[00:02:07] And you know, you can’t, for me personally, like from an economic perspective, a geopolitical perspective, a military perspective, you know, American hegemony, et cetera, like I just can’t stop thinking through the ramifications of what happened and the raid itself and like America’s military capability. I mean, like, it answered a lot of questions.

[00:02:26] To me it’s like I’m looking at Russia and China and I’m like, are they paper tigers? Like is bricks dead? Like all these things happened basically overnight. Where you’re looking at like the capabilities of like the F35 in combat where you’re like, we really do have air supremacy. Like we have air supremacy as America.

[00:02:43] There’s so many things we could say about it. We could spend an hour talking about it. I’m sure.

[00:02:47] Preston Pysh: Anybody else? Initial comments.

[00:02:49] Jeff Ross: So I’m just bored with Bitcoin these days because all I want to do is think about AI and geopolitics and, think I posted something like that a week or two ago that we are all geopolitical analysts now. That’s all everybody talks about, and we all have our conspiracy theories.

[00:03:02] But I think we talked about this briefly on the last show about I’ve gotten full tinfoil hat, you know, with this whole Monroe Doctrine and Western Hemisphere deal and people have called me out for being just flat out crazy. And I’m okay with that because, you know, usually as an investor when people say, you know, make fun of me and yell at me and, and do all that stuff, usually I’m onto something. And I think, and you guys can make fun of me for this, I think that Trump and Xi and Putin all did some kind of backseat deals where they had little conversations and said, we won’t mess with you if you don’t mess with us.

[00:03:37] And the US is like, we got the Western hemisphere. You guys got your stuff. And so here’s what I think. I think within the next few years, Russia is going to expand further west and it’s going to be hard for Europe to stop. And I don’t think we’re going to do much to help.

[00:03:52] I think China is going to basically take over the Middle East and the Eastern Hemisphere, the rest of the Eastern Hemisphere. And they’re also more importantly, going to take Taiwan back and have access, open access. They’re no longer going to be boxed in. Like we’ve had them boxed in since for basically 50 years or so from, you know, Alaska, South Korea, Japan, Philippines, the whole Taiwan Strait area, the Chinese, you know, China Sea. We’ve had them hemmed in for about 50 years.

[00:04:22] I think that they are going to take Taiwan and we’re going to raise a big fuss, but we’re not really going to do much about it. And I think that they are saying, okay. If you don’t mess with us, we won’t mess with you as you basically take over Central and South America and do what you did to the Middle East.

[00:04:39] As you pull back from the Middle East, the US, the Central and South America is basically the new Middle East. We’re going to get our tentacles and all of it. We’re going to put in puppet leaders all over the place, and we’re basically going to control the empire of oil and rare earth elements and other things.

[00:04:54] That’s my take, and I don’t think they’re going to mess with us either, and that’s why I think they look like paper tigers.

[00:04:59] Preston Pysh: So Jeff, this is a fun little thought experiment, but explain to me the offset of the chips. So like giving up Taiwan to China, like I just don’t think the US could possibly have any appetite for all those fabs going under Chinese control.

[00:05:15] Jeff Ross: I think that’s why we’re going all in on getting fabs here as fast as possible and just pouring billions of dollars into it to get it. And I don’t think that we’ll be able to get it up in time. But I also think that the way that it’s set up is that by the time this all happens, which is probably about 2027 before 2028 ish, is the timeframe I’m looking at, which is also interesting.

[00:05:36] By the way, real quick. We’ve promised Taiwan, I think $21 billion worth of weapons to, you know, stave off China. We haven’t fulfilled those orders as far as I can tell. They’re just orders so far and it looks like we’re pushing it off. If you kind of read the documents carefully, we’re pushing off delivery of those defensive weapons until 2027 or 2028.

[00:06:00] And ironically, President Xi says, we are prepared to take Taiwan by 2027. They’re going to do military action. And I think, wouldn’t you know it, we didn’t get our stuff there in time for Taiwan to defend itself, and we’re going to kind of leave them hanging. That’s my, so that’s the issue, Preston. What do we do about the high end semiconductors? I think we’re scrambling as fast as possible to do what we can, to be able to have what we need before that.

[00:06:24] Preston Pysh: Isn’t it interesting how the number one thing that Elon’s working on right now are chips and fabs?

[00:06:30] Jeff Ross: Yes. And I think that’s intentional, personally.

[00:06:33] HODL: Well, there’s been all this talk about oil, but what is the new oil of the 21st century? It’s actually the chips. Chips of the new oil. You know, they’re a critical resource. I kind of disagree with Jeff’s take here and I’ll tell you why Jeff is because I think 2027 is the date for China. They’ve been telegraphing that for quite a bit now.

[00:06:50] I think this Venezuelan raid changes the calculus for them. I don’t know if it’s so easy as like a backroom gentleman’s agreement between Xi and and Trump, and I don’t really think that we are just focused on the Western Hemisphere in a Monroe style sense.

[00:07:05] Like we want the world. And if you’ve been planning the Taiwanese invasion from the Chinese military perspective, after the awesome showing of special forces by the US military down in Venezuela, I mean, one of the cleanest operations in history, the F35s demolished Chinese air defenses and Russian air defenses.

[00:07:23] They didn’t have an answer for it. If you watch like the staging of the way they went in, I mean, it was so precise. It shows that our guys really are these tier one operators. I kind of like almost think about maybe this is, you know, jingoistic and you know, I’m, I’m an American supremacist and whatever, but I almost look at every other army in the world as being like, guys that larp at the gun range. They just stand there in their uniforms and look tough.

[00:07:43] Meanwhile, like our guys are hardened warriors who have the best tech on earth, they have the full backing of the Trump administration. There’s a new attitude at the Pentagon. I mean, we’re finally interfacing with startups from Silicon Valley, like we’re getting our best tech companies on this.

[00:07:59] So anyway, like let’s say that they are going to still go for Taiwan, they’d be stupid to do it during a Trump administration.

[00:08:06] Preston Pysh: So you’re not buying it, HODL. How about you, Joe? What do you think about Jeff’s thesis here?

[00:08:11] Joe Carlasare: Well, let’s go back to Venezuela if we can for just a second.

[00:08:14] One of the things I tend to fade pretty hard is that this new thing that people are talking about is completely remade the global order. I think that has been a narrative to fade consistently for the last like 25 years. Incremental changes are big, right? But that’s not to say that, you know, things can’t depart.

[00:08:29] But let’s look at like Venezuela in particular. History has taught us one thing is that when you have a leadership decapitation, but you still have all the second and third tier guys under him who are currently in the interim government, who have currently grown up and fostered the trafficking and fostered a lot of the bad behavior the US is trying to excise.

[00:08:45] They’re still there. We’re relying on them as the interim government to maintain order, and we are implicitly validating their authority. So I’m really interested to see, you know, absent significant US ground presence, what happens? Because if you decapitate Maduro and take his forces out, who’s going to come in the wake, who’s going to actually function in the government, who’s going to be a sympathetic ally to the United States that’s going to be put in place?

[00:09:08] I understand the administration would love to have somebody stand on their own two feet there, but the reality is there is widespread corruption throughout Venezuela. Most of the people that are in power right now are part of the conspiracy of corrupt actors in the past that aided and abetted the Maduro regime.

[00:09:21] So what are you going to do? Pick your poison. They refuse to legitimize some of the apparent successors or lawful victors in the prior election. So that’s interesting to me why the administration’s taking that, the tactic. So I agree with HODL, it’s a huge development, but we don’t know how it shakes out.

[00:09:36] I’m cautiously optimistic. I hope whoever comes in their place is very sympathetic. But we know plenty of examples where, you know, look at Iraq, the shock and awe campaign led to a massive 10 year boondoggle, which cost countless, you know, American lives and civilian lives, et cetera. So it’s definitely, I think a historic moment, but we have to see exactly how it plays out, and I think that’s to be determined.

[00:09:58] HODL: Let me pitch you a conspiracy theory here. One of the conspiracies is that Delcy Rodriguez, who’s currently in charge of Venezuela was the CIA insider who gave up, you know, the information at the American government so they could get Madura..

[00:10:10] Joe Carlasare: I don’t know how much of a conspiracy that is. I actually saw, I’ve seen some evidence of that.

[00:10:13] HODL: It seems pretty real. I know it seems pretty real, but we don’t, I don’t have like the full goods. And I’ll say this, Joe, I think one of the big things that you have to consider here when you look at this action down in Venezuela is it does show that Russia and China are weak. Because if you are allied with them, you know, in the bricks block, they’re not going to come to your aid.

[00:10:31] The Americans can come in and scoop your leader out of a military base in the middle of the night, and they’re not going to do anything about it. Okay. Like that’s a big blow to their power structure.

[00:10:40] Joe Carlasare: Agree.

[00:10:40] HODL: Yep.

[00:10:41] Jeff Ross: Did you guys read the National Security Strategy from November 25? To me that validated the conspiracy theories that I’ve been having personally. Like, do you guys think that’s not legit?

[00:10:50] Preston Pysh: I did not read it. Jeff, can you give us like the…

[00:10:52] Jeff Ross: The nutshell is, we’re reviving the Monroe Doctrine basically. And we’re going to take over the Western Hemisphere. And they didn’t really say it, but it’s what they didn’t say that I thought was important, but they basically said, without saying it, we’re sort of pulling back from NATO, pulling back from Taiwan, from China in general, pulling back from the Middle East. And we’re going to focus our efforts here in the Western hemisphere, which by the way, I think includes Greenland as well.

