Jeff Walton - How MicroStrategy Will Hit $1 Trillion in 2025
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Hey, hey, welcome to the Bitcoin Matrix podcast. I'm your host, Cedric Youngleman. In this episode, I talk with Jeff Walton, aka Punter Jeff on X, about the connections between financial markets, Bitcoin, and MicroStrategy's groundbreaking strategies. Jeff is famous for his master's level analysis on economic warfare and market dynamics, and sharing insights that have transformed the way many investors think about navigating today's markets.

If you're curious about the future of Bitcoin, market design, or how to leverage MicroStrategy's innovative approach, this conversation is packed with game-changing ideas. So I hope you enjoy this rip. Again, the only thing I'm going to ask of you is if you can please go and subscribe to our RSS feed or our YouTube channel. And if you do want to get in touch with me, it's Cedric at TheBitcoinMatrix.com. And now, let's enter the Bitcoin Matrix with Punter Jeff.

Jeff Walton, aka Punter Jeff, is a risk and capital advisor, market theorist, lopsided investor, and he's proudly irresponsibly long Bitcoin and micro strategy.

Thank you. Thank you. That intro gave me the chills. So here we are, excited to be here. Thanks for having me. And yeah, I mean, no shortage of things to talk about. The market is incredibly dynamic.

And I mean, this is the most interesting story in financial markets ever, in my opinion. So we just happen to be at a unique time in the world. I really do agree. I think 2024 was wild from the perspective of financial engineering, what MicroStrategy is doing. And I want to preface this with, you know, what we're going to get into is a lot about, I think, trading, trading theory. But, you know, I think that's really helpful for people who are diamond hand hodlers.

to kind of understand how markets work, what's happening in the market, how traders think, and sort of how to kind of think through your own scenarios. And I think also for a lot of people, and I speak for myself, who kind of came through MicroStrategy, maybe through GBTC or having money trapped in the system and just wanting to get Bitcoin price exposure and then recognizing the best vehicle to do that.

And I think in 2024, what's unfolded with what Michael Saylor has done with micro strategy has been beyond fascinating. And I come from a finance and accounting background. I love markets. I think they're fascinating. And so I really want to get into with you. I'd love to find out what were you doing? Like, what did you study in college?

And what do you do for work outside of all this madness? Yeah, so I studied in college. So I was a business and economics double major at the University of Puget Sound, which is a small Division III liberal arts school. I played two sports there, a double major, graduated at the top of my class, focused on business and economics and particularly finance. So I took every single finance class that the school had to offer. Originally, when I got to school, I wanted to be an engineer.

I took a physics class. I struggled with the physics class and quickly pivoted. And I found out I was incredibly interested in economics and I loved math and statistics. So I kind of really leaned into that passion. And that's really...

Uh, you know, taking four years of finance and econ classes really, uh, was incredibly exciting to me. Additionally, uh, I was like a class away from a minor in math. So I've, I took, you know, all the statistics classes, uh, two levels of calculus, uh, econometrics, like every math related econ class. Those are the ones I picked as well. So, uh, really focused on math and econ understanding, um,

structures, things like that. And it's interesting, you know, just thinking about this. One of the things I really like about financial markets just in general is the architecture and the design of financial markets. And so thinking about, you know, my desire to be an engineer when I went into college, I think that keep the the the same

things that I'm interested in. It's like the design and building things. And that's always been really appealing to me. I mean, when I was a kid, I was playing with connects and Legos and all of those things. So that's awesome. How did you get the nickname punter Jeff punter Jeff? That's a, not many people have asked that one either, but you know, it was actually crazy. I, uh, I showed up to college my first day, uh, of going to, um, I went to baseball practice. So I I've been

Two sport athlete, I played baseball and football. So I had been, you know, practicing in football, just getting ready for the football year. My position in football was a punter.

I showed up to baseball practice in the fall, which is just like fall baseball. It's just everybody's shooting the shit and playing around. And some guy was like, oh, this is the punter. This is punter Jeff. And it just clicked and stayed since then. Like day one of baseball practice, I was the punter. And that was how I became punter Jeff. And then people knew me around school as punter Jeff. That was just like...

the thing. I think I've had punter Jeff as my name on Twitter since 2012, like when I started my Twitter. So, um, yeah, it's funny. The, uh, a lot of people had mentioned that I guess in Europe, it's like a gambler, like a high stakes gambler. So it's a dual meeting, you know, I've got the, uh, investment, yeah, investment, but I, but I was also a punter in college. So that's awesome. I, I also see a similarity, uh,

With what you guys are doing from a quant perspective, which is running the numbers and crunching all the numbers of what's happening here, looking at how the markets are architected and figuring out how things work. So when I came to Bitcoin in 2017, I got so geeked out and running the numbers. And you just kind of get really can be overwhelming. But you start to learn a lot about where this can go mathematically. And, you know, there's also maybe that feeling from the outside, though, maybe others have of like, is this roaring kitty?

Is Punter Jeff the next Roaring Kitty? I think from the outside, a lot of people – and that's what I got excited about with the MicroStrategy crowd because I think that really came to fruition in 2024 with the way the trade went from better than GBTC to really better than ETFs and why. And I think that dawned on Michael Saylor during the year and sort of the obstacles he had and challenges with ETFs being approved.

So what was your rabbit hole story like? And did you come to Bitcoin or MicroStrategy first? Yeah, that's a great question. I came to Bitcoin first. You know, in college, I had heard about Bitcoin. You know, my senior econ thesis class, three out of the six people did that thesis on Bitcoin. And I was like, this doesn't make any sense. And I just totally overlooked it because I was focused on other things. And, you know, I got into finance and in 2017, I was like,

I traded Bitcoin a few times. Everybody in my company, like in my office, was just talking about Bitcoin. It was a lot of buzz, but nobody really knew what it was or what was going on. And then I just didn't think about it anymore. I continued to operate in the reinsurance market. And in 2020...

During COVID, I became like a lot more fascinated with just equities and options, like how the options market worked. And so I started playing with options trading and figuring out the math with options trading. I mean, you could have traded, you could have bought call options on anything in April of 2020 and made money. But I was starting to like develop a thesis. I bought Sony call options because I was making a bet on the PS5 and I was just figuring out how those worked.

and watching the market, looking at other things and how they kind of interplayed together. And then just taking a step back and thinking about the equity market from the perspective of my job and how insurance companies manage their portfolios and how large capital makes decisions. I think that's probably something I've got a unique lens on. And so 2021, I was part of the GameStop trade. I watched it from the beginning.

And I like thought it was too good to be true I bought put options on a Friday because again I was playing with options I bought put options on a Friday did a ton of research over the weekend Realized I was totally screwed in in my position buying put options, which was bearish GameStop Realized I was totally screwed on Monday. I sold the put options for a profit So somebody stupider than me bought them and I liquidated my entire portfolio and I bought GameStop shares on that that Monday and

And then proceeded to ride the price of GameStop up from, I don't know, like 50 up to 300. And then I exited at like 280 because it was very apparent that, you know, there were other actors in the equity environment realizing that the trade had been disrupted and sentiment had been broken.

