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You're listening to Teip. Hey, everyone, welcome to our Wednesday release of the Investors podcast, where we are talking about Bitcoin. On today's show, we have a big name from the traditional finance space, and that's Mr. Brent Johnson from Santiago Capital.

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What started out as a little spat between Brent and myself on Twitter quickly evolved into a phone call and then a decision that we should probably be recording this and turning it into a podcast. So this was a really fun conversation because Brent is a guy that likes Bitcoin a lot, but he also has a lot of concerns and points that he just likes to raise when having the conversation about it. One of the things that we really pride ourselves in here at Tippee is offering all sorts of points of view on a particular topic so that anybody who's listening to it can make whatever decision they want after hearing the conversation.

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And on today's show, Brent provides a lot of food for thought on markets in general, expectations for going forward into twenty, twenty one and then the bull and bear cases for Bitcoin. So without further delay, here's my chat with Brent Johnson.

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You were listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by the Investors Podcast Network. Now for your host, Preston. All right, so here I am with the one and only Brent Johnson, man, it's amazing how we came to this, Brent. It is.

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I can't tell you how many phone calls or meetings or initial communications with people I've had over the last year or so where it started off with. So I saw you on Twitter or I heard you I saw an exchange on a podcast. It's a very social media related when people first reach out to me in one form or another. So I whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, I'll leave that to other people to determine. But that is what it is.

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I love it how fast, though, when we talked on the phone after the back and forth, I'll call it that on Twitter and we talked on the phone and like literally in the first minute we hit it off and we're like, all right, well, let's let's record something.

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Let's do this. Let's you know, I don't know, this might sound sexist, but that's kind of how little boys I mean, they'd argue they get in a fight for each other and then they're fine.

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It doesn't get drug out that long. And then they're playing together. Right. Right.

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So let's do this, talk to us about your framework, because I want people to kind of really talk about the big chunks of the things that they feel or that they view as being valid or what's making the economy function the way that you see it today. And then we'll just take it from there.

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Perhaps some people have heard this before, but just let me give you a quick overview of what it is, actually, because I think in many cases people hear me speak and they think I only do one thing or they have a very limited view of what I do. It essentially I manage money for high net worth individuals and I have a very concentrated group of very wealthy clients and we customize a wealth management plan for them. And when I say a wealth management plan, we work with their trust and estate lawyers and their CPAs and we come up with an investment plan and then we help them implemented.

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And no two people are the same. So nobody has the exact same portfolio. But that said, because I'm kind of the architect of the overall plan and the quarterback of it, so to speak, there's going to be similar themes across all of them. And my framework for everybody, even though their individual investment plan may get implemented differently and they may have different allocations based on their certain circumstances, the framework of which that I help them develop, that plan is going to carry over across lines.

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And so the reality is, is I am not trying to make my clients rich. Most of my clients are already very wealthy. They got wealthy either through a very concentrated position at a company that they were working at or a business that they started and then it went public or they sold it or whatever it is, they had a very concentrated position. And then I've helped them diversify out of that concentrated position. And now we're kind of creating an overall diversified plan.

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I mean, the greatest way to get rich is to have a concentrated portfolio and the greatest way to get poor is to have a concentrated portfolio. That's, in my opinion, like that. And so it works both ways. And so most of my clients like that, they're not trying to become a billionaire. They've done very well. They've got a very nice lifestyle. They want to pass it on to their heirs or their foundation or whatever it is.

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And so we're trying to protect it. Right. And so that's where diversification comes in. So I don't think anybody should put it all into one thing. I want to ask you a question about that real fast, because I would think volatility would be something that would be very high on the list as you're sitting down with one of these clients and you're saying, all right, so talk to me about your risk tolerance. You know, if your portfolio moved by 20 percent in a year, what would that make you do?

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Or there's some of the things that you really kind of focus in on it from start. Absolutely, I mean, at the end of the day, my job is not to capture one hundred percent of the upside of every move of the S&P. Five hundred, I think many people have wrongly started using the S&P five hundred as their benchmark. There's no reason the S&P five hundred has to be a benchmark. It might be appropriate, but it very well might not be appropriate.

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So what we try to do is to come up with an appropriate benchmark for them. What are they trying to accomplish and how do we get that right? And for some people, it means taking a lot higher level of risk. Some people, like I have one client who is a very successful tech executive. He was a former Air Force pilot and he's sixty five years old. All he wants to do is live off his earnings and go flies airplanes.

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He just wants to make a very concerted effort to make five or six percent a year. So his portfolio looks much differently than somebody else who is younger, wants to take more risk and wants to get 15 percent a year or whatever it is. The point is, is I think it makes sense to come up with a plan for yourself and who cares what everybody else is doing. I guess if you're just managing a mutual fund and your goal is to outperform the other mutual funds, your mandate may be a little different than my mandate.

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So with that said, and I think that is so important for people to understand, is every single person is looking at their circumstances, their age. I mean, alone is is a huge factor of it. Right. All of those things are it's custom. So a person listening to this, if they take one thing away, it's going to be completely different than somebody else. Talk to us about the big story. Like if you had to explain, if you had to sit down with a new client and say, well, this is how I see the world and the environment that we're operating in right now from a macro landscape, give us that one over the world, pitch or description of how you would describe it to them.

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First thing I would tell them within the next four years may be the most difficult years from an investment standpoint in the last hundred years, and I truly believe that I'm not trying to be dramatic. I'm not trying to to scare anybody. I just I really think we're kind of at this critical point in history. I think the big theme that I would point out is the debt. It's all about the debt and debt. What do you think it does or not?

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Debt has consequences. And central banks around the world are doing their best to push those consequences down the road so they don't have to deal with it. And regardless of whether they can continue to push it down or not, we're at a minimum, we're going to continue to bump up against it and then maybe they can take it again. But there's at a minimum, there's going to be events along the road that are going to be very volatile and very scared because of all the debt in the world.

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And I am of the opinion that they can't solve it. They can try, but ultimately we will have the kind of come to Jesus moment. Right. And we've had several of those over the last 15 or 20 years. And they've been able to successfully I think we're getting to the point we're going to have to be dealt with. I might be wrong on that, right? I might be wrong. But my point is, again, because I'm trying to keep people wealthy, I'm always looking for the pitfalls and I'm always looking for what could go wrong.

