Latest / The Income Show / Fix the Money | The Income Show | Ep. 9

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Fix the Money | The Income Show | Ep. 9 · The Income Show

• 0:00
  We have so many people right now who wanna get rich super fast in these unrealistic time spans, and I would argue instead that very few people wanna get rich at that medium speed,
• 0:08
  that medium setting, and that's how I've, I've set my portfolio.
• 0:10
  I think digital credit is a lot more important.
• 0:13
  I think that we have an existential need to move to a better money.
• 0:17
  All of our systems are on the verge of breakdown right as we have exponential, totally novel technologies, giving us a,
• 0:24
  a way forward.
• 0:25
  There is no amount of political reform that is going to fix our- problem if we don't unpoison the money.
• 0:32
  I started to understand what Bitcoin really is and started to appreciate it more as a discovery like fire or,
• 0:39
  or electricity, but just looking at from first principles, I couldn't possibly be more bullish for what the next, few years look like for Bitcoin.
• 0:56
  Hey everybody, welcome back to the Income Show.
• 0:59
  This week I have on John Wilbanks.
• 1:01
  John, welcome.
• 1:03
  Thanks, Joe.
• 1:03
  Pleasure
• 1:04
  to be here.
• 1:04
  Big fan of, of you, the Strive team, True North.
• 1:08
  huge advocate for this digital credit revolution.
• 1:12
  longtime Bitcoiner, and excited to, excited to chat with you.
• 1:16
  Yeah, very excited as, as well.
• 1:18
  I know we have a lot of interesting topics to cover on a, on an interesting day.
• 1:22
  So this will, this will be a great, great show.
• 1:25
  Maybe I kinda wanna start off, like, before we get into digital credit, before we get into Bitcoin, maybe I wanna like,
• 1:31
  start off at a very high level, like, what's your general investment philosophy or like, how have you thought about,
• 1:37
  like, throughout your life, investing in asset classes and assets and trying to grow your wealth over time?
• 1:45
  Sure.
• 1:46
  So I have a, a pretty strong conviction on, on my portfolio style, it works well for me, but that is high concentration,
• 1:54
  high conviction, and, very low time preference.
• 1:57
  So just to give you a, a sense, most of my, most of my portfolio is either Bitcoin or, Tesla,
• 2:03
  Musk industries related, and then a little bit of diversification, but, you know, I think a lot of the conventional wisdom around,
• 2:10
  you know, for, for a while, there were years of my, my life and career where I was really, Conservative index fund investor with a couple smaller plays,
• 2:17
  and, as I've watched the economy evolve over, over the last decade, so much of the growth has really concentrated in tech,
• 2:25
  being led by the Meg Seven, now Meg Eight, Nine, with, with SpaceX driving a disproportionate amount of those, of growth,
• 2:32
  and, it's just hard for me to get excited.
• 2:34
  I think that there's probably a, a lot of, or have been, has been a lot of overheating in different aspects of the tech sector with a lot of legacy businesses,
• 2:43
  and I don't- I don't really wanna get dragged along for that ride, and I think increasingly over the last few years,
• 2:48
  as the world seems to be, you know, we've been on the cusp of the singularity and now we're very distinctly in it,
• 2:53
  we're at a very, I think, critical time for humanity, and so increasingly I have really worked to align my portfolio with my values and make sure that I'm putting as much of my energy as I can in the,
• 3:06
  the companies and the assets that are bringing about the world that I want to live in and that I want for,
• 3:11
  for my daughter.
• 3:14
  Part of why I'm, I'm so excited about Bitcoin, but why I think a lot of the conventional wisdom around diversification,
• 3:21
  index fund investing, I just-- there's a lot of companies in the S&P 500 that I have a hard time,
• 3:27
  getting excited about.
• 3:28
  And so, my, my strategy and philosophy has really been play conservative with leverage, make sure that, you know, I'm in a strong enough position to not get shaken out in the noise,
• 3:38
  and then enjoy the, the roller coaster ride.
• 3:41
  it's been, see, Tesla since And first Bitcoin purchase in twenty thirteen, then again in twenty seventeen, bought high, sold low,
• 3:49
  and then really started dollar cost averaging into Bitcoin around twenty nineteen, and so have gone through several of these,
• 3:55
  these super cycles and, you know, I get-- I love investing in, in companies that I'm, you know, not only do I believe in from a mission standpoint,
• 4:03
  but that I find interesting and fun, and so I love learning about these assets for, for recreation, and I know I don't wanna buy something or have a high concentration in something that- I couldn't talk for hours and hours about in an excited way,
• 4:17
  and so what that gives me on the other side, other than, than entertainment, is, it lets me know what I own.
• 4:23
  And so when we're seeing, like what we're seeing right now in Bitcoin's just crashed to like fifty-nine thousand five hundred dollars,
• 4:30
  a bit of a white knuckle day for anybody, in the space, and it's been a rough several, it's been a rough year to date,
• 4:35
  but knowing what I own in depth and, and having a really fleshed out investment thesis around it Markets like this,
• 4:44
  and that's, I think, entirely what we're seeing.
• 4:46
  I think Bitcoin is-- there's nothing structurally broken with Bitcoin, power law is, is holding these, the treasury companies, strategy,
• 4:54
  stra-- strategies in a stronger position, much more than it was, you know, years prior in the last bear market when it's,
• 5:00
  was stock-- and, or when the stock was trading much higher a year ago.
• 5:04
  And so I feel really comfortable and sleep well at night knowing what I own and that, it's really a waiting game for
• 5:14
  Yeah, no, I think that was a, a, a really great overview.
• 5:17
  Specifically, I wanna ask you, like, how do you think about volatility?
• 5:20
  'Cause you, you mentioned like your general philosophy is to make high concentration, like, you know, very specific investment decisions.
• 5:29
  Obviously, you know, broad based index funds kind of the opposite of that, where you're extremely diversified and you're just buying the basket of everything.
• 5:37
  How do you like mentally handle the volatility or like prepare for the volatility?
• 5:42
  I think
• 5:44
  outsized volatility
• 5:45
  is the price of, of outsized gains.
• 5:46
  Like, I can tell you, you know, I think my thesis and structure is being tested a little bit this week,
• 5:51
  so I'll tell you how I set my, my portfolio up, particularly, in regards to the, the Bitcoin, section, which is,
• 5:58
  which is a lot, which is I've got, it's roughly, you know, a third, On-chain Bitcoin, a third, quality blue chip Bitcoin treasury companies,
• 6:07
  so that's primarily Strategy, Strive, MetaPlanet, which I think is super interesting and doesn't get, doesn't get enough due, and a,
• 6:16
  a little bit in, in twenty-one, 'cause I think Jack Ma is interesting and they have too much Bitcoin to not be doing something interesting in the future.
• 6:22
  and so obviously that's gonna be much more volatile than Bitcoin itself.
• 6:25
  And then I have a pretty big sleeve of options on those, those, treasuries.