So it kind of exited the trade at that point. But like during that entire week, it was, um, it initiated this like enormous game theory process of thinking about the entire market and who operates in the market. Retail made the most noise, but retail wasn't the, wasn't the, wasn't the group that made noise.

that made the whole thing happen. There was big money behind the scenes as well that also saw what was going on. And they were taking leveraged positions to the upside as well, recognizing the retail energy movement. So you can think about bots and high-frequency traders that are trading on sentiment and number of tweets and all of these other, this infrastructure of automated trading and how it was kind of building over time.

So again, I was like thinking about the structure of the market and realized very quickly, like, okay, any large capital that's been in on this trade just made a 4X or whatever. They just made the returns for the next decade for their whole company from what they would traditionally make. So they have no incentive to hold until, you know, the price of GameStop goes to 10,000.

Meanwhile, the retail trader who's never invested in equities before needs the trade to go to 10,000 because they want to retire or like get out of the system that they're in. So quickly recognize that there was a dichotomy between who was in the market. And, uh, ultimately I sold on Monday, like the Monday morning when I realized sentiment had broken because I knew the incentives of the other players in the game, uh,

in that position. And drawing this correlation to like MicroStrategy and thinking like the GameStop situation, I mean, it's a, I think it's okay to kind of compare them, but it's a very, very different scenario because in this instance, we may see a very similar mania type scenario. However,

your opportunity cost of capital, in my opinion, there's no better place for your opportunity cost of capital. And this is more of a long term type hold, just given the dynamics of the market, how Bitcoin works and the fundamentals of Bitcoin, having a Bitcoin understanding on that. Yeah, for sure. We'll get into that in a little bit. So what do you do during for work?

Yeah, that's an interesting question. So over the last 11 years, I've been a reinsurance broker. So I've sold insurance to insurance companies. As a reinsurance broker, you structure and design tranches of risk and you sell them to reinsurance companies. The reason for reinsurance is to manage and mitigate volatility on your balance sheet.

So you have an insurance company, they bring in premiums in the door to pay out claims and liabilities in the future. So those premiums that they bring in the door, they invest that, they invest that money to pay out for the liabilities at a point in the future. So they're investing in bonds, equities, ETFs, you know, cash, you know, all these things. Um, but in the meantime,

They buy reinsurance to offset the volatility of the potential of having to liquidate the assets in their portfolio to pay off future claims. So it's a...

I've had this perspective for the last 11 years, like working in this environment. As a reinsurance broker, you're speaking with CEOs, CFOs, you're like C-suite of these insurance companies that are making decisions and driving the boat. These are the people that are driving the capital boat. And so you are trying to help them protect their little capital boat.

And we're able to structure and design products in the tail of the probabilistic distribution, both from a single loss, like an occurrence perspective, or an aggregation of losses, like in an annual perspective. So we've got freedom to design different products to manage costs.

corporate balance sheets. Yeah. So you're helping large insurance entities protect against catastrophes and reduce volatility. I spent several years in the reinsurance and insurance industries very early in my career at Ernst & Young, now EY, both on Wall Street and then Silicon Valley. How big a market is this reinsurance?

Yeah, I actually just looked this up. So in terms of reinsurance, I think there's about $800 billion of reinsurance capacity out in the market. So I mean, it's pretty niche, right? $800 billion is not that big. It's not that big of a market. And that's the global reinsurance marketplace, total reinsurance capacity. So it's really not that big. And I think...

There's there's reinsurance for the reinsurers as well. There's called retro reinsurance. And that's that's probably another, you know, couple hundred billion dollar market that maybe sits on top of that. The insurance market itself, I think, is around a seven to eight trillion dollar market. So that's like total insured value, I think, within the global. I think that's that might just be the U.S. market. About six or seven trillion of insured value in the U.S. market.

So, I mean, these are these are small in comparison to in comparison to like the equity market or the bond market or these these other different markets. Yeah. You're thinking about the world of probabilities. All the time. All the time. Hey, Bitcoiners, invest in Bitcoin with confidence. Why do I recommend River? River is the best place to build your Bitcoin wealth and they offer zero fee on recurring buys.

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So yeah, world of probabilistic distributions. And this is where, you know, having the statistics mind, having the economics background really, really goes a long way because we run Monte Carlo simulations. So Monte Carlo simulations being 10,000 simulations of specific events. Let's just say a hurricane, right? You run a hurricane,

Over a portfolio and you make different damage assumptions and you run that scenario 10,000 times in different directions all over a portfolio to give you a probabilistic distribution of what the potential loss may be. So you could say, you know, one in 10 years, you can expect a $2 billion loss. One in 100 years, you can expect that 10 or $100 billion loss. And so that.

depending on what that probabilistic distribution looks like, you start to structure and tranche out risk that you can sell to the reinsurance market to offload that volatility. So it's wild. You know, you got the math, the statistics background, finance, economics, and then you're looking at probabilities, tail end risk, you know, what happens in extreme scenarios. How do you think about how markets, financial markets are designed?

like specifically the equity market how does it work and who who are the largest players pushing money into equities and why yeah i i think about this a lot as well uh again thinking about the design of of um just markets and how they work

I mean, most it's it's interesting if you if you zoom out and you think about one just like who's trading daily in in equity markets is another interesting way to look at things. But I think there's something like 75 percent of daily traded volume is algorithmic. So we've got one component here where you've got algorithms that are that are trading in the market all the time.

And then you think about, okay, how much of the capital that's actually plugged into most of these equities, where does it come from? Who's buying it? And why are they buying it? And I think some of the largest players that are really interesting to think about how they work are one of these banks, pension funds, and insurance companies. When they are taking in premiums,

They are purchasing assets to pay for liabilities at a point in time in the future. I think pension funds, the scale of pension funds is significantly larger than insurance companies, but the concept is the same. And then you start to think about what they're invested in and why and how they're invested in these types of assets. And I think most...

The most intriguing part of the equity market to me is particularly the S&P 500, which represents three of the largest index ETFs in the world. The S&P 500 is the top 500 positive earnings equities in the U.S. market. And the S&P 500, the way it's designed is it's market cap weighted.

Which is important in thinking about how the equity market works, right? So if you've got dollars that are flowing into these different index ETFs from pension funds, banks, or insurance companies, every time a single dollar comes in, that dollar is split up between those 500 different equities at a different weight depending on the size and the market cap of each one of the equities in the index, right?

And as a company gets larger in the index, its relative proportion, it doesn't increase linearly. It increases exponentially. And so I think that's why we've seen this MAG7 trade be very popular. The MAG7, you know, top seven publicly traded equities be very popular over the last decade. It's because understanding the design of the market that like as these larger companies get larger and they maintain their competitive moat,

They they get an exponentially increased proportion allocation in the index ETFs. And and some of this has to do with like history, equity market history. I think John C. I think it's John C. Bogle, like that guy that started Vanguard when he when he started and designed these index ETFs. They were incredibly popular ETFs.

