BTC257: Bitcoin Mastermind Q1 2026 w/ Jeff Ross, Joe Carlasare, and American HODL (Bitcoin Podcast) | We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network

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Hey, everyone.

Welcome to this Wednesday's release of the Bitcoin Fundamentals podcast.

On this week's show, I have the mastermind group back to talk about all things Bitcoin and macro.

And we start off by discussing the surprise military raid in Venezuela and what it signals about the shifting global power dynamics.

The group debates whether the US would defend Taiwan against the Chinese invasion and analyzes the strategic importance of semiconductors in this equation.

We also unpack Elon Musk's prediction that AI and robotics will lead the massive deflation and force a major rethink of economic models.

The conversation spans AI's real-world implications on jobs, content, and even national security.

Plus, we look into the Clarity Act and its implications for.

Finally, we dig into fresh Bitcoin market analysis, long-term price predictions and how macroeconomic signals could shape Bitcoin's next big move.

So with that, let's jump into the conversation.

Celebrating 10 years, you are listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by the Investors Podcast Network.

Now for your host, Preston Pysh.

Hey, everyone.

Welcome to this month's, or this quarter's, quarterly mastermind with Joe Carlisari Hodl and Jeff Ross for the first quarter of 2026.

Wow, it came fast.

So guys, I think I know where we want to start this, which is the obvious.

This Venezuela piece is where I think we're going to start this off.

So anybody have an opening take on this particular topic?

I'll go first.

I mean...

I have been absolutely glued to my screen since it happened.

I mean, we're like 11 days into the year and like boom, it feels like the year is, you know, off on a rocket ship ride because this event that you know, the kidnapping of Nicholas Maduro was a total global reordering overnight.

And you can't.

For me personally, from an economic perspective, a geopolitical perspective, a military perspective, American hegemony, et cetera 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 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.

Uh, where you're looking at like the capabilities of, like the f-35 in combat, where you're like we really do have air supremacy, like we have air supremacy as america.

There's so many things we could say about it.

We could spend an hour talking about it.

I'm sure anybody else initial comments.

So I'm just bored with Bitcoin these days because all I want to do is think about AI and geopolitics.

And I 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.

But I think we talked about this briefly on the last show about I've gotten a full tinfoil hat 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 usually, as an investor, when people say, make fun of me and yell at me 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.

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.

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 Alaska, South Korea Japan Philippines, the whole Taiwan Strait area, the Chinese China Sea.

We've had them hemmed in for about 50 years.

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.

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.

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.

So Jeff, this is a fun little thought experiment, but explain to me the offset of the chips.

So giving up Taiwan to China?

I just don't think the US could possibly have any appetite for all those fabs going under Chinese control.

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, by the way, real quick.

We've promised Taiwan, I think, $21 billion worth of weapons to 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.

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.

So that's the issue, Preston, is 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 then.

Isn't it interesting how the number one thing that Elon's working on right now are chips and fabs?

Yes.

And I think that's intentional, personally.

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 are the new oil.

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.

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 Trump.

And I don't really think that we are just focused on the Western Hemisphere in a Monroe style sense.

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 F-35 demolished Chinese air defenses and Russian air defenses.

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 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.

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.

So anyway, like let's say that they are going to still go for Taiwan and They'd be stupid to do it during a Trump administration period.

So you're not buying it, Hoddle.

How about you, Joe?

What do you think about Jeff's thesis here?

Well, let's go back to Venezuela if we can for just a second.

Yeah.

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 25 years.

Incremental changes are big, right?

But that's not to say that...

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, 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, 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?

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.

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 is taking that. don't know how it shakes out.

I'm cautiously optimistic.

I hope whoever comes in their place is very sympathetic.

But we know plenty of examples where.

Look at Iraq.

The shock and awe campaign led to a massive 10-year boondoggle which cost countless 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.

Let me pitch you a conspiracy theory here.

One of the conspiracies is that Delcy Rodriguez, who's currently in charge of Venezuela, was CIA insider who gave up the information the American government so they could get Maduro.

I don't know how much of a conspiracy as I actually saw.

I've seen some evidence of that.

It seems pretty real.

I know.

It seems pretty real.

But I don't have 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 in the BRICS bloc, they're not going to come to your aid.

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 a thing about it.

That's a big blow to their power structure.

I agree.

Did you guys read the national security strategy from November 25?

Yeah.

To me, that validated the conspiracy theories that I've been having personally.

Do you guys think that's not legit?

I mean- I did not read it, Jeff.

Can you give us like the-?

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.

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 a attempt by this current administration than people realize.

I think Greenland is 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 breaking of international norms.

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 the way ICBMs would flow over to America from Russia.

