In short
Q2 2025 Bitcoin market outlook and “mastermind” cycle discussion. Guests analyze macro drivers (global liquidity, economy, leverage), why Bitcoin’s spot price diverges from ETF-driven flows, and how stablecoins and US regulation (Genius Act) could reshape stablecoin issuance. They also focus on Bitcoin treasury companies, shifting capital structures (convertibles to perpetual preferreds), and whether treasury firms may outperform miners. They end with bold predictions (BTC price targets, Fed/Powell politics) and debate stablecoins’ impact on Bitcoin adoption.
Guests (backgrounds)
- Joe Carlasare: macro/market-focused investor; discusses yield curve, inflation swaps, recession probabilities, and “three burners” framework.
- HODL (speaker): technical/market-cycle perspective; emphasizes ETF/RSI-driven behavior and “three burners”/leverage timing.
- Jeff Ross: fund manager perspective; watches leverage late in cycles and compares treasury-company risk to miners’ leverage mistakes.
Key claims
- ETF/options structure creates multi-month trading ranges (e.g., ~110–90K) and resistance bands.
- “Three burners” (liquidity, economy, leverage) imply leverage hasn’t fully turned on yet; possible all-time highs around Q2 2026.
- Treasury companies are the main bid; perpetual preferreds may avoid convertible “resistance bands.”
- Genius Act could enable non-bank stablecoin issuers; stablecoins are a bridge from fiat to Bitcoin.
Notable examples
- NVIDIA-like “massive range” behavior; RSI “overheated” signals from Wall Street.
- Mention of MicroStrategy’s financing approach and “forced seller” risk being low.
- Miners: some outperform, but operational leverage makes sustained bids unlikely.
- Tom Lee’s “Ethereum is the new Bitcoin” thesis via an Ethereum treasury/stablecoin transaction demand narrative.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOExploring the All-Time High Day
1:20 to 2:04
Discussion on the significance of Bitcoin reaching an all-time high.
“I'm here with the Mastermind discussion.”
Trading Ranges and ETF Impact
2:04 to 3:38
Analysis of Bitcoin's trading patterns and the influence of ETFs on price movements.
“You guys told me that when we first met and I didn't even realize.”
The Three Burners Theory
3:38 to 6:16
Introduction to the concept of three burners affecting Bitcoin's price.
“So I'll tell you why, but let's hear your theory first.”
Economic Predictions and Bitcoin's Future
6:16 to 8:31
Discussion on economic indicators and expectations for Bitcoin's performance.
“Now, Everybody literally and their grandma is talking about global liquidity now.”
Policy Shifts and Market Reactions
8:31 to 12:39
Insights on recent policy changes and their implications for the economy and Bitcoin.
“So we're probably going to be talking about all-time highs somewhere in Q2 of 2026 now, which is a surprise to me.”
Challenges and Institutional Perspectives
12:39 to 14:00
Reflections on the complexities of economic policies and their impact on investors.
“how there's been this massive policy shift.”
Discussion on Bitcoin's Role in Economic Strategy
14:00 to 25:23
Explore the implications of Bitcoin in current economic discussions and strategies.
“to keep the economies flowing and that you don't get credit impairment.”
Discussion on Bitcoin's Role in Economic Strategy
28:02 to 28:38
Explore the implications of Bitcoin in current economic discussions and strategies.
“You probably already know NetSuite, the AI-powered business suite that securely connects all your data, financials, inventory, commerce, HR, and CRM all in one source of truth, trusted by over 43 ,000 customers.”
Analyzing Meta Planet's MNAV and Bitcoin Investment Strategy
28:53 to 30:42
Discussion on Meta Planet's trading dynamics and potential Bitcoin investments.
“Planet and you look at the MNav that it's trading, where is it at right now?”
The Future of Bitcoin Miners and Treasury Companies
30:47 to 33:41
Debate about the role of Bitcoin miners and their financial strategies.
“Anybody in here, I think it's going to make the S &P 500 right now?”
Show all 31 chapters
Comparing Bitcoin Treasuries to the Dot-Com Bubble
33:44 to 36:03
Insights into Bitcoin treasury companies and potential market bubbles.
“I actually personally believe the treasury company bubble can get, like I said, dot-com level large, which was$11 trillion in that era.”
Ethereum's Position in the Crypto Narrative
36:04 to 40:00
Discussion on Ethereum's current standing and Tom Lee's controversial claims.
“then it goes sideways for six months and it gets another run-up, maybe the derivatives market is preventing this euphoria from really kind of creating the 80 % drawdown and the massive run-up.”
Impact of Stable Coins on Bitcoin Market
40:01 to 41:34
Exploration of stable coins and their influence on Bitcoin adoption.
“Well, I think, well, a couple of things.”
The Importance of Call Recaps
42:00 to 42:36
Learn how effective call recaps can enhance communication with investors.
“the conversation and hands me back a clean, searchable recap.”
The Importance of Call Recaps
43:41 to 44:35
Learn how effective call recaps can enhance communication with investors.
“They say every day your business is late to AI.”
US Regulations and Stablecoins
44:46 to 49:51
Discuss the implications of US regulations on stablecoin issuance and competition.
“Joe, don't you think that the US messed up on the Genius Act with the part where they're saying that the issuers can't pay the interest of the coupons to the holders of the token?”
The Future of Stablecoins
49:51 to 50:34
Examine the potential for various stablecoins in the market and their adoption.
“I mean, to me, it's not just those two, because I think we track at our firm.”
Merchant Engagement with Stablecoins
50:34 to 53:19
Understand the role of merchants in the adoption of stablecoins and consumer incentives.
“Because stables are great for peer-to-peer transactions, but we know that a lot of people, they're going to take that and they want to buy things at Amazon or they want to buy things at other retailers.”
Interoperability in Crypto
53:19 to 56:00
Explore the challenges of interoperability among different blockchain systems.
“That makes a ton of sense, but don't you need the, you need the merchants, you need the merchant buy-in.”
The Future of Stablecoins and Bitcoin
56:00 to 57:32
Exploring the potential future of stablecoins on Bitcoin and the transition period in cryptocurrency.
“And where this is all going is the one that's the most interoperable, Bitcoin, wins, right?”
American Exceptionalism and Market Trends
57:32 to 1:02:18
Discussion on the future of American exceptionalism and its implications on investments and market dynamics.
“I think that the intranet is very analogous to private blockchains, and it will likely meet the same fate.”
AI, Robotics, and Global Market Dynamics
1:02:18 to 1:10:00
Analyzing the impact of AI and robotics on global markets and the future of US economic dominance.
“They will need features and the AI resources that will be based in the United States.”
Analyzing Gold vs Bitcoin Trends
1:10:00 to 1:10:54
Discussion on the comparison between gold and Bitcoin performance visualized in a chart.
“I threw up this chart real fast to talk, because we've been mentioning gold quite a bit during the conversation.”
Generational Perspectives on Investment
1:10:54 to 1:12:09
Exploration of why older generations prefer gold over Bitcoin and the societal mindset influencing these choices.
“So whether the trend continues, who knows?”
Price Predictions and Market Dynamics
1:12:09 to 1:13:39
Predictions and insights regarding Bitcoin's future price trajectory and market behavior.
“Any other topics you guys are satisfied?”
Long-Term Bitcoin Outlook
1:13:39 to 1:15:31
Discussion on the potential for Bitcoin to reach significant price levels over the next few years.
“I think it takes us beyond a million dollars.”
Assessing Economic Influences on Bitcoin
1:15:31 to 1:18:29
Panelists share their views on how economic conditions might impact Bitcoin's price by year-end.
“And I think it's going to take us to the million dollar range over the course of three, four years.”
Political Implications and Future Legislation
1:18:29 to 1:24:01
Discussion on potential political changes and legislation affecting Bitcoin and the economy.
“I think we end the year between 130 and 140.”
Joe Carlosari Introduction
1:24:01 to 1:24:35
Joe introduces himself and his professional background in litigation.
“I'm at Joe Carlosari on Twitter, where I'm quite active talking about financial things.”
HODL's Ghee Recommendation
1:24:35 to 1:25:02
HODL shares a recommendation for a ghee product made from Jersey cow milk.
“I don't care if you follow me, but these homies of mine on Noster, they make this ghee called Great Ghee.”
Closing Remarks and Gratitude
1:25:02 to 1:25:14
The hosts express their appreciation for each other's participation and time.
“All right, gentlemen, gentlemen, really appreciate your time.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:02Hey, everyone.
0:03Joe Carlasare:Welcome to this Wednesday's release of the Bitcoin Fundamentals Podcast. So on today's show, we got the Bitcoin mastermind for the third quarter of 2025. And in this episode, we dive into the current state of the Bitcoin market, unpacking the key macro forces, driving price from global liquidity to the evolving role of stable coins and treasury strategies. Jeff introduces this idea of three burners and understanding market cycles, and we dig into the growing divergence between spot price and the ETF-driven flows. We also explore the rise of Bitcoin treasury companies, the shifting capital structures they're using from convertibles to perpetual preferreds, and how these firms may be outperforming miners over the long run.
0:44Joe Carlasare:On the regulatory front, the team breaks down the Genius Act and the potential to reshape stablecoin issuance in the US, especially for non-bank players. There's a friendly back and forth on the future of the US dollar, AI's impact moving forward, what tokenized gold, and JP Morgan's stablecoin mean for Bitcoin adoption. And of course, we wrap it all up with bold predictions from Bitcoin's price targets to whether Powell survives another term at the Fed. So let's dive into this. This was a really fun conversation. I'm sure you guys are going to love it.
1:20Joe Carlasare:Celebrating 10 years, you are listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by the Investors Podcast Network. Now for your host, Preston Pysh.
1:37Joe Carlasare:Hey everyone, welcome to the show. I'm here with the Mastermind discussion. Everybody is smiling and laughing because they were all here waiting and I thought this show was happening in an hour from now. So we are literally on the fly making this up as we go. Just a very candid conversation. This is how this is usually done anyway. I come up with questions and we don't even go to them. We just talk. So where do you guys want to start off? I think I know where you want to start off, but where do you guys want to start off? New all-time high. All-time high day. Yeah. You guys told me that when we first met and I didn't even realize.