[00:11:18] Preston Pysh: I think the Greenland thing is looking like it’s getting pretty viable as well. I think a lot of people are just reading it in the news and kind of rolling their eyes and like, well, that’s just nonsense. But I think it’s actually more of an attempt by this current administration than people realize.

[00:11:33] HODL: I think Greenland is going to happen. I think Greenland’s going to happen one way or another. I think it’s probably unlikely that we take Greenland by force because that would be a big breach of international norms.

[00:11:43] You know, there was some talk about international law and how it doesn’t really exist. It doesn’t, spoiler alert. But international norms are real and we probably wouldn’t want to do that to our allies, but there will be some type of agreement made on Greenland. We’re going to need it. If you look at just like the way ICBMs would flow, you know, over to America from Russia, like we need control of Greenland. You know, the Danes can’t secure it.

[00:12:03] Preston Pysh: So I read Luke Roman’s weekly report that he put out on Friday and on this particular topic, and it was interesting because he kind of framed it as just further enforcement or attempted enforcement of the Petrodollar system. And he’s showing how, you know, back when Russia, when we took their reserves back in 2022, that was kind of an act of role in trying to enforce that oil exports be denominated in US dollars.

[00:12:34] And so when he looks at Venezuela, it’s just another example of here’s a country that’s not denominating oil exports in dollars. In fact, you had a lot of Chinese investment to the tune of like $50 to $60 billion down in Venezuela over the last 20 years. And the US comes in and is like, well, I know that you earned those $50 or $60 billion through trade, and you made those investments in Venezuela, but we’re just going to take this anyway, and it’s now ours.

[00:13:02] You know, he’s just kind of framing it as the US is getting more aggressive in defining, and I’m going to loss for words here to, to properly frame it, but basically it’s just further enforcement of the petrodollar system. Any thoughts?

[00:13:17] HODL: It’s definitely part of it. It’s kind of like a re-oilization of the American petrodollar.

[00:13:23] Preston Pysh: It is fascinating when you look at the US as enemies, every one of them are denominating oil exports in something other than dollars, right?

[00:13:33] You got Iraq, Iran, well, Iraq prior to going in there in 2003. Then you got Iran, you got Russia, you got Venezuela. You know, and you just list them all out, and it’s like every one of these countries is the one that is not denominated in dollars. They’re oil exports, and that’s lo and behold the enemy of the United States.

[00:13:51] HODL: When again, China is now going to have to, you know, settle their export of Venezuelan crude and US dollars, that’s a big blow to China again. That’s why it makes it hard for me to think they have a backroom deal over this. They’re going to make a play on Taiwan, that’s for sure.

[00:14:05] Joe Carlasare: Yep, for sure.

[00:14:07] Jeff Ross: I think they’re going to, do you think they’re going to get it? I think they’re going to get it.

[00:14:10] HODL: I think to get it, I think during the Biden administration, the plan was basically to strip mine Taiwan of resources, you know, basically fab engineers and then leave Taiwan to the Chinese. I don’t think we’re going to do that anymore. I don’t think that’s the plan.

[00:14:24] Preston Pysh: What do you think the plan is?

[00:14:25] HODL: I think the plan is defend Taiwan during a Trump administration.

[00:14:28] Joe Carlasare: I don’t see any way Taiwan falls during the Trump administration.

[00:14:31] Preston Pysh: Well, I would agree with that, but the next administration comes along, and who knows?

[00:14:36] HODL: That’s a different story. Guys, a reality TV star president came in and basically showed us that 30 years of, you know, American foreign doctrine and you can just go kidnap a president in the middle of the night if you feel like it. So it’s all about political will: Do you have it to act, or don’t you?

[00:14:51] Preston Pysh: Jeff?

[00:14:52] Jeff Ross: Well, I think we all agree that the world order is changing. We’re in a transition phase right now, right? And so I think things are going to look very different five to 10 years from now. Personally, I think we’re peeling back from American as the imperialist nation for the world, and we are going multipolar.

[00:15:09] And that’s again why I think like we’re okay, we’re going to dig down, we’re going to dig in our trenches, and we’re going to focus on the Western Hemisphere. And to me that’s what all these policy decisions have been about.

[00:15:19] HODL: And I’m totally opposite from Jeff. I think this is the beginning of America’s bid for total global domination. The death of the Republic and the beginning of the empire.

[00:15:29] Preston Pysh: So just to put some context on the size of what Venezuela represents from an oil export standpoint, right now, their exports are about 1% of the total world oil production. It’s estimated to be about 17% of the world’s proven oil reserves, which are obviously tricky to fully understand, but that’s the number I’m coming up with: 17%.

[00:15:55] So just to kind of put some context on the sizing here as to maybe why you’re not seeing Russia or China respond as to the situation, they’re looking at it from just a numeric standpoint. It’s only 1% of the total oil that’s being exported globally. So it’s kind of like, it’s not worth it. But maybe if it’s something bigger, like I would argue the Taiwan Fab Chips issue is an absolute. I mean, we saw in COVID the impact of delayed chips on car manufacturers and whatnot. I mean, it was somewhat disastrous.

[00:16:30] So I can only imagine if something like that came under China’s control, what that would mean for getting such vital components in the supply chains. But yeah, to Jeff’s point, you know, you have a change of administration.

[00:16:45] Let’s say that you have a complete change out in the next, not here at the midterms, but in the next presidential election. That might be the, from a timing standpoint, where you could see something like that.

[00:16:57] Alright. Any other comments on this particular topic? It’s just fascinating stuff, like obviously the four of us, you know, we’re just out here spitballing ideas. But I think it is a really, you know, going back to what we normally talk about, which is Bitcoin, the change in the dollar system, the petrodollar system is where I think this is all really relevant to fully understand and I don’t think that this really kind of changes anything today or in the next year, but it’s just another knowledge point, if you will, in this continued defense of the Petrodollar system that exists.

[00:17:31] So I want to play a clip. I’m really excited to play this clip for you guys. It’s about five minutes long, but I really want you guys to listen to this clip because Peter Diamandis recently did an interview with Elon Musk, and everybody knows Elon is making all these autonomous cars. He’s making all these Optimus robots.

[00:17:53] And you know, the talking point is that it’s going to bring in just extreme abundance to anybody that has one of these robots in their house, call it, in five years from now, or whatever it is. And, long story short, it’s going to lead to a situation where governments will have to print to offset all the technological deflation expected.

[00:18:15] And this is the conversation that they had on this particular topic. I want you guys to listen to the whole clip and then I want to have a conversation about a bunch of different ideas that kind of pop out of this. So let me bring this up, and I’ll play the clip.

[00:18:29] Peter Diamandis: Yeah, but you have a solution to this, which is UHI.

[00:18:33] Elon Musk: Yes. Everyone can have whatever they want.

[00:18:34] Peter Diamandis: So how does that work? How does UHI work?

[00:18:37] Elon Musk: It’s a good question. Like we’re have to figure out some like, I mean, it’s trying to transit. It’s not a, it’s a bumpy road.

[00:18:41] Peter Diamandis: I mean, so my concern isn’t the long run, it’s the next three to seven years.

[00:18:46] Elon Musk: Yes. The transition will be bumpy because humans don’t like change simultaneously. Yes. A radical change. Social unrest and immense prosperity.

[00:18:57] Peter Diamandis: And you can buy all the cyber trucks you want.

[00:18:59] Elon Musk: Things are going to get very cheap. So this is actually, in fact, if this doesn’t happen, we’d go bankrupt as a country.

[00:19:06] So the national debt is enormous. The interest on the national debt exceeds. Not just the military budget, but the military budget, I think plus Medicare or Medicaid, one of the two. It’s like one point trillion enough. It’s crazy of interest.

[00:19:20] Peter Diamandis: Which is growing.

[00:19:21] Elon Musk: Yes. And the deficit is growing. Yes. If we don’t have AI and robots, we’re all going to go bankrupt, and we’re headed for economic doom. There’s also competitive pressure from China. So this is definitely going to happen, I guess.

[00:19:33] Peter Diamandis: We’re going back to the theme of this talk. How can AI and exponential tech save America and the world?

[00:19:39] Elon Musk: I was like quite pessimistic about it. Ultimately, I decided to be fatalistic and look on the bright side.

[00:19:47] Peter Diamandis: But this is not about taxation and redistribution. How does it work? Reason through it with me.

[00:19:51] Elon Musk: Listen, by the way, I’m open to ideas here, so it’s not like I got this all figured out. Alright?

[00:19:56] Peter Diamandis: So I’m wondering if instead of universal high income, if it’s universal high stuff. Yeah. And services?

[00:20:02] Elon Musk: I guess. Okay. This is my guess for how things play out. And I, by the way, I’m, this is going to be a bumpy ride, and it’s not like I know the answers here, but I have decided to look on the bright side and thank you guys for being an inspiration in this regard.

[00:20:16] Peter Diamandis: Thank you. Appreciate that.

[00:20:17] Elon Musk: Happy to help. I actually think it’s better to be an optimist and wrong than a pessimist and, right?

[00:20:22] Peter Diamandis: Yes, for sure.