We need control of Greenland.

The Danes can't secure it.

So I read Luke Roman's weekly report that he put out on Friday on this particular topic.

And it was interesting because he just kind of framed it as just further enforcement or attempted enforcement of the petrodollar system.

And he's showing how back when Russia, when we took their reserves back in 2022, that was kind of an active role in trying to enforce everything being denominated in US dollars that are oil exports.

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.

He's just kind of framing it as the US is getting more aggressive in defining and I'm at a loss for words here to properly frame it but basically it's just further enforcement of the petrodollar system.

Any thoughts?

It's definitely part of it.

It's kind of like a re-oilization of the American petrodoll.

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?

You got Iraq, Iran.

Well, Iraq prior to going in there in 2003.

Then you got Iran, you got Russia, you got Venezuela, and you just list them all out.

And it's like every one of these countries are the ones that are not denominating in dollars their oil exports.

And that's lo and behold the enemy of the united states so when again china is now going to have to you know settle their export of venezuelan crude and u.s 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 yeah They're going to make a play on Taiwan, that's for sure.

Do you think they're going to get it?

I think they're going to get it.

I don't think we're going to cower on it.

I think during the Biden administration, the plan was basically to strip mine Taiwan of resources 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.

What do you think the plan?

Taiwan during the Trump administration.

I don't see any way Taiwan falls during the Trump administration.

Well, I would agree with that, but the next administration comes along and who knows?

That's a different story.

I think the Venezuelan thing shows us that many things that i'm laughing at jeff's face.

But go ahead, i'll finish up your thing, 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 if you have the political will to act or if you don't, jeff.

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.

And that's, again, why I think we're okay.

We're going to dig down, we're going to dig in our trenches and we're going to focus on Western Hemisphere.

And To me, that's what all these policy decisions have been about.

And I'm totally opposite from Jeff.

I think this is the beginning of America's bid for total global domination empire.

Interesting.

The death of the republic and the beginning of the empire.

Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.

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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 that it's about 17 of the world's proven oil reserves, which those numbers are obviously tricky to actually fully understand, but that's, the number that I'm coming up with is 17.

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, yeah, it's not worth it.

But maybe, if it's something bigger, I would argue that the Taiwan fab chips issue is an absolute.

I mean we saw in COVID the impact of delayed chips coming to the US with car manufacturers and whatnot.

I mean, it was somewhat disastrous, the impact there.

So I can only imagine, if something like that came under China control, what that would mean for getting such vital components in the supply chains.

But yeah to Jeff's point, you have a change of administration.

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, from a timing standpoint, where you could see something like that.

All right.

Any other comments on this particular topic?

It's just fascinating stuff.

Obviously, the four of us, we're just out here spitballing.

Some chumps.

We're just spitballing ideas.

But I think it is a really 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.

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.

And 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.

Long story short, it's going to lead to this situation where the governments are going to have to print to offset all of this technological deflation.

That's expected.

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.

So, but you have a solution to this.

Which is UHI.

Yes.

Everyone can have whatever they want.

So how does that work?

How does UHI work?

It's a good question.

Like, we have to figure out some, like, transition.

I mean, it's not a redistribution.

It's a bumpy road.

Yeah.

I mean, so my concern isn't the long run.

It's the next three to seven years.

Yes.

The transition will be bumpy.

We humans don't like change.

Simultaneously.

Yes.

Radical change, social unrest, and immense prosperity.

Yeah.

And you can buy all the cyber trucks you want.

Things are going to get very cheap.

Yes.

So this is actually... In fact, if this doesn't happen, we'd go bankrupt as a country.

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 something trillion of interest.

It's crazy.

Yeah.

So 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.

We're going back to the theme of this talk.

How can AI and exponential tech save America and the world?

But I want to hit this because... I was quite pessimistic about it.

Ultimately, I decided to be fatalistic and look on the bright side.

But this is not about taxation and redistribution.

So how does it work?

Reason through it with me.

All right.

So I'm wondering if instead of universal high income, if it's universal high stuff and services.

Yes.

UHSS.

I guess...

Okay, this is my guess for how things play out.

And by the way, 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.

Thank you.

Happy to help.

Yeah.

Because I actually think it's better to be an optimist and wrong than a pessimist, and right for quality of life.

This is not a force of nature.

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 is going to be addressing this exact topic that we're talking about.

It has to be one of the big four AI machines that is dealing with it.

There's no velocity knob, right?

There's no on-off switch.

It is coming and accelerating.

I call it, AI and robotics, the supersonic tsunami.

Yes.

Which maybe is a little alarming.

It's good.

Well, because the world needs a wake-up call.

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 de minimis price.

