From Bitcoin Banks to Meme Coins: A Financial Exploration

Old Men, New Money. Please subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, and iTunes. Thank you. I'm Phil Arman. I'm Douglas Borthwick. And this is Old Men, New Money. Before we get started, remember to like and subscribe and share on your platform of choice like LinkedIn, Instagram, and you can find us on all major podcast platforms like Spotify, iHeart, and YouTube. Before we get started, I want to tell you about a new newsletter that we have on LinkedIn that is packed of just short, quick information on crypto, Bitcoin, blockchain, AI, just bite-sized pieces that you can consume very quickly.

We'll put a link down below the show that you could quickly subscribe with one click. Let's get started with the show. All right, Douglas, what do you want to talk about today? You want to talk about Michael Saylor. Yeah, but let's start there for sure. Saylor is obviously the chairman of MicroStrategy, named Strategy, and he owns more Bitcoin than any country right now, more than China, more than the United States. And he's a financial engineer that's figured out Bitcoin and the different investors in different pockets, whether you're a fixed income investor looking for low volatility, looking for yield, or you're an equity investor.

And he's creating all sorts of structures, financial structures for people to invest in Bitcoin and in the possible upside. So very exciting what he's doing. He's obviously come out with Strike, which was a $20 billion at the money offering that he did around a 9% effective yield. And lately he's also talked about Strife, which looks like it's around a $500 million offering an 8% yield. And I think that folks are obviously very concerned. They're saying, where's he going to get the money from to pay the dividend on this?

And I think that it's a little short-sighted because here's someone that could easily turn strategy into a Bitcoin bank and he can pay dividends from revenues generated from clients who would be borrowing fiat against their Bitcoin holdings. So that's obviously one way that they'd be able to do it. Another one is obviously if the price of Bitcoin goes up, he could sell a little bit of Bitcoin, but I don't see him as being a Bitcoin seller. But another thing that's very interesting is obviously the volatility of Bitcoin is much, much higher than 8%. It's multiples over that.

So he can be selling volatility and at the same time using that the selling volatility for in order to pay off dividends. But I mean, your strategy is obviously the biggest player in Bitcoin other than Satoshi. And it's very exciting what they're doing. Well, it seems like he might even get even bigger because he's got a major seat at the table. He's invited to the White House along with other crypto or Bitcoin type leaders and thought leaders. I have to think that now he has the right audience and he's walking everyone through his strategy why this is a great opportunity to have a reserve for the US government.

Do you think he's still in like the education phase talking to these people or do you think that the folks that were in that room with him on the government side actually understand the opportunity now? The government certainly understands the opportunity. I think that every government employee that's been coming out since then has talked about how they want to own Bitcoin, they want to buy Bitcoin. Obviously there was the executive order that's come out that said they want to build a strategic Bitcoin reserve. In that they made it such that it has to be budget neutral. Now what does that mean?

It means that they're not going to be taking money from the taxpayer and using that to then buy Bitcoin. They have to look at what do they already have in their purview where they could either sell it or keep it. There's a number of different things that have been floated around. One was revaluing gold that would give the US around $800 billion from where it's valued right now and the price is valued now versus where the market price is. Gold's obviously gone up a lot. It's trading over $3,000 now, but Besant, who's the Treasury Secretary, came out yesterday and said that's just not going to happen. Let's look at other things.

There's obviously forfeiture and seizure. That's where the US government got the $200,000 Bitcoin that they currently have on their balance sheet. Also, as time goes on, I'm sure there's going to be a lot more seizure and forfeiture from bad actors. There's also specific funds that the government has for different uses. There's the ESF, that's the Exchange Stabilization Fund. That's got about $39 billion in it and traditionally that's used to stabilize foreign exchange markets. If Bitcoin is now seen as digital gold, that may be something that they could sell some of the assets there and buy Bitcoin and remain budget neutral.

They have another thing called SDRs in the SDR balance and that's essentially a currency created by the IMF. Within that, there's around $160 billion of SDRs. The SDR really is a weighted basket of different currencies belonging to many other countries. We could obviously sell some of that and buy Bitcoin with it. There's also legislation that's happening right now that Cynthia Loomis is trying to get passed. That's the idea to buy 1 million Bitcoin over the next five years. That seems to be gathering attention. There's a lot of centers now that are co-sponsoring that bill. It's also something that is not just across party lines.

