Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
BULL OR BEAR MARKET? TARIFFS FOR EVERYONE! 🔄 The Aggregated Ep. 107
Recorded: April 4, 2025 Duration: 3:39:45Space Recording
Short Summary
In a dynamic discussion, crypto enthusiasts explored the implications of new partnerships, project launches, and the evolving landscape of meme coins, highlighting growth opportunities and the need for innovative strategies in the face of market volatility.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. you
you You gotta hump it, hump it, hump it. You gotta hump it.
Z-K-E-V-M, it's a dearie. I don't hear anything.
Whoa, there it goes.
Oh, that's just an echo.
Yeah, it's went from having the music being choppy
to just not coming out at all, which is really interesting.
I think Chrome updated something, and it's just been like,
nope, not today.
You know what?
I think it's just because you're useless, Panda.
It could also be that that's more likely i'm just kidding darren is the man
i actually go to darren all the time for various questions about things in the industry darren is a
beast
all right guys shall we get started? Well, actually, we don't have a lot of speakers
on the stage. What's going on? Yeah, usually this is the music part where people show up.
Okay. How is everyone doing today? We can kill a little time with chit chat. We all know I'm good at that
Or you could just sing and instead of down playing music you could be the singer
Nicole you up for singing
Z K E V M is a key to you.
So are we pumping today?
What's the plan?
Are we allowed to do that?
I thought that was next year.
It's supposed to be during fall, actually.
I just remember the saying, like, survive till 25.
Survive till 25.
But it's 2025 now.
I made it.
What happened?
That question literally just made Rock leave. It's like, nope.
Okay. Yeah, that was weird. Oh, he's back.
Maybe, maybe not.
I missed the question. I had to reset. I have a weird issue in Puerto Rico with my Wi-Fi just is super buggy for Twitter spaces.
So I just turned off Wi-Fi before joining but forgot today.
What was the question? Have you tried funneling all your room?
Oh, wait.
That's really loud.
Try funneling all your tax savings into just Wi-Fi.
I actually brought like a really strong router here, but haven't set it up yet.
I tried to set it up and it wouldn't connect.
So I think I got to get with the ISP, but no one cares about this.
Everyone cares about this crazy market.
I've got a lot of opinions on this.
Not sure if we want to get started.
It's very interesting times, really unprecedented times for the world.
And it's going to be interesting to see how things shake up.
Yeah. Well, does everyone know each other or do you want to do like 30 second intros?
Yeah, let's do that.
Okay.
These are all, almost all these are, I think, speakers we haven't had on before.
I don't recognize a lot of these beautiful faces.
Okay, so I'll just go.
Is that Johnny Bravo as a speaker?
Yeah, it's a influence from Johnny Bravo.
My name is Alex.
I'm from Meme City.
The idea was, I actually didn't have a designer at that time,
and I said, ChadGPT, can you give me the essence of the most alpha male ever
with some cartoonish thing?
And it came out with Johnny Broward.
So I guess he's the most alpha guy.
That's pretty funny. That's pretty funny.
That's pretty accurate.
Who remembers?
Put some hands up.
Do you guys remember Johnny Bravo?
Who's old enough to remember that?
Or young enough, I guess.
All right.
We've got a bunch of old people here.
I remember the joke is when guys go to the gym and they only
work out like upper body and then we call johnny bravo you know nice i mean just carrying the
weights around there's enough for legs farmer carries yeah well i need to pick up the dumbbells
to go take them somewhere so that the between is where i do like
darren you don't you don't go to the gym get out of here no i barely leave my office to be to be
completely the same all right uh we have why don't here nicole why don't you uh you take over here
sure yeah okay so i'll just go through the speakers and ask you each to intro.
No more than 30 seconds, please.
Let's like, you know, you can talk more about what you do later.
But first is Ada.
Oh, hey, guys.
So this is JC from Ida.
I am the ZMO advisor from Ida. I am the ZMO advisor from Ida. Ida is an AI Power Trading Terminal that is basically connecting multiple deckses.
And yeah, we're here to talk and have fun with you guys.
And if anyone wants to talk AI, here we are.
Okay, great. Thank you. JC?
That was actually me.
Oh, sorry. You're on both. Okay, of course.
Okay, how about Futurist? Futurist token.
All right. Good morning. This is Moe Yohan from Futurist.
We are building a decentralized platform
for remote jobbers in web 3. and we are just here to have a happy conversation with you
and to contribute so yeah thank you thank you all right and then we've got Alex, who is Johnny Bravo PFP.
Yo, GM. I do marketing for Meme City.
I'm not sure if I'll be able to have a significant input in all the topics today,
mostly for meme guys, but definitely we have a lot to discuss.
So mostly having fun here.
Thanks for having me.
Okay.
Thanks for being here.
So on my end, I don't see any more speakers.
I know sometimes it's a little bit buggy.
I don't know.
Darren, do you see other people who are up as speakers
who we haven't already had intro?
I don't. I think that's all of them yeah we have a couple requests coming in here still though and i see some friends in the audience i see
patrick always good to see you uh jennifer spencer a long time friend in the industry
good to see you jennifer from energent and we've got uh kbot in the audience two cent
timmy who's uh becoming a legend in the industry and man you know we got to get two cent timmy we
actually need to we don't shill a lot of stuff on this show but we gotta we gotta show what you're
building at uh community uh currency because, you guys are building some incredible stuff and I'm going to be trying
to help you guys find some, some investors soon, just cause I have no vested interest in it, but I
just believe in what you're doing. It's, it's really cool. Um, basically building the coolest stuff on Reddit right now, by far.
Yeah, really cool stuff.
All right.
And actually, Two Cent Timmy, is it you on the Polygon handle?
Yep, I am.
I'm behind the Polygon handle, so.
I see your account in the audience, but yeah, good to have you, man.
Yeah, I'm trying to pump up the numbers here, get more listeners.
If you're allowed, I don't even know.
We'll let you shill from polygon handle and i was like maybe i'll need to switch over the other ones on my pc so i'll i'll come up later sure all right we do have
a new speaker who was who just joined captain juju oh yeah hi what's good everyone nice to be up here again and nice to see you quick swap and
everybody up here i'm representing wolf swap and what we are is simply a project that brings fun
simplify so thank you so much for having me up here i'm looking forward to talking about the topic, though. Awesome.
Yeah, me too, actually.
It's all I want to talk about lately.
I mean, not specifically.
I mean, the topic is kind of vague here. And I actually don't even know what exactly was planned and the questions and things.
But I'm going to definitely steer it towards tariffs and macroeconomics geopolitics.
Because it's incredibly interesting right now what's happening.
Scary for some, bullish for others, uncertain for most of us, I think.
But yeah, it's interesting stuff.
All right, Nicole, do you have some questions you wanted to start with?
Yeah, yeah yeah i do so the actual you know our topic for the for the day and it always goes off the rails right but is actually
about trading so uh you know the the general state of the market of course but about specifically
about you know what the strategy is for trading crypto so So as an icebreaker question, I guess I wanted to ask
everyone what the most unexpected thing that's happened to them while trading in the crypto
market is and how that changed everyone's perspective. I can go first, actually, like
when I was brand new to crypto. So I don't trade now, right? Like I hodl, I might make a swing trade here and there,
but for the most part, I'm just accumulate and hodl. But in the beginning, I used to think,
oh, I don't have a lot of money and I really need to aggressively trade so that I can increase my
bags so that I will have a lot of money someday. So one of the
first things that I did, this is in 2017, was really seriously believe that the SEC was going
to approve a Bitcoin ETF. And I moved all of my money in advance of this, like moved all of my
money into Bitcoin thinking, oh, it's going to be great. I moved all my Ethereum into Bitcoin. Oh, this is going to be great. They're going to approve the Bitcoin ETF
and then I'll get back, you know, double the Ethereum that I put in. That didn't happen.
And the biggest lesson that I learned from that was that you don't know what the government is
going to do. Like you don't know what agencies are going to do and if you
don't have real insider information and you're just speculating maybe speculate with smaller
percentages of your bags yeah i'm also a hodler go ahead alex yeah i just wanted to say i mean
what happened this year is something I
think no one could imagine two years ago that two presidents of like one of the largest countries
I think actually three right with uh Seychelles Islands I'm not sure if it was real one so
Argentinian and U.S president are literally launching meme coins I mean this was this was what get the hype at the market and one of the
reasons that uh destroyed the market I think I'm not sure that happened ever and will ever happen
again so uh that was the most interesting experience funny enough at that time when
Trump coin was launched I was asleep and then when melania coin launched i was awake but i couldn't buy the
coin because there was too much transaction i think that's experience of many of us share share
and uh yeah definitely i think it's once in a lifetime uh thing that's happened in terms of
trading what is your opinion on memes?
As a meme guy, their influence on the industry?
Are they good for the industry?
Are they bad for the industry?
What are the repercussions of this meme trend for the last year?
I think mostly negative to be honest because most of the people
that uh I got that's getting into space they have one goal to get rich quick uh which is I get it
especially if you're a young person and uh there are people who are profiting from that there are multiple strategies like uh to
make people believe that your coin is legit etc so uh on meme city we are trying to do something
about it uh we are not like as far as we want uh uh right now but at least we have audits of the
tokens uh automatic audits that's uh like you can spend
you don't have like everyone saying do your own research but if you have don't have tools
under your hand uh i think nobody has time to do it so generally i would say which i think
is quite weird uh talking about uh bbcd project but generally negative so but uh i want to hear others opinion
as well maybe some people here who made millions i'm happy for them uh but i think many people get
rocked as well from coins so captain juju you had your hand up do you have an opinion on this
oh yeah of course of course i do so um right, I feel like there are actually layers to this thing, right?
If you're looking at memes as memes in itself, it's kind of like great for the space because
it kind of like makes a very serious product look less serious and more interactive, right?
More user-friendly to the audience and people could actually relate with these things.
actually relate with these things then if you're going into meme coins in itself right meme coins
Then if you're going into meme coins in itself, right?
are there's no like should i say there's no way to actually like quantify it maybe it's good or
bad for the space right but i would say that it has its pros and cons if you're looking at the
pros is great it's a great way to actually onboard people into Web3, right? But if you're looking at the cons,
it's a bad way to actually retain people on Web3.
So the user retention is not there with meme coins,
but the onboarding is there.
So there's no...
Man, what a great way to put it.
I love that.
Thank you so much.
So there's no real way to actually say, like, it's good or bad in the space, but it's something we definitely need.
So I'm just going to like end it there.
Thank you so much.
That's I mean, this is my feeling, too, is it attracts people because it sounds exciting.
it's uh you know people hear about their friend making a bunch of money but the problem is it's
It's, you know, people hear about their friend making a bunch of money.
like a gateway drug where people come in and uh you know you kind of want a gateway drug that
gets people to stay in the industry and like have a good time in the industry but this is more like
a gateway drug like when you go to the hospital and they give you you know painkillers and then
you know you later you get hooked on heroin and you hope it happens like every cycle right i think last cycle was with nfts cycle
before that i cannot i wasn't in crypto yet this cycle is beams but i'm not sure even uh maybe
someone has the stats that uh like mfds and sorry new coins could much much more hype until i mean even in
terms of uh check like solana top earners and so there are bots pump fund is the top one and
so so most of transactions and most of activity happening for the last couple of months i would say
happening for the last couple of months.
I would say, I think 30, 40% was memes.
There was actually interesting point made by Justin Sun
as one of my colleagues visited the large event.
He said, okay, memes are dead.
So new thing is AI.
Wait, Justin Sun said that or what?
Say that again?
Yeah, he said on the stage, so memes are dead.
He said on the stage- Wasn't he about to do a new
meme, like,
wave he was about to do, just like
weeks ago? Yes, exactly.
So that was exactly my point.
And then we have
ZZ with broccoli, so
it's in a weird stage.
So, for example, I was like...
What happened with broccoli? I actually don't know.
So he had a dog. Someone found out that he has a dog i think he made a photo
something and then everyone started speculating what's the name of the dog and then someone
said okay it's broccoli and then one day there was 200 000 meme coins created and i think only
few of them are still alive more or less uh yeah and they were all
called broccoli yeah yeah they're all called broccoli and that's we don't even know if it's
actually the name of his dog what are we talking what is happening what the hell what are you
people doing what do you mean people doing what is this yeah i mean the same happened with I think it was one of your spaces uh or that was the founder of
um oh my God another big uh exchange uh coinbase I think that's coinbase dog meme uh that's uh
got the same like hype in a few days and that's that's all the story you don't need
anything else just the name of the dog and uh remember how few spaces back we did with uh
zack's horny turtle when you talked about someone told about the turtle wait someone made a meme
coin of that conversation yeah we made it in the space I think it got a few sales and it's just left as it is.
So I'm not sure someone's still holding it.
Oh my God.
We're not planning a marketing campaign on that.
Just like a random fact.
That's pretty funny.
Futurist, hand up.
And by the way, guys, feel free to just jump in.
If you, like we all, it gets right now it's a
little simmered down but once things start really going uh it gets a little hectic and maybe it gets
hard to jump in if you're not used to butting and elbowing yourself in so if you'd like to put your
hand up we'll we'll go to you but you don't need to you can uh jump in at any time. LFG.
Okay, thank you.
I think Captain Juju, the coinbase dog meme we were talking about that took crypto Twitter by storm last year was Bosu.
I think it was Bosu you were talking about.
Yeah, I heard of it.
Anyway, meme coins with no utilities,
they are more like fireworks. They are fun to watch. They are exciting for a moment, but they actually do not last and
they do not leave much behind. They still do play a big role in crypto. Don't get me wrong.
They bring in new people. Like you said earlier, they create buzz and they make the space feel
more open and fun uh in my opinion memes can be a starting point yeah for people so they could just
grow into something more something the community can build on the way we don't just laugh we build
something that lasts so yeah that's just for me thank you man okay so now let me jump in with a
question right that this will go to everybody.
What do you think is the best way that you could actually remove the negative aspect from meme coins
and make it more, you know, make it be able to actually retain people more in the space?
Like, what do you think?
You can't, bro. There is nothing you can do.
I actually feel you can. I'm going to say, but do you guys feel like it's not possible?
I don't think it is, though.
Mean coins, in my opinion, personally, they have positive sides in kind of acquainting people with the space and driving adoption
for a certain type of demographic
but at the same
time you just have to kind of make peace with
them being a casino
and not a lot more
when you kind of do it
it becomes much easier to
kind of live with that
and just have fun with them but that again that's
my own opinion I totally agree with you now like I really couldn't agree more I love meme coins I
love memes I think they they make a serious financial space fun for people who might be
intimidated and yeah there are aspects of
them that are super negative, right? Like constant rug pulls and, and them actually really having no
utility, but like, I don't want to get rid of them. I enjoy them.
I mean, exactly.
Okay. So now let me try to like jump in with my own top process, right?
I feel like, okay, firstly, right?
The only thing that could actually make real difference is education one,
but that's not the major thing in this sense.
I feel the main thing that could actually change, you know,
the way meme coins are in the space right now is IP.
So when it comes into like ip right then that shows
like okay yeah you're having a pre-existing community before actually launching coin
and you know you're definitely here for you know the long term and i've seen a couple of things
like this in the space because you know quite recently i saw baby shark and i don't know if
you have kids in the space you obviously know that one so I saw them like you know coming out with two web three as well dropping a token and another
great example itself is Pengu from Pudgy Penguins you can see that as well so you know it's gonna
move outside of it just being a casino and move into something with cultural relevance, right? Having a community behind it.
And that way is going to like create a community
to like actually look beyond it just being like
number go up and stuff,
but more like trying to be a part of something.
And if you're looking into this IP communities right now,
that's something that they're definitely built on.
So I feel like when Memecoin is trying to like actually grow and transition into the
space of actually building IP, then, you know, the negative sides are going to like
come way down.
Yeah.
Can I throw something on there?
Oh, I'm sorry.
What I wanted to kind of, I don't know if I'm going to kind of oppose that or not, but take it again, take it with a grain of salt.
But if you want to build IPs around a meme coin, you have to put in a lot more labor than what a lot of already existing meme coins are already doing.
So if you want to, again, if you want to join a meme coin community and view with
something aside from it being like an entry level kind of manual test type thing
to test out trading or just again, a casino, you have to build something
else within the narrative.
There has to be some other media, I believe it has to be attached to that meme coin so
that it has more meaning other than like number go up or number go down.
Exactly.
That was just what I was talking about. meeting other than like number go up or number go down.
Exactly. That was just what I was talking about. But I think JB wanted to speak or something.
Yeah. No, I think there could be scenarios where meme coins do have viability in Web3.
But just like everything in Web3, you know, it's primarily insider built. I don't see it coming out as like, because like, I don out as like... Have you guys ever seen the episode of South Park where it's about member berries?
It's where essentially they get nostalgia over things that happened in the past.
Web3 is...
Yeah, exactly.
And memes, their only existence is based off of nostalgia at this point or something that's a fad.
You know, they're not really a product.
And like, let's say in 2005, right?
A meme may be popular.
People may make shirts out of it, so forth and so on.
But the people that are actually going to wear that long term or continue to rep that product is going to disappear.
And that's all meme coins are essentially is like a hype for like a very short amount of time.
And Web3 is extremely fast paced anyway.
And even good products and good companies in Web3 fell, you know.
So I think there's going to be outliers in every point of the industry that can work.
there's going to be outliers in every point of the industry that can work but in the general sense
of like what web3 is i doubt there's going to be a lot of success long term just because like
loopholes and like the things you have to go through to get an ip done um however i mean um
in general yeah i'm sure you're going to see at least a few meme coins that stay around for a
while and there's going to be successful examples that are going to be able to be
used as comparables for future companies.
But if we look at Web3 as a whole, 99.99% of all projects go to zero.
You know,
so you can't really have too high expectations with anything in the current
environment that we're in because everybody is essentially trying to raise
off pitch decks and vapeware, you know?
So meme coins have just the same amount of chances of being successful as one e apoiar o Pitch Decks e o VapeWare. Então, memecoins têm apenas o mesmo maior de chance de ser sucessivas
como uma das empresas que
estão apoiando agora sem
uma narrativa ou sem uma narrativa.
Então, longo prazo, eu acho que é
só PVP até que as pessoas
realmente sejam a mente que não vão estar
aqui apenas para ser uma liquidez de alguém.
Lembra Juni Bravo?
Lembra Cheapaca?