And it kind of shifted the onus of like investing from, you know, understanding the companies you're investing in to just trusting a company and just instead of picking the needle in the haystack, you just buy the whole haystack. And there were a lot of studies and statistics that were done over time saying that the likelihood that you beat the market is incredibly low. So you might as well just buy these funds. And you start to look at some of these studies that are done and you

They were likely funded by the fund managers who just want dollars to flow into the fund. And it's kind of created this new way of thinking and perspective that, you know, there's it's impossible to beat the market. You just buy this fund and it's kind of become ingrained in society with like 401ks, like even with 401ks, when you invest in your 401k.

you often only have like a limited number of index ETFs that you can invest in. Like you can't even invest in individual stocks, which seems kind of skewy as well. So I guess that was a bit of a ramble, but it's all of those things combined. There's not a great way to kind of like...

You almost have to just go down each individual rabbit hole of like, who are the holders? What are they holding and why are they holding and how long are they holding? And the reason I bring up the index ETFs is because, I mean, if you think about some of the top publicly traded equities, Apple, for example, number one, our NVIDIA might be number one. I don't know who it is, but Apple, 6% of Apple holdings are held in the S and P 500 index ETFs.

6% of all of Apple's stock is held by the S&P 500. If the S&P 500 didn't hold Apple, I don't know if Apple's a $3 trillion company. So then it starts to get into this narrative too of like, what are narratives? Like, what is a valuation? Like, how do you value any company? How does Apple at $3 trillion make sense?

And people start to create narratives, create narratives around it. They start to say, you know, they trade around P.E. ratio or they trade around cash flows or they trade around, you know, some some made up metric that may be a function of their analysis on how they view the world. And it's interesting when you start to compare some of these pop top publicly traded equities that none of them have a homogenous characteristic of.

to compare each other to, right? It's really hard to compare like Apple to Tesla. Like how do you do it? I mean, they both have a huge technological moat. Their cash flows are completely different. Their future cash flows may be completely different. Their financial structures are completely different and they have different trading metrics. They're different PE ratios. They're different like forward looking ratios.

Yeah, just come completely different completely different companies and you're like well the only thing you can really compare is market cap and That's like how big is the company right like at that at that point when they get to the top. It's like okay It's just a who's who's bigger who's better like a boxing match For capital like at the top once you're at the top because you once you're at the top it's

It's kind of hard to fall out of the top because you have so much buying pressure from all of these like huge institutional ETFs. You basically just have to not fuck up, right? That's kind of my perspective on it. So, I mean, there's so much there. Like I've learned a lot just in the last four or five years thinking and just doing a lot of independent research on my own. But it's funny, like thinking back to my college days,

there was so much narrative of like, you can't beat the market. Like even in my finance classes and we, and we, we like recreated these studies of like trying to beat the market. How do you beat the market? Um, and so I've taken my, my scope and view of the market has changed pretty significantly just in the last four or five years, thinking about how these insurance companies operate and the design, how they work, how cash flows, how big capital moves kind of globally, um, and alternative investments and how, um,

how capital is just allocated between them.

Yeah. I mean, all that is fascinating. Made me think of a bunch of things. One, I mean, something I kind of got from Bitcoin Tina early on is these indexes sort of cause blind shopping. So it's like imagine you went to the supermarket every two weeks or week whenever you invest in your 401k and you were like last week tomatoes were three for a dollar and today they're 90 bucks each. I'm still buying tomatoes. You would switch. You would get something else. Yeah.

Right.

These stocks are not – these equities are not – and I think microstrategy sort of like breaks the paradigm on this in a lot of ways. But these equities are not built to be tremendous heat sinks. So a company reaches $3 trillion in value. You can't – society can't port all its wealth into NVIDIA if society deems NVIDIA the best store of value. Because at a certain point, it's too big to handle that company.

It gets too big. The metrics get out of whack. The KPIs get out of whack. Everything looks abnormal. And you're just building an incredible bounty for all your competitors to come and take away your chip business or your iPhone business or whatever it is or your automated car business and come out with a better product that's valued a lot less and have people port their wealth into that thing. Also, with the S&P 500, it's fascinating because, I mean, it's literally called the standard in pours.

So I don't know why anyone would think they're going to get ahead investing in the standard and pours. You know, and that's a bit of an American hodl's joke, but it's so true. And also what Joe Burnett was getting at is with the S&P 500 and the way things are sort of getting faster and faster in our world is companies are getting into the S&P 500 faster and faster and burning out faster and faster. And they can't stay in there. I know that you were saying, I get sort of like you can play the game and stay in there long enough, the behemoths.

But just in terms of lifespans of companies, they're getting shorter. And so what he pointed out, a really interesting dynamic there is you missed the incredible growth at the beginning of these companies that become these billion dollar and hundred billion dollar companies really quick. You missed the beginning, but then they might burn out really quick and not stay or be a Coca-Cola or Disney or Microsoft and burn out. And you kind of miss the best parts and the best ends by going in the index.

It's really, really fascinating there. So they're just not great. It's not great heat sync these securities until you see something like MicroStrategy. Because, you know, what if it's acquiring sort of a heat sync in Bitcoin and, you know, pristine collateral? So what kind of metrics do traders or these algorithms, what are they looking at besides sentiment? I think there's so many things. Well, just any equity or MicroStrategy? Yeah.

Yeah. Any equity. What are they looking at? Like, so how do they see? I mean, because this is what's steering how they see micro strategy if they don't understand what's coming with like FASB and, you know, Bitcoin and understanding the properties of those things. Yeah, I think, you know, I could be wrong here, but I'm fairly certain that a lot of a lot of daily price movement is a function of derivatives trading.

So what's happening in the options market and what's happening across different points in time on the options market on both sides of the trade. So on the short side and the long side, it's a very complicated analysis to look at and understand both.

You need significant computing power to see how like energy is moving on either side of the trade on the long side or the short side of the options derivative market, because you need to understand like how pricing and volume is trading on every single strike price across every expiration. So you're, you're talking about thousands of like thousands of data points, like maybe even hundreds of thousands of data points on one equity. And, and you, you,

Different pieces move at different times and you've got these market makers that are you know seeing they have the insight to this information and have the ability to kind of hedge and manage their The liquidity within the market based on what they see in the data of the derivatives market and then you've got like spot buying which I think is a smaller portion of that but

Yeah, I mean, there's so many players in the market. I could only speculate as to what kind of metrics they're looking at. But I think a lot of it is just volume in the options market and how it's moving, particularly for MicroStrategy. And one thing that's really interesting and appealing about MicroStrategy is that in the last 45 trading days, so the last 45 trading days, MicroStrategy has been a top 10 publicly traded equity by volume in the entire market.

They're the 120th largest U.S. company, but they're top 10 publicly traded by volume. That seems crazy. That's an interesting statistic. And you start to ask, like, why? Why is that?

Why is that happening? And I think it's because the significant amount of options and derivatives trading that's happening in the market on both sides, both going long and short on this trade, because as people go long and as people go short, you have market makers that are trading in and out both directions to hedge their positions both long and short and hedge the liquidity and the leverage in the market.