There's Republicans and there's Democrats that are getting behind it. But the states are also getting behind this in that if you can look at Texas, Arizona and Utah right now, Texas is probably the closest. There's one final vote to happen. It's already passed through all the other areas. Texas looks like it's going to be the first state that allows Bitcoin to be held. Arizona and Utah are bringing up the sides there, but certainly it's getting very close. Now, Cynthia Loomis believes that the states will be first and then the United States, and that could certainly be the case, but it's certainly very exciting.

There's other nations that have come out in the Middle East that have said that they're been buying Bitcoin aggressively. Given that, though, if I'm Phil Lerman from Columbus, Ohio, that I've got some Bitcoin, I believe in it, and I've tracked the price, and I say, "Okay, I would think all this news, all this positive news that's going out there that we're going to have a strategic reserve. We have policy that's positive in this direction. We have nation states that are going to have reserves." You'd think that by now, you'd see an uptick.

Why do you think that the price of Bitcoin is relatively stable, given that Bitcoin can have quite volatility and jump very quickly? But why do you think that it's still hovering in the '80s and hasn't gone to 150 or something higher? Is it just straight economical challenges right now where the economy is trying to reset and we're trying to get new policies and people are liquidating other things, or what is the reason? There's certainly economic anxiety or uncertainty.

I think that the tariffs obviously had a negative effect on the stock market, and there were some folks that were holding equities that maybe got margin calls, so they started selling whatever they held of which Bitcoin could have been part of it. But there's also a very large trade that was on, and that trade was buying Bitcoin and selling MicroStrategy. MicroStrategy was obviously trading at a much higher multiple relative to Bitcoin, and people wanted to see that multiple squeezed somewhat, and it's come down significantly.

In order to put the position on, you buy Bitcoin ETFs, and that's what folks were doing, buying iBit, and then you sell MicroStrategy. You then pick up that difference as it squeezes together, and then what you have to do, well, you've got to sell the Bitcoin ETF and you have to buy MicroStrategy. And I think that we've seen some unwinding of that trade over the past couple of weeks, and that's the billions of dollars that you've seen going out the door on the Bitcoin ETF. Folks were very excited. They said, "Look, hedge funds are buying the Bitcoin ETF." They weren't really buying it to go and hold it.

Hedge funds don't really hold things for the long term. They were buying it against selling MicroStrategy. And as you unwind, that obviously sees pressure on Bitcoin. So I think that's probably one of the larger pieces of the puzzle. The other one is that MicroStrategy hasn't made a large buy in a couple of weeks, and they've been a large part of the institutional market. Now, the institutional market is about to turn around significantly.

The OCC, that's the guys that govern the banks and tell the banks what they can do, recently came out and said, "It's okay for banks to hold Bitcoin on their balance sheet, for banks to custody Bitcoin." And I think that you're going to start seeing the likes of Chase, of Bank of America, others, open up wallets, digital wallets for you to custody Bitcoin, custody USDC, custody stablecoins at your bank. And that's going to really allow average Joe investor, who's sitting there and he opens up his bank account and he says, "Oh, I can buy some Bitcoin through my bank account." That's a lot simpler than the other ways available right now.

And I think that when that happens, that's obviously where you're going to see a lot more retail come in. Retail buying Bitcoin has been rather niche in that folks have heard about it. And it started off with a guy in his basement wearing a metal hat. And it moved then on to the younger generation getting involved and learning about it. But has it reached up to that 45 to 65 year old age group? Probably not. It's so bubbling there. They've probably heard of Bitcoin, but they haven't invested in it.

But I think that as people learn that this is like investing in real estate, but in fractional terms, in that if I'm looking for a lifeboat for my wealth, something that's going to float against inflation, and so it's going to move up with inflation, then I think that's something that you probably want to be involved in. And I think you're going to see a lot more allocations towards it. BlackRock turned around the other day and said that their global fund is now going to start investing in Bitcoin. And their global fund, I think it has what?