2:10Joe Carlasare:Any thoughts on that? Any thoughts on the all-time high? You know what's great about an all-time high day is it's just this special moment in time where nobody has ever been wrong about Bitcoin. Nobody ever in the history of Bitcoin has ever been wrong about Bitcoin. Now that's going to change. We know that. But for right now, we can savor the moment. Yeah. I mean, the thing that's exciting about it for me is that Bitcoin, since really the launch of the ETFs, it makes it new to all-time high. It goes on a run. It goes up to a new level. And then it's consolidated for several months before breaking to a new level.
2:39And for as long as I've been in Bitcoin, I think it's trading very differently. I think it's trading in this massive range where there just aren't a lot of sellers. There are people steadily and in a very persistent way accumulating Bitcoin. and then we launch higher. And then we'll probably consolidate there for three, four months, and then launch higher. We talked about one of the prior podcasts, whether the cycle theory will die at some extent, the halving cycle. Obviously, we can have drawdowns that can happen, but that's really interesting. We're getting to that point here. We're in Q3 now of 2025.
3:09So it's interesting. It looks kind of dead, doesn't it? The cycle theory. We're trading like NVIDIA or something. Yeah. We can pull back, of course, anytime, time, right? All markets pull back over time. Just the question of like this predictable four-year cycle.
3:22Joe Carlasare:I've got a theory on why I think that's why we're seeing these ranges kind of take place. But before we go there, Jeff, any thoughts on the all-time high? Let's go. All-time high, more to come. Oh, yeah. I don't know how much we want to get in here, but I want to hear your theory first, Preston, but I'm very bullish. So I'll tell you why, but let's hear your theory first. I just think the trading ranges that we're seeing, like it just hung around this 110, to call it 90K range for what feels like, what, six months or so if we've been here? I think it's the ETFs causing this. I think you got a lot of options that get constructed over, you get a big ramp and then all the ETF owners that are here that are much more tourist-like than long-term holders or whatever.
4:05Joe Carlasare:And then you have all the options on top of it that are just building these resistance levels or bands around where it just moved to. So let's say this thing would run, and I'm just going to throw out numbers here. Let's just say it would run to like 140 pretty aggressively. You might have some bands that kind of get set up maybe around 150, 160, and then maybe down at 130 or whatever. And it just kind of goes sideways in that range for a few months before it kind of pops through maybe another level. I don't know if this is the new norm or not. I suspect it has something to do with the ETFs though, because they're so big.
4:39Joe Carlasare:Like, I mean, these things are growing like crazy, way beyond what I think anybody anticipated when they launched, what, a year and a half ago now. Yeah. Well, the other thing too here is just to piggyback your point, Preston, is I think that Wall Street traders, institutional money has a totally different view of the RSI than people who are crypto traders or Bitcoin traders. and in Bitcoin, we're used to the RSI running really hot during bull markets. And I think that the Wall Street guys see that getting up into the 70 range and they start getting pretty squeamish and they want to take off, trim their position, right?
5:12And so I think that's a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy because those guys are the big money sitting at the table right now. And so it's trading a little differently than it used to.
5:20Joe Carlasare:Just for people, the RSI is your relative strength index. This is a technical, you know, astrology for men. This is a technical metric that is really popular, especially for fast money on wall street. And they're just looking at it and saying, Hey, this thing's getting overheated. So let's go ahead and start lighting up on the position. And that's to Hoddle's point there. Anything else that you guys want to - It's basically like Preston said, it's a measure of how overheated the market is. And they believe that a market is overheated much sooner than the typical Bitcoiner believes. The typical Bitcoiner is like, what do you mean?
5:51It can't be overheated. We haven't even seen a bajillion percent this year. Still many, many multiples to go. So you guys clearly haven't heard my three burner theory about how the Bitcoin price works in a bull market. So I'll just lay it out here. I talked to Danny Knowles about this a little bit. So, but here it is. So imagine if you will, the price of Bitcoin is a pot of soup on the stove. And underneath that pot, you have three burners. Okay. Burner number one is global liquidity. Everybody knows about this. Now, Everybody literally and their grandma is talking about global liquidity now. Nobody knew about it a year ago.
6:25Now everybody talks about it. Burner number two that affects the price is the economy. You got to have economy that's revving up. And when that starts to heat up, that's a second burner to get the pot boiling. Burner number three, which comes towards the end of a bull market is leverage. So when everybody is just feeling wild and animal spirits are going, everybody starts applying leverage. So, so far, all we've had is burner number one going at a pretty good rate. The economy, as you guys probably know, has been stuck and kind of muddling since 2022. We haven't really recovered. Manufacturing has basically been below 50 at or below 50 since 2022.
7:01Services have held us higher and we're a services economy. So that's been sitting kind of in the 50 to 55 range for a couple of years and that's been propping it up. But it's still weak and this is still a very unusual economy, which I still think goes all the way back to COVID and the response to COVID, what happened there and all these kind of things that these interplays with the central intervention. So anyways, what I think is going to happen, okay, and Joe, I see your smile, so I want to get your response to this. Liquidity is rising. I think that in the second half of this year, so basically starting July through December, we are finally going to see the American economy take off and it's going to start ripping.
7:39And I think the global economy will follow actually, and it will be a strong second half. And when the economy is booming, that means businesses are booming and are flush with cash. It means people are employed and making decent money and have money to save and invest and speculate with. That gets burner number two going, and then the animal spirits start to pick up. And I still think there is a chance that we have this rip higher, where we have that exponential hockey stick higher now. And then one interesting thing that I'm still waiting for, there's a chance it can still happen like it has in the past where we have these traditional kind of four-year economic cycles, and we get this by the fourth quarter of this year, and it kind of melts everybody's face off, that's possible.
8:20But what it's looking to me more like is the economy is actually going to stretch into the first half of 2026, and we're actually going to have an extended cycle. So that's based on the forward metrics I look at. I think that's what's going to happen in this. So we're probably going to be talking about all-time highs somewhere in Q2 of 2026 now, which is a surprise to me. Yeah, that sounds about right. Joe? I couldn't agree more of the latter part. I think there are signs here of green shoots all over the place with the real economy. And I think that the yield curve is telling you that in particular, particularly the 30-year, we're rising, I think we're already down on 1.5 % now with 30-year.
8:52Yields are rising across the board. And to me, I think what you're seeing is you're seeing structurally higher nominal GDP and consistent inflation risks across services. I think the inflation swaps are starting to rise. I think you see crude and copper starting to rise. And recession fear is completely still. I was looking at the Goldman's index, there's 35 % probability of recession. That's way overblown. There's just no evidence of that. It's nowhere in sight. And for whatever reason, we've had this risk off atmosphere. And I think the rise structurally in yields personally right here, I think is a reaction function to the big, beautiful bill, to the stimulus that's coming into the system, to the fact that the recession risks were overblown.
9:31You got to remember, if you flashback six months ago, people were talking about Doge somehow magically cutting $2 trillion. I don't know where that was coming from, but seemingly smart individuals on FinTwit were talking about that actually being real. It's not. I think it was completely fabricated. I don't know why people got that in their mind. You were talking about there being a massive reduction in government spending overall outside of Doge. And what do we see? We saw the fact that that was largely abandoned and a failed effort on Doge. And we see now the big, beautiful bill, which is going to continue to drive consumption and potentially cause this boon in the economy that we've been waiting for, some catalyst.
10:06Now, is this a problem that it's being driven by the sugar eye of additional spending? Yes, but it's not a problem now. And it's not a problem in early 2026. And to me, to Jeff's point, right, if you're an investor, or you're positioned, I fail to see the bear case here. Obviously, any black swan can arise. There can be something totally off the radar that it's going to have to get priced into the market. But this idea that we were just going to collapse the economy and that it was all going to be take your medicine with tariffs and attack on the consumer and reduction spending, none of that's really materialized.
10:37The tariff is largely a negotiation tactic, and it's been walked back. And even now the market, like today, new tariff headlines, the boogeyman tariff, it's like just shrugging it off. It's not just Bitcoin, guys. like NASDAQ has made a new all-time high today. The S &P 500, all-time high today. Bitcoin breaking out. And the most interesting thing about it to me is that we know that when Bitcoin runs, it runs hard. And you had this whole year, basically, we were just consolidating over the inauguration day high of what was it, 110, somewhere there. We're going to break here and we're going to go higher.
11:06And I think this persistent services inflation, which there's signs of it picking up again, is going to keep us closer to 3 % than 2%. And what is the Fed going to do in that environment? Is the Fed really going to cut in the face of that? I know they're getting browbeat, but that in some ways makes the problem worse. So really fascinating here. I think the overall TLDR is that the recession risks are totally overblown based on the current data.
11:29Joe Carlasare:The holy bull in the house. Yeah. I mean, listen, I think this is an absolutely exciting time to be long risk assets across the board, but especially with Bitcoin, because we've got every catalyst in the world. We've got massive Bitcoin treasury companies, which I'm sure we'll get into, is sucking up Bitcoin, planning to buy Bitcoin, getting in the marketplace. We got a frenzy on that. We got Bitcoin, I think, structurally undervalued here. We look at all time high, and sometimes we get this natural PTSD like, oh, this seems a little weak. I think it's the opposite. I would be curious, Jeff, your thoughts or Preston and Hodel.
12:00Do you really feel like there's leverage in the Bitcoin space right now? I feel like there's a complete lack of leverage. Right. That's what I'm saying. That burner hasn't even turned on yet. Yeah. So yeah, we're not even close to the exciting part yet of a bull market. And I think to you guys point just a few days ago, I don't post very much on social media, but on Noster, I post a little thing of a reverse head and shoulders pattern that I've been watching play out with Bitcoin. And we're pretty much there right now. So with a price at about 112 to 113, I think it taps on the door and then it shoots higher.
12:29And I think we'll be at 140 to 160 before people can blink. And so people who are sitting on the sideline waiting for it to pull back again, I think they're out of luck personally.