[00:20:23] Elon Musk: For quality of life. It’s also force of nature. It’s under, to me, it’s really clear that we don’t have any system right now to make this go well. But AI is a critical part of making it go well. And at some point, Grok will address the exact topic we’re talking about. It has to be one of the big four AI machines.

[00:20:43] Peter Diamandis: I mean, it’s coming, that is dealing with it. It’s no velocity knob. There’s no on-off switch. It is coming and accelerating.

[00:20:49] Elon Musk: I call a AI and robotics the supersonic tsunami. Which is a little alarming. It’s good.

[00:20:55] Peter Diamandis: This is important for folks to Grok because I don’t want to leave people depressed. I want people to understand what’s coming. So we’re basically demonetizing everything. I mean, labor becomes the cost of CapEx and electricity. AI is basically intelligence available at a di minimis price. So you’re able to produce almost anything.

[00:21:18] Things get down to the basic cost of materials and electricity. So people can have whatever stuff they want, whatever services they need. It’s not, when we see universal high income, it, it sounds like it’s a tax and redistribute, but that’s not the case.

[00:21:33] Elon Musk: I think my best guess for how this will manifest is that prices will drop. As the efficiency of production or service provision declines, prices will fall. If prices in dollar terms are the ratio between the output of goods and services and the money supply. Sure. So if your output of goods and services increases faster than the money supply, you will have deflation, or vice versa.

[00:21:57] Peter Diamandis: So it’s a good thing we’re growing the money supply so quickly, though.

[00:22:01] Elon Musk: Yes. That’s why I came to like, let’s not worry about growing the money supply. It won’t matter because the output of goods and services actually will grow faster than the money supply. And I think we’ll be in this, and this is a prediction, I think some others have made, but I will add to it, which is that I think governments will actually be pushing to, to increase money supply like faster.

[00:22:19] They won’t be able to waste the money fast enough. But you’re saying something for the government.

[00:22:23] Peter Diamandis: Isn’t it? Isn’t it crazy how close those timelines just randomly worked out? I mean, at the rate, because we were expanding the national debt, not because we’re anticipating AI, we were going to do that no matter what. And so it is like right on the edge of becoming Argentina.

[00:22:35] Elon Musk: So productivity is going to improve dramatically, and it is improving dramatically. I think we’ll see a high double-digit output of goods and services. We have to be a little careful about how economists measure things.

[00:22:44] Peter Diamandis: Yeah.

[00:22:45] Preston Pysh: Alright, guys. This is a crazy clip, right? No response?

[00:22:51] Jeff Ross: Well, I’ll start with something, and then you guys can jump in. Okay. I spend a ton of time thinking about this very thing and, I think we touched on this last time a little bit too, is the conclusion I came to like three months or more ago was capitalism is the best system for humanity, I think.

[00:23:06] But when we reach a point where AI robots can do everything or most things quite a bit better, or you know, magnitude of orders better than humans can. You don’t want to be in a capitalist system at that point, because if you’re competing against things that are a hundred times smarter or better than you, or faster or more efficient than you, you’re going to lose every single time and you’re going to be unemployed.

[00:23:32] And so I think if this, you know, Elon talks about it. Peter Diamandis talks about this, this sort of age of abundance, basically because manufacturing efficiency becomes so pronounced, it drives the cost of goods down close to zero. I don’t know that I agree with that. I think in some things it will, in some forms of technology it will, but not in everything, but even in the things that they’re talking about, what do you do?

[00:23:55] So does that mean everybody gets something? Do you turn into a socialist? Or a communist system, even. Do you force the government to be like, okay, so everybody is unemployed now, or 30% or 40% of Americans are basically unemployed. We have to do something, so we are going to actually tax these companies that are just crushing it, and we’re going to give everybody, you know, entertainment, internet, electricity, food that they need.

[00:24:19] It’s a very in interesting question. I’ll stop talking. I want to hear what you guys have to say.

[00:24:22] HODL: I think one of the things that’s going to happen is, you can’t have idleness in a population because, like everybody’s grandmother used to say like, the devil makes work for idle hands.

[00:24:31] Like idleness leads to political revolution. It leads to social and cultural revolution. And people, like during COVID, when they had all day to sit around, got up to some really bad things really quickly. And so I think my version of how I think society’s going to solve for this coming wave of, hyper deflation or abundance or whatever you want to call it, is that the productive output will be robots and AIs. Okay, fine.

[00:24:56] You’re still going to need human beings in the loop to certify it. You’re going to need human beings, you know, to basically, like we’re still going to have jobs so that we can provision status, sort of mainly status. Who deserves what, who is what cast in society. And you’re going to also need something for people to do so that they’re busy all day long so they don’t foment, you know, revolution against the government.

[00:25:16] So like Elon is saying, like, will your personal home robot be able to do like an emergency appendectomy on you? Like maybe, I don’t know. And if that happens, do we need doctors anymore? Like, maybe not, but we’re still going to need high-status human beings who have some sort of a role in certifying the output of AIs. Or, you know, I don’t think you can just do away with work. I think that’s like, unless you’re going to have an ethnic cleansing, you know, which you probably shouldn’t do.

[00:25:42] Preston Pysh: Joe?

[00:25:43] Joe Carlasare: Okay. So not to take anything away from Elon, but his notions and predictions regarding timing are probably some of the worst of any technological innovator. And I mean, he said that by 2018 there were going to be 10 times as many self-driving cars on the roads that we have right now. 10 times as many. So that was 2018.

[00:26:02] So while he is quite, and I would never take away the fact that he’s a visionary and a genius. For me, his expectations of how quickly this is going to roll out are, I think, perhaps misguided. Moreover, I think, you know, I’ve been doing something similar to Jeff sort of a review of this.

[00:26:16] There’s a few books I’ve picked up recently where I’ve looked into some of, like the expectations and sort of tried to find a balanced view of how quickly some of this is going to roll out. Whether these things, like artificial general intelligence, are realistically within the pipeline.

[00:26:29] It’s kinda like quantum, right? It’s like all over the place in terms of how quickly this is going to actually take hold. And then from a sociological perspective, what I think you’re seeing even with the rollout of some of the tech right now is that, you know, you had the GPT moment where people, you know, in certain fields and sectors widely adopted it. Said this is the latest craze. But from a cultural perspective, I think you’re reaching points where adoption rates are diminishing.

[00:26:53] And we’ve actually seen some people walk away from the technology with some data that I’ve seen recently that found that there are far more efficient ways of going about it. I’ll give you one particular example. I have a client who routinely uses GPT in almost every conversation I have with him. And what we found is that it’s actually slowing us down because of the bot, like giving crazy advice that I have to expend five minutes explaining why it isn’t applicable or doesn’t work, or it’s trained on something that’s not for this particular jurisdiction.

[00:27:18] Definitely interesting discussions, right? But in terms of its efficiency, overall input, it really not have a value add. And then the final thing that I think I’ll say is that if you look back historically. Industrial revolution, the automobile age, the computer age, the recurring thread. You can go back and capture news clippings where they say, I’ve seen them recently, like the exact same thing we’re talking about right now.

[00:27:39] That this revolution, this technological revolution, is going to completely wipe out all of the people that depend on agriculture, right? Completely eliminate all agriculture jobs, and there would be nothing for society to do. And then we’re going to lose blacksmiths, we’re going to lose stable hands, we’re going to lose elevator operators. They’ll never find anything to do.

[00:27:54] And every revolution, right? There’s a subsequent new class of jobs where, in many cases, they’re adopting the tech, or they’re facilitating or maintaining the tech, and that is the next segment of society that has that employment. So. I agree with HODL, like I don’t think you’re going to see a mass exodus of nobody has to work.

[00:28:11] There will always be people that can harness the technology. What I do think is a fair sort of, viewpoint is that for certain classes and segments of society, they may get left behind very quickly, right? And that causes societal unrest, which they allude to in the clip. That’s spot on. So where do you do, what would a central planner or policymaker do in that?

[00:28:30] You come in, you smooth over the edges, you do UBI. You do things to make it easier to transition because a lot of the people will be able to leverage that technology to actually maximize their returns and become far more productive. By the way, we’ll get to the discussion here about, I’d love to hear Jeff’s take on the productivity numbers we saw just recently in the last few days here.

[00:28:49] Massive productivity boosts, I think, and I think that’s sort of going to be the par, right? You’re going to look at the aggregate data, you’re going to see these productivity boost that is showing up in the aggregate data, but then you see whole swaths of this country that are left behind, which to me, that’s not an economic issue.

[00:29:04] That’s a political one where the political unrest is going to cause most of the societal distress over, I think, the next, you know, 10, 15, 20 years.

[00:29:12] Preston Pysh: What about the comment that things are going to get really cheap in dollar terms, and they specifically said in dollar terms.

[00:29:19] HODL: I think anything that’s made in the factory is going to get really cheap.

[00:29:22] I mean, think about like, how many times have you been walking through a Target recently and you’ve seen a 75-inch, you know, division television for $200, and you think to yourself, nah, not going to buy that. Because you already have a cheap television home and eventually that television will be $27.

[00:29:40] Like, so anything that’s made in the factory is going to get cheaper and cheaper over time. And that’s a trend that’s already happening and it’s only going to accelerate with, you know, enhancements in robotics and artificial intelligence. So, that’s true, but like Jeff said, it won’t be true for all sectors of the economy.