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I don't just have the luxury to say, let's go buy Tesla. Let's put it all on Bitcoin. Well, when you said you don't see them being able to solve it, what would be your driving point of view for why? The main reason is because all of the solutions to kick it down the road actually make the overall problem bigger. Let's take March as an example, just because it's the most recent and probably the freshest in everybody's mind what the central banks did as they came in and they provided a lack of a better word, liquidity to the market, because what happened was the debts were not getting paid.

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The dollar was not circulating. Asset prices started going down. It created this kind of vicious cycle to the downside. They needed to do something to stop the downside, provide liquidity to the market and get it back up without going into too much detail. Based on the design of the monetary system, it has to grow. The monetary system is designed to get bigger. It cannot survive contraction. If it contracts, that actually collapses or if it continues to contract, it will collapse.

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It's an exponential system and an exponential system either go straight up or they crash. And so that's what we had when we hit those. And when the debt gets too big and the debts don't get serviced, you get a contraction. And the Central Banks ByDesign have to come in and provide new capital to the system in order to get it growing again. And this has numerous effects across all kinds of markets, whether it's talking about growth rates or inflation rates or alternative currencies, it literally affects so many different things.

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To me, it all goes back to the design of the monetary system, the fact that it's a debt based monetary system, which means for it to grow, the debts have to grow, but eventually the debts create. I get so big they create a deflationary force. So you have this situation where the system has to grow, which is inflationary, but the system has grown so big it has to deflate at the same time, eventually gets big enough to where it becomes in conflict with itself.

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And I think that will eventually have implications for all kinds of markets. And do you think that we're at a parabolic point where this isn't linear, it was probably never linear, but it's becoming very evident now that it's not linear and we're actually starting to go parabolic in the growth of M2 and all the promises that are built on top of that. Do you agree?

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Well, there's no I do agree with that. And I think there is some misconception when you see these graphs of into it and I'm not minimizing them. This is a problem and this will have severe consequences. But it doesn't necessarily indicate what a lot of people think about, even though into a spite, the world is not just awash in tons of liquidity. People still need dollars and aren't getting them right. It doesn't mean they can't get them. I'm just saying that just because that in two is taken off, a lot of it's still trapped into the banking system.

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And we could spend five hours just on that topic alone. So we probably don't have time to go into too much detail. But a lot of the money that the central banks have pumped in based again on the way they've done it, it gets trapped in the banking system. It doesn't get into the real economy, or at least the full extent of it does not get into the real economy the way many people thinks it does. I think the common perception is that the banks are printing money.

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They get to the banks, the banks go out and buy stocks and the stock market goes up. That's sort of true, but it really detailed since it's not true and the fact that it's not getting to the moms and the pops of the world, meaning Wall Street benefiting, but Main Street is not. And so then that creates all kinds of problems. Right. That creates problems for small businesses and it eventually leads to problems of inequality. And it's a system that benefits the wealthy at the expense of the masses and it benefits the few at the expense of the many that can go on for a long time.

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But it has consequences. We've seen central bankers come out and say that they don't buy into what she's just saying.

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I definitely agree with you, but we've seen central bankers that came out and are saying that's not the case, that it's not adding to inequality and destruction of the middle class. Are they just straight up lying or do they believe that? You know, it's funny that you ask that, because I always ask people kind of in the know I said there's that famous you our leaders are smart people who are putting us on are idiots and really mean it. And I've kind of come to the conclusion that central bankers as a whole at the staff level, for the most part, I think they I think they really mean it.

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But I think at the really high levels, I think they know or at least they know that they're there to perpetuate the policies. I think that they do know that it does lead to inequality. And I'm very critical of central bankers and I'm very critical of the Fed. I think central banks in general are probably the smallest group that have done the most damage to the biggest number of people, if that's the right way to say it. And I'm not just a Fed, but around the world now, there's a lot of people who disagree with me and to say they're actually good people and they're trying to do the best, that may be true as well.

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But my point is, is that I believe that it leads to these inequalities and these inefficiencies unfairness. And so I'm very critical of central banks. But the flip side of it is I'm not one of these people who just kind of how the mood about the central banks. I mean, it is what it is. And if you lose money because the central banks did something that you didn't think that they should do or you because you don't agree with QE.

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In other words, if you've been trying to short the stock market for 10 years and every time it goes up, you say this, it's only because the central bankers well, at some point you have to start factoring these central bankers into your formula. Right. And so to think that the central bank that they're ever going to do anything other than bail out the system is silly because that's literally their job. They're the lender of last resort. So to think that they're not going to step in when a crisis hits and just let everything fall, that's not going to happen.

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They are going to step it. That's why they were created. Do you think that in twenty twenty one we're going to see printing that exceeds the printing we saw in twenty twenty? Highly, highly likely. Nothing is impossible, but it would very much surprise me if it did not exceed it and perhaps drastically so, I say that not just the Fed, like the whole world is doing that. Yeah, that's the other thing. I always I always like to point out is it's fine to take shots at the Fed, and I think that they deserve it.

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But it's not like we have the idiots at the Fed and then there's these geniuses at the ECB. Right.

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Or these masterful financial guys over at the DOJ. They're all the same. So let me ask you this, then, March, huge liquidity event as you were describing massive amounts of impairment on trusts between two parties all over the globe, and then they had to step in with real printing to put all those units back into the system. If you think that we're going to have printing and debasement like we saw in twenty, twenty one, but maybe even bigger.

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Does that mean that we're going to have another liquidity shock like we had in March that would generate the need for something like that? Because I agree with you 100 percent. I do think that it's going to be higher in twenty one. I'm just looking at it like, well, you need some type of event for that to happen. Do you see that? I do, and I don't know what's going to trigger it and everything is just so violent, is that the right word?

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I mean, sentiment is high on everything. Markets are euphoric. And listen, sentiment and narratives are extremely powerful. And right now the narrative is that the world is going to print its way out of it. We have a global reflation. The central banks have reduced the amount of risk they have your back and so get into risk assets and here we go. And that can last a while. And I'm not denying that that that is an incredibly powerful force and that it can't go on.

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I just don't think it can go on forever. And I don't have perfect timing. It pretty good at the beginning of this year and have done so well in the second half of this year, trying to time that. But I do believe that we're going to have more of these liquidity events. And I think these liquidity events are going to lead to solvency events because Fed and central banks around the world, they can provide liquidity, but they can't make a business profitable.