Eu quero comentar algo sobre isso e é que Yeah, I actually want to comment on something regarding that and it's that I know we talk
a lot about like the narrative and the liquidity and everything, sorry, and the utility, but
at the end of the day we have projects in this space and I'm not talking about Mink Coins
but I'm talking about like projects building real good tech, that their price doesn't necessarily correlate what they are.
So basically, in my opinion,
WebTree right now,
it's a race of who does the best marketing
and who attracts more people.
Even if the technology is trash
and we see it every day, the top 20 projects aren't necessarily the top 20 tags.
And I'm saying this as a marketing person.
I know that the end game is marketing. able to market your product so well that people will like use it no matter how trashy it is like
that's that's what it's important right now so the tech those things can i have a quick question
for you jc yeah of course talking about marketing is it still possible to participate in this
thing you have uh yeah yeah yeah yeah so so you you mean the partnership with QuickSwap?
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely. So I just want to kind of chill this.
So we just recently with Ida announced a partnership with QuickSwap.
And right now for this space, we're going to give away a thousand USD.
So go ahead and check the comments of this post or go ahead to IDA profile, follow
the instructions, and then at the end, we're going to ask someone from the speakers to
say like a couple numbers and then we're going to give away some money.
So you're going to get something out of this space today.
But yeah, I want to continue with the topic in terms of yeah so the price that the
narrative is not told by by the tech the narrative is right now being told by the
price like right now somehow we see everybody like kind of hating on
ethereum because of the price but then once we see it back at like four thousand
everybody's gonna be like oh you can say whatever about theorem but it's here and
these and that and it's always the same story and we've seen it for the last years and
it will continue to do the same as as long as the price is good people do not care about the tech
and that's my personal jc juliana opinion well i think the thing is most people just think the tech is better if the price goes up.
If a game has a hundred million market cap or it's got 10 million market cap, the hundred
million market cap game is better.
It's as simple as that just because it's worth more money.
Honestly, full disclosure, I think the hop to a meme coin had the best tech
no one's disputing that at all yeah yeah well i mean i like i like that tech to it
the the technical lawyers that got her out of the mess those that tech exactly
Exactly.
Yeah.
I'm launching that long.
No, deadass.
Like, I have switched over on my game that I've been working on for four years.
Rock, everybody, you guys know what I'm talking about.
I'm switching over now into a meme coin style launch for legal purposes.
It's okay.
It's okay.
You can throw out a little shield.
I rebuke you.
I rebuke the shield.
Can I say the name?
You shall not pass
he has an incredible product it's empire of sight it's an amazing game by the way
uh the guy has been building true and true for a long time uh so yeah you'll get it from me you'll
get the show from me oh i appreciate but no like. But no, like, legal purposes, like, Hawk Tua set up, like, a whole, like, foundation to do this.
And I don't mean, like, the actual entity as a foundation.
But I mean, like, the foundation for other people to come in and do similar things.
It made it a lot easier legally.
Like, I'm going to, yeah, long story short.
To rug?
Super simple.
Well, I think what they, yeah, long story short. To rug? Super simple. Well, I think what they did.
Not even to rug.
Is it really simple to rug?
They set it up to where they can actually, it's like a 5013C, I think, or like, it was actually to donate money to like animals or something.
Is what I remember.
And then they rugged.
So how can you do it?
I mean, like, the
biggest scams are
5013Cs.
I mean, come on.
Oh, man.
You're just gonna
spit on those
animals.
Oh, my God.
It's like those
commercials.
I always wonder, you
know, those old
commercials.
Those are the old,
like, kind of, like,
charity memes when,
like, they put, like, a, you know, a dog with three legs and some sad music or an African child.
That's the early equivalent.
The ASCP commercials?
How is it?
Yeah, the ASCP commercials.
Okay, wait.
I have a crazy take right now to actually bring up, right?
Because, you know, sorry to go back to the tech thing, right?
Where you're talking about the tech.
If the number doesn't go up, the tech is not great, right?
Now, do you think that every startup or every product in Web3, right,
you actually think they need tokens?
That's the question.
Because imagine a good product without a token. Oh my God, I need to talk and jump into this question.
Because.
Jump in.
Because.
So last week, I was at Merch Buenos Aires in the conference.
And then we had this panel and right outside when it was done,
we sat down just to talk about this.
And the take was no,
not every single project in Watt3 needs a token.
We would be so much better if the projects building in certain chains,
I don't know, in Polygon, in Polkadot, in Ethereum,
whatever, they would just take the token and use it.
But no, they decide not to do it.
But in reality, what I was talking with these people is
that it's not the founder's decision.
Basically, the VCs are forcing
founders to create a token so they can get the easy access.
No, no, no.
So it's not, it's not, it's not, okay, look, hold on.
I've invested half a million into my own project and I wasn't even going to do a TGA.
I wasn't, I wasn't forced to do one either.
And I know this isn't the scenario for most people, but in the general sense, these people
building products, if they weren't doing it in Web3, they couldn't succeed in Web2.
You know, I've spoken with thousands of founders.
I've even done my own little arm in my day.
I've been in crypto 13 years.
Most of these founders have never been a founder of a company.
They've never built anything in tech.
They've never worked past basic like Z-level employeeship, you know. They have to do
a token because they have no other product, you know. Their vapeware or something that they're
building, like VCs of course aren't going to invest into a first-time founder that's never
done anything. You know, if you go to Web2 and try to raise the numbers that people are trying
to raise in Web3, they would get laughed out of the building 99.9 of the time
especially if they just walk in with a deck and no mvp you know like i think that the token is
the only thing that gives these people a chance to even operate within web3 because grants are
extremely diluted now people have a very hard time even getting grants because the grant raiders for
the last i don't know five years years. And yeah, I mean,
without a token, they have zero chance to participate in the industry, sadly. And VCs
do need that security or essentially, and then most of the time, even now, VCs won't even enter
priests. They won't enter anything below a series A or B or private. And now even very specific
situations, they've avoided all that. And now they're just doing OTC deals where they can buy 50 to 100k on the market.
And then you cap them at another 25% extra for free investing over three to six weeks.
You know, and sadly, that's where the industry is.
So I want to disagree there and say that there are a number of really successful products that have launched that don't have tokens.
And one of them being
what Polymarket, right? Like Polymarket does not have a token. It operates with Pohl. And then
Darren, can you speak from the quick swap handle? I know we were having this conversation recently
because we had another like kind of prospective client who we were suggesting maybe didn't need
to have a token and you said
everything that launches without a token is a success you had a bunch of examples
even on polygon there's uh courtyard as well like they have obviously got like pokemon trading cards
and just general trading cards obviously polymarket everyone knows about it but i think people would
if they had tokens people would equate the success
of the token to the success of the project and then if the tokens don't go well because obviously
there's like 50 percent tariffs across the world now um then they think oh maybe the tech isn't as
good it's literally that but um i do think that um not only it's so true it's it's like when you
put a valuation on yourself you get judged by the
valuation i mean this is like uh the like silicon valley if anyone's watched silicon valley they
they go into this kind of stuff a lot it's a it's a it's it's like a funny show but it's it's accurate
a lot of it also uh what i kind of wanted to add on is that launching a token for a new project is kind of release a token, launch an airdrop, promise
a whole bunch of things to people. And then when people try to get back at you for not
keeping your promise, you just shrug and act as if though nothing happened. And this is, again,
I'm the CMO and I'm speaking as a marketer who has criticized that in the past and then again has done it in the past.
So I'll throw in a piece about this. everything in the industry chain l1s l2s defi memes everything that if you don't use a token
you're kind of at a disadvantage even though the token sometimes contradicts the health of the
product it helps the product in some ways and it's actually works against the product in some
ways so and like i always use the major league baseball exam, you know, uh, analogy, which is in major
league, I'm a libertarian.
I think, Hey, if people want to use steroids and they're only hurting their own body or
maybe helping whatever, that's their own choice if they're not hurting someone else.
But the problem is in baseball, for example, in, or any sport, if some people use steroids
and others choose not to, the others won't be able to compete.
Right.
And so you'll
just end up with a league of all steroid users like, uh, bodybuilding. That's, that's what exactly
what happened in bodybuilding. And it was starting to happen in baseball until they banned it and
all, you know, UFC too. Um, but anyways, so now bring that back to tokens. If, if you're a DeFi
project called, let's say you're a DEx and there's another dex and you're
both competing on a chain and one has emissions to juice up the trading fees and the other does
not have emissions uh then the one with emissions will gain market share early and then beat out the
other one in many cases now there is a contradiction to this. Uniswap,
yes, they have a token. They don't technically do emissions. They do do market making and deals
in the background. So they kind of do emissions. And lately, actually, they've been starting to do
more emissions. The reason they kind of even had the token in the first place was that Sushi came
out and said, hey, we're going to do what Uniswap does and vampired them and said, but we're going to give people tokens.
We're essentially kind of equity.
You could look at our shares or, you know, you can make your different argument on securities laws or not.
But that's a whole different point.
industry, it's difficult because you kind of can't compete in many cases without a token,
unless you're the number one big dog, or you have some big advantage. Like if you're base
and you have, you own Coinbase, right? And now you can get away with not having a token and you're,
you can monetize different ways and people are just going to come to your chain because you're
an awesome chain and they have this massive you know uh sex behind them that has
enough money to pay millions of dollars in you know uh paying people to come on chain or things
like that you know i'm just gonna say this that tokens in itself are basically used for markets
and then aside that most projects they also use tokens for fundraising so now like you gotta think about
this now do you think there's any other ways to actually raise funds aside you know making a token
because you could actually look out there even founders were no backed by vcs and stuff at the
end of the day they roll out tokens to like raise funds but do you think there are other ways that it could be done to like actually raise like personally i feel like maybe nfts might be a route but who
knows like what do you guys think well i mean absolutely you can raise funds for a company so
let's like take a dex as an example you can have a dex where you you tell investors hey we're not
going to have a token now you're going to get a different kind of investor because a lot of the investors in this space want a token they want
that quick liquidity uh event right it's the same as like going public so my good friend was the
first angel investor in fireblocks uh and he was he's big on the cap table of bitgo as well
and he has not had a liquidity event in either of those in,
I don't know, five, 10 years, you know, because they haven't gone public and there was just no
liquidity event. Essentially, like going public is the main kind of liquidity event. Now you could
sell tokens on secondary markets. That happens a lot in Web2. You could sell, or not, sorry,
tokens, equity. You can in uh in these secondary markets and
there's platforms built for that that are kind of um some people like them some people think they're
not a good thing but anyways so the whole thing of tokens is it gives you a liquidity event you
can invest and you're not like stuck in your investment for 10 years or or permanently i mean
there's some companies that never have a liquidity event. They could be around for 20 years and not have a liquidity event.
They might do some kind of dividend or something.
But yeah, and then the other part of tokens is that it gets the community involved.
And oftentimes, the people that are holding the token, they have a vested interest in a product,
so they're going to use that product over some other product.
And the coolest thing about the tokens is that it democratizes ownership.
So I think in that way, tokens are absolutely an amazing, beautiful innovation.
Unfortunately, everyone has to emit these tokens to make their product compete with
others, similar to how Elon and Peter Thiel were competing
when they were building the two companies that became PayPal. They were both emitting funds.
They were paying people $20 to refer friends, basically, and they were competing on that.
And they were bleeding themselves to death and not making any profit because they were both
trying to fight to win. And it wasn't until they merged that they were bleeding themselves to death and not making any profit because they were both trying to fight to win.
And it wasn't until they merged that they were able to really grow because they weren't just competing to death.
So we've seen stuff like this forever.
I mean, YouTube, Amazon, Netflix, I think.
None of these cared about generating a profit for the first some of them 10 15 20 years they just
wanted to spend spend spend to build market share and then monetize down the line or get to cash flow
positive down the line um so there's a lot of these things with tokens are kind of we've seen
in the past uh and then they're they're also just a good crowdfunding mechanism. Yeah, and aside from crowdfunding,
there is also a pretty good use case for tokens
as like loyalty points,
especially when you lock a token within an ecosystem
and you incentivize people to use that ecosystem with tokens
and then there is an avenue within that ecosystem to pay with a token
for something, then it kind of becomes this perfect kind of equilibrium where the tokens are
necessary for using the platform. And at the same time, in order to get those tokens, you have to use the platform.
So it's kind of what we've done within our own service.
We do have a token which we kind of use as a cashback tool.
And you can pay with a token for getting better fees and getting better conditions.
So I guess that also makes the token kind of not as dependent on the market conditions. Because again, it exists within the ecosystem without going out.
And yeah, this is basically what I wanted to say to add up on that.
I think what most people miss in crypto is, like Rock mentioned public rounds and stuff along those lines but like i'll mention what your accent is too strong
public public rounds yeah okay so like i i always equate a lot of web three projects to just
straight up startups but what crypto sort of lets them do is get access to
immediate liquidity by launching a token so a lot of like a lot of startups fail like not a lot of
them go past like the first year um probably 90 95 don't go past the first year in yeah yeah exactly
but but what crypto does is it lets people buy into those at the ground level, like launch at the start, where a lot of them would just fail and die off well before anyone would have any liquidity event or be able to buy any equity.
If you're doing a normal startup, and I've been involved in a ton of them, and you're trying to raise funds early, you have like a select number of people you could go to.
You could go to kind of friends and family.
You can go if you have some contacts.
If you're not, you know, a big business person, you probably don't have a lot of contacts in the investment world.
have a lot of contacts in the investment world um but in crypto if you have a truly innovative idea
if you're a good builder if you've built you know an mvp or even a concept and now you could go to
this global public market where and it's not even like we only have access to probably a few percent
of the world right now but it's still massively larger than any other, uh, way you would raise as a
startup company. Um, so just having that, that access and this, these easy kind of to use tools
like DEXs and launch pads where you can go to the kind of, and I say this not as a legal term,
but go to these kinds of public markets and get crowdfunding it's I mean look at the
crowdfunding websites they were they were huge for a long time I think they're probably still
huge right but this is like even better yeah they are one of the issues though with a lot of these
startups and projects uh you know using tokens as a raise mechanism like although it's easy access that gets the project going,
if they do decide to get acquired or to exit, now they're going to be faced with a lot of issues.
So, I mean, not everybody has this on their plan and on their plate, whether or not they
want to continue the project or if they want to exit the project. But tokens do pose like
an issue if you do decide,
if that's part of your plan is to actually sell it and exit it.
Definitely.
I've told projects, if a project is strongly considering getting acquired,
I've told projects they should really strongly consider
whether they should launch a token or not.
Because if you launch a token,
it's definitely going to make it more difficult to do any kind of mna well and not just that but i mean if you're considering long-term
and a lot of these projects like don't last very long i mean the worst thing that you could do is
leave your community hanging right i mean if you get acquired it's potentially you have the option
of at least handing your community over and the people who initially invested inside of this token um there's definitely a lot of drawbacks to to to actually
utilizing a token for a lot of projects um so yeah let's see you so with that's with um launch
pads right with launch pads right you know zach was actually talking about launch pads and stuff a lot earlier.
Do you think that maybe launch pads actually need a regulation
or something in place to actually
reduce the amount of rock balls or scams
that are actually done in the space?
Because I feel like
that could be it.
No, that's messing with free market.
In my opinion.
I don't want to go down. Yeah, I'm going to quickly slap Captain Juju's hand.
No, bad boy.
No, like, I'm a libertarian, and maybe my views may be, like, strongly libertarian on this.
But I think at least in the early stages, like I'm not against
regulation. I think, you know, that's one of the things that we need, you know, governments for,
but I think in generally, in general, we go too hard on regulation. And I think in an emerging
market and in these nascent like technologies, it's important to allow the market to breathe
and let it figure itself out.
Like, you know, earlier we were talking about, you know, all this meme coin rug stuff. And I,
I hate where it's gone. I think I like meme coins that have communities and, or even have a utility
or even are just fun and silly, but that's not where memes have gone. They've gone into degenerate gambling and PVP rug pulling,
which is also maybe interesting for people.
Even though I hate that, I hate gambling.
I've hated gambling since I was a kid.
I've always thought it was just silly.
And I've always liked to compound my interests since I was very young.
I started trying to make money when I was six, selling candy.
And at eight, selling Pokemon cards and at
Eleven selling digital currencies and video games. But anyways, um, yeah, so but even though I hate gambling
I think that
11 what happened after that but I feel like you're living something now
Yeah, definitely
All kinds of things I bought and sold. That to put myself through college, through Loyola Marymount University, a private university. I've always been an entrepreneur.
And I was supposed to go, I was studying, getting ready for medical school, and I found the Bitcoin white paper in 2015 and went all in on this industry.
But anyways, the point is, I think it's, I like, I actually like that we've had this experiment with memes.
I like that the government is laying off on it.
I don't think they should put huge regulations on memes. I don't think they should put huge regulations on memes.
I don't think they should have huge regulations on launch pads. I think that's the beauty of
these markets is people can learn how capitalism works and get their hands dirty, lose some money,
you know, get slapped in the face a couple of times, and then understand how the real world
works without having a government, a paternalistic government that's going to tell you
what you're allowed to do or not do or tell you that you're too stupid to invest in an early
stage company you have to wait till the public markets so the vcs can dump on you i hate all of
that and i think that's one of the magic the this is what makes this industry so magical is that it
is the wild west that it is a frontier that we can all explore together
and learn from and i hope a lot of people that buy these meme coins and get screwed uh they
learn from it they learn that you don't just trust anyone in investing or in in the business world or
in in general in the world uh so i i like leaving it free but then again uh life is fucking pvp life in general is fucking
pvp you know like doesn't matter what industry you're in everything about it's pvp and like
if you look at like a coddled kid who their parents didn't let them go outside so on and so forth
when they hit the real world it's a reality shock know, like how if you move to a new country, it's a culture shock. Their entire world has shifted. You know, like I stopped
going to school when I was 13 years old. I started working, provided for myself for the last 19 years.
And I see people my own age or even like when I was in my early 20s, I would see the way people
would react to basic reality like instances and it threw them off like
Web3 itself is kind of like cliche in its own cringy way.
You know, I do get that.
And there are people here that are playing with fire that they don't understand.
But I mean, like, look at the dot com bubble.