[00:29:54] Joe Carlasare: I don’t think that, sorry, Jeff, but I don’t think that’s at all dissimilar for what we see historically. There’s always, like Kyle said, there’s always things that get cheaper. There’s always things that remain, you know, relatively high priced or, you know, increase in their value. So to me, I think that’s, again, it’s consistent with all the revolutions we’ve seen from a technological perspective over the last, you know, several hundred years.

[00:30:14] Jeff Ross: And I think Elon kind of contradicted himself a little bit talking about, you know, as technology becomes more and more efficient, it drives the cost down. We all know that that’s just a rule. That’s the, you know, price of tomorrow. Jeff Booth. And so, but then he was talking about how the government is going to be printing like crazy to try to keep up with it so that printing like crazy is going to show up somewhere in the goods that aren’t, is deflationary.

[00:30:34] We’re going to see prices of things skyrocket. I think that means we’re going to have more volatility in prices. So it really depends on what is your measuring stick. And I would say that’s why I try to encourage people, and I’m sure we’ll talk about this later, but consider pricing things in gold or in Bitcoin if you want to see how much things are actually costing in the future.

[00:30:54] Joe Carlasare: No, sorry, Jeff finish.

[00:30:55] Jeff Ross: One other thing I wanted to throw up, Joe, based on what you said is Microsoft just put out this AI diffusion report from the AI Economy Institute dated January, 2026. Very interesting. I think it’s also worth the read for you guys. They were talking about comparing the first half of 2025 to the second half of 2025 working age population in the global north and the global south and in the global north.

[00:31:18] The amount of working-age population that regularly uses AI has increased from 22.9% to 24.7%, and I think the US is about 28%. The global South is a little bit behind the global North, and the UAE has about 64%. 64% of its population working age population is using AI regularly for their work.

[00:31:42] All of those numbers across the board are basically increasing. So you know, I still think it has its K, I’m a little more optimistic about it. I think that it is improving rapidly and I think that the use cases are going to only increase. So I tend to take the more kind of optimistic view. And, and then one other thing, and then I’ll stop.

[00:31:57] Do you guys see that OpenAI just released this OpenAI Health that was approved by the government, and it is not violating HIPAA? You can actually upload all of your data into OpenAI, and it will basically be your personal physician, your concierge physician. That’s amazing to me. Wow. Yeah. I didn’t know that that

[00:32:14] HODL: just happened.

[00:32:14] How often, by the way, are you guys using AI? Because I’m an everyday, multiple times a day user of pretty much like five or six different AI services.

[00:32:23] Jeff Ross: I’m daily, probably about only about 30 minutes a day. I’m trying to increase it, but having a hard time.

[00:32:28] Joe Carlasare: I’d say it’s case-specific. ‘Cause you know, one of the challenges with it is that, you know, if you’re in my field where you have sensitive information, attorney-client privilege, right?

[00:32:37] You can’t just trust any of the online models relying on it and going into a big black box, clients wouldn’t appreciate that. You don’t want to waive privilege. It’s very useful, I think, to talk in hypotheticals. That said, I think I’ve frequently had issues with it providing reliable information, at least in my experience.

[00:32:54] One of the things really interesting to me is how bad it is with case law. It hallucinates probably more than it gets it correct in my expectation. But my one big takeaway, just go back to wrap up with a video, is I couldn’t help but chuckle a little bit when I heard Elon talk about how we’re not printing fast enough when he had the whole Doge campaign.

[00:33:12] Like, did he just suddenly realize this in the last, you know, year since he took like, oh, you know, now it, now it makes sense Elon, like after, you know, having this whole campaign of Doge, it seems inconsistent. Yeah. Wasn’t that crazy?

[00:33:24] HODL: He’s flipped. He’s an accelerationist now.

[00:33:26] Preston Pysh: Yeah. Well, I think he, I think the, the front row seat of trying to tame that beast taught him firsthand.

[00:33:33] There ain’t no taming the beast. In fact, you gotta feed the beast. There was an interesting comment in that same interview and I, I want to make sure we give credit to Peter Diamandis podcast ’cause that’s where that came from. And we will have a link to that in the show notes. But one of the things that they said was, is it smart to go to college to become a doctor right now?

[00:33:53] And Elon literally said, absolutely not. He looked at him and with that question of like, that’s an idiotic decision right now because an Optimus robot armed with AI is going to be far superior to any doctor even providing surgery within. And I’m right on track with you, Joe, on the timeline he wants. If Elon says it’s going to be three years, it’s probably going to be nine years or whatever, based on historical calls.

[00:34:16] But I found that to be really fascinating and just kind of like, wow, here’s the world’s richest person. Literally like almost laughing at people wanting to go to med school, which. You know, whether you agree with him or not, I think you gotta look at whatever he knows and whatever he is seeing and just say, wow.

[00:34:33] Like, what the hell is he seeing? Or what is it that he’s expecting in, call it 10 years or 15 years that’s going to, you know, and he’s saying this in like three or three to five years. But

[00:34:45] HODL: yeah, I, I think the, the rate of change is something that, you know, we’re just not accustomed to. This type of speed.

[00:34:52] 10 years ago, journalists were telling truckers that they were going to have to learn to code. Well, it turns out that these ais are better at coding than they are at trucking. Yeah. You know, and they’re going to be able to do both things. They’ll be able to do trucking and coding. I do also think it’s ironic that, you know, they came for basically like journalists and artists and musicians.

[00:35:10] I mean, you can now make songs on Suno that sound like top 10 hits and just do ’em, you know, in the click of a button. It’s crazy. So yeah, we’re just not used to this type of technological change, and the only way is to just adapt as rapidly as you possibly can. There’s nothing else to do.

[00:35:26] Preston Pysh: Hold on. HODL? Do you have your own music?

[00:35:27] Is that what you were saying? I will make music for this episode and send it to you guys.

[00:35:35] Preston Pysh: We need an outro. Send it over. Give us something. Are you rapping? Singing? What? What are you doing in this?

[00:35:44] HODL: No, I mean it’s, I literally just type, like I will type, you know, Preston Pysh mastermind discussion, and then it will spit out a top 10 banger song and, and not like a crap song, like a good song that the audience will be pleased to listen to. I’m serious.

[00:35:59] It’s crazy.

[00:36:01] Preston Pysh: Oh my God. They had another comment in that clip about white-collar labor going first or being impacted the most. I’m just looking at Joe’s comment. He’s like, I’m getting all this feedback from clients where they’ve used AI a bunch, and it’s actually taking us more time to go through it.

[00:36:16] And I’m just thinking, oh, so he’s making more, he has more billable hours because he has to go through all the, the AI slop that’s getting fed. And I would imagine this isn’t just in, you know, legal services. This is across the board. Like people are dealing with AI slop and maybe it’s actually, you know, more valuable for people that have to sift through.

[00:36:35] And maybe this is just an interim thing. Maybe this is like the next two years we’re dealing with AI slop and then all of a sudden you have, you know, an AI that deals with AI slop. I don’t know, but like, what are your thoughts on the white collar labor first?

[00:36:48] Joe Carlasare: Well, my thoughts are that I think what it’s going to do, it’s going to attack the margins, right?

[00:36:53] It’s going to the bottom 50%. The people who are arguably not even competent in some of the higher quality fields, that they’re already just copying and pasting someone else’s work that they don’t understand philosophically or conceptually why something is done. They’re just copying what their boss or someone told them they will struggle, right?

[00:37:13] Because I think the bot is able to provide advice and it’s be able to analyze far better than what I think they have been accustomed to. So it’s really competitive for them. The upper, say 25%, they become superhuman when properly utilizing these tools, not only in the sense that they can analyze. And execute better.

[00:37:33] But they also have the ability to increase their productivity so they can pull in more of the workload from that bottom 50%. So it makes it much harder, right? The upper 25%, they’re going to be fine. I think for the foreseeable future, because they’re able to utilize the tools in combination with their knowledge, skill and experience to have a much bigger client base.

[00:37:52] And then the sort of median white collar worker, he’s going to really struggle, he or she, because ultimately, they’re going to say, what are you doing better than this thing? And there’s a lot of those people out there. So I definitely don’t understand that concept, but the notion that it just all goes away, I don’t see that happening anywhere on the near horizon.

[00:38:10] HODL: I think in terms of AI slop, it’s not a problem that’s ever going to be solved because it’s structural. And what I mean is that the errors AI makes will probably reduce significantly, or even go away entirely, at some point in the future. And all of the AI outputs will be more or less, you know, good something that you would want.

[00:38:32] But just based on the ability for any one of us here, like I could create an agentic bot using Claude Code that goes on, nano Banana Pro V three and generates a hundred thousand images a week, a million images a month, you know, whatever. And I can, that’s just me, one person with one bot. If I have a thousand bots, I can do, you know, a thousand times more.

[00:38:53] So it’s just a sheer volume problem for the amount of potential slop that’s out there. And then we have all of these, you know, sort of, online feedback networks, like the social networks that are going to want more of this lop content and amplify. I mean, I’m already getting caught on X and on Instagram reels, seeing video, I saw a video of a guy getting chased by an AGI grizzly bear, you know, like accidentally caught by a drone.