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They can't make a good business, a good business. And what I find kind of interesting this actually it's kind of affected my overall thesis this year is that the central banks to this point, they can provide liquidity, but they can't make businesses better. And I expected to have a year like this even without Kofod, like we were set up for this long before I knew anything about a virus. And even when I did know about the virus, I didn't know initially the impact it was going to have.

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Right. What I knew is that all the pieces were in place for a crisis. I didn't know what would be the catalyst to kick it off. I just knew all the pieces were there and whether it would be some kind of a company missing earnings or whether one country would default on its debt or whether another currency peg would break something would happen and then it would cause this chain reaction. Well, turns out it was a virus. And when it initially hit, I thought, oh, my God, this is the catalyst.

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This is not only going to be really bad, but it's going to accelerate my whole thesis. It's going to make it happen even faster than I thought. And that initially was correct. And I knew that the Fed and central banks around the world and monetary authorities would put policies in place to provide emergency liquidity and send checks to people in these Kahrizak. That didn't surprise us at all. What we didn't factor in and what we missed. And in hindsight, this was something that we should have done a better job of picking up on was their ability to defer demand.

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And what I mean by that is they put policies in places that you don't have to pay your rent for the next six months. And in the meantime, the landlords can't kick you out. Think of all that money that's been deferred. Those payments still exist. They haven't been forgiven. They've just been deferred. But that is a dollar demand that was kicked down the road at the same time that they're providing supply. We initially thought the demand was so high that it would overwhelm the new supply that they're kicking in.

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And had they not been able to defer the demand, we think that would have been the case. But they also did the same thing with mortgages. Right? You don't have to pay your mortgage this month. We'll just take the next three or four months onto the end of the mortgage or whatever it is, or once it's behind us, then all those payments, same thing. What kind of trade finance? If you ordered a bunch of inventory from China, but the planes weren't flying and the ships weren't floating, and so you weren't receiving that inventory, well, then you didn't have to pay for that inventory right away.

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You know, you could pay for three months later, six months later, once the economy opens up. And so they've been able to provide a bunch of supply while kicking the can down the road. And I guess the point I would make is they can't kick the demand forever. And when the demand comes back, perhaps that's what causes the solvency and the liquidity that leads to these solvency issues. I'll tell you, I saw this chart. I think that good luck sent it out.

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Somebody told me not to and I didn't see it initially posted, but somebody sent it to me and it showed households around the country that are either in arrears on rent or behind on their mortgages. And it's like every state that's like 20, 30 percent of the population are either behind on their rent or their mortgage. But San Francisco is a big restaurant town and we actually have several friends who own restaurants and bars and they're all just getting decimated. So there's all these businesses that they've been able to survive on either savings or the emergency loans or the program with the government.

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But I don't know that those businesses are ever going to be solvent again. Maybe they will, but they might not. And so I think that there's all these issues that are still out there, and I don't know exactly what the catalyst will be. I just know that the tables still set for another crisis. There's kind of a long, rambling answer to your question, but that's kind of how I see it. No, and I think those are all really interesting points, and I think when we look forward, the triple P was such a huge event and how they issued it, because, I mean, it was literally willy nilly like, hey, here's a giant pot of money.

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Everyone stick their hands in and grab as much as you can and go and you might not have to pay it back. So just get as much as you can kind of event. And I kind of suspect that the next one and I fully expect there to be a next one, is going to be an equal sized pot of money, maybe even bigger. And I just can't imagine the zombification that that's going to have on just businesses all across the whole country and really kind of gradually.

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Well, and not only that, but think of even if, let's say they get the vaccine to everybody in the next 60 days or not to everybody and everybody takes it and there's no more code even that's the case. I just don't think that the world is going to go back to work the same way we did a year ago. Businesses have the ones that have been able to in restaurants. You kind of have to go to the restaurant in order for the restaurant to be successful.

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But someone like me or a lawyer or banking or some of the shops like you don't really have to go to the office every day or in a sales job. You don't really have to get on the plane and fly to Houston to meet that pharmaceutical company to you can just do zoom and you can ship them the stuff. Right, and so on. I don't think the companies are going to need the same amount of office space that they have. But think about how big the office and the real estate markets are and those are all financed by debt.

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I just don't see how commercial backed securities don't have real trouble. And the problem is, once you start based on the design of the monetary system, when you start to get a credit event, it has this effect where it kind of ruffles through the whole world and the whole economy. And so I just think there's too many events out there to think that this is all going to go smoothly. I was listening to a clip of Sam Zell probably in the August time frame, he was looking at the commercial real estate and just like this is a disaster and no, I don't think it's time to step into this and start buying it.

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I think people need to stay the heck away. I'm surprised we haven't seen more bankruptcies in that space. Are you aware of the government basically providing some type of relief for that middle tier? I don't think they have yet, but I think on some of that, the banks have just extended the loans to the people that over the next quarter or next six months will defer about another year. But like I said, I mean, that can go on for a little while.

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But eventually the banks have to get it to the banks, stop them because they owe money to people. Right. And so, again, this all works for a while. But it's interesting in a way that if the economy opens back up and all the demand for the currency increases again in a way that causes problems to. Right. Because then you actually have to pay your bills. And so I just kind of feel like we're in this corner.

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There's it's kind of like with interest rate, interest rates are so low, there's no way that we can let them rise again. Right. But the flip side is, if interest rates rise, then banks don't do well and pension funds don't do well and then they'll go bankrupt. So you're kind of damned if you do and damned if you don't. And that's why I say they've done a masterful job of kicking the can down the road. But I just don't think they can kick it out much longer without consequences coming up.

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And you go back 20 years, but if you just go back 10 or 12 years and the great financial crisis, a lot of the problems around the world got bailed out by the central banks. So it's the central banks that have the assets on their books now. And to solve those, then you start messing with currencies and the currencies become the outlets. Right. And so I think we're going to have a currency crisis. And whether, again, whether it kicks off in twenty twenty one or twenty twenty two, I don't know.

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But I just know that we're set up for a massive currency crisis.

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So based on all that, I suspect you have a lot of the same narratives that that I hold dear. Is anybody else that talks on all these podcasts, which is the narrative is scarcity wins. If you can own something that's truly scarce, it's going to do really well in this environment just because of the expectation for how many more units central bankers are going to be adding into the system. So is there anything beyond that that you can see from an investment standpoint or just talk to us a little bit about your opinions on that and maybe even bet on that?

