Mike Stroup (00:02:35):

I think you get this result where majority of the US debt, the US marketable treasury securities are very short-term, and that, when you do a simple pie chart of it, or if you just do a ladder chart, it really, really comes up, and then what you’ll really see the effect of that, is when we talk about the interest rates as they’ve gone up lately. You can see a huge change in the overall interest expense from the US government just over the last six months, the running 12 months total of the amount of interest they’ve been having to pay has just skyrocketed because there’s so much short-term debt, and because that’s just what they rely on. Side note, it’s a little bit reminiscent of Lehman and the stuff that has happened in ’06-’07 a little bit, I’m not trying to say that something like that is going to happen again, but people love to borrow short-term at super low rates, and just keep rolling, and rolling, and rolling until, maybe someday you can’t roll it again.

Preston Pysh (00:03:34):

All of a sudden the yields that they were used to, and got comfortable with are not even close to where they were at. You sent me some slides, that I’m going to go ahead and project here for people that are watching this, the video version of this, they can see it, make sure that you are explaining this to the folks that are just listening via the podcast. But as we go through this, you have US fiscal position here, and one of the first things that you highlight is this majority of the US debt is short-term. The number that I hear as far as the duration, if you’d take all the debt and you’d kind of normalize the duration on it, it’s around five years, is that accurate? Or what would you say that the average duration is for all the outstanding debt?

Mike Stroup (00:04:18):

Well, duration’s a pain. Duration’s funny because it’s somewhat complicated, and I don’t want to go down the rabbit hole of tips too much, but you have tips which change their principle based on inflation, so that will change the duration because that’s just all way out there. I think seven years, I’ve heard seven years is kind of typical for duration, and that’s really not something you want to calculate by hand. I mean, you’ll just pull up a Bloomberg or whatever and pull that up, I think that kind of makes sense. The thing that’s going to affect your duration is all those little interest payments along the way, it’s just a measurement of how much interests are you getting along the way, how much interest are you getting at the end of the principle at the end, that type of thing.

Mike Stroup (00:05:02):

What I did here, on just this simple pie chart, I basically redid a chart I did a few months back. I pulled down the data from the US Treasury, and this is something that should be easy to find. You should be able to Google debt outstanding by year and find stuff like this, but for whatever reason … it’s probably available, but it’s just hard to find, and I found it easier to just run the numbers myself. Right here on the chart is just marketable securities, these are not US Treasuries that Social Security owns in their trust fund for instance, and it just breaks it up in a pie chart by year. So between the next three years, you have 50% of all US Treasury debt, including tips that is coming due within the next three years.

Preston Pysh (00:05:51):

That’s crazy.

Mike Stroup (00:05:52):

It’s heavily weighted as a short-term.

Preston Pysh (00:05:54):

As they’re rolling that over, and this is the point you were making earlier, if they’re rolling over half of this in the next three years, and we’re dealing with these higher interest rates, things become really unaffordable really fast. Let me go to this next one here. You have rising rates hit government bottom line fast, exactly what we just said. Go ahead and walk us through this one a little bit.

Mike Stroup (00:06:17):

This is the rolling 12 month interest expense. Jim Bianco is one of the few guys on Twitter that will post this occasionally, so if you follow him, you’ll sometimes see it. If it’s between times when he hasn’t posted it, then again, that’s when I found myself just running the numbers because like, “Man, Jim hasn’t tweeted about this in a while,” but you can just pull this down again from Treasury, and run the numbers there. It shows over the last 12 months how much interest has been paid, so the gross interest was kind of humming along at about 550 to 570 in the pre-COVID times. When we had the interest rates really bottom out, that expense dropped to about 470 or 480 in the trough, and then from there, as we had the rate heights, it’s just skyrocketed.

Mike Stroup (00:07:09):

The gross interest expense for the last 12 months right now is about 718 billion. We, as Americans, have kind of gotten used to just billions and trillions, who cares? But, to put it in somewhat a perspective, the military defense budget is 750 billion, something like that, so you could say it’s almost like we have an extra military. Then the US Military, as we all know, is huge, it’s the largest in the world, we spend more on it than anyone else, so we basically have two militaries of the biggest military, which is kind of interesting. Then just one little point on this, is backwards-looking, so even if rates just stopped right now, you would still see this number continuing to go up, and then the other thing is that there is-

Preston Pysh (00:07:50):

Explain that real fast. Mike, explain why that number would keep going up even if the rates [inaudible 00:07:55].

Mike Stroup (00:07:56):

It’s a 12-year backwards, it looked back, so this is including September of 2021, all the way through to August of 2022. So even if rates … we kind of plateau with rates, you’ll drop off the September month, and add October, and then you’ll drop off, and you’ll eventually just pick up more and more months that had higher rates because that debt is so short-term. Then just one last thing, this is net interest, and so there is an important point to be made about net interest versus gross interest. Net interest is actually closer to 310 billion, but I’m not necessarily sure that that matters so much. It’s important to keep both of those in mind, but the main problem here is that as rates go up, the Fed and Treasury are in a tough situation because the more that they raise rates, the more expensive their life becomes, so it’s a pickle.

Preston Pysh (00:08:55):

Let me ask you this. I’m assuming you’re familiar with Luke Gromen’s work, where he’s talking about a lot of the stuff that we’re seeing between Russia and the Ukraine, and pretty much NATO in general, versus net exporters and them demanding payment in their currencies. Do you believe that they’re looking at this and saying they, “There’s no way they can get through this without further debasement, and that’s why they don’t want to necessarily be paid in euros or dollar,” do you buy into that thesis?

Mike Stroup (00:09:27):

Well, Luke is awesome. I have his subscription. I kind of roll off, it’s a little on the pricey side so I do a couple months, and then come back later again. I mean, there is that wider point about certain nations no longer want to hold US Treasuries, Russia, China, Iran, we could get into a discussion about, “Is China holding their treasuries in a Belgian subsidiary or not? How do we know?” Play detectives, whatever there’s people who push that research, which is interesting, but for this particular point, I don’t think that matters, for at least the short to medium term, the US is the cleanest, dirty shirt. We’re just talking US debt, fiscal monetary position here, if you’ve got a choice between euros and dollars, you’re going to choose dollars every day of the week. That kind of point you were explaining about a broader, “Is there a way for Russia to put a short squeeze on the US in terms of their deposition?” No, I don’t really think so, at least not in the short to medium term.