So that's incredibly fascinating. I mean, the volatility of, of micro strategies, I don't know, like 120, uh, whereas Bitcoin's volatility is like 60. So if you're, if you're addicted to volatility and using volatility to manage your portfolio, like there's, there's one asset, like the best asset to do that is, is micro strategy with the most liquidity. So that's one thing. I, obviously there's this MNAV component, which is a, a very, uh, what's the word I'm looking for? Um,

polarizing topic. So it's a very polarizing topic. I think it's a decent proxy for understanding like the valuation of a company or a forward-looking future view of what a company may be worth, particularly one that's got a very highly leveraged balance sheet. But where that dynamic seems to break down, in my opinion, is when you start to compare

compare MicroStrategy to like other companies and other stocks that aren't valued on an MNAV. Like, again, it kind of comes back to this point of like, how do you, how do you value any equity and how do you, how do you compare them? But, but I think there are people that trade MNAV and it's a very interesting statistic. So you can see like how the, the relative like

Value is heated up and we're going to see people slingshot trade this where they're going to be going long MicroStrategy until they deem that you know The M nav is hot and then they'll exit that side of the trade and short MicroStrategy until they deem that the M nav is low and then flip right back around and we're gonna see it slingshot back right the other direction and people are going to trade that as one point of this and additionally

That impacts the leverage in the options market. So we're going to see that. And then implied volatility. Again, this is kind of like derivatives market where the implied volatility is a data metric of

effectively, like how much volatility there is in the options market. And people are looking at these figures to understand, like, is this overheated? Is it too high? Implied volatility is historically a mean reverting metric. So as implied volatility peaks or rises really quickly, like we saw in November or back in March, there have been instances where implied volatility rises massively and then reverts back to the mean. So, I mean, there are so many there are so many data points

Bitcoin per share. There's so many things that people can be trading off of. And I think that's what makes the stock incredibly appealing. Yeah, it's wild. I mean, the MNAV, I think, has always been sort of a red herring for me.

When I looked at the stock, I looked at it as, again, a way to channel money trapped in the system. It's a simple A-B test, I think. Back in the day, Michael Saylor was a better owner-operator than Barry Shilbert over at GBTC. So easy trade there. And then looking at the ETFs, I think he has a lot of advantages where he can raise debt. He can sell at the money. He can do lots of different things that they can't do, and there's no fees whatsoever.

And I always saw the MNAB as, again, like not like I just didn't see it as the white rate of value of this company. And if anything, it points to how undervalued it is, because I think, you know, when you look at an equity, you're trying to focus on the future value of this this company. Yeah. And so do you think volatility is going to go up?

When you say like how volatile is that, what, 110? You said vile? Do you think that goes up in 2025 when you look at things like FASB changes coming down the pike, a potential SBR, a Bitcoin bull market? Like does that just, you know, does Bitcoin vile go up as well in 2025? Yeah.

Yeah, there's a, you know, Jeff Park really has got all of the information. I think his view on this is really interesting. But the volatility smile of Bitcoin is, it's a volatility smile instead of a skew. So there's this weird phenomenon that happens with Bitcoin where as the price goes up of Bitcoin, the volatility on both sides of the tail go up.

So that means the upside volatility goes up and the downside volatility goes up. Whereas typically with most equities like Tesla, for example, if the price of Tesla goes up, the volatility skews to the downside. That means people are buying insurance. People are buying insurance, recognizing that there's this possibility that this thing is overvalued. Whereas Bitcoin is almost a Veblen good, right? So like as the price goes up, it actually becomes more valuable to more people.

And more people are interested in it. So it leads to this like really weird non-traditional dynamic where as the price goes up, the volatility goes up. And with MicroStrategy, it's even like it's 2x, right? It's even more because the underlying value is stored in this nuclear core of Bitcoin. And...

That's a really interesting phenomenon. I personally think the volatility is going to increase. I think we're going to see bigger amplitudes like up and down moving forward into 2025. And it's going to freak people out. Like this thing is totally going to shake a lot of people out and people are going to totally freak out because they've never seen anything like it before. And we're like the mania that we saw in November, like,

is like is going to look like a drop in the bucket i think at some point in 2025 of the mania that we might see

because MicroStrategy's balance sheet is incredibly healthy. They're under leveraged. They have the ability to tap into these different capital pools. They're going to add more Bitcoin to the balance sheet. If there's a strategic Bitcoin reserve, we're going to see the price of Bitcoin go up and that could be a game theory phenomenon happening where you've got nation states competing for adding more Bitcoin to balance sheet. And I suspect we're going to see 20 plus companies add Bitcoin to their balance sheet in 2025, potentially even more.

And maybe they're not fully porting like full, you know, MicroStrategy treasury company, but they're going to add it to their balance sheet as a I need to do this. I need to do this too, because the cost of not adding Bitcoin to my balance sheet is too great. And so I foresee there being a lot more volatility and the amplitude of the price of Bitcoin and MicroStrategy increasing.

And personally, I think the volatility of MicroStrategy today, it seems and appears to me like it's already trading as if it's a $1 trillion company. Like if you were to see the price discrepancy and the change in market cap today, it's more akin to like how a $1 trillion company moves from a relative delta in market cap. So...

I don't know. I feel pretty confident that the volatility is going to increase and it's not going to be decreasing in the future. So I got to ask, I mean, Josh Mandel described this beautiful trade or beautiful situation where you're playing the options market and, you know, it's kind of like playing a pinball machine.

And you get a good whack on the pinball and it goes up really high and it comes down the next time you kind of get maybe like 80 or 90% of that whack. And the next time it gets down, you maybe get 60 or 70% of that. But once in a while it comes down, you keep it going enough and you get a 110, like 150% whack at this thing. And the whole thing goes crazy and it's pinball wizard time. And it's bing, bada, bing, you know, and the machine's going nuts.

And if you were to kind of look at the year ahead and start from sort of now, like how would you think about entering like a micro strategy trade or set up? Like how do you and it's not so much about nominal amount.

And it could, you know, maybe we start from scratch, but it applies to people in different situations. Maybe people, you know, are in a very different situation than they thought they were many years ago where they put maybe they had a relatively small amount in microstrategy. Now they have with, you know, technology.

When the shares divide, you get more shares. So now they have more shares. They could sell covered calls. They could sell puts. They could do all different kind of things. And if you were sort of lining up that pinball wizard machine, what do you think you would do in this year? Yeah, great question. None of this is financial advice. I'm going to start with that. This is for fun. But that's a great question. And I think there's three components, right? You've got, well, actually, I think there's four components.

Bitcoin in cold storage, boom, saved away. That's your savings account. Don't touch it. Don't touch it. Cash, MicroStrategy shares leverage. So you got four pieces.