So you're able to produce almost anything.

Things get down to basic costs of materials and electricity, right?

So people can have whatever stuff they want, whatever services they need.

It's not.

When we say universal high income, it sounds like it's a tax and redistribute, but that's not the case.

I think my best guess for how this will manifest is that prices will drop.

So as the efficiency of production or the provision of services drops, prices will drop.

Prices in dollar terms are the ratio between the output of goods and services and the money supply.

So if your output of goods and services increases faster than the money supply, you will have deflation, or vice versa.

It's a good thing we're growing the money supply so quickly then.

Right.

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 increase money supply Faster.

Yes.

They won't be able to waste the money fast enough, which is saying something.

Isn't it crazy how close those timelines just randomly worked out?

I mean, at the rate, because we're expanding the national debt, not because we're anticipating AI.

We were going to do that no matter what.

Yes.

It's like right on the edge of becoming Argentina.

So productivity is going to improve dramatically, and it is improving dramatically.

I think we'll see high double-digit output of goods and services.

We have to be a little careful about how economists measure things.

All right, guys.

This is a crazy clip, right?

No responses.

Well, I'll start with something and then you guys can jump in.

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.

But when we reach a point where AI and robots can do everything, or most things, quite a bit better or 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 100 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.

And so I think, if this 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, but 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?

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 therefore, we are going to actually tax these companies that are just crushing it.

And we're going to give everybody entertainment, internet, electricity, food that they need.

It's a very interesting question.

I'll stop talking.

I want to hear what you guys have to say.

I think one of the things that's going to happen is you know you can't have idleness in a population, because you know, like everybody's grandmother used to say, like the devil makes work for idle hands,

Like idleness leads to political revolution.

It leads to social and cultural revolution.

And people like during COVID, when people had all day long to sit around, they got up to some really bad things really quickly.

So I think my version of how I think society is 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.

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 caste 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.

So, like Like Elon is saying, will your personal home robot be able to do an emergency appendectomy on you?

Maybe, I don't know.

And if that happens, do we need doctors anymore?

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 the AIs.

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, which you probably shouldn't do

Joe?

Okay, so not to take anything away from, But his notions and predictions regarding timing are probably some of the worst of any technological innovator.

I mean he said that by 2018 there are going to be 10 times as many self-driving cars in the vehicle on the road that we have right now.

10 times as many, right?

So that was 2018.

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...

I've been doing, similar to Jeff, sort of a review of this.

There's a few books I've picked up recently where I've looked into some of 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.

It's kind of like quantum, right?

It's like all over the places 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 had the GPT moment, where people 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 you're seeing diminishing adoption rates.

We've actually seen some people walk away from the technology.

There's some data that I've seen recently that found that there are far more efficient ways of going about doing 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 giving crazy advice, that I have to spend 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.

Definitely interesting discussions, right?

But in terms of its efficiency, overall input, really not having a value add.

And the final thing that I think I will 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, that this revolution, this technological revolution is is going to completely wipe out all of the people that depend on agriculture, right?

Completely eliminate all agriculture jobs and there'll 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.

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 Hoddle.

I don't think you're going to see a mass exodus of Nobody has to work.

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 doing that?

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.

Massive productivity boosts, I think, and I think that's sort of going to be the par, right?

You're going to look at data.

You're going to see these productivity boost that is shown 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, that's a political one, where the political unrest is going to cause most of the societal distress over, I think, the next 10 15, 20 years.

What about the comment that things are going to get really cheap in dollar?

And they specifically said in dollar terms.

I think anything that's made in a factory is going to get really cheap.

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 Vizio television for two hundred dollars and you think to yourself nah, not going to buy that.

Right.

Because you already have a cheap television at home.

And eventually that television will be $27, right?

So anything that's made in a 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 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.

I don't think that.

Sorry Jeff, but I don't think that's at all dissimilar for what we see historically right.

There's always... Like Kyle said, there's always things that get cheaper.

There's always things that remain relatively high priced or... 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 several hundred years.

Right, right.

And I think Elon kind of contradicted himself a little bit talking about as technology becomes more and more efficient, it drives the cost down.

We all know that.

That's just a rule.

That's the price of tomorrow, Jeff Booth, right?

But then you're 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 as deflationary.

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.

Go ahead.

No, sorry, Jeff.

Finish.

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 a 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, the amount of working age population that are regularly using AI has increased from 229 to 247.

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.

All of those numbers across the board are basically increasing.

So I still think it has its kinks.

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 optimistic view.

And then one other thing, and then I'll stop.

Did you guys see that OpenAI just released this OpenAI Health that was approved by the government?

And it's not violating HIPAA.

You can actually upload all of your data into OpenAI.com.

