themselves in these days. But what is, what role is Bitcoin going to play in your opinion, as it relates to the US strategic reserve or other ways that we should be thinking about it in terms of a more bright orange future rather than a doomsday type of scenario. Lawrence Lepard (18:07.918) Yeah, think that Trump, it's interesting, as you recall, a few years ago, Trump was not a Bitcoin supporter. Do you know what I mean? I don't think he really understood it, but he was negative on it, three years ago or so. I think Vivek got into his ear and he listened to that. And now he's got JD in his ear and he's got Senator Lumis in his ear. You know, I have to say, Trump is Trump, right? I mean, he founds his own shit coin. I mean, come on, man. I mean, he's in favor of Bitcoin, good. But he launches a shit coin, come on, Eric. Get with the program, man. So it just goes to show you that none of these guys are perfect, right? But I think that, you know, I mean, my gut is they're going to bring Jason Lowery back into the administration of the Pentagon. mean, you know, they're going to probably listen to what Saylor has to say. I mean, I think it's very bright and I think they will, you know, form a strategic Bitcoin reserve, hopefully between now and the end of the year. You know, as I understand it, the government does have a couple hundred thousand Bitcoins that they got in confiscation from Silk Road or somewhere else. And I hope that Biden doesn't try and sell those between now and the year end. David Foley (19:12.081) out. Lawrence Lepard (19:17.806) So there's the beginning of your strategic reserve. as you know, Lummis introduced a bill into Congress. so, you know, we'll see where that goes. But the point is, yeah, I think they're, you know, I think they're starting to get it. mean, Kennedy clearly gets it. J.D. Vance gets it. He he has six and a half of them. know, Vivek gets it. And I have to say, Trump is, you know, there's some good things about Trump, there's some bad things about Trump, you know, whatever. But, you know, if you look at him, you know, he's evolved and he's, you know, I'm very, I'm very positively encouraged by the people that he's got around. him and if he starts listening to those people you know I have a high opinion of Tulsi Gabbard I you know I have a high opinion of RFK and others. Michael (19:48.189) it. Michael (19:55.435) I'll throw out a, it's a very bullish case for Bitcoin in America, but the individuals you referenced as being in the ear on Bitcoin are on purpose, not the individuals that are actually leading on the Bitcoin stance. the folks there, this is obviously a take, it's not for certain, but it is the people that have been in Bitcoin for a very long time that are very influential. It's like the notion of a... Lawrence Lepard (20:13.037) Huh. Lawrence Lepard (20:17.795) Yeah. Michael (20:23.019) Who's the best monopoly? It's like Google, but they never say they're a monopoly, right? Because you never want to say you're a monopoly. And then when you aren't a monopoly, you say you are a monopoly, you go to Peter Thiel, who JD Vance is a, know, protege of Elon Musk. You go to that. And so if that's the angle and they understand because they're very second and third order thinkers and they understand the fiscal policy and how do you get out of a position, you start to construct. whole plan before it's even out in the open of how do you actually become. That's the bullish take of, there are actual thinkers. I know Jason Lowery, I don't know him personally, but I know there's the book and things he's done. But he's very like newer folks that have come into place versus a lot of the guys. You think about even Chamath, Jesse's read about him back in like calling this thing Smuck Insurance in case of all this stuff in 2011, 2012. There's some very deep influential people in politics that if anything's happening, they're the— folks behind the scenes working this plan long before it ever. And an example of this was... Lawrence Lepard (21:19.746) Very, very possibly, although I have to say, I don't think Elon completely grocks Bitcoin. I don't know, what do you guys think? Do think he does, Do you really? Michael (21:26.251) I think he deeply grocks Bitcoin. think it's a show. yes. Insanely grocks Bitcoin. It's a show. Offline, there's a lot of actual anecdotes that I've heard from very people that have in the space for a long time that Elon's... The Doge thing is like a deflection. It's a joke. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (21:28.294) really? Interesting. Huh. Lawrence Lepard (21:39.916) Okay, well that's positive, if that's true that's positive. I yeah I watched him do that and I watched him do some other stuff and I thought to myself, this guy doesn't get it. What do you think, Jesse? Jesse Myers (Croesus) (21:45.396) Really? Michael (21:50.133) We bought $3 billion, he has to get something. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (21:53.473) Yeah, I feel like the doge thing was such egg on his face that that you wouldn't make that mistake like going on SNL and talking about Doge at the exact top of Doge I think that's humiliating. I think that I wonder about you on I've wondered this that like his he thinks he knows money because of PayPal and So you're gonna you're gonna have a certain arrogance and certain hubris of like no like I know how this works And you're gonna be slower to be open Lawrence Lepard (22:03.66) Yeah. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (22:22.431) to other people teaching you about money. And so that's been my mental model of like, I don't think Elon gets it yet and it's understandable if he doesn't because of that. But I would love to be wrong on that. I would love for him to already be a big corner. Lawrence Lepard (22:35.475) Yeah, I'd to be wrong too. I just don't know. Michael (22:38.687) Yeah, I you the thing that's unexpected to talk about it, but if you really think about it, like consensus isn't that hard, right? Like the notion of consensus and and and a not distribution, but decentralization and like, how would you keep something 21 million like so like, you know, it's pretty smart. It's kind of far fetched for anybody like, well, what makes a good money like the leaps aren't like that hard to get for somebody that is that intelligent like Jackson Mikalic (22:38.895) Yeah, we did the thing that's... Michael (23:06.099) Now there's the different orders of magnitude where somebody has the bias of the yuppie elite that can't get past it, but that is more of a social construct than an intellectual one. Anyway, so it's just part of the reason why Elon shouldn't have a problem in grokking why Doge can't be money because you can just make more of them and if you can make more dollars, that's not money. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (23:18.42) Yep. Lawrence Lepard (23:27.35) Yeah. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (23:27.849) Yeah, you're right. And Elon has had an interesting few years of, has probably challenged his trust in the system. And so maybe he would be, maybe he's more open to it now. Maybe he got it years ago and it has been a smoke screen the whole time, but yeah. Michael (23:47.039) Yeah. like, just to add to that is like, I'm sure everybody's had these discussions. It's been kind of like insinuated since the ETF, everybody's placing their chips on the table from financial institutions on like how they're going to integrate Bitcoin. And then the second part is the Vance and I don't know if it's Vivek, but there was it's Strive, their RIA that's like one of the first to integrate Bitcoin. Like these guys are putting everything like around because they already know what's coming. Lawrence Lepard (24:12.579) Right. Jackson Mikalic (24:15.384) Yeah, what are the implications of that? Elon gets it or he doesn't get it. Maybe he does. Vivek understands at RFK, all these people surrounding Trump understand it. Trump's still launching shitcoins, so maybe there's a lack of understanding. But nonetheless, the US finds itself in an unsustainable debt situation. But there is also the talks with Senator Lummis and a lot of support there with him. potentially million Bitcoin that they want to have in a strategic reserve. So it was like, how do you even think about that as it relates to the unsustainable fiscal situation, the $2 trillion deficits, fiat currencies being credit based and having to continue to the base, but at the same time, governments stacking Bitcoin, the hardest form of money, scarce digital bearer instrument, how does that potentially mitigate some of these risks or this path that we're on as it relates to just further Fiat Debasement. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (25:15.805) Yeah, I have some strong thoughts on this, but I'm super interested in Larry and David's take here. Well, I guess to tee it up, I think that a Trump administration here on Bitcoin is very mildly good for Bitcoin, probably considerably good for crypto, except if the strategic Bitcoin reserve actually happens, then it's extremely bullish for Bitcoin and probably not so much because America would be a buyer. Lawrence Lepard (25:16.162) Go ahead, Jesse. David Foley (25:18.708) But you go first, Jesse. Lawrence Lepard (25:19.553) All right. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (25:45.215) But because if there is any sort of real momentum around that, then the geopolitical game theory kicks into overdrive and there will be sovereign buyers for Bitcoin outside of the US all over the world. And so like, is it possible that happens this year? Yes. And that would be unbelievably bullish for Bitcoin at a current, you know, total valuation of $1.3 trillion. That would be outrageous. So... Lawrence Lepard (26:14.072) Yeah, but. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (26:14.931) Yeah, I teed up that way first of like, Trump might be like, not that important for Bitcoin, or very, very important. Lawrence Lepard (26:25.23) Well, so let me just react to that because my view is the strategic Bitcoin reserve is a great idea and he might be able to prevent them from selling the 200,000. I think the odds of Loomis's bill passing are as close to zero as possible. And I say that because, you know, I think what will happen is, you you've got to get senators and congresspeople to, as a majority, want to do it. And what they're going to do is they're going to consult with the Federal Reserve, who's the keeper of the currency and the U.S. Treasury, and they're both going to come out and treat it the same way they treated Judy Shelton's nomination of the Fed board, which is they're going to go berserk and say that if we do this, I mean, you know, as Saylor points out, the first country that started, I we can print money to buy Bitcoin, but you know, which is great because then the country would have Bitcoin, you know, the U.S. government would have Bitcoin, although arguably I'm not sure I want a big central government to have more power. I mean, I'm kind of mixed on this. I mean, I like the separating money from state. I'm not even sure I want Jason Lowery in the state to win and have a bunch of Bitcoin, right? But here's for sure. The people that are fiat masters, the people that are in positions of power, the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury are going to mount an extremely aggressive campaign to suggest that having the US government print money to buy Bitcoin is a bad idea, an extremely dangerous idea, an idea that will probably destroy the dollar. And so you think senators and congresspeople, majority of both, are going to do that? I think the odds of that are zero. Jackson Mikalic (27:43.289) So you think senators and congress people David Foley (27:49.494) You know, I'll build on that. mean, last time we met with Jason Lary up here in Boston, right before he moved to Florida when he was leaving MIT. This is not, you know, this is nothing confidential so we can disclose it. He had said that, I remember I asked him, I said, well, what's your sense when you sit inside with Biden and them and the administration, how does it go? And he has this discussion about Bitcoin go. And he said, look, he goes, the Pentagon absolutely was like 100 % behind Bitcoin. They're like, this needs to be strategic reserve asset. This is critical. You got to have sound money weapons, so to speak. It was the treasury though that ruined, that always rules the day down there and yelling at them were like, hell no. You will destroy the dollar. And so now it's interesting, right? I'll throw a slight slider in this is, I wonder if this treasury, while it is impressive that Trump's going to have, it feels like a full mandate with complete control, but maybe they worry that they don't want to trash the dollar or maybe Luke Roman's right. They do want to trash the dollar and build back America. I think that's kind of hard though, and I'm not sure life's black and white. I think it's really complex and gray that like we're so reliant on all these importation of goods made in China and in hell, even oil. don't, can't even refine our type of oil. We have to get Saudi Arabian oil. that we're relying on others that you can't, gotta be careful what you do to the dollar. But I wonder if the Bitcoin backed bonds is kind of what you're going to see to keep rates in the form of yield curve control. But that's one way that I think they could kind of finesse that, which also would be incredibly bullish for Bitcoin. So I don't know. mean, I think that... Go ahead. Michael (29:31.691) I think that's the end state, which you described the end state. Jesse, if you remember, we kind of backed into this on accident. We talked with Joel Reville back in the day when they were doing in Wyoming, talk in discussions to do the sovereign stablecoin backed by BTC. And we're like, that's interesting because you first start with a dollar to dollar, but then if you want to incentivize, whether it's to the integrity of the backing or some yield or whatever, you would put a little bit Bitcoin, and put more Bitcoin to accrue more of the dollars. then this, so that was how this initially we started. talking about it. then Marty, a months ago had brought up, I guess this was a conversation in circles in Nashville about, what if you start to put Bitcoin on 30 year bonds and how do you start to incentivize the purchase of that? And I'm not sure enough to know how you go from A to Z, but ultimately you can see how you can slowly progress into the weaning confidence of a dollar into a unit that can get turned into this. And then ultimately you just use it. And so I think there's something there basically. David Foley (30:30.006) Well, and you could argue it's a distinction without a difference to a degree, Michael, right? If I were criticizing my own argument that that's the same difference. They're going to theoretically have to buy the Bitcoin to store as a reserve asset to back the bonds. But there's a slight nuance maybe of the signal that you're sending to the world of we're not trying to trash the dollar. I mean, you know, so anyhow, I'll pause there. Jackson Mikalic (30:30.339) Yep. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (30:46.377) Yeah. And there was there was a nuance in I forget the details here, but what Senator Lummis proposed, the bill has a different source of funds rather than printing dollars. I forget where you know what piggy bank is being used there for purchasing Bitcoin. But. Jackson Mikalic (30:48.047) Anyhow. Lawrence Lepard (31:04.558) The only source that wouldn't be inflationary would be, well, and even this would be inflationary, if they did what Luke Cromen suggests, which is to say they revalue all their gold, you know, up to $10,000 or $20,000 an ounce. that was what she was talking about. And that's an interesting issue, right? The dollar is overvalued. We've got too much debt. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (31:15.337) I think that was part of the option set, yeah. Lawrence Lepard (31:24.888) people wonder how we get out of this without, you know, kind of blowing up the world or having hyperinflation. And I think the answer is, you know, as bad as he was, we've got to do something similar to what Roosevelt did, which is we've got to structurally devalue the dollar, maybe in a one-time move so that the debt is more livable. And, you know, I think the best candidate with which to do that today And you could do it in two steps. You could do it with both of them in parallel. But because gold is so widely understood around the world, and there's more of it, and the market cap is $17 trillion, or $18 trillion, not $1 trillion, or $1.5 trillion, you revalue gold. And effectively, what you've done is you've devalued the dollar. And you say, OK, we've got 261 million ounces of gold, which we assume we do. We may not. Maybe even audit it to prove that you've got it, because it's one of the problems with gold. It's not very, very viable. And we're going to mark it up to $30,000 an ounce. And we stand ready to buy or sell gold at $30,000 an ounce. Michael (32:24.395) Wait, Last time we chatted with Larry and David, but I don't think this came up, is Larry was historically a gold bull, but then turned Bitcoin realizes me money. now we're sitting at the bull market that gold believers have been waiting for. We're sitting at 2,700. Which one, Larry? Which one is going to get us out of this mess? Lawrence Lepard (32:33.923) Mm-hmm. Lawrence Lepard (32:44.43) Well, so hang on just a second. mean, what you're talking about is which is going to be a better asset longer term, which is going to perform better term and what the ultimate solution is. The point that I'm trying to make is that it's pretty hard right now to revalue based on Bitcoin when Bitcoin's got a $1.5 trillion market cap and absolutely no payment rails, no background, no support from every other major central bank, et cetera. Michael (33:04.5) Yeah, yeah. Lawrence Lepard (33:11.47) And so, you know, we've got, we don't have time to wait for Bitcoin to grow, you know, in order for this to happen. And so, you my sense is that the way this will happen is it'll be a two step process where they'll move first with gold and then Bitcoin will be the ultimate winner. Michael (33:16.245) Yes. Michael (33:27.595) Yeah, I'm partially teasing. I was just referencing because of the gold notion, but also the other side of that coin is that the gold or the Bitcoin's obvious verifiability that you reference. you start to back it with gold and then you start to get the games played on top of it. And now everybody's