And those pieces are going to change and move over time. But my goal for 2025, personally, is to acquire as many MicroStrategy shares as humanly possible. I feel comfortable with my Bitcoin stack, so I'm a little bit less interested in making this trade of...

you know, converting, you know, MicroStrategy shares to cash over to cold storage Bitcoin. I feel comfortable where I'm at. But my entire goal of having as many shares of MicroStrategy as possible, the reason for that is if I want to live off of my shares into perpetuity, I want to be able to have the ability to sell covered calls on my position

to generate a yield in the interim strategically, maybe once or twice throughout the year when I think things are crazy, to generate a high yield with a lower probability of potentially getting my shares called away. And if they did get called away, it would be so far in the tail, like so high at such a high price, I would be really happy with the outcome, just personally. So with my goal of acquiring as many shares as possible,

I'm also strategically applying leverage in both directions. So in a situation where you have implied volatility, like so in November, we saw implied volatility increase drastically, like the volatility increased significantly. And then recently in the past two months, we've seen implied volatility kind of come back down to like a mean reversion, even potentially lower than the mean.

And in this situation where you see a mean reversion, probably in Bitcoin and the price of MicroStrategy, I've added on strategic long leverage with a time horizon that's pretty far out, like nine months, giving myself like three quarters, nine months to 12 months, giving myself three quarters to four quarters of a potential situation for this mania to happen again.

And in a situation where mania happens again, so let's say we get a crazy run up in May after FASB is announced or, you know, like let's just say we get some market mania in May and implied volatility kind of peaks again. I would be in a situation to potentially offload those leverage positions or exit those leverage positions for a gain.

and either purchase as many shares as humanly possible or exercise those contracts to purchase shares to add to my total stack of shares. And then perhaps at that same time, I may be doing that, but also selling a covered call on the existing shares to generate more yield. And so in that circumstance, you may be

gaining cash so having cash to hold on your balance sheet and holding holding that cash for a future point in time where you have the mean reverting back implied volatility kind of reverting back and holding for an opportunity to kind of go long again so i i personally and this is where josh is like fantastic at his trading he's he's doing this on both sides he's seeing

He's seeing the energy move in both directions and he's taking the opposite trade and he'll short it down. He'll go the opposite direction. I'm a little spooked to go the opposite direction on this trade. I am irresponsibly long. I'm very long on this trade. And I personally don't want to pay that much attention to it where I'm freaking out on the...

taking a short position and I'm wrong and it totally flips and goes the other way. And I lose my shares that I've like worked so hard for. So that's kind of, I guess my, my base view, like establishing and creating a position. And because I, I'm, I don't want to sell these shares ever. Like they're these micro strategy shares that I've got, I'm planning on holding, holding forever. And I guess I could be in a situation where,

You know, let's say you yield some cash, like when you hit an implied volatility peak, either, you know, porting that over into Bitcoin or using it to facilitate my life or, you know, whatever that may look like or whatever that is. And that kind of general structure exists. I mean, people do this all the time. People do this all the time on other equities like Tesla.

This is a very common infrastructure that people deployed for Tesla. Anybody that's been a Tesla bull since 2013 and they're holding on to a shitload of shares, they're okay putting some shares at risk on a covered call strategy if they get called away because they've got so many because they've been holding since 2013 and they've caught the whole run up from 10 billion up to...

I don't know, a trillion and a half. It makes me think, you know, it sounds like you're living a bit on a micro strategy standard. I heard this from Josh is great. Yeah. I wonder if you guys long term, not so much, Josh, I wonder long term, do you think it's better if micro strategy would just let the price accumulate or accrete and never do splits?

as long-term hodlers, you know, and kind of be like more like a Berkshire Hathaway or kind of keep dividing, splitting and get more vol, I guess you're thinking. And I guess that, I guess that helps with the Bitcoin yield. And how are you managing sort of, uh, the risks, which you, you alluded to there and really the tax implications. What are you thinking about the taxes? Yeah. Well, I mean, there's, uh, there's a lot there. Um,

Yeah, I guess I would say I'm living on a MicroStrategy standard and a Bitcoin standard, really. It's like they're layered on. It's like layer one, layer two. Especially if you look at, I mean, I just did a show with CJ Constantinos and...

And you could look at the dollar as a layer two in all these markets as a way to spread Bitcoin. MicroStrategy is a way to spread Bitcoin. I was making fun of the standard and poor's earlier, but MicroStrategy fixes the standard and poor's. And it's Bitcoin fixing MicroStrategy in a way. And I think Michael Saylor is the greatest financial magician who's probably ever lived and created the greatest security we've ever seen. But it's built on Bitcoin.

And I don't think a security like this could exist without an asset like Bitcoin underneath it. So how are you managing the taxes here? And sort of what are you thinking about? Oh, my God. Taxes are a freaking nightmare. But having to consider taxes means you had to gain.

Uh, and that's, that's been some of the best advice I've gotten from some people is like the fact that you get to consider taxes means that you had a gain. So you should be, you should be happy about that. But I mean, managing taxes has been the, like the biggest, uh, variable of my entire calculus is like, Oh my God. Okay. So like with, with options, for example, if you hold, if you hold options for longer than a year, uh,

You can take long-term capital gains if you sell an options contract that you hold for longer than a year. So you get a tax benefit from holding there. Now, alternatively, there's no taxable event if you exercise those trades. So that's where I've been exercising contracts that I've held since 22 and 23 pretty religiously. And it restarts the clock on capital gains taxes. However, my shares...

There's no taxable event that occurs. And my cost basis now moves to whatever my strike was for that option. So the way I look at the taxes is if I hold my shares and I never sell them, but I start to use them as collateral, I can have more tax-efficient ways of managing and financing my life. And this is the classic buy, borrow, die strategy that most...

I guess wealthy people adopt this strategy. They hold on to their assets and they hold them in different portfolios, real estate, equity, you know, all these things. And then they get loans from large financial institutions to finance their life. And these loans, interesting thing about these loans, they're generally like, I don't know, seven, five to seven to 10% interest.

which if your capital gains taxes are 15% or 20%, it's more efficient to take out a loan on your portfolio and have dividends pay your interest on your loan than it is to sell your portfolio and pay capital gains taxes. This is like wealthy people 101, the buy, borrow, die strategy.

And I think that's what is really appealing to me about Bitcoin and the development of Bitcoin over the next decade is we're going to see a massive development in the economic infrastructure for usage of collateral. And, you know, for me, MicroStrategy is just an easier way, like the traditional infrastructure for using MicroStrategy as collateral exists today.

But it doesn't it's it's in its infancy for for Bitcoin. And as financial infrastructure is built out over the next decade, like there's there's going to be more use cases for all of these different products. Yeah, for sure. So then how are you looking at 2025 in terms of maybe your ultimate price predictions? Maybe the inauguration coming potential for an SBR, you know, could micro strategy hit one hundred thousand per share?

a hundred thousand per share seems pretty that seems pretty insane unadjusted here unadjusted uh from here from from here that seems pretty insane that would be like a i don't know 30 trillion dollar market cap like maybe 40 trillion to your point that you made earlier right like you get to a point where you're like what is this you know like is is this worth four trillion again

I think MicroStrategy has a... When do you factor in the future value of Bitcoin into the share price of MicroStrategy? When you look at sort of the math... I look at sort of Bitcoin as the only thing that's mathematically certain to go in a certain direction. When Michael Saylor says something like it's going up forever, Laura, forever...