Three, I don't know the number, but all I know is it's going to be a heck of a lot of Bitcoin that they'll be buying, or I bet they'll be buying against it. So I think that whether you look at corporations, whether you look at nations, whether you look at states, Texas is the eighth largest country in the world if it was a country, and they start allocating to Bitcoin, that's a heck of a lot. The buyers are there, the buyers are coming out and you're going to see a lot of it.

I was listening to, I think it was either the CEO of Bank of America, and he said that with all the policy that's going forward, there's more education, there's more adoption, they've got a bunch of patents, and they're not opposed to maybe launching a stable coin. What does that really mean? They'll have their own digital wallet, does that just mean it makes it easier for their customers to transact in a crypto manner? Look, banks obviously transact business that they know they're not going to get into any regulatory difficulty.

And I think that Moynihan, Davos, he leaked this out in Davos, that they're very excited about getting into something if it's legal. And once the president says something in an executive order, it doesn't make it necessarily legal, you obviously then have to have all the regulatory agencies come together. And there's a thing called Operation Choke Point, and Operation Choke Point essentially had all the regulatory agencies going to banks and saying, "You better not touch customers with crypto, and you better not touch crypto." Or there'll be trouble.

Now, that's obviously now seen the light of day, and the regulatory agencies are now becoming friendly towards crypto, but the banks still need to wait for all of the i's to be dotted and the t's to be crossed. And I think that when that happens, you will see an onslaught of crypto or digital offerings offered by banks, whether it's their own stablecoins, or whether they're using current stablecoins like USDC or USDT remains to be seen. I think we all understand the simplicity that exists with a stablecoin compared to doing, let's say, a wire and how it's cheaper.

And so the banks can either lose the ability to make money with that, or they can embrace it. And I think we'll see some embracing. Got it. Where do you think the reserve, is this something to where you think this is going to continue to inch along, and then we have the US reserves, the state reserves? What is the benefit? Are they going to be holding it? And then just like they do with gold, they have it on their balance sheet, and then they're creating loans off of it, taking money off of it, or creating bonds off of it. What does it really mean to have reserves, to have a strategic reserve?

If you're a state or you're a nation, you've got assets and you've got liabilities. And when you have a debt issue that the United States has right now, or some states have, if you can show greater assets against that debt, then the debt doesn't look quite as bad. Or if the assets rise in price significantly, then you can pay off the debt. And so some of the states that are looking at doing state reserves are saying, "Look, we won't touch this for five years.

It's going to be sitting there in cold storage." I think that it's in the US's interest because if Bitcoin certainly goes as Cathie Wood said this morning, she said, "Look, by 2030, Bitcoin is going to be at $1.5 million, and it's $84,000 a day." If that's the case, and you bought Bitcoin and you were a state, by 2030, in four years' time, you could pay off the debt that you have as a state. And that puts you in a much, much better position. Maybe you could abolish state taxes.

You've got countries out there like Bhutan that's been building a reserve with Bitcoin, and using the proceeds from that, as they sell some off, and they buy it or they sell it, but using that to pay for services that otherwise would have come from taxes. So I think that it makes a lot of sense to buy something if you think it's going to go up in price. Now, Besant was asked this question, and it was like, "Why would the United States have Treasury Secretary Besant? Why on earth would the United States look at doing either a strategic Bitcoin reserve or have a fund essentially that invests in things?" And his answer is pretty good.

He said, "Look, if debt costs 4%, we could pay it back. We could buy off the debt. Or if we could invest in something that's going to make us a heck of a lot more than 4%, we should invest in it. Because either way, you want the asset to appreciate at a greater speed than the debt that you have and what you have to pay the debt off for. So if you can borrow at much lower than the asset that's going to rise in price, then you're going to do that." And that makes sense. That's why you buy real estate, right? When interest rates are next to zero, you want to buy real estate because real estate is going to go up over time.

I think that everyone understands this in a personal sense. "Oh, wow. Here's an opportunity that I believe I can get 10% on and I can borrow at 5%. I'll pick up that 5% difference." Yeah, I think we do- I'd love to be a fly on the wall, just to hear if there's a formula that they're calculating to see how much that each state or us as a nation is going to buy, if it's looking at just regular allocations, like even on the personal level, if when financial advisors are going to be advising their clients, is this going to be like a 10% allocation?