• 6:30
  So I've got, Leaps on Strive and a lot of December twenty twenty-eight Leaps on mstr, and so that volatility ratchets up the food chain and then the,
• 6:42
  the, The load-bearing wall that is supposed to be the, the, volatility insulator was digital credits, so large positions in Stretch,
• 6:52
  Seda, and Strike.
• 6:54
  I really like Strike, I don't, I, it's, I think it's sort of the more interest-- most interesting press out there,
• 6:57
  doesn't get talked about a lot.
• 6:59
  And, you know, the idea is those are there to, to, to help weather storms like this.
• 7:04
  Obviously, you know, we don't expect Stretch to drop down to what I think it's eighty-two dollars at the moment,
• 7:09
  so this is a bit The market sees that they can take these dividends to the bank, that, that volatility will begin to,
• 7:19
  will begin to diminish, and then, I keep some dry powder elsewhere and then try to have a few non-correlated assets,
• 7:25
  but again, it's just, it's hard to get-- I look at the market, it's hard to get too excited about things that aren't,
• 7:30
  pretty closely correlated either to the Bitcoin decentralization thesis or to, you know, exponential singularity fourth industrial revolution thesis, and those are both risk-on assets,
• 7:42
  and so, you know, it's But, yeah, I think long term as digital credit matures, I don't, I don't think this thesis will change.
• 7:49
  I think I'm probably gonna adjust some of my thinking around digital credit, to a little bit more of a medium term capital mindset and always keep,
• 7:56
  you know, a little, keep a little bit more dry powder in USD than, than I have in the past.
• 8:01
  I do love, I keep some cash at River, they pay me three point three percent in, in straight Bitcoin,
• 8:06
  and then, you know, still other places you can earn a three and
• 8:15
  What would you say a typical person gets wrong about when it comes to thinking about Bitcoin or, or digital credit,
• 8:21
  or just in-investing broadly?
• 8:25
  I think it's high time preference.
• 8:27
  I think we've all been-- we hear, and there's a, there's a big survivorship bias in, in the success stories that people hear is,
• 8:34
  you know, everyone's, they're, they're wanting, you know, a hundred x return in, in two years, and, it, it doesn't work that way.
• 8:39
  And, you know, I'm perfectly happy with-- I actually expect Bitcoin to outperform a thirty percent Kager, but, you know,
• 8:45
  I'm very happy with that for the next few Get rich slowly, because it is, you know, it backtests so well,
• 8:57
  you know, drop your money in the S&P 500 and chill for thirty years is the most, you know, I think battle-tested,
• 9:03
  back-tested way to, to build wealth over time.
• 9:06
  I think it-- I don't think that that math necessarily accounts for in-inflation, for, for debase-ment, nearly enough, but I would,
• 9:13
  I would argue that, and, and, and, the corollary is we have so many people right now who wanna get rich People wanna get rich at,
• 9:25
  at that medium speed, that medium setting, and that's how I've, I've set my portfolio.
• 9:29
  And I, I think I don't invest in anything, I don't take a material position in anything that I'm not willing to,
• 9:34
  thinking about in at least a five year time horizon.
• 9:36
  And I tell anybody, particularly with Bitcoin, I say, "Do not buy this if you aren't willing to hold it for four years."
• 9:43
  I said, "You need to fully expect, as soon as you start putting money in, that you could open your account and see,
• 9:54
  I think you are going to panic and bail out.
• 9:56
  Don't buy this, I'm telling you now.
• 9:58
  Bake it into your expectation, it's gonna happen.
• 10:01
  Every dollar you put in, and ideally dollar cost average.
• 10:05
  Don't, don't think about it, for four to five years.
• 10:08
  And, you know, that, that obviously back-tested well, and I think will continue to hold up.
• 10:12
  And I, I've done pretty well.
• 10:13
  I've, I've orange-pilled, you know, these are my, my orange pills on my desk, that I collect, and I started about a year ago.
• 10:20
  I'm like, you know what?
• 10:20
  Every time I get one of these, I'm gonna keep it on my desk just as a little reminder.
• 10:23
  And everyone that I have brought
• 10:37
  Yeah, I mean, I, I feel like Bitcoin is obviously like incredibly interesting, right?
• 10:42
  I mean, I think most people agree like they have a very high time preference, they, they can't think for more than,
• 10:50
  you know, one day or even like a few minutes.
• 10:52
  Like everyone has TikTok brain or Instagram real brain or, or whatnot.
• 10:57
  I, I definitely agree that like the conventional wisdom is to like hold index funds, and I think without Bitcoin,
• 11:03
  that is probably like the out- Strategy.
• 11:06
  I mean, I, I, I generally think that markets are relatively efficient or at the very, you know, at least they trend toward efficiency over time,
• 11:15
  and I'm not intelligent enough to know exactly like which company to ne-necessarily buy.
• 11:21
  So I would just, if I have a very long time horizon, I'd prefer to buy everything in a relatively,
• 11:26
  relatively frictionless way, and I think that is kind of like the, the vanguard, you know, way, i-i-in a sense.
• 11:33
  But of course, I, I think that that- It's wrong in, in the sense that Bitcoin now exists and, and in a way,
• 11:40
  when you're trying to buy everything, you're kind of just trying to avoid debasement, and therefore it's like, okay, well,
• 11:46
  if you just had a good form of money and you could benefit from technology deflation and, you know, just the economy becoming more efficient over time,
• 11:57
  you probably would just hold the money, and I think that would work out, you know, the best for you over,
• 12:02
  over a long enough time horizon.
• 12:03
  And on top of that, you know- Bitcoin adoption is almost zero, so it's like, okay, well, if Bitcoin adoption is zero or,
• 12:10
  you know, one percent, say something like that, well, you get the benefit of it being a better form of money,
• 12:16
  and you get the benefit of it being adopted, and, and you own it before almost everybody else does, and that's kind of how I would get to,
• 12:23
  to the, the thirty, forty, fifty, sixty percent Kager that we, you know, we could see over the coming years.
• 12:28
  But I completely agree that, you know, the volatility is, is, is You're not used to volatility like this.
• 12:37
  People don't even like the volatility of the S&P 500.
• 12:40
  You gotta try Bitcoin, it's, it's another animal.
• 12:43
  Well, and I think that, that's the beautiful thing about-- one of the things that, that digital credit, that stretch,
• 12:48
  that SEDA, you know, their potential for, for, You know, I'll say normal, more normal investors, who, who maybe aren't as,
• 12:57
  as passionate or in the weeds on this stuff as we are.
• 12:59
  You know, I think about the problem it solves for someone like my parents.
• 13:03
  My parents are in their seventies, they're, they're on a fixed income.
• 13:05
  I, I really resent the fact that we, we live in a system where they are forced to gamble in the,
• 13:10
  the stock market just to keep pace with, with inflation.
• 13:14
  And so the prospect of a, you know, I, I realize this term A money market account to, to save and have,
• 13:25
  have their, their principal, their liquidity available while getting, you know, a borderline S&P 500 returns, a tax advantage is really,
• 13:32
  really interesting.
• 13:33
  I think it solves a, like civil-- potentially solves a civilization scale problem.
• 13:38
  We'll see.