Preston Pysh (00:10:37):

Got you. Okay, so let’s go to this next one that you got. It says, “Tricky fiscal position even with rising interest rates,” and you’re just laying out more of the numbers here, and then there was your comment, right there with the US being still the cleanest of the dirty shirts. Let’s go to this one, “Can the US inflate the debt away?” Your answer is, “No, not really,” and you’re breaking it out between Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Defense. Talk to us on this one.

Mike Stroup (00:11:06):

You mentioned Luke Gromen, this is a bit of a point, and sort of a pushback on his thesis slightly, which is in theory, in past history, governments have tried to inflate away their liabilities. So lessen the value of their liabilities by just inflating their currency, whether it’s debasement, so changing the metal, whether it’s clipping the coins around the outside, all those kind of things that are in Saifedean’s book, if you read the Austrians or whoever. What we have in modern times, at least in developed markets, we have a lot more inflation indexed liabilities. We have a lot more inflation indexed promises, so at the end of the day, this will be settled in the political context.

Mike Stroup (00:11:52):

But when we break down our three big expenses, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, a lot of those are going to be hard to decrease those commitments through inflation. Social Security is the worst one here, it’s about 1.2 trillion, the benefits are fully indexed to the CPIW, that’s very similar to the main CPI that you always hear about. How much of Social Security is overhead versus payments? I don’t know, maybe 20% , maybe something, so let’s say it’s 200 billion worth of clerical workers, and 1 trillion worth of payouts, that’s probably not right, but let’s say it is.

Preston Pysh (00:12:30):

No, no, no, I’m laughing because I’m thinking that’s probably not right, but hold on a second, it probably is right.

Mike Stroup (00:12:37):

Who knows?

Preston Pysh (00:12:39):

Go ahead.

Mike Stroup (00:12:40):

So the payout that they got for 2022 was a 5.9% increase, which was right align with CPI, and then starting in 2023, they’re probably going to get at least an 8.7% increase in their Social Security benefits. So, if it’s 1 trillion paid out per year, then that’s another 8 billion in spending, kind of like that inflation spiral that people talked about the wage price spiral. This isn’t wages necessarily, but it’s a little bit, it’s a transfer payment. People are going to take that money and go out and spend it. The reason why we kind of already know what that payment is, they average the July, August, September inflation stats to get the payout for the next year, and it’s tricky how they do that. Elections are in November, so incumbents are smart, they announce the new Social Security bump in October, mid-October, to get it just a week or two before election, so everyone knows to vote for the incumbent who helped them out. There’s your Social Security there, a big portion of it is inflation index, which makes it hard to just inflate your currency and make the value of these promises weaker.

Preston Pysh (00:13:58):

Yeah, that’s such a great point, and I think that’s something that a lot of people fail to think about. I think when you look at the defense number as well, so much of that goes into material and labor costs, which I would also imagine are extremely tied to inflation, right?

Mike Stroup (00:14:18):

Yeah. Good luck, if you’re going to try to get a defense contractor to eat some inflation increases, they definitely … My experience with military contracts was they really know those contracts, and they will find a way to … if you don’t specify exactly what you need to the letter, they will finagle their way to say that, “Hey, that wasn’t in the contract. We can add that for you, but we’re going to need to do an addendum contract.” You see a lot of these addendum contracts, where you want to add one little feature, one tiny little feature, whether it’s software or hardware, or anything, and they find ways to really get you on a new contract. So any of these three, I mean, good luck trying to [inaudible 00:15:05] the increase, the pre-programmed, the legislatively required increases to these payout.

Mike Stroup (00:15:14):

So, if I could just push a little further on this one, if you were to think a little adversarially, you would say, “Okay, the Federal Government has an incentive to somehow report a CPI that’s not as bad as what it really is, or they have incentive to try to find ways to decrease these liabilities more than what CPI is.” So, I think as CPI prints come out, I think one thing I like to do is I like to go through all the little pieces, and just see, “Okay, what’s weird?”

Preston Pysh (00:15:47):

You have some of this right in here. Hold on, let me find it. I saw a chart that you had that was talking to this. Well, just the … No, that wasn’t it.

Mike Stroup (00:15:57):

Yeah, it’s somewhere in there. Here it is.

Preston Pysh (00:16:00):

There it is. Yup.

Mike Stroup (00:16:03):

This slide here isn’t so much a conspiracy about CPI because this … We’re looking at a slide here with owner’s equivalent rent, and how it contributes to inflation stickiness. Owner’s equivalent rent has been written up in the literature over the years as being a lag, having a bit of a lag, and so knowing the methodology on this is kind of useful. The way they … Shelter is roughly one-third of the CPI, it’s a big part of it, that’s probably equivalent to what most people’s spending basket is. The way they measure shelter, they have rent, and then they have owner’s equivalent rent, and then they have a tiny bit for hotels or whatever. The methodology for owner’s equivalent rent is they just say, they just ask people what they think their house would rent for, “You own a house, how much do you think it would rent for?” In past history, that has always lagged inflation because people are busy, they’re not a real estate agent and maybe they don’t know.

Mike Stroup (00:17:05):

If you look at past, in times of inflation increases, this has lagged, and then continued after the rent prices actually stopped dropping just because people aren’t paying attention or whatever. I would argue that it’s a weird way to do the methodology in 2022, to just ask people. So I posted to here the Zillow Rent Index, which a couple … after I ran this, I saw a couple other people posted charts on this too, which is cool, but you could see for the last year … Oh, you know, it looks like I included an extra month there, it’s not 12, so tiny mistake there on my methodology, but I think you’re going to have an 11% or a 12% increase there on your Zillow Rent Index.

Mike Stroup (00:17:52):

A key point on this, a lot of times when you talk to normal people, or even when you talk to economists, they say like, “Oh, 6%, 12%, that’s just a 6% difference.” It’s not, it’s double, it’s a two X difference. It’s a double difference. So sometimes that just gets mistaken, and people talk about, “Oh, inflation, should we target 2% inflation to 3% inflation?” That’s not just one point difference, that’s a huge difference, so that’s interesting there.

Mike Stroup (00:18:19):

Another thing that we’ve seen that’s really interesting, you can go and look at the statistics for automobile prices, and the CPI index. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, automobiles have been the same price for about 30 years since the late 90s. But, of course what they’re doing there is the hedonic adjustments, and we all know that that’s not really true, automobiles aren’t the same price, but there’s lots of weird chicanery that happens with the CPI stats. Then, of course there’s very few ways that I know of, and I’ve tried to read as much about this as I can, there’s very few ways to do a hedonic adjustment up, to increase the price of something.