Is it going to be a 5%?" I'd really be curious of how bullish folks are going to be on making recommendations to their clients since they're fiduciary, but also then on the state and nation level, how are they figuring out how much to buy? I think that as with any investment, you buy as much as you can afford to risk. And I think that everyone's got different risk parameters. In fact, many funds have risk parameters that are written into their prospectus. So there's only a certain amount that they can actually put into it. These states that are looking at Bitcoin also have a maximum as to how much they can buy based upon their tax receipts.

So I think that maybe a state could say, "Look, we could buy up to 10% of our tax receipts," or a high net worth guy advisor maybe is calling his clients and saying, "Look, put 5% in, maybe put 2%," but you've got to start somewhere. And I think that everyone's going to start realizing that they should have a percentage in it. That's not for everyone. Average Joe in the street with a minimum wage job, they can't decide, "Let me put 10% in," because it's like paycheck to paycheck. The nice thing with Bitcoin is you can buy small, tiny amounts. You don't have to buy one Bitcoin, you can buy the Sats.

And everyone understands that you can buy small amounts of this, and over time it will add up to something. If Bitcoin goes up in price. I was listening to Elon Musk the other day, and I had to start laughing to myself when you were saying how much money we have, either as a state, as a nation, and how much we can risk. When he's talking about, he's found these money machines, he calls them money machines that just print money. It'd be interesting to know as we go through these audits and all this money that we're saving hundreds of billions and trillions of dollars, is that going to be allocated towards strategic reserves?

Is it going to be allocated towards refunds to taxpayers? Do you think any of that money should and could go to a strategic reserve of Bitcoin? Maybe. I don't know. I haven't really done any research into that. I think that what we're trying to do, obviously, is get our debt level down. And I think that what's more like how do you do that? You have to reduce spending considerably. You've got to get rid of bloat in government. You've got to get rid of abuse and fraud. Let's do that first. And then we look at how do we make it efficient.

And I think that all of these things, just because the US is saving money somewhere, doesn't mean that we should continue the bloat. There's obviously discussion about returning some of that back to taxpayers that has been hoodwinked in the past into providing capital for things that they had no idea they were providing capital for, but saving 50,000, 100,000, 100 billion and putting it into something else. What that does is keeps the bloat, maybe, but just has it in a different area.

I think that what the US public is looking for right now is for sure to see that the federal government is running at an efficient rate, that the programs that the American public has voted for are getting funded, and that people in the United States are prioritized above folks outside the United States. Now, I think that Bitcoin comes secondary to that right now. But I believe that it is very important to the current government's agenda. So, we've talked a lot about Bitcoin, but we haven't heard a lot about meme coins lately. Are meme coins dead? It certainly feels like that.

I do a weekly show with the Wolf of All Street, Scott Melkert and Mario Nalfall. And I'd say for the last couple of months, it's really been about meme coin mania. And everyone's been discussing it, but the reality is the average meme coin is a pump and dump, and really just a way to lose money. It's an absolute casino where it's completely rigged. And I think we've seen that in a number of examples. The US government said that they see meme coins as being like beanie babies. So in that regard, they're collectibles, good luck, caveat emptor, buyer beware.

I think that they were good and that they had a lot of people get into it and learn about it. But what you generally find is you find these manias and whether it's NFTs or meme coins or whatever, where folks learn about crypto in some way, crypto, not necessarily Bitcoin, they lose money in it and then they sweep their balances into Bitcoin. And I think that we find that again and again. Now, Solana obviously has benefited from the meme coin mania because folks were putting everything on Solana.

People hasn't benefited from meme coins, but certainly Ripple XRP benefited a lot this week because the US, the SEC just dropped their case against them. And XRP has been whispered about as being the rails for US government financial transactions. And if that ends up being the case, and that should be very positive for Ripple, the company, but I still am having difficulty in finding how that translates to XRP, the crypto. And then obviously there's Ethereum. Ethereum has really been on a downward spiral for the last couple of months, much more than Bitcoin.