• 13:39
  You know, I think right now this is a hiccup for, for digital, digital credit, and we'll see these heal back up to par.
• 13:45
  I think there's some interesting conversations.
• 13:46
  Obviously wasn't supposed to go, as low as it I think that gets really exciting.
• 13:53
  I think that's one of the things that I lights me up about digital credit, is it's not just like,
• 13:58
  I'll talk about this at cocktail parties or dinner sometimes, and, with the wrong crowd, it sounds like I'm just nerding out about,
• 14:05
  like, this exotic financial instrument because I just-- because the yield looks good.
• 14:09
  And I think digital credit is a lot more important.
• 14:13
  I think that we have an existential need to move to a better money.
• 14:18
  I don't think that all of our systems are on the verge of breakdown right- Is we have exponential, totally novel technologies giving us a,
• 14:26
  a way forward, but there is no amount of political reform that is going to fix our problem if we don't unpoison the money.
• 14:35
  And, so I think Bitcoin is that solution, but Bitcoin is volatile, it doesn't make sense for everyone, you know,
• 14:41
  for my parents in their seventies, it's hard to tell them, and I wouldn't tell them to put most of their wealth into,
• 14:47
  into on-chain Bitcoin.
• 14:49
  But what digital credit offers is something that, Is, I think, easier to understand and, and has-- is a less volatile journey that solves some of that problem,
• 14:58
  but it unlocks this massive pool of capital into the Bitcoin base layer.
• 15:02
  And so I, I, I really think of it as a-- it is a, a machine that can capture the thermodynamic melt that,
• 15:11
  like, like heat energy from fiat money printing, and once it's moved into-- once you buy Stretch and Strategy or,
• 15:19
  or Strive buys new Bitcoin coin for it, it's been Permanently moved into that Bitcoin base layer in this, you know,
• 15:26
  Aikido style way that is, really taking the fiat system's energy and using it against itself to accelerate this transition to hyperbitcoinization,
• 15:35
  and, and as that money moves into the base layer, it's gonna reduce volatility.
• 15:39
  I think eventually it's gonna cause some parabolic supply shock and price discovery to the upside, but absent that, it,
• 15:45
  it's gonna soften, it's gonna mean that the highs are higher, but the lows are, are a lot lower and a lot gentler over time.
• 15:51
  And so, you Markets like three hundred trillion dollars, I think, is the, is, is the stat, you know, capturing even a fraction of that,
• 15:58
  I think, is exciting and probably accelerates Bitcoin's inevitable, inevitable success and, and a hyperbitcoinized, a hyperbitcoinized world by years or decades through that,
• 16:10
  through its flywheel potential.
• 16:11
  And so when I advocate for digital credit, it's, you know, kind of in the most practical meat and potatoes sense that,
• 16:17
  hey, here's a product, here's a, here's a product that can solve a problem for you today, you You don't have to get into Bitcoin,
• 16:23
  you don't have to take huge swings and bets, it solves your problem right now, but it really is coming from an ideological,
• 16:29
  and a mission place that this is a, a really powerful way to help accelerate our transition to the first,
• 16:35
  the world's transition to the first truly global, free market.
• 16:38
  And I get, I think there's a, a lot of potential.
• 16:41
  You know, we talk about the fixed income market, but I think there's a lot of capital sitting in private businesses,
• 16:46
  in corporations for medium duration capital that's I was at a retreat recently with a, a number of venture capitalists who have,
• 16:56
  you know, many of their LPs are like, "We don't wanna deal with capital calls, we just wanna, you know,
• 17:00
  can we just cut you a check at the beginning?"
• 17:01
  It's like, "Oh, that must be nice to, to be, be in that view, here's all my liquidity up front."
• 17:05
  But that they are just, you know, having to park it in these money market accounts that are yielding almost nothing.
• 17:11
  And so when I look at how can I be, you know, I exited one company I have a, a few months ago,
• 17:16
  and, I'm on a great track with, with number two, and as I have a little bit more bandwidth opening up,
• 17:21
  I've really been introspective saying, how can I be-- I think this is from first principles, the single-- Bitcoin is the single highest leverage thing on the board that I can advocate for,
• 17:30
  and thinking, how About in, in my network and, and my, my speaking, my writing is how can I be an advocate for business owners,
• 17:42
  corporations, and, and investors to think about this new asset class to supercharge, their, their portfolios and put that otherwise unproductive capital to work?
• 17:53
  Yeah, I think that was very well said.
• 17:56
  you made an interesting point about digital credit being this like medium duration or moderate duration instrument.
• 18:03
  I think that that is, you know, probably the best way to think about it.
• 18:06
  Obviously, it's not a, it's not a stablecoin, as everyone has, has very clearly learned at this point.
• 18:13
  But, but it's interesting to, to, to think about it as this moderate duration instrument that, you know, does pay quite a high yield.
• 18:19
  Maybe like, can we go back and like learn more?
• 18:21
  More about your background, you know, you mentioned you exited one company, you're working on the next company.
• 18:25
  You mentioned earlier that you first, I guess, bought your first Bitcoin around twenty thirteen and then twenty seventeen.
• 18:31
  Maybe give us your background and, and how you initially like started learning about Bitcoin.
• 18:37
  Sure.
• 18:37
  So,
• 18:38
  in, in college, I was part of Students for Liberty.
• 18:41
  I volunteered for the Ron Paul campaign.
• 18:42
  So, Ron Paul was really my entry point to, and I still actually, I keep copies of, of End the Fed on hand.
• 18:49
  I, I tend-- I like to mentor a lot of people in Gen Z, and I'm like, "Okay, just-- they wanna learn about,
• 18:52
  you wanna learn about investing?
• 18:53
  Start here.
• 18:54
  I have them read End the Fed, because we kind of need that foundation to talk about, everything else that follows."
• 19:02
  And, And so, really early on, before, you know, Bitcoin was really on the, you know, its earliest days, before Bitcoin was on the radar,
• 19:13
  I, I spent a lot of time learning about monetary theory, and, and policy, and was certainly the contrarian in some of my,
• 19:21
  my, my econ classes.
• 19:22
  I, I dual majored business and film joint major at USC, and, and definitely teed off, ticked off some of my,
• 19:27
  professors 'cause they didn't like some of my conclusions.
• 19:30
  But so when Bitcoin really came on my radar I was a poor college student, I come from a lower middle class background,
• 19:39
  I was working, paying my way through college, didn't have a lot of money to invest, it was really hard to,
• 19:44
  like the exchanges weren't built out, like Mt.
• 19:46
  Gox, I think was even, I don't even know if Mt.
• 19:49
  Gox was, was stood up at that point, and it was a little bit beyond, not only did I not have money to,
• 19:54
  to play with, but it was a little bit outside of my, my technical comfort zone, and so I was like Okay,
• 20:06
  so this is digital gold.
• 20:07
  This could really solve, a problem and come-- get around, circumvent some of the shortcomings that, that gold has had for,
• 20:14
  for thousands of years.
• 20:15
  So this is like a super cool project, but there's no way the system is going to let it succeed.