Mike Stroup (00:19:03):

Airplane flying stinks. It’s a lot worse than it used to be. When you had to fly with the mask on for a whole flight, and you couldn’t get a drink or anything, did the DLS bump up the price of an airline ticket for how uncomfortable it was? No, they didn’t, but what they do is, for things that are easy to measure, like a big screen TV that’s 1080p instead of 720, well, that’s really easy to just throw that data in the model and then say, “Hey, everything’s cheaper with a hedonic adjustment.” I have a real … I don’t know. Just one final thing on that, if you could buy a chair … if you had a time machine you could buy a chair from Ikea right now, or you could buy a chair made in 1910 by somebody with their hands, which would you rather have? Which do you think would last longer? Has there been a hedonic adjustment down on how terrible Ikea furniture is? I don’t know, probably not.

Preston Pysh (00:19:58):

It begs the question, I mean, this is something that Michael Saylor, Saifedean, many have brought up this idea that inflation is a vector. If you could make up the rules for a day, how would you try to account for this? Because it’s such a complex problem when you really try to pull it back, and try to assess this. I know what Lyn’s proposal is for tracking it, I agree with that, from just a simple way to keep track of it, but I’m curious how you-

Mike Stroup (00:20:29):

The money supply?

Preston Pysh (00:20:30):

Yeah, the broad money supply, really kind of being the metric, and that there’s lag to it manifesting itself, but I’m curious how you think we should go about it.

Mike Stroup (00:20:41):

There’s just a fundamental reality that everybody’s basket is different. Everybody’s consumption basket is different, maybe in a perfect world you have a retiree basket, a family basket, college kid basket, I don’t know, I mean, if we really have tons of data available, and we have tons of compute available, maybe that would make sense to have those out there as just something to look at. I don’t know if it’d be good to make policy off it. It’s just such a difficult question. I talk about it with my friends and so forth, mostly just to make them aware of it, and to just pay attention to it. Because if all you do is just listen to the newspaper telling you, “Inflation has been 1% this year, inflation has been 10% the other year,” that really kind of misconstrues the reality for somebody, let’s say, that’s raising kids, trying to pay for college. Look at the price of college over the last few decades, it’s nothing but up, right? Man, that’s a really tricky problem, and I don’t know if there’s a right answer.

Preston Pysh (00:21:52):

Where I get hung up on it is really accounting for asset prices. If they’re stepping into a bond market, and they’re buying the bonds, they’re pushing yields lower, that’s just simple math. If we’re using interest rate, I mean, look at what’s happening right now, interest rates are blowing out in the equity markets, anything that’s equity-based is half in the reprice itself. So, as they’re adding supply or they’re reducing supply, and then it’s a credit-based system so then you have this multiple being constructed on top of the baseline money, it makes it so smushy and so difficult to account for all of those factors, in addition to the prices of individual things in different age categories, and all of that. It’s just super complex. I guess that’s why I just default to Lyn’s constant, its broad money supply over a long enough time period, like if you’re looking at the last 10 years, and the broad money supply had a CAGR of 5%. Well, the inflation rate in very general broad brush terms is probably 5%.

Mike Stroup (00:23:02):

The tricky thing about the broad money supply, just looking at that, and I’d like to have a chart of base money in M2 and M3 in front of me right now just to discuss this, but the … No, I’m not saying pull it out, I just [inaudible 00:23:18].

Preston Pysh (00:23:18):

No, I’m going to try to get something here.

Mike Stroup (00:23:21):

So just from recollection, one of the things that tricked a lot of us right after 2008, was thinking that the money that was a bailout to all the banks would somehow cause inflation, and that really is … Anyone who’s still saying transitory nowadays, or anyone who’s still saying inflation’s not sticky nowadays, that’s the thing they keep hanging their hat on, it’s like, “Well, you know.” You can increase the money supply, but you won’t necessarily have that hit inflation because it’ll all be trapped, but part of the issue, what happened back then was that the new money just solidified the banks, and the huge leverage that they had. The banks just had huge leverage, went way out beyond what was prudent, and where they were supposed to be, and a lot of the new money that we introduced just made them whole, and then after it made them whole, never got spent again, never went out. Yes, we did have interest rates go lower, and that did affect asset prices, but we didn’t have an increase elsewhere because it never really hit the real economy.

Preston Pysh (00:24:36):

The chart I have pulled up here, Mike, the dark blue line on the bottom there is your M sub O, your base money, and then the light blue is your M2 or your broad money supply. You can see it goes back quite a few decades there. You can see the massive jump that we had in the base money in the ’08 crisis, and you can see how they’ve been exercising and growing that quite significantly ever since, in a very non-linear way. This is a log, the Y axis is a log scale. You can see how the broad money supply, throughout all of those gyrations in the base money that we saw, has been pretty, I mean, again, it’s a log scale on the Y axis, but linear in those regards where they’ve been able to really control the broad money supply there, the top line, until the COVID crisis where you see it really jump with everything that they were doing.

Preston Pysh (00:25:42):

To Lyn’s point, she has an amazing article on this, maybe we can throw it in the show notes, where she talks at depth about this dynamic, and how you’re not going to see inflation start showing up into the prices until they start doing things that are very similar to what we saw happen here, post the 2020 COVID shock.

Mike Stroup (00:26:03):

But I think even if we zoom, on linear scale we zoom in on what happened in ’08, I think we had a huge increase. Unprecedented up until then, we had huge increases in them too, I believe.

Preston Pysh (00:26:16):

Yeah, you can see the M2 did grow, so here’s the bump here. Let me see what it is percentage-wise. Through this 2008 crisis, it was up, broad money was up 8%, in what appears to be, let me see what the timeframe here is, it was up about 8% over 217 days. Then it was fairly flat for the next year, and then it continued to grow at a very similar pace that it had grown for decades.

Mike Stroup (00:26:50):

Yeah. I mean, to give maybe a utopian answer, it would be … We started this off talking about inflation and statistics, and how to measure and what’s more accurate, if we get to a hard money standard, then this isn’t as important. It’s going to be less important for people to constantly be paying attention to inflation, and make sure their salary is indexed to inflation, that type of thing.