And I think it's because there's just concern within the Ethereum community about who exactly is the leader. Now that doesn't make sense if it's truly decentralized, but there's been lots of discussion about we need to upgrade, we need to do this, we need to do that. And there doesn't seem to be clear leadership and that's been causing anxiety over folks holding Ethereum. Now, I still like Ethereum certainly at these levels, but I think that it would end up bouncing, but it's going to have to see Bitcoin make a bounce first for it to be dragged up in that orbit. That's been what's happening in the altcoins.

Do you think meme coins hurt adoption of people that maybe are interested in going into Bitcoin? They hear these stories about these pump and dumps, or do you think that is there a way to stop that? Because obviously there's disclosures. They say, look, you're investing money. You could potentially lose it. You're a big boy, big girl. I don't know if meme coins have disclosures. I think that meme coin just, hey, buy now it's going to go up a hundred times. And so that's a different type of investor, I think, than someone that buys Bitcoin.

I think someone that buys Bitcoin understands that there's going to be heartache as well as heartache and pain in order to get there. I think we've all seen the charts of holding Bitcoin and it's like holding Amazon in the early days where it was complete ups and downs and lots of volatility and you've got to have a hard stomach in order to move through those periods. Just a couple of years ago, it was at $60,000 and went down to much lower levels and it was up at $107,000. Now it went back to $79,000. Now it's back to $84,000. It moves around and it shows that it's young. It shows that large buyers haven't necessarily come in yet.

It's not yet run by institutions. When institutions really start coming in, we certainly see this in the currency markets, volatility collapses and Bitcoin volatility is still elevated. It's still very high. And so I don't think that meme coins hurt Bitcoin. I think what they do is they bring novices into the space. But I think that there is a common misconception. I think people look at crypto and it's like you look at the car industry, right? You've got Rolls Royce Bentley on one end and on the other end you've got cars that shouldn't be on the road.

And if someone has a car that shouldn't be on the road and it gives them a problem, it doesn't mean that all the car industry was wrong. It just means you bought the wrong car. And so I think that folks are going to start realizing that crypto, the term really just refers to blockchain and things that run on it. And there are some things that run on it that are extremely efficient, extremely good at what they do. And there are others that are just a complete joke. Got it. What about, so we're hearing this name Josh Mandel. Who is he? What does he do? Why is he important? But Josh Mandel, I think was very exciting.

This is a guy, he was an options trader. He was working at Solomon and apparently worked at Caxton as well. It's a big hedge fund. And he, back in November, he said, listen, Bitcoin will be at $84,000 on the nose on Pi Day. So that's what March 14th, 3.14. And sure enough, on March 14th, on the nose at the close, Bitcoin was at $84,000. Now what he said was, he said, listen, if it hits that level or below between 80 to 84, it's going to go higher. But in his latest prophecy, he said he now sees it going to $444,000. But in this cycle, so in the next couple of years, he can see it going to $444,000.

And obviously, because he was on the nose with this prediction, everyone's gotten very excited, but I wouldn't say everyone. I'd say that market professionals haven't gotten excited, but certainly, retail's got very excited about it. And some people call him a time traveler. Some people says he's got visions, he can see things in the future. But the net of it is, look, he sees it going to $444,000. Cathy Wood at Ark sees it going to $1.5 million. Standard Chartered sees it going to, I think, $250,000 lately. Everyone is talking about how it's going to go higher. So I think that's inevitable.

Now, if he gets it bang on the nose at $444,000, that would be very exciting. And then we'll all listen to what he has to say. But here's how I think of it. If I'm a Pisces, if my horoscope tells me something that's in the same kind of decision making that I want to make, then I'm excited about it. And obviously, he's saying things that I like. So has he ever had any sort of prophecy type predictions previous to this? Or is this his first major one that was like, wow, it was on that day and exact number? I don't know, Josh. So I can't really give you any sort of feedback on that.

But certainly, this is the one that everyone seems to care about right now. I don't think he charges as a clear avoint. I don't think he reads palms. But certainly, when he makes something and it happens, I think people get pretty excited about it. It sounds like we need to try to get him on the show and peel back the onion a little bit and see if there's any other prophecies coming. For sure, that'd be amazing. What else is on your mind? You're doing a lot of talking about digital securities, meme coins, Bitcoin, blockchain, digital investments. What is top of mind for Douglas Borthwick right now?

