Buffett called out what should be obvious but rarely gets said by anyone in his position. Even at 2% annual inflation, the compounding effect over decades is devastating to purchasing power. Brian's observation: Buffett understood this decades ago. He just wasn't incentivized to say it while he was actively benefiting from the fiat system. Now, later in life, less to lose, he's saying what he actually thinks. Michael went further: the real problem isn't the inflation rate. It's that there's no free market for money at all. Interest rates are administered, money supply is manipulated, and the fact that this is debatable is the fundamental issue. The 2% target itself was invented by a central banker in New Zealand. It was never based on anything. And actual money supply growth globally runs closer to 7%.

The Strait of Hormuz is still closed and the clock is ticking. Ship traffic has collapsed roughly 90%. Insurance premiums on tankers have gone from 25 basis points to as high as 10% of the vessel's value. A JP Morgan chart showed that for the United States, most deliverables stop arriving around April 15, two weeks from now, which lines up precisely with the administration's stated timeline. Michael compared the current moment to two to three weeks before March 2020. Multiple world leaders gave public addresses about energy shortages in the same 24-hour window. Even if the strait opens tomorrow, the disruption already has downstream consequences that take months to work through. And if it stays closed, the mid-April cliff is real.

The quantum FUD cycle is back, and the incentive structures behind it haven't changed. Google's AI department released a new paper and the panic merchants are online again. Brian's reality check: the most advanced quantum computer currently in existence can factor the number 15. Everything else in these reports is theoretical, contingent on engineering breakthroughs with no defined timeline. Some co-authors have direct ties to competing blockchain ecosystems. Developers are actively working on migration paths including new quantum-resistant address types and soft fork proposals. And as Michael pointed out, if quantum computing reached a level that could threaten Bitcoin, banking encryption, military communications, and government systems would all break first. There would be plenty of smoke before any fire reaches Bitcoin.

Oracle cut 30,000 people in a single email. The stock went up. This follows Block's layoffs a month ago, which provided air cover for every other large company to do the same. The playbook is now established: announce cuts, cite AI investment, watch the stock respond favorably. Michael pushed back on framing this purely as AI. The bloat existed long before these tools arrived. Zero interest rate policy allowed companies to over-hire for nearly two decades. What's happening now is the correction. AI just gives executives a clean narrative. Meanwhile, six of the seven Magnificent Seven stocks are already in bear markets (down 20%+) while the S&P is only off about 9% from its January high. The concentration that drove markets for years is unwinding.

Coinbase is sending sports gambling notifications while Americans are trying to figure out how to pay off their credit cards. Michael called this out directly. A publicly traded company with stock price incentives needs velocity, needs to look like a casino, needs to push people further out on the risk curve. That's the opposite of what most people actually need, which is a counterparty that helps them preserve and accumulate wealth. The market wants better solutions. They just don't exist yet at scale.

We wrestled with whether Dow milestones and headline inflation numbers mean anything real.

The nominal case: The S&P has a 100% success rate of positive returns one year after CNBC runs a "markets in turmoil" special. The financial industry publishes charts showing 16 thousand-point gains in the Dow's history. From a purely nominal perspective, markets always recover and assets always go up over time.

The real case: Jackson pulled up the data: the Dow didn't hit 1,000 until 1972. Every milestone since then is measuring the same thing, the debasement of the currency it's priced in. Brian called it "absolute data slop." Meanwhile, ground beef is approaching $7 a pound. In 2019 it was under $4. Michael made the case that meat prices are the single best heuristic for real inflation because of the sheer number of physical inputs that can't be gamed: land, water, feed, labor, transport, processing, retail. That's not 2% inflation. That's closer to 75% in six years.

Where we landed: Stop measuring in nominal terms. The question isn't whether your portfolio number is going up. It's whether it's going up faster than your groceries. Bitcoin on almost any meaningful time horizon lets you buy more groceries next year than this year. The dollar lets you buy less. That's the whole thesis, distilled to a kitchen table conversation. And now Buffett is saying the same thing, just without using the word Bitcoin.

Buffett just validated what Bitcoiners have been saying for a decade. A geopolitical crisis with a hard deadline is two weeks away. Real inflation is running multiples above the official target. And the labor market is about to get a lot more turbulent.

The pattern from the past several weeks is clear: the system was already breaking, and now external shocks are accelerating the timeline. The repo market broke in 2019 before COVID. Private credit was cracking before the war. The math on the debt was already unsustainable. Whether what's happening now is coordination or chaos, the outcome is the same: they're going to need to print. And when they do, you want to be holding the asset they can't inflate away.

If you're still sitting in cash equivalents and hoping the uncertainty passes, consider what Buffett himself is now telling you: even the "safe" option compounds against you every single day. And that's at 2%. The real number is much higher.

This week's action: Demand better from whoever holds your Bitcoin.

The largest crypto exchange in America is sending you sports gambling push notifications. That tells you everything you need to know about their priorities. They need velocity. They need you to trade. Their stock price depends on it.

Ask yourself:

There's a reason Michael called Onramp "the counter Coinbase." We're building for people who want to preserve and accumulate, not gamble. Institutional-grade custody, inheritance planning, financial services, and a team that treats your wealth like it matters.

We help individuals, businesses, and institutions who own Bitcoin (or want to) secure it properly: institutional-grade custody, inheritance planning, financial services, and access to a team that knows what they're doing.

If you're holding serious BTC and haven't pressure-tested your setup, or if you're building a position and want to do it right from the start, let's talk.

Book a 15-minute call here

— Jackson

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— Jackson

Also: Golf this summer. Brian and I are putting together foursomes for listeners who play. If you're interested, reply to this email or hit me at [email protected]. Michael will not be invited.