off sides. Lawrence Lepard (33:30.093) Yeah. Lawrence Lepard (33:39.33) it's much better. is better in every single respect. The difference is, the question in my mind is, is Bitcoin ready for it? you know what I mean? 4,000 transactions every 10 minutes. You should see the volume that gets done in gold every day around the world. It's just enormous. so we need rails. David Foley (34:02.186) Yeah, we've talked to Jim, like Stan. Yeah, like Stan Druckenmiller, we know like guys used to be his chief lieutenant as he said, the thing about Stan is he loves both. But he said he can call JP Morgan and put one point five billion dollars in gold derivatives down in 14 seconds. He can't put that kind of exposure yet on Bitcoin. So and look at the central banks throughout the world that are buying gold. And you're going to have to have the whole BRICS monetary system. Everyone keeps thinking is the BRICS can have a currency. It already has a backing basically on gold. Everything is going to be backstopped by gold over there. It's the net settlement layer. So this is whether you like it or not. Like, I'm not sure they're mutually exclusive. I think as Larry said, though, at the end of the day, Bitcoin is the scarcest. And we can't even call it a commodity. It's a scarcity, but it's the scarcest asset in the world. And therefore, supply and demand is going to overwhelm in terms of the price upside. People don't even have a clue, I think, of just how big that will be. Lawrence Lepard (34:44.333) God. David Foley (35:01.096) over the next decade and yet gold can be a great performer as well. Jackson Mikalic (35:01.709) next decade. Lawrence Lepard (35:06.654) It's just, I mean, they're both, both new. I mean, what we need is a neutral reserve asset that can't be printed because the printer is what's ruining the world. The printing press, monetary printing presses ruin the world. We're at the end of the great Keynesian experiment. And so, you know, we've got to, we've got to re-devalue all that printed money in terms of something that's real. Jackson Mikalic (35:07.197) I mean, they're both. Lawrence Lepard (35:25.442) And there are two candidates. One's been around 5,000 years, the other's been around 15 years. But, you know, they're both going to get used. And I could argue for going to either one. I just think it's going to be more difficult and messier to jump directly to Bitcoin. I think the countries, just like the countries that were on silver, lost out to the countries that were on gold. Like the people who, you know, who've made all their bet on gold and don't have a bet on Bitcoin, they're going to suffer. I mean, and I think this is a place where, you know, China and Russia and India own a lot of gold. you know, strategically, geopolitically, strategically, if the United States wants to get ahead of those countries, we should go to a Bitcoin standard, just skip the whole gold step. But I think as a practical matter, you know, it's going to be hard to convince all the various players in the world, all the central banks in the world to just immediately go to Bitcoin. And we see them going to gold right now. Some of them are going to Bitcoin. Jackson Mikalic (35:50.68) Thank Jesse Myers (Croesus) (36:14.281) Yeah. Jackson Mikalic (36:15.407) We see them going to Gold Rush. Lawrence Lepard (36:19.362) Bitcoin is it's still just, it's such an infant. It just needs to get bigger. You know, I when Bitcoin's a million dollars a coin, it'll be a different matter, you know. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (36:26.963) Yeah, I think we'll see Bitcoin growing up in a funny way that it makes it so that the individual still has an opportunity to do better than than than nation states because they'll they'll they'll go through gold first and yeah. Lawrence Lepard (36:38.219) absolutely. I mean, look, I don't. Yeah, for the front. Look, I've never, you know, I mean, I'm all in for Bitcoin and I think Bitcoin is vastly superior to gold. All I'm describing here is the way I think that the cards are likely to be played and that this is likely to unfold, you know, in what I think is a monetary reset that will occur sometime before 2030 based on the math as I kind of interpret the math today. So in the next six years, we're going to have a credit event and, you know, a monetary event that's going to really shake the world to its core. And I think both of these assets will do extremely well in that event, extremely well. Which one is chosen as the reserve? That's a matter of politics, really. Jackson Mikalic (37:21.967) Yeah, the. one is chosen as the reserve? I think I think the interesting thing here, too, is that we were talking about trashing the dollar and the status quo is trashing the dollar. What we've been living through for the past 50 or 100 years is trashing the dollar and through a debasement of currency. And what we're kind of talking through right now is that sound money is going to be needed to restore. Lawrence Lepard (37:34.084) yeah. Jackson Mikalic (37:48.08) any sort of credibility among other nations in the dollar. And whether it's gold or Bitcoin, I feel like it would be gold just kind of given where Bitcoin is as an asset class in technology. still, Larry, as you mentioned, kind of an infit compared to a 5,000 year track record. But nonetheless, I mean, it is going to take something because the status quo, trashing the dollar means yield curve control. means, you know, we have the long dated US Treasury is continuing to spike in yields yet the Federal Reserve is I'm not sure if it happened yet, but likely going to reduce interest rates, right? So did they? Okay, so yeah David Foley (38:22.272) They just cut 25 basis points. They basically said that they're holding off on taking away QT, but generally they think it's kind of balanced between inflation and unemployment risk right now. So I would call it was right down the middle of the fairway with the three irons what they hit today. Michael (38:32.011) you Jackson Mikalic (38:41.805) Yeah. Yeah. And that makes sense. So then it's like, all right, well, the bond market is sniffing out. Who wants to touch long dated U.S. treasuries? Right. And then in the front end of the curve, you have the Federal Reserve lowering interest rates. And it just seems like there will be some necessary action as relates to adopting sound money to bolster the U.S. dollar. If the U.S. dollar wants to stay relevant for the next 50 years, then gold and Bitcoin, likely both, will have to play a role in preserving. Lawrence Lepard (39:09.773) Yeah, I mean, problem is that debt's growing at between 7 and 10 percent a year and GDP is growing at 3 percent a year and that's an example of Stein's law that can't go on forever. And so, you know, they've absolutely got to run hugely negative real interest rates and so this is why they pivoted towards more and more bonds being bills and short dated things versus the long stuff. There is no demand for the long stuff because people aren't stupid and, you know, and yet even in spite of this pivot towards the short end, you know, the federal interest expenses up over a trillion dollars a year like close to one, two trillion. run rate and so you know we're starting to look like a third world country where you've got to finance it all in the short-term stuff and they're gonna have to start cutting the rates and of course that's gonna lead to another you know bout of inflation that's gonna lead to probably a higher high in the stock market which is grossly overvalued but it doesn't really matter I mean that we've got to we've got to grow our way out of this thing and we've got to have inflationary growth or else the whole thing collapses and so The inflationary piece is the piece that suggests that the two absolute no-brainer investments for anybody are forms of money that cannot be printed. And the only two that really exist are Bitcoin and gold. So they're both going to do stunningly well. think people are going to be shocked. think gold is going to $5,000, $10,000, maybe $20,000. think Bitcoin is going to multiple millions per coin. Bitcoin will outperform gold. But it's not as though gold is going away. And the transition between the two is just a matter of time. I mean, it's like the pound and the dollar in the 1800s and 1900s. mean, eventually the dollar became the world's reserve currency. But for quite some time, the pound was the world's reserve currency. OK, guys, I'm going to have to hop off here. What I'm going to do, I'm going to get off the video here, get on my audio, and then join you audio-wise. So I'll see you in a minute, OK? Jackson Mikalic (41:04.041) Sounds good. yeah, one thing that I think is interesting is... we got some background noise. Brian's gonna edit this out. David Foley (41:13.014) If you want to mute, yeah, you want to shut that off Larry? There you go. Jackson Mikalic (41:16.527) There we go. All right. Thanks, Brian, for the edits here. But yeah, so one thing that's interesting is that Bitcoin at $75,000 is now the ninth largest asset globally. So while we were talking about it may take a while for Bitcoin to surpass the market cap of gold, which is $17-18 trillion, Bitcoin is now the ninth largest asset. just surpassed Meta and it's standing around $1.4, close to $1.5 trillion. And I think it's only