Preston Pysh (00:27:16):

I just did another measurement there on the M2 post-COVID, and approximately, for people listening, it’s about a 40% growth in M2 over a two-year period of time, approximately. When we compare that growth rate-

Mike Stroup (00:27:32):

I mean, we had that fiscal, we had that fiscal impulse there, which was way different.

Preston Pysh (00:27:37):

Yeah, and that was-

Mike Stroup (00:27:37):

In terms of just handing out money to people.

Preston Pysh (00:27:39):

That was Lyn’s big point, was just like when you mix QE with fiscal simultaneously, that’s when you’re going to start to see it show up in the broader or the CPI gauge. You can see the M2 was really, especially in comparison to the base money, and you see how violent the base money was changing, and you look at the M2, it was really quite flat and normal considering all those gyrations that you were seeing in the base money, until the COVID crisis. So let me ask you this, I mean, Luke is of the opinion, and he says that he thinks that a lot of the fiscal stimulus is going to have to be there in this next crisis that’s brewing. Would you agree with that? Do you think that they’re going to have to do more UBI-like things like they did during the COVID crisis?

Mike Stroup (00:28:35):

I think if you are somebody that enjoys free markets, that pays attention to markets, that monitors all this stuff, we have left the world of free markets long ago, maybe it was 30 years ago, maybe 20, maybe 10, and we’ve entered the world of geopolitics, and domestic politics, and anything that you’re trading or any market you’re looking at or whatever, your number one question, as you open up a new charter or whatever, is geopolitics. Luke talks about it, it’s energy, it’s resources, it’s this and that. I think we’ll see governments continue to have no qualms about stepping into that market, like a 800-pound gorilla and just messing up whatever was there, whatever incentives, whatever the charts we’re doing don’t matter. That’s just the thing I think we’re going to see more and more, is the geopolitics will continue to be more important. We’re seeing in Europe, we’re seeing in order to help with high inflation, high energy prices, we’re going to just hand out money to pay for it. Right now it’s just tough because it’s very difficult to just snap your fingers and make a power plant.

Preston Pysh (00:29:52):

Yes. Yes.

Mike Stroup (00:29:53):

The problem has been brewing for a while, but I think we’ll continue to see more and more issues like that, and the exit valve is the currency. The exit valve, like we saw with the London Metal Exchange with the nickel contracts, that there was a huge short on, and somebody should have lost a ton of money, but the exchange just sort of paused everything, now there’s lawsuits. Somebody had probably had a great full thesis there online, nickel should have gone up, but it didn’t matter. When it comes to the survival of the exchange, or the survival of the sovereign, things will be done that may destroy markets permanently, but it doesn’t matter if you’re just going for survival of your government, survival of a group of politicians. So we’ll see more of that going forward, for sure, and the currency is the exit valve, like the euro, we’ll just see those just skyrocket.

Preston Pysh (00:30:51):

Yeah. Hey, I’m going to pull up a chart here that you shared, and I really want you to make this one simple for us. Because I think anytime somebody hears reverse repo, it’s just kind of like, “What are we talking about here?” And most importantly, how is it more relevant in a broader understanding of how the markets are functioning? If you can lay that out for us, I think people would be thrilled with hearing that simplified.

Mike Stroup (00:31:19):

Sure, and all this stuff I post on Twitter, these slides, it’s really just publicly accessible information with a little bit of first principles behind it to try to get to some insights. There’s nothing that’s proprietary or something you can’t get anywhere else or anything like that, but if we look at a chart of the overnight reverse repurchase, we see … we had a little bit of that go on in ’08, excuse me, 2018, but for a while, even back then it wasn’t that much, maybe a couple 100 billion, and then when things are going good nobody uses it.

Mike Stroup (00:31:58):

Since mid-2021, we’ve seen the amount of that reverse repo go up to 2.2 trillion, and it’s hanging around at 2 trillion. Let’s see, I’m going to make sure I get this right, so a reverse repo is when money market fund or a bank, or whatever, when they have cash, and they lend it, they basically buy a bond from the Treasure, excuse me, from the Fed, which the Fed has, and then they sell the bond back later at a slightly higher price, and they make a little bit of money. Right now, that’s on the order of, I think it’s 2.3% currently.

Mike Stroup (00:32:41):

The issue here is it’s kind of weird because the Fed has a ton of bonds in their portfolio because of QE, and now they’re repoing these bonds back out to the street overnight, and then bringing them back. It doesn’t make any sense, but it … We have just a huge pile of dollars, a huge pile of cash at banks, and at money market funds, and so forth, and so that little picture I put down there in the bottom is just my little thinking about the future. We have a ton of QE that the Feds has been doing, and there’s plans and there’s talk about quantitative tightening, and we’ve seen a little tightening so far, tightening being when the Fed starts to sell the bonds that it owns. The issue is, “Well, who’s going to buy these bonds?” So we have a huge cash pile of 2.2 trillion, they can’t buy these bonds, and that is actually buying them every night for a 2.3% rate.

Mike Stroup (00:33:42):

Then, one of the points here that I like to make, is whether we talk about this, whether we talk about interest on excess reserves, a bunch of these different programs, these rates are lower than some of the bond yields. They’re lower than, let’s say, a one year bond yield, but it’s overnight and there’s no commitment. This is like if you’re not sure what you want to do, there’s a great spot to park your money without any duration, the duration problem being as rates change, and then as the bonds that you hold change value, there’s a risk there.

Mike Stroup (00:34:16):

So, as rates go up or rates go down, if your bond has duration, that’ll affect the value of the asset you hold. So, 2.3% for a repo is pretty darn good, especially considering the banks pay basically zero to their customers, some money markets pay a little bit more, but … I think it’s a very interesting big pile of money that’s been collected. I think in the long-term, that will be a standing bid for some of the QT, but it’s been very interesting to think about how slow the QT roll off is, how slow should it be, if it’s too much [inaudible 00:34:54] the market.

Preston Pysh (00:34:56):

You would think that for the banks, that this would be a huge boost to just their revenues by having these interest rates coming up, and getting that higher interest rate without having any type of risk, really, but I’ve seen a couple reports in the last couple days, where some of these banks are saying that they’re going to have a huge hit to their net income in future quarters here. Are you tracking any of this? I’m just curious if you’re dialed in on it, because I’m not, and I saw just a couple posts on it and was trying to piece it together, but it wasn’t making sense to me.

Mike Stroup (00:35:32):

No, I’m not, unfortunately not monitoring the banks, the US banks.

Preston Pysh (00:35:37):

Okay.