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Well, first thing I'd say, and I've been saying this for over a decade now, almost 15 years now, is that everybody should own gold. I mean, I think that should I mean, it's just to me, it's a no brainer that you have tons of gold and it doesn't mean you need to rush out now and sell everything you own gold 30 or 40, 50 percent of your portfolio in gold. But you need to have something right.

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And I think having some kind of assets kind of outside the banking system, so to speak, that aren't subject to the whims of the monetary authorities is a good thing. Now, the part of the issue is that a lot of the way that people don't gold is either through an ETF or a mutual fund or they trade futures. And that's sort of that's kind of exposure to the gold price. But it's not really gold itself. Right. But gold is the thing that it's scarce and it's it's always been in demand for five thousand years.

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And so I think over the years ahead. But as governments around the world increase the supply of their fiat currencies, that gold will rise. We kind of talked about Bitcoin a little bit on the phone the other day. I think everybody should own Bitcoin. I think for some people, maybe a higher allocation is appropriate. I think for other people, higher valuation isn't appropriate. But I think if you can afford to own something, you should have some.

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Bitcoin is the potentially biggest asymmetric trade in history. It already has been, and it could be even from here. And there's even as much as I like gold, I don't think gold has the same asymmetry as Bitcoin does now. What you would like me to hear me say is I think Bitcoin could fall a lot to right. I'm not convinced that it's going to be the greatest asset in history, but I know that it has the potential to be.

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So I think you got to own it. But I think that there's some things that could go wrong with it. So I wouldn't sell somebody to sell everything you own and go out and put all your money into Bitcoin either. I think it has a place in a diversified portfolio, but not an all or nothing thing for me. The whole Bitcoin versus gold debate, I think is kind of silly. I think there's no reason you have to choose between two.

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If you do, I understand it, but you don't have to. Talk to us about some of the risks that you see with it. I think the biggest one is that it's unproven. Now I know you'll say, well, it's been around for 12 years. We've had two or three crises. It's gone from pennies to twenty three thousand dollars. It's proven itself. Well, fair enough. It's proven itself over the last couple of decades, but it's been very volatile along the way.

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It's been open to massive swings if you bought three years ago at eighteen thousand. But when was it? Two years ago. It was twenty seven. If you did all your analysis in twenty seventeen and you thought this is the greatest asset in history, that is going to a million dollars and you put 50 percent of your portfolio in there. Well today you look pretty smart, but six months ago you didn't because you were down seventy five percent from where you started six months ago from eighteen thousand to six thousand or whatever that number is.

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Right.

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But it wasn't six thousand in March, was four thousand in March. And so if you had liquidity from other places and you knew your in the long term it didn't matter. But if you needed that liquidity for something that's 60, 70 percent, that's a big draw down. Right. So my point is it's not without risk. The second thing I would say is, you know these figures much better than I do. I kind of go like this a bit when I get really into it.

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And then I kind of leave it for two or three months and then I get really into it. And Bitcoin's kind of one of those things are the crypto world. And one of those things I feel like if you're not on top of it every day or every week, so much happens that you miss it. And so this might some of my stuff might be dated and you know the figures better than I do. But a couple of other risks that I would say is that isn't it something like two percent of the holders own 80 percent of the coins or something like that?

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The whales dominate the market. So typically the whales are pretty smart people. Right. And so and I'm not saying this is happened. I'm just saying this could happen if the whales pump it up. This is the greatest asset in the world. And then all the small retail guys come in and buy it at the margins and push it to thirty or forty thousand. And then one night a whale says, you know what, I'm out. I'm 80 years old, I'm rich, I don't need any more.

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And he sells. He can sell a lot of coins really quickly. Again, I'm not saying that will necessarily happen, but it can. And maybe you argue that it's not a thinly traded market, but if you have a big whale selling in a thinly traded market, prices can move really quickly. And you've seen that several times in Bitcoin. But the flip side is a whale comes in and you go from four thousand to twenty three thousand and six months.

[00:29:29]

Right. So it cuts both ways. The other thing I would say is that, again, I don't know the numbers, but I know over 50 percent of the miners are located in China. And so I'm not going to say that that's necessarily a bad thing. But if the CCP just rolls up to all the mining operations and says these belong to us now, those people don't really have to say no. They don't have to go to say no, they don't.

[00:29:53]

Right. I mean, if they want them, they're going to take them now. And then you'll say, well, then I'll just migrate to the miners there outside China or it'll work or something. And that's that's possible. But I'm just saying that is a risk that could cause some disruption in the short term. The other thing, and you'll know this better than I will, the whole Teather thing, as I understand it, there is a big part of the growth of Bitcoin.

[00:30:14]

And it's my understanding you can correct me if I'm wrong on this, but it's my understanding that Teather is really more of a way to send dollars around the world than it is to send Bitcoin around the world. In other words, it's dollars backed by Bitcoin instead of Bitcoin that I might have it wrong, but that's my perception. And I know there's like two or three years ago, they kept saying it's one hundred percent debt, but they would never, never an audit was never done.

[00:30:39]

It was never approved. And then it finally said, well, you know, it's more like 70 or 80 percent. OK, well, that's that's actually still pretty good. No comment. But what's it backed by? Well, it's backed by assets. Well, are those assets dollars or what kind of assets are they backed by? OK, well, they've never actually said that. And then this year, I think they said the value of Teather has increased a lot.

[00:31:00]

But then when you look at the banks the Teather uses, there's been no dollar flows into those banks. So if all that tether backed by the dollars, well, where are those dollars at? Because they're not in the banks that they say that they use. So it doesn't necessarily mean there's a problem. It's just a red flag for me. And then the big one, the really big one. And I already know where this is going to go and that's why I laugh.

[00:31:22]

But the idea that the governments around the world are just going to sit by and let a private currency be the currency of the realm and they're just going to be slaves to this Bitcoin and that's going to become the national currencies for a number of governments, I think is absolutely ludicrous. Now, it doesn't mean that Bitcoin is not going to go to a million dollars, but I don't see governments adopting Bitcoin. I think they'll have their own digital coins.

[00:31:48]

And if Bitcoin ever seriously threatens the livelihood or the ability of the government to fund themselves with their own currencies, I think governments will take steps to limit the use of Bitcoin. And then I know people will say, well, they can't shut it down because they have to shut down the Internet. I get it. I totally get it. That's why I still think you should own Bitcoin, but you throw a few people in. Jail and activities will you know, behaviors will change.