I think that the DAS conference, the digital asset conferences, is going on right now in New York City. And I think that a lot of folks are very excited, obviously, about stablecoins, where they can go, what they mean. And the US government is now behind them. And so I think there's a lot of folks that are building within that arena. I think that digital securities are going to be significantly important. But the biggest worry has been distribution. And distribution is something that I've been working on with a company called Dibs Capital. And we're working on finding a solution for that.

But I also think that there's a lot of private companies out there that want to get on the blockchain in some way. And I'm working on that as well with another soon to be announced company. But I think that everyone is trying to figure out what is the next big thing when it comes down to... I don't think anyone's going to create a coin that's going to compete with Bitcoin. I think that that ship has sailed. I think that now people have to figure out how can they work with Bitcoin and work with similar structures and with the blockchain to make things more efficient. Now, California is something that you brought up in a past episode.

Okay, let's take all government titles, car titles and put them on the blockchain. Great use case example. And now we have to think about with a blockchain friendly government, and that's looking for efficiency, what else can we put on the blockchain? I think that the current government is talking about transparency. There's nothing more transparent than putting something on the blockchain. If you want to see where the payment goes after Congress approved something and goes to Treasury and say, "Okay, make the payment," then you want to see that it goes from A and goes to B. And then once it goes to B, is it going to C, D, E, and F?

And I think that sort of transparency is what Doge is calling for. And I think that everyone's going to be interested on what rails that would run on, what blockchain would something like that run on. Because you talk about the money printing, magic money machines, computers that Elon talked about yesterday in a podcast. And the reality is that I don't think the American public really appreciates that. Is it really the fact that the government can just send a check and no one's actually checking where it's going? Or is it getting audited in some way that it actually reached that end point?

And was it spent in the way that it was directed by Congress? And Chain allows us to do these things. And I think there's a lot of folks that are working on many tools to help with that process. I would love for it to eventually get into voting. I think there'd be a lot of trust at the citizen level if you could vote and you could go in and actually log into something, identify yourself and be able to make sure that your vote is actually the way that you casted it. And it'd make you feel a lot better that there's no shenanigans going on. I really hope that we get to a point where we can do that.

You're right there, but there's some limitations obviously. One would be you're giving your digital identity to the government. And there's a lot of folks that are US citizens that don't want to do that. Now there's one thing is showing your ID at a voting booth. I think that everyone understands, yeah, that makes sense. That means that illegal aliens can't vote. But in terms of doing, let me give you my eyes, my bio information and all of my identity, keeping it on the blockchain, that's still got some privacy hurdles, I think, in the United States.

So yes, the blockchain would be great in terms of making sure that your vote went to the right spot. But I think that we've got some privacy details to work through first. And I think that's one of the first things that Trump did when he came into office. He said there's going to be no central bank digital currency, because in the US we have something called the right to privacy. Do you really want the federal government knowing where all of your money's going? There are some things that people listening to this podcast, probably they don't want the government to know where they spend their money. And that's what fiat's for.

Because you can take your cash, it's not on your credit card, and you can use that cash to pay for things that maybe you don't want others to know about. And that right to privacy is something that very much is supported by the US populace. Let's talk about AI really quick. Amazon just announced the other day that they're likely or going to lay off about 14,000 managerial type level roles. As AI keeps on coming into these larger organizations and obviously some people are going to lose their jobs. In theory, it means that profits should increase.

Does that mean that there's a bigger opportunity for investors in this space or to implement more technology? What is the benefit of going from a regular stock exchange, like the New York Stock Exchange, to a digital security? All right. There's a lot of questions you just had there. Unpack it for me. Here's the thing with AI. What we're finding with AI is AI is getting cheaper and cheaper. The first time I bought a 42-inch plasma television was probably around maybe 1999, 2000, and I think it cost $15,000. It was a big purchase for a television. Nowadays, that's maybe $300.

And with AI, we're finding a deep seek, obviously coming out of China, proved that you could do AI for a lot less. And I think that what we're finding is once one company has done all the research, the others can essentially copy from them all the information. AI becomes cheaper and cheaper, and it begins to replace a lot of different jobs. You're finding that now that governments are sitting there saying, "How can we make things more efficient and easier for us to do?" Well, that results in greater profits. Maybe, only if prices stay the same, you could actually see prices come off.