Mike Stroup (00:35:38):

Nothing for you there.

Preston Pysh (00:35:39):

That’s all right. That’s all right. I’m still piecing it together myself. Let’s go back to … This slide is just a title, but I find the title really interesting, and I want to hear your thoughts on this. What are you saying here? You say proof of work or data center, what are you saying here?

Mike Stroup (00:35:58):

So I, just this morning listened to your podcast with Pierre, which was great. He talked a ton of-

Preston Pysh (00:36:06):

He’s amazing. So smart. So smart

Mike Stroup (00:36:08):

Yeah, he’s awesome, and of course an accountant so that’s great.

Preston Pysh (00:36:13):

That’s why we get along.

Mike Stroup (00:36:13):

It’s on the topic of-

Preston Pysh (00:36:14):

That’s the only reason we get along.

Mike Stroup (00:36:17):

It’s on the topic of the title of the name Bitcoin Mining, so he put out a paper on it, people are kind of chattering about it on Twitter. The bigger conversation here is if the name of Bitcoin Mining is to change, what’s the goal? Is it to make it more technically accurate? It’s to make it so that new people coming into Bitcoin understand what’s happening? Different people can disagree. I think someone like Pierre, and Peter Todd knows, those folks wanted to be just super technically accurate about what’s happening, which is fine.

Mike Stroup (00:36:57):

If I was to put myself in the shoes of a public miner in the United States right now, and I were to list the top three or so risks to my company, mitigated or not, what are the risks? In that top three is definitely legislative risk due to proof of work, ESG type, energy use legislation, and unlike some other risks, the risk of a fire, the risk of fraud, the risk of somebody stealing your hash and directing it somewhere else, and taking the Bitcoin that you’re hashing, unlike those other risks, I would say that that legislative risk is the one that’s the least mitigated, the least protected against. You can’t really buy an insurance policy on that necessarily. My recommendations, if I were in charge of the world, for the name of Bitcoin Mining, it would be to go just one level up in terms of taxonomy from what Pierre was talking about. Pierre was talking about time stamping what’s actually happening on technical level with the computers.

Mike Stroup (00:37:59):

Let’s think about what data centers do. Let’s think about the cloud. Data centers host stuff in the cloud, typical things would be compute, storage, that type of thing. Now, your typical investor, your random person in Congress, do they know the difference between an Amazon S3 bucket and Azure Blob Storage? No. Do they even know exactly what’s happening in the cloud or in data centers? No. They just know that that’s a building over there, it’s got a ton of computers in it. It’s got internet connected to it, and it’s got electricity connected to it, and the computers do stuff in that building.

Mike Stroup (00:38:34):

So if you’re a public miner like Marathon, or RIOT, or whoever, you’re kind of a data center company. You’re a data center company just like Equinox or Digital Realty. Do you do storage? No, not really. Do you do compute? Do you do on command compute for customers, for clients? Yeah, you do. What type of compute? Well, you do a very specific type of compute, the SHA-256 compute, but that’s what you are. So, I think that one of the biggest threats we face right now is the ESG threat to proof a work, nobody really seems to understand it. I would love if we could change the narrative, and the framing of this to be more in line with those data centers that, maybe they’re hosting funny cat videos, or maybe they’re curing cancer by folding proteins, who knows?

Preston Pysh (00:39:23):

Okay. So, I’m going to switch gears on you, Mike. This question comes from Eddie, he asked, “Do central banks hold reserve simply to defend the currency if needed?” He said, “I never understood this notion of fiat-backed by X, Y, Z assets, say gold, when the currency is not redeemable.” It’s just back to sell for said currency to make it stronger, or God … maybe they’re doing it to make it weaker. I don’t know. What’s your take on that?

Mike Stroup (00:39:54):

First thing there would be to separate it out, develop market, emerging market, so reserves that the US has would be very different. Some people might say like, “Wait, does the US have reserves?” On their balance sheet, technically they still have some gold, which is kind of reserve. It’s an old school reserve, but it’s reserve. Now, would the US ever sell gold to defend its currency? It did in the past, it’s kind of a relic of the past, but if we think more about emerging market, your typical emerging market country will hold FX reserves.

Mike Stroup (00:40:31):

It depends on the, I guess, on the setup that they have, if they have a peg, then yes, they need a ton of reserves because they need to defend the peg. It’s like the LUNA situation from crypto, where you had to have a ton of reserves to try to defend the peg. If it’s a floating peg, if it’s a floating currency, absolutely floating currency, then yeah, in general there’s less the need for those reserves in the traditional sense to defend the currency. Hopefully that answers the question, I don’t know if there’s anything deeper to it than that,

Preston Pysh (00:41:07):

It seems like you put it into really … I would maybe quantify it as three buckets, you got the US, you have everybody else that’s a developed nation, and then you have non-developed nations, as far as them trying to defend their currency. I’m curious if you would agree with this. From the US standpoint, because it has such a tremendous network effect it almost serves as its, and you have so much dollar denominated debt, that almost provides a floor to a certain extent for its strength, as we’re seeing right now with how they just got to tighten a little bit, and it’s just magnified because there’s so much dollar denominated debt, and this massive network effect around the world. When you look at other countries, and you go into the opposite side of the spectrum, and you’re maybe dealing with a developed nation, they have to have something tangible as a reserve in order to defend the strength of the currency, obviously debasing it is pretty easy to do, but as far as defending its strength, they have to have something to sell against it, right?

Mike Stroup (00:42:13):

The key distinction there is if they’re actively trying to control that currency to a peg, or even if it’s a partial peg or something. The issue with the US, the network effect that you’re talking about, that would also be, economists would call that the exorbitant privilege, right?

Preston Pysh (00:42:32):

Yes.

Mike Stroup (00:42:32):

That would be the Kent … no, not the Kent, that would be the Triffin dilemma.

Preston Pysh (00:42:36):

Triffin dilemma.

Mike Stroup (00:42:38):

Where if you have the reserve asset, you need to make enough of it for everyone else to use, and because US money is basically … in some ways it’s not even fiat money, it’s like debt back money. We use debt mostly to make new money, to make new dollars, so there’s like an unlimited bid for those dollars because it’s a reserve asset, so it gives you that exorbitant privilege to just run those deficits, run those debts, and then the term people typically use is just other places can then sterilize all that spending. So if you’re another country and you’re kept in line by the markets, those bond vigilantes are selling your bonds, making your rates go up, if your debt’s too high, if you have that kind of a situation, then you can’t just borrow as much as you want and have other people take your currency. But the US has been in a pretty happy position, where it’s just been able to just sterilize those huge debts and deficits because of the demand, the offshore demand for those dollars.