two or three hundred billion dollars behind the market cap of silver now. So it is pretty interesting to think that Bitcoin is one of the 10 largest assets in the world. And we're still at this point where it's it's widely misunderstood by certainly any of my peers from the traditional finance space. Like I feel like I'm still like an orphan in the sense that I don't really know too many people from my days at BNY or Stiefel and the fund manager space that have really started to understand Bitcoin. And Dave, I'm curious, like, is that your experience as well? David Foley (42:17.654) Yeah, completely. I'll give you some anecdotes here. yeah, whether it's guys I used to work with on Wall Street that call up and they're like, yeah, I see you're involved in this. Kind of tell me about it. And you can kind of just hear kind of the skepticism deep in their head, which I've explained to them. said, hey, that was me in 2015 and I was skeptical too. And Larry and I used to have these debates about gold versus Bitcoin then. And he was right. I was wrong. And then eventually I saw it a few years later. But I think it's natural and healthy for people to question anything in life before you dive in and enter. I'd say, you know, I got ex-Hedge Fund colleagues that are calling me. I swear some of them might have the Carisdale capital trade-on of shorting micro strategy and long Bitcoin. And that's what they try and play is just the spread. And I've explained them, like, that can blow up on you six ways. And here's how. And that's a mistake. And you're underestimating the fact that MicroStrategy has leverage and can leverage it. They are arbing it. They have a flywheel going. You're better off just joining the trend and taking two and a half percent of your portfolio and putting it in Bitcoin. if I, David Folley, am an idiot and wrong and the whole Bitcoin thing blows up, you'll never miss the two and a half percent. But if I'm right, you're going to way outperform a lot of your peers. So people just don't understand asymmetry. Look, I think we saw it with the elections. We were talking about the beginning conversation. We're all, you know, it's like those little Charlie Munger isms, right? We're all kind of like anchored into our biases and, and, we, and we have more mental models and we, and we think we know it all. And Nate Silver has it all figured out that Kamala has got this thing in a Lancelot. We're just, it's Eric, it's to be honest, it's, it's naive at Tay. It's arrogance, whatever you want. So I think that, look, I think that the Larry thinks the world have showed this is a real asset class, to go through numbers like I, I. have a hard time seeing. I've talked about it with Brian Estes that whether this thing really has 10 percent penetration in the Bitcoin space. think if you look at and Jesse, you I know we've talked about fours. I think it's in the low single digits. I think that I think the thing that we always look at is, know, out of not, Michael Jesse, Michael Celer uses your chart in all the slides, right? There's 900 trillion of global financial assets. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (44:22.227) Yes, very low. David Foley (44:36.544) Bitcoin, gold and silver essentially are just under 1 % of global financial assets. Well, at the end of the 1970s, sound money assets, gold and silver at the time were like 7 or 8 % of global financial assets. If we get an inflationary period or something far worse, I can promise you, you will be up at 8 to 10 % of global financial assets that are likely inflated from here are going to be a lot higher. And so therefore, the obvious thing is bond money. That's where it's going to come from is Jesse Myers (Croesus) (45:00.649) Yeah. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (45:05.332) Right? David Foley (45:05.622) the 300, call it 250 to $300 trillion of bond money that's out there, it's going to be easy to go grab 10, 20 % of that wallet share that will come flying into bonds when you get a real rate environment that is going against them. so, Saylor always talks about Bitcoin grabbing gold and I get that, but really to us, the low hanging fruit is the bond money that's going to come calling for sound money assets. So this is, to us, it's inevitable. It's just a matter of when. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (45:33.193) Completely agree Yeah, completely agree with all of that assessment. I you know, I think right now we've been talking about like How they're gonna have to inflate away the debt to make it more manageable at some point in the future But like I think that's already happening. I think that playbook to some extent I think there's some parties who are aware that that is happening and I don't know I think that they're not all on the same page about it because people you know, it's not that well Coordinated but I think inflation is higher than the CPI numbers. I was struck yesterday Luke Roman surfaced a chart from Larry Summers former Treasury Secretary Who pointed out six months ago that you know if you run then if you run the inflation numbers based on the Yeah, this chart if you run the inflation numbers based on 1980s CPI basket well we actually peaked at eighteen percent inflation in the last few years and larry summer's point was was that of course of course an incumbent is going to lose in an election if you if your real inflation is eighteen percent at some point during during during a president's tenure there but i think that that speaks to like if that's true if eighteen percent Inflation is really what has been going on then then bonds are are Negative in terms of you know, they're destroying wealth every every year you hold bonds You're actually destroying wealth if you know as this chart suggests we're still in the high single digits inflation rather than the low single digit inflation that that official government numbers state and and so then it comes back to you well, what's the value proposition of holding bonds? It's that you're gonna do slightly better than inflation. And that's the store of value proposition of bonds. But if we're already living in a world where that is not true, you're actually destroying wealth by holding bonds, then what are you doing holding bonds? And then here's this new asset that because of its different set of characteristics does deliver on that promise of you put value in it today and it grows and purchasing power over time and staves off inflation. There's 300 trillion. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (47:56.925) sitting in bonds, destroying wealth and it can, all it has to do is wake up and migrate over to Bitcoin. And I think we will see a continuing exodus of that. And then bringing it back to Jackson, your question at the top of like, how early is it for, know, how early are we still? Bitcoin's, let's call it one and a half trillion dollar asset and nobody seems to get it. know, David's talking about his conversations with his... peers, hedge fund managers should know, should have a deeper understanding of this asset and nobody seems to get it still. So we're a tiny, tiny slice of the world that has woken up to the reality of this thing and we're at one and a half trillion dollars of value. And I think that sort of speaks to how big this thing can get. I think that Brian Estes numbers, those pain me. think that. He says what's like 30 % adoption rate already of Bitcoin. It's like, absolutely not. We are way less than 1%. And that's easy to figure out because you can go look on chain and see how many people have 0.1 Bitcoin, how many addresses have 0.1 Bitcoin in them. It's 4 million. And so, you know, if that's a measure of true adoption that you have put some material savings on chain, Michael (48:58.251) I think less than 1%. I think less than 1%. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (49:23.958) then I think that's a reasonable measure of true understanding and adoption of Bitcoin. Well, that's one two thousandth of the world. So, you you're not at 10, 30 percent or whatever adoption that Brian Estes says. And so that makes it that much earlier for Bitcoin. So one and a half trillion is just the beginning of us getting to 100 trillion and I think eventually 200 trillion. David Foley (49:47.414) Well, sticking with that election analogy because we're in that season, It's a little like the pollsters. I don't know what the hell they're all looking at and ate silver in them, but just look around at your neighborhood and your peers like you're saying. Again, you could look at Call Her Daddy podcast for Oprah ratings versus Trump's YouTube and Twitter hits of Joe Rogan and the tens of millions of viewers. And you can kind of get a sense. Ask that same thing of your neighbors and your colleagues. own Bitcoin when you go to a PTO, know, parent party or something like it's so small and and granted I live up in Boston where it's kind of stayed capital I would argue with the mutual fund industry but you know, I'm probably considered the renegade in the space and you know, think two years ago people felt bad for me like God that guy's running his family into the ground and in the Bitcoin space and now they kind of look at you think, you know, is he cocky and it's It's like, I'm not cocky. I'm just playing the odds of where we see the world