And I look at that from an engineering perspective. Like if you build rockets, and I'm not a rocket scientist, but doesn't the rocket have to go faster and faster to continue to go up forever and never slow down and always increase speed? So, you know, when you look at it from that perspective, and I think we're looking at that from an informed perspective, is like what is the, you know, I mean, how many coins do you think you could acquire in 2025? And if you factor in the future value of,

And this is before the market even understands what Bitcoin is and what MicroStrategy is doing on top of Bitcoin. I mean, we talked about the size of that. I don't think the entities buying the preferred, perpetual preferred stock, the convertible debt, the options, I don't think any of them are looking for the exposure to get Bitcoin in the future. Like 99% of that is just trading, like you said, vols.

and and and living off gains and has nothing to do with the under uh MicroStrategy underlining properties of Bitcoin uh yeah I think the con just yeah it's probably you're probably 90 right yeah I think maybe 10 of those I mean we're seeing game theory of corporations now yeah yeah yeah I mean could anyone catch MicroStrategy that's been my question I mean do you think uh meta could

Not anymore. No, I think they could have back in October. I don't think there's any chance that Meta can catch them. For example, Meta's got, I think, $50 billion of cash on their balance sheet. MicroStrategy's got $42 billion worth of Bitcoin on their balance sheet. It's going to cost more than $50 billion to buy. Okay. Does Meta or Microsoft ever raise enough money in the markets to buy MicroStrategy products?

and just offered Michael and the shareholders 10x current price. I don't think there's a number that he'd sell for. I don't think there's a number that shareholders would want to sell for.

Doesn't that get factored in at some point? It should. Look, I totally agree with you. I totally agree with you. And the numbers get really wonky, like super quick. And like, how do you how do you value a company like this? It's never existed before in like all of humanity. Where do you think the price discovery is either thinner or more interesting on MicroStrategy or Bitcoin? And I'm talking about Spot.

Which is a less liquid market. In a weird way, Josh Mandel was getting at it as well. I mean, there's more transparency in a lot of ways of the, in terms of what's available for sale from a perspective of the stock market and the listed shares versus Bitcoin, everything's available for sale and nothing's available for sale. Just because it's on the exchange doesn't mean it's available for sale. And just because it's off the exchange doesn't mean it's not coming back on an exchange at a new price.

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The interesting part with MicroStrategy is you've got, again, this ETF pressure that's just continuously on the bid. And it's going to be continuously on the bid for perpetuity. I don't foresee the equity market changing rapidly enough for ETFs to become less important and ingrained in financial ecosystems in a fast horizon. So

ETFs are going to be on the bid for a long time and everybody has incentive to buy MicroStrategy and hold MicroStrategy in the ETF. So I don't think there's going to be a situation where all of the ETFs drop MicroStrategy either. So you've got this ETF pressure, you've got this like long term Bitcoin holder perspective and you've got Diamond Hands and those people are the most hardened holders of all time. And now you give them this tool of earning a yield on their Bitcoin holding proxy.

via a covered call strategy and people are like, oh shit, this is interesting. And it makes them want to hold even harder, right? Because the utility value of holding your equity has just increased. And now it's just like the game theory gets nuts quick where you think about like what's actually trading at the margin. You know, we see this huge daily traded volume, right? It's the top 10 publicly traded equity. However, like who's actually selling their, who's actually trading hands right now?

Like how much of the equity that's trading at the margin, which I think is razor thin and which is why it's so volatile, how much of it is actually trading hands to like new buyers and new holders and new sellers? And I think it's a very small...

portion of the market. Whereas like most of the market is just like all of this insanity that's happening in the options derivatives market. But the actual number of traders or the stock that's trading hands to the buyers that are going to hold for the future is like a very, very small, very small number. So yeah, I mean, it's totally fascinating. I think we hit a trillion. I think MicroStrategy hits a trillion dollars in 2025. Add a trillion,

The number of bears and FUD that we're going to see in the market is going to be unbearable. It's going to be totally ridiculous. And I think at a trillion, we see like a mean reversion. And it could happen quick. I mean, we could go from $100 billion to a trillion, I think, pretty quickly.

Is that all predicated on Bitcoin price action? Yeah, I think Bitcoin price action, if the price of Bitcoin goes from, if it breaks into a new all-time high and into price discovery again, we get up to $150, $175 or $200. What about some more outrageous probabilistic outcomes? In 2016, we went into 2017, we were at like $1,000.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and we ended 2017 at like 17,000. Yeah. 19. Yeah. I mean, yeah, whatever. Yeah. And it was more like probably eight 50, whatever. It's like something like a 16 X or something. Yeah. We're 20. I don't know what it is, but like that, that if this would happen again and Bitcoin had a crazy 25, I mean, you could be looking at a million and change, you know, late 2025, early 2026.

And it wouldn't be outrageous from Bitcoin's historical perspective. And again, I go back to how is this thing not going to go? This is what I keep. Bitcoin is already 8x. It's already 10x eight times in 16 years. And if the rocket ship is going up forever, doesn't it have to go up 10x eight times in less than 16 years? Yeah. And that's 10 trillion. Yeah. In 16 years or less from here.

Yeah, I agree with you. And this has kind of been part of my long-term thesis. I think this is going to break a lot of financial markets and people's brains to the upside. Bitcoiners say faces are going to melt. I don't think faces have melted. What is it going to take? It's going to take moves like that. We're not getting faces going to melt going to 175 over the next 12 months. No, no, no. Which would be great to have Bitcoin grind its way up to 250, which would be very steady, very solid. It'd be a trader nightmare.

Yeah. Less volatility and just a slow grind. But I and it'll be interesting to see how it goes. Where this gets crazy to me and just like the game theory and thinking through this is like the air gets pretty thin, like above, I think, like even above one hundred thousand where, you know, two hundred thousand, four hundred thousand at a four hundred thousand dollar Bitcoin price. I mean, who's who's who's selling and why are they selling and how much are they selling?

And if they are selling at 400,000, but the thesis is unchanged, what like who's like, if you really think this is a new economic monetary ecosystem where you can use it as collateral to facilitate and finance your life in different ways, in different modern ways, what's the point? What's the point of selling, you know, especially this is, this is the, one of the really interesting parts in my perspective is if there's a

development or innovation in utility. And, and if there's an innovation in utility that happens within the next year and people start to realize that I don't have to sell my Bitcoin, there's alternatives and they're able to utilize their assets as collateral and never have to sell their Bitcoin, but they continue to like use their energy to like work in the world and pay off their loan. Um, but don't have to actually sell their Bitcoin. People are going to start doing that.

But people have to learn about collateral, which collateral is a confusing concept. It's not like, it's not, I didn't learn about collateral until I started working in a collateralized reinsurance market. You know, like I didn't, I didn't grasp it. I've never been able to grasp it before. I didn't learn it in college. It's not learned, you know, nobody teaches it to you in high school or learning about finance, personal finances or anything like that. So once people grab that and understand that their Bitcoin is collateral, they're

and the infrastructure is built out for it, that fundamentally changes the value proposition. Everybody's always thought the value proposition is like this is the best money ever. But if infrastructure improves, that's a huge catalyst. That's a huge, huge catalyst. And all of a sudden, I think you could see the price of Bitcoin wake up massively. Cantor Fitzgerald starts offering 8% B-lock loans, Bitcoin line of credit loans.