Preston Pysh (00:43:42):

How do you see the housing situation playing out here in the US in the coming 12 to 24 months? This is a really popular question that I personally get all the time, and I just don’t know that I have a good answer for people.

Mike Stroup (00:43:55):

The first point, I don’t have a super strong position on that, but I do think I have, maybe a decent framework thinking about it. The first point is, as investors or whoever we are, a lot of times people talk on podcasts about this will happen, our job is to assess the five, six, three different paths the future could take, and then think about probabilities of each of those, and then set ourselves up okay for each of those. It’s trendier, it’s cool to say, “Oh, this will happen, housing will drop 20%,” and probably in this podcast, I probably already made a bunch of calls like that, where I’m saying this is going to happen, but the point is to have a good understanding what are the possibilities for some different paths, and not necessarily just pick like, “Oh, I’m pretty sure housing going to drop 20% by next year or whatever.”

Mike Stroup (00:44:48):

When we think about housing [inaudible 00:44:50] point is I think generals always fight the last war. I think that’s very common to have that recency bias, and to be prepared for what just happened. I think it’s highly unlikely we’ll see a 2008 style crash. I think you still have some real imbalances in terms of supply and demand in housing, like the millennial generation delayed getting married, delayed having kids, that type of thing, and then with COVID they finally moved out of apartments and wanted more space. I think we have a pretty big structural shortage in terms of housing, and I still think that’s there. Now, rates are very high, yeah, they are high, I think it’s going to be a headwind for home crisis in the short-term, but I don’t think it’s likely that we’ll see a major crash like we did in ’08.

Preston Pysh (00:45:44):

Do you think that we’re going to eventually see rates come back down into these really low figures that we saw pre-COVID, or should I say post-COVID, because after COVID happened, that’s when we really saw them spike down?

Mike Stroup (00:46:01):

To get kind of a pivot, this goes into the whole like, “Oh, the Feds in a quarter, they’re going to have to pivot.” I don’t know.

Preston Pysh (00:46:08):

Neither do I.

Mike Stroup (00:46:10):

I don’t know, and I don’t necessarily want to bet on it. I don’t necessarily want to bet on the timeframe of it. Oh, man, there’s a ton of stuff happening. I’m sure in Europe they want the US to stop hiking rates. I’m sure Japan probably does. So there’s some geopolitical implications from raising rates. Maybe the Fed will be able to find some weird novel work around where they’re able to raise rates domestically, and kind of pinch off inflation here, but have some kind of way to [inaudible 00:46:42] lines, whatever it might be to help out.

Preston Pysh (00:46:47):

It seems like we’re at the point in this long-term cycle, if we go to the Dalio long-term credit cycle, that things are starting to break down, and that can be part of the reason why we’re seeing the inflation prints that we’re seeing. The railroad thing that’s getting ready to play out, what’s the ramifications of that? All that erosion of trust that seems to be playing out right now, almost like we’re starting the end game, and we’re now maybe in it, what does that mean for prices, and their ability to control their prices? If they’re using CPI, and the bond market’s obviously using CPI in order to price all the bonds that are out there on the open market, how are they able to get that under control? Even if we go into a deep recession, it just doesn’t seem like it’s like the previous ones. I know the classic phrase, this time is different, but it sure is starting to feel like there are some things that are much different than previous just business cycles, that we’ve seen ever since we’ve been alive.

Mike Stroup (00:47:59):

Yeah. God, that’s a hard question. The this time is different question is important, my short answer to that would be, the time that it is different, it’s going to look like all the other times right up till the end. Every stakeholder, people in power, institutions, there’s major incentives to just shorten your short-term thinking less and less, and less to just survive one more day. Also, humans are great at not thinking about the disaster that’s coming. Do you remember the [inaudible 00:48:37] Ukraine stuff in February?

Preston Pysh (00:48:38):

Yeah.

Mike Stroup (00:48:39):

Where people were partying in Kiev right before the invasion thing and like, “Oh, it’s just a bluff. It’s just this and that.” I think that’s a short answer, is that there’s not going to be great signals to know this time is different. We just know that structurally everything is set-up. Ray Dalio talked about the end of a debt supercycle. We know that all those structures are in place, and whether that kind of stuff unwinds, what’s the end game? Does it happen in a year? Does it happen in a few months? Do we get another crack-up boom and it happens the next cycle? Man, that’s hard to say, and that’s not something that I want to bet on necessarily. I don’t want to take investments or take positions betting on like, “Oh, it’s within a year, but not in four years.”

Mike Stroup (00:49:26):

I just think for us, for Bitcoiners, we have that long-term understanding of what the end state’s going to be. The path dependency is a little tricky, but I wouldn’t set anything up for trying to call the short-term in terms of year or so. It’s very difficult to know if there’s going to be a pivot, if there’s going to be major a pivot in terms of the Fed and their policy. I lean towards the camp of no, this time is different. Powell’s close to the end, it’s his last term, I think. I think he wants to just not be the guy that’s known for letting inflation run. I think they want to keep rates pretty darn high. I don’t think there’s a huge incentive to just pivot in light up another crack-up boom, unless it comes from those allies like we were talking about, the situation in Europe, the situation in Japan, that would be the only thing I see changing my view on the crack-up boom happening.

Preston Pysh (00:50:25):

Risks to Bitcoin as you see them today.

Mike Stroup (00:50:31):

It’s good. There’s plenty of risks, a lot of them are mitigated however. In terms of unmitigated risks, the main one that I see, and I’m going to get a little out over my technical expertise here, and I don’t know the word for this, it’s the nation state chain tip DDoS attack with a large amount of hash power. It’s that type of attack where non-economic actor tries to DDoS, to basically just send out tons of new blocks, and reorgs, and different things like that, to just put a lot of chaos into the consensus of what the heaviest chain is, what the valid chain is. That’s something that I see as a little bit unmitigated, there’s not much that’s in place right now to prevent that. We had a situation where a bunch of the hash rate left China, but hell, you have a ton of hash rate in the US, and that’s something that I do worry about a little bit.