12:38Joe Carlasare:So I want to talk about a point that Joe brought up about how there's been this massive policy shift. You started off the beginning of the year, Elon was supposed to go out and trim two, what was it? Two trillion. He backed it down to 1.5 and Bassett was supposed to raise a bunch of revenue through the tax adjustment to the tariffs and all this. That was the plan. And all along, we had a conversation early in the year and we were like, there's no way they can do this without offsetting it and still printing the money and inserting it into the system. If they pull out$2 trillion worth of liquidity in the system, they have to still print it somehow and get it in there, regardless of how much they're saving the government and doing all these things.
13:18Joe Carlasare:And sure enough, that's exactly where I think the Trump organization found themselves. And I had a conversation with Luke Groman. He was like, this is the biggest pivot I've ever seen in an administration where they're basically saying, Look at this bill they passed. I heard rumors that Elon and Bassett came to blows in the hallway. I'm sure that there's, I don't know if you guys heard any of that or what you've heard, because that Elon was just, he was given a fool's errand. At the end of the day, he was given a fool's errand. And it's so ironic to me, this guy's the richest person on the planet.
13:54Joe Carlasare:And yet he doesn't realize that this entire game is rigged. It doesn't matter who's in office, which party's in office, they're going to juice the numbers because they have to, to keep the economies flowing and that you don't get credit impairment. So guys, what are your thoughts on the pivot? And I know you think it's going to just rip into the end of the year. And I agree. Any comments on that or the pivot and maybe the implications of it anymore? Well, I'll just say, I don't think it was just rumors. It was like there were published articles about how Elon hurled his body into Besson's rib cage and body checked him like hockey style.
14:27But yeah, this is good intentioned people, well-intentioned going into a situation, hoping they could fight the institutional inertia to spend more money and just running up against the wall. You're taking some of the most successful, innovative people currently alive across many different domains and subject matters, and they're just running into realizing just how incredibly difficult it is. And then the administration who desperately wants to make a deal and acknowledging like, look, name a better deal that we can get through the Congress. This is how screwed up the system is. Congress is so broken.
14:59We have to make all these sacrifices when what we're doing is effectively just agreeing to what we had before with slight incremental changes, the slightest change in the world, even with the best of intentions. So to me, it's got to be frustrating for those guys because I do think they went in there thinking they could cut out a lot of fat, but unfortunately, it's just, it's a tall order.
15:17Joe Carlasare:But it seems like they're looking at, okay, we have to print. We have to print in style. We got midterms coming up and they're looking at Bitcoin. And I think they're all in, man. I think that they're looking at Bitcoin as the only thing that actually solves all of this. And they're loading their personal bags, is my impression. Do you guys disagree with this? No, I think that's 100 % accurate. It seems to me like everyone on Wall Street, everyone in a powerful position is exactly like you said, just simply loading their bags. I had a friend call me. I had orange, but this guy's a pretty wealthy guy.
15:51I used to work for him back in the day in my 20s. And he called me, I convinced him to buy five Bitcoin back in 2018. And he had gone from, he put in$20 ,000, it's like a half million dollars, right? And he called me and he goes, hey, we were sitting around talking about Trump and everything that's going on. And we decided finally, after all these years, you're right. And we put 25 % of our net worth into Bitcoin. And they're like, they're eight figure people. So that's a significant position, right? And I think that everybody has now, once Bitcoin crossed$100 ,000, the psychological phenomenon or effect that occurred was everyone now default believes the Bitcoin story.
16:26Everybody believes that Bitcoin is going to millions of dollars a coin. That's a very recent and new phenomenon. I don't think everybody believes that. No, I think they do. Many people do. They just don't admit it. I think everyone believes it. Like deep in their heart, they know it's about to happen. Even the critics? Even Peter Schiff knows it. He's on the board. Dude, it's an open secret. Peter Schiff has got positions on the board of the different crypto companies and like, come on, like everyone knows it. It's like the iron shake, right? Like he's playing the heel. Schiff is out there playing the heel, like America.
16:59Joe Carlasare:You know, like that's what he's talking about. To Hoddle's point, Joe, to Hoddle's point, I've heard a lot of like hardcore critics that will say something to the effect of, well, it might go to a million, but that doesn't mean that it's going to end up being successful or something like they just acknowledge that it's possible that it's going to a million, but that it's somehow going to fail at a million, which what is the, what are we at? 20 trillion at that point? Yeah. Yeah. But don't you think that's just like, you know, saving face because they've been wrong for fricking forever. They still want to, they don't want to try to call a top anymore.
17:31There's yeah. I mean, I've heard Michael Green say something like this. Like he's like, Oh, it could go higher. I'm not going to bet against it. I'm not going to short it, but it'll, you know, I think that's just saving face. I don't think they actually believe it because they would position for that. They actually thought it was going to a million dollars. They would put more money in. Take the most staunch critics in the world out, right? Because that's a very small portion of the population, the intolerant minority, right? I think that the average person believes that Bitcoin is going to millions of dollars of coin.
17:57And that is something that obviously we were all laughed at and called insane for saying things like that. And now that is like a default assumption. So everybody believes that the Bitcoin story is going to happen. The only thing going on in the minds of retail participants is they don't believe that they are going to be a participant in that story for whatever reason. I miss that.
18:16Joe Carlasare:I miss that. Yeah. I missed it. It's too expensive. It's for other people that are more well off and they just write it off as I missed that boat. And then that brings us to the treasury companies. Yes. Because the treasury companies say to the person who has this psychological effect where they go, I missed it. No, Hey, here's another opportunity. This is a time machine to 2017. 10 step in young man let's go get you your big that's it it's crazy the comments that i see online in reference to the treasury companies is just asinine like all of it all of the people really don't understand security analysis now are there is everybody going to be like micro strategy absolutely not but there's going to be some companies that exercise this strategy that are going to crush it.
19:05Joe Carlasare:They're going to absolutely murder it. And to something to Jeff's point that you made earlier in the show about these three burners, I would maybe even make the argument that there's a fourth burner, which is just liquidity pipes into Bitcoin, right? The plumbing that is now being wired up into Bitcoin, and one in particular is just preferred stock. So this is a market that was just really small in the grand scheme of things relative to debt markets, to credit markets. And I think that the plumbing on this is just getting opened up, and I think it's going to become a massive market in the coming 10 years, like massive.
19:48Joe Carlasare:One of the reasons why is convertible debt creates this situation where it puts resistance resistance levels into the common stock based on assuming this whole treasury strategy thing kind of gets way bigger than it is right now. That's what I think is going to happen. I think it's going to get way bigger, like monumental in size in the coming 10 years. And when you're looking at how convertible debt sets up like this Delta hedge situation on the common stock, you put these resistance bands in that make it hard for the MNAV on the company to run. But when you do it with preferred stock, perpetual preferred stock, where there's no end date for the call on the principle of the initial issuance, you don't get that.
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20:30Joe Carlasare:And I think MicroStrategy has figured this out. And I would be really surprised to see them do much more convertible debt issuance because of the issues that it kind of creates in the options and everything. Basically, it sucks all the volatility out of the common stock every time they issue this. And they don't want that. They don't want that at all. So I see this market, this preferred market getting so much bigger. And I don't think your everyday, I think most people don't even understand preferred stock. If I have a conversation with a hundred people off the street, I think there might be one or two that actually even understand what preferred stock is.
21:06Joe Carlasare:And I think this market's about to get really big. Yeah. I think in fact, you can kind of look at what Saylor is doing as him building out his own yield curve and he can go up to, I believe this is speculation, but I think he can potentially go up to the kegger of Bitcoin, which means there's a lot of room there to build that out using those preferred structures. And then you're right about the treasury companies, like not all of them are going to, here's the nuanced opinion, because you're right, like people are out here, there's all this paper Bitcoin discourse on Twitter and everything, which is very fun and colorful.
21:34But I'll give you a bit of a nuanced opinion slash prediction, which is, I think the treasury companies are a real thing. They're a real phenomenon, and they're going to live large in the world over the next 10, 15, 20 years. I also think that we're in the infancy of a very large bubble, a bubble that could be like dot-com in nature. In the short term.
21:53Joe Carlasare:In the short term. And that's over the course of like maybe three, four years. Totally agree. Here's the distinction in my mind, Hodel. So largely, I would say the companies that have begun and grown and had traction as a Bitcoin treasury company, I would say they've done it in a responsible way with both their debt issuance, with their share issuance. I would say so. What tends to happen in frenzies and in the short term, you know, things that attract a lot of attention, flavor of the month type strategies, I'm not saying this is, but I think at the beginning that you could have entrants into the marketplace that move out on the risk curve.
22:25They start to do riskier things to acquire Bitcoin. And that's where it really gets introduced. I don't think we've even seen that yet, but somebody is going to come along and say, well, they're having such success if we just tweak a little bit, if we just take out a little bit of debt that set a higher rate or play a mildly different strategy, that's where you introduce the real contagion risk. So that's to me what I'm on the lookout for. That's the sign of overheating.
22:47Joe Carlasare:To this point, Joe, to this point, I think that a lot of the amateurs that come in and try to do this, they're going to think that they've got to provide better value in the issuance than microstrategy. But what I think is going to be discovered with enough time is that the smaller the company is that's implementing this without a whole bunch of operational risk behind it, okay, is actually more desirable to the market participants because as a percentage of how much more Bitcoin they can stack relative to the treasury that they have, it's going to yield way bigger and better results than the behemoths.
23:26Joe Carlasare:And what's fascinating about this is it's almost like the laws in nature where the animal can only, like an elephant can only get so big, right? And then it has a disadvantage because it's too big. You have the same dynamic, I think, that's going to play out for these treasury companies. And so I guess what I'm saying is you don't have to, I don't think that the people implementing this strategy really need to go out there and offer way better dividend yields on, let's say they're doing a preferred issuance. I don't think it has to be all that much better than MicroStrategy for it to be desirable to the market, because especially if there's a callability piece to it, they're going to have a lot of buyers, I think, that are going to want the issuance because I think that the yields that the underlying will perform at is going to be pretty good.