With an eight-year horizon. It's like holy fuck. I mean that totally changes the whole like perspective on Finance and in the value proposition for Bitcoin so and I mean obviously at the US The US government has a strategic Bitcoin Reserve I mean we're off to the races even if they just announced that they're keeping the existing stack of Bitcoin as a strategic Bitcoin Reserve I think that's that's a signal enough to

cause a lot of mayhem and chaos in these markets. It'll be amazing to see. I don't know what's going to happen on the 20th and the days to come. You know, I think, you know, Bitcoin is sort of a simple A-B test for humanity in a lot of ways. But I think, you know, its unit of account is the superpower.

And when you start thinking about Bitcoin as your reserve asset, you're using it as a unit of account, essentially, but we start applying to anything. And I think, again, this goes back to corporations, nation states, but ultimately people, even if you have no stats or very little stats, using it as a unit account will be a superpower in life. You'll just make better economic calculations against anyone you go against.

And what's been fascinating with MicroStrategy and is sort of lining up to be the trade of the century here is, you know, when you looked at something like Amazon, right? Amazon has crashed over 90% three times. And through those first two cycles, only Jeff and his parents held, you know, through that. Jeff's parents only held through because they love Jeff, right? Right.

When Jeff, though, went through those first two things, he understood that what he had was more valuable than the market was deeming it. You know, he wasn't Pets.com when the whole entire internet economy crashed. But, you know, people thought he was competing against Barnes and Nobles and Borders and just brick and mortar bookstores. And he realized that before, you know, he had to do books first, but it was CDs and it was music. But it was all of retail, every vertical. But he didn't see AWS coming.

Yeah. Which is now like 65 or 70% of the business. I don't know. Well, I think he did though. Okay. Even if he did, let's say even if he did, the market did it.

The market didn't. That's very clear. And he probably couldn't explain it to the market until he rolled it out or, you know, very, you know, you know what I mean? Until that technology, everything caught up and the vision could meet the road. You know, it's sort of like when I, you know, internet service providers came out and it's like, we're promising a better product when the municipalities roll out better bandwidth or, you know, the telecoms allow us to use their pipes. So it's only so far you can get on the rails.

You know, and so micro strategies going from like, hey, we're going to save and put our reserves into this asset to we're going to financially engineer our way through the capital markets and let Bitcoin eat everything to, you know, what's next? I mean, is it a Bitcoin bank? Yeah. And what is what does that even mean to you? Yeah. So, yeah.

Take a look at my profile, search Bezos. I posted like this two minute clip and maybe it's a five minute clip of an interview that he had in like 1996 or 1998. And he's talking about tracking advertising clicks.

And it's one of these like, oh my God, he knew. He knew exactly the power of what he had at that moment. And like the breadcrumbs are there. Like everybody saw it as a bookstore for sure. But the breadcrumbs were definitely there. You can see that if you were to take like a zoomed out view and see like, oh my God, the amount of data that he's collecting here is just like astronomical. Like this is something way, way, way bigger than an e-bookstore, right?

And everybody else was just so wrong. They had no idea. So I think Bezos knew all along the power of what he had. Just the market had no idea because the accounting, similar to a microstrategy, the accounting was so skewy because they shoved all of their profits into R&D. So it looked like they'd lost a ton of money and they were just shoving all of their money into R&D.

Meanwhile, over here with MicroStrategy, the accounting is skewy and it looks like they're making huge losses, but the way that the asset is accounted for on balance sheet, nobody gives them credit for it. Or they don't get credit for it until they adopt FASB here in 2025. And I think that will be an interesting phenomenon in the market. I don't think it'll be instant rocket green candles to the upside, but the market will reassess things as a whole.

there's going to be entities that have never heard of MicroStrategy, right? Like this is a small relative company still. There are gonna be companies that will learn about MicroStrategy for the first time in May when they adopt FASB Fair Value Accounting. That alone is important and a big factor. So a lot of correlation there between that Amazon example. And then thinking about the future and just FYI, I got to jump here in like 10 minutes. But in thinking about the future of MicroStrategy,

They have more of the best, most pristine collateral than any other market, than any other company in the entire market. And what can you do with that collateral? The world doesn't really know yet. The world doesn't really know exactly what you can do with that.

But the innovations will come and the innovations will come because the people that hold this asset are going to start expending their energy building that infrastructure out. Like as the price of Bitcoin rises and the price of MicroStrategy rises, people will be escaping the fiat matrix and entering the Bitcoin matrix to preserve and expand and grow their wealth in this system. And the thing that's really appealing to me is like the Bitcoin itself is

uh programmable it's programmable money and no nobody's nobody's quite figured that out yet and i didn't have it figured out until i had some conversations with rob hamilton and becca over at anchor watch and i saw the infrastructure of what it likes what it looks like to code on the bitcoin network and the fascinating thing that they've done is they've effectively created a custody solution

where you can have like layers of custody and time locks that are controlled by multiple people and have basically like if then statements built into a Bitcoin transaction. So like if X happens, then Y happens. If X happens, then Y happens. And that's not priced in.

That is absolutely not priced in. So I'm imagining a world, a trustless financial world where you have economic transactions that are designed in code on the Bitcoin network. You can call these smart contracts. They could be layer two solutions, whatever it may look like. We don't know exactly what it looks like yet. But for example, in my marketplace, in the reinsurance market, companies post collateral contracts.

in reinsurance transactions all the time. This is super common. Like you say, okay, I want to take $100 million. I want to take this $100 million tranche of risk here. Let's just call it Florida hurricane exposure. I'm going to post $100 million of collateral in this account. Alternatively, if you don't post collateral in the account, you have to have like a letter of credit from the bank that says you're good for it. Or, you know, you have some sort of like trust system.

Now I can foresee a future where you remove the trust system, you remove letters of credit, you know, you remove this trust component and you post Bitcoin as collateral written in code with an escrow system, probably insured by anchor watch. And you have now insured collateral posted for, to earn yield on some sort of exposure in the future. So you, you put your capital or your collateral at risk.

And if you've got a company that's got, let's just say, $500 billion of capital, let's just say MicroStrategy or Bitcoin 10Xs and the amount of Bitcoin they hold stays the same, they're going to hold $500 billion of capital. They're going to put $10 billion of capital at risk, $20 billion, $30 billion of capital at risk in these different marketplaces to earn further yield and to continue this kind of hyper-Bitcoinization process.

of the entire market. And this is going to happen. Like it's absolutely going to happen because the companies that hold the better money are going to be able to provide better rates. Like if your money is broken, like the insurance, we're already seeing it right now, like in the insurance and the reinsurance market, rates are rocketing. And on top of an inflationary environment, like it's perfect storm. Like all the bad shit is happening at the same time. Now, if you have a

a vacuum on the other side that's capturing all the bad money and turning it into good money, the people that hold the good money are going to be able to provide better rates to those that need the coverage, whether it be insurance or lending or whatever that may be in the future. And I'm incredibly bullish for that future. That sounds incredibly bright because you're storing your value in an ecosystem that doesn't decay.