And it will basically be your personal physician, your concierge physician.

That's amazing to me.

Wow.

I didn't know that.

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.

I'm daily probably about only about 30 minutes a day.

I'm trying to increase it, but having a hard time.

I'd say it's case-specific, because one of the challenges with it is that if you're in my field, where you have sensitive information attorney-client privilege, 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 frequently, at least in my experience, I've had issues with it giving reliable information.

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 the 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.

Like did he just suddenly realize this in the last you know year since he took like, oh you know, now it's, now it makes sense elon, like after you know, having this whole campaign of doge, it seems inconsistent.

Yeah, wasn't that crazy.

He's flipped, he's an accelerationist now.

Yeah well, i think he.

I think the the front row seat of trying to tame that beast taught him firsthand.

There ain't no team in the beast.

In fact, you gotta feed the beast right?

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All right, back to the show.

There was an interesting comment in that same interview and I want to make sure we give credit to Peter Diamandis' podcast, because that's where that came from and we'll have a link to that in the show notes.

One of the things that they said was, is it smart to go to college to become a doctor right now?

And Elon literally said, absolutely not.

He looked at him with that question of like that's an idiotic decision right now because an optimist robot armed with AI is going to be far superior to any doctor, even providing surgery within an.

I'm right on track with you Joe, on the timeline.

If Elon says it's going to be three years, it's going to probably be nine years or whatever, based on historical calls.

But I found that to be really fascinating.

And just kind of like wow, here's the world's richest person, literally almost laughing at people wanting to go to med school, which

Whether you agree with him or not, I think you got to look at whatever he knows and whatever he's seeing and just say wow, 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 And he's saying this in three to five years, but

Yeah, I think the rate of change is something that you know.

We're just not accustomed to this type of speed.

Ten 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, right.

And they're going to be able to do both things.

They're going to 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.

I mean, you can now make songs on Suno that sound like top 10 hits and just do them, 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.

Hold on.

Hodl, do you have your own music?

Is that what you were saying?

I will make music for this episode and send it.

And send it to your guys.

We need an outro.

Send it over.

Give us something.

Are you rapping, singing?

What are you doing in this?

No, I mean it's.

I literally just type like I will type you know, Preston Pish, mastermind discussion, and then it will spit out a top 10 banger song.

And not like a crap song, like a good song that the audience will be pleased to listen to.

I'm serious.

It's crazy.

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.

I'm just thinking oh, so he has more billable hours because he has to go through all the AI slop that's getting fed, And I would imagine this isn't just in legal services.

This is across the board.

People are dealing with AI slop and maybe it's actually more valuable for people that have to sift through.

And maybe this is just an interim thing.

Maybe this is the next two years.

We're dealing with AI slop and then, all of a sudden, you have an AI that deals with AI slop.

I don't know.

But what are your thoughts on the white-collar labor first?

Well, my thoughts are that I think what it's going to do, it's going to attack the margins, right?

The bottom 50, the people that 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 him. they will struggle, right?

Because I think the bot is able to provide advice and it's 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 to the sense that they can analyze and execute better, 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.

And then the sort of median white collar worker.

He's going to really struggle, he or she because ultimately, that they're going to say like, what are you doing better than this thing?

And there's a lot of those people out there.

So I definitely understand that concept.

But the notion that it just all goes away, I don't see that happening anywhere on the near horizon.

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 by that is that the errors that AI is making will probably reduce significantly or maybe even go away entirely at some point in the future.

And all of the AI outputs will be more or less good, something that you would want.

But just based on the ability for any one of us here like I could create a agentic bot using Claude code that goes on a nano banana pro V3 and generates a hundred thousand images a week, a million images a month.

You know whatever.

That's just me, one person with one bot.

If i have a thousand bots, i can do you know a thousand times more.

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 um online feedback networks like the social networks that are going to want more of this slop content and amplify.

I mean, i'm already getting caught on x and on instagram reels.

Uh, seeing video, i saw a video of a guy getting chased by a grizzly bear, you know like caught up accidentally, caught by drone, and i was like, oh my god, i can't believe this guy's being.

It's fake, it's a fake video.

Yeah, i saw yeah, 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 a sonic weapon on him, but the image is fake right, and so i'm getting got by ai content all day long.

You know, I can only imagine my parents.

I mean, they're just getting one shot at, you know at one after another on any type of on Facebook is where you know where they're at.

It's just so bad.

The living hell out of people's time energy focus attention, all of it, which is very concerning.

Well, the one thing that I want to bring it back to from that clip is Bitcoin.

So Jeff, you had said it's important 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.

Let's just say it's seven years.