24:17Joe Carlasare:And I see, Jeff, you seem like you agree with me on this. Yeah. Yeah. And I agree with that. And I have like multiple points about this is I think that several of these newer ones, probably I'm sure there's some we haven't even heard of yet that are coming to the market soon too. They, I think they have great potential to outperform MicroStrategy, who is the founding father of this strategy in the bull market. But I will be watching very closely as a fund manager for who is putting on the most leverage late in the cycle, who is hyping up on Twitter and all the social media accounts and talking about how awesome they are.
24:48I will be watching them closely because they will get absolutely wrecked in a bear market. If we get a bear market, if liquidity pulls away, if the economy turns, I mean, these are like basically the same thing that happened to miners in 2020, 2021. We saw some of these miners that were the best performers during that cycle that they put leverage on late in the cycle and they paid and lots of them went bankrupt because of that. And I think that same thing is going to happen this cycle. So, well, that tells the bond issuance. It's not the equities. You're going to look at the bonds. I mean, that's going to be the tell, I think.
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28:53Joe Carlasare:Another interesting dynamic with all this is when you look at Meta Planet and you look at the MNav that it's trading, where is it at right now? Like eight times it's treasuring nuts, something like that. Yeah, I'm not sure. Let's just for simplicity, just say that it's like eight times. So if they go out there and they raise$100 million, they can basically go buy the Bitcoin as if it's on sale for, call it$30 ,000 right now, instead of it being$110 ,000. It's real ballpark numbers. And if you're buying it for$30 ,000 and today in the market, it's worth$110 ,000. And let's say we have an 80 % drawdown.
29:29Joe Carlasare:They basically bought the Bitcoin at the drawdown level. And so from a risk standpoint, these companies that have the really high MNAV that are exercising and buying all this spot, they seem like they're going to be able to weather the downturns more easily. I see Joe literally. It depends on what they have to pay. Right. I mean, it depends on what obligations they're writing. Yeah. So. Well, you're saying. You're saying. How the debt is encumbered. Exactly. Yeah. Of course. Because they've all, they're all adopting. Of course. In this strategy. they're like, well, we're never going to sell the Bitcoin.
30:00Well, we'll see about that. You know, once you have to meet your obligation, like micro strategy, I think one of the reasons why I think to Jeff's point, right, it trades where it trades is because he's put in place a system where it's very, I think it would be very likely that he's a forced seller. It almost, to me, I can't even envision a circumstance. Even if Bitcoin were to fall 50%, he wouldn't be a forced seller. Just look at what they've got out there. I don't know. Do you disagree, Jeff? No, I don't think they will ever have to sell. Not during seller's tenure.
30:26Joe Carlasare:I mean, if you add up his interest expense and all of the dividends, even the ones that he doesn't have to pay because they're non-accumulative, I think it's 200 million a year. It's a pittance compared to even if you have an 80 % drawdown, he can continue to do that. Not to mention he can just do more issuance and come up with more cash to make the payments. Anybody in here, I think it's going to make the S &P 500 right now? Yeah, I think so. This year? Yeah. I think so too. i think you i think the s &p is in a situation where if they don't include it they're at risk of being undesirable from just because you got such a fast rising star in the mix if they don't include it people are going to be like well i'm not owning that i want to own whatever else that they shut out tesla for far too long yeah we know that right like that i don't know jeff you didn't weigh in i'm 50 50 don't have a i don't have a strong opinion on it i don't and i don't know anybody on the panel, so I can't.
31:26This is the point of indexation, right? Like the indexers in some sense win again, because eventually it will get into the S &P 500. Now, if it gets in this year or not, I don't know. But eventually we, even you agree, right, Joe? Oh yeah, eventually. The Bitcoin is going to come to where you are if you're an indexer and you're not going to get the same returns that the early guys like us got, but you're going to do okay. Like you're going to be all right. Right. And I think that's I think that's very important for, you know, not just Bitcoin, but the markets broadly and MSTR stock. But, you know, the markets broadly are going to be buoyed by the amount of Bitcoin that Michael Saylor is holding.
32:00Good Lord. Do you guys think that so slight switch of subject, but because I brought it up, do you think Bitcoin miners are going to catch any sort of a bid this bull market? I'm still going to fall bag, but I'm not that hopeful. So I go ahead, Joe. I think a lot of the miners are becoming treasury companies is really what's going on. Well, if you spend any amount of time on Twitter spaces with Mike Alfred, he'll tell you they already have. And he'll cite his favorite example of a stock, which I'm not going to name for obvious reasons. I mean, you know, there have been a few of them who in recent weeks looking at one here, it has 300 percent.
32:35That's not a bad bid. I have a diversified portfolio of miners, which means that some of them are up 300 percent and others are down 99 percent. Right. It's diversified.
32:45Joe Carlasare:I don't like the miners. I don't own any miners. The main reason that I like when I'm looking at it, can they implement the same, the ones that are public, can they implement the same thing that Michael's doing? They can. The issue is, is they have this operational business with extreme risk relative to the treasury. In addition to the other risks that we were talking about as just far as meeting interest rate or interest expense and dividend payments, if you're issuing them in a cumulative way. So why would I own that versus something that doesn't have all that operational execution risk and liability, especially when you look at how much of a cutthroat business all of that is.
33:28Joe Carlasare:So - Hugely capital intensive. By the way, I like Mike Alfred a lot. So I'm not, I'm not knocking him at all, but I just feel like miners were the flavor of the last cycle. And I just, it's hard for me to see how they catch a sustained bid this time around, personally. Yeah, it's going to be treasury companies this time around. I actually personally believe the treasury company bubble can get, like I said, dot-com level large, which was$11 trillion in that era. Because basically when you have this big type of bubble, it's like around an idea. The dot-com bubble was around the internet. And it was like the thing I said earlier, everybody now believes in the Bitcoin story.
34:02Well, in 1996, everybody believed in the internet story. They just weren't really participating. And then the fever caught them at some point between 97 and 2000, suddenly everybody and their mother was in on the thing, right? And like every idea that was possibly going to happen on the internet had a company that was associated with it doing a rudimentary or crappy or fake version of that idea in 1996, right? Like broadcast.com. Yeah, it's a big deal that we all watch on the internet, right? But we don't watch any of Mark Cuban, but Mark Cuban got paid a lot of money for that idea. And I think same thing with the treasury companies now is that the big idea is Bitcoin.
34:38Everybody goes, Bitcoin is going to happen. I missed it, but it's going to happen. And we're in the infancy of this bubble. And what's going to happen, I think, is that the treasury companies need to differentiate themselves. Because if you look at XYZ treasury versus what's the difference between Nakamoto and CEP, or sorry, Jack Maulers 21, or the Metaplanet, or this or that or whatever, you need to have a credible story about how you're differentiated from your competitors. That credible story is going to be something about Sats Flow, Bitcoin-specific businesses, how you generate Bitcoin capital.
35:10Oh, we're doing it on the Lightning Network. Oh, we're doing it over here with insurance. Oh, we're doing it over here with this. We're doing it over here with that. And like Pets.com before it in the dot-com bubble, a lot of these ideas are going to be real ideas that will happen in the future. Pets.com later became Chewy, which sold to PetSmart for$3 billion. But in the interim, we have no ability in 1997 to ship giant bags of dog food through the mail through the US Postal Service, right? So like there is missing infrastructure that's going to cause some of these ideas not to come to fruition, but people are going to want to bet on them now.
35:43And that's the thing that's going to cause the bubble, I think, because everyone's going to get really excited about the internet of money, Bitcoin, the future of where this is happening. And that's why I think like Jeff was saying we could expand into Q2 of 26. Dude, I think this could be a three or four year run with like a slight lull in between. It takes us up to beyond a million dollars.
36:03Joe Carlasare:Well, another, yeah, because of the dynamic of if these shelves that we're talking about, like it gets a run-up and then it goes sideways for six months and it gets another run-up, maybe the derivatives market is preventing this euphoria from really kind of creating the 80 % drawdown and the massive run-up. I mean, when you look at the, just using power law, and I'm not saying I'm like a huge promoter of this power loss stuff. But when you look at the price action, it is just going right down the center of that model. It's not going out to the extremes. Now, whether it stays there or not, I don't know.
36:35Joe Carlasare:But I find it interesting that it's just running like this really clean path right down the middle of the model right now. Yeah. And for me, I think the deciding factor will be if the Trump administration is able to successfully rev up the economy, and especially if they can overheat it, then I think we see it start to rise significantly above that line where it can go exponential at that point. That's my take. I also think there's a potential future where you could have a massive bubble in treasuries with a more stable, steady power law like climb in Bitcoin itself. And I'm not sure which of those futures plays out.
37:07A bubble in treasuries? Yeah. In Bitcoin treasury companies. Bitcoin, I thought you meant treasuries. Sorry, sorry, no, sorry. Bitcoin treasury. I have a very Bitcoin centric worldview. I have the same reaction. Regular treasuries don't mean anything to me. Like there's a bubble in treasuries right now. What are you talking about? The huddles all in on treasuries. I'm like, why would you guys invest in that? We talk about boomer money. Like what the hell?
37:28Joe Carlasare:Love it. Joe, do you have any policy or up like Washington DC update with the genius act and all that kind of stuff? I promised huddle before we got on that I would ask him about his thoughts on stable coins, which I was at the stable coin conference back in Vegas. And I wanted to make sure that we had sufficient attention paid to the stable coin, massive move. We also have to talk about our good friend, Tom Lee, and his new comment that Ethereum is the new Bitcoin, Preston. I really want to get your take on that, but we'll go to HODL first. I didn't even hear this from Tom. Oh, yeah. You didn't hear it?
38:02He said on CNBC that Ethereum is the new Bitcoin. So your reaction. That don't make a lot of sense, Joe. Well, here's his thesis, okay? Don't yell at me in the comments, but I'm just going to give you his thesis, okay? So his thesis is as follows. He has started a Ethereum treasury company. And his thought process is that Ethereum as the second largest adopted, quote unquote, blockchain is going to be ripe for massive transaction usage as all these companies and financial institutions implement stable coins. So for those that aren't familiar, we have a massive piece of legislation that looks like it's going to be signed by the president, the Genius Act for stable coins.