If we would have had the regulations and all the eyes on Web3, like we like like if it had had the same eyes that we've had as an industry
it would have been restricted so fucking heavily you know and people were gambling big there too
people were spinning up a hundred different websites every 10 seconds with bots you know
and they weren't getting regulated and they weren't saying hey this website's worth a million dollars
why is it worth a million dollars you had people investing in dumbass.com names just because
someone else had
bought it for 250k a few days before you know so I agree here we shouldn't be as regulated
one thing that I do think should be semi-regulated is like the VC nature and the exchange nature
you know market makers as well you know like I've been in inside in in and out of this industry and
I've been in Crip for 13 years years. And with this very specific instance,
like we have extreme PVP going on,
but 95% of the liquidity,
if not more, flows upwards
every single fucking time.
Even though that's the reality
of the real world,
people go to work nine to five
and they understand
they're making someone else money.
They're getting rewarded each week,
each month, each year,
whatever their salary basis is.
But in Web33 we have the
most scandalous pvp nature out of india in any industry i've ever worked in and i worked in
i worked at black market gold cells for video games and it wasn't this treacherous you know
like web3 pvp is a different level of fuckery. What game is that?
RuneScape, Warcraft.
Yeah, yeah.
In three hours, I have a new patch going live with Path of Exile 2.
And we were doing 50k a day in profits
at the very beginning when they did
the first patch of this a few months ago.
So we're going to hit it hard again tonight.
So I'm going to hop off here soon and get a nap.
But yeah,
I think we can all agree here soon and get a nap. But yeah, like, I mean,
I think we can all agree here. Like if you've been in the top circle of what web three is,
and I'm not talking about like just knowing people, like actually sitting down at tables
with people that have launched some of these massive networks and companies, so on and so
forth. A lot of them will sit there and laugh about how dumb everything is. You know, like they
don't even take their own fucking company serious. and they just raised 50 million dollars because what they did was allow dilution to an
extent where they're going to have their market makers up 10 on the open market and pray to god
they don't get caught and if they do get caught there's chances are they have rat holes via their
airdrop systems where they just airdrop 30 million dollars worth of tokens to a thousand of their own
wallets and they have a bot that's about to liquidate those,
and people wonder why they don't get any airdrops.
And if they do, there's only a few KOLs that go public with it,
so it looks like the majority of people are doing it.
And then you've got VCs that are coming in, and they're like,
yo, okay, well, you give me X, Y, and Z plus a marginal percentage extra,
and let me exit before everybody else.
And this long token price looks like it's doing good because the market makers are there and the OTC buys are being bought on the
market and they get their bonus. Everything's cool until it's fucking not, you know? So there
are points that regulation really should come into play. And I don't, I don't vote either left,
right, up or down or sideways. I'm a realist. And in reality, our industry is is bleeding right now and that's why a lot of
vcs have stepped back on their capital a lot of market makers going out of business like
companies now we're not even in a technical bear market you know we're not even technically in a
bear market we're only down like 30 since the all-time highs and people are freaking the fuck
out and cutting like 40 of their staff you, you know? And yeah, it's
pretty much. Well, it depends on, well, down 30% if it's your Bitcoin or, you know, but
if your altcoins, many are down, you know, even good stuff is down 90%.
My portfolio is like 70% down. Yeah. I learned my lesson with Ethereum. I've learned my lesson
with Ethereum. I won't talk shit, but I've been holding Ethereum for a very long time and I've round tripped that motherfucker. And pardon my language, guys. I've round tripped that so many fucking times. I have realized in my heart, in my heart, Bitcoin, I've become a Bitcoin maxi in terms of holding. Let's just say that.
Welcome to the dark side.
I'm just about I would like to
to just you know keep the word
on what we were supposed to do for this space
so Rock do you want to give me like
five numbers from 1 to 107
please just real quick
five numbers
from a to 107
yeah from 1 to 107 let's do that's a good number
107 it was the number of comments so so we oh okay let's do 23 wait wait wait what 23 yep
23 let's do okay number one whoever was the first to comment. One and 23.
Let's do someone who's here now.
So number 107.
What was that?
107.
Okay.
Let's do 36.
Okay.
And let's see. Jay, pick another one.
Yeah, 100.
100.
Okay.
Well, I got to jump out, but thank you guys for the call.
We'll be contacting to the winners. What did they get? Oh the good 50 boxes
No 50 no like it's a ah, wait wait wait. I might be wrong. It's five numbers and he was like
Thousand USDT so whatever that amounts for wow. So you're giving 200 USDT to five people in the audience
Wow, so you're giving 200 USDT to five people in the audience?
Something like that.
I have to check.
I need to check the conditions.
Yeah, no, the five people from this, and then we're going to select 50 more.
Actually, it's 50 each one.
So the five people right now won 50 bucks each.
Yeah, and then 15 random ones.
Nice.
Cool.
Okay.
Cheers, everyone.
Hope someone won some money.
Let's see.
Who was number one?
We can say that one right now.
That's easy.
I have it in order of most relevant.
Shoot.
How do you figure that out?
Most relevant, let's see most recent You just click on the arrow
Notifications from from the IDA account we go to the notifications and those calming order
Oh, they had to tag you or something or no
They had to command in on a post. So basically we we're going to see the order in which each comment came.
Is it our comments for this show or different?
No, it's a comment on a post, actually.
Okay, did anyone get that?
I didn't even understand that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marshall sent us the post.
Okay, did the audience understand this?
I don't know. More than 100 comments, so people understood. Okay, did the audience understand this? I don't know.
More than 100 comments, so be on your suit.
Okay, perfect.
Nice.
Well, thank you, guys.
Cool.
Have a good one.
Let's do more giveaways on the show, guys.
We used to do this like every episode.
Projects would give money away to our audience.
If anybody wants to give NFTs, memess memes tokens whatever away to our audience give our
audience some money guys they're good audience yeah absolutely i mean you can come on either of
uh next time i hope there will be next time i will for sure i will show up and we're gonna
we're gonna raffle some stuff off. Hell yeah. Give the audience money.
Hell yeah.
Brother.
Cheers.
Thanks, JC.
Don't do anything here.
Jay, your connection is not good.
And what was JC's company?
Who's giving that away?
Ada?
Ada app?
It's like, yeah, it's an that away ada ada like um yeah it's an ai it's like ada app what is uh
does anyone know what it does let's give them a little shill for giving away a thousand bucks
it's an ai powered trading terminal that connects multiple decks and launch pads for the best
trading experience and they are looking for ada ambassadors nice and they're doing some
partnership with quick swap i heard it sounds like richard already signed up
they were giving away money no i'm just kidding
all right cool give more money away guys uh we have adrian ashley just joined the stage hello lovely how you doing i am doing
fabulously well how are you guys i see we're still talking about tariffs actually we're talking about
we haven't gotten into tariffs i want to get some more experts on the show and then talk about them
pretty soon here um so in the background uh actually adrian if you know anyone who's really
good on this topic i do want to get into that pretty soon here maybe in the background, actually, Adrian, if you know anyone who's really good on this topic, I do want to get into that pretty soon here.
Maybe in the next, like, 30 minutes or so, we'll jump into that.
Maybe at the half of the hour or something in 23 minutes.
But, yeah, this is, I mean, it's crazy stuff.
I know you have some opinions on this.
We discussed this a bit on the BitAngels space yesterday.
It was very, very rambunctious.
A lot of people were listening
and joining the conversation. It was a great conversation. I just think that,
I mean, maybe it's because I'm the eternal optimist, right? I'm always looking at whatever
the situation is, where are the opportunities? So when the entire market fuds, I'm like, oh, looky, looky, a surprise Black Friday sale.
I can get everything at a discount.
Awesome.
Right?
Where most people are like, you know, they started with $10, they got it up to $100 million
and the market crashed.
Now they're down to $20 million and they feel like they're poor again.
I'm like, dude, you had $10.
You're not poor.
Like, it didn't go negative. And I mean, as long as you're not trading on a margin dude, you had 10 bucks. You're not poor. Like it didn't go negative.
And I mean, if you're not, as long as you're not trading on a margin account, you're not
going negative. And HODL is always usually the key. Exactly. I mean, that's just my mindset.
Michael Ionita, long time no see brother. How you doing? Where have you been, Michael?
Hey, man. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Well, I was quite busy growing my channel, by the way. It's almost, it's at 100,000, 180,000 today. I'm very happy, by the way. It took a long time. And I moved to Dubai also. It's a lot of work and a lot of taxes to pay, right? Anyway, long story. And so I was very busy with that, but I'm coming back.
That means you're going to be a token 2049?
Yeah, 100%.
I moved to Puerto Rico.
We'll see you there, man.
We're doing a few events there.
I moved to Puerto Rico.
It's paradise, and it's also great for taxes.
No, yeah, Puerto Rico.
I've been there once. Cool. and it's also great for taxes. No, yeah. In their ones.
Cool.
Yeah, actually,
speaking of Dubai,
token 2049,
so we'll be doing a few events there.
We'll have a BitAngels
and Polygon event.
That's going to be a big one.
I think that'll be at least 300, 400 people.
That'll be really awesome. an invite let's meet let's have fun and uh to rattle the cage a little bit because that's my perfect that's what i'm good at and
somebody said hodl is the key definitely not okay mathematically horrific advice and i can prove it
we can talk later but i have no problem with anyone disagreeing with me. I am easily persuaded with logic, reason,
facts, and passion. So please change my mind. I'm always open to new ideas and, and will make my
decisions based on the information that I have. If you provide me new information, you can change
my mind. So I just want, yes, that's great. I have a video, but also I wanted to just bring a
little bit of maybe potentially controversial stuff. We have topics to discuss, but I'm
sure there are more than that, than the hodl topic.
Well, we're going to take with a grain of salt as you do promote and teach trading. So
of course that's...
No, just look at the, No, it doesn't matter.
Look at the numbers only.
That's only...
Always matters.
I mean...
Like she said, I love that.
Just numbers and facts.
That's it.
So, I'll give my story on this.
And so, I've been in the industry since 2015.
And I've had lots and lots and lots of friends over the decade who have done different things.
A lot of trading, leverage, buying a bunch of altcoins,
trying to make their Bitcoin stack bigger or just make their USD stack bigger.
And out of all those people, I think anyone that I've known that long, I'm doing better by just holding Bitcoin.
Now, other things that I've huddled a lot of things. I've huddled my ETH since 2016.
I've huddled my Polygon, my Matic since, gosh, 2018 or 19. I've huddled my Quick. I've never
sold that. So in some of these cases, they've gone down a lot. Right. But luckily, most of my stack
was always Bitcoin. And that is I i mean that's been my kind of
rock and i've outperformed most of my friends who do the trading stuff the meme stuff etc
now is it possible to trade better of course but for the majority of people like
yeah no for the actually for the majority of people they shouldn't be trading at all
right that's the thing right but when the thing, when you sell an asset, right, at some point, right,
is that trading just because you sold it?
It's like buying is investing and selling is trading.
I mean, that's not smart, right?
So is it trading just because you get rid of something before it crashes 50%?
No, right?
It's just smart.
It's like a smart move, mate, okay?
So promoting just buying forgetting
about the sell button is not good advice okay that we can agree on that in general okay and
the reason for that is because this is not real estate mate okay it's not like you buy and it goes
up forever no okay because 99.9 percent of the coins other than bitcoin might never come back
right so you must learn about the sell button, okay?
And for that, you need to have some strategy, whatever it is, to get rid of this asset so that you can keep your purchasing power, okay?
Which you've made some profits, you want to keep it, okay? You might skim like 10, 20% from the top because you sell a bit late,
but you sell, right? And you keep the rest of the dollars that you made so you can go and buy your family good stuff, okay?
So that is the logic, the underlying logic.
What strategy you use to get out is up to you.
I have some whatever, but you have to have something.
That's what I'm saying.
And if you do mathematical, if you calculate this
and you huddle everything or you have a sell strategy,
whichever it is, the sell strategy will always be better.
And this is not about selling every day, right is selling maybe once a once a cycle okay like you
just have to get out okay that's all i'm saying and so that's why hodling is just by pure logic
you don't even have to run the numbers it's not good okay so you're talking about profit taking
not trading which i don't think that even people say that they're hodling are opposed to
right like i i call myself a hodler because i don't trade between assets but i definitely
take profits but there's a huge distinction there yeah yeah that's exactly i'm not saying trade like
between assets go banana not at all just take profits right so but but hodlers for like just
because i think that might most people might misunderstand what you mean, right?
So they hardly never sell. Yeah, but that's not true, right?
Because you sell at some point for dollars or whatever stablecoin to take profits. So that you need to learn that.
So if you look at around the social media sphere, you will find almost nobody that tells you when to sell.
Almost nobody. They tell you when to buy because they make profits by promoting some stupid stuff but they will never come around say oh no it's time to sell
like almost never gonna happen right and that's why a lot of people hold the bag
and they get destroyed right and that's what I'm not I don't want to promote
that right I want to promote help like people actually making it right so
that's why I'm saying yes profit taking so to have some strategy for that right
so suddenly you open the door for
hey i need a strategy and you find 50 million options right and of course you need an option
that's simple to use and it's not overfitted and not over engineered and all these things
but you need to find one right so yes profit taking actually that's what it is right
i'm gonna hold my bitcoin and my gold and my tesla shares and my pole and my quick probably till i die
that's something that like has always super confused me it's like okay then what was the
point of buying those things if you're gonna hold them until until you die then why did you buy them
like are you just are you a collector sort of yeah i mean in in everquest for example i was in
the second best raiding guild in the world and we had these dragon kill points which were like you
go to raids you get these points and i never spent mine and i retired from the guild with
the most points in history and it just sat there in a database right? So some people might not think that makes any sense. And I guess
here's how I look at these assets that I only buy things I believe in. I don't buy things to trade.
I don't buy things to hope they go up and I'm going to get an exit. I buy things I believe in,
and if they die, they die. I don't get an exit. And if they become multi-billion dollar,
I don't get an exit. And if they become, you know, multi-billion dollar, trillion dollar companies. Cool. And I guess the way I spend money, well, I guess I make enough money for my income that I don't just borrow against these assets. That's another option. You could just hold your Bitcoin for the rest of your life,
borrow against it, and then leave it to your kids at some point.
I mean, there's options.
I suppose I wouldn't be opposed to,
the way I live my life is I don't buy anything
unless it doesn't affect my net assets.
So if I have $10,000,
I wouldn't spend more than, you know, $100 on anything. If I have 100,000, I'm not spending more than, you know, 1000 on something. If I have a million, I'm not spending more than, you know, 10,000. If I have 10 million, I'm not spending more than, you know, 100,000 on something.
you know, a hundred thousand on something. Uh, I just live a very frugal life and I just keep
stacking these assets and someday maybe I'll do something with them, but likely my Bitcoin will
go to my grave. So your position has even changed since the beginning of when you started talking,
because you're saying eventually you might take some profits. I could, sure I could.
And I think what Michael is saying here and what I've always said is that when you buy an asset,
Michael is saying here, and what I've always said, is that when you buy an asset, you need to keep in
mind what your purpose was for buying it, right? And then take profits strategically to fulfill
those purposes or that purpose. So like I've said before, right, when I bought cryptocurrency,
I was like, I want to make my life easier so that I don't have to work so many hours so that I can spend more time with my family.
And then I take strategic profits at times so that then I can take time off from work.
And other people maybe buy assets because they're like, I want to buy a car or I want to buy a house.
And so for those people, when people say things like never selling, it doesn't make any sense at all.
It sounds like cultish or collector.
I am very cultish.
All the things I mentioned, I am in those cults.
Okay.
I mean, like Tesla, I didn't buy it because I wanted to make money.
That wasn't really in my mind.
It was, I believe in what Elon is doing.
I believe in this company and I want to support him with my money. So a lot of these things, I believe in what Elon is doing. I believe in this company
and I want to support him with my money. So a lot of these things, I'm buying them to support them.
There's memes I've bought and NFTs I've bought that I will definitely never sell. And I didn't
buy them to make money. I bought them to support the things I believe in. Bitcoin, I believe in.
There's a difference here, right? Okay. you, okay, so you bought stock in Tesla
to support Elon, but you also drive a Tesla
or you bought a Tesla to drive and you drive that car
because that's what that money was spent for.
You bought it as a vehicle to drive it.
So when people buy Bitcoin or cryptocurrency as money just collecting it forever
it doesn't make any sense well like the tesla the tesla is a good example i didn't uh liquidate
any assets to buy that i took out a loan on maker dow uh to buy the Tesla. I put my ETH up and I borrowed against it and I bought the
Tesla. Right, but you drive, but you do drive the Tesla, right? Like you drive it around from place
to place to get someplace. You're not like, oh, I bought this. Yeah. I mean, I gave it, I gave it
to my, I gave it to my parents cause I don't drive much, but yeah, but yeah, I bought it to drive.
Yeah. And to support Elon. And to support Elon.
I didn't really drive it much.
Go Elon!
Is your Tesla scratched or something?
Did somebody try to mess it up or something?
I don't know.
My parents haven't said anything like that.
I don't think so, though.
I gave it to them a while back.
I put my Tesla in the garage and went to Dubai.
When I go back to my home country for a couple of days
for figuring some stuff out,
I hope that when I drive my Tesla out,
it's a beautiful car.
I love it.
I don't want it scratched or anything.
So I hope they leave it alone by then.
Hey, Rock, sorry.
Can I say something?
Yeah, please.
Yeah, sorry. My name is John. I'm a community manager at Ada. Just some clarification about the giveaway.
First of all, we already sent messages to the first five winners, and we'll be dming them asking them for the wallet and for
the next section rock can you please say a random number from one to five so based on that number
we will add it to this number that you said before for example someone said one
and you said three now so next number before okay i'm sorry no no worries but everything is unchanged you're
giving our audience money it's cool we'll take the complication uh let's go with four
okay four so just add to the numbers and by the way for the community how we will calculate it
we'll collect calculate it towards the end of the space so for example if the last
related towards the end of the space so for example if the last uh comment was 107 and we
have five more so you're very likely i mean sorry if you have four more you'll be the winner so
it's a game of numbers now and uh sorry for interrupting you're good man give our audience
money and we'll let you interrupt i don't think you said before i think everyone should retweet
the space to get some more eyeballs.
I think this is one of the best spaces in Twitter.
And again, thank you for having us.
Yeah, I mean, I guess there's like, look, there's exceptions to this rule, right?
I'm talking more generally like gold.
I don't, I never, like when would I ever sell my gold? I would sell my gold if like there was some catastrophic event and I needed some kind of liquidity.