• 20:19
  Like, they're gonna-- they're, they're gonna do, if, if this gets any traction, they're gonna do everything they can to,
• 20:24
  to stamp it out.
• 20:25
  And I do think there was a time-- I mean, in hindsight, it's like, "Oh, You know, could have stalled,
• 20:38
  but re-regardless, so I, I did finally buy my first in twenty, in twenty thirteen, and it was in a,
• 20:44
  there was a, a, a bull market happening, and I was like, okay, maybe this is catching on, I should,
• 20:48
  I, I put some money that I probably couldn't afford to lock up, put some money into it, re-- you know,
• 20:53
  it, it ran another fifty percent, I thought I was a genius, and then it, then it crashed really hard,
• 20:58
  I was like, I've lost half Then I repeated the exact same, exact same pattern in, I want to say it was twenty,
• 21:12
  maybe seventeen, and the same thing happened.
• 21:14
  I ended up buying on a, on a bull run, I was like, okay, maybe, maybe, maybe this time is,
• 21:17
  is different.
• 21:18
  It crashed, and I was like, "Fool me twice."
• 21:21
  And then, sometime in between when Bitcoin was, was just kind of quiet, and out of favor, I started taking a,
• 21:28
  a closer look at it, and I was like, and I, and I had a good friend of mine also,
• 21:31
  who's, who's pretty orange blooded, and had been advocating, for me to take a closer look as well.
• 21:36
  I said, "You know what?
• 21:37
  I don't think this is going anywhere.
• 21:39
  I'm gonna be, you know, I didn't I saw that they were gonna, that they were turning on the money printer,
• 21:50
  I was like, okay, this seems like a pretty good bet.
• 21:53
  And then I've just consistently dollar cost averaged into it every day since then, and, and I've ramped up my DCA as my,
• 22:00
  you know, income and, and resources, have grown and, you know, a lot of that, I think a lot of my capital's gone in the last,
• 22:08
  couple years, but my ROI on, you know, seven years of, of Steadily stacking stats, is, is looking pretty great,
• 22:17
  and I think something really happened in my-- something clicked for me, or I took it to a, a whole other level.
• 22:25
  Middle of last year is, I had been so distracted, you know, building my business, having a, you know, a,
• 22:30
  a young child, building my company, family, just hadn't been paying too much attention.
• 22:36
  Obviously, politics had been very chaotic, but I kinda looked up and I was like, okay, the Biden administration did everything they possibly could to kill,
• 22:44
  Bitcoin and slow roll crypto, like China tried to ban it, like it's still here, it's stronger than ever.
• 22:50
  We somehow have, you know, the Genius Act had been passed, we now have like direct rails Into like the inner belly of,
• 22:57
  the monetary system, and we have, you know, almost every tr- cabinet member is pro- crypto, we have a, a,
• 23:05
  a pro Bitcoin Treasury secretary, and then one of the Trump family's biggest assets is Bitcoin, and whatever we think about the Trump administration,
• 23:13
  I, I think it's, it's pretty fair to say that self-interest is a, is a pretty good predictor of, of some of their behavior,
• 23:18
  and I'm, so I'm looking at this and thinking, wow, this has been, Bitcoin has now been vascular Even a very hostile future administration isn't going to be able to remove without,
• 23:30
  I think probably killing the patient.
• 23:32
  This is a really-- This is different, and like, this is the moment to, to go and just felt a real activation around it.
• 23:39
  That was when I started going deeper, and instead of just my, my kind of cyberpunk libertarian, apocalypse hedge as a better form of money or better gold,
• 23:48
  I think it was really listening and reading Jeff Booth really rewired some of my brain around this, and I,
• 23:53
  I started to understand Understand what Bitcoin really is and started to appreciate it more as a discovery like fire or,
• 24:01
  or electricity.
• 24:02
  And, you know, I'm a, a bit of an armchair futurist.
• 24:05
  I love, I don't know if you can see my bookshelf, got a lot of science fiction on, on the shelf behind me,
• 24:09
  and thinking through as a form of, of, a store of value as, as capital that can really serve us through the,
• 24:16
  the singularity and, and to the stars.
• 24:18
  Bitcoin holds up really well.
• 24:20
  Now, when we start dealing with like faster than light We're gonna have to, the protocol's gonna have to adjust a little bit,
• 24:28
  but I think that there's probably even ways around that.
• 24:30
  And so I think now is Bitcoin's time, and that's-- This is like not popular, just Bitcoin's very out of favor at the moment.
• 24:35
  Everyone's, got FOMO, you know, AI FOMO, and I'm very much on the, the singularity like effective acceleration train, but just looking at from first principles,
• 24:45
  I think the board has never been set up better for-- I, I couldn't possibly be more bullish
• 24:55
  Yeah, no, I think that was very well said, and I honestly completely agree.
• 24:59
  Let's dive in more on the, the concept of the singularity and this idea of accelerationism.
• 25:05
  Like, maybe for the audience that doesn't even know what that is, could you like kind of explain what you think is happening from like a technology perspective and AI perspective,
• 25:15
  and kind of like how Bitcoin fits into that?
• 25:19
  Sure.
• 25:19
  So, the best way I like to describe this to give people a visual that, that most people can understand is if,
• 25:26
  if you've ever played the game Breakout, where you've got the little bar that moves across the bottom of the screen and it bounces up and you hit a block and it bounces down,
• 25:33
  and your goal is to get rid of all the bricks.
• 25:35
  Well, in that game, not a lot happens for the first eighty, ninety percent of that game until, you know,
• 25:42
  you, you break the right, you break the right brick, and the ball starts ricoch- Off of other bricks, and it spins off new balls,
• 25:51
  and they all start ricocheting off of each other, and then in the span of thirty seconds, the whole border's gone.
• 25:57
  That I think is a visual, probably would be better if I had a graphic to, to show that, but I think that is a,
• 26:02
  a, a visual representation of where we are right now.
• 26:05
  we look at, like, Ray-- I've read Ray Kurzweil for years, track record's absolutely astounding, and, and spent a lot of,
• 26:14
  and, and Peter Diamandis To men really helped me internalize a framework around, thinking in ex-p- extrapolating the future in exponential terms.
• 26:27
  Our, the human mind is biased for, to extrapolate linear progress, and that's been like evolutionarily appropriate through most of our history.
• 26:34
  We look at the, behind us, at the hill that we've climbed, and we look at that slope, and we say,
• 26:39
  "Okay, I'm just gonna map out that scope, that, that slope, ten, twenty years in the future."
• 26:44
  The, the problem is that's a, that's a perspective bias Exponential technologies, anything that's fundamentally powered by Moore's Law, I think Metcalf's Law,
• 26:54
  if we're talking about like network effects, that slope is getting steeper and steeper as technology improves.
• 27:00
  And, you know, you look at crazy stats, like the iPhone, I worked at, it was a-- before it was cool,
• 27:05
  two thousand three, two thousand four, huge Apple fan, I worked at the Apple store in high school.
• 27:08
  I was there the, the night that, that I was at the Apple store when they launched the iPhone, and we got an hour,
• 27:17
  the store closed To this day, I've never had another experience like that where it felt like someone had beamed alien technology from the future back in time.