And I would expect what you'll probably see is AI could lead to, yes, higher profits, but also lower prices for some of these goods. AI, because you're making something more efficient, the cost of creating that product goes down. And I would guess that some of that would be passed on to the consumer, especially if the consumer doesn't have a job and can't afford that higher price anymore. So I think that the biggest question really is what happens to the workforce that's laid off and the significant amounts of labor that's being laid off right now, obviously from the federal government.

Each of the departments in the federal government announced layoffs. That's a lot of people entering the workforce. And then you've got private companies that'll be laying folks off on the back of AI improvements. But I think that's something that's rather typical for industry, in that what you find is you find layoffs as something becomes more efficient, and then you find new jobs and new opportunities start to rise in their stead. But do you really think publicly traded companies will pass on that savings when they have a board and they want to make as much money possible for their shareholders?

Or do you think that could be a strategy to continue to grab more market share because they have the opportunity to make it quicker, faster, cheaper? But here's the nice thing. If they don't make it cheaper for the consumer, then someone else will come along using the same techniques and make something cheaper for the consumer. That's the beautiful thing of the market, right? It's a competitive market. We don't like monopolies in the United States. So if someone says, "Look, this widget that I was making for $500 is now only costing me $300," someone come under, cut them and offer it for $305 now in the market.

When I say that, I think more of an Amazon. In my opinion, Amazon is a monopoly. I think that Amazon is also going to have probably higher pricing coming in because of the fact that their tariffs are being introduced in China. And so a lot of these goods that you may buy on Amazon are coming at a higher price from China. And so maybe Amazon has decided we need to figure out a way that we can keep the prices the same because we're paying this 25% tariff on these goods. And so the way we'll do that is we'll get rid of some of our costs of production.

In other words, the cost of getting that good to you, and we'll do that by becoming more efficient. So what they do there is the tariff is an increased expense that someone would have to pay for the price of something. But instead of passing that along to the consumer, instead of what they do is they lay off some of their workforce, and they make things more efficient using AI. But again, that's the marketplace talking. I think we're at about the 40-minute mark. We've talked about a lot of neat things. There's some things that are moving and shaking. It's exciting to see where we're going.

I think probably the next couple of months, we're going to have even more big announcements because now we've had policy set, but now the courts are getting involved to try to push policy back.

I think it's going to be interesting to see if that stalls the type of speed that Doge and Elon and President Trump are doing, or if those are just going to be pushed to the side and say, "No, the president has the power to do this, back off." I think one of the biggest surprises to the market over the next week and a half is going to be the numbers of countries that come to the United States and say that they will no longer have tariffs on US goods in their country. What Trump is doing right now is a negotiating position with tariffs. Though the media is going to try to scare you, this is not actually something to be scared about.

What he's actually doing is he's saying, "Look, if you're charging a 10% tariff on our goods as they come into your country, we'll charge a 10% tariff on your goods as they come into our country." Now, the US is obviously the largest consumer, so it's going to hurt the other country more. What are they going to do? They're going to say, "You know what? We'll scrap our 10% tariff on US goods." We're going to see that from many countries who are going to start scrapping their tariffs. It's going to be great for US manufacturers, great for US companies, and the market hasn't figured that out yet.

I think that's one of the things that I'm probably most excited about. It's got nothing to do with crypto, nothing to do with Bitcoin or blockchain, but it's something I think that the market just hasn't figured out yet. Reciprocal tariffs are a negotiating position that gets adversaries and allies to the bargaining table. At the bargaining table, given that we are the largest consumption nation, people are going to fold. As Trump likes to say, they don't have the cards. To me, it only makes sense, and I hope it happens. Let's wrap on that. I'm Phil Larmon. I'm Douglas Sporthwick. You've been listening to Old Men, New Money.

Remember to like, subscribe, share, and we have our new newsletter. Make sure you subscribe to that and bite-size pieces that will keep you up to date with all the latest and greatest. Until then, we'll talk to you soon. Thank you.