The thing that I that just makes my head spin is the printing, the government printing globally is going to continue to get masked if what they're saying is true, even half of what they're saying is true.

And so people are going to be able to afford.

I was looking at the prices of an Uber to the airport.

Let's say you had a $100 fee to go to the airport on an Uber.

With this robo-taxi, it might be $10 or $20.

So you start getting these types of savings where the cost is reduced by 90 80 on things that consume a lot of your income.

All of this printing because they're going to look at him like, well, I can still go do these things because all these other things got cheaper.

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?

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?

Humans are always progressing and making things better.

And so it's driving the cost down, you know, the marginal cost of production.

And so it's always being masked by government fiat.

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.

That's just a fact.

And so that's why you see 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.

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

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 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.

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 their monetary expansion, China has been decreasing theirs.

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.

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.

Joe, can you talk to us at all on the Clarity Act and what's happening with this market structure stuff?

Well, I mean, I'm still optimistic that we get it.

We've got a few more weeks.

I think 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 better than 65%, 70% that we get it through.

There's this big hiccup where I was just reading earlier that the banks were pushing forward to try to again clamp down on yield type instruments being issued.

They're very much focused on that.

So we'll see.

And which side, because I read this well, I didn't read it very thoroughly, but I saw that this was an issue.

Getting it through the Senate is the banks are back at it again as to how the yield should be treated on stablecoins.

Do you know the specifics on what it is that they're for or against?

Because right now, as it stands, they cannot pay any of the yield to any of the clients.

They just basically get to retain it as the banking entity and sweep it all into retained earnings. right so they want to sustain that i'm assuming well they the banks have said that the stable coin reserves are going to siphon money from the traditional banking system so they're clearly against that so that's obviously they have a big pull they were helpful arguably in getting portions of the genius act passed right the banking lobby was helpful in getting that across so it's a question of whether that um you know you're going to see this coalition which is i think i would describe it as is talking about, basically they're saying they're going to reconsider its support of the Clarity Act.

If you have these restrictions in place that prevent the reward system, that don't let them fairly compete.

They want a level playing field.

So that's the big question, right?

If some of the more pillar type crypto institutions like Coinbase and others start exiting from the bill, then the bottom would fall out.

But really, you know, we're winding it through.

As you know, the lawmaking process is like making sausage.

It's very messy and there's all constant changes and back and forth and horse trading over different aspects of it.

So it's still to be determined.

But I still think we have a narrow window here that we can get it done really before the spring.

If you don't hear about this, getting through to the president's desk you say that the latest by April.

April March roughly, it's a no-go, I think before the midterms.

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, which is my understanding.

That's the whole purpose of the clarity act is to kind of like draw these lines as to who the regulator is and all the clear divisions of jurisdictions, including options for sort of a 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 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, that may be precedential, it may be binding, but there's always subject of interpretations.

You can 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 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 stable coin rewards and the yield, I think is really critical to see how that shakes out.

That's the key question now.

Any other comments, guys, that you got on this one?

Not really.

Okay.

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 stable coins attract lots of interest and therefore attract lots of T-bills, that the government basically can force a lower T-bill rate onto these stable coin holders.

You know.

So basically the deal that Tether has going right now, where they make whatever three and a half percent and just pocket it right now.

And 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 T-bill or they're actually going to force the Fed to lower the Fed funds rate so much that they're going to just artificially keep this very low rate T-bill so they can borrow so much more money at a much lower rate.

I think that's actually probably going to happen.

I'm surprised that that hasn't happened.

Gravy train with what we've seen Tether specifically, and anybody else that's doing this in order to sweep all those coupons, to just basically issue digital instruments on top of.

I'm just surprised that the US hasn't gone and said okay, so we're going to allow you to back this, but you're going to get a completely different rate.

How would they do that?

I'm confused.

How would you force... Just think about it.

The assets are held at a financial institution on behalf of the issuer of the token.

So are you going to say that by law, the issuer of the token is not allowed to buy standard market treasury bills?

Yeah, I think so.

So either they create a special kind of T-bill That's just for these stable coins.

And what I think they're trying to do also is the Trump administration is obviously trying to pressure the Fed funds rate down, which would lower the T-bill rate as well.

So, just whatever they have to do to suppress the short end of the curve so that they can just issue 12 trillion, or whatever they need to do to roll over the 2026 roll that they have,

Whatever they can do to get the rates down to borrow more cheaper.

Well, this comes up every year, right?

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, every year this comes up.

And by the way, we rolled that $8 trillion while yields declined throughout the year.

So I don't think that supply issuance is causing as much issues with the yield as people think.

So Joe, I would agree with you as long as yields are low.

If the yields start spiking again or we start getting really high yields in treasuries.