• 27:25
  It was such a, it was such a quantum leap.
• 27:27
  And I think, man, that was two thousand and seven.
• 27:30
  So, here we are, nineteen years later, and the entire world has been, like, our, our relationships, our economy, social dynamics have been reconfigured around the device of this mobile phone.
• 27:43
  And the mobile phone that's in my pocket is many, hundreds of times, I think, probably thousands of times Point faster than the original,
• 27:50
  you know, Motorola, you know, two hundred megahertz chip that was in that iPhone, and we're seeing that replicated in,
• 27:57
  in every other aspect of, of, of life.
• 28:00
  And what's happening now is we're hitting these recursive self-improvement curves where, two, I think two things are happening.
• 28:06
  One, technology, particularly AI, is smart enough that it is able to start improving itself, and this is a very pivotal moment and a threat chasm that we've just crossed in the last few months that's been predicted for a very long time,
• 28:17
  and that That, that exponential curve goes, you know, parabolic.
• 28:22
  I think we are there right now, but what that's also doing is causing, and back to the breakout analogy,
• 28:28
  breakthroughs in one domain are, are ricocheting off of and catalyzing breakthroughs in others, which are then spinning up a flywheel across the entire economy.
• 28:37
  And there's a, there's a wild stat, and, I don't know where this came from, but it's in my, it's in my brain RAM here,
• 28:42
  that what we expect if we extrapolate out these curves across key industries, Next decade, we will see more technological advancement than in the last two hundred years of human history,
• 28:54
  and in the next twenty years, we will see more than in the last two centuries combined.
• 28:58
  And I, I believe it.
• 29:00
  I've been on the, and I'm an early adopter.
• 29:02
  I, I think my, my strength of weakness, and a few friends who will joke that I'm, I'm perpetually, you know,
• 29:06
  five years too early to a lot of trends, but I do my best, you know, in terms of technology,
• 29:10
  to live, five years in the The thing that has really-- another kind of catalyst that really radicalized me was,
• 29:23
  living with Tesla FSD every day.
• 29:26
  So I've been driving a Tesla since twenty twenty, like early autopilot was so cool, like driver assist, way better than,
• 29:32
  than anything else.
• 29:33
  But that, that path, trying to solve for reasoning in, in real-world artificial intelligence is a-- with through Boolean kind of if-then logic,
• 29:42
  is a, is a dead end.
• 29:43
  That's what Waymo's doing.
• 29:44
  They can't-- their economics suck, they have scaling limits.
• 29:47
  But, about Let's see, it's the end of twenty-four, twenty twenty-four, I got the beta for the first neural net version of FSD,
• 29:56
  and it was actually a step back from autopilot, but it was kind of cool 'cause it could, you know,
• 30:01
  see stop signs and handle side streets, but it was really a tech demo, and it felt like I was supervising a,
• 30:06
  a really nervous drunk teenager not ready for prime time.
• 30:10
  But then the next update, like six months later, suddenly it was better than regular autopilot, and then with each update,
• 30:16
  it was, you know, certain Functions and sometimes order of magnitude improvement, to the point that now it's been like a year and a half since,
• 30:24
  like, I, I, I touch my steering wheel like to back out of my garage at this point, my car is a dramatically better driver than I am.
• 30:33
  I can, it almost feels sentient, it is able, I can watch it reason and problem solve and do that faster and with better reflexes than I can,
• 30:41
  to the point that it's now, I, like, I trust it with, I, I think the responsible thing as a parent when I've got my daughter in the FSD drive,
• 30:50
  and the stats back that up, my, my mother-in-law and my mother are now Tesla drivers using FSD to solve huge mobility problems,
• 30:58
  for them.
• 30:59
  I, I'm not to go on a tangent, but it is so-- the reason I, I say this, and for anyone who thinks it sounds like I'm just pie-in-the-sky futurist,
• 31:06
  is if you haven't, if you don't think that AI is coming for everything, including manual labor and, and not just,
• 31:12
  not just white-collar knowledge economy jobs, but coming for everything Current model Tesla, put it on FSD, and if you really wanna be convinced,
• 31:23
  hit the Mad Max button to let it go into, to overdrive mode, and, I think you will come out,
• 31:29
  profoundly shaken that AI is here, it's in the real world.
• 31:33
  and then of course, you know, the-- Using AI in my daily life, I'm able to build models for, for my portfolio that five years ago would have been limited to hedge funds with a,
• 31:43
  a team of twenty analysts and probably taking them a week to do, and now with some I'll use Grok Heavy to build and iterate on a model,
• 31:50
  and then I bump it over to Gemini Ultra to cross-check my work and point out flaws, and then I'll,
• 31:55
  I'll, I'll have them, argue with each other as needed to reach a consensus.
• 31:58
  The amount of empowerment and acceleration is just, so exciting, and I think, I think what Elon is building with SpaceX and Tesla is really the ultimate physical real-world manifestation of that.
• 32:10
  I could go even further, but I'll, I'll, I won't go too far on that tangent.
• 32:14
  Yeah, no, And that fact that we've kind of crossed that chasm like very recently is fascinating, and yeah, that full self-driving with Tesla,
• 32:27
  you know, unbelievable.
• 32:29
  Where do you see this all heading, in addition to what you just said, and like, where specifically does Bitcoin and digital credit kind of fit into what's all happening right now?
• 32:40
  So I think we're at a crossroads for humanity, and I think that we have-- so we've spent a lot of time catastrophizing,
• 32:48
  extrapolating into the darker scenarios, and I, I do think it's important for everyone to be sober about the fact that,
• 32:53
  like, there, there's a real danger of AI leading to a totalitarian dystopian nightmare if we allow all of our critical thinking to be outsourced to AI that is controlled by a handful of companies who,
• 33:08
  who's are self-appointed Gatekeepers of right think, very skeptical of Google.
• 33:12
  There's things that I know exist and will search for it with exact terms that get censored all the time.
• 33:17
  I think that we're putting powers in the hands of the state that would make the, the, the Stasi and the,
• 33:23
  the SS absolutely salivate, and I think it could be really hard to come back from that.
• 33:27
  And so I think the most important things to protect between here and the other side of the singularity are free speech and,
• 33:34
  and Bitcoin.
• 33:35
  I think that, but I choose to put my energy and I put my And really, a, a thesis of what I think the other side of the next ten,
• 33:43
  twenty years, the other side of the singularity looks like, and that's a future of sustainable abundance.
• 33:46
  That's why I find what Elon is building with Tesla and SpaceX and that recursively self-improving flywheel to the stars to be so exciting and inspiring,
• 33:55
  with math that checks out, that works, and I, I believe they can execute on that.
• 34:00
  I think we're moving, I think the, the key is-- So my, my vid-- I'm extremely optimistic about what the other Total science fiction today are gonna be commonplace in the next ten to twenty years,
• 34:12
  radical life extension.
• 34:14
  I work in, in animal health, but I'm, I'm a biohacker, been fascinated by longevity science for twenty years.