going and where the puck's going. And that's our job to protect wealth and to protect our clients' wealth. But yeah, I think that that's all you have to do is understand that anecdotally, how early we are. think a couple of other thoughts that I'm ahead of. Let's give them floor for a minute and a half. If we think about what this administration is going to do, I think the obvious highest probability things are I actually am hopeful that he can pull off something with Ukraine and Israel and quiet things down with Russia if he can negotiate it. I think they will cut taxes, obviously, or reinstate the Trump tax cuts that are expiring in January. think then Paulson or whoever the secretary of treasury is and the Doge group led by Elon Musk, Department of Governmental Efficiency, it's kind of funny that he calls it that, they'll come up with some cuts. Now, the question is, where's the beef, right? Are they real cuts or are they bullshit cuts that are kind of, you know, like I could see something like, like, you know, they cut expenditures on the inflation reduction act stuff, but they start putting it into fracking and drill baby drill to go get oil down to $50 a barrel because that does stimulate productivity in the economy. But then what I worry about is the bond market. And like Larry and I were talking about, like David Foley (52:06.358) I could argue, if I were being optimistic and charitable, that the bond markets are paying attention to CPI and they're saying, the Fed's on track to get to 2.5%. They're kind of guiding to that again today. So you put a 50 basis point premium on the short end of where they need to get to over that. So about 3 % target Fed funds. They're at 4.5 area now after today's cut. So they have one in 150 basis points more of cuts to go theoretically. But then your 10-year treasury yield should trade at about 150, 175 over that 3 % target. So it should end up around 475, 5%, 10 years fair market value when you wake up a year from now. Well, that's where you are now. What I'd worry about is what Larry was talking about earlier is if they lose control of that bond market, if this inflation rears its head or just the balance sheet starts to matter, That's when this thing like fireworks go off. And that's where to your point, some huge percentage of that bond money is coming running over because of the inflation, because they're losing control of bond market. Like that's the obvious one of what can go wrong that creates the next financial crisis. And so back to administrative policies, like this is a little bit like brain surgery. I think we all wake up on election day and people are like, they'll solve it. It's like this is brain surgery. Like if they cut the stem on the Inflation Reduction Act, you're pulling a massive amount of stimulus out. You better spend elsewhere. And that's why I'm not sure the deficit can really be reduced. And I think ultimately Bitcoin and gold and silver will continue to march on. We're going to have pauses and ebbs and flows, but this train will just keep going. And so I'll pause there, but that's kind of what I see as the real interesting debate of the next 40 days for all of us in the money management business is this administrative and policies. and then thinking about bond markets in the Dixie over the next year, I think that's kind where my head goes to today. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (54:04.373) And in that scenario you you paint of you know, possibly inflation running again would be an echo of what happened in the 70s the sort of bullwhip effect of inflation having several peaks Three really where each each one was bigger than the prior and it Strikes me. I didn't live through that but it strikes me as human nature that that the measures that were put in place then to try to solve inflation and then you, okay, you ease up on the measures once you start to rein it in. It's a very human psychology trap that we could be falling in again here. David Foley (54:43.358) Yeah, I Larry if you want to comment on that before I do. Lawrence (54:46.742) Yeah, I I lived through it. Can you hear me now? No? David Foley (54:47.99) You're on mute. I'll pipe in. Larry's might have technical difficulties. Yeah, I was going say I was a kid born in the early 73. And so the only thing I remember the 70s was like, I remember America just didn't feel that wealthy. That's for damn sure. You you'd take your two week vacation or one week vacation as a family and you were grateful. And to some degree, we were probably happier. We weren't as entitled as a society. You helped your neighbors out. The second thing I can remember the gasoline lines were Lawrence (54:53.785) I don't think I've got a good connection. David Foley (55:18.998) even houses could go on certain days and wait in a two and a half hour gas line. And I remember the kids in my town selling lemonade on the side of the road in those gas lines. so like, yeah, I think as you just described, I inflation is a monetary phenomenon and the money supply has grown at over 7 % for the last 50 years since 71. That's the real inflation rate. It's not two and a half percent CPI. That's why people are pissed and feeling it because just because Kamala and Biden tell you that inflation's checked back to two and a half percent, you should be happy. good God, you've dealt with like 45 % increases in home prices in the last four years alone. Grocery prices are up in the, you know, somewhere over north of 20 % cumulatively. And so it's, if not more, and it's expensive and salaries haven't kept up. So now I think what you see is you got wage inflation. I mean, think about every strike you're hearing about in the settlements, whether it was the East Coast ports recently, or airlines. And I think that that stuff, we're in that cycle. And this is now you chase it, and it's hard to combat it, as all the famous economists have talked about. But I think that, tell me what the next crisis is that relates to that bond market, or tell me how bad the recession is on the next one, and why these Deficits go and you can kind of just smell the money printer go really fast and then suddenly, know again sound money's flying and and it's really tough to put back in the bottle unless you're willing to take the economic pain like Paul Volcker did Putting us into that double dip recession the early 80s That's that's gonna be the choices. They're gonna have to make and as everyone knows These politicians that they're on two-year election cycles. They'll already be talking about the midterms in February they're not gonna wanna make a lot of cuts if Elon and John Paulson are serving up a lot of cuts. So this is hard, we're in a cycle. so again, we don't get a lot of adjunct over it. It's like over the medium term, we know how this is gonna play out with the probabilities are. But the next six months, it'll be an interesting tennis match to watch here on some of these things. Jackson Mikalic (57:31.469) Yeah, one thing that I thought was particularly interesting, and Dave, I agree with everything you just said there about the bond market and having to think through what the next crisis or inflationary spike could be and how will policymakers react to it. One thing, I'm not sure if you caught it or Jesse, I believe Michael, you listened to it, but the Howard Lutnick podcast with Pomp was really interesting to hear someone who has the Wall Street mentality and background and the business mentality think about how to manage the U.S. fiscal position and he focused less on, he did focus a bit on, let's say the expense side of the equation and what could be done to reduce the deficit there. But there were some really fascinating ideas about how to leverage the assets within this country just as it relates to, he mentioned like natural resources and energy. But there are a lot of interesting things that I'll probably end up butchering it, but just the idea of the U.S. government potentially taking equity stakes in startup businesses to have equity position there and if the businesses are successful and they are able to help those businesses achieve success over the long term, they're growing their equity valuation which could offset some of the future liabilities of the country. And then just a ton of, like I said, natural resources, energies that haven't really been tapped into that I think supersede many other countries just in terms of what we have below the Earth's crust here. I thought that was particularly interesting. Not sure if you guys have any thoughts there, but it's like interesting to hear someone step into the room without the politics background, similar to how Trump did it, and say, and have all these unorthodox ideas about how to manage the government's balance sheet. Michael (59:10.891) Just to add to the second part, absolutely fascinating podcast when we listening, the best one I probably heard in years because there was one part of that. The second part was how he managed 9-11 and it's just absolutely incredible because he has a very sad story growing up with losing both his parents. You realize the only way somebody can manage losing 600 employees is because you had that resiliency, that resilience built in. Really incredible. the second part... of a Jackson referenced was effectively tariffs and the understanding