[00:32:13]

What I think is interesting is one of the reasons that people are so, I guess, into Bitcoin, if that's the right way to say it is, they see it as a way to take on the evil system. Right. There's this evil system that has lasted for centuries and it's the few take advantage of the many. The money is always in the hands of the powerful and it's never in hands of the people. These guys will do anything in their power to maintain their power.

[00:32:38]

But then on the other hand, they're not going to do anything when this private currency comes along and threatens their existence. I don't quite get that. I don't I don't quite get how someone can think the evil empire has lasted for all these years because they're the most ruthless people in the world. But then those are the ruthless people in the world are also just going to sit by while this private currency comes along and threatens its existence. To me, at least, there would be a battle underway anyway.

[00:33:06]

Those are just some of my thoughts.

[00:33:07]

Yeah, I love this. So on the on the last one with the government ban, what are your thoughts on entrenchment? Because I think if you talk to any hardcore bitcoin or is they're going to look at that argument, they're going to say you're getting like insane entrenchment right now. Billionaire billionaire is buying into this who then have the ability to lobby and influence policy makers, elected officials. And you're not just seeing it in the US, you're seeing it globally.

[00:33:33]

How would you respond to that?

[00:33:35]

I'd say that's absolutely correct is a very good point. And it's one of the reasons you should own Bitcoin, right? Yeah, that is very, very true. And the more powerful people that own it, the less likely it is to get banned because it's those powerful people that fund the politicians that would try to ban it in the first place. So I completely get it. I'm just saying that Bitcoin could become worth a million dollars, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to replace the US dollar.

[00:34:01]

It's not necessarily going to replace the euro. It's not necessarily going to replace the yen. So I think that people who say you have to own Bitcoin because it's going to become a world currency and governments around the world are going to fall, instead of people being slaves to the governments, the governments are going to be the slaves of Bitcoin. I think it's the personification of silly. But if let's just say the U.S. stands up, you know, their own US token and they have their own protocol, right?

[00:34:28]

They're still managing that centrally. It's not like it's going to be a decentralized token. So if we still buy into the narrative, which I'm sure you agree with, which is they have to continue debase the currency based on the policies that this massive deflationary price. So it doesn't really matter if they call it a US dollar token or they keep doing what they're already doing. They're going to have to debase whatever that thing is. And it's going to be debased against gold.

[00:34:55]

It's going to be debased against Bitcoin because I buy into Bitcoin being fully decentralized at this point. I think you have an interesting talking point. I think a lot of people in the community share your fear with the Chinese mining. And you brought up the point that full node operators can talk if there is a bad actor or there's somebody who's trying to go back and reverse one of those blocks. Right. That have a 51 percent attack. The full node operators can go in for the protocol.

[00:35:23]

But I agree with you. I think in the short term, it's going to have an impact on price and it's going to create volatility, which I think is your biggest concern for a person owning this. Your opinion is they might not be able to handle the volatility associated with it.

[00:35:36]

Yeah, and the thing is, I don't have a problem with Bitcoin. I'm a fan of it. I would love to see Bitcoin continue to rise and become more popular and not get attacked by the government. I think one thing, people get a little bit faster, and I think this is a mistake a lot of people make. And I made it many times in my life and I think I've gotten better at it. Is the difference between what you'd like to see happen and what's actually going to happen.

[00:36:00]

Right. I would love it if we had private currencies competing with government currencies and we were allowed to choose. But there's legal tender laws for a reason that don't have the time to go through all but look around the world and look how many times a country kind of this rogue nation started talking about using something other than the dollar. And think about how it ended up for those people and those leaders. They're gone. Do you think there's a certain market cap?

[00:36:24]

I don't know what the Bitcoin market cap is right now, but this is maybe like if we get to a trillion or we get the five trillion, does that argument really kind of go away? And it's like, all right, now governments are going to have to adapt because there's no way they can really kind of stop this force at this point. Well, I would say that governments already have to adapt, they're all talking about digital currencies, right?

[00:36:44]

I think this thing kind of sprung up and that was kind of this cute little anomaly. And then it kept growing and growing. And then I think it's gotten to the point where, I mean, my mom knows about Bitcoin at this point. Right. It's not like a secret thing anymore. And it's kind of entered the Zeist a little bit. And I think the governments of the world realized they had to wake up. And I think they're kind of scrambling to try to catch up.

[00:37:06]

And government currencies are not going to be decentralized. They're going to be centralized. Right. And so I think that they will be fine with Bitcoin existing and they'll try to regulate it to a certain extent as long as it doesn't threaten their coins themselves. Right. But I guess my point is the idea that they will just sit back and allow Bitcoin to become the currency of the world and not push back, I think is wrong. Now, that doesn't mean that Bitcoin won't win.

[00:37:36]

It just means that they're not just going to sit back and allow it to happen. So one of the arguments that, well, I make this argument a lot, the reason that we've gotten to the entrenchment level that we're at right now, which I think is extremely high, way higher than anyone would have suspected if we walked ourselves back 15 years ago and we said, hey, there's going to be this decentralized protocol that becomes money in all the central banks and all the governments of the world are going to allow it to happen.

[00:38:03]

Right. You, me, everybody else pretty much on the planet will look at you and said, that's impossible.

[00:38:08]

They're never going to allow something like that. People who study the protocol and how the protocol functions believe that the four year having event was by design and by design in order to create deep entrenchment. And so what it does is through its scarcity, it basically ratchets up into these various scarcity levels, but they stay put for four years. So you get these exuberant bits that happen because there's this suffocation of supply on the open market.

[00:38:37]

It goes up. There's a total overreaction. It has this big giant correction. Regulators are getting ready to really start taking action, like, hey, we got to start regulating this.

[00:38:47]

Then the whole thing falls apart and they forget about it for three more years. And then the protocol, it does through another four year having cycle and it basically does quantitative tightening and it ratchets it up. So in May, we had another one of these events and there are a lot of analysts, a lot of people that are looking at, well, what does the scarcity level now take us to with this new having event? Well, it takes us over one hundred thousand and we're seeing the price run post having event.

[00:39:14]

And it almost seems like this whole thing was designed to perform in this way that allowed entrenchment at the deepest level into our existing financial world.

[00:39:25]

Do you buy into that? I do buy it. Bitcoin is one of the most ingenious inventions in the history of the world. I mean, I think it's incredible. I find it endlessly fascinating. And I think, again, I think everybody should own it. I think the Bitcoin has this first mover advantage. I'm kind of one of these Bitcoin maximalists, even though the Bitcoin maximalists drive me absolutely crazy.