I think that's exactly what any government is going to do that has stable coins being issued on top of their treasuries is it's going to be like all right?

And I'm just going to use this as an example.

Let's say yields blow out to 7% on the 10-year or something like that.

I think that's when they're going to step in and they're like all right, there's 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.

Preston Pyshenko Yeah, 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 Hoddle have any thoughts on that.

And you might be right about that.

I'm not speaking to the viability.

I guess I'm speaking to the incentives of the government to do that.

Yeah.

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 until they can't do it anymore.

So right now, they're kind of doing an operation twist already.

Do you guys know they're buying off the run 10 years right now to keep the rate down since the 10 years?

Very, very few.

Very few.

Right, but they're also not...

But they're doing that and they're also issuing a relatively very low amount of 10-year treasuries right now.

Yes.

That's been the status quo for years now.

Exactly.

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.

I mean, according to Elon, the prices of everything are going to drop to nothing.

So, you know, the end of scarcity.

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, even approaching four.

They said that this was going to be a second wave and reacceleration of inflation.

Just about a year ago at this time.

Yep.

Given the tariffs, what did we actually see?

We actually see, based on Goldman Sachs.

They said that there were roughly 50 basis points of pass-through effects on CPI 50 basis points, right.

Which is nothing, right?

Which is basically like if you're looking at the 29 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 that they just completely dropped the shelter from the basket.

But still, if you isolate for the 50 bps through the tariffs, we're seeing CPI in the low twos.

I mean, that's nothing.

That's historically where it was 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 to Preston'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 2022, he said the labor market was out of balance.

They set out, by jacking up interest rates, to pump the brakes, slow down to the labor market, and they wanted these price pressures to come off.

And the only way to do that is to destroy demand by causing unemployment to rise.

And they ever so slightly caused unemployment to rise.

To me, that's why you've seen yields decline is because we finally are seeing some tick up in unemployment.

This just came out two hours ago.

So an hour before we started recording, Federal prosecutors opened criminal 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?

Yeah, 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.

Wow.

And then Powell issued a statement saying this is completely because we didn't listen to Trump and didn't lower rates.

He literally said that.

It is wild.

The quote just for the audience here, and this is directly what he released tonight.

He said that this new threat about he's talking about indictment is not about my testimony last June of the renovation of the Federal Reserve billions.

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.

I mean, it's fake, basically.

The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of 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.

That's Jerome Powell tonight.

And 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's not very good at building buildings.

What a time to be alive.

I remember they were both at the building site Powell and Trump and they were in front of the news cameras and Trump was going.

You feathered yourself quite a nest here.

And Powell was just like I, never.

I don't know what you're talking about.

Show, it is nuts, okay.

Did you guys have any other topics that you guys want to make sure we address?

Why do you think that he hasn't named uh, jeff or hodl or press?

Why do you think he hasn't named the successor chair?

Because besant said back in the summer to expect the new fed chair to be named in september, october.

Then he moved to november.

Then there was a recent interview of besant in, i think, november where he said we could get the name before december or before christmas.

They're pushing it back.

You know, if for someone wanting to undermine Powell you think he would just name the successor, then that guy goes out there and you know the market's forward thinking, they're going to be looking to the new guy or grow up.

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 a prudent course of action.

I think that's why they haven't announced yet.

By the way, the bizarre thing about this comment tonight, this uh information about the indictment, is that you know they cut in december and september and october, so like three cuts in a row, right?

So why why now?

Why is this uh still an issue?

Because it wasn't 50.

It wasn't 50 joe, it was 25 maybe.

Maybe Powell really did steal all those construction funds.

We'll never know.

I don't know why they're delaying the announcement.

I mean, maybe they're just testing the waters to see kind of what they get the best reaction, market reaction from.

I don't know.

I'm wondering if it's because they knew this case was coming and to see what the follow will be.

You know, maybe they could pressure Powell out.

Maybe he'll quit if he's, you know, being subpoenaed.

Maybe they can arm him out.

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.

There was a cryptic tweet from Stephen 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.

Not sure.

Final question for me to you guys what is causing Bitcoin to go sideways for a year, while gold is ripping?

What is your take on just the frustration of a sideways market?

Yeah, 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.

Well, as you're recording this, we made a new all-time high in silver and gold.

So did we ripping.

You're ripping right now.

The silver guys keep winning.

It's a sunday.

It's a sunday night.

Well, can i use this to segue into that chart?

I said Preston.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Because I feel like I 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 two times, I think.

Here it is again.

It's a 100 plus year chart, the S&P 500 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 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.

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 and gold as like an 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, this chart suggests that these periods will go on for about 10 to 15 years or so.