again, maybe Dave or Larry, if you're, you're still on, can speak to this because not a student of this notion that either wasn't always an income tax would be majority of, or a lot of the income came from the notion of tariffs. And then after the wars, we wanted to, you know, offshore or bring in like, how about the other countries effectively bringing in, their imports, but then effectively exporting all of like the things that were built here. And it's like, no, no, if you want to play ball, you have to pay. And it sounds so crazy, but it's like when you've broken down from a business perspective, it's like, well, wouldn't you want to take care of it? It's like, I was trying to explain this to my wife. It's kind of butchering what's happening, but it's effectively globalism versus like running the country as a company, right? And Trump effectively cares about the country as a company versus trying to like make everyone else happy. And because of that, you piss some people off, but you end up taking care of the country and the people that are there in this thing. And so that was part of that, like, Lutnik. positioning is that there's half on unorthodox ways to accrue value to the country. But then the second part is how do you actually just cut off things or make things be made here, which bring back capital. David Foley (01:00:47.701) Larry, I don't know if you want me to... Yeah, we can hear you clear. Go ahead. Lawrence (01:00:47.834) Yeah, can you guys hear me now or not? good. that's good. I got technical difficulties. Yeah, you know, so what's happened in the last 50 years is we've offshored our manufacturing base through this strong dollar policy and it's been great for the elites and it's been really shitty for the average American. And that's completely reversing and Gromann does the best job of laying this out, but it needs to reverse because the wealth inequality and all the political division we've got is because... Michael (01:00:49.663) Yep. You're back. Lawrence (01:01:16.365) you know, most Americans are getting screwed while the coastal elites are getting rich. And so, yeah, I mean, we let China into the WTO in 2000 and they were supposed to trade fairly with us. They didn't. We couldn't sell things into China. They could sell things here. And, you know, there's a lot of sense to having an America first approach to this whole thing. We've got to reshore some of our manufacturing base. But again, it all goes back to the currency and the strong dollar and the fact that we don't have a neutral reserve currency. I that's why it happened. And so, you know, We defended the world with the biggest military, we also were able to export our inflation to all of them. And they're getting pissed off about that inflation. And our military is not such a big deal anymore. you know, I mean, as an example, Grumman points out that we couldn't really even fight a war now if we had to. mean, the components we need to fight a war are made in China. So if China moves on Taiwan, we're screwed. We can't do it. We can't fight back. So, you know, this all got to change. And I don't know that, you know, I really like the notion that Trump and all these administrations are going to try and do the right thing. I'm all for that. Having said that, the events are going to overtake these guys. I mean, I have a very strong view that this everything bubble is going to pop in some time in the next six years and that when it does, it's going to be a complete, you know, turn over the table, all new cards kind of situation. And at that point, we'll have to build back from the base of strong money or sound money, some combination of gold and Bitcoin. the existing political stuff that we have that you won't even recognize it. It'll all change. It'll have to change because it's just, we've gone way, way, way too far in one direction and we're about to go back in the other direction with a vengeance. That's kinda how I see it. David Foley (01:03:00.574) I think the only thing add to it is, know, obviously, Letnik's a really smart guy and I'm optimistic too. I want to be. I just think that it's not black and white. For instance, like to Larry's point, the time for the U.S. to have utilized tariffs was in 2000, 2001 with China before they were able to establish such a manufacturing base when we had real leverage. And it was poorly negotiated by the U.S. at that time. And even Hank Paulson, or when he left Goldman, was the Treasury Secretary. Like, you know, he was kind of complaining, even when I was a Goldman and Paulson was running Goldman, he used to complain about China not opening up the markets for Goldman Sachs. Like the iron fish had been put down then because now it's late because now the problem is you have smooth holly risk where we start going with tariffs and you could substitute. I got a list from this pause. A couple of people have said it's great. You can. I've heard someone say you could drop income taxes and just go like tariffs. And it's like a VAT type thing. But it's like. It's incredibly inflationary as we learned with Smooth Holly in 2930 and that you can have massive policy error on that. And then the consumer ends up just, you know, not being able to afford this. The inflation rages and we get into those cycles that we talked about of chaos. So I don't know how I don't think it's going to be this black and white easy on that front. And yet I'm curious to see what they're what they're cooking up. And they're smart guys in the room, I think. But It's it's not, it's not so black and white. I think, yeah, I mean, I think, think, look, I like the idea though of, of Trump playing hardball with China to say, open up your markets. I thought, you know, I remember even Jamie Dimon talking about that five years ago of how Trump was doing a good job. He basically let the, whatever that economic council was that Diamond was a part of, that group in Silicon Valley were basically driving the agenda for Trump's negotiation strategy with China. And, and he's, he, Diamond pointed out, Trump did a good job listening to those groups and just fighting their fight. And so that's one of the positives, I think, of Trump is he listens to business, to Wall Street, to technologists and says, OK, yeah, I'll go negotiate. I just worry that it's too late. Like, I don't know how you solve it cleanly. This is like brain surgery again that that I think these guys have to deal with the economy. I sure as hell wouldn't want to be Treasury secretary or the Fed chair. I think there's a lot of real tough situations going on the next few years. Michael (01:05:25.003) There's one aspect that we haven't talked about. Like I think one, we probably would objectively agree. The other one's a little bit ties into the brain surgery. But the first one is we always end up in these positions where we overextend ourselves in the price appreciation of Bitcoin. The market comes back, but then we all get to hang around and see all the fundamentals grow while nobody else knows. Right. So we all would agree like risk adjusted. This is the absolute best time. And the amount of plumbing that has been built to bring in capital is insane. And so like independent of the brain surgery, incorporating Bitcoin into offsetting this, we're probably primed to see some price appreciation at levels we've never seen before because of the amount of visibility. And again, the strategic thing, whether there's any chance it's the Overton window that Jesse's talked about with like back in the day when Lemus brought this up and then it's just like, we have a president. So, point being is there's game theory with that. So that's just incredibly bullish in the sense of get to sit back and look at like, like it's, there was a tweet. I've always thought about this. It's like the Bitcoin price could be 500 K tomorrow. And like, what really changed from a fundamental perspective? It's just mispriced. Now the second part goes into the brain surgery. It's just something I thought of over the course of this pod. I don't know. Like if this is, this is, this is giving them a lot of credit if this was part of it. But to your point, what we talked about is well, this asset is too small. only a trillion and a half. Well, what size does the asset need to be? Does it need to be gold's previous market cap? 10 trillion? Well, that's actually only 6X from here. And what's 6X from here? You know, what is that? 360K, 350? Like how far are we from that? Six months? Is it a year? You know, like, so you can start to like mess with dials potentially where you can use this asset to do things. And again, nowhere near smart to understand how to perform that brain surgery. But I don't think it's as far fetched because it's this notion of it took 15 years to get to a trillion dollar asset. It's going to be a lot quicker to get to 10 trillion dollars. I think we all know that. So there's something interesting there that it'll be fun to watch. I can't help but be optimistic with everything because it's been so bearish for so long with all that's happened that post this election, I'm just going to take the white pill forever until proven otherwise. David Foley (01:07:39.311) Yep, I hear that. Jackson Mikalic (01:07:42.126) Yeah, react to that real quick is just that there also needs to be more access, right? Like this was a big