[00:39:50]

That said, there's such an incredible advantage to being the first mover.

[00:39:54]

But that said, there's also the first mover disadvantage if and I'm not saying that they will, but if private digital currencies ever start to threaten government issued securities, the government's not going to go after the little tiny one. They're going to go after the big boy to try to cut him off at the knees to scare the whole world and don't threaten our existence. And again, I just think the people that think that this isn't going to happen, that Bitcoin will just be allowed to take Bitcoin may take over, but it won't happen with the government just saying, OK, without a fight, they will fight it.

[00:40:27]

They will fight it to the bitter end and they will score some points along the way. That's my point. What do you think about the game theory of other countries, so, you know, if this was an individual country that was dealing with this threat, I buy into what you're saying all day long. But when we look at and you and I are looking at this from a US lens. Right. And we're looking at it from a lens where there's been US dollar dominance for decades.

[00:40:54]

And it's benefited us tremendously from a military standpoint, from all sorts of standpoints where dollar dominance has given the United States a massive advantage. You look at all the other countries in the world, they see that through the exact opposite lens. It's been a detriment to them, that dollar. So when you have this new token that's decentralized and it affords them a huge opportunity to take back some of that advantage that they've been a victim of for literally decades, even if I'm using the US as an example.

[00:41:25]

But you could really kind of use any country as the example if they want to step in and perform heavy regulation, I think you're going to have others that are going to look at it from a game theory standpoint and say, well, we're going to do the exact opposite. We're going to actually promote the use of this heavily.

[00:41:38]

You look at Switzerland, I know they have an entire valley out there that they call Crypto Valley in Switzerland. And it's heavily. Yeah, and it's a beautiful one of those beautiful places in the world. Tell us about it. It's basically from Zürich down to the border with Switzerland as it goes along like lucerne and the zoo and know there's a half dozen vaults up in the Alps that are former army bunkers that due to this cold storage and they've passed laws and encourage businesses to do so.

[00:42:12]

I agree with everything you're saying. I guess my point is, is because I think they see the advantage, right? They want productive economies. They want growth of the economy. But I don't think that they want their currencies replaced. I mean, that's a big thing. I mean, you got to remember that the currency of a government is one of its biggest tools. Yeah, flexibility. I mean, think about this, OK, let's pretend for a second that let's just you Switzerland, because that's what we were talking about.

[00:42:39]

Let's pretend that Switzerland is more of a rogue nation rather than just a neutral nation. And they decided, OK, we're going to as the rest of the world tries to clamp down on Bitcoin, we're going to embrace it and we're going to make Bitcoin the national currency of Switzerland. OK, now you're operating the business in Zurich, Switzerland, and the currencies Bitcoin, and it's priced at twenty five thousand dollars. And now you need to go build a new plant.

[00:43:04]

So you go down to Union Bank of Switzerland and you borrow two million dollars of Bitcoin because you want to go buy some trucks and materials to buy that plant. And then a year later, Bitcoin's price at seventy five thousand dollars. Well, now you're dead. You took out three times as much debt as you thought you did. Right? I mean, remember that cross of gold speech that was given by the politician back in the early nineteen hundreds because they didn't have the flexibility of the currency?

[00:43:31]

Well, how do you grow your country in your economy if your currency is going up in two or three times a year and nobody wants to borrow? I mean, there's that side of it, too, right? You need that. In order to have a productive economy, you do need to have at least somewhat of a steady currency. My concern is this, Brent, when I look at so I buy into the whole Ray D'Alessio big credit cycle that basically started with Bretton Woods and the interest rates peaked in the early 80s and now we're here at zero percent.

[00:44:00]

Interest rates are right that big giant cycle. And I look at how much that inflationary monetary policy has incentivized capital investment and you look at how much technology growth we've had through that period of time relative to any other period throughout history, because it was this global collective incentive structure that was supplied through that monetary policy.

[00:44:22]

And when I look at and I just look at how nature works, if you have 12 hours of daylight now, you've got to have 12 hours of darkness and you look at pretty much everything throughout nature has this cyclic piece to it.

[00:44:36]

And so when I look at the fact that we've been going through that since nineteen forty four up until now, and we're 80 years into that big giant credit cycle that created all this innovation and all this growth, I then have to wonder to myself, is this Bitcoin thing supplying such a hard bag that it's bringing the night time to this massive credit cycle that's going to slow everything down? Just because you and I like the fact that we've been able to have so much progress and growth through our entire lifetimes doesn't necessarily mean that that growth rate or that incentive to continue to produce and grow is going to continue to be there for the second half of our lives because maybe something like the steps in.

[00:45:18]

Do you think that that's a little hard core or.

[00:45:21]

Listen, I mean, these are extremely big concepts that we're thinking about, right. And it's like the cycles of history. And I don't think you're off base. I don't know whether that's going to play out or not. I certainly think barring some new technological discovery, I think maybe the growth rates over the next 50 years maybe are not quite as high as they were over the last 50 years. Maybe if we got rid of all this debt, whether it's by default or inflation or whatever, but if we can get past all this debt that's taking all our productive capacity away, then maybe we could get to these higher growth rates again.

[00:45:51]

Again, I'm just not sure there's a difference between having a great store of value, which I think Bitcoin has the potential to be a great store value. I'm not sure it's as good a currency as it is a store value, I guess is that right now it doesn't mean it couldn't become a good currency. But again, I don't I don't want to borrow a currency that's going to go up three times a year and I have to pay back three times as much as I borrowed unless I took that money that I borrowed and invested something that went up more than three times a year.

[00:46:18]

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[00:49:02]

All right. Back to the show. The way some of the lending works now is, if you go and you want to borrow one hundred thousand dollars, well, you've got to have two hundred thousand dollars in Bitcoin in order to take out one hundred thousand. And so then if the value of Bitcoin is going up, if you have other money in Bitcoin, it's going up in value and it's getting easy for you to pay back that loan. That's true.

[00:49:22]

It's an interesting dynamic. I want to say something before I forget again. If I had to be something in the crypto world, I would probably coin maximalists because I just think the advantage of it are so much higher than than any of the other coins. It's the Bitcoin maximalists who also just think that bitcoins magic and it's going to take over the world and it's going to solve all the world's problems. I think that that's wrong. But I will say this.