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.

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.

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.

You might get a bump in the next year.

As far as the trend, I'm with you, Jeff, on this.

As far as the long-term, we zoom out 10 years from now.

I think you're going to have been very right about all of that.

But it goes back to the question, it's like, what is going on with Bitcoin?

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.

We've been 50 plus days where we haven't taken out that bottom.

We've sat on November 22nd.

I think Bitcoin can make a new all-time high this year.

I don't know why people are convinced they can't.

I think the only reason people are upset is because 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.

All that myth 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 100K. this thing can move very quickly, especially with stocks breaking out.

I mean, you're in a market where the S&P just hit a new all-time high recently.

IWM is ripping out.

Even VXUX, which is the ETF for foreign stocks outside the United States, new all-time highs.

I mean, Pull up the chart of... Is that Bitcoin?

Yeah, there's Bitcoin.

I mean, from a volatility standpoint, I'm with you, Joe.

It's like right where it should be.

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 like it's decoupled from risk on assets.

And I think that's where a lot of people are having frustration, including myself.

I'm frustrated with that.

But I can't say why.

I don't really know.

I think you have to just look back at the ETF launch, the massive amount of redistribution of coins that came with 100K Bitcoin.

Psychologically, people had in their heads, I want to lighten up at 100K.

You had a lot of long-term holders sell, 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 buy that yacht because we hit 100K Bitcoin.

To me, that's inherently healthy.

You want that redistribution.

I think you've seen that.

And as long as Bitcoin stays around these levels and creeps higher, I think, and 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 business cycle.

And if Jeff's right, which I think I understand, his position, which I agree with, is that we're entering into a reacceleration of the US economy, a manufacturing, I think, broadening out from a services base to a manufacturing rally here which I think is screaming through the charts.

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 up.

Those people aren't holding copper for debasement.

That's showing you an economic impulse.

That's showing 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.

And if this doesn't get you bullish, I don't know what will.

Look at the emerging markets ETF.

Pull up a monthly chart.

Is that a monthly chart?

No, it's weekly, but I can get monthly up there.

Wow.

You're breaking out to new all-time highs not visited since 2007.

Yeah.

2007.

I'd be really curious, Jeff's take on this, because I think this chart is screaming at you.

Yeah.

And I hate to keep beating the 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.

So it tends to trade.

You tend to see a secular, weak dollar and a 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.

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.

I tend to agree.

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 the new chair.

I think that that is I won't say certain, but that's a highly probable possibility which is going to have serious investing implications.

And to me- Into the end of 2026, you're saying?

Yes, sir.

Yes.

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, You know we have a very sentimental Bitcoin market.

It flips from.

You know we're all heading to Goblin Town to we're all back in, like a week based on one candle.

Right.

So three days, sir.

Three days.

Not even a week.

We're so bad.

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'd love to you guys get on the record right now.

What do you think the sentiment would be?

What do you think the thought process would be?

Because I think that could be massive.

I think it'd be electric.

It's discounted by the market right now, but sometimes the discounted thing happens.

I don't have a problem going on record and saying I think we will see an all-time high this year, or seven, 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 140, like, woo!

Like, it's pretty good, you know?

A little bit underwhelming.

So, for whatever reason Bitcoin, everybody knows that it trades in sympathy with global liquidity right.

But what it also does.

And again, we talked about this last time and I feel like I keep beating a dead horse.

It trades in sympathy with ISM manufacturing PMI.

It directly correlated.

So to go way back to your question Preston, why hasn't it been such a disappointing last several years for Bitcoin?

Preston Pyshenko To me, that just explains it.

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 don't know if you guys saw that.

Still in contraction, still like 477 or something like that which was at 474, I think was the most recent, which is a bummer to see that.

Yeah, there you go.

So this is 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.

And for the record, what the ISM has been doing 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 that it's been lagging and being contractionary like this.

The manufacturing sector has basically been in a recession since 2022.

So, and people are feeling that that's the bottom portion of the K2, 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 of the price of Bitcoin.

Yeah.

So I completely agree.

I think there are indications based in 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 will lose sight of this, is, you know, Preston, people talk about like, what if China dumped all their treasuries?

What if Japan dumped all their treasuries, right?

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.

Yeah, but get the actual data.

I think China's got around 800.

I think Japan's got 1.3, 1.2 somewhere.

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 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 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 blow up that hasn't been on hard mode, we've been on hard mode in financial markets, not easy mode.

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 capital.

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.

Yep.

The number for China is 700 billion, and for Japan, it's 1.2.

Okay.

So it's the equivalent of dumping all of China and all Japan's holdings and treasuries, plus another trillion dollars.