38:45It's going to make non-financial institutions have a clear regulatory path to issuing stable coins. So market participants are really excited about this. A lot of crypto companies are excited about this. And the bet that Tom Lee is making is that he thinks there's going to be this huge demand for Ethereum. And he thinks that if he launches this Ethereum treasury company, he's going to be able to adopt the sailor strategy and then he's going to continue to increase his returns because not only is he going to continue to borrow and buy Ethereum, which will be needed for transactions, but he can stake the Ethereum Preston.
39:19And when he stakes the Ethereum, it will only in this perpetual money machine advance his returns. So any commentary on that reaction to that? Does anything prove how dead Ethereum is more than the fact that they don't even have their own narrative this cycle. They had to steal our narrative. Like what, you know, you could do NFTs again. Like what happened to monkey pictures, man? You know, at least that, that was your narrative.
39:43Joe Carlasare:Can you believe that the, I mean, they were literally making pictures of JPEGs of rocks in different shades and selling them for a hundred thousand. Like how did that even. And it may have, and here's the crazy part. It may have been a better investment than an Ethereum treasury company. you know here's the power law chart that i was saying that it seems like it's just kind of like running up the middle there's a lot more time that would have to play out with it continuing to do that for that to kind of looks kind of good warrant the comment but anyway just throwing it out there so do you guys think is there any situation jeff where stable coins have any impact in the bitcoin market you see any positive catalyst for bitcoin and the stable coin is that just totally at the periphery, not even on our radar, not worthy of discussion.
40:29Well, I think, well, a couple of things. I think that it's expected from where we are right now in history. I think we're at a transition point, right? Where we're phasing from analog to digital, we're facing from fiat to Bitcoin. And I think that stable coins are the perfect sort of segue to get into Bitcoin from the analog world. So it's getting everybody digital, right? Get everybody on programmable money. And then you have the people like, you can't deny like Tether, those dudes, Like, first of all, that's the best business model that's ever existed. I think that's inarguable at this point, at least to date.
41:00And they're buying a ton of Bitcoin and they're putting on their balance sheet. So they're not stupid. They're sort of fundamentally Bitcoiners to some degree, at least. And they get Bitcoin. If I could create that business model, I would do that in a heartbeat, right? If I could give somebody a token for a dollar and then buy treasuries and then just collect the interest and not have to pay anybody and then buy Bitcoin with that, I would do that all day, every day. So it's a great business model. So I think it's a natural segue into where we're going. I don't think that they'll last. I think Bitcoin is built to last.
41:29These will have a limited lifespan, probably of a few decades or so. That's my guess. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. One part of being an investor that I don't think gets enough attention is how hard it can be to continue to improve as an investment researcher. And for myself, I'll often find that when I finish a great conversation with some industry expert or fund manager, my head is full of ideas, but by the time I sit down to write it all up, half of them are already gone. That's why I've been using Plod Note Pro. It's a small device that sticks to the back of my phone and captures the conversation and hands me back a clean, searchable recap.
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44:48Joe Carlasare:Joe, don't you think that the US messed up on the Genius Act with the part where they're saying that the issuers can't pay the interest of the coupons to the holders of the token? No. Well, mess up in the sense that they're going to be shut out of many markets abroad. Yes. I think that's true. So just for the benefit, and again, I'm sorry, this is not cool in the Bitcoin podcast, but I think it's fascinating because what it's showing is this, the massive lobbying power of banks. Because the banks fought very hard to prevent the yields being transferred in any way given to customers. Because keep in mind, the stable coin applies to non-financial institutions.
45:25What does that mean? That means if you're not a bank and you're launching a stable coin, you have to abide by the Genius Act. It does not apply to banks issuing stable coins. So you may have noticed in the news about JPM and do you have a question, but JPM, for example, could launch their stable coin and pay yield. No way. Yes. Right. That's crazy. That's why I'm here. Dropping the alpha.
45:46Joe Carlasare:Wow. Now what's going to be interesting is that's going to be a blood bath of competition for the incumbent banks. And if you're not a bank and you're being forced to sweep the yield, the coupons, and you sweep them into Bitcoin, you're a way safer institution to use the coin. And nobody's using these things for the yield right now. They're using them to get in and out of all their degenerate gambling in the crypto economy. So I don't think that the typical person that's using these coins are using it for the yield. Correct. And then you also will have a bifurcated market because under the Genius Act that becomes law, entities outside the United States, so foreign issuers, for example, Heather, they basically have to subject themselves to a comparable US regulator.
46:35They have to prove and get a permission to do the issuance. They have to abide by most of the major banking regulations and laws, which I am skeptical they will ever do. And the big one, they have to subject their entire organization to safety and soundness reviews from the Washington Stablecoin Review Board. So because of that, you're going to have these entities outside the United States that have to pick and choose. Do you want to access United States capital markets and play in the sandbox and know that your organization is now subject to US jurisdiction? Or do you want to stay outside? So my prediction is you're going to have this bifurcated market where you have tether that largely stays outside of the United States, they're going to be continuing to be out there and trying to have penetration on both the trading vehicles, the finances and these different trading desks, but also locally.
47:21And to me, if the goal is we want emerging markets to adopt stable coins, I think that this is just my view. I'd be curious, Jeff and Hodel and you, Preston, what you think about it, but I don't know why you would be more encouraged to adopt a stable coin that somehow has Washington regulation behind it. To me, if anything, if you're outside the United States, you want something that isn't subject to Washington, where they can't freeze the accounts very easily, they won't freeze the Tether. You want to get far away from the reach of Washington outside the United States as possible. That's just my read, but I'd be curious if you think that regulation of Washington would cause emerging markets to adopt it.
47:54Joe Carlasare:Well, what I find interesting is, because I didn't understand that, Joe, what you just said, but I find it interesting that Tether made the decision to start tokenizing gold in the face of what you just said. Think about it. Instead of buying treasuries, they're saying, okay, well, gold's kind of better than the dollar anyway. So why don't we just tokenize that for people that want dollar-like stability and performance? Is that why they started tokenizing gold? I think it's definitely an effort to potentially still have access to US markets. Yeah. I mean, that's a key thing because it's not dollars.
48:31Stable coins are just applying to dollar backed or purported peg tokens. So it's fascinating. Wow.
48:37Joe Carlasare:What a play. But I think they messed up by, well, maybe, I don't know. Well, it depends on who messed up, right? If you're the banks. Yeah. That's what I'm saying. I think the Wall Street banks. The banks, why would the banks want there to be stable coins that can pay yield? I mean, think about it. Think about the effect that would have on money markets. And money markets have systemic risk factors in our society, right? If money markets are just disrupted, that causes financial stability. The Fed is going to be on that very closely watching if money markets get disrupted. And money markets have had issues before, historically.
49:08So I think that there was an impetus to try to keep the yield part of it out. These can be rails and peg tokens and these types of things. But once you start playing with yield, that really threatens the model of the banking sector. So I got a question there, a couple for you, Joe. So to me, so based on this, it looks to me like Tether is going to remain ex-US. It's going to be the international option. and I think they're going to pivot to gold. And I think that gold stable coin concept is actually going to rise and be very popular in the coming five to 10 years. Relatively, it's going to rise in popularity.
49:38Dollar will still stay popular, but gold will quickly rise. Here in the US, it's basically circle now, which is outside of the banks versus the JPMD and the other bank stable coins. How do you see that playing out circle versus the bank coins? Who wins that in the longer run? I think it's going to be fascinating. I mean, to me, it's not just those two, because I think we track at our firm. I think there's a hundred stables that are, have plans to launch or already launching. I mean, most of the major exchanges have some version of a stable coin. Now Kraken has a stable coin.
50:11Joe Carlasare:A hundred, Joe. Yeah. Yeah. But it's going to be like the ETFs, right? You're going to have this massive flood of a bunch of vehicles and then it'll consolidate down to the few winners, right? It's like, think of it like a sport, right? You have to get market penetration. And to do that, you're going to have to figure out, how do I get this into the hands of customers? And ideally what you'd want is you want merchants to somehow incentivize people to accept the stables, right? Because stables are great for peer-to-peer transactions, but we know that a lot of people, they're going to take that and they want to buy things at Amazon or they want to buy things at other retailers.
50:42So the key thing for me is how do you get this to get outside of the crypto trading apparatus and used as medium of exchange. Credit card companies would have a very easy path to doing that. I have not heard credit card companies doing that. I'd be curious though, I don't really see an avenue. I have a JPM account. I don't know why I would use the JPM stablecoin. See, what I think is going to happen is I think they're going to introduce them through, they're going to talk about, they're finally going to take on Bitcoin custody and they're going to be like, okay, you want us to custody your Bitcoin?
51:12First, send your cash in here, convert it to the JPMD and then convert some of that into Bitcoin. And then why not have a little bit of yield over here in the JPMD coin and hold Bitcoin and we'll custody all of it for you. I think that's how they're going to introduce it.
51:26Joe Carlasare:Joe, are they doing this on Solana, Tron? Like, what are they using to do this? I think, I just want to confirm this. I think they selected base, this base network, which I am by no means an expert on HODL. Probably is all over that. Probably got a ton of base to open. He's based. HODL's based. Totally. Bags of base. Hold on. I got to figure this out. Go ahead, Todd. What were you going to say? I'm going to do a little research. No, you know what I was going to say is one thing I've heard about the Tether guys is that they sort of have this worldview that China is going to be this perfected version of communism, that America is sliding into feudalism, and that they're building, they're essentially going to be the iron bank for the new emerging network state, which respects sovereigns.
52:09And that's a very large worldview. And it's kind of crazy that they're actually in a position to do something of that nature. They could actually do that. They could actually pull it off. So, oh, another thing on the stable coin thing is the reason, one reason, Joe, you tell me what you think about this, but I've heard that there might be a proliferation of smaller stable coins under 10 billion, because under 10 billion, they're state regulated and not federal. That's correct. There's a reg arbitrage there. Absolutely. And that's where you get this massive number, right? You're going to have these effective regional banks.