And that's, that's just so incredibly appealing to me in any way I look at it. Yeah. It's fascinating. One more question before we let you go, maybe two. So, you know, if we have a Bitcoin bank, one trade, I think it might've been Josh Mandel again, who speculated on this. If an entity wants to short Bitcoin, they can borrow it from MicroStrategy and MicroStrategy is going to buy it right back on the short side and say, we'll take the other side of that trade. And they don't have to give up any Bitcoin. And,

And it's like a zero risk trade. And the other entity still gets what they want. Miniscript is phenomenal. What they're doing over at Anchor Watch is exciting. I'll have to have Rob back on the show. So I want to ask you, you were at the 100K Bitcoin New Year's Eve party at Michael Saylor's house. What was it like meeting Michael Saylor? And what did you guys talk about?

Yeah. Yeah. Great. Great question. Uh, it was fantastic meeting sailor. I mean, he was obviously the most popular person at the party. It was at his house. It was crazy. I mean, the decorations were incredible, uh, phenomenal party, great food, great champagne. There were artists, artists there, uh, like trapeze artists and then they had big TV screens with gifts going on the whole time. It was, it was great. It was a great party. Um, meeting Michael sailor was fantastic. First time I've ever met him. Um, he was, uh,

uh, great to chat with. He met with our crew. So it was me, Ben Workman and Tim Kotzman. We were there. Um, and just chat, just chatted a few things. It was high level. You know, we weren't, we weren't trying to get him to say any non-public information or like get himself in trouble, but we were, we were just,

uh, chatting it up about the marketplace. We're laughing at the people that were shorting the stock and do, you know, they have an opinion. They read a news newsletter or like a, a headline and we'll short the stock with a hundred million dollars without,

you know, having, doing any research, like looking at page two of the document, right? Like they don't do any research or understand what's going on. Uh, yet they have an opinion and they'll, they'll just throw a hundred million dollars short at it, which is just crazy. Um, you know, we congratulated him on QQQ inclusion. And we said, that's a great accomplishment. And I asked him, you know, if he expected it and he said, you know, I think he said it,

We don't plan for it. So it was, it was very clear that it's not part of their business plan, right? It had no impact on their business plan. I think he even said that they were surprised that they got included in the QQQ. Um, but it, but it does help. And it is, uh, I think he has the same perspective on S and P 500 here in 2025, but, you know, asked him also, you know, I congratulated him on 2024. I said, congratulations on 2024 is a great year. Um,

And he took like a step back. He was like, yeah, 24 is pretty good. I think 25 would be better. Yeah.

Uh, and you know, it was, it was fantastic chatting with him. Uh, additionally chatted with, uh, Sharice Jajodia and he was just fired up. He, he was, uh, a ton of fun to talk to. He's the CIO chief investment officer over at micro strategy. So he's, he's behind the scenes kind of getting, getting into the dirty work. And those guys are working their asses off over there, working on Christmas day, like working on new year's Eve. Like they are working to get this stuff, uh,

across the finish line and moving fast. I mean, they do not wait. I don't know if you noticed, but they do not hesitate on announcing pricing, getting things out to market and getting these transactions done. And I think they're very excited about the future and the future products they can potentially offer to the market. I mean, just thinking about the convertible debt, right? It's unrated private placements. Now, if we get to a situation where they can start getting these bonds rated,

and maybe they're public placements, all of a sudden your pool of capital that you're accessing is completely different. Preferred stock, different pool of capital. There's other products that can be designed with different pricing, different mechanics to get the same outcome of taking down the volatility of Bitcoin. So I'm very bullish on being able to raise more capital to buy Bitcoin in the future. I wouldn't be surprised if they end 25 with

750,000 Bitcoin, 600, 650, 750,000 Bitcoin. I wouldn't be surprised. I thought they were going to end for 500,000. So we'll see. But I think they're going to go bold and I think they're going to keep increasing how much they accumulate per year and pretty much doubling what they accumulate per year until they can't. So I think this is the last big year that they can. This might be the double year. This might be the double year. Yeah. And get to the million, maybe a little double plus. I wish I got to run into you guys at the party.

I saw Gladiator. He was wearing the MicroStrat proudly. It was awesome. I got to meet him. I wish I got to meet his dad. I got to meet Tim Cotsman briefly. He came on a new show we're putting out. And I've reached out to Ben and already invited him on to come on in February because I love what he's doing as well. So my final one and a half questions for you is how has Bitcoin changed you?

Oh man, it's fundamentally changed my life. Uh, it's fundamentally changed how I view money. It's fundamentally how I changed, like just walking around in the neighborhood. You know, my wife is, she yells at me and she's like, okay, Jeff, you got to stop saying Bitcoin fixes this, you know, everywhere you go. So I mean, it's given me a whole new, uh,

lease on life. Uh, I've, you know, in running the rat race and in the insurance world for so long, it's like, I keep working harder, keep working harder, get money. And it's just like, I felt like I wasn't really getting anywhere. And I was like, how do I, how do I beat this? And, uh, this felt like a, an opportunity to kind of beat the system. I just had to work and think and, um,

I'm excited to build the future. So yeah, super, super excited about where this thing goes. And I, I'm excited for the, the, the computer science nature of money, right? Like having, having computer internet money for like younger people like myself, like

People that are born these days, they have an iPad in their hands and like year three, right? Like if you don't think these people are going to be using Bitcoin in 20 years, like you're crazy. You're like totally crazy. Like all the, all the older people are going to, you know, hit, hit the, hit the hay. And, uh, you know, the younger people are going to be using internet, internet currency into the future. So,

Yeah, that's you skate to where the puck is going, right? That's what that's what I'm doing. Yeah, man, that's awesome. I remember the you know, my kids grew up with electronics. I embraced it. And I remember the first time my little one went one of my little ones went over to the TV and tried to pinch the screen to enlarge it because every screen they were used to, you know, you could just fucking pinch it.

So, you know, technology changes you. So to roll out Zach at, you know, underscore base, underscore money wants to know when Valhalla. When Valhalla. Man, 25, honestly, 25. I think the whole year I would get in position, get in position now. Yeah. FASB Fair Value Accounting. I mean, who knows? Like the first couple of quarters could be crazy. And yeah,

I don't think we see anything until presidential inauguration. And then the first hundred days will be pretty critical. FASB fair value accounting, Q4 earnings call, like, yeah, 20, just 25. Awesome, man. Thank you so much. It's been so dope. I'll leave it to you for any parting words and let people know where they can find you and your work.

Yeah, absolutely. You can find me on X at punter Jeff. My name is Jeff Walton. You can see it down here on the screen. I do run a show called MSTR True North. We run every Wednesday and it's just a group of guys gets together and chats about micro strategy, what's going on, cutting edge of the trade and, you know, news events, products, you know, everything that's going on in that nature. So please follow along. It's incredibly exciting. We have a lot of fun. We laugh. We, you know, we go, we go through some really niche stuff.

So, yeah, feel free to join, follow along.