[00:39:16] And I was like, oh my God, I can’t believe this guy’s being chased. It’s fake. It’s a fake video. Yeah. I saw, I saw a picture of Nicholas Maduro with blood running down his clothes because we used a sonic weapon on him. Like, and maybe we did use the sonic weapon on him, but the image is fake, right? So, and so I’m, I’m getting got by AI content all day long, you know.

[00:39:33] Preston Pysh: I can only imagine my parents, I mean, they’re just getting one, one shot at, you know, at one after another. On any type of it’s bad on Facebook. It’s bad because where you know where they’re at, it’s just so bad. Yeah. Yeah. It’s just, I mean, it’s just consuming the living hell out of people’s time. Energy, focus, attention, all of it, which is very concerning.

[00:39:54] Well, the one thing that I wanted to bring it back to from that clip is bitcoin. So Jeff, you had said it’s important to, to look at the price of things in gold or Bitcoin terms, because that’s how you’re going to actually see it. But for me, I’m looking at this, and I’m saying, let’s just say that maybe their timeline is really accelerated with the next three years.

[00:40:12] Let’s just say it’s seven years. The thing that just makes my head spin is the printing, the government printing globally is going to continue to get mass, if what they’re saying is true, even half of what they’re saying is true. So people are going to be able to afford, you know, I was looking at the prices of like a, an Uber to the airport.

[00:40:35] Let’s say you had a hundred-dollar fee to go to the airport on an Uber. With this Robotaxi, it might be 10 or $20. So you start getting these types of savings where the cost is reduced by, you know, 90, 80% on things that consume a lot of your income on an annualized basis. And people, they’re just going to continue to be duped by all of this printing because they’re going to look at it and be like, well, I can still go do these things because all these other things got cheaper.

[00:41:04] And it’s just like this mask never seems to come off of the lie, which is fiat currency because of all this tech revolution that’s happening in AI and robotics. Any comments or thoughts? Do you agree? I would just say, if you talk to Jeff Booth, he would say, well, that’s been going on throughout the history of humanity, right?

[00:41:24] Jeff Ross: Humans are always progressing and making things better. And so it’s driving down the marginal cost of production, you know. And so it’s always being masked by government fiat. Mm. And so you’re going to get duped by that. You’re going to continually get duped by that if you’re pricing your life in government fiat currency.

[00:41:39] That’s just, that’s just a fact. And so that’s why you see, we all, I know we’ve all done this stuff where you look at charts of housing in gold or in Bitcoin, and it’s just gotten cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. And if you can look at pretty much any technology and it’s done that, and so I just think that continues.

[00:41:53] I do think that if you have this massive deflationary sort of bust because, and by the way, I think China is actually starting to experience that the manufacturing capabilities that they have right now. They’re just churning out goods right now that more than their own money supply, more than buyers are keeping up with and more than their own money supply is keeping up with, and they’re having a huge deflationary problem right now.

[00:42:18] That’s a problem for governments, right? It’s not a problem for people. Stuff getting cheaper is awesome for people. It’s not good for the government. So if you have a credit based fiat currency system. Deflation is actually your worst nightmare. And so they are going to have to start fighting that at some point.

[00:42:33] Jeff Ross: So I’m really curious to see what they’re going to do. They’ve been on a cadence recently that’s basically the opposite of the us. So as the US has been increasing its monetary expansion, China has been decreasing its, and it looks like they’re about to flip again, where China is going to start rotating higher and start printing like crazy to keep up with this deflation that they’re experiencing right now versus the US.

[00:42:52] It looks like we’re going to actually slow down a little bit for the foreseeable future. The rate of change is going to slow down a little bit.

[00:42:58] Preston Pysh: Joe, can you talk to us at all on the Clarity Act and what’s happening with this market structure stuff?

[00:43:04] Joe Carlasare: Yeah. Well, I mean, I’m still optimistic that we get it. We’ve got a few more weeks.

[00:43:08] I think the, the real key deadline is the, I think it’s March. That’s when I think the last sort of window to pass it comes through. But I definitely think there’s a realistic push. If you had a gun to my head, I think the odds are, you know, better than 65%, 70% that we get it through. There’s this big hiccup where I was just reading earlier that the banks were, you know, pushing forward to try to, you know, again, clamp down on yield-type instruments being issued. They’re very much, focused on that. So we’ll see in which side.

[00:43:37] Preston Pysh:  I didn’t read it very thoroughly, but I saw that this was an issue getting it through the Senate, and the banks are back at it again, as to like how the yield should be treated on stablecoins. Do you know the specifics of what they’re for or against?

[00:43:52] Because right now, as it stands, they cannot pay any of the yield to any of the clients. They basically just retain it as the banking entity and sweep it all into retained earnings. So they want to sustain that, I’m assuming?

[00:44:06] Joe Carlasare: Well, they, the banks have said that the stablecoin reserves are going to siphon money from the traditional banking system.

[00:44:12] So they’re clearly against that. So that’s obviously, they have a big poll. They were, arguably, helpful in getting portions of the Genius Act passed. The banking lobby was helpful in conveying that. So it’s a question of whether that, you know, you’re going to see this coalition, which is, I think I would describe it as pretty fragile based on all the folks I’ve talked to.

[00:44:30] If it starts to fall apart, for example, like Coinbase is talking about, basically, they’re saying they’re going to reconsider their support of the Clarity Act. If you have these restrictions in place that prevent the reward system, that don’t let, let them fairly compete, they want to level playing field. So that’s the big question, right?

[00:44:45] If, if some of the, the more pillar-type crypto institutions like Coinbase and others start exiting from the bill, then it could just, the bottom would fall out. but really, you know, we’re winding it through. As you know, the lawmaking process is a, is like making sausage. It’s very messy, and there are constant changes and back and forth and horse trading over different aspects of it.

[00:45:03] So it’s still to be determined, but I still think we have a, a narrow window here that we can get it done really before the spring. If you don’t hear about this getting to the president’s desk, say at the latest by March, April, roughly. It’s a no-go. I think before the midterms.

[00:45:19] Preston Pysh: What’s the impact if this doesn’t go through from just how, because I would imagine it’s very Wall Street centric, like Wall Street’s really going to lean into Bitcoin and crypto at large if this goes through, because then they don’t have to worry about whether it’s SEC governed, whether it’s CFTC, governed, like all that would just.

[00:45:39] My understanding that the whole purpose of the Clarity Act is to kind of like draw these lines as to who the regulator is and all

[00:45:46] Joe Carlasare: of that. Correct. Clear divisions of jurisdiction. Including options for a sort of hybrid approach, depending on the asset and its constitutional makeup. So yeah, I mean it’s going to make it far easier, I think, to launch some assets, some digital assets in the United States if they get it across.

[00:46:01] Much clearer definitions that are actually codified in the law. Which is what you want. You don’t want case law, in my opinion. You don’t want case law to develop these things on an ad hoc basis because as you know, like that’s, that may be precedential, it may be binding, but there’s always subject of interpretation.

[00:46:17] You could say, oh, this asset’s different from this asset. So then the developer has to sort of guess, in combination with their legal counsel. You want, you want an actual law that you can point to and say, here’s what the text of the bill says, and here’s what we can say based on that text. But this issue of the stablecoin rewards and the yield, I think, is really critical to see, you know, how that shakes out. You know, that’s the key question now.

[00:46:39] Preston Pysh: Any other comments guys that you got on this one?

[00:46:41] Jeff Ross: Not really. The only interesting thought I have about it is what I think Luke Groman has brought this up and maybe others, but that, you know, assuming that these stablecoins attract lots of interest and therefore attract lots of T-bills, that the government basically can force a lower TBI rate on these stablecoin holders.

[00:47:00] You know, so basically the deal that Tether has going right now, where they make whatever three-point half percent and just pocket it right now, and they’re, the government’s going to be like, yeah, no, that’s not going to work anymore. And so if you’re going to be buying T-bills, there’s going to be either a special kind of TBI or they’re actually going to force the Fed to lower the Fed funds rates so much that they’re going to just artificially keep this very low rate TBI so they can borrow, you know, so much more money at a much lower rate. I think that’s actually going to happen.

[00:47:25] Preston Pysh: I’m really surprised. I’m surprised that that hasn’t happened yet, to be quite honest with you. I mean, it’s such a gravy train with what you know, we’ve seen Tether specifically, and anybody else that’s doing this in order to sweep all those coupons. To just issue digital instruments on top of that, I’m just surprised that the US hasn’t gone and said, okay, so like, we’re going to allow you to back this, but you’re going to get a completely different rate.

[00:47:49] Joe Carlasare: How would they do that? I’m confused. What is the, I mean, you could just piece, how would you force, just think about it like the assets are held at a financial institution on behalf. Yeah. Of the issuer of the token. Yeah. So are you going to say that, you know, by law the issuer of the token is not allowed to buy standard market treasury bills?

[00:48:09] Jeff Ross: Yeah, I think so. So either they create a special kind of TBI just for these stablecoins, or, and, and what I think they’re also trying to do is pressure the Fed to lower the Fed funds rate, which would lower the TBI rate as well. So just whatever they have to do to suppress the short end of the curve so that they can just issue, you know, 12 trillion or whatever they need to do to roll over the 2026, roll that they have.

[00:48:33] Whatever they can do to get the rates down to borrow more cheap. Well, it just comes up every year, right?

[00:48:36] Joe Carlasare: The roll of the seven to eight. I heard this at the beginning of last year. We rolled eight and a half trillion. I mean, like every year this comes up, there’s no, and by the way, we rolled that $8 trillion while yields decline throughout the year.