52:39There will be big winners, but you'll have these small regional banks that have their own. You've got a great read on like the consumer. Like if a local bank is issuing and pumping up a stable coin, do you really think that as a product market fit? You think people are going to be like, you know, I'll give you a, I'll give you a consumer perspective. I was thinking about a little bit in regards to this, which is an expansion of the gift card industry, essentially in a way that like, let's say I'm a, you know, normal family in the Midwest. I do a lot of my shopping at Walmart and Walmart has a stable that they offer me.
53:06Right. And so I park X portion of my check direct deposit with Walmart into this stable coin with the money I know I'm going to spend at Walmart. And Walmart gives me huge discounts and incentives for doing so because they can't offer me yield, but they can offer me crazy discounts and incentives. That makes a ton of sense, but don't you need the, you need the merchants, you need the merchant buy-in. And this is the problem. I don't, maybe they get that through. I don't, I don't know. That seems like it has to be merchant driven. It has to be, you know, Amazon, Walmart, major retailers saying you have to use this for some reason.
53:38I think so too. Yeah. You need the, you need Amazon, you need Walmart, Starbucks, et cetera.
53:41Joe Carlasare:You guys ready for this? Yeah. Okay. So base is an Ethereum layer two chain developed by Coinbase. I asked it. Okay. So who runs the nodes of base? And the answer came back. Coinbase is currently the sole sequencer node on base. Wow. There you go. You only need one. You only need one. This is nuts. this is so funny coinbase is just taking over the world i mean the non-bitcoin world yeah coinbase is like basically they're like they're like the lex luther of the government exchange brian armstrong has been respecting bitcoin lately he has here's the quote bitcoin again the quote preston we're thrilled to see one of the nation's most prominent banks come on chain said jesse pollock creator of base and vp engineering coinbase base offers sub second sub cent 24 out 7 settlement which makes fund transfers between JPM institutional clients instant.
54:38We're proud to partner with JPM and this pilot combines the credibility of JPM to help us bring institutional money into a global economy.
54:45Joe Carlasare:I mean, one sequencer, of course it's instant. Hey question. What's, what's the point of ripple? Isn't this ripple soul? Yeah. He's on the hill a bit, huh? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh my God. This is such a, but you know what? I'm just thinking about all this through the lens of your typical person who doesn't care about finance at all they see all of this all this fancy language and terminology oh it's a sequencer on top of the layer two of ethereum and just like what a what a rube goldberg machine disaster of just you know terminology and nonsense total nonsense well and the big problem is like okay you have one chain that this base chain that's got one coin running on it.
55:32There's no interoperability because it's not across protocol. So you got like one higher ecosystem, like, well, I've got stables on Solana and Ethereum and all this. That's a mess that the consumer experience there is terrible. It's just absolutely awful.
55:47Joe Carlasare:Well, it's going to be, yeah, it's going to be such a walled garden that either you're a JPM client and they force feed you that you're now using their blockchain, but nobody's taking that thing outside of their ecosystem. To your point, there's no interoperability whatsoever. And where this is all going is the one that's the most interoperable, Bitcoin, wins, right? And is actually backed and has tens of thousands of people running nodes because they want to, not because they're being forced to. I just don't know how people can't see this, man. It is crazy. Do you think we get stable coins on some sort of layer two or some sort of derivative of Bitcoin?
56:24I mean, well, I think Tether's already said they're doing it.
56:27Joe Carlasare:Yeah. Tether's already made that announcement in January. That they're doing stables on Bitcoin. Yeah. Is that going to be not in the United States, right? Because they're. Well, I mean, they're doing it on layer two lightning. So, and you don't need a token to run it on lightning. So, yeah, I don't know. It's, this is really interesting. And that was just JP Morgan. I can't imagine what the other, what you're seeing, the others are using it for their quote unquote tech to run these things. Peter. Sorry. Go ahead. I was just going to say, some of you guys are too young probably, but in the 90s, the intranet phase took over for a very long time, several years.
57:04And that's what I think is going to happen with these stable coins. They're going to spend tons and tons and tons of marketing dollars. And like what you're talking about, Honol, with trying to get you to Walmart, here, give you all these discounts. Here's a Disney stable coin, park your money here, we'll give you cheaper tickets. And I think they're going to really push hard for about three, four, five years, and then it's just going to fizzle because they're going to realize it's not worth the effort. And then, yeah, because all roads do eventually lead to Bitcoin, for sure. This is just this transition period that we're in.
57:32Completely. I think that the intranet is very analogous to private blockchains, and it will likely meet the same fate. And we've seen that with many different private blockchain projects over the 15-year history of Bitcoin. So yeah, all roads lead to Bitcoin, man. All roads lead to Bitcoin. Can I change the subject? Yeah, of course. Preston, are you able to put, I don't know if you have trader view or something. Yeah, I can put something up. An XPX divided by gold.
57:58Joe Carlasare:XPX divided by gold. Okay. Let me, let me. And as long as like the longest term possible, a hundred years hit the hole. Okay. Let's see here. This is what I can't stop thinking about. And I've, it's, I've been going on this for a couple months now. And my leading question to you guys. XPX divided by gold. Is that what you said? Yeah. Okay. And if you do it on trading, you can go back to like the 1920s. Oh, really? And my question I'd pose to you guys is, do you think that the period of American exceptionalism, as people talk about, is it over for now? And yes or no? And I'll take the other side of that, Joe.
58:30I think it is. I think we're in a period, and I think this chart is very helpful in showing this, that I think that we've reached the point where the dollar strength, it's strengthened enough that investment in US assets, financial assets has reached a peak. And we're now rolling over similar to 1929, and then into the 30s, similar to the late 1960s and through the 70s, and similar to basically the dotcom bust through about 2011. And I think it's sort of shocking to me, at least how well you can see these huge secular trends when you have like the S &P 500 divided by gold. and it looks very clear to me at least that we're at the start of that now we may reverse that and go back again and i wish i had the chart up to show you i can show i have it right here if you want to see yeah go ahead and pull it up show okay sorry to put you guys on this is no no no no problem this is the sbx over gold this is a charge of the 18 1884 yeah so and so the bars are monthly yearly bars can you do monthly you don't like the yearly it's too that's too big that's fine but it shows the same thing when I feel like you can see the the waves a little better okay either way but you guys can see it anyways so where that first peak is I'm gonna go I'm gonna go to monthly here's Monday okay there we go okay so and you can see so that first peak that's 1929 that hump number two that's about 1968 ish peak number three that's the that's the dot-com bubble yep okay I I think that we're at almost the exact same period right now as we were kind of in the early 70s.
1:00:09And I will be very surprised if gold does not outperform US stocks and if emerging markets and international stocks don't outperform most US stocks for the next five to 10 years. And I think global assets are the place to be. And I think US assets in general are not the place to be, except with a few exceptions, mainly AI, the tech stocks, I think can still do well. AI, robotics, semiconductors, I think still can outperform. But I think in general, US investors who are only in US stocks and US bonds are going to get decimated as an inflation-adjusted returns over the next five to 10 years or so.
1:00:50Tell me why I'm wrong. Well, my response is going to be look at VTI versus VXUS, which is what you're looking at. This is the, actually, let's look at it the other way. VXUS is the Vanguard, total international stock market, excluding US stocks. And then there's a total US stock market VTI. This is the chart. Okay. And we're going to zoom out as they say. This is the path, this thing. To me, this tells the whole story. Look, when you see repeatedly, you could have made the same argument going back, but this is 2011. Here, here, here. It'd be awesome if you were able to see it back with the timelines that Jeff was
1:01:27Joe Carlasare:But you can. So 2011, notice that's when this starts. That's when the last bubble started. So gold last peak in 2011 relative to stocks. And then it's been free falling since then. It's rolling over here yet again. I expect it to make a lower low. And the reason is very simple. You're going into an age where the companies that are dominating the artificial intelligence space are based in the United States. They're part of the US capital market. Yeah. I personally expect a massive productivity burst. I think nominal GDP is going to run a lot hotter than we expect. I think we can't even measure it correctly because of the technologies that our little rodent brains can't wrap our heads around.
1:02:09And because those are largely domiciled and have access to US capital markets, you're going to have to own those things. Those things are going to print cash over the next 20 years. And the majority of the world's companies, although meaningful and having a competitive advantage on raw materials, they will need the AI. They will need features and the AI resources that will be based in the United States. So I find it very difficult that people... Actually, I don't understand it at all, how people make the argument that we're going to have this massive boon, economic boon, where AI companies are going to drive productivity and just print cash effectively.
1:02:40And then they also think that we have the end of American exceptionalism. Those two things seem completely at odds with one another. Either the AI narrative is total fluff, and that's not going to transform and cause a productivity burst, or alternatively it is, and American equity is an American investments, American stocks are going to do fantastic. So can I counter that? So I think that I totally agree, actually, with almost everything you said, but I think the difference is AI will become commoditized and will diffuse throughout all markets, global markets. And I think all companies around the world, because you can be in Sri Lanka and you can subscribe to OpenAI if you want to or whatever.
1:03:18And I think we're going to see the benefits and operating margins of all companies are going to massively improve. And then we also have robotics, right? Robotics is going to replace lots of human workers. It's going to create companies, cause companies to be more efficient, improve margins even further. But I think because of where the US valuations are currently, that we're going to see more margin expansion and margin improvement across the globe and throughout value-based companies. And so it's not just the AI companies that are going to make money, it's the AI tech itself is going to diffuse throughout the world and actually cause all companies across the world to do well.
1:03:55Well, it'll diffuse, but the, I mean, the data centers, if we're going to spend trillions of dollars over the next 10 years with data centers in the United States, massive. There's a massive, massive CapEx. Yep. In the United States. And yes. Which is terrible for margins. Sure. It's terrible for margins, assuming there isn't huge amounts of stimulus coming from the U.S. government running structural deficits of six to 7 % GDP and potentially getting bigger. So to me, that's going to be a nonstop cash investments. And you can do that as long as nominal GDP is running hot. They're telling you the strategy.