It's there as an insurance.
I told one of my family members recently, they were having a hard time with money and
I told them I didn't want them to sell their Bitcoin.
So I told them, look, take some of my gold, go take it to a gold shop and you can sell
it and use that.
So look, I do sell, I guess, at times for some things,
but the general rule is like these assets, I believe in, I'm going to hold them, you know,
for the longterm. Hey, Rock, how you doing? Doing well.
Yeah. All right. This is Brian from Dame, the crypto wealth manager. I want to touch on a
couple of things that you were saying there. You you know from what we see from our clients that
have high six figures seven figure wealth in crypto um you know retail shouldn't be trading
this and then when it comes to possibly selling um no they they want to hold they want to talk
about bitcoin in terms of units and not price just like they do land like ah you know i have
a thousand acres in texas I want to have a hundred units of
Bitcoin, but really down the line, what ends up happening with those units is yes. Like you were
saying, um, they get borrowed against, and then they get put into some kind of structure where
those are going to get passed down. They could be like a generational skip trust, even where those
units of Bitcoin end up, you know, going to their grandkids. So what you're thinking about there, you know, is great in the way your mindset to it.
And, you know, that kind of asset is worth holding.
But then when it comes back to like what Michael was saying, Mizzy, on the altcoin stuff,
we really strongly advise our clients on having an exit plan before they hit the buy button.
I can't like reiterate that enough.
It's price or time.
If it doesn't hit the price that you want it to go to
and the event passes, you need to exit that position.
Otherwise, you just get wrecked.
And as we've seen here, this underperformance,
it's been pretty detrimental with the alt and meme coin market.
Yeah, when it comes to most alts, I'm not, I'm not going to
flame anyone for, uh, selling at some point. Uh, for me, I don't buy very many alts. I only buy
the things I really believe in. And I'm, I'm like kind of prepared to watch them go to, you know,
past unicorn or just die, go to zero. I mean, I'm okay with that when I make these purchases.
Yeah. And a lot of people too, kind of the mistake we see is they don't consider the
opportunity cost versus Bitcoin, which everybody should look at when buying something. If you're
looking at XRP and you just keep saying it's going to 10 bucks, as we know, that market cap
is going to be really blown out. Is that achievable? And is it going to outperform Bitcoin on the BTC ratio?
And so studying the opportunity cost before you hit the buy button and watching that is something that really people need to do as well.
Mila, you have your hand up?
Yo, Jim, it's a really interesting panel.
And honestly, lots of experts, lots of great minds.
Rok, you have mentioned something about an apocalyptic event, which really interested me.
Sorry, a what event?
Apocalyptic event.
Oh, yeah, yeah. I don't think they'll happen, but it's good to know I have some gold stashed away if it does happen.
way for if it does happen but yeah go ahead so i just wanted to pick your brain um in a in a maybe
But yeah, go ahead.
not so possible event sorry guys um what would you do to actually how would you sell your assets
because let's imagine that the world is burning all the exchanges are closed people are trying
to save their lives so how would you
actually liquidate your gold your bitcoin your assets and what would you liquidate liquidated to
uh i mean i suppose if we want to get like hypothetical here so you would trade gold for guns, ammunition, food, land, protection, whatever.
Whatever you need.
Sorry, I think I totally am with you on your question, girl. Why would anybody even want
gold in that situation? Wouldn't everyone just want food, water, guns, ammunition, land protection?
Does gold even hold value in the event of an apocalypse?
People just love shiny stuff.
I mean, gold has been money for 5,000 years.
I imagine it would still hold a good value.
I don't know.
Would it drop because people are liquidating their gold,
panicking like they did for toilet paper during COVID?
Maybe.
Or maybe gold would skyrocket because all other forms of money would be, you know,
useless if electricity was completely down or, you know, the dollar crashed completely.
I think gold, I have a good feeling gold would be a pretty strong asset to have then.
Now, if you want to hold like some of our, do, like a bunker of food and farmland, cool. I'm not going to take it to that extreme. I don't think we're going to have an
apocalyptic event. And I think having my gold and gold in smaller denominations too. I have
larger denominations of gold and I have smaller denominations of gold that can be traded for
things. I think gold would hold its value in a a I might even go massively up in value because it would be the only money
I think yes so that's also that's super interesting what you're mentioning and also there was a case
in nowadays European Union but but but well during second world war it wasn't european union yet uh where after second world war gold having
gold was prohibited and was even penalized by uh by death so in like you know i'm trying to
figure out like if we are potentially preparing for recession for this terrible scenario everyone
is expecting for possible worst case scenario,
how would we actually liquidate our assets?
Because all the solutions, all the infrastructure that we have nowadays,
I'm trying to think how would it perform in a state of emergency?
Well, even if the government bans these things,
the US banned gold and our personal ownership of gold, you know, in what, the late 30s or early 40s or I don't know the exact time.
But either way, people didn't really follow that rule.
A lot of people just held their gold under their mattress, in their drawer, under the ground.
They didn't give up their gold.
That's my understanding of it.
Exactly. I think what's important here is to have actual physical gold on hand, because if you just hold a voucher, which equals to some amount of gold, which is kept somewhere in a vault, in the case of an apocalyptic event, none of that is actually going to matter. So if we're talking apocalypse, then what is going to matter
the most is the actual gold ingots that are lying somewhere in either like a safe or,
as Rock has previously said, under a mattress or in like a case underground or something like that.
Fun story. Be careful where you, where you bury your gold. I had buried some gold at my
parents' house. And I told them, hey, I know my dad is always doing remodel and stuff. I said,
don't dig in this area. I came back and noticed he had a new generator and his,
he had some laborers dig the trench for the conduits.
And it was right where I had buried some gold.
It wasn't a lot.
It was, I think, a couple ounces of gold,
which today is valued at, you know, whatever, 7,000 almost.
But yeah, the laborers found the gold, I'm sure.
I didn't even attempt to get it back from them.
And it was kind of funny that my parents were, were laughing about it and said, uh, the next
week, uh, the laborers had a new truck.
And actually that, that is one, uh, one time where I did actually trade some Bitcoin. I traded it for gold. And the person I was trading to told me that he was a friend of mine and he's a super OG Bitcoiner, has a newsletter for a long time now, over a decade.
decade. And when I traded in Bitcoin for gold, he told me, hey, I really don't think we should do
this. I feel bad. You're my friend. We both know this is not going to be a good trade. And I said,
I know. Bitcoin's going to outperform gold. We both believe that. But that's not why I'm getting
this gold. It's not to make money. It's a hedge. I can't have all my assets in Bitcoin. So I traded some and within a year, Bitcoin had gone up 5x and gold hadn't
moved and he felt bad and he was like, man, I'm so sorry here. Come out to my ranch in Oregon and
I have a nice watch with your name on it. But I'm not sad that I did it. I'm glad that I did it. I'm glad that I did it. Did I lose everyone?
Am I lost?
I'm still here.
No, it's still here.
We can hear you.
Yeah, I still hear you.
By the way, in the background, I created a chart and I pinned it to the top.
So if somebody wants to check the difference between HODL, DCA, and some other strategy,
you can check it, visually check it, because I couldn't put it as fast as we were speaking.
So sorry, I'm a bit late putting that graphic.
But maybe it helps somebody.
Check it out.
Well, speaking of investment strategies, there is one thing I want to say,
because I'm sure there's newbies in the room.
There is no one-size-fits-all strategy for whether you hodl, whether you trade, how much you trade, how often you trade, what you trade, what you invest in.
Every single piece of that equation is unique to you like a fingerprint, and you have to understand you first.
understand you first. So I always tell everybody, take five bucks, 10 bucks. If you're brand new,
So I always tell everybody, take $5, $10.
go to crypto.com, buy a bunch of things that you've heard about on the internet, a dollar here,
50 cents here, whatever. One day over the next week, every single thing will be bloody red.
How does that make you feel? That's a really good litmus test to know before you start playing with
any real money. And I mean like more than a Starbucks. Start with a Starbucks.
How much you would spend?
12 bucks?
Is it 12 bucks now for a really highfalutin fancy Starbucks?
Start with 12 bucks.
Trade that.
Learn how to trade.
Move wallets.
Swap things.
Do this.
Do that.
Play with pennies.
That is the best part about crypto in onboarding.
You can play with pennies.
You can learn with pennies.
But the psychological test is
how do you feel when it's bloody? Actually, that's a good advice because a lot of people ask me,
hey, do you have a trade automation software or whatever? And they ask, hey, do you have paper
trading? I'm like, no. And also, why? It's useless. No, it's not useless. I love paper
trading. That's how I teach people how to trade. No, no. Paper trading is useless. Just take a little money. No, it's not useless. I love paper trading.
That's how I teach people how to trade.
No, no.
Paper trading is useless.
Let me explain, right?
So what you basically said contradicts that, right?
Because here's the thing.
If you trade with real money, a little money, right?
Like you said, perfectly correctly, little money.
You see every single thing that can happen, okay? You see the spreads, the fees, the fear because it's your own money,
right?
You see everything,
right?
You see how much
really stays in your pocket
after making a trade,
okay?
On paper trading,
because it's not real money,
you have no emotions
whatsoever.
No, no, no, no,
I do historical.
You're talking about
algorithmic trading.
You have to prove the model.
Okay.
I'm not done yet,
okay?
And then,
so no emotions and by the way, emotions are 90% of the issues that people have, not the model. Okay. I'm not done yet. Okay. And then, so no emotions.
And by the way, emotions are 90% of the issues that people have, not the strategy mostly,
right?
So basically you eliminate exactly what they should be learning.
And second, very often paper trading is implemented so that the fees are taken care of, but the
spreads are not taken care of.
Okay.
So you basically make more profits with very fast-paced strategies or whatever, manual trading, and it will look better than it actually will be.
And I have a lot of people that say, oh, I moved from paper to real money and I lost money.
Yeah, okay.
Oh, okay.
You mean real-time paper trading?
No, I mean paper trading.
No, you mean like live…
I think paper trading is the worst invention ever because people don't learn the real thing and they don't play with real money.
Even if it's $15, they should put it on the line.
They should.
They should just learn their paper trading where you just play with numbers that don't exist and there's not money.
You're never going to learn anything because you have to have the emotions.
You have to have the emotions to go through.
And if it's not money that you actually lose, you don't learn anything.
Okay?
Okay.
Because if real money is on the line, you will do different things, right?
I think we're talking about different things.
You will back out of the position much faster.
You will be afraid to lose profits you sell early.
But if it's not your money, who cares, right?
You can –
No, no, no.
Wait, wait, wait.
Wait, wait.
Stop.
Stop.
I think we're talking about different things.
I said I love paper trading because you said algorithmic trading. The reason I liked paper trading is because when I program a bot, I can literally program it and then historically look back and see if my assumptions were correct. It's called backtesting. It's called paper trading, okay?
Oh, okay. Backtesting. In the app that I'm using, it's called paper trading, okay? Oh, okay. Backtesting.
In the app that I'm using, it's called paper trading.
Yeah, but backtesting is the most...
I never heard anything else.
If you test a strategy historically, it's called backtesting.
That's it, right?
Okay.
Well, then I'm using the wrong word.
But backtesting is what I consider paper trading, where I'm not actually trading it.
I'm looking and making sure that my assumptions were correct before I implement a strategy where I am not humanly making and pressing the button every single time for trading.
Oh, yeah, that makes sense.
I mean, backtesting and paper trading both have flaws.
So, funny story.
Lunar Digital Assets used to be one of the divisions of our company
used to be an algorithm.
We used to build trading algorithms and trading tools and things like that.
And we learned the hard way over trial and error and just from reading books and studying
these things that, you know, backtesting is very dangerous.
It's really easy to fit an algorithm to a curve.
And then, you know, it doesn't work moving forward like you think it will, these models.
Now for paper trading, I mean, it has benefits. I'm not saying it doesn't have benefits. It's a
good starting point to see if an algorithm kind of makes sense, but it doesn't mean that it's
going to perform well. And it's kind of dangerous, actually, sometimes backtesting, if you don't
understand that. But anyways, so paper trading, I mean, look, I agree with dangerous, actually, sometimes backtesting if you don't understand that.
But anyways, so paper trading.
I mean, look, I agree with you, Michael, that the best thing to do is get your hands dirty and put real money on the line.
That's why I always tell people just get like $10, $50 of Bitcoin and then you'll start like looking into it and learning about it.
I'm not encouraging them to trade, but it's the same concept.
Get your hands a little dirty.
And if you actually trade with real money, you're going to have way different behavior but i'll also say i started paper trading when i was like 12 in just stocks just and it was a really good experience for me i learned a lot i it made
me start thinking about the world and compound interest in these kind of things um and i would
say yes like i don't think there's anything wrong with someone starting with
paper trading and then graduating to put some money in and and play with it um i think yeah
i'll i'll leave it at that i don't think paper trading is a bad 12. if you're 12 then yes i mean
like you shouldn't have a real account anyway right like you're not gonna but like if you're 12, then yes. I mean, you shouldn't have a real account anyway, right?
But if you're 18 or whatever it is in the US, 21, whatever, you can afford $15, $20 to play with the real thing, mate.
Like, it's so much better.
You learn much faster, and it's great.
But don't put a lot of money, of course.
That's a fair point.
Oh, wait.
Speaking of learning. There's enough platforms now that you can do that without paying a huge amount of course. That's a fair point. Oh, wait. There's enough platforms now that you can do that without
paying a huge amount of fees. You could put $2 into Tesla and $3 into something else or whatever.
That's a fair point. We have to really make sure that we explain to the audience because I am
dealing with a scam right now, trying to help a client recover her $450,000, private WhatsApp groups are not giving
you the secret sauce and sending you to a super secret, only the best people know about this
exchange where they can literally turn off your ability to withdraw. So every time you are going
to do something, look at the exchange where you're going to send your funds.
Is it custodial?
Is it a DEX?
When you look at the DEX, go look up the smart contract that controls all of the trading on that.
And when you go, you look at the contract, you go down, you click on contract on Etherscan or whatever platform,
and then you scroll down.
scroll down and if it says anything in the nature of turn off blacklist uh you know anything like
that that is a a even if it says it's a decentralized exchange if it has that in the
contract somebody can turn off your ability to take your money out or move it anywhere and that
is one of the biggest biggest scams that that is being affected that regular everyday people who think
they're getting into trading and they think they're learning what they're supposed to do
and they're doing it on these no-name DEXs, there's a whole way to determine whether or not
you should be sending your money to a platform. Wow, that's so horrific. Oh my God, she sent the
money to an exchange and that exchange is fraudulent
like yeah can we agree that should use only the big ones for now and to be like i mean
oh yes but see the big ones didn't do the advanced trading strategies that this one does
or the binary it's like binary options trading man how many times have i been pitched on that
i'm still uncertain i think there's some realness to it, but it's kind of MLM style. Well, it is, but interestingly, she's got 1.2 million in the
wallet and I can see it in the wallet and I've done all of the tracing. The problem is that I
can't hack the key that would unlock her account. So I'm having to go through and it's hosted in
China on Alibaba. I've tried to go through there and find those people and see if I can get them to tell me who the person is,
because I think the nexus is in California and Colorado.
So I actually think they're Americans, and I'm happy to send Kash Patel right to their front door.
But there's all of these different mechanisms.
I mean, crypto is ripe for fraud, and it's usually targeted at the new people,
right? Or very faith-based. That's the other big thing that I have seen is they go after the faith
base, like Barnage. And I'm sitting there busting this scam before they're even doing their pitch,
not realizing I'm talking to the guy who is the coordinator of it. And I'm telling him all the reasons why this is literally illegal in 17 states.
It's a misdemeanor to participate, a felony to promote it.
I did it.
I did the whole thing.
I literally mapped out all of the legal reasons why people were going to jail.
And he gets on a webinar with hundreds of people and pitches the whole darn thing.
And they fell for it.
And I'm like, how can I not stop these things in real time? I literally want
to be like, no, no, no, hell no. Right? That's what we have to protect everybody from. And we
have to stop being so sensitive about calling things out. I mean, there was a time when Andreas
Antonopoulos and I and three other people were the top, most highly fraudulently added advisors to crypto projects during the ICO craze.
And we just got sick of it and just started popping off.
And we had a little group and he'd be like, are you speaking at this event?
Are you advising this company?
And boom, like full blast.
We have to start calling it out. My mom DM'd me yesterday that someone DM'd her from a new phone number saying,
hey, this is Rock.
How are you doing?
Yep.
My mom.
Yep.
My sister, one of my sisters actually got scammed by one of my impersonators.
There's like, it's ridiculous.
But anyways, okay, guys, let's, I want to jump to another topic here.
Let's see who here uh has an opinion on current
tariffs how these are going to affect our industry how they're going to affect the world
uh what's going down should everybody be panicking uh who wants to jump in here brian do you uh do
you have you haven't gotten a lot of chance to speak. Do you have any opinions on this stuff?
All good. So as for the tariffs and what we see here, really what we're actually looking at is the VIX index. And so the measure of put buying, right? And we see the VIX had spiked today,
hitting like 36, upper 30s. You know, it just seems like this may be-
You know, it just seems like this may be overspoken.
VIX is about puts. I thought it was volatility.
VIX is about puts.
I thought it was volatility.
Yeah, the volatility index, right?
Measuring the put buying.
And then so you're seeing the spike here.
The last time it spiked into the 30s was in April of 2022 when we started interest rate hikes, right?
And then about six, seven months after that, the crypto market bottomed.
And then we started the new bull market.
And then the time before that was COVID in 2020 when the VIX went to 60.
So we tend to see here that this is just an overcorrection.
We do like the way that Bitcoin is holding.
And so the Monday, Trump may come out over the weekend.
It's been a couple of weeks since he's manhandled prices by saying something over the weekend.
We could see that and easily be higher here come Monday in the stock market and in crypto.
I think this is a bit short lived.
Yeah, Bitcoin is holding pretty strongly.
I mean, it's I think a good sign.
Someone has some noise in the background.
Can everyone mute in between talking, please?
But I guess, yeah, anyone else have opinions on this before I jump in?
I had Richard pin something that was from, you know, from someone who had, like, a really interesting take on the tariffs.
Hang on, let me see who it was by.
Sorry, Clint Russell, who said that this is actually an attempt to create trillions in revenue and potentially eliminate the income tax. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, a lot of people
are talking about this as if it's just reciprocal tariffs, but it's more than that, isn't it?