[00:48:51] So I don’t think that supply issuance is causing as many issues with the yield as people think.

[00:48:57] Preston Pysh: So, Joe, I would agree with you, as long as yields are low, if the yields start spiking again, or we start getting like really high yields in treasuries, I think that’s exactly what any, any government is going to do that has stablecoins being issued on top of their treasuries is it’s going to be like, alright, and I’m just going to use this as an example, right?

[00:49:16] Let’s say yields blow out the 7% on like the 10-year or something like that. I think that’s when they’re going to step in, and they’re like, alright, there are two different market rates here. If you’re tokenizing dollars on top of this, we’re only paying 2% or 3%. The rest of the market has these other treasuries that they’re going to buy, and they’re at these percentages.

[00:49:37] Joe Carlasare: I think that would face challenges getting through Congress. That’s just my view. I don’t know. I’d be curious if Jeff or HODL has any thoughts on that.

[00:49:44] Preston Pysh: You might be right about that. I’m not speaking to the viability. I’m, I guess I’m speaking to the incentives of the right of the government to do that.

[00:49:51] Jeff Ross: I think there’s already a lot of manipulation of the yield curve going on, and they’re going to continue to apply a lot of pressure to the Fed on the short end and on the 10-year intel; they can’t do it anymore. So right now, they’re kind of doing an operation twist, as you guys know. Like they’re buying off the run 10 years right now to keep the rate down since the 10 years. But they’re also not, they’re not, but they’re doing that, and they’re not, and they’re also issuing a relatively very low amount of 10-year treasuries right now.

[00:50:19] Joe Carlasare: But that’s been the status quo for years now.

[00:50:21] Jeff Ross: First of all, I think that inflation for the first half of 2026 looks like it’s going to continue to fall and surprise people to the downside. And I think a lot of people are going to be surprised by that. At some point, though, I think with all of the borrowing we’re going to need to do to bring back the amount of manufacturing we want to bring back and to get the energy renaissance we’re trying to foster here. At some point, that’s going to drive yields higher, and I think that at some point, probably by 2027 or so, we’re going to actually institute yield curve control and that’s when things will get exciting.

[00:50:52] Preston Pysh: I mean, according to Elon, the prices of everything are going to drop to nothing.

[00:50:58] Joe Carlasare: If you roll back the tape and listen to most of the experts, economic experts talking about the tariffs, there were many forecasters who said that CPI was going to get back up into the mid threes.

[00:51:11] Even approaching four, they said that this was going to be a second wave and a re-acceleration of inflation. Yeah. Just about a year ago at this time. Yep. Given the tariffs, what did we actually see? We actually see, based on, you know, Goldman Sachs, that there were roughly 50 basis points of pass-through to CPI.

[00:51:28] Which is nothing. Which is basically like, you know, if you’re looking at the 2.9 or 3%, the favorable inflation rate that we had in December, we didn’t have the shelter data included. That was a little funky, but they just completely dropped the shelter from the basket. But still, like, if you isolate for the 50 bips through the terrace, we’re seeing CPI in the low twos.

[00:51:47] I mean, that’s nothing, that’s historically where it was, you know, for 10 years. So, I mean, is it a little bit hot still? Yes, and I agree with Jeff. I think it’s going to continue to fall, but the president’s point about what’s going to cause yields to spike, you need an inflation impulse and where’s that going to come from? Particularly with unemployment creeping up highly. I mean, that is accomplishing the Fed’s goal. In 2022, Joe Powell said the labor market was out of balance. They set out by jacking up interest rates to slow down the labor market, and they wanted these price pressures to come off.

[00:52:17] And the only way to do that is to destroy demand by causing unemployment to rise. And they ever so slightly raised unemployment. To me, that’s why you’ve seen yields decline: we are finally seeing some tick up in unemployment.

[00:52:30] Preston Pysh:This just came out two hours ago, so an hour before we started a recording federal prosecutor, this is on CNN. Federal prosecutors opened cra iminal investigation into the Fed and Jerome Powell, you were talking about Jerome Powell, so I figured I’ll throw this one out there. Any thoughts or comments on this breaking news?

[00:52:50] Jeff Ross: It looks like they did it over the central Bank’s renovation of its Washington headquarters and whether Powell lied to Congress about the project’s scope. Which, and then Powell issued a statement saying, this is completely because we didn’t listen to Trump and didn’t lower race. He literally said that.

[00:53:06] Joe Carlasare: The quote, the quote just for the audience here, and this is, this is directly what he released tonight. He said that this new threat he’s talking about, the indictment, is not about my testimony last June or the renovation of the Federal Reserve, billions.

[00:53:19] It’s not about Congress’s oversight role. The Fed, through testimony and other disclosures, made every effort to keep Congress informed about the renovation projects. Those are pretexts, which means it’s fake. Basically, the threat of criminal charges is a consequence for the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the American public rather than the preferences of the president.

[00:53:38] Jeff Ross: One final follow-up is Trump just put a quote out saying, I don’t know anything about it, but he’s certainly not very good at the Fed and he is not very good at building buildings.

[00:53:50] HODL: Oh my man, what a time to be alive. What a time to, I remember that. I remember they were both at the building site, Powell and Trump, and they were, you know, they were in front of the news cameras, and Trump was going, you feather yourself quite a nest here. And Powell was just like all, I never, I, I don’t know what you’re talking about, you know, so it’s ridiculous, man. We live in a reality show. It is nuts.

[00:54:08] Preston Pysh: Okay, did you guys have any other topics that you guys wanted to make sure we address?

[00:54:12] Joe Carlasare: Why do you think that he hasn’t named the next one, Jeff or HODL? Or Preston? Why do you think he hasn’t named the successor chair? Besson said back in the summer to expect the new Fed chair to be named in September or October. Then he moved to November. Then there was a recent interview of Besson in, I thin,k November, where he said we could get the name before December. Excuse me. Before. Before Christmas. Yeah. Keep pushing it back, you know, if for someone wanting to undermine Powell, you think he would just name the successor.

[00:54:38] Then that guy goes out there and you know, everybody markets the market’s forward thinking they’re going to be looking to the new guy. Or go out.

[00:54:45] HODL: There was a lot of talk about them doing that. Basically, putting in a shadow Fed chair. Yeah. I think they just kind of backed down on it because they decided it wasn’t prudent. I think that’s why they haven’t announced yet.

[00:54:56] Joe Carlasare: By the way, the bizarre thing about this comment tonight, this information about the indictment is that, you know, they cut in December and October. So like three cuts in a row. So why, why now?

[00:55:17] HODL: Maybe Powell really did steal all those instruction funds. We’ll never know.

[00:55:20] Preston Pysh: We’ll never know. I, I don’t know why they’re delaying the announcement. I mean, maybe they’re just testing the waters to see what kind of market reaction they get the best from. I don’t know.  Do you have any thought?

[00:55:31] Jeff Ross: I’m wondering if it’s because they knew this case was coming and to see what the fallout will be. You know, maybe they could pressure powow out. Maybe he’ll quit if he is, you know, being subpoenaed. Maybe they can zero chance, maybe strong-arm him out. Yeah. Zero chance. I, I’m just wondering if that’s why they waited though. Let’s see what the fallout from this is. And then after this, he’ll name somebody.

[00:55:49] HODL: There was a cryptic tweet from Steven Miller. I’m trying to find it, but it was something to the effect of, you know, over the next 10 days wait and you’re going to see justice be served. So I don’t know if this is one of those actions, and there’s more incoming.

[00:56:04] Preston Pysh: Final question from me to you guys. What is causing Bitcoin to go sideways for a year, while gold is ripping? Like, what is your take on just the frustration of a sideways market?

[00:56:18] HODL: It’s a weird one, isn’t it? I’ve been thinking about it for a while. It was interesting to watch the, the metals top, especially silver. The metals guys were like, it’s not our top. It’s like the silver guys were, and it’s like,  I think it’s your top man. I’ve been through a few of these myself.

[00:56:32] Joe Carlasare: Well, as you’re recording this, we made a new all-time high in silver and gold.

[00:56:36] HODL:  It’s ripping. It’s ripping right now. The silver guys keep winning.

[00:56:41] Preston Pysh: It’s a Sunday night. We’re so racked. It’s a Sunday night.

[00:56:42] Jeff Ross: Well, can I use this to segue into that chart I sent Preston?

[00:56:46] Preston Pysh: Yeah.

[00:56:46] Jeff Ross: Oh yeah. Because I feel like I have got to keep talking about that. To me, it’s the most important chart in all of finance and investing. We talked about it last time.

[00:56:53] Yeah, the last two times. I think. Here it is again. It’s a hundred-plus-year chart. The S&P 500 is priced in gold. It doesn’t include dividend reinvested because that chart doesn’t go back as far, it only goes back to like 1980 or something. But it shows basically the same thing. And basically again, what it shows is, you know, we have periods where everybody rushes into the US and US assets are the cream of the crop and they get financialized by not just the US but by the world.

[00:57:21] And then that peaks and it rolls over and then everybody wants hard assets and they flee the US in general and go to hard assets in gold is a like a easy and primary beneficiary of that. I think we had the most recent peak basically in January of 2022. And that’s when basically the transition happened. And since then it’s been like all gold. And I think, if you look at this chart, it suggests that these periods will last about 10 to 15 years. So I think we might be talking about this still in 2030 or longer or later, where gold is going to continue to outperform US stocks by a wide margin.