1:04:26Besson came out and he told you, we're going to run this economy hot. How do you run an economy hot? You're running hot by effectively borrowing a lot of money and pumping out a huge fiscal impulse. That is the nothing stops this train. That is the massive... Go ahead. Totally agree. But so is the rest of the world doing that. They're not going to be able to compete. Compete in what? Just AI tech, you mean? Because we're behind? On the data center front. I'm saying they're going to compete by... They're going to be doing even more relative stimulus. They're going to be pumping more currency into their markets.
1:04:58Which will get converted to dollars. That's the dollar milkshake theory. So yeah. So I disagree with that. I think we already have reached the period where we're going to have basically 10 years-ish of declining dollar value. I think the dollar is going to get weaker over the next 10 years, not stronger. So this remains to be seen. We'll have to come back in 2035. Just to be clear, when we're talking about the dollar for the audience, we're not talking about the consumer prices that are people paying, the cost of goods and services. What we're talking about is the relative foreign exchange value as measured.
1:05:28I think most people use the DXY as a proxy for currencies. And the problem I have with the argument is that most of the major lending still to this day, even after the Russian sanctions where people says, oh, everybody's going flee the dollar. We have more transactions going through dollars. We have more credit creation that's denominated in dollars, regardless of the settlement mechanism. And I fail to see how that structural dynamic is going to change. Unless you're going to get the entire Eurodollar system to start issuing more denominations of credit in other currencies, which I can't really find one other than maybe Bitcoin, which maybe that comes, maybe that transforms things and disrupts it.
1:06:03But are they going to do it in the ruble? Are they going to do it in the yuan? I think gold and then Bitcoin are coming. And I think gold is already rising quickly as a reserve asset. It's the second largest - For credit creation? Not for credit creation, but I think that's also coming. I think the world is shifting from US dominance to global hard asset dominance. And we're just at the early days of that. And that's going to continue for the next 10 years or so. Yeah. My view is - This is very esoteric. Sorry, guys. No, no. My view is it's a weakening of US hegemony. You have more regionalization.
1:06:36I totally buy that argument, but you framed it as the end of American exceptionalism. And I failed to see a country out there that can truly rival the United States in terms of its relative power. I can see regional blocks, of course, but they're not one country, not one entity.
1:06:53Joe Carlasare:Jeff, to the two charts that you threw up there, as far as gold outperforming, call it the S &P, I would agree with that. I don't know how long it runs though, before kind of this whole AI, I think everything's getting rewired for levels of efficiency that we can't even comprehend. So I don't understand how long that would run, but I think in the coming five years, I think you're going to be right about that. On the second one, the chart that Joe threw up there was amazing. And it was showing that there has been no trend line that has broken with respect to the US economy getting weaker versus relatively everybody else.
1:07:30Joe Carlasare:So you might be right. But that was since 2011. That only went back to 2011. Yeah, no, I know that. But I'm saying like right now, as we're looking at it, I'm looking at that trend. I'm saying that has definitely not been broken in any type of average true range or any type of like momentum metric that you want to use. So I think it's yet to be seen whether your thesis, the second thesis there is demonstrating any type of performance or validity. Yeah. So a couple of points I'll just throw out there and then I'll stop. I think that the amount of debasement that's going to happen in the US as we de-globalize and ramp up manufacturing here is going to be like, it's the nothing stops the strain.
1:08:07It's legit. And we are going to debase the crap out of our currency. And that's going to cause the globe to lose confidence in US dollars relatively, not completely. I'm not saying hyperinflation. I'm not one of those people. I'm saying, relatively speaking, we're going to increase the pace of people losing confidence in the dollar. The dollar is going to weaken treasuries on an inflation-adjusted term are going to get absolutely decimated. The amount of money we have to spend to do the things that we're going to do are just going to cause a huge amount of debasement. And to your point, Preston, I think, yes, we haven't seen a definitive change yet.
1:08:44But if you look back just year to date, emerging markets, European stocks, Asian stocks have all significantly outperformed US stocks to date, as has gold. And I think what What I'm saying is this is the beginning. So six months, the trend does not make, but I think we're going to be talking about this five years from now and even 10 years from now. And we're going to look back at this as this was the pivot period right around this time. The only thing I'll say is that the debasement of the dollar, letting the economy run hot is a direct, it's a coordinated strategy to manage US debt. Yes. And to me, long run, if you use that strategy, you're going to hurt your people.
1:09:24You're going to make the cost of living increase. It's going to have very pernicious effects for society, potentially societal instability, but it makes your debt situation far more manageable, which means that the plates can keep spinning in the air. And so I'm agreeing with you and I'm saying that's what we're going to do. And that's why that's going, this is why this is going to, because smart people and nations are realizing this and they're going to pull their capital out and let us do, we're going to inflate our debt away and get our debt to GDP under control. But nobody's going to want to own our assets because of that is kind of my point.
1:09:55So Americans, like the 70s, they're going to think they're doing okay, but they're actually going to get decimated in risk-adjusted returns, excuse me, real returns, inflation-adjusted returns.
1:10:04Joe Carlasare:I threw up this chart real fast to talk, because we've been mentioning gold quite a bit during the conversation. And I think this chart is totally nuts. It's an amazing chart. I think about this chart all the time. Like based on the trend line, like as you lie awake at night, you think I do. I literally do. Cause it looks like the Weimar chart, right? It's crazy. Uh, for people that are just listening, we're showing all of the gold ETP, the ETFs and all that stuff that's holding gold, the performance and mostly just the total value. If you add it all up relative to the Bitcoin vehicles that the ETFs and the IBITs and all that kind of stuff.
1:10:44Joe Carlasare:And what you see is this chart where Bitcoin is just like a rocket ship quickly approaching the levels that the gold value is at. So whether the trend continues, who knows? We obviously were hardcore Bitcoiners. We think it is. But if you interpolate some of these lines out, it's getting really interesting here in the coming five years like really interesting yeah so i don't know i find the whole pivot with tether doing tokenizing gold really interesting i think it's gonna catch on for something why would anyone want to own gold though why would you want to own gold i think because you're too stupid to understand bitcoin or well i think most people that are older they just they understand gold they understand the dollar and they that's the end of their their level of thinking and caring about any of this stuff yeah it's for the boomers and some gen xers but yeah most people just want to just join a political party and then just blame the other side for all the woes in their life and that's the end of the analysis like that's where 90 of the population a friend whatever a friend told me this thing today that i've been chewing on ever since where he said when you grow up and you become incurious all kids are curious then you become incurious you stop having a true false framework run in your head and you start having an us them framework run in your head.
1:12:02I think that's, I think that's what it is. It's like, you know, Bitcoin people are people who are searching for truth and everybody else's us versus them. Yeah. I would agree with that.
1:12:10Joe Carlasare:All right. Any other topics you guys are satisfied? All that preparation. No, I, well, we have, we have to give the red meat to the audience, but we have to talk about price, right? Going forward here. Jeff is very bullish. I think everybody's bullish on this podcast. Where do we see this going? Do we think it's going to stair step up, crawl higher through the end of the year? Do we expect any pullbacks during the fall? I know we've kind of alluded to it going higher next year. I think that's generally the consensus view of the panel here. Let's see if we're right about that. Where are we at in Christmas time?
1:12:44What's our next? Is this our Q2 or Q3? I forgot. This is Q2. I think I'm staring at this chart. I think I'm a power law believer. Look at it. It looks real. I'm in. Power lobby. No, I think that the most likely thing is that we get this Q2 26 expansion. I agree with Jeff. I think that's sort of like a consensus view at the moment amongst Bitcoiners who've been here for a while. But again, we could easily go into, I don't know, man, it's so hard to pick because it's like that we could get the diminished returns narrative where we go to like 180 and then we go to have a 50 % correction or something.
1:13:24Or we could just keep going. So here's my prediction. My prediction is going to be, I think that the bull run is going to go on for four years. I'm just going to go out there. I haven't heard other people say. Wow. I think we're going from here to 2028. I think it takes us beyond a million dollars. I think it's on the back of this dot-com style Bitcoin treasury company bubble. And I think that there will be probably a lull period in there or one or two lull periods where it climbs up, it grabs onto an all-time high, and then there's a 30%, 40%, 50 % correction. There's a lull. But in the meantime, the treasury companies keep going, hockey sticking up and to the right.
1:14:04because if you look, if you check Bitcoin treasuries.com, NVK's site, every week, there are more and more and more treasury companies, and they are not going to stop being added. And every single person I was talking to in Las Vegas was telling me that they were gearing up to start a treasury company. And again, a lot of these people are rank amateur who have no clue what they're doing. And there are podcasters on the board. By the way, are you guys on any boards you're not telling me about? But like, you know, you can't, The excesses are going to be there. The leverage is going to be there. The amateurs are going to do all the wrong things.
1:14:36And we're going to get this collapse. Yes. But this idea is so big. This narrative is so big. It can carry us through. And I think there's an inherent reflexivity here to this big idea that now everybody has figured out, which is like, yes, Bitcoin is going to millions of dollars. I mean, just think about it. Just take a step back here. Just pause for a second and think to yourself, the president of the United States believes that Bitcoin is going to millions of dollars. The treasury secretary believes that. Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, believes that and thinks fiat money is hopeless.
1:15:05We all believe that. Your friend who you met at the bar for drinks when Bitcoin crossed$100 ,000, he now believes that. Wall Street believes, everyone believes, China believes it. Everyone believes it. And the only logical thing to do when everybody believes in a big new idea, whether it's AI or the internet or Bitcoin, is to have a supermassive dot-com style bubble about the whole thing. So I think that's what's going to happen. And I think it's going to take us to the million dollar range over the course of three, four years. I appreciate that narrative response. But we were looking for a number for the price prediction by the end of the year.