• 34:20
  I think there has been more, more that's, more has happened in the last three months than in the last twenty years that I have been following that space.
• 34:27
  I think we're going to be able to live much longer lives, potentially hundreds of years.
• 34:31
  In fact, if I had to put money on it, I would bet that the, the first human to live to be
• 34:39
  we're going to have a lot more agency over our biology. I think we're going to be able to
• 34:43
  design and edit our biology, not just in germline in future generations, but in vivo,
• 34:50
  in our own bodies in real time. And I think the people that are on the frontier doing things like
• 34:55
  peptide therapy and hormone therapy and some of the bleeding edge functional medicine
• 35:00
  technologies are already experiencing that right now. But I think the bigger thing that gets in,
• 35:04
  So in that sustainable in a future, like we're you think about what are the cost inputs for everything that we interact with in our economy? Right. So it's it's knowledge, it's manual labor and it's energy. And that's the majority of your cogs on anything that you sell. Well, the trend line, the cost for all of those is trending towards zero. Energy is the hardest problem to solve. I'm a huge advocate for solar, but even solar doesn't solve all of our problems.
• 35:28
  I think going around that bottleneck into space where we can capture hyper-efficient solar energy, that's probably the last one to conquer.
• 35:36
  But the cost for all of those things is being driven to zero such that it does seem feasible to me that we're looking at a future where anything you want within reason that's a product, a physical product, is accessible, is affordable for extremely little money.
• 35:51
  I think my questions are two, my two big questions are one, what does it look like between here and there?
• 35:58
  It sounds like a great future, but I think there's going to be a lot of disruption in between because it's going to be a fundamental renegotiation of our social contract, our economy.
• 36:08
  I am an ardent capitalist. I believe that principal capitalism is the greatest force for good in the world and has a very strong track record to that effect.
• 36:16
  But I have real doubt. I think that the singularity might break capitalism or it's going to have to come out on the other side looking different.
• 36:23
  And so I'm very cautious and skeptical of kind of techno-utopian socialism as much as I like Star Trek. It's like, okay, show me how that economy is really going to work. But I want to keep an open mind. So one is, you know, what does this transition look like? It's going to be bumpy, and I think it's going to be really difficult for a lot of people until we get to that other side.
• 36:42
  And then in that sustainable abundance future, what is that? What are the implications for human meaning? I think we've got a crisis of human meaning coming. My view, I guess somebody who grew up watching a lot of Star Trek, is that the goal of the sustainable abundant future in this technology should be to satisfy the base layers of Maslow's hierarchy of needs to create a platform for self-actualization.
• 37:06
  I think there's a I want to live in a world where anybody, regardless of where they're born, has the ability to really figure out who they are and build and and explore and find new ways to create value.
• 37:19
  And I think there are so many pockets of value and things that people may may want to pursue that they can't for economic reasons, whether that's wanting to be a teacher or an artist.
• 37:30
  I think the possibilities become endless, but it does get interesting because AI can do art better than we can, and it's a better surgeon than we can, and it's a better researcher than we can.
• 37:39
  Then what does that leave for us?
• 37:41
  For me, that comes down to probably building and exploring, but I think a lot of people will have to make that choice for themselves, and I think there's going to be a lot of depression.
• 37:50
  And if you've seen Wall-E, you have a lot of people floating around on a cruise ship with VR and unlimited big gulps.
• 37:58
  I think there's sadly a lot of people who will probably choose to go into the Ready Player One world and the sex robots.
• 38:06
  And it's kind of hard to blame them because some of that stuff sounds really enticing.
• 38:10
  But anyway, so that's where I think we're going and how Bitcoin plays into that.
• 38:14
  I don't think Bitcoin will solve all the world's problems, but I think Bitcoin creates the foundation, the conditions in which all of the world's problems can be solved.
• 38:24
  I think it doesn't matter, you know, even if we get really lucky and hit this kind of deflationary, this deflationary curve from from AI that can soften the need to the inevitable need to turn on the money printer.
• 38:39
  That will get that the chickens have to come home to roost on that system over time.
• 38:43
  And until we fix the money, we're just going to be kicking the can down the road to recreate a more painful version of these problems in the future.
• 38:50
  And so I think having essentially perfect money back, the perfect energy that solves for trust and is able to carry energy forward through time, potentially for millennia, the implications for civilization, for building are quite exciting.
• 39:08
  I might have rambled a little bit there, but hopefully it gives you a feel for my vision.
• 39:12
  Yeah, no, I think that was great.
• 39:14
  Like thinking about this transition period from like where we are today to this, you know, world of abundance, it does seem like we are heading towards like it's kind of hard to deny that.
• 39:25
  How do you see like wealth and value like alternating between like different assets and different asset classes?
• 39:32
  Like obviously right now the AI trade is incredibly hot.
• 39:36
  The Bitcoin trade is not incredibly hot.
• 39:38
  do you foresee like it bouncing around from like AI to Bitcoin then to perhaps like another you
• 39:45
  know physical industry like energy and then back to AI and then back to Bitcoin like will it be like
• 39:50
  this rotation or will they all eventually start growing together how do you foresee it you know kind of playing out yeah it an interesting question and I don have a crystal ball I think you mentioned something that there something interesting you said there which is value I think companies that
• 40:10
  build products and solve problems, those are building value. And Bitcoin itself is money.
• 40:17
  I don't really want my money to, I don't expect my money to build. That's not what money's supposed
• 40:20
  to do, right? It's supposed to be a store of value. We are in this interesting transitional period
• 40:26
  where the return on my capital to kind of go toe-to-toe with these exponential technologies
• 40:36
  that are solving physical problems in the real world is there, right? So when I look at my,
• 40:40
  when I'm assessing returns in my portfolio for the next decade, at least, like Bitcoin is my
• 40:45
  my hurdle rate. But I think at, as it matures, Bitcoin hopefully gets less sexy. I mean, I,
• 40:51
  I, you know, I think it's going to go, I, you know, it's going up forever, Laura, I think is
• 40:56
  probably right. And you think about, you know, I think Jeff Booth really painted this picture well,
• 41:01
  that deflation is the natural state of the free market. And so in a future where Bitcoin is the,
• 41:08
  settlement layer or if not majority, you know, a substantial piece of global wealth and pie is
• 41:18
  denominated in Bitcoin. I would expect to see returns forever. But yeah, in terms of what is
• 41:26
  that cycle, like what's in favor now, like right now we saw, you know, AI got really overheated.
• 41:31
  There's a rotation out of like semiconductors right now. Everyone's looking for the next,
• 41:36
  you know, Micron or Sandisk or like Thousandbacker. I don't know what that's going to look like for
• 41:42
  the next, I don't know what that's going to look like for the next few years, but I'm, that's why
• 41:47
  I'm pretty concentrated on Bitcoin and then treasury companies that exist to amplify and
• 41:53
  grow my Bitcoin for me with actual products like digital credit that are creating value,
• 41:58
  are very much creating value. And then the Tesla SpaceX flywheel, which I think really spans
• 42:03
  outside of biotech, another interest of mine,
• 42:07
  really checks all my boxes for robotics, AI,
• 42:11
  autonomy, space, energy,
• 42:13
  with structural competitive advantages
• 42:16
  that no other company is, I think,
• 42:18
  going to be able to compete with for a very long time.