year in particular for Bitcoin because of the ETFs. The five of us didn't have to wait for BlackRock or Fidelity's ETF product to come out for us to want to allocate to Bitcoin. We've been doing it and we figured it out ourselves with Bitcoin native products, but most of the market... Jesse Myers (Croesus) (01:07:42.547) Yeah, go ahead, Jackson. Jackson Mikalic (01:08:06.541) may not want Bitcoin native products as they exist today in the sense that they have a Charles Schwab account. It's very easy to purchase ETF shares and then forget about it. It's much more painstaking of a process and at least requires intentionality to be seeking out a Bitcoin exchange, you purchase it and then go through a process of trying to understand how do you secure the asset. And we talk a lot about that, but and Michael, maybe it was your point originally, but we have a $1.5 trillion asset class in front of us at the moment. But Bitcoin could have been potentially a two or a $5 trillion asset class after 15 years if there were different solutions to meet people where they're at. And I think that's what I'm also hopeful for, just seeing firms like Shrive Asset Management, Vivek's firm, wanting to step into Bitcoin in a wealth management capacity. You imagine... how much the ETFs did for credibility for Bitcoin in the traditional finance space. If you have other firms beginning to offer new access and entry points and differentiated ways to access and invest in Bitcoin, that's going to be really important for the industry. So I am excited about that. And funny enough, Cantor led the series B for Strive. So you're starting to see this kind of ecosystem in the traditional finance world that's really bullish on Bitcoin and wanting to invest directly into the ecosystem. Michael (01:09:28.873) Yeah, Larry and Dave, maybe just to give us a little of a shout out. I don't know. Did you guys see that the first UK pensions allocated to Bitcoin this week? David Foley (01:09:38.518) did not see that, Lawrence (01:09:40.267) Yeah, I actually thought. Michael (01:09:40.341) So the first UK pension, they allocated to Bitcoin, but here's the kicker. If they allocated to our on-ramp Bitcoin trust, if that ding didn't exist, they wouldn't have allocated because they couldn't find a solution without counterparty risk. And so while it was just the first pension, I think they advised over a hundred, the point goes back to Jackson, independent of last being involved in it. is a reality of people want to put material wealth in this asset, but they can't find bulletproof solutions because at the end of the day, they can't wrap their head around putting it on a hardware device and God forbid losing it or leaving it on Coinbase. And we all know the things that have happened with centralized exchanges. So that's the real exciting part is as we professionalize this asset class for serious people, there's going to be the products that exist. And once people find out that there's ways to get exposure to the asset in a security like fashion while not having the underlying counterparty risk of a single custodian, but then also being able to take delivery, that's going to start to really put the market, at least the knowledge that there's better products out there. And then ultimately, we all know the product at the end of the day that fulfills the needs of the end client are going to win. David Foley (01:10:48.032) Yeah, no doubt about it. look, there are huge, huge advantages of just controlling your own Bitcoin and using guys like you guys to do that is critical, right? And I think that some funds obviously are constrained in terms of regulatory reasons, can't custody their own assets. But as those solutions develop and all that, there's no doubt. mean, having your own possession is ideal. so, yeah, no, that's phenomenal. Great work by you guys. Lawrence (01:11:16.875) Yeah, it's it's a pretty exciting time I mean I we were talking on another pod a day or two ago about this I mean I if you look at the you know the power law model Which I subscribe to until it breaks to the you know to the upside You know we we easily get to max's number of 230 230 thousand a coin You know sometime next year and and it's entirely possible that we squirt well beyond that in the three four five hundred range I'm not sure I'd be a buyer at five hundred, but you know it's It's really this this ramp is going to be something to behold and It's going to kind of I think put put to rest forever the notion that this is not a real asset class you know at that point timing and sadly, you know a lot of people will be paying 250 for it and Only to maybe you know have it draw back down to 125 at some point, but It's coming. You can just feel it coming. I mean, I'm I'm incredibly bulled up for the next six to 18 months Jesse Myers (Croesus) (01:12:09.659) Yeah. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (01:12:14.197) Yeah, it sure does feel like it did in 2020 around this time of year too, around the election. You know, we were at 10,000, I think, starting October four years ago, and then got up to 13,000 at the end of October. And that was just the beginning. Lawrence (01:12:25.086) Well, yeah. Lawrence (01:12:29.512) Yeah, and Jesse, let me jump in on you there too. I remember that period very well and I held them both. you know, the clue is gold, right? mean, gold has just been relentless and it broke 2070 and it marched to 2700, you know, in a negative real interest rate environment without missing a beat. so, you know, gold is the much more widely distributed asset that more people are focusing on, you know, the issue of monetary debasement. And so, Bitcoin always follows it, but then it goes way beyond it in terms of performance. And that's what's going to happen here. You can just feel it. You can just feel it coming. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (01:13:03.187) Yeah. Yeah. Larry, thank you for. Yeah, go ahead, Michael. Michael (01:13:04.075) This time last. No, I was just to say I have the chart up there. don't know if you can see it. It's like even this time last year or four years ago, we hadn't even broke the all time highs. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (01:13:09.737) Yeah. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (01:13:16.051) Right. Yeah. David Foley (01:13:16.758) Well, it's not necessarily even that it's the halving cycle that does it, although obviously it makes sense it does because it creates more scarcity. But someone has said it's really the election cycles that drive this thing. It's when you get the post-election uncertainty that you get this liftoff right after it, right post-November. So, you know, I think personally, I think it's both, right? It's the halving and the election cycle. But it makes sense, as Larry said, that right now after gold's run higher here over the last five, six months. It feels like it's about time for Bitcoin to take that baton and go. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (01:13:50.697) Yeah. And Larry, thank you for for keying me in on that dynamic with gold. It is kind of amazing to look back in time and see how gold's legs up in the past preceded Bitcoin's following it. And of course, with much greater amplitude when Bitcoin finally does move. And I I I wonder what that is. But I guess it could just be that people who are into gold are hard money first. And, you know, they're focused on the sound fundamentals of gold and investors in Bitcoin, I think, unfortunately, are still probably 90 percent like this is a risk on tech asset, you know, and so. Lawrence (01:14:34.778) There's certainly there's certainly some of that yeah, I agree with that, but I think it's shifting I mean more and more investors of Bitcoin or sound money people but but yes I mean there a lot of people said it's really hard heavily correlated with the Nasdaq But I think in this cycle that's gonna break Because I think the Nasdaq is gonna eventually the bubble in the stock market is gonna burst It cannot go on forever unless we just have a total crack-up boom in which case bitcoins going to a million And I think when this bubble bursts, then what's going to happen is what I call the big print. It's going have to be bigger than the last one. And that's going to just drive all these assets. They're just going to go nuts. I mean, it's going to be... And people are to wonder what the hell is going on. mean, including the people in the Treasury and the Fed. They're going to... Powell is about to be... He is going to truly be a deer in the headlights. He has no idea what he's playing with here. He's way over his head. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (01:15:08.798) and Michael (01:15:23.627) Yeah, gold ripping that 2000 mark was the big tell because like after that it was game over. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (01:15:32.009) Yeah. And that, last print Larry was 10 trillion in the U S 20 trillion globally for the COVID stimulus. Lawrence (01:15:39.077) Right. Yeah, I I personally I back back to the envelope thinking that we're kind of the Fed balance sheet is going to have to go to between 20 and 25 trillion. I mean, imagine imagine if you will, the stock market burst and just the implications of that for taxes, for transfer payments, all of that stuff. And imagine they go QE, they go yield curve control, they expand their balance sheet massively. And it's still not enough. You know, very similar to in the beginning. I mean, when March 2020 came around, Powell started with $40 billion of monthly purchases. Didn't even move the needle. He had to go to 120. And that's what's gonna happen this time. Each one of these things has to become progressively bigger. The printer has to run harder with each event. David Foley (01:16:22.262) And I think that kind of speaks to again back to how this is not black and white with Lutnick and these guys trying to solve it. You you got to remember like Bernanke and Bernanke had to keep the gas, the pedal of a metal in terms of quantitative easing and low rates for a long time into yelling, then taking over for him. was the one in 2018 that tried to raise rates and dial all that back. And then the repo market broke like It's so important for growth, this GDP growth, to have this government stimulus, both monetarily and fiscally. And so if they, if they, you they almost don't have a choice but to keep that going. And Delary's point, in a typical recession, you should see the deficit jack out to about four to seven trillion dollars on average, right? Depending on what tax receipts do and the state unemployment benefits that kick in, because taxes go down, tax collections go down during recessions. So if you're doing that, combine with the fact that there's just so much debt in the system. And then, you know, this goes into, you know, the Van Hosingen guys of of of of kind of how there's so much debt, like just because you're cutting taxes. I'm not sure consumers and corporations can keep pushing on a string and spending, spending, spending. There's probably going to be a marginal propensity to save at some point, which is going to forced the government to have to come back to spending and cutting taxes to drive deficits higher. So there's so many things that likely just speak to, as Paul Tudor Jones said, it all roads lead to inflation, all roads lead to deficits and larger deficits, and then the inflation as well. so like again, Lawrence (01:18:04.171) Yeah, it's the classic gradually and then suddenly and we're in the we're in the gradually piece but but boy it's getting you know, it's getting faster, you know, it's getting faster. It's getting larger. I mean, you know, they they weren't even able to pal wasn't even able to tighten. He started tightening in early 2022 and by fall of 2023 the 10 year went through 5 % and they panicked and they had 12 guys within 10 days say, I don't know. We're done. I mean, they just you know, you just know what's going to have to happen here. I mean, it's And it's hard to see if you're not watching this stuff day to day, if you're not deeply involved, if you don't know what these guys are. I mean, the Fed's got a third mandate. The third mandate is really the most important one, which is financial stability and continuity. And we just know they'll break all the rules to keep that going. Excuse me, and they have in the past. Jackson Mikalic (01:18:52.59) Yeah, those are all good points and it makes sense. mean, you can't really undo all of the fiscal irresponsibility of the past several decades in one term. So it'll be interesting to see nonetheless what kind of unconventional methods could be used to try to balance the budget. I know there's talks of it, but. Lawrence (01:19:10.432) Absolutely, By the way, I'm rooting for them. I don't want to see all this happen. But I'm just saying it's mathematically likely to happen. Jackson Mikalic (01:19:17.825) Right. Jackson Mikalic (01:19:21.259) Right, yeah, and I agree with that. Well, I know we were up on time anyway, so unless there's anything else that was really top of mind, Dave and Larry want to thank you both for jumping on. I'm sure I would think that most people, if not all, are familiar with the two of you, but maybe you just want to give a handoff as to what you're working on these days and where is the best place for people to get in touch. Lawrence (01:19:46.856) I'll let Dave do that because POF is doing another fund and there's a lot going on David Foley (01:19:52.01) Yeah, so yeah, I'm involved. James Lavish and I run the Bitcoin Opportunity Fund and we are looking to launch a second fund here shortly. And Larry and I also are affiliated with Equity Management Associates. So those are the two things that I'm involved in. Lawrence (01:20:09.768) Dave, you might mention your rough returns so far this year in the BOF. You've been doing pretty well. David Foley (01:20:15.254) Yeah, I should look what it's up here. But yeah, we've done well. think we're up, I don't know, 60 % plus on a gross basis and all that. So yeah, think things have gone well. Michael (01:20:32.895) Awesome. Thanks for coming on. If anybody's listening wants to get a hold or is in contact with us, we can put you in touch with Dave and Larry. then David, to the extent you're interested in talking to some of our private clients about what you're building, happy to set something up where we can get like a round table. do them with other asset managers across the board in the Bitcoin ecosystem. So happy to facilitate that if it makes sense. Jackson Mikalic (01:20:33.059) Awesome. Thanks for coming on. David Foley (01:20:52.724) That'd be terrific, Michael. Thank you. Larry, I don't know if you want to mention your book. Jackson Mikalic (01:20:55.599) Well, thanks gentlemen, appreciate the time. Lawrence (01:21:00.093) yeah, I'll plug my book. So I'm writing a book. The goal is to have it out at the end of the year. Might slip a month early into next year. The overarching goal of the book is to write something that an average citizen of any position or financial level of knowledge can read and say, my goodness, I understand what's wrong. I understand it's the money. I understand what the Fed has done to us. I know what I have to do to protect myself. And I know what I have to do to make the world an overall better place. above and apart from protecting myself. is to say, money creation away from the state because that's what's ruined our world. And so it's about a 200 page book, but it's easy explanation. I've really borrowed from everybody else. And Jesse, I've got your chart in there, which is one of the most fabulous charts ever. The total available market for all these assets. yeah, hopefully it's a book that will be something people can give to friends and neighbors and people will read it and go, yeah, I see. got a good point maybe I should bite yeah year end is the target I'm working hard with an editor right now it's it's surprisingly difficult to get to a final edition but it's not going to slip much beyond year end David Foley (01:22:00.778) to say and having. Jackson Mikalic (01:22:01.283) Yeah, goodbye. Michael (01:22:03.371) When is that out, Larry? David Foley (01:22:15.422) I was gonna say that- Michael (01:22:15.805) put us on the hook for some of them. Not that our clients might need them, but we can give them to them for their friends and family. So, you know, we'll definitely get down to 50 to 100 at least to start and send them to our clients. I'll appreciate it. Lawrence (01:22:27.907) Well, whatever. Yeah, whatever. mean, that'd be great. David Foley (01:22:28.982) just ten seconds on and having read it myself, these drafts and helping Larry with it, what I like about it is that one of my favorite books of all time was Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation. And what I loved about it was not only because of the great stories of the people that grew up during the Depression and that World War II generation, but Each chapter was like three pages, four pages long. So was the best nighttime book reading because you could get one or two chapters knocked out, go to sleep, work the next day, then come back and plow through four more the next night. And Larry's kind of written it like that, where I think it's a really good piece that builds on it. And it's a really great educational thing. I think actually every high school kid in the world should be reading this once it's out. Jackson Mikalic (01:23:12.335) That's exciting. Well, yeah, I am always looking for new resources because the thing is with Bitcoin, there's just so much information out there and I really struggle to find the best one individual resource to point people to and also be digestible as well. So Larry, excited for that. You've done so much great work over the years. So excited to check it out. Lawrence (01:23:29.316) Thanks. It's not a textbook. mean, think Lynn and Safe and Jeff have written much better books. This is meant to be, and I borrowed a lot from their books, by the way, this is meant to be something that anybody could read quickly and easily and get the gist of our message. Michael (01:23:49.899) Awesome. Look excited for that. Appreciate you guys coming on and look forward to the next one. Jackson Mikalic (01:23:51.087) I'm excited for that. Appreciate you guys. David Foley (01:23:55.584) Great seeing you guys as always. Thank you for having us. Jesse Myers (Croesus) (01:23:58.197) Thank you, David. Thank you, Larry. Michael (01:23:58.291) Of course. Thanks. Lawrence (01:23:58.624) Good to see you guys. Thanks all. Take care. David Foley (01:24:00.01) See you guys.