1:15:40For the end of the year. It's like when I'm taking a deposition. Nobody answers the question. What is the price at the end of the year? At the end of this year? Yes, 2025. I think like 160. Pretty low. Wow. Yeah. Jeff? I will be watching closely what the economy is doing and what leverage is doing. And if they're both ripping, I think Bitcoin could go very high by the end of the year. I thought we were going to 400, but isn't that still happening? 475K has been my call based on past cycles, but the economy is so weird right now. Like we talked about, it's been muddling along since 2022. So I'm still waiting for the economy to pick up.
1:16:16So I use that as my excuse. First of all, I'm planning on being wrong with that call, but so many people have used it as clickbait on their YouTube thing. So I feel like I'm like, it's like tattooed on my forehead. I think that we're going to extend. I don't know if we go three or four years, like HODL says, but I think we at least extend into the second quarter of 2026 now. That just kind of changes everything. So if maybe we hockey stick in the second quarter of 2026, then I would actually have a higher price target. So here's what I'll say. If we hockey stick, if the economy is booming in the second quarter of 2026, then I'll raise my price target to 525 ,000.
1:16:54Joe Carlasare:He wants an option on his prediction. Preston, what's your target? I'm kind of with HODL. I bought some options today. Oh, man. And I priced, when I was looking at what I think, you know, the conservative estimate of where it's going to be by the end of the year. Because normally when I buy an option, I always do two years. I always give myself enough runway. But these ones I bought are due in January. And I don't want to say too much because I don't want people, you know. To all follow you into the trade. I don't want people following. Yeah. I'm kidding. But I bought these, they're out of the money by a decent amount.
1:17:27Joe Carlasare:They're pretty levered. But I got the timeline, so they come due in January of 2026. And I was using a base Bitcoin price of about 160, 170 for a planning factor of where I thought the underlying was going to go when I priced them. So do I think it can go more than that? I do think it can go more than that. But I guess I felt pretty confident that we could get to those price levels by, call it Christmas of this year. So we'll see if I'm right. If not, it's going to be a painful situation. But I obviously didn't do it with a whole lot of capital. I mean, this is not a very high conviction position.
1:18:07Joe Carlasare:This is more like ashtray money. I'm going to have a little fun money. I'd take that bet, though, Preston. I think that's a good one. We'll see. What about you, Joe? And by the way, hold on, Joe. This is important. What's it? I bought it this morning and it closed the day up 20%. See? Hey, dude. Nailed it. So we'll see tomorrow. It'll be down 30%. Go ahead, Joe. I've had the same target all year. I think we end the year between 130 and 140. But I also think we go a lot higher next year because to your point, I think the economy is going to heat up. Before we go real quick, can we do like a lightning round?
1:18:39I want like three things, three answers very quickly. It can be yes, no. Number one, hodl in everybody. Does Powell finish his term? number two answer about do we get any rate cuts this year and number three no sorry what was that no and no i'm no and no no rate cuts the entire year okay and then the third one which is just just kind of for fun do we get any other major pieces of legislation out of the administration this year also now i'm going no across the board no no what do you mean by major well something i mean that i wouldn't consider like the bitcoin act or something like a yeah strategic reserve act something simply alumnus anything you know we were talking about these things getting passed and anything major on a Bitcoin front other than the stable coin, which is not really Bitcoin, but you know my point.
1:19:21So those three, go ahead. I'll take the exact opposite of HODL. Yes, yes, and yes. And number four, I think the four of us should start a mastermind treasury company. Let's go. You think Powell's done? Hang on a second. You think Powell gets out this year? You think he's out? No, HODL said that. Yeah. There's a lot of talk about him residing. Oh, I'm sorry. You think he's gone? I think he stays. Powell's pretty stubborn, turn, but there's a lot of pressure politically. So I'm not sure. I think he stays and I think we get rate cuts and I think we pass major legislation. What piece of legislation you think?
1:19:53I don't know. Something major. Okay. So I don't think, I don't think Powell's going anywhere.
1:19:57Joe Carlasare:And if true, then I don't think we're going to get any rate cuts. And, uh, I think they are going to pass the Bitcoin act. So, wow. They did. That's huge. That's crazy. I guess that's more me just being optimistic because I really, I honestly don't have a beat or have even heard a rumor as to what the probability on that is. I'm actually really curious what you think on that one, Joe. Yeah. Again, that's one of those things where I really wish we would get it through. It's just going to be challenging. I think that they used up a lot of political capital on this big, beautiful bill. And I just think it's going to be hard to get anything through the Congress.
1:20:31And you got to remember with the window, basically, once you get into the fall, there's the holidays, there's not a whole lot of work going. And then boom, boom, we're into midterm elections. And there's going to be, I think, I expect a very heated midterm election. And not to get into some of the recent headlines last 48 hours here, but even it seems like conservatives and people in the mega world are upset and frustrated. So we'll see how that pans out.
1:20:52Joe Carlasare:Do you think Elon's new party is going to actually be a thing, or is this just all talk? It's all talk. And the simple reason is this, there aren't national elections. There are 435 congressional districts, right, that have local elections and you got to get on the ballots in those specific areas. And to get on as a third party, the system is rigged to prevent that. It's so difficult. Some congressional districts, you have to get like between five to 10 % of registered voters in the actual district to get on the ballot. They make it prohibitive so that third parties can't. This is the big secret, right?
1:21:25Like the two-party monopoly is built at the state and local level so people can't get on the ballot. In some ways, the easiest office to run for as a third party is the president. Aside from that, it's very challenging. And then to coordinate candidates across the whole country in individual congressional districts, it's going to be very difficult. Now, can he recruit a handful of people to go after some of his enemies on the Hill? Absolutely. He can do that. And I expect him to do that. But the notion that's going to be in the majority of the congressional districts, I just don't see it. Interesting.
1:21:56Joe Carlasare:Well, what's your response? Joe, what's your response? So I think that Paul is not going anywhere. I completely agree with that, I do think we get a rate cut for two simple reasons. Number one, the reason we thought that he ostensibly was not going to do rate cuts was because he wanted to wait and see in his own words about the tariffs. So that's a huge reason, right? We wait and see. We haven't seen inflation manifest itself yet to a degree that would cause him to hold back in the rate cuts. But the bigger reason is he's an institutionalist and I think he's being attacked. And the only way to ease off that pressure is to do the cut.
1:22:27So I don't think a 25-bit cut, a face-saving cut is going to amount to a hill of anything. I don't think it changes really anything in the real economy, but it's very easy for him to take the heat off him politically because if he doesn't, he's going to face this shadow fed chair that they're dangling over him, like this chair waiting. I think all of this is again, posturing to try to get him to do some modest face saving cut. And then they're hoping the entire yield curve reacts to it. That's a hope and a prayer. I don't know. I don't think it will given the state of the economy, but it is what it is.
1:22:56My one thought, Joe, to your midterm election being contentious is I would say a booming economy covers a multitude of sins. And so if they can truly get it up and running by then, which I actually think there's a good chance that they do finally, that could sway the elections pretty significantly, I think. Completely agree. And that's what the strategy is. Yep. That's why they're pounding the table on cuts. They're pounding the table on all this stuff.
1:23:19Joe Carlasare:Yep. I agree. All right, gentlemen. What a pleasure. I look forward to the next one. Thank you for always making time. Let's go around the horn. starting off with Jeff, give people a handoff where they can learn more about you. First of all, Preston, I want to thank you for preparing this so hard and being ready for it. Disaster. It was awesome. Adlib. I run a little friends and family hedge fund and that's about it. Go, go touch grass. You should follow hot old Joe and Preston. Don't follow me. We'll have a link in the show notes to Jeff's. Oh, I'm sorry. Can I say one more thing? Public service announcement.
1:23:50I am not on any other social media. I know you guys probably have this problem too. If you see anybody that looks like me on anywhere on social media other than Noster, it is not me. So do not click any links. Don't send anybody any money. Please don't do that. It's an imposter. Thank you. Joe? Joe Carlosari. I'm at Joe Carlosari on Twitter, where I'm quite active talking about financial things. I do have a day job that I work as litigator. So if you have a litigated dispute, please contact me. If I can't help you, someone else will. We handle a representation for a variety of Bitcoin miners, complex commercial disputes, fraud claims, some securities work, and really anything in the courtroom litigation.
1:24:26So we do have a regulatory practice for crypto businesses, Bitcoin businesses as well. So I look forward to trying to help you if you do. If you're an innovator in the space, definitely reach out because I'd like to help.
1:24:35Joe Carlasare:Best lawyer in America right there. Hodel, go ahead. I don't have anything to shill. I don't care if you follow me, but these homies of mine on Noster, they make this ghee called Great Ghee. Check it out. It says highest quality animal fat for the hardest money on earth. Nice. And it's made from raw Jersey cow milk. It's really delicious. It's really good. So you can only buy it on Noster. It's a Noster only business. Check them out. Great key. Great key. Everybody available on Noster. All right, gentlemen, gentlemen, really appreciate your time. This is always such a pleasure. And I really do look forward to the next one.
1:25:12Joe Carlasare:So thank you guys. Thanks, President. Thanks, man.
1:25:25Joe Carlasare:To access our show notes, transcripts, or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decision, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by The Investor's Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.
From the publisher
Bitcoin market insights, Treasury trends, stablecoin regulation, and bold predictions for Bitcoin's future.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN:
00:00 - Intro
03:21 - How global liquidity and leverage affect Bitcoin's market performance
08:56 - The evolving role and risks of Bitcoin Treasury companies
17:26 - Why stablecoin regulations are reshaping digital finance
18:35 - What the Genius Act means for bank and non-bank stablecoin issuers
21:03 - How Tether and JPM are responding with gold tokens and Layer 2 solutions
24:50 - Why the Base network's centralization raises concerns
27:45 - Differing views on the US dollar's future amid AI-driven economic shifts
35:30 - Long-term predictions for Bitcoin and gold prices
40:33 - The strategic role of Bitcoin options trades
48:06 - Legal strategies for enforcing advertising contract disputes
Disclaimer: Slight discrepancies in the timestamps may occur due to podcast platform differences.
BOOKS AND RESOURCES
Related Episode: Bitcoin Mastermind 1st Quarter 2025.
Related Episode: Bitcoin Mastermind 4th Quarter 2024.
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