Preston Pysh (00:51:36):

I was shocked at how well the protocol handled that, considering … I mean, it was no joke, 50% of the hash rate was just straight taken offline in a matter of, what was it? 45 days? 60 days? The two week adjustment just kind of crunched through it, and economic incentives sent those rigs to all over the world, a lot, like you said, here to the US. But on that one, I don’t know, have we already checked that block as far as the 50% attack vector?

Mike Stroup (00:52:15):

I think it’s highly unlikely, and there’s a lot of stuff that has to happen in MeetSpace to do that. It’s a little bit when people talk about war that have never picked up a gun and they say, “Well, this is going to happen, and then this is going to happen, and then that’s going to happen,” like, “Okay, well, you know-

Preston Pysh (00:52:33):

It’s kind of like flying an F-18 in the Top Gun movie, right? It’s just like in the Top Gun movie.

Mike Stroup (00:52:38):

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, but there’s a lot of things that need to happen in real life, and with physics in order for that type of attack to happen. I think it’s unlikely, but if you ask me, “What is the one thing that’s still out there?” That would be the one.

Preston Pysh (00:52:52):

How terrible was the movie or how much did you love that movie?

Mike Stroup (00:52:56):

It’s a good movie. It was an old school … Top Gun was kind of a good old- fashioned action movie without [inaudible 00:53:04] agenda.

Preston Pysh (00:53:05):

They upgraded to the F-18, right?

Mike Stroup (00:53:09):

Yeah, they flew Rhinos. They flew the Super Hornet, so that’s the newer one. I flew the Legacy, so the one from the 80s, but very similar, controls are very similar. I’ve got like, I think five hours in the Super Hornet, in the front seat so [inaudible 00:53:24].

Preston Pysh (00:53:24):

They’re very big, the size difference between the Navy, and the Marines, and depending on which, it’s almost like a completely different aircraft, right? The size.

Mike Stroup (00:53:36):

Well, it’s bigger, it has more internal fuel capacity, that type of thing. If you know what to look for, you can spot the differences. It’s not that much bigger, they’re both kind of pretty small fighters, but in terms of the movie, it was cool to see a movie with some F-18s in it. They did a fantastic job. I don’t know how long the production was on that, but I’ll tell you one thing, when I was in Miramar in 2017 or 2018, when I was still in, their team came in to spot locations, and things like that, so they’d been working on this for a long time. The director was there, and all that, and it was in the works for a while. They put a ton of work into it, and it’s … The action wasn’t very accurate, but they did amazing job of shooting a bunch of stuff in the cockpit, making you feel like you’re in the cockpit.

Mike Stroup (00:54:31):

Then the culture, and the surroundings, and costumes or whatever, they did a great job with that. I don’t mean … I mean, just the type of pen that somebody has in their sleeves, we always use these four color pens, it’s black, green, blue, red, and you always have it in your sleeve right there, and they all had those. It was very authentic in terms of the shots, maybe the dialogue and stuff less authentic, but they did-

Preston Pysh (00:54:56):

The mission was total crap.

Mike Stroup (00:54:58):

Yeah, the mission was pretty nuts, but they made you feel like you were in there, that’s for sure.

Preston Pysh (00:55:03):

So, if people haven’t figured it out yet, we’re done talking about the finance, now we’re going to just talk about pilot stuff. So, I’m kind of curious, just to pick your brain, because as a former military pilot myself, so you went through flight school, how long were you … Were you in for 10 years? What did you do?

Mike Stroup (00:55:23):

About 11.

Preston Pysh (00:55:23):

11 years, okay.

Mike Stroup (00:55:25):

As you know, but the audience may not know, there’s pretty long contracts for pilots in the military, and you do all the training upfront. It took about three and a half years for my pipeline, and then you owe them eight years once you’re done. So it’s a long time, that’s for sure.

Preston Pysh (00:55:44):

How many hours did you come out with?

Mike Stroup (00:55:46):

I think about 1300 or so.

Preston Pysh (00:55:49):

Okay.

Mike Stroup (00:55:49):

These days I’m not flying professionally, so I don’t keep up to date with that too much, but yeah, so-

Preston Pysh (00:55:54):

We’re similar. We’re similar.

Mike Stroup (00:55:56):

Yeah.

Preston Pysh (00:55:57):

I’m around, I’m going to say I was like 1200 or something like that.

Mike Stroup (00:56:00):

Okay.

Preston Pysh (00:56:00):

That’s wild.

Mike Stroup (00:56:04):

The joke is always [inaudible 00:56:05] for the rotary guys, is they can get a 20 knots ground speed, or they think it’s enough ground speed, but we can get to 480 knots ground speed.

Preston Pysh (00:56:17):

Yes.

Mike Stroup (00:56:17):

Yeah.

Preston Pysh (00:56:18):

Yeah, we did a joint exercise over in Korea one time, where we were working with the, it was with the Air Force. We were working a joint exercise with their F-16 unit where we were lasing hell fires from one aircraft and shooting them from the other, then vice versa. We got to go up in … I got to go up in an F-16 and experience it, and after that flight I was like, “Oh, my God, I am so glad I fly helicopters.” That is like running a marathon. I think we only logged 1.5 hours, and it was like I got out of that aircraft, now we did air to air coming back, which was just exhausting. I felt like my brain was put in a scrambler, and was just like, “This is out of control.” The G-suit was just squeezing the living hell out of me. It was a really neat experience, but very taxing on the body. I was not expecting it to be that taxing.

Mike Stroup (00:57:20):

Going straight into an F-16 is pretty … that’s a hell of a jump because they pull some of the, or they have the capability to pull some of the most Gs, it’s like a new G limit, a reclining seat, and all that stuff.

Preston Pysh (00:57:31):

We did seven.

Mike Stroup (00:57:31):

Dang.

Preston Pysh (00:57:31):

We did 7.1 or something like that, and it just felt like your brain was going to pop.

Mike Stroup (00:57:40):

Yeah, it’s a hell of a workout. It’s fun too.

Preston Pysh (00:57:43):

What did you guys pull? Five? You were probably restricted by the armament and stuff.

Mike Stroup (00:57:48):

Yeah, it depends on the weight, it depends on the fuel load, and different things. You have a computer that automatically calculates it, and then there’s a G-limiter switch on the very bottom of the stick, so with your bottom two fingers, if you really needed more time or whatever, you can pull on that thing, and just yank for all your worth and go way past the G-limit, but we had … 7.3 was the normal G limit, and then at lower fuel states, you can go higher to 7.5. I accidentally pulled 8.4 once when the jet was real empty fuel, and I just kind of honked it on too fast, but yeah, it’s-

Preston Pysh (00:58:25):

Dude, it’s brutal.