[00:57:59] And that’s only accelerated since the last time we met. And I think it’s going to continue to accelerate for the next several years. So long hard assets, be careful with US-based financial assets is the take-home point.

[00:58:11] Preston Pysh: Okay. And I’m not disagreeing with you, and I love the conversation we had in the last mastermind where you brought this up, and we were talking about the volatility.

[00:58:19] You might get a bump in the next, you know, year as far as the trend. I’m with you, Jeff, on this. As far as the long term, like we zoom out 10 years from now, I think you’re going to be very right about all of that. But it goes back to the question, it’s like, what is going on with Bitcoin?

[00:58:35] Joe Carlasare: Bitcoin looks fine. I don’t understand what the concern is, so the way I look at it, if you pull up a weekly chart, I don’t know if you could pull that up, Preston? yeah, I will. To me, it looks like you have a higher low from the April low. Last April, we were at 78,000. You have a higher low here. I think Bitcoin looks great.

[00:58:52] We’ve been 50 plus days where we haven’t taken out that bottom. We’ve set on November 22nd. I think Bitcoin can make a new all time hide this year. I don’t know why people are convinced it can’t. I think the only reason people are upset is that they got this idea of the four-year cycle stuck in their head, which all that goes out the window if you make a new all-time high.

[00:59:10] All that myth is, is shattered once and for all. If you do, I mean, tonight as we record this, we’re at 92 2 on Bitcoin, you retake 100 K. This thing can move very quickly, especially with stocks breaking out. I mean, you’re in a market where, you know, the S&P just hit a new all-time high recently.

[00:59:26] IWM is ripping out. Even VXUX, the ETF for foreign stocks outside the United States. New all-time highs. I mean, pull up the chart.

[00:59:38] Preston Pysh: I’m with you, Joe. It’s like, look at that. It’s right where it should be.

[00:59:42] I think the frustration, though, is typically when we’ve seen risk on moves is when Bitcoin is just outperforming and shellacking everything, right? It’s shellacking, the S&P 500, the NASDAQ Gold, you name it, Bitcoin’s outperforming, and for the last year, that has not been the case. It seems decoupled from asset risk, and I think that’s where a lot of people are frustrated, including me. I’m frustrated with that, but I can’t, I can’t say why.

[01:00:10] Joe Carlasare: I think you have to just look back at, you know, the ETF launch, the massive amount of. Redistribution of coins that came with a 100K Bitcoin. Psychologically, people had in their heads, I want to lighten up at a 100K.

[01:00:25] You had a lot of long-term holders sell, but not because they lost faith in Bitcoin. Just because that was the mark in their head. They said, okay, here’s where I’m going to, you know, buy that yacht. ’cause I, ’cause we hit a hundred K Bitcoin. Yeah, to me that’s inherently healthy. You want that redistribution?

[01:00:40] I think you’ve seen that. And as long as Bitcoin stays around these levels and creeps higher, I think it breaks out, you destroy this myth of the four-year cycle, which I think was always kind of a myth. It was more tied to liquidity and the business cycle. And if Jeff’s right, which I think I understand is position, which I agree with, is that we’re entering into a re-acceleration of the US economy.

[01:01:00] A manufacturing, I think, broadening out from a services base to a manufacturing rally here, which I think is screaming through the charts. You know, one of the interesting things is if you look at the metals, throw out the precious metals, look at the industrial metals. The industrial metals are breaking out.

[01:01:14] Those people aren’t holding Copart for, you know, debasement. It’s, that’s showing you a economic impulse that’s showing the manufacturing growth that’s coming. Palladium, even the silver, industrial output. I mean, I think that is a huge piece of that move. But the other one I want to show you, pull up EEM, the emerging markets ETF.

[01:01:31] Okay. And if this doesn’t get you bullish, I don’t know what will. Okay. Look at the emerging markets. ETF.  Pull up a monthly chart. You are breaking out to new all-time highs. Not visited since 2007. I’d be really curious, Jeff’s take on this because I think this chart is screaming at you.

[01:01:55] Jeff Ross: Yeah, I, and I hate to keep beating this same dead horse, but this is what we talked about last time too, is that when you have these periods where basically people are getting out of the financialized US where it’s peaked and rolled over, then you have these basically decade long trajectories where emerging markets tend to outperform as well.

[01:02:12] So it tends to trade. You tend to see a weak, secular dollar and strong performance in precious metals, industrial metals, farmland, real estate, and emerging markets as well. And so they just kind of go hand in hand. So yeah, I expect emerging markets to also outperform US stocks in general for the next, say, five plus years or so.

[01:02:33] Preston Pysh: I mean, there’s no way this current administration is going to let the markets be idle or going sideways into the midterms. I just don’t think that’s going to be the case. I think they’re going to run it very hot into the midterms.

[01:02:44] Joe Carlasare:  Yeah, I tend to agree with the question, I think, well, number one, I think the market is underestimating the potential for Trump to get negative real rates at the Fed with a new chair. I think that that is, I won’t say certain, but that’s highly probable, which is going to have serious investing implications. And to me, into the end.

[01:03:05] Preston Pysh: Into the end of 2026, you’re saying?

[01:03:07] Joe Carlasare: Yes, sir. And then to me, what I would be very curious, because I think this is the biggest story in Bitcoin right now, if you want to stay focused on Bitcoin, if we can make a new all time high, you know, we have a very sentimental Bitcoin market.

[01:03:20] It flips from, you know, we’re all headed to goblin town, to we’re all back in like a week based on one candle. So three days.

[01:03:27] Preston Pysh: Three days. Not even a week. We’re so back. Not even a week.

[01:03:29] Joe Carlasare: We’re so back. So I’d be really curious, I mean, listen, I know it’s not the base case for a lot of people, but if Bitcoin were to make a new all-time high, I love that you guys get on the record right now, what you think the sentiment would be.

[01:03:41] What do you think the thought process would be? ‘Cause I think that could be massive. I think be electric. It’s discounted by the market right now, but you know, sometimes the discount happens.

[01:03:50] HODL: I think I don’t have a problem going our record and saying, I think we will see an all-time high this year. Or several all-time highs, but I’m also kind of of the opinion that they’re going to be kind of underwhelming. So, you know, an all-time high to one 40. Like it’s pretty good, you know, like it’s a little bit underwhelming.

[01:04:07] Jeff Ross: So, for whatever reason, Bitcoin, everybody knows that it trades in sympathy with global liquidity.

[01:04:14] And then, but what it also does, and again we talked about this last time, and I, I feel like I’m keeping beating a dead horse. It trades in sympathy with ISM manufacturing, PMI. You could like it directly correlated. So, to go way back to your question, Preston, why has it been such a disappointing last several years for Bitcoin?

[01:04:30] To me that just explains it. Like when you see manufacturing finally take off and I’m all on board with Joe, the current administration is doing everything they can to cause the manufacturing sector to explode higher. And so I thought it was going to happen in 2025. It did not. I’ve been disappointed. Even new orders just came out recently. I dunno if you guys saw that still in contraction, still like 47.7 or something like that, which was at 47.4, I think it was the most recent. Which is a bummer to see that.

[01:04:56] Preston Pysh: So this, to Jeff’s point, I just threw up a chart of Bitcoin’s price historically over the last 15 years against the manufacturing, the ISM and the PMI indexes.

[01:05:08] Jeff Ross: And for the record, what the ISM has been doing at manufacturing. This is unprecedented. It does not do that. It has not done that since the post-World War II era, since they’ve been keeping track of this. So it’s very unusual for it to have been lagging and contractionary like this. They reached the manufacturing sector has basically been in a recession since 2022.

[01:05:29] So, and people are filling that, that’s the bottom portion of the K too, right? The blue-collar workers have been getting just hammered and continue to get hammered year after year. And so I think that’s reflected personally in the price of Bitcoin. And I think as that recovers, which I finally expect to happen this year, 2026, I think that will be reflected in the enthusiasm for the price of Bitcoin.

[01:05:47] Joe Carlasare: Yeah. So I completely agree. I think there are indications based on the metals and some of the other indicators that you could be early cycle, not late cycle, and everybody seems to think we’re late cycle for some reason. That’s really exciting to me in terms of my bullish outlook. But you have to remember, okay, and I think people lose sight of this, you know, how Preston people talk about, like, what if China dumped all their treasuries?

[01:06:07] What if Japan dumped all its treasuries? Like you hear this constant refrain, right? China. They have, I think, what about 800 billion in treasuries, right? Jeff? Somewhere thereabouts. I’ll look it up for you. I’ll look it up for, yeah, but get the actual data. But I think China’s got around 800; Japan’s got 1.3, 1.2 somewhere.

[01:06:25] But let’s just say, let’s just round up, let’s just say China and Japan. Collectively, they got 2.5 trillion in treasuries. Well pull up the chart of the Federal Reserve balance sheet, right? They’ve drawn down their balance sheet by $3 trillion over the last several years. So this entire market has basically been on hard mode Yes.