• 42:21
  So outside of that, I kind of want to stay in my lane.
• 42:23
  Like those are my most developed thesis.
• 42:25
  I think there's going to be a lot of great investments
• 42:27
  and a lot of great winners,
• 42:28
  but I don't know when they're going to hit
• 42:29
  or what the next, you know, 100 bagger is going to be.
• 42:32
  Yeah, it's hard to tell. Maybe tell us more about like your current company that you're building. And yeah, let's hear about that.
• 42:39
  So I'm founder and CEO of Artera Pet Science. So we are a pet health brand that was really founded
• 42:48
  from my own journey, biohacking my dog, almost 70 pound golden retriever mix with a 10 to 11
• 42:56
  year life expectancy to almost 17 and outstanding health. So I developed a protocol for him that
• 43:00
  started as a, you know, just a preventative maintenance regimen. I wasn't happy with the
• 43:04
  supplements that were on the market in the pet space. And I learned enough from solving some
• 43:08
  very difficult health problems of my own and having to become my own advocate. I started with
• 43:14
  a simple preventative formula from human grade ingredients that I put together for him, but it
• 43:20
  became an evolving science project. Over the years, every time I would see a sign of a degenerative
• 43:24
  aging creeping in, hesitancy going up the stairs or getting tired on walks faster, etc., that was my
• 43:31
  cue to go back to the research well and through trial and error add something else until we brought
• 43:36
  him back to his happy, healthy baseline. And by iterating that process, helped him exceed his life
• 43:41
  expectancy by over 50%, made it to the human equivalent of 117 years old for his breed and size.
• 43:47
  And most importantly, did that with outstanding quality of life until his last few weeks with us.
• 43:53
  But that came at the expense of a lot of cost and complexity. He was getting 40 supplements a day
• 43:57
  for the last few years of his life. My very supportive husband let me install an industrial
• 44:02
  pharmaceutical powder mixer in our guest room to make his regimen. And I was spending an hour and
• 44:07
  a half each week and about $500 a month to do so. So while that was totally worth it for me,
• 44:11
  and we had incredibly strong validation from his doctors, from lab work, and just from
• 44:16
  observational data that it made a huge difference, that's wildly impractical for almost everyone
• 44:21
  else. And so as I was building my last company and scaling it, we reached a point where I looked
• 44:25
  around at my great leadership team and realized I'm probably not that necessary in the day-to-day
• 44:29
  anymore. I'm going to go build this and commercialize an even better version of that
• 44:33
  formula. So we work with board certified integrative vets, recruited one of the top
• 44:37
  product leads from Purina for a decade, the founder, a DVM of the largest integrative vet
• 44:43
  practice in Austin, Joe Rogan's personal vet to help us develop this and solve some really hard
• 44:49
  manufacturing problems along the way. But what we have commercialized is two products. The simplest
• 44:54
  is our supplement, which is essentially,
• 44:59
  if you've seen Brian Johnson, right?
• 45:01
  Think of the eccentric billionaires,
• 45:03
  handful of 60 pills a day.
• 45:05
  We have distilled that into a palatable daily chew
• 45:10
  that dogs actually love.
• 45:11
  We have a 99 acceptance rate It one of the hardest problems in our space to solve And it takes all the work out of a preventative health regimen for you and your dog at a fraction of the cost
• 45:23
  that my MVP required. And then we actually kind of stumbled into a hit that has really been
• 45:30
  accelerating the business dramatically, which is nanohydroxyapatite-infused dental chew.
• 45:36
  There's an epidemic of dog dental disease, not to mention doggy breath, but 26% of all veterinary
• 45:41
  surgical volume in the U.S. are anesthetic dentals. That means your dog's teeth got in such bad shape
• 45:47
  that a vet could visually identify a cavity, which means your dog's probably been in severe pain for
• 45:52
  months or years. And at that point, your only clinical option is to spend $1,200 and put them
• 45:56
  under risky general anesthesia to have a tooth extracted. There have been no good proactive
• 46:03
  solutions in the space. Everything either falls into the bucket of it's essentially soap for your
• 46:07
  dog's teeth, or it's relying on just mechanical abrasion to scrub. In human toothpaste, we use
• 46:13
  sodium fluoride to remineralize and repair the outer dentin layer of the tooth, which can repair
• 46:19
  itself up to a point, but it's toxic when you swallow it and you can't tell your dog not to
• 46:24
  swallow their chicken or peanut butter flavored toothpaste. And so we're the first company to
• 46:28
  bring a molecule. It's actually NASA developed really cool tech called nanohydroxyapatite
• 46:32
  to the dog space. It is 97% of teeth and bones are hydroxyapatite. And we use a very small form
• 46:40
  of it that's able to get into the teeth and act as a grafting agent. We've put that into a daily
• 46:44
  dog chew that's infused with prebiotics, probiotics, active botanicals to freshen breath,
• 46:49
  support the oral gut access and a healthy microbiome. This was a side project for me.
• 46:55
  My board didn't want me to do it. They said it was a distraction, but I saw how big the problem
• 47:00
  was to solve and I just can't help but build better mousetraps when I figure one out. I've
• 47:04
  got a background in product management throughout my career. We launched it and the signals have been
• 47:09
  incredibly strong. And so we are growing like a rocket ship right now. Awesome. So check us out
• 47:15
  at, by the way, if anyone hearing that is interested, I'm mostly here to talk about
• 47:18
  Bitcoin, but if you'd like to check us out, there's a lot of love and a lot of science
• 47:21
  and care that have gone into our products. Our website is rterrapet.com, A-R-T-E-R-R-A-P-E-T.com.
• 47:29
  and you can use discount code INCOMESHOW
• 47:31
  for 40% off your first order.
• 47:34
  Awesome.
• 47:34
  Yeah, I love it.
• 47:35
  Well, if anyone has a dog,
• 47:37
  consider checking that out.
• 47:38
  Specifically thinking about the business,
• 47:40
  I know you guys also decided to put digital credit
• 47:43
  on your balance sheet.
• 47:45
  How was that process and what led to that decision?
• 47:49
  Yeah, so we're still in startup stage
• 47:53
  and my goal is to raise as little capital as we need
• 47:55
  because I want to own as much of my company
• 47:58
  and maintain that optionality long-term.
• 48:00
  And so whenever a startup raises capital,
• 48:03
  it usually just goes,
• 48:05
  most brands put it in their savings account
• 48:06
  and maybe the savvy ones put it in a money market account,
• 48:09
  you know, earning a few percent.
• 48:11
  Then after really studying these products,
• 48:13
  learning about it and using it in my own portfolio,
• 48:15
  became really comfortable with the risk profile
• 48:17
  to put stretch and Seda on our balance sheet
• 48:21
  as a cash-like instrument.