Mike Stroup (00:58:25):

It’s tough, man. I mean, you remember just moving your head so that the thing is you’re not pulling 9 Gs just right here like this, and it’s a refuge. You’re pulling 9 Gs, but the bad guy is back there so you’re having to just put your head in this craziest position, and try to look behind you. Hopefully he’s not behind you, hopefully he’s right in front of you, but you’re having to do that, so it’s definitely pretty taxing on the back, and the neck, and so forth.

Preston Pysh (00:58:53):

Yeah, I just remember landing, and I was just like, because I’ve done some pretty taxing things on the body through the years, just whatever, and I got out and I was just like, “That was brutal. That was brutal.” Yeah, and you’re right, what’s neat about the rotary wing, I would say, is we’re down in the trees so it’s much more of a rollercoaster kind of feel, where you have the relative velocity that you’re seeing just kind of [inaudible 00:59:20] by, where on my flight we were like … I flew with the battalion commander of the squadron, and the squadron commander, and we went up and we were over the LOC, and he was like, “All right, you want to break the sound barrier?” I was like, “Of course,” and so he breaks the sound barrier, and there really wasn’t a lot to it. I was kind of-

Mike Stroup (00:59:42):

Exactly.

Preston Pysh (00:59:42):

I was really kind of blown away. There was just this little shutter, it got a little quieter, and he’s like, “All right, well, you did that.” I was like, “Okay, well, that was it,” but you’re not seeing the relative velocity, where in the helicopter you’re going so much slower, but you’re … There’s a lot of relative velocity if you’re flying tactically, it’s just different.

Mike Stroup (01:00:05):

I was in a debrief with a guy one time, a Cobra guy, a helicopter guy, and he was talking about how there’s a bush here and a tree here, and he was just doing this to … he seemed really into it, and I just let him go because he was really getting into his tree and his bush, and this little hill. He was talking about, I don’t know, like a 50-meter, 100-meter space that he was in for an hour, and I was like, “Okay, yeah, it’s a different world.”

Preston Pysh (01:00:30):

It is a different world.

Mike Stroup (01:00:32):

I got a crazy story for you. So one time we were doing a flight, we were at [inaudible 01:00:37] in Yuma, and this guy, this helicopter guy … Did you ever carry side liners on your helicopter?

Preston Pysh (01:00:44):

No.

Mike Stroup (01:00:45):

Okay.

Preston Pysh (01:00:46):

It can put them out there on the end, but we never flew in that configuration.

Mike Stroup (01:00:50):

Okay. So, it covers the same thing, they can put side liners on there. Realistically, I don’t know if they’ve ever flown like that, or how often they do, but for this mission you have simulated load outs, we had those, and he claim … he’s like some Red Force or something, he claimed that he shot down one of our F-18s like 10,000, 15,000 feet. He’s like, “Oh, yeah,” he knows the valid shot and tone, and this and that, I’m like, “Okay, whatever. Get out of here with your valid, by the book, valid shot from your helicopter.”

Preston Pysh (01:01:23):

That’s hilarious.

Mike Stroup (01:01:24):

About 15,000 foot straight up.

Preston Pysh (01:01:26):

Hey, some of us are just a little insecure.

Mike Stroup (01:01:33):

But it’s fun, and then I spent some time in infantry too, so I-

Preston Pysh (01:01:36):

Oh, okay. I didn’t know that.

Mike Stroup (01:01:38):

I was just in the back of the helicopter all the time instead of walking. I much preferred that.

Preston Pysh (01:01:42):

Yeah, then all of a sudden it’s really fast.

Mike Stroup (01:01:45):

Yeah, and then we did a ton of work at OSCARs too in the Marines.

Preston Pysh (01:01:49):

Oh, yeah.

Mike Stroup (01:01:50):

Those are pretty nice as well.

Preston Pysh (01:01:52):

Expansive.

Mike Stroup (01:01:53):

Yeah, 250 knots.

Preston Pysh (01:01:54):

Oh, yeah.

Mike Stroup (01:01:55):

It gets from here to there, it’s a lot better than … more like 150 or so.

Preston Pysh (01:01:59):

Yeah, twice as fast, five times more expansive. Oh, that’s awesome, man. That’s pretty cool. I’m sure we could talk this for literally hours more, but we’ll close it out there. I really appreciated this, Mike. You were so knowledgeable, love the chat, the charts were awesome, and give people a handoff if they want to learn more about you, or they want to follow you on Twitter. Just give them a handoff to some stuff.

Mike Stroup (01:02:25):

I don’t really have anything to pitch, but one thing I was hoping to talk about, I’ll just mention here real quick, is having some sovereign stacks, having stacks, having a sovereign stacks. I just want to make the point that I think folks should be thinking about acquiring some Bitcoin, not from Coinbase, or not from someplace like that, and it’s been a really good time to do that over the last couple months, 18,000, 19,000 prices are pretty low. You’re going to pay more if you buy it in ATM, or if you buy on Bisq, or wherever like that. But I would love to really just normalize, whether it’s finance bros, whether it’s Tradify people, whether it’s Cypherpunk people, I think it’s really important for everybody to have a little bit of that sovereign stack that’s a little bit more private, and who knows maybe someday you may need to use it in that kind of manner. I’ll just put that out there, that’s one thing I wanted to plug. Then also, my Twitter is @MikeStroup10, so that’s where I am if you want to get in touch with me.

Preston Pysh (01:03:31):

We’ll have a link to that in the show notes, so just click on the show notes and make sure you follow Mike, amazing posts on Twitter, some of the best charts. I’ve enjoyed following your account, and I really appreciated this conversation, and you making time.

Mike Stroup (01:03:45):

Awesome. Thanks, Preston. Yeah, it was a blast.

Preston Pysh (01:03:48):

Absolutely. If you guys enjoyed this conversation, be sure to follow the show on whatever podcast application you use, just search for we study billionaires. The Bitcoin specific shows come out every Wednesday, and I’d love to have you as a regular listener. If you enjoyed the show, or you learned something new, or you found it valuable, if you can leave a review, we would really appreciate that, and it’s something that helps others find the interview in the search algorithm. Anything you can do to help out with a review, we would just greatly appreciate, and with that, thanks for listening, and I’ll catch you again next week.

Outro (01:04:22):

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