[01:06:41] For all assets, right? As they’ve rolled off $3 trillion of the balance sheet. And I think people lose sight of that because they constantly just, you know, say, well, nothing’s exploded. There hasn’t been, some Armageddon where we’re all under a bridge eating cat food. So because of that, because there hasn’t been some big blowup that hasn’t been on hard mode, we’ve been on hard mode in financial markets, not easy mode.

[01:07:01] And I think Bitcoin and a lot of other asset classes have shown that. You can see the S&P grinding up the major indices driven by the tech AI, you know, CapEx boom, yeah, yeah. Et cetera. But there’s a lot of companies, a lot of stocks, a lot of high growers that have done nothing that have just languished for years.

[01:07:16] Preston Pysh: Okay? Yep. the number for China is 700 billion, and for Japan it’s 1.2 trillion.

[01:07:23] Joe Carlasare: So 2 trillion. So is the equivalent of dumping all of China and all Japan’s holdings, the treasuries, plus another trillion dollars. That’s what’s rolled off the Fed’s balance sheet.  Trillion.

[01:07:33] Preston Pysh: Yeah. To your point on the AI driving the indices, I think that’s also been somewhat of a liquidity suck for Bitcoin, which is, you know, on the really aggressive moves, there’s just tons of speculators coming in.

[01:07:47] And if you’ve got these moves that are happening with Nvidia and Tesla and you name it, right? Some of these moves are huge. I read that Nvidia moved, it cycled up, it cycled down in one week, and the number was like a trillion dollars worth of market cap had changed in just one week. So, I mean, it’s pretty crazy.

[01:08:08] Like how much of a liquidity suck that is in and of itself, just from speculative animal spirits out of what I would say is bitcoin’s. You know, Bitcoin makes really big moves. It’s because of all the speculators.

[01:08:22] Jeff Ross: I think it’s important for people to remember, too, like Joe’s point, because liquidity has been tightening for several years.

[01:08:29] It can only go to certain sectors, and this central command control government has been dictating where it goes, right? Yeah. It’s going into AI, CapEx for sure is going into energy, and then globally, it’s going into, if you’re China, Russia, India, it’s going into gold reserves as well. Yeah, and so that, to me, that explains that there’s limited liquidity. The governments are directing where it should go.

[01:08:52] Jeff Ross: Yeah. As liquidity starts to expand again, and hopefully things get bullish from a political point of view in 2026 for Bitcoin as well, that may channel some of that liquidity into Bitcoin, which will be reflected in the price.

[01:09:04] Preston Pysh: Jeff, to this point, I see the, every conversation that I’m watching from studying all the tech is, it’s all about energy.

[01:09:12] We have to have nuclear, we have to have all of this energy infrastructure stood up, and if it’s not energy infrastructure, it’s fabs. And when you look at the CapEx on both of those things, it is an astronomical amount of fiat that needs to be pointed at those things. So yeah, it is interesting. It’s almost like the whole world is retooling and rewiring itself for this next phase transition that we’re going through.

[01:09:37] And hey, maybe that’s one of the reasons why you just don’t see the liquidity getting pointed at Bitcoin is ’cause it’s getting pointed at these other things to kind of build out. But I don’t know. I don’t have a good answer, that’s for sure. And I’m trying my hardest to figure it out, and I don’t seem to be able to, but yeah, go ahead, Joe.

[01:09:53] Joe Carlasare: Can we talk about this productivity, US productivity surging to 4.9%? Yeah. The highest in six years. Any, any thoughts on that?

[01:10:01] HODL: I mean, it’s, at first blush, it seems kinda like an AI story. Is there more to it than that?

[01:10:05] Joe Carlasare: Well, labor units fell like 2%, which is one of the biggest declines in recent years as well. So that’s showing you the labor costs aren’t driving the inflationary pressures. That’s fascinating to me. The other number, which I, again, it’s one of those things I just shake my head. I don’t fully understand, haven’t had a chance to dig into, but Atlanta Fed GDP now is showing 5.1% for the fourth quarter.

[01:10:25] Preston Pysh: That’s crazy.

[01:10:26] Jeff Ross: So it spiked higher. A big reason is because of the import exports is because the US exported a crazy amount of gold to Switzerland and that had that big spike like that, but it’s still very high regardless of that as well. I mean, we’re going to see, I think amazing GDP numbers going forward, even if we have unemployment basically kind of staying the same or creeping higher.

[01:10:49] We continue to see the young population, the college grads are just not getting hired. We have a bunch of people like Joe, like super lawyer, who is going to use AI efficiently and become the top 1% lawyer. Joe will be the last remaining lawyer. United States, the last lawyer on earth. Everybody’s going, sorry.

[01:11:06] But these poor kids are coming out and they can’t get hired and that’s an issue. But these companies are going to become more and more efficient. I think we’re going to see that it’s going to be an amazing productivity boom in the next few years. That’s my take.

[01:11:17] Joe Carlasare: So, Jeff, are you optimistic on assets here? I mean, I don’t remember you weighing in. Do you think Bitcoin hits a new all time high in ’26?

[01:11:24] Jeff Ross: So I do the same thing. I’ve learned to be cautious with how I say things. Here’s how I look at Bitcoin. No. So I think it’s unlikely to go below 50K in 2026 or ever again. I think it’s unlikely to go higher than 700 K, but I think the, and I think the average price will be $145,000.

[01:11:43] The average price based on my stuff would be $101,000. And I think I got it within 1% of that. So to me, the average price for people who just save in Bitcoin is the most important part. The fluctuations don’t really matter. What matters is just kind of what is the price that you’re living off of?

[01:11:57] Joe Carlasare: Wait, so you’re saying unlikely to go above 700,000 in 2026? 2026 ever?

[01:12:02] Jeff Ross: In 2026. So even if the economy takes off and liquidity is flush and crushing it, there’s people still calling for a million or 2 million, right? I think that’s not reasonable. I think it won’t go above 700K, but it won’t go below 50k either.

[01:12:16] Joe Carlasare: For, he just called you unreasonable, HODL.

[01:12:18] HODL: I think it’s quite bearish if Jeff, no, I mean obviously like pretty reasonable call. Pretty reasonable.

[01:12:24] Jeff Ross: I’m trying to be more reasonable in my calls because I don’t like getting inflated by people.

[01:12:28] HODL: You don’t like getting trolled on Twitter?

[01:12:29] Jeff Ross: I do not like that.

[01:12:30] Preston Pysh: All that needs to be said is the volatility’s crazy intense. And based on the history, those are the ranges that you could see. And two, the most important thing that you said, Jeff, is just dollar cost average. That’s the thing I’ve learned through all the years, is just dollar cost averaging.

[01:12:44] HODL: I have full, me and Joe used to argue about this a lot back in probably the 2021, 2022 cycle. But I was a total cycle guy and I fully capitulated. I think the cycles are completely, it’s over. It probably was just an illusion. It probably never was real, but, it’s certainly dead now. And like I do think Bitcoin could trade, you know, next year, 500,000, like that could happen. Next year. 50,000. Yeah. That could happen. You know, so like, we’ll see what happens.

[01:13:11] Preston Pysh: We’ve seen a lot of volatility.

[01:13:13] Okay. You know, with the advent of AI. You know, while we were having this conversation, HODL literally texted me a song that he created with AI to close out the show. So, yes. here we go.

[01:13:31] Clip: Song generated from AI: Preston, Joe, and HODL and Jeff in the room.

[01:13:37] Preston Pysh: This is so bad.

[01:13:42] Clip: Song generated from AI: My interest in the only comes around four times year. It’s the quarterly, let’s go…

[01:14:08] Preston Pysh: What is this?

[01:14:09] HODL: That’s a banger dude.

[01:14:11] Preston Pysh: What is this? Trying to turn it down. I can’t even turn it down. And you made a whole song with lyrics and all. I can’t even turn it down.

[01:14:18] Alright, this was a blast. Thank you guys so much for always making time and making it fun and making it hilarious.

[01:14:25] We’re going to go around the horn, Jeff, if you have anything you want to promote or hand people off to go ahead and take it away.

[01:14:31] Jeff Ross: I never have anything to promote. I’m only on Primal. I think my handle is Less On there. Actually, I want to encourage you all to read, going back to the very beginning of our conversation, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America that was published in November of 2025. That’s where I get a lot of my views. In case you think I have a tinfoil hat.

[01:14:50] I would, my only recommendation is to go, if you need an attorney, go to Joe Carlasare. He is the last great American attorney.

[01:14:57] Preston Pysh: Human attorney. Yes, human attorney, Joe Carlasare, take it away.

[01:15:01] Joe Carlasare: Thanks for having me on. I always appreciate it. You can find me very quickly by Googling my name and my firm’s website if you have a litigated matter you’re, you’re involved with. Otherwise, you know, looking forward to the next one and an exciting quarter. I really want to just leave with everybody with the idea that I think this is going to be a massive quarter.

[01:15:17] I know that there are people very negative here, but I think you see a lot of signs that things could be turning in a very favorable way.

[01:15:23] Preston Pysh: HODL?

[01:15:24] HODL: I’m on Nostr. You can find me on Nostr. And I would like to say it’s not the Monroe Doctrine, it’s the Don Row doctrine. Okay.

[01:15:31] Preston Pysh: Alright, gentlemen, appreciate your time and always coming on the show and just sharing your opinions and thoughts and hopefully it’s valuable for others.

[01:15:40] So everyone out there, thank you for joining us, and until next quarter, that’s our quarterly mastermind.

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