[00:49:46]

I mean, Bitcoin is a revolution, right? I mean, it's the money for the people trying to take on the most powerful groups in the world, and it's trying to overthrow them. And that big group is going to do everything it can to keep from getting overthrown. But you know what's sometimes not very often, but sometimes revolutionaries win. Right. And if you go back and you look at revolutionaries throughout history, they're typically not the most rational people in the world.

[00:50:12]

Right. There are the people who think that their cause is worth dying for. And to be a revolutionary, you kind of have to be out there and you kind of have to be a little bit crazy. So even though the bitcoin maximalists drives me nuts, I kind of understand it because if you're going to start a revolution, you're going to win. You need the true believers who are willing to die on the floor for the cause. And there's people out there that are selling everything they own and taking out loans in order to go buy more Bitcoin at twenty three thousand dollars because they're the true believers.

[00:50:42]

Who knows? We'll have to see how it works out. One of the things that gets lost in where this could potentially go and unravel is really around the fixed income market. So today we've got let's just ballpark it and say we've got a one hundred trillion dollars of fixed income in the world, most of it yielding literally nothing. We'll call it 18 trillion is negative yielding. And so I'm just going to lay out a scenario, my opinion and the opinion of a lot of other people due to this scarcity shock that just happened in the protocol back here in May of twenty twenty is that the price of Bitcoin should be around one hundred thousand by the fall of twenty twenty one.

[00:51:22]

That's the numbers in the math. A lot of people are suggesting, if true, I'm curious how people in the fixed income community could possibly keep holding on to those positions as they watch something that is, quote unquote, becoming the new store of value. I mean, we're already seeing narratives. I saw one on CNBC probably two weeks ago, and the headline was think it was like the dollar's death or something like that. And it was a picture of a bitcoin with a crown on top of it.

[00:51:53]

This is like on CNBC right now. And they're having these conversations. And I'm thinking, how are people possibly not going to say, you know what, let me just pull a sliver of one percent out of this 100 trillion dollar market, a fixed income, and start sliding it into Bitcoin. And I I think that the potential for it to totally unravel due to what has been caused by the central bankers that you were describing perfectly at the beginning of the show starts to play into some of this.

[00:52:22]

And I'm just curious if you would agree with it. I don't disagree with that, but I don't agree with that for a few reasons as well. So what do I mean by that? So I think you're the one hundred trillion that you're talking about. Those markets, the people that make the decisions overseas, those markets, they can't go buy Bitcoin. Yeah, it's just not in their mandate right now of the individuals who perhaps believe in Bitcoin, maybe currently lobbying their investment committee or their board of directors or whoever it is to allow them to take the one percent and put it into something like Bitcoin.

[00:52:56]

But a lot of these the big holders of these one hundred trillion dollars of fixed income, these are big pension funds and big endowments and big mutual funds and a mutual fund that is tasked with managing triple-A rated bonds. Their mandate is to go buy triple-A rated bonds. And that guy may have his own money invested in Bitcoin, but he can't take these mutual funds money and go buy Bitcoin.

[00:53:23]

And if and when that mutual fund company ever does, let somebody go buy Bitcoin, they're probably going to set up their own Bitcoin mutual fund or something to go do it. I guess my point is your argument. You could also make that same argument. The gold's been going up over the last couple of years, not not at the same rate as Bitcoin, I get it. But that same fixed income managers say, why am I why do I have to buy negative yielding bonds when I could go buy gold?

[00:53:49]

That would perform better than these negative yielding bonds. But they go to their investment committee in the best sense that we have at most a one percent allocation to gold. And we we would just go buy a gold mutual fund. We're not going to put in our triple-A rated bond portfolio. We're not going to go buy gold. So my point is, I'm not saying that those those endowments and those pension funds, they may at a group level decide that we want to have a small allocation to Bitcoin.

[00:54:17]

But these investment, it takes years sometimes to get a change in the investment policy statement or their mandates to allow them to go into the new asset class. And it's becoming easier. Right. And when you have people like Druckenmiller and Paul Tudor Jones and, you know, these kind of legendary investors step up and buy into coins, that obviously helps. You've got a guy like Michael Saylor who's a little bit more of a that guy's kind of crazy, right?

[00:54:44]

But he's he's gotten his board to sign off on cutting. What do they get, 10 percent of their money? I want to talk about that, because this relates to fixed income, what he's doing right now, so he just went out and he issued a press release that he was going to try to raise four hundred million dollars with a note, a five year note that had a convertibility clause to it. And what was so fascinating, so I talked to him on Monday and it was oversubscribed.

[00:55:13]

It was oversubscribed to six hundred and fifty million dollars.

[00:55:17]

One hundred and fifty million dollars higher than what he was going after. And you know what? What I think is going on is you have people on fixed income that have the mandate that you're talking about and their Bitcoin owners, or they they believe in Bitcoin and they're saying, holy crap, this is my chance to basically participate in this upside and do it in a way that I'm still meeting my mandate.

[00:55:40]

That's I think that's absolutely right.

[00:55:41]

I mean, listen, whether or not you agree that Bitcoin is going higher and whether or not you agree with Michael Saylor of the the attributes of Bitcoin is fairly genius. Move on his part. Oh, yeah. Genius. Yeah.

[00:55:54]

If he's right about Bitcoin, which I obviously think he is, but.

[00:55:57]

Yeah, well, I guess my point is there was a way for him to go raise capital. And I have to confess, I'm not sure that I know the answer to this was that he would put one hundred percent of the proceeds into Bitcoin or just a portion of it, which is crazy. And what was the interest rate on the seventy five basis points?

[00:56:20]

So that's essentially what it was. Basically, he sold a call option on Bitcoin to people who couldn't buy Bitcoin.

[00:56:27]

Exactly that. That's the best summary explanation of what he did. And then so I was really curious. Well, let's see how the market handles this. Right.

[00:56:36]

Is he the seventy five basis points payable in Bitcoin? Oh, no, it's dollars. Oh, yeah, it's definitely dollars.

[00:56:44]

Yeah. Because genius, it works out. I don't know, but it's very clever.

[00:56:48]

I love how you just describe that because that's, that's what this is. And my so when I'm seeing this move on am I, I'm looking at it, I'm saying are we just seeing a preview of what Apple and other large cap companies that have a really pretty balance sheet? Is he providing a template that's going to be copied in 12 months from now?