That's what's rolled off the Fed's balance sheet.

Wow.

Yeah.

To your point on the AI driving the indices, the equity indices, I think that that's also been somewhat of a liquidity suck for Bitcoin, which is on the really aggressive moves.

There's just tons of speculators that come in.

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, 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.

I think it's important for people to remember too, like to Joe's point, because liquidity has been tightening for several years, it only can go to certain sectors.

And this central command control government has been dictating where it goes, right?

It's going into AI, CapEx for sure is going into energy.

And then globally, if you're China, Russia, India, it's going into gold reserves as well.

And so to me, that explains that.

There's limited liquidity.

The governments are directing where it should go.

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.

Jeff, to this point I see every conversation that I'm watching from studying all the tech is.

It's all about energy.

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 astronomical the 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.

And hey, maybe that's one of the reasons why you just don't see the liquidity getting pointed at Bitcoin is because 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.

Can we talk about this productivity, U.S. productivity surging to 4.9% in six years?

Any thoughts on that?

At first blush, it seems kind of like an AI story.

Is there more to it than that?

Well, labor units fell by 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.

Yeah.

I mean, the other number, which I, again, it's one of those things I just shake my head.

I don't fully understand and haven't had a chance to dig into, but Atlanta Fed GDP now is showing 51 for the fourth quarter 51.

That's crazy.

So it's 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 and 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.

The last lawyer on earth.

Yeah.

Everybody is going to go to jail.

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.

So Jeff, are you optimistic on assets here?

I mean, I don't remember you weighing in.

Do you think Bitcoin hits any all-time high in 26?

So I do the same thing.

I've learned to be cautious with how I say things.

Here's how I look at Bitcoin.

So I think it's unlikely to go below 50K in 2026 or ever again.

I think it's unlikely to go higher than 700K.

And I think the average price will be $145,000.

And last year I thought the average price based on my stuff would be 101000 and I think I got it within 1 of that.

So to me, the average price for people who are just saving 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.

So you're saying unlikely to go above $700,000 in 2026 or ever?

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.

He just called you unreasonable, Hoddle.

I think it's quite bearish of Jeff.

No, I mean, obviously, pretty reasonable call.

Pretty reasonable.

I'm trying to be more reasonable in my calls because I don't like getting flayed by people.

You don't like getting trolled on Twitter?

I do not like that.

Yeah.

I mean, all that needs to be said is the volatility is 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 average and I have me and Joe used to argue about this a lot back in probably the 2021 2022 cycle.

But I have, I was a total cycle guy and I fully capitulate.

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, yeah, that could happen.

Next year, 50,000?

Yeah, that could happen.

So, like, we'll see what happens.

We've seen a lot of volatility.

Yeah.

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, here we go.

Preston.

It's the quarterly What is this?

What is this?

Try 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.

All right.

This was a blast.

Thank you guys so much for always making time and making it fun and making it hilarious.

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.

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 2025.

That's where I get a lot of my views, in case you think I have a tinfoil hat.

My only recommendation is to go, if you need an attorney, go to Joe Carlisari.

He is the last great American attorney.

Human attorney.

Yes.

Human attorney, Joe Carlisari.

Take it away.

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 involved with.

Otherwise, I'm looking forward to the next one and an exciting quarter.

I really want to just leave everybody with the idea that I think this is going to be a massive quarter.

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.

Toddle?

I'm on Noster.

You can find me on Noster.

And I would like to say it's not the Monroe Doctrine.

It's the Donrow Doctrine.

Okay.

All right gentlemen, appreciate your time and always coming on the show and just sharing your opinions and thoughts.

And hopefully it's valuable for others.

So everyone out there, thank you for joining us.

And until next quarter, that's our quarterly mastermind.

Thank you.

And the Investors Podcast Network is not responsible for any claims made by them.

Copyright by the Investors Podcast Network.

[Bitcoin Fundamentals: Geopolitics, AI Deflation, and Macroeconomic Shifts]-[BTC257: Bitcoin Mastermind Q1 2026 w/ Jeff Ross, Joe Carlasare, and American HODL (Bitcoin Podcast)]

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The Shifting Global Power Dynamics

The Supersonic Tsunami: AI and Economic Deflation

Bitcoin and the Future of Monetary Policy

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[Bitcoin Fundamentals: Geopolitics, AI Deflation, and Macroeconomic Shifts]-[BTC257: Bitcoin Mastermind Q1 2026 w/ Jeff Ross, Joe Carlasare, and American HODL (Bitcoin Podcast)]

📋 Summary

The Shifting Global Power Dynamics

The Supersonic Tsunami: AI and Economic Deflation

Bitcoin and the Future of Monetary Policy

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🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

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