I mean, it's a much larger plan. Yeah.
Um, Seth is here also. Hello, Seth, how you doing? Mind your biz?
We I don't know if you heard the premise, but we're getting into tariff talk and global markets.
I love Seth's name. It sounded like you introduced Seth and I told him to mind his business.
Mind your biz is his name for anyone who doesn't know.
Oh, hey, this is just Twitter being Twitter.
It took a second and either my phone rugged or the entire system rugged and I did not hear a single thing.
Thank you for the introduction.
Surely only 20% of what he said was true.
And if any of it was flattering, well, you know, I received that.
Thank you so much.
Thanks for having me.
I go by the handle Mind Your Biz and my name is Seth.
Seth, what's your opinion on the tariffs and on the global markets in general?
Is it going to go much lower?
Is this good for the U.S.?
Is it good for the world?
Is it good for labor class?
I don't know if you can hear me, and I apologize if I've interrupted.
Twitter is doing one of those special types of rugs where I can't hear you at all.
I'm going to jump down and then jump back up because this is maddening.
Perfect.
Okay, sounds like you couldn't hear anyone.
All right.
So I'm kind of in the middle on these tariffs.
I think the world has been going on a path for a long time that was unsustainable.
The U.S. has been on a path that seems unsustainable for us.
And I think a lot of other countries have benefited from the system we have in place, which is like we export money and financial services and then import goods.
I think there's benefits to that.
It's given us a nice way of life for a long time.
But it has hollowed our production.
It has greatly strengthened our competitors.
The U.S., I saw a recent study that out of 63 key sectors, important things, important industries,
the U.S. used to lead in, I think the number was like 55 of them.
of them. And now China leads us in like 57 of them. And so I don't know if Trump's tariffs,
And now China leads us in like 57 of them.
the way he's doing it, are the answer. But I think the world has been on a weird path for a
long time of everyone going into debt. I think the U.S. has been on a generally negative path
for probably 30, 40 years. And I'm open to some kind of experimenting
and shaking things up. And for the US, as a US person, us thinking a little more about strategically
about what's good for us and not just the whole world. Maybe that's a mean way to think. I don't
know. But I am definitely concerned what these tariffs will look like.
You know, I think there's some validity to trade wars are kind of bad for everyone.
But if it's part of a broader strategy, I'm open to playing this experiment a little bit.
And just because, you know, stock market crashes doesn't really mean too much to me,
other than that's a market signal that enough people believe
that it's either a bad thing or a short short term uh bad thing anyone else want to jump in here
i don't really think i'm qualified to speak on the tariffs uh so i guess we're just going to wait and see uh because again as it's
always been with um any types of markets both crypto like the crypto market and the traditional
financial markets uh right now there is a lot of fog i guess we could call it like fog of war that's been happening and uh we will not see any substantial kind of results
of the tariffs influence on the world economy um up until the panic kind of settles a bit because
right now what we've seen like the market crash um like the crash of the American markets, the stock market, I'm talking about that,
has been in a lot of ways mostly emotional, I believe.
So people are freaking out.
The market is freaking out because the people are freaking out.
So I guess we just have to wait and see.
AK just jumped in.
AK, did you hear the premise? Do you have any opinion on this?
AK is, I think one of my, one of my brightest friends on this kind of stuff has run multiple funds and had some pretty good performance on these, traded in a lot of global markets. Yeah, what's your opinion on this, AK?
I think it's just a normal part of the cyclical cycles. I mean, if you were to look at the performance of the traditional markets
as well as the crypto markets over the last year and a half or so.
They have greatly, greatly outperformed the last multiple years in terms of returns.
So with any cyclical type of markets that we know exist, you're going to see some ups and some downs.
And you're going to see a little bit of cooling down.
I mean, yeah, we're down, but what are we down from?
We're down from where we were a few months ago.
We're not down from where we were years ago.
We're actually at all-time highs on most asset classes ever right now at this turn of this year, right? The S&P is the highest.
The Nasdaq is the highest.
Bitcoin hit all-time high, 108K or 110K.
Ethereum, ironically enough, hasn't moved at all.
But most of the assets have been greatly inflated.
And what we saw at the same exact time is that there was a lot of strength in the U.S. dollar, which is a phenomenon, right?
Usually before any one side breaks, both sides usually look like they're too frothy.
So when we're seeing a very strong U.S. dollar, rates that are steady, they still haven't been moved or dropped,
and risk assets are at all-time highs and continuously pumping,
something is at a break, right?
So with Donald Trump coming into office,
with his agenda and how he likes to play,
it's in a way right now trying to weaken the dollar
because the dollar has been getting stronger and stronger and stronger under Donald Trump.
He's looking to make a weaker U.S. dollar because he wants to make the stocks go higher.
But in the meantime, until that effect takes change,
the stocks will obviously take a hit, a discount, until the U.S. dollar adjusts, in my opinion.
And as we start to see the pressure of interest rates begin to slowly drop as Powell and the Fed here make their decisions as the year progresses,
you will see that slowly the markets and the risk assets will start to come back and
inflate again because the cost of risk reduces, as well as the actual cost of the dollar goes down
against other global currencies, which makes risk now a little bit more padded because the dollars
are cheaper to get than they are today, given that the U.S. dollar basket has been so expensive, while stocks have also been so expensive.
So that puts us so much pressure on global exports and demand.
So that's my take on what's going on right now.
If I sounded like gibberish to you, too long did not read. This is just short-term
pain. And I think the long-term gain will continue. I don't think we are at the point
where it's like catastrophic crash levels, but the markets are very, very inflated and they need to
cool down. And that's what we're experiencing for probably the better part of this summer,
probably until the end of the summer.
How do you see crypto getting affected by this, by the way?
Your crypto should actually be suppressed, not very much heavily affected. It should be suppressed by this. So this
is a really good opportunity for a lot of people to start getting into the risk assets because as
they were inflated and we're hearing them drop now and things are crashing, that's okay. I'm
telling you, that's literally kind of like the reset spring for things to go a lot higher.
So I think, Michael, you're a technical analyst as well.
So, you know, for crypto, I think when we zoom out and look on the fundamental side, any time that the interest rates have actually went down or improved, we see Bitcoin tremendously jerk up to the upside because the amount of, I guess,
systematic leverage that humans are willing to take to participate in unsystematic risk or
leverage, which is Bitcoin, we don't know where it will end up being in five or 10 years,
but the people that are participating in it are willing to bet against them not caring about cost of systematic risk to take on risk in the world
of Bitcoin.
So our blockchain, which honestly, it's worked out every single time for the last seven or
eight years.
The difference is in 2020, when all physics of actual reserves broke and the Fed printed six trillion dollars, there was so much money pent up in the system and interest rates went down to near zero.
in blockchain and in Bitcoin because there was so much pent up money that was so cheap
that it took the risk of Bitcoin and it brought it to where it is today.
So it's a phenomenon.
Every time we see interest rates drop, you're going to see crypto go higher, in my opinion.
So just suppressed an opportunity for people to buy.
I mean, a lot of people are kind of thinking that Trump is on this 40 chess move to purposely
push prices down so that the Fed is forced to respond with lower interest rates, which lower
interest rates can drive all of the rest of Trump's agendas, right? It drives everything. It supports the
immigration policy. It supports the stock market. It can counter some of the negatives of the
tariffs while he's building out his plan, which look, I'm uncertain of all this, but it seems,
when people first told me that I was like, come on, you're just like,
this is just hopium. You're just like,
you're just like trying to give Trump a lot of credit here.
But the more I'm looking at it,
the more it seems like this actually makes a lot of sense, man.
I read a really good thread on this earlier, but I couldn't find it.
We have Alex Damsker here. Good to see you. How you doing?
We have Alex Damsker here. Good to see you. How are you doing?
Hey, how are you?
Doing well.
A beautiful sunny Friday.
Yeah, it is. It's really nice.
I'm in Scotland.
It's been rainy for a while.
What's that, Darren?
I said not in Scotland.
Speak for yourself.
I'm in Puerto Rico.
It's always nice and sunny.
We get like 15-minute little rainstorms, and then it's sunny again.
We get 15 minutes of sun.
Sorry.
It's beautiful there.
It is gorgeous.
I'm not going to pick a bone. I not going to pick a bone.
I was going to pick a bone.
You're in Canada right now, I think.
Myself?
Yeah.
Yeah, Canada.
What's the weather like there?
It's always cold.
It's always chilly.
There's always just some hip.
So I've been thinking
okay sorry I don't want to sidetrack from this too much
but I gotta throw this in
for places like Canada
and Greenland that are cold
I'm kind of
surprised there's no movement to support
global warming
let's pump out emissions
and the
warm areas will get really hot,
but the cold areas will get like livable.
Well,
a lot of them are building the data centers and stuff because it costs less to
keep them cold.
Yeah.
Bitcoin data centers in Greenland has been a thing for a long time.
Montreal is actually the cheapest place I think,
or one of the cheapest places in the world to get energy because of that reason.
It's the water and the coldness make it very cheap to maintain servers out there.
I had some people pitching me on investing in some Bitcoin mining facilities in Russia because they had, I guess,
they had some kind of facilities that they needed to heat just to do their business
because it was just too cold.
And so they were building a Bitcoin mining facility up against this other facility,
and then they were transferring all the heat to the other facility just to warm it.
Interesting. Okay, let's get back to the topic here, guys. So, yeah, Alex, we're talking about tariffs. I don't know how
much you heard, but I'm guessing you have some opinions on this and just generally global markets.
You know, I ran a whole space explaining tariffs and economics and how they work.
So it's on my profile.
I think the whole space was only like maybe 90 minutes.
So if you want to listen to it, anybody wants to listen to it, you can listen to it.
It goes through, you know how they work how they
don't work when they work um and uh it even predicted the you know powell recantation today
so um you know i'm not surprised by anything that's going on right now uh and uh yeah you know
And, you know, I kind of said a lot of what I was going to say.
I've pinned it to the top.
I just pinned it as well.
Oh, okay.
But, yeah, let's get your opinion on it here.
Yeah, we didn't even get to, like, the CPI and USAID stuff, but we did talk a lot about the you know all the goldman and all that
stuff um so fundamentally um so tariffs really only work uh let's tariffs really were really
part of this era of mercantilism and there's a reason why we don't really have them before.
And there's a reason why globalism was the era,
like happened from the seventies forward.
And the push is not entirely to put people out of work
or anything like that.
Globalism was actually the driving force
towards world peace, right?ism was actually the driving force towards world peace,
right? That was actually the whole thing, because it turned out that something called the McDonald's
thesis turned out to be actually quite true up until Yugoslavia broke down. And actually,
after Yugoslavia broke down, still true. Two countries that have a McDonald's are very unlikely to go to war,
didn't go to war, right? Except for the Yugoslavia breakdown, because all the sides of Yugoslavia
as it broke down all had McDonald's in it, and they were at war. And so that was the one exception
to the McDonald's thesis. By the time you got a McDonald's, you were so embedded in world trade,
right? You had economic interests that were so deep that you did not actually have any interest
in going to war with your neighbors. War with your neighbors was the biggest problem that happened,
that was the pervasive issue against war, like that was happening with like, war happened because
people just constantly were fighting their neighbors for various reasons, because they
wanted to feel safe, because they needed more money, because they had scarce resources, whatever
it was. But following the 70s and 80s, because of nuclear weapons, right, after the salt talk
treaties and things like that,
because now war was not about just killing your neighbors. It was about eliminating human,
the entire human race, right? This was the now the possibility. The big issue was we have to end war.
So now the stakes were so high that it was like, how do we actually end this? And so the whole idea was we have to figure out how we can make it so that it's no longer in anyone's interest to have war.
So that is why globalism arose, right?
That's the whole issue of it.
That is why we had GATT and all of these other, which is the predecessor of NAFTA and these other treaties.
of these other, which is the predecessor of NAFTA and these other treaties, all of that came from
this idea that we have to make it not in anyone's interest to have war, right? So that's where we're
coming from. That is all post-mercantilism, which is a 1700s and 1800s idea where tariffs were common
all the time, because that was this zero-sum game where everyone was
trying to export more than they imported. And it turns out no one wins when that happens, right?
We're way past that idea. We're not comparing the amount that we export to the amount that someone
else imports of our goods. That doesn't actually serve anyone's purposes.
So that equation is stupid. You don't see it as any issue?
You don't think it's an issue at all for a country to...
We're not comparing.
That's not actually how it works.
The way it works, because we can't punish someone into buying something of ours.
It doesn't actually work for us to say, we're going to tax you into buying more of our stuff.
What actually works is for us to say, we're going to make stuff that you want a lot.
And then we're going to withhold it if you don't do what we want, right?
That's how it works.
That's how, for example, the federal government manipulates the states.
We want you to raise your drinking age
to 21, but we have no right to make you raise your drinking age to 21. We do have federal funds
that we control for your highways. So we are going to tell you that we're going to withhold
the federal funds from you until you raise your drinking age.
You don't need, you know, look, you can continue to operate without federal funds for your highways
if you want, but if you raise your drinking age, we'll give you the federal funds. It works when
there's an incentive, right? With a problem that we've had, this actually stems from the dollar.
Or you can call that like blackmail also or something like that.
But what it is is incentivizing people to do things. It's totally, it is blackmail when it's
something that someone doesn't really want to do. But that is really what, right? That's,
that's, that is how things get done. But it's a, it's a combination of diplomacy,
get done. But it's a combination of diplomacy, trade, and military, right? But it doesn't really
work saying, I'm going to punish you into taking more goods of ours that you don't want. Because
fundamentally, the governments of any country aren't determining how much of anything is being
imported or exported. It's the companies and the consumers
of any country that are determining how much is being imported and exported.
And that is based on their own internal demand. And no government can force demand. That is one
of the core business concepts that every country fundamentally learns no matter what, or else you
end up with what the EU started with these butter mountains and milk lakes. And we have huge amounts of reserves because what ends up happening is if
you try to force demand, you find out soon you can't, and you end up having huge amounts of
reserves of something that you can't sell, right? And nobody wants that. So what ends up happening is you can't force someone to manipulate
demand. You have to generate demand, right? You have to create something that other people want.
And this has been our fundamental problem is unequal demand. What we've been fomenting in
other countries is demand for our culture. But we haven't been manufacturing things at a price
that they want. That's been our fundamental problem. And that's why our exports have not
been meeting the demand that we need. We need to export more. We need to sell more goods. That's
fundamentally true. Not compared to other people. That's just compared to our own needs to actually
generate more money. How do we sell more goods? We need to change what it is that we're producing,
right? At the price that we're producing it. We need to change our business model. That's what
we need to do. But that has nothing to do with forcing other countries to buy. You can't force other countries to buy.
It just makes them mad.
And that's exactly what's happening now.
You're saying it as if it is like a free market
and we're disrupting the free market.
But if other countries are tariffing us,
which there are definitely cases where they are,
and we're not tariffing back,
then we've broken this free market model, right?
But very, very few of them are and very
like our tariffs make no sense i mean i don't know if you know like some of our tariffs we're
tariffing countries that have no people like i posted that was hilarious did you see that
there's penguins there's only penguins we're tariffing the penguins but i do have a question
for you okay so one of the things really quick quick, one of the things that the tariff has done...
What does that matter, though? If you tariff all countries, if you do a blanket tariff, of course there's going to be some countries that might not have a material benefit, right?
Right. Wait, I have a question.
So the tariffs have driven the treasuries lower, and we have nine point something trillion dollars in treasuries that mature this year.
We're going to be able to refinance that debt at a lower interest rate.
That is a good thing that nobody is talking about the tariffs, and I want to factor that into your analysis.
That is all.
Okay, so one of the problems that we have, though, is that we're not actually able to generate, like we're dropping our revenue.
That is the biggest problem that we have right now.
So one of the problems that we have is that the real value of our dollar is actually declining right now.
So our ability to refinance in general is going to decline no matter what,
because the real value of our dollar is going to decline and is continuing to decline
unless we get more actual goods and service value underpinning it.
goods and service value underpinning it. But that's the whole point. Yes. But we've got six,
is it $6 trillion worth of investment commitments already to build manufacturing and produce things
in America? And there's no tariffs in America. And that little bit of blackmail leverage is
actually working and bringing home and reshoring a lot of manufacturing that went
offshore to avoid the tariffs. So that's a net positive. We've got lower treasury rates,
which is not good for social security and not necessarily good for pension plans that are
relying on treasuries. But at the meantime, we can refinance our debt at a lower interest rate.
That's a net positive. And I think that this mass hysteria
is FUD. And in six months, people are going to go, damn, I can't believe that worked.
Yeah, but tariffs don't just train a workforce, build factories, and all of that stuff.
So the issue is China has monopolized all of this because they've had one direction
and sort of one government in various practice for years, lots of years, whereas America basically changes everything every four years.
It goes a different direction.
And I agree, but if you look at how quickly that XAI built their data center and you look at from raw materials to shipping to customers, one factory
builds Starlinks. I think that what is going to happen here is the way that we manufacture things
in the United States is going to be revolutionized because we're doing things old school. We're still,
you know, 30 years ago. Heck, our government is using software from the late 60s, early 70s.
Like that's got to change.
I think there's so many things and innovation, and you now see a whole bunch of people stepping
up to volunteer to fix these things.
I think that we're going to experience an innovation cycle in all of our industries
that is going to change the game.
I think we're analyzing this based on what is, not on what will be and
what could be and what we're aiming for. I think everybody has to get on the same page on we need
massive infrastructure improvement. And part of the way you drive down the cost of production is
by producing more. And if you, as a government, attempt, and look, as a free market guy,
I'm hesitant to say this, but if as a government, you force the production on shore, you force us
to innovate and find ways to make things cheap like China does. China doesn't just make things
cheap because of their cheap labor. That's one factor. It's because they've gotten really,
really good at producing things.
And they use lots of automation in their factories.
They're probably as good or better at automation than us.
So if we can start learning again by forcing it a bit, which is what China kind of did in many ways. I mean, China forced people to buy their stuff by one.
China forced people to, you know, buy their stuff by like one, there's all these non-free market things that China did to support that sector because they saw it as a strong sector.
So they banned their citizens from using US apps, right?
They can't use Facebook and YouTube and all these things.