• 48:24
  And actually there was a time last year
• 48:26
  where we had some amazing returns
• 48:28
  because I was, you may hate this from the stride perspective, but it was just arbitraging the
• 48:33
  ex-dividend dates between not just stretch and SEDA, but then some of the quarterly strategy
• 48:38
  dividends because the market hadn't figured it out yet. It was super inefficient and the mechanical
• 48:43
  price drop that should have happened, you know, wasn't. And so there were just these,
• 48:47
  it was really easy to kind of sweep through the catalog. And we were able, you know,
• 48:51
  it added two months of runway before we had to raise additional cash. We chilled out that,
• 48:56
  You know, those arbitrage windows are basically closed now.
• 48:58
  But our philosophy is we want to keep three to six months of operating cash on the books
• 49:04
  in a high yield money market account at all times.
• 49:06
  And then for our medium duration capital in a basket of stretch, Seda and Strife.
• 49:13
  I do.
• 49:14
  Strife is held out better than any of the press right now.
• 49:16
  It's boring, not super sexy, but I think some diversification in the space can be smart.
• 49:22
  Now, we'll see, you know, my in February, we had what was then the February of this year, we had the largest nominal price drop, I think, in Bitcoin history. And, you know, Stretch briefly dropped. I think it was like $87, $88 for a day, and then it bounced right back up. And so in my thinking, I was like, okay, well, it was, you know, early nascent and, you know, bad Bitcoin price crash. That's probably about the worst case scenario.
• 49:47
  And so kind of built that into my risk model, seeing Stretch drop to $82 right now is, we'll question that. I think we've done well enough in digital credit since putting on our balance sheet in the fall that even if it stayed there for a while, we can still in good conscience tell our investors that that was a good trade for us.
• 50:06
  My expectation is that these products are going to heal back to par. I don't know if it's a couple weeks or a couple months, but I think a good lesson for me in extending our time horizon from, you know, a couple months of short-term working capital, probably more to that six-month range in USD cash on our balance sheet.
• 50:23
  But I do think it smart for anyone who in startup stage and having to raise through dilution to fund your company It a really smart way to put your balance sheet to work And it not hard especially if you can get to series A territory you raising eight to million You may not want to go on a full Bitcoin standard even if you believe in it
• 50:44
  or that might be a battle you're not able or willing to fight with investors. But you think
• 50:48
  about the power of 10 to 13% yield on your cash while you wait. And that potentially adds,
• 50:57
  you're talking, you know, adding six, 12 or more months to your cash runway and letting you hit
• 51:03
  escape velocity a lot faster. I think certainly any business that I start going forward, unless
• 51:09
  something just really fundamentally breaks, is going to have a digital credit-based balance sheet.
• 51:15
  And increasingly, my goal is to move to a full Bitcoin standard. But it is hard
• 51:19
  in startup world to get investors to buy into bold thesis. And so, you know, we already have a few
• 51:26
  hills to climb to advocate to get the right partners on our side. And I have to be selective
• 51:31
  in choosing which battles I fight there. But if anyone in Bitcoin world is listening,
• 51:37
  we're going to be raising, the company's doing great. Our metrics are phenomenal.
• 51:41
  We're going to be raising a Series A this fall. And I would love to find the right values aligned
• 51:46
  investors, probably looking at an $8 to $10 million raise, would love to find investors around the
• 51:51
  table who understand Bitcoin and who understand that operating on a Bitcoin standard with some of
• 51:57
  our profits in actual cold chain Bitcoin, but using these digital credit instruments for our
• 52:02
  balance sheet actually de-risks the company and puts your money to work. Please give me a call.
• 52:08
  It's jonathan at arterapet.com. Would love to show you more about what we're building.
• 52:14
  Yeah, no, that's very cool. Incredible. Maybe last question, then we can start to wrap it up.
• 52:19
  With this context of the singularity that you talked about, this accelerating technology, and also digital credit, continuing to bring capital into Bitcoin, where do you see the TAM or simply purchasing power of Bitcoin over the next maybe 5, 10 years? How big do you think it can become?
• 52:39
  um boy over five to ten years uh yeah i don't know i i tend to fall all of my i have all sorts
• 52:48
  of uh kind of moonshot and and and bull case scenarios that are fun to model out but what i
• 52:55
  think you can take to the bank or what i what i think is is bankable is i build all my forward
• 53:00
  looking models on uh the bitcoin power law floor is if i just if bitcoin just hugs the the the
• 53:08
  power law floor, where are we going to be in five or 10 years? I don't recall off the top of my head,
• 53:13
  but it's plenty. It's a great return. And I fully expect that the most likely outcome is there's a
• 53:19
  lot of upside from there. But I want to build around the power law floor with a little bit of
• 53:24
  worst case scenario contingency buffer, and then just be pleasantly surprised and enjoy the ride
• 53:29
  when Bitcoin's at a million dollars in 2030, 2032. I think that's super reasonable. John,
• 53:37
  And thanks so much for taking the time to do this.
• 53:38
  This is an awesome conversation.
• 53:40
  Any final closing thoughts?
• 53:45
  Yeah, I'll say one thought that I have in just following the discourse around the Bitcoin
• 53:51
  treasuries, I think a couple of things.
• 53:54
  If you believe in Bitcoin, I don't understand how you can be bearish on strategy and strive.
• 53:59
  But that aside, we are a small community and infighting is not helping us right now.
• 54:04
  And I think we all need to do a better job of trying to listen, listen with an open mind and engage constructively rather than flinging feces at each other on Twitter.
• 54:14
  And also there's a real, I think, mechanical misunderstanding that I see between with I'll talk about strategy because they're the 800 pound gorilla.
• 54:24
  But the the job of the common stock and if you buy MST, our common stock, you have signed up explicitly to absorb the volatility for stretch.
• 54:33
  And so whatever strategy needs to do, there's community proposals for like a buyback mechanism that could be CB accretive.
• 54:40
  Like, cool, I'm fine with that.
• 54:42
  Like, that's the ticket that I bought and I signed up for.
• 54:45
  And I know that in the next bull market, I'm getting the upside of that digital credit, excuse me, of the Bitcoin that that digital credit allowed the treasuries to buy.
• 54:55
  And there seems to be a lot of resentment from people who have bought the common stock and then are upset that it's their job to absorb that volatility or who are surprised that Amplify Bitcoin is underperforming Bitcoin over a short time horizon in a bear market.
• 55:10
  And so I think I encourage anybody looking at the stock to just take a closer look, take a look at the CEB framework. And if you're not comfortable with that trade, just go with on-chain Bitcoin.
• 55:21
  But I think that ultimately these treasuries and digital credit are going to be of immense service to the protocol and anyone holding Bitcoin in any form.
• 55:31
  And so I'm definitely with you guys on the Strive team and with Michael Saylor.
• 55:36
  Hope that we all ride out the rest of this bear market together and everyone in the meantime chills, stays humble and keeps stacking sats.
• 55:45
  I love it. Yeah. Keep stacking sats is a great way to end it.
• 55:49
  John, thanks again.
• 55:50
  This is a great conversation.
• 55:53
  Absolutely.
• 55:53
  Thanks for having me.