[00:57:11]

Well, I would I would say it's unlikely he's the only one to do it right. If somebody does something that's successful on Wall Street, everybody starts to copy it. Right? I mean, that's just kind of how it's historically been. Somebody figured out credit default swaps. And the next thing we've got so damn many credit default swaps because the global financial crisis. Right. So whether or not this will turn out to be that same type of thing, you know, I don't know.

[00:57:33]

But I would not be shocked at all to see more people do this again. I think there is demand for Bitcoin. And I think that there's individuals at these institutions who would love to put one percent of their institutional capital into it. And my guess is that as Bitcoin stays high in price, some of these mandates will get through. And then when we have a pullback in Bitcoin, maybe Bitcoin goes to fifty thousand, then pulls back to thirty thousand.

[00:57:58]

I don't know. But whenever we have the next pullback, these things will kind of get shelved a little bit or they won't be quite as popular as they were. And then again, I think that Bitcoin is going to go ultimately going to go a lot higher. But I don't think it's without risk. I think it's I think that the risks are much bigger than the Bitcoin community. Thanks are. But that doesn't mean it's not going to be successful.

[00:58:18]

There's risk in every industry. This is the absolute truth in investing. You can always come up with a reason not to do the trick. There's always one hundred reasons not to do the trick. But if you can find a couple of reasons to do it, sometimes you just got to do it right. And I kind of feel like Bitcoin is one of those things. I own some bitcoin. I don't know as much as you probably want me to or other people think that I should.

[00:58:39]

But I want a little bit just because I see I'll tell you, I if you want to call me bitter about Bitcoin, I will absolutely admit that I'm better on Bitcoin because I've been following it since 2010. Somebody sent me the white paper in January of 2010. They sent it to me because I was a big fan of gold and they said, hey, this is pretty similar to gold. We think you might be interested in this. I remember reading the white paper.

[00:59:03]

I remember sitting back in my chair. I live in Silicon Valley or near Silicon Valley, and I have a lot of people at work. It kind of goes over my head. I talk with them about the things that they're doing and my eyes just glaze over because I just don't really get it. But I remember reading this white paper and I remember sitting back in my chair thinking if the technology works the way this paper says the technology works in a million years, it'll never be legal because it's the most powerful thing possible.

[00:59:31]

And Bitcoin was twenty five cents at the time. And I remember thinking I should just put five thousand dollars in it and forget about it. Well, yeah, it's the one time in my life where I was somewhat practical and just had a son a couple of years before I started to pay for him to go to private school and I changed jobs. And there's all these reasons. I just realized I should have just done the trade. And I didn't because I thought about it and I was like, well, no, I well, I ended up buying it later when it was a thousand dollars or eight hundred dollars or whatever it was.

[01:00:00]

But yeah, I mean, you can imagine what, five thousand dollars at twenty five or thirty cents would be worth even if you sold it off along because you would never would have held it. All right. So it's not like I have three billion and. You know, Bitcoin, but, you know, 20 to 30 million wouldn't do that, right? It's pretty amazing there are a few people in the community that have held from very insane prices of a dollar or a quarter and yeah, I mean, it's as if it keeps to go, if it keeps going where it's no.

[01:00:32]

Many suspect it could go. I mean, they're going to be millionaires as far as buying power goes. Again, I find the whole space fascinating is it's kind of the intersection of economics, politics, finance and the Wild Wild West, right? I mean, what's not to like about it? This is fascinating to me. But again, the wild, wild West, I mean, you can get shot in the street in the Wild West, right?

[01:00:58]

That wasn't to say it might have been a very cool environment and a very kind of wide open and opportunities were amazing. But I mean, somebody might ride up on a horse and shoot you. So that doesn't mean that it wasn't some pitfalls like. Last question, because believe it or not, we've already gone an hour, I can see why everyone wanted us to talk.

[01:01:17]

We haven't even gotten in a fight yet.

[01:01:22]

Last question. Tell us something about yourself that you've never shared or that people might be surprised to hear. It's just something really unique.

[01:01:31]

That's a good question, because they asked me that before. I don't know if people have heard this before or not, but one thing that people might not know is the reason my company is called Santiago Capital is I hiked the Camino Santiago, which is an old ancient pilgrimage route across Spain, and I was between jobs in nineteen ninety nine. And I was looking for something I wanted, something kind of adventurous and kind of spiritual and kind of off the beaten path.

[01:01:57]

And so I decided I was going to walk across Spain and that's where the name comes from. Oh, that's awesome, and you know what, before we had this conversation, I actually thought that to myself. I said, why is it called Santiago Capital? Because I don't see that anywhere kind of in his, you know, the bio and I'm reading area. You don't see it anywhere there. So that's cool.

[01:02:17]

OK, awesome. All right. I lied. There's one more question, book recommendation or person that really influenced you that people can research and study up on that really had a big impact on your investing style. I think the one book that's probably influenced my overall view the most is the fourth turning and people heard me say that before. I think the fourth turning is just a genius work of history and analysis, and it applies to the past and it applies to the future.

[01:02:44]

So if I had to give one book recommendation, that would be it. My two favorite books of all time are The Alchemists and the Old Man and the Sea. And those are books about one of them is about going on a big adventure. And the other one's about kind of the ultimate struggle. I think that's what life's about. You can live kind of a boring life or you can take some big swings and go on a big adventure and you may go through the struggle to do it, but ultimately it makes life pretty interesting.

[01:03:09]

Brent, I really appreciate you agreeing to come on, especially after, you know, us wrestling or each other in front of the playground. People take Twitter so seriously. I really appreciated you being willing to just talk to me on the phone, I knew right away I was like, all right, this is going to be a great conversation. And just coming in here and sharing some of your concerns. And I think that this is super important for people that are entering the Bitcoin space or even if you're taking a one percent position in Bitcoin to hear counter arguments, to hear people say what their concerns are now, whether they're valid, they're their super valid, invalid, whatever, it doesn't necessarily matter.

[01:03:48]

It's in the eye of the beholder of the person listening to this to decide to do future research. And you brought a whole bunch of that today. And I really appreciate it. And I appreciate your time and coming on the show.

[01:03:59]

I appreciate you having me and happy to come back anytime time and hope you and your family have a great Christmas. Hey, you too.

[01:04:06]

And yes, we do need to do it again. Thank you for listening to talk to access our show notes, courses or forums, go to the investors podcast Dotcom. This show is for entertainment purposes only before making any decisions, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by the Investors Podcast Network written permission must be granted before syndication forecasting.