So they forced their own, the use of their own things.
things that seemed to work for them. They subsidized multiple industries like EVs and cars
That seemed to work for them.
and other industries to get the prices down in the short term enough that they can basically
make all the other countries just go, we're just going to buy your stuff. We're going to stop
producing it. And then they pull the subsidies away. And now they don't even need the subsidies
because they're the best at producing these things. So I don't like that manipulation, but if all the countries were free market,
I'd say, let's not do any tariffs. Let's have no tariffs anywhere. But that's not the case.
The other countries are tariffing. They are subsidizing. They are banning their citizens'
use of our services and apps. So it's not such a, I wish it was a free market, but it's not.
But here's our fundamental problem though. We can't, we're never going to be competitive
in terms of our cost of labor or our cost of manufacturing because of the dollar, right?
This is what happened when the dollar became the global currency.
Every other country is essentially able to manufacture, right? All the manufacturing
companies manufacture because they essentially have their currency as a fraction of a dollar. China literally made its renminbi an eighth of a dollar.
Like everything is a fraction of a dollar. We can't have our currency be a fraction of a dollar.
That's the problem. We're always going to be the value of a dollar. we our cost of living is always going to be based on the dollar so more
expensive other countries can have the same goods and services and they do the same things they live
the same life but everything is a fraction because they can base their point but there's there are
industries where we have competing so like look at Elon, what he did with rockets.
Because we can't...
Wait, wait, wait.
When we become...
One second.
Okay.
One second.
This is fundamentally the problem.
We traded our manufacturing ability.
We traded the cheapness that we could have for the strength of the dollar, which only benefits people who are
operating in other countries that can actually use the strength of the dollar, right?
So if you are manufacturing in another country, the strength of that dollar works to your
advantage. If you're traveling in another country, if you're investing in another country,
the strength of the dollar works to your advantage. If you are maintaining your entire
existence, the circle of your personal economy stays in the U.S., you're fucked, right? The only
benefit that happens is when you have the dollar and you move it to outside the country. That is
when you see the benefit of that dollar actually show its strength. It doesn't actually work if you keep it within the
U.S. because other countries fractionalize it. And they do that on purpose because that is the way
they use the dollar as the basis of the power of their economy, but they fractionalize it to make
the cost of what they're doing a fraction of whatever it is in the
U.S. and that is actually a very good idea for them. The other thing is about the bond market.
Remember that falling treasuries can mean right inflation going down but they also mean growth
slowing. You have to see when when treasury falling, you have to understand which one is actually
happening. What we're seeing right now is inflation rising and slowing growth. It's not like we're
looking at the 70s again, right? But we're looking at this period where we have both of these
happening, which is a form of stagflation. We have to actually look at what's happening here,
not what we wish is happening or what we hope is happening. We have to actually look at what's happening here, not what we wish is happening or
what we hope is happening. We have to look at what is happening for most people, not just asset
holders. And here's the thing. Many of the people speaking on the stage are asset holders. Many of
the people listening are not, right? So we have to think about both of the sides of what's happening here.
People who are listening are probably not asset holders. If you are not holding assets, if you're
not like a significant portion of your net worth is not held in things that grow over time where
you can sell them at a higher price or you make money while you hold them those are assets then and you're primarily living from
salary then you are basically not making money from this economy right you're
not okay wait wait wait wait because this is the whole point of this America
first agenda okay and I'm keep in mind I was a Bernie delegate and I'm a Maha girl, but I freaking love Doge.
Here's the deal.
The point that is being made is that we want to be the blockchain and AI epicenter of the
world.
So what happens when everyday Americans have the ability to be running four or five AI agents
that are doing the work for them?
We're going to end up with robot
tax. Those agents will be taxed, but we the people as humans will not. That's the end-all goal.
And so if we have that, then we can improve innovation. We can improve exponential growth
in our GDP without actually working more hours per week as human beings. Once we get to that point where we unleash that innovation,
all of this becomes moot. And that's the end all goal. And that's why it's so important that we
drive this innovation and we drive it now instead of all the FUD. We all have to get on the same
mindset and say, we are doing this. We are freaking winning. I mean, you got to think of it like,
this is our football team. We are going to the Super Bowl, and we are going to crush it.
And if we all got on that same page, we absolutely would.
I'm not opposed to having AI agents.
I'm just saying that when they replace people, we have to remember that there are people that are being replaced, right?
And those people don't have alternate sources of income.
No, no, those people are going to run that. No, I want those people to run them because right now
you have corporations training the agents based on their people and those people won't get
remunerated. That's why we need blockchain so that they get royalties from their intellectual
property. Hold on a second. Hold on a second. That's what we're seeing right now is
all the downsizing, right? We are seeing a lot of people who are losing jobs to AI agents and
to robotics and to like, that is the innovation that's happening. And that is actually one of
the ways that America is competing is, you know, like Elon Musk made Tesla's factories completely
automated, right? Which does reduce the cost. That's great,
you know, and machines don't complain. They don't take off of work. They don't come in late. Then
when they stop working, you just replace them. It's, you know, they're for the owner's perspective,
they're amazing, right? But we do end up with more and more people who are no longer going to be required to do manufacturing
and working jobs. Now, I am all for innovation. I think there's a huge amount of innovation here,
but I also think a new economic model is required. We need a post-industrial economic model,
a completely new model. And that is, you know, look, we're on our whatever, you know,
economic model here, right? And we're a pretty new country. So, you know, look, we're on our whatever, you know, and economic model here, right? And we're a pretty
new country. So, you know, look, economic models change. I don't know why we have to kick and
scream and say like, no, no, this economic model can't change. No, no, no. Look, you know, economic
models change over time. We've we're past hunter gatherer. That was an economic model. Like we're
we're we're past scarcity. I think that that's another thing that we have to start
acknowledging is that one of the things that a lot of the innovation that's happened already
has created is that we are a post-scarcity society. We have a distribution issue. That's
really our big issue. But we have to acknowledge that, honestly, we are post-scarcity. So that creates a different
economic problem. We have to have a different distribution model. That's okay. And I think
that we can be leaders in innovation. I think that we can create a completely, you know, like a
completely innovative society. I just think that we have to approach it from a completely different
mindset. And I think we have to acknowledge that, look, we require fewer people to run our economy. And there's nothing wrong with
that. I think that's amazing. And I think that the people that are needed to run the economy
should be rewarded for the work in their economy because they are incredibly necessary.
But I don't think that the people who are not required to run the economy should be completely disregarded. I think that they exist. What are we going to do,
shoot them, leave them under a bridge? I think that's stupid, right? Look, they're also here,
and they're also like nascent incubators of innovation. We need to provide resources for
everyone to basically be whatever they can be, right? We have a new era of
humanity coming. And I think that that's something that we should honor. I think something exciting
is going to happen. I think that everybody should be excited about what's going to happen instead of
fearing what's going to happen and trying to hold on to this position. I also think America has been a pretty shitty leader. I think that we are,
we get so upset at other people, like, you know, not risk, like not respecting us or not,
you know, trying to compete or come after us or something like that. Look, being a leader sucks.
I don't know why people want to be leaders, to be sucks. I don't know why people want to be leaders,
to be honest. I don't know why people always fight for that position. Being a leader means
taking all the blame and none of the credit. Being a leader means you're the first one shot.
Being a leader is the one that has to come up with all the ideas and most of them don't work,
right? Being a leader is hard. It is a hard job, but we have done it for a very long time and
people will hate us for it. But that's what we chose to do. We chose this position. We chose to
be a leader and we resent people for not saying, oh, we love you for being a leader. Like nobody
loves the leader. Certainly not all the time. Like I think that we have to just acknowledge,
like, look, we're, we're a leader in a global economy, and we have to basically understand that that role can suck a lot
of the time. And it's just the way it is. But we have to be good leaders by supporting the rest of
the world sometimes. Like, that's just the way it goes. That's what leaders do. So my mindset is
very different, I think, maybe than the rest of the people on the stage, and that's okay. But I still think it's a very valid one. And I also think that it's, you know,
I think something super exciting is happening here. I think that, you know, we need to look
forward to this time that's happening. And I think if we're open to considering some change,
I think something really wonderful is happening. I think technology
and economic change are like, it's a juncture that no one has experienced before.
And something really wonderful is happening.
So generally, because you went on a lot of paths there. So generally, it sounds like you think tariffs is not the way, that we need some other new path.
You want us to change something, but do you generally agree or disagree and give a percentage of confidence in your answer about what Trump is doing?
I don't think tariffs only work when they're targeted at specific things, right?
Like, I used to work for the U.S. trade rep.
We had tariff wars all the time, and they were ridiculous.
We had one with China where we had a tariff war.
This is where tariffs actually did something.
We were mad at China, and so we had a tariff war where we put a tariff on 10 cars that were coming in,
10 types of cars. Only two of them were actually sold in the US. They put a tariff on 10 of our
cars, only, no, like one of which was actually sold in China and eventually ended up giving us some more trade in to China. That's what ended up
happening. They're targeted on very specific things, right? They're not this or die. They're
not like, they're not ultimatums, right? So what if, what if Alex, and this goes for everyone, but what if we, again, I'm a free market guy. I hesitate to say these kind of experiments. But what if we strategically went through one by one, God, this sounds so much like USSR price control type government mingling. So I'm very hesitant to say this, but it's an interesting thought experiment. What if one by one, we went through each tariff and we said, okay, cars, we have enough car manufacturers here in the US. And we think that's an important industry. We're just going to thousand percent tariff all other cars. We're just not going to import other cars.
that we don't have here in the United States,
we're going to put zero tariff on these.
Eggs, we make enough eggs and poultry,
you know, pork and things here.
We export a lot of them.
But let's just put a million percent tariff on these
and stop bringing them in from other countries.
What if industries where we know we can do it,
we don't put tariff, we do put tariffs.
In industries where we can't, we do put tariffs.
I mean, like think about a tariff. So if you buy a good, a good from China and let's say it costs
99 cents to make it here in the U S but it costs $1 to make it in China, uh, or sorry, the other
way around a dollar here, 99 cents in China, including shipping, then generally people are
going to buy the 99 cent thing. Right. So, but if we were to put a million percent tariff on that, it's not going to raise the
price of goods by a million percent or anything like that, because we actually can produce
it here for one penny more.
Now, that's not the actual how the real world is set up.
But on each of these individual items, there are either slight price differences or massive
price differences.
And if there's massive price differences, it's probably because we just can't make that here. We don't have those materials here or
something like that. But what do you, what does everyone think about this? Maybe, maybe let
everyone else jump in because Alex, you went on a pretty good rant there, but, um, and then Alex,
I'd like to hear from you too. Anyone have a thought on, on this? Is this a crazy, it's to
me, it sounds like this is like most government things though. They sound great in principle, but the government fucks them all up.
So I wouldn't trust something like this, but it's an interesting thought experiment.
Hey, guys.
I'm glad to be here.
Have a couple of points about it.
So I think, first of all, balancing the tariffs is pretty tough.
Because in your example, yeah, you put tariffs on the on the
cars but you you don't put them on some some stuff that you have to use to produce them and at the
same time even though when you talk about the poultry and the eggs and things like that in the
supply chain of producing all the stuff there might be a lot of import actually so
that's I think why and why one of the reasons that the Trump went this kind of
the super simple way they put they kind of found the trade deficit basically like
the bottom line right and they extrapolated from there because that's just the simple way
and when you do the the hard way yes maybe you can fine tune it by the by the end of the day
the efficiency is better but by the end of the day you're gonna spend like several millions
dollars to to figure this out you're gonna spend years and years to do so you're gonna spend a
thousand of resources to actually put tariffs in place and enforce them.
Because one thing is to put tariffs and the other thing is to enforce them.
So when you, you know, pick and choose small cherries, it's hard to enforce them.
So by the end of the day, these tariffs don't work.
So they went the easy way.
They put the kind of blanket tariffs on everything
because it's easy to enforce.
It's easy to get the results and it's easy to see.
But on top of that,
I don't think that the tariffs
and balancing the trade deficit
is the kind of end goal, right?
Because we can think about it
from the point of view of the game theory right
so that's one of the steps and now america have something to trade and not only the goods now
they can trade the tariffs and now they made sure that all this chatter all this you know rumors that uh they will do it or not uh they're
gonna back down or not uh will they do it or not you know there was a lot of uncertainty now
everybody knows that this is for real they're gonna put the tariffs and next time if they say
okay now we're gonna you know put sanctions or tariffs on this thing or on this country, everybody will understand that they will do it by the end of the day.
So I think that's more about the politics and about having the strong position in the negotiations and trying to get something you need from other person.
get something you need from other person.
And ultimately, I think that's how this will play out.
Because if we do the calculations,
a lot of this don't make sense, right?
By the end of the day,
the real profit kind of from this study
is going to be so small
that nobody's going to think about it.
That's the drop in the ocean.
I saw an estimate.
I don't know if it's true.
And I don't remember if it was partisan or not.
But I saw an estimate that these tariffs at their current rates would generate $800 billion.
Now, you can argue where that comes from.
Are people paying essentially a consumption tax or the sellers paying a tax?
Or it's really somewhere in between right they'll
drop their prices to some extent to keep selling to us but also our our our you know consumers here
in the u.s will have to pay higher to to meet in the middle somewhere if they're going to keep
selling to us but uh so i don't know if it's going to be a drop in the bucket a trillion dollars is
a lot of money yeah but at the same time uh what is the percentage yeah what is the lot of money. Yeah, but at the same time, what is the percentage of this... Sorry, 800 billion.
Yeah, what is the percentage of this 800 bill
going to come from Botswana?
And what percentage of it going to come
from some small nation there and there?
And what percentage of it going to come from China?
Because maybe, maybe,
like 80% of this 800 bill
just comes from a couple of countries and you
don't have to blanket tariffs all over all the world you can you can tariff you know only a
couple of places and only a couple of industries as you said before so that's just backing to my
point that i think it's going to play out in some view uh later down the road because everybody is going to be like,
okay, let's negotiate.
I think that's kind of the whole point,
the whole kind of direction of the politics here,
just pushing the strong negotiation point and stance and negotiating the best deal.
So we are, look at it,
here's something that's an important fact here.
We are the biggest importer in the world.
We are the biggest consumers in the world.
So to some extent, if I'm China or if I'm some other country that relies heavily on exporting to the U.S., if Trump came to me and said, hey, fuck you, I'm being facetious here.
But if he said, fuck you, you can tariff us 25% and I'm going to tariff you
40%. You agree? Or maybe it's 29 and 30, whatever the number is. But the fact is the US is the
largest import in the world. And if you're another country and your citizens are heavily reliant and
it would put you into a recession not to do this, you're going to probably make a deal, I would think, right? Alex, go ahead. Thanks for being patient.
Yeah, I was just going to say the problem is that complicated is usually better.
The problem is that non-targeted general tariffs, one of the problems that we're having is that it is components, right?
So people were very excited to hear, like, for example, that foreign competitors were going to have tariffs.
Like, let's say I'm a U.S. automaker and I'm going to say, oh, my gosh, all my component, my manufacturers, overseas manufacturers are going to be taxed.
The problem is my components are almost entirely made overseas.
That's the only way I can get my price down.
So if I had to make everything here, it would be too expensive for people to buy.
So if you just like, say, did this is where the targeting stuff comes in that I was talking
about earlier.
But if you just said we are going to do a million percent import tax on any cars, so
no more cars come in, but we're not going to we're not going to tariff all the individual
components.
So that what does that do?
It drives the production here.
We'll still buy from people.
We'll still buy components. But then why would another country, if they're going to say,
okay, you're not going to let us sell our cars there,
this is where the retaliatory tariffs would come in,
and they would say, we're not going to sell you our components.
But none of them have answered with that.
None of them have answered with that.
They've answered with, we're going to not buy your shit. They're not retaliating with, we're not going to sell you shit. Right. They need to sell it. We haven't done, we haven't done the, the, the kind of, that kind of thing, but that is exactly what would happen. They would say, we're not going how smuggling operations start. You've seen this.
There's case study or history of this.
Oh, yeah.
That's what happens.
Because they're mostly just retaliating with their own tariffs.
Well, think about what happened in Russia and think about what happened in several South American countries and stuff like that.
What ends up happening is you get smuggling operations coming in with these overseas parts.
Because what ends up happening is that then you have to start manufacturing operations
in that country, right?
And at first, they're not very good.
And then they're very expensive.
And so that ends up making the local cars very expensive, right?
So it's very difficult for them to sell.
And most people can't buy them.
I imagine if we tariff China and say we're not buying your
cars and then they say oh well we're gonna screw you over and make it hard for you to make cars
because we're not going to sell you components now they're going to cut off their nose to spite
their face fair strategy okay but i imagine someone else in the world is going to go hey
hey us hey we'll we'll sell you that we'll sell you that. We'll sell you that component. We'll take all the business. I mean, the fact is, if we cut off all trade in the world, like let's say the worst case scenario, we are the biggest buyer.
We have the most money and we have massive ability to produce things.
Again, I'm just playing devil's advocate.
I don't know if this tariff thing is a good idea.
I don't, but I'm just playing devil's advocate.
It doesn't work that way. So what happened after mercantilism, right,
is it turns out that specialty trade is actually the best form of trade. So what ends up happening is you find that countries actually import and export based on their specialty, right? So either
the resource that they have or the operations that they're most efficient at. And so it turns out that wherever someone gets a part, like there's a reason why Taiwan makes most of the semiconductors, right?
Because they're the best at it, right?
So everybody gets their semiconductors from that one country.
So it turns out that most parts are not like, like there are some parts that are commodities,
but most parts are not.
And it turns out that that's just because,
I mean, there are commodities within the country.
But they're building them here now.
They're moving the semiconductor production to.
Right, they're starting to, but it turns out.
And we used to be the best at it, by the way.
We invented it.
Well, it turns out that most countries
end up getting a specialty.
And it turns out that there are some countries that are better at doing...
Now, we have specialties too.
But it doesn't necessarily mean that just because we started something that we are the lowest cost, most efficient producer of something.
That other countries may turn out to be lowest cost, most efficient producer of something that other countries may turn out to be lowest cost,
most efficient producers. We started producing high-end textiles for the world, but it turns out
we're not the most efficient producer of textiles, right? You see that we're not, right?
Could we be?
Coming out of China or Bangladesh, we're not. We're not the world's producer of textiles.
But could we be?
And there's a reason for that. It doesn't matter if you created it. What ends up happening is
who is the most efficient producer? So the problem is components end up coming from
wherever you are the most efficient producer. So when a car is from a country, from doesn't mean all the parts are there and all the labor is there.
It's really the design plus the finishing.
So there's really like a Honda, like most Hondas are created, a lot of it is done here, right?
There's, it's not, you can't really determine
where things are manufactured.
Well, now it'll be, all of them will be created here
if things keep going the way they're going, right?
Well, no, because a Honda is not an American car, right?
They won't all be here.
They won't be here at all.
They have factories here.
They'll suck down all the Honda plants.
Do you know what I'm saying?
Why? No, they'll be down all the Honda plants. Do you know what I'm saying? Why?
No, they'll be incentivized to build plants here, as Adrian has said.
No, they won't be incentivized necessarily to build plants here because that's not our government.
No, they are.
They are.
They are building them here because they want to sell them here without tariffs.
And there's a whole bunch of empty auto factories, and they're literally taking them over,
and Ohio is making the pitch to do all of the...
They're like, they are going hardcore, at least Vivek is, going hardcore on rebuilding manufacturing,
and they're taking the leases on those buildings, and they are moving their manufacturing here to avoid the tariffs.
leases on those buildings and they are moving their manufacturing here to avoid the tariffs.
I just want to point out what happened with Foxconn and several other manufacturing things
during Trump's first administration. And I want to, I will point out that I am not, um, I'm not
political. I mean, I am, I'm neutral, like I am, I'm an independent and I have been-
I can vouch for that. She's pragmatic. She's very pragmatic.
Yes, equally.
Right?
I hate both sides.
But during Trump's first administration,
he talked about all the manufacturing jobs
he would bring in.
And he said Foxconn came in
and was going to build a plant in Wisconsin.
And here they are.
And they put money in to build a plant in Wisconsin.
And then because of the cost of labor and the cost of the output, how much it would cost for them and who would buy from them afterwards, they ended up just taking a loss on the money that they put in in Wisconsin.
So I just want to say, just because you see some deals made,
you have to wait until you see actual things being pumped out. I trust nothing, right? I trust
nothing. Trust nothing until you see stuff being pumped out. I don't trust anybody saying, oh,
I'm going to move stuff in here and I'm going to, you know, I'm going to start a factory or I'm
going to do this or that because we've seen
it before and nothing happened. So I don't trust anything. The other thing that I want to mention
that wasn't part of this before but should be mentioned, governments aren't supposed to be
efficient. I don't understand why there's any sort of push towards efficiency. Governments are supposed to be fair.
I don't understand why anyone wants them to be efficient. Governments are supposed to be fair,
and that means multiple points of oversight. The reason we have a bureaucracy is because it is
harder to corrupt people when there are multiple people overseeing one person. When there's one point
of oversight to someone, it's very easy to corrupt that person. And we see that over and over and
over again in other countries. And I will agree, wait, I'm going to stop you right there though.
No, no, I'm going to stop you right there because the bureaucracy are required. Yes, I agree. And the problem is with the bureaucracy is that there was so many layers, it was opaque for any oversight into Congress.
Where you see these hearings and they go, I don't know, I'll bring that to you later.
And they stonewall and slow roll them.
That's different.
That's different.
That's transparency.
Transparency and accountability should always be applied right that's why i think
stock markets should be on blockchain that's why i think that i don't understand why like i'm in
california and i don't understand why like we have a general fund we keep getting these bond
issuances on our on our ballot every year and i don't know what happened to the last bond issuance
i want to know where money goes absolutely Absolutely. 1000%. But that's the problem
with the Treasury, the bureaucracy. They didn't decline a payment for 22 years. That's bureaucracy.
That's different. That's transparency. No, that's bureaucracy.
No, wait. No, that's different. That's transparency. That's not the same as efficiency.
That's transparency. That's not the same as efficiency. I don't care if it takes a longer
time for things to get done or if there's multiple layers to go through.
How can we say that?
No, no, no, no, no, no, because it takes, they can only retire 8,000 federal employees per year
because it's a manual process and all the paperwork is in a limestone cave. You don't care. No, we need to be able to retire.
All of these people who need to retire,
they need to be able to retire,
not limited to just 8,000 federal workers per year can retire.
That is an efficiency issue.
I don't care.
I want manual things.
I want someone going over this and someone overseeing them.
And then, and then why? Well, then if we're going to do that, hold on. Okay. Let me jump in guys.
It then, if that's the case and we, you know, don't care. Efficiency isn't even something to
discuss. Then why don't we just have, uh, 20 agencies overseeing the same thing? Let's have
6,000 agencies. Let's just make the entirety of America. That doesn't mean logical.
Yeah, logical is efficiency.
That's the logic.
You're trying to trim things down.
Here's an efficiency thing. This is ridiculous.
No, no, we have our...
Trying to trim things down without having...
Okay, you're not...
Having oversight is important.
But the oversight that you're talking about does not work.
It has failed.
We had 68,000 copies on subscription of WinZip,
and only 10 of them were installed.
We are wasting money because we do not have any ability
because of the bureaucracy.
We do not have the efficiency to have oversight
and anybody taking a look.
There's not transparency and accountability.
But you're talking.
That's not the same thing.
But you are conflating the two.
When we are saying we want efficiency.
No, I'm not.
When we are saying we want efficiency.
I don't need to have.
I want it to be a streamlined, clear and transparent process.
I don't need a streamlined one.
I need a transparent one.
I want a streamlined one. Why need a transparent one. I want a streamlined
one. Why can't we have all of these? Why can't we have transparency, checks and balances,
and efficiency? We can absolutely build in checks and balances. I don't want only one person
in control of one thing. That's what we had at USA. One person who could literally send billions of
dollars and nobody would say no. That's what we have had is one person able to do things.
What we have is people who don't have accountability. That's different.
That's important too. Accountability is different than having efficiency i don't need
to have only one person at every station that is what efficiency is no it's guys let's stop talking
over each other we gotta let's let's try to let's also guys let's also let uh other people on the
stage jump in uh maybe we can pause here anybody else and's also let other people on the stage jump in.
Maybe we can pause here.
Anybody else?
And put your hands up if you want to jump in.
We'll get you in because it's hard right now to jump in.
I know we're all kind of talking over each other.
But you can have a world.
I'm all for checks and balances.
And we know that having checks and balances does make you less efficient in ways.
But that doesn't mean that efficiency shouldn't be part of the discussion.
You can have transparency and you can have checks and balances in an efficient way and a less efficient way. It could be 99 points on efficiency. It could be 80 points on efficiency. It could be
zero points on efficiency. And what we've been doing so far has led to massive amounts of waste and
there's a ton of inefficiency in the government and we are finding it are you against that you're
i mean you're against looking for efficiency obviously like they can't yes efficiency and
checks and balances contradict each other i'm not against having, you know, a reasonable, like, I'm not against rational
numbers of people with oversight, two people overseeing a person, right, that also have their
own jobs. Their sole job is not oversight. But I don't believe one person should be left in control of something significant what
are you referencing the risk of corruption is real of course i don't think there is any hold
on hold on hold on hold on hold on what what is she what are you referencing so we can understand
what you're talking about where where are you worried about the one person thing pretty much
everything i mean right now the risk of corruption is real. You have,
at every point, like I've worked in a number of government agencies,
the risk of someone trying to tell you, let me get by. Let me just, let me do this thing that
I want to do, even though it's illegal. That happens regularly. Or inefficient. Maybe it's
not illegal. Maybe it's just inefficient. That's not inefficient.
That's illegal, right?
That is the risk of corruption.
And the higher up you go, the stakes are bigger and the companies and the people who are trying to do it are bigger.
And the risk is much larger, right?
The money is bigger.
The stakes are high.
That's happening. That's actually happening.
It happened already. You're saying there's corruption. There's been corruption. So we
need to do something about it. And now we're putting eyes on it. That's what we're doing.
You need to not have someone's, only someone's goodwill keeping everyone from being corrupt.
keeping everyone but we don't um from being corrupt but we don't you need to have a system
that prevents them from being corrupt yes that is what the system did no the system possible
the system did not do that it did not that's why they were easily able to give guys we have two
other hands up guys i'm gonna i'm gonna stop us here for a second. We have two other hands up. Two Cent Timmy, what's up?
Yeah, I just wanted to point out,
what Alex is saying, I understand on one level,
but saying you don't want efficiency is not a good idea
when it's not only America.
We don't own the entire world,
and we're competing against
other countries. And if they are more efficient than we are, with the same lack of corruption,
then we are going to be in trouble. So you do have to find this balance. Like Rock, you said,
you need to find a balance between efficiency and lack of corruption. But I also think if we had more transparency,
then you actually need fewer checks and balances because people are going to self-police more. So
you aren't going to get shady deals and money corruption when it's all on-chain, let's say, because people will see like, oh,
look, this politician is doing something shady, they're doing something wrong. And then it's
going to come back and you're going to be able to be more efficient when you open up transparency.
And I think the more bureaucracy you actually put in, the more opaque things get, and it's harder
to see where reality is.
And I think it's really important to, and I don't disagree that we should have checks and balances to prevent corruption,
but I think transparency solves a lot of it.
And we need to be efficient, especially when we are very inefficient and it's hurting the country right now.
And I don't think anyone would disagree with that.
Queen Bazaar, your hand up.
Yeah, thanks.
So my
question is
so much what we are talking of,
what is the intent?
What is the intent
of making
or building something or maybe
getting into government or anything of the
sort? It depends.
I think what I believe is the intent should be right.
Probably there are other things that happen to have been there.
It is something that is inevitable.
But the intent has to be embraced.
It doesn't mean that someone would like this thing or not. But the intent has to be embraced it doesn't mean that that someone would like this thing or not but the
intent has to be embraced yeah what do you think about it i don't know i mean because so much so
have been talked about about the things that okay fine what is going to be there what is the intent
of the bull or beer market what is the intent of it?
What do you want to achieve?
How are you going to go ahead and solve it?
That should be the question and that should have been answered.
It is not something that we're going to talk vaguely,
anything and everything.
Everyone has their own free speech.
Free speech has to be there
conditionally that it should have been embraced by the things that that that could solve something
i mean i have so much things to talk and no people out there probably who are there since i have seen
you know and people should know me but yeah that those are the things so have seen, you know, and people should know me.
But yeah, those are the things.
So what do you think?
So my question is,
I'll put on a question right now.
Do you think the intent should be right
or the things that you see,
see it is valuable to you
it is valuable to you or not?
or not.
Yes.
Yeah.
I know one way to get
rid of corruption.
Have a smaller government. When there's
less money to be corrupted,
you'll have less corruption. That's
just a fact, right?
If the government was half its size...
And you'll notice when the money goes missing.
So yes, absolutely. Now, when there's trillions of dollars being spent, we don't even notice when
a hundred million is used for some stupid thing, right? It's just, there's so much money and it's
impossible to monitor everything. And even if we put good, of course, we could try to put good systems in place to
monitor things. But as we have seen, it doesn't work. It's not, it's not, you'll never be perfectly
efficient in that. You're never going to catch all the fraud. You're never going to catch all
the corruption. You're never going to catch all the waste. Generally, I just don't think government
is good at very many things. So they should only do the things that only they can do, which is like defense, right? Maybe police, maybe firefighters, maybe roads. I think that's
even questionable. Um, you know, protecting our freedoms, protecting our ability to trade,
protecting our property rights, all this other stuff. I just don't think they're very good at.
And we have millions and infinite case studies on this.
The DMV, nobody likes the DMV. The post office, bleeding money for how long? Why is FedEx and UPS able to turn a profit, but United States Parcel Service cannot turn a profit? It's bleeding us
taxpayer money. Why do we even have USPS? There's some okay arguments for it uh but i think it's
it's uh the government has not been good at spending and we i i know personally personally
just from friends and family i know at least five times i've seen people do corrupt shit to
get government money it's fucked up up. I know, man.
I think DMV isn't that bad.
You know, my personal experience
when I was getting the ID in California
went pretty smooth, you know,
from the first try.
Easy, easy exam.
So can't complain there.
It's gotten better.
It has historically been a nightmare.
It has definitely gotten better.
It took them...
They were 20, 10 years late on getting getting digital like stuff happening everything was like paper
and you had to go in there it took how long if that was a private company look at triple a long
before dmv finally got okay d uh triple a was providing amazing registration services oh yeah
that's for sure that's for sure but i wanted actually to touch on one of the things you mentioned.
You said about the systems that should be put in place
to prevent different things, right?
So I think that's a really great point.
And I think right now is the best time
that when it actually can happen
with advancements of AI,
with creation of different agents.
So what are the agents, we are at minecrafts that's one of the things we do actually we are developing
agents and allowing everybody to to create their own agent without code without everything but
kind of main difference from the just llm or or, you know, large language model and stuff
to agent and basically access to features and to things that they can do. And the agents now can
can use the laptops, use the personal computers, they can access a lot of different things in real
time, a lot of the data. They can execute transactions.
They can go deep into different databases
and they can be in the middle between different things.
And I think that's one of the really interesting things
that's happening with the government right now in the US
with the Doge Committee,
that they, instead of hiring a bunch of auditors,
instead of hiring a bunch of ex-governmental employees and stuff like that,
they actually hired engineers to analyze stuff with the algorithms.
And I think right now the efficiency of any government body
can boost, you know, thousands of times,
just because instead of, know 100 people you can
get a couple of ai agents who can go through thousands and thousands of different entries in
the database and figure out the patterns figure out to the fraud find the fraud uh because they
fired all the nuclear like uh engineers and stuff, no. They didn't do this right.
They've been firing people without understanding.
You have to break stuff.
They're taking a move fast,
break things approach.
They're not doing it well. They're firing
a bunch of people without understanding what they do.
They're like 20-year-olds.
If you can't understand
that
somebody is doing something
there there is a high chance that they're doing nothing that's my you know i was managing like
hundreds of employees at some point okay so they rehired them what's the big deal
because they it's an oops they make mistakes they're making a lot of mistakes because you
hire them back what's what's wrong with that that? When you move this fast and they have to.
No, what's wrong is that they don't know what they're doing.
I disagree.
I mean, to say, oh, they hired a bunch of 20-year-olds is honestly an ignorant statement.
They did.
They did.
Yeah, but when you look at what these kids have done and what they're doing, I mean, one of these kids.
They don't know.
Hold on.
Hold on.
Hold on.
Yeah.
So one of these kids was responsible.
Yeah, he's in his 20s.
Who gives a fuck?
He was able to take old scrolls that were burnt in a fire and buried under the dirt for thousands of years or whatever.
Hundreds of, you know, maybe a thousand years.
And he was able to take those and there's a
documentary on him because he was able to use AI to translate a language they don't even know
from burnt scrolls that were buried forever. I mean, these are not like little retard kids.
How does that show that he understands how organizations work?
They don't need to. That's not that kid.
He doesn't understand the
government and he doesn't need to that's not what they're hired for these kids are not
hired to understand be hired for none of these people understand how the government let me speak
hold on hold on alex let me let me let me jump in here so these kids are not hired to make political
decisions that's not their fucking job no one's asking they're not they're huh it's not political
no one there is political no one good we're not hiring political people who are trying to protect
but the people that they're firing are not political. The people they're firing are not political.
They're civil servants.
They are meant to be there.
Okay, they are meant to be there.
They're firing people who are just civil servants.
No, and they don't know what they do.
They have no idea.
It is like office space.
The kids are not firing anyone.
The kids don't have the ability to fire anyone.
That's what they're doing.
Alex, hold on okay they are not there to make any decisions about who to fire they are there to find
errors to find to find where payments were made that shouldn't have been made to find conflicts
that's they're using ai to comb through large databases and check them against other
databases. Things like this. They are approaching it from an engineering perspective. Then it gets
brought to, then it gets brought to. That is what they're doing. No, that is what they're doing
sometimes. But that even that isn't what's happening. Cause like, like what happened
with the social security, they literally pulled up a list of everybody who got Social Security.
They didn't pull up the list of everybody who's receiving Social Security checks right now.
So they're like, look at all these people on Social Security manifest.
Like, they're not even reading it correctly.
This is not what the people who are hired are doing. What they're doing are making decisions about who is actually
going to continue working there without understanding who does what and why. And that's
one of the big problems is that they don't understand what the agencies do, why, and who
is doing what. And I agree, there's not inefficiency there, but worse is that there's not, there's
lack of accountability, right? There's no transparency.
I don't know where the money, for example, from the fines at the SEC goes. Where's that money?
What is that? That's what they are attempting to figure out.
That doesn't mean that these people should be firing these people. I don't know that there
are these fewer people. Yes, they are. Yes, they are. They're getting rid of these
probational people who have just been promoted. They're getting rid of probation. That's exactly
what's happening. What do you think these freezes are? Why are these people going to these meetings
and so angry? What is happening? What do you think is happening? That's part of what's happening here.
Okay. Those 20-year-old kids that you're referencing are not there to go and walk up to people and go, you're fired.
They are there to look through databases and find things that seem suspicious and then bring them to Elon, bring them to Trump, bring them to Congress, and then decide whether they get rid of these things.
They are not firing anyone.
So let's use your example. Let's go with, let's take your path. So social security,
you said they brought up database and this wasn't necessarily people that were actually getting
checks. It was just some other database. Why is there any database that has people that are dead
on it saying that they are in the social security system.
There's a list of literally everyone who's ever had, who's gotten a social security number.
It's not, but that's not what they're bringing up. They're not bringing up a list of everyone.
That's literally what they pulled up. That's what they had to correct later on,
is saying that, no, no, the list that they pulled up saying-
They're not, because that would be everyone that's ever moved.
Yeah, that's what they pulled up, is list of everyone who had who had a social security number.
But that's not what that's not the people who are currently getting checks.
I don't think that's what's happening.
I don't I.
One of the 20 year olds was the one who actually got rid of the nuclear engineers who then had to be brought back.
That was a mistake that was done.
That's why I'm saying that I understand what you're saying.
They're using AI to find inefficiencies.
Great.
But that is the decision of one of those people, right?
Or whoever oversees them, which again is exactly the point, is that it shouldn't be one point.
It shouldn't be one person. It shouldn't be one person.
It should have oversight.
Someone else should be supervising that person.
So that it's not one person saying...
There are people supervising.
If there wasn't, they wouldn't have brought back those...
Whoever the supervisor was approved this decision to get rid of all these nuclear engineers who then had to be hired back.
Because all of our
nuclear facilities are weren't being controlled and overseen because those people are are necessary
right they didn't understand who necessary personnel were what i'm saying if you go to lay
off if you go to lay off massive amounts of people and to cut spending, you are going to make mistakes, right? We're going
to make mistakes. They're important. They're important people. And these are huge errors.
What percent of them were mistakes versus good things is the question. Do you know what percent
of them were mistakes and how do we know that they're good things? We don't know yet. We don't
know. I don't know, but, but I am, I am thanking the Lord that someone's looking at it.
At least they're fucking looking.
Why?
Because you agreed that we have massive fucking corruption.
I would rather have transparency put in than getting people cut and then having all the waste and cost of having to go to court and having them be reversed.
Like, this is just more waste.
I'd rather just have transparency put in. is just waste waste waste you want to have transparency but not actually
paid this is more waste this is my money this is my tax money i don't want my tax money being
spent on this bullshit just put transparency in and then just leave them
working leave that leave the corruption so then have transparency but don't fire them
not if they're doing stuff transparency and like doing stuff you want our government just doing
stuff yeah i know i've been there i know what most of them are doing i know that most of them
are doing work but what i want you're fucking is You're fucking insane. You're fucking insane if you think, hold on, hold on. You're fucking insane
if you think that all government workers are acting efficiently, but you said you don't care
about that anyway. I'm not worried about those workers. Do you know who I'm most worried about?
Our Congress. I'm worried about elected officials more than I am about civil servants. Civil servants
How about the ones that aren't doing anything? Let's let two cent Timmy jump in.
No, no. Do you know who doesn't work? People who worry about getting reelected all the time.
They worry about getting reelected all the time. That's all they do. That's all they do. They
spend all their time raising money and getting reelected. Those are the people I want accountability
for. When are they doing anything for me? government all other government workers you don't care about if they waste time if they're not doing anything
you think all government workers work hard i think i think most workers work hard because
i've worked in the government you're crazy have you have you been in the government no but i've
worked in any government office no i haven't don't you't talk about that, which you do not know.
That's what I'm saying. You're all speculating.
You're all speculating.
You're all assuming that you work hard, but other people don't.
You're assuming you work hard, but other people don't work hard.
What assumption are you making about other people?
You're assuming you work hard, but other people who go to work, come home, want to play with
their kids, want, you kids, pay for their schooling or
whatever. You assume other people don't work, don't want to work hard. You want to work hard,
but other people are lazy bums, right? You got to let other people jump in, Alex.
You got to, it's like, say a sentence, then someone else says a sentence, then you say it.
Come on. So I'm assuming, I'll let you in just one second
to send to me. I'm not assuming that I work hard and that everyone in government doesn't.
I'm assuming that when there is profits on the line and when you can, when a company can go out
of business and when there's competitors. You to finish the ha. Not two cents to me. I get it.
You wanted to say something.
Yes.
Yeah, I'm trying to jump in.
Yes.
You are assuming that other people don't work hard.
You're assuming that people, just because they work in the government, don't work hard.
I'm assuming that when it is government and you're spending someone else's money, the incentives, they are.
They're spending your tax money like you just said. But you're spending a company's money. If you're working
at a company, you think people who work at a company work harder than people who work at a
government? Yes, I do. Generally. You're spending someone else's money. No. You're spending someone
else's money. A company has to be efficient because if it's not, it dies. Government never dies. It only grows.
So the incentives are not strong there. They're not efficient generally. Now there are cases where
it makes sense to have them even if they're inefficient because no private company is going
to be our military, right? There are things that they can do. They could like monitoring voting.
These are things that we don't want to trust a private company to do, but for most things,
it's going to be inefficient because you're spending someone else's money.
I could give you 100 examples of friends I've known who did work for government or were getting checks from government that were scamming it.
That is, that's people who are not working for the government.
Those are people who are getting checks from the government.
No, it is people who are working for the government.
Military people.
I've had my, I've heard. Then you have some scammy-ass friends.
I'm saying that I work in several different government agencies.
Okay, I mean, I don't think I run in some scam circles, but I've seen friends and family do scammy shit.
And I'm sure you have too.
And you've never seen someone waste time.
They work like normal people work.
They go to work.
They come home. They work like normal people work. They go to work. They come home.
They play with their kids.
They want to make money.
And we get very little value for it.
That's not true.
Like we see from USPS.
That's not true.
Like we see from all of these government agencies.
I think that we're assuming that everybody is lazy.
Except if what?
It's not just being lazy.
It's incentives. I is USPS so inefficient compared to UPS or nobody uses it email
no people do use it most most mail goes through it actually the majority of mailbos are true. Nobody uses the postal service. That's not true. You're wrong. Are you kidding me?
I just want to say I love USPS.
That's all.
It is, from my experience, working in retail arbitrage, a million times better than UPS or FedEx.
Well, it's losing money.
So it's operating with a subsidiary.
So, of course, it should be cheaper because we're paying for it.
The taxpayers are paying for it.
Anyways, let's let Timmy up.
Yeah, what I was thinking too, and I think one of the problems is it's not all one or the other and we have to find nuance. But I think an example of government workers,
and this isn't meant to slight any of them,
but everyone has different things they value.
And I've heard many people talk about like one reason why it's good to work
as a,
in government as a public servant is it's a safe job and you have reliability. And I think
people that want to play it safe, typically, like the safety comes from security in the job. And then
when you look at motivations for people, a lot of people you run towards something and you run
away from things. And if you work for a private company, one thing that you run away from or you try to get away from is not to get fired.
And you do that by being productive.
So when the risk of getting fired is decreased, you have people not wanting to run as hard away from that.
And I think that impacts the efficiency.
And that's not to say people in government don't work hard.
say people in government don't work hard. I'm sure that like people in government work hard and they
I'm sure that people in government work hard and they have the right motivation.
have the right motivation. But in general, when it's harder to get rid of people who aren't
efficient and who aren't good at their job, then you end up carrying this bloat over time where
you just simply can't get rid of people. It's the same reason why in universities, when professors
get tenure, like you look at them and you go, holy shit, you wrote 15 books before you had tenure.
And then after tenure, even though you've been tenured for three times as long, you've written
two. And it's just the incentives and people get comfortable. And I think that that could be why
government is much less efficient than the private industry. And then you go to like, okay, how
efficient do you want to be? And I think you should really look to maximize efficiency for people, especially when you're taking money from
them. Like if you have a company and then you take money from investors, it is your duty to
maximize the shareholder return. But because you're taking money from someone else,
and you say, I'm going to produce this good or service. When you are in government, and you take
money from people, either through straight taxation or through inflation, the logic would
follow that you have to try to be as efficient and give the greatest return as possible. But I don't
think even the biggest proponents of the government can say that happens to the same degree as it happens in private industry and i think that's really the
the tension that we're hearing between alex and rock is like this is what like there it's
somewhere in the middle it's a continuum and we just haven't found that right balance yet
well said um we're gonna wrap the show up pretty soon here.
Ada, did you have anything more on the giveaway you needed to do?
Ada got lost. Two Cent Timmy, I did want to, let's quickly, if you can, tell us what you guys are
building at Community Currency. I have no vested interest in this, but I am very interested in
what you're doing. It's actually incredible. And maybe start with, and like, tell just a quick
blurb about like Reddit and the avatars and how Polygon's involved in that. And then what you're
building, which is just incredible with the whole new apps that Reddit has released. They released
the ability to build stuff on Reddit, like applications, which is, I think, going to open
up a whole new world and you're leading that. So go ahead. Yeah. So I actually, yesterday I did a demo and I just pinned it up top.
But really, so Reddit is what I would consider like a Web 2.5, almost Web 3, where they were obviously originally a Web 2 platform.
And then they started introducing NFTs as avatars.
And really what Community Currency did and the origin story is a meme coin was made based on one of these avatars and distributed to users on Reddit.
And we wanted to just have fun and make utility with the meme coin for no other reason than so that we could have more fun.
could have more fun. And then eventually people started asking us to integrate the platform and
software we did for their own meme coins and tokens. So the general idea is we are monetizing
content on Reddit. So after 24 hours of someone's post, the number of upvotes they get corresponds to a certain number of off-chain
points that they accrue. And those off-chain points are held also as an on-chain token that
they can withdraw and use. So you can tip one another, you can use these point systems off-chain,
and then when you want to come on-chain, you can easily withdraw them.
The idea is you have Web2 users.
You want to give them a familiar platform that they use,
and then we want them to be self-motivated
to start exploring Web3,
and that happens when they realize they have $5, $10, and to go on.
What we did, so initially it was very clunky.
It was all through comments and text and
not a clean experience. We were granted by Polygon and Thrive in June of 2024, and we took those funds
and really built an application native to Reddit. So on any subreddit page that uses our project,
you see how many points you've acquired,
your transaction history.
And then we've also built features
where you can bid on NFTs.
There's a governance portion where you can vote
that can't be symbol attacked on Reddit.
Like right now, if you just make a poll on Reddit,
people could easily just create multiple accounts
and manipulate the poll.
But with our point system, you would be unable to do that.
So it's more like on-chain governance.
We are building out a game that's very similar
to almost like a Pokemon game
where a user will be able to compete first against an environment
and then we're going to have PVP contests and win prizes.
But really the idea is how do we take Reddit's 500 million users
and have them dip their toe into Web3
to hopefully convert over all the way to Web3 when they realize that
our idea isn't that we want to expose people to Web3, we want to expose people to the application,
they see that it's better, and then they come to Web3 because it's better, but it's
Web3 at the end, not marketing as a, oh, it's on-chain, you should use it.
That was basically the TLDR of it.
Yeah, super cool stuff you're doing.
I mean, you guys are basically, so now these new apps on Reddit,
so they had a window where they allowed projects or teams to come apply to get their apps like approved,
like kind of white listed. And you guys were one of the approved ones. And from what you told me,
at least you're biased, obviously, but what you told me is the only other, there's like maybe
one other one that even has anything and it's nothing compared to you guys that you demoed and showed me um like um wall street bets has one but it's super simple your guys has all kinds of features right
a game and leaderboard and and all this really cool stuff um and yeah i think it's super cool
i want to either i want to get involved somehow i want to invest in it or help you like raise funds or incubate it at LDA. I just
think it's like an incredible bet. I think what you guys are doing is like, I see, you know,
when the world went from, I think platforms and marketplaces are really awesome. And I think
when the world went from, you know, shipping like e-commerce, like individual sites to Amazon, that was a breakthrough moment for the world.
And now there's like millions of like people selling stuff on Amazon.
I think we're going to see the same thing on Reddit for applications because it makes communities so much more engaged.
It makes them like want to stay on that Reddit that gives them points so that they
can be like, Hey, I'm one of the top people on this subreddit. You know, I'm, I'm, I do a lot
in, uh, subreddits. And if I had points for what I do, I, it would definitely make me more sticky
and feel some loyalty to that subreddit. You could put, you know, your app shows up at the top of the
subreddits and you work with all these, a lot of different subreddits.
So you could have at the top, you know, the home screen is the leaderboard showing who's been participating the most. And these points, it can actually become worth money if they start having like kind of like a little circular economy, like you're using them to buy skins in the game that you have.
Or you can use them to put cool flair on your name or all these things but you
guys are leading the way in that charge you guys have been leading the way on reddit for a long
time you know originally reddit had on polygon the avatars and the point systems but they they
kept the avatars and that's that's polygon Polygon. You use Polygon for these avatars, which, and there's like 38 million, um, avatar, um,
wallets or whatever.
But, um, and then when they got rid of the point system, all these communities were like,
oh, this sucks.
Why, why did they get rid of the points?
We liked this.
I don't know why they did it.
Maybe regulatory, who knows.
But then you guys had already built your own custom point system for Coneheads.
And so you said, hey, we could just start giving this to other communities so they could use it and make them their own custom points.
So we have it on QuickSwap.
We use the QuickToken, actually.
We plugged in the actual QuickToken into this.
Other people can make up their own new tokens, you know, like moons on Reddit or that kind of stuff.
And, yeah. you know like moons on reddit or that kind of stuff um and uh yeah uh oh so yeah you guys are
leading in that in the point in the the point systems for subreddits and you have multiple
big people using it like our cryptocurrency uses it and a bunch of big ones quick swap uses it
um and then you guys are leading and building applications on Reddit. So, I mean, I'm super bullish on what you guys are doing.
Yeah, and just to throw out some numbers, we're on probably, we're on over 50 different subreddits with 35-ish tokens.
So, some subreddits use the same token.
But the really cool thing, and what I think I'm most proud of and bullish on on is we're on subreddits that have nothing to do with crypto.
Obviously, this is very much a crypto project.
So we're on our cryptocurrency, like you said.
We have a faucet on the Polygon subreddit.
So we are in the crypto world, but we're also on subreddits like r slash tacos, r slash sandwiches, r
slash cringe tricks, where...
Tell people what r tacos is.
I was, I thought, I didn't even know this existed until you told me, but it's a pretty
cool little thing.
Yeah, it's people literally sharing their tacos.
Like, they like tacos, they show pictures of tacos, recipes or whatever like it.
I think of it like old school Instagram people taking pictures of their food and sharing it online.
And then all of a sudden you can do this. You can have people share their taco recipe.
Other people go, oh, my God, that looks so good. They earn points which they can convert into crypto, like talk about a way where people feel very comfortable
coming on board to Web3 in a way that you never imagined possible.
They don't even know that they're using Web3 at first, right?
Exactly.
Because there's a central element,
and then if they want, they can pull their stuff off chain,
but you don't force them to go do do all the on chain stuff right away.
But if they want to unlock the true value of these points and all this stuff, then they can choose to make a wallet, which is the same thing that Reddit does with the avatars.
This is the same thing that a lot of games are moving to now because they realize onboarding people to games and making them like get metamask and shit is just way too much friction.
games and making them like get metamask and shit is just way too much friction so you just let them
play the game and then if they want to claim their assets and own them themselves or trade them or
trade them for bitcoin or do whatever with them or trade them with other people then they need to go
get the wallet but uh it's yeah it's really cool guys yeah and go to our tacos guys r slash tacos on or what is it reddit slash reddit.com yeah it's reddit.com slash r
slash tacos so it's just like to go to any subreddit that's r slash and then the name of a
subreddit yeah really cool stuff man i had to shout you out here uh because i just think what
you're doing is really cool man and you guys have guys have a lean team. I've been digging into it more because I'm thinking about how we can get involved,
but somehow I want to get LDA incubating it or something, man, because I like it.
You guys have been a huge supporter.
They know I replied to your comment, but you've been great.
Even just one thing I really like about this space,
I want people to try it out and everyone's super intelligent and can go
like, okay, here's what you should do.
And here's how you can iterate because I'll be honest,
a lot of our, our ideas and what we built out,
some came from our team,
but others came from other people who use it and said,
this would be really cool and we want to see this.
And that's what we did.
So definitely really appreciate supporters.
If a subreddit wants to, I mean, this is like as I was talking about earlier when we were talking about trading or holding.
And I just say I just buy things and I hold them that I believe in.
I mean, this is my motivation for wanting to be involved in this is I just believe in what you're doing.
I mean, I don't know if you'll be like the top app maker on Reddit in the future, but you basically are now.
And I would bet on you
cause I think you guys are doing great stuff. Um, if someone in the audience has a project and they
want to use, uh, your community currency platform and get points or get an app, what, uh, what does
it cost? What do they got to do? Do they talk to you? Do they DM you. Yeah, they can literally DM me. And right now it is literally we're taking the Fortnite approach where we want as many projects using it for their subreddit as possible.
And we're not charging a fee like we want people using this and getting feedback.
I know I touched a little bit on the game that you said it like we can monetize through skins.
We're going to have different items in the game, things like that.
One thing we are putting forward is, like I said, you can bid on avatars and we're going to start to create a secondary marketplace native to Reddit because people in Web2 buy avatars that they think are cute and they may want, they may sell out, they want to rebuy them.
And it's a whole bunch of friction to take a Web2 user,
have them download a wallet, go to OpenSea, find the avatar,
make sure that they're not getting scanned,
that it's the right collection and all of those things.
So if we can natively build payments,
which is a huge focus for Polygon POS where it's like,
Hey, we can, you can pay natively on Reddit.
You don't have to jump through all these soups.
We're going to be able to monetize that way.
But for communities, we just want them getting onboarded.
And then as we start to monetize the subreddit,
there's going to be a revenue split
where most of it will go to the moderator team.
And we'll just take a small portion to make, I think incentives and aligning incentives are important. But if we give the
incentives to the moderators of a subreddit as a way to make money, because right now,
you can't make money as a moderator on Reddit, which is kind of ridiculous. If you ask me,
I mean, you have people that are moderating subreddits of 10 million plus people that have to spend three, four, five hours a day doing it and not getting compensated.
And I think the quality of moderation goes down, where if you incentivize people to get paid this way, you'll have a better user experience, a better subreddit.
And then everyone's making money because people are willing to pay for things they enjoy
um but yeah if people and the users the the people commenting can make money as they earn points for
for being engaged hey could you build a custom so i'm on i spend uh too much time on the r uh
capitalism versus uh socialism subreddit could you you build a custom like system where the people that are fighting on the capitalism side have a different point than the people fighting on the socialism communism side?
Is that is that possible?
But as I think it would be possible in a way where it's almost like we give users a free flair that says capitalism and communism.
And then if you're a user with a capitalism flair and you get upvoted, you get capitalist points, let's call it.
That's what I was thinking.
And then you get communism points if you have a communism flair.
I think we could probably implement something like that.
That would actually be really funny to do, like, on debate subreddits.
I'm, like, and it's funny you say that.
I love debate subreddits.
We could even do something, like, one of our people were,
so not to leak too much alpha,
but we are in contact with all of the major sports subreddits,
so, like, RNBA, rnhl, rnfl,
and wanting to create almost a team.
So like, I'm a Boston Celtics fan.
What if you have a Boston Celtics subreddit?
And we saw teams, like I think Milan,
AC Milan had their own token,
and a lot of these European soccer teams
created these fan tokens.
But we could create them for these subreddits and then have these users like basically talk shit and like create this like next level of fandom of like oh we have a different point
different points for their different team and stuff that's cool it would show like
which are the more hardcore team fans you know yeah so we're we're playing around with ways to
do like that so i do think that subreddit you were talking Yeah, so we're playing around with ways to do like that, so I do think that
subreddit you were talking about, yeah, we
should be able to do it.
I'm going to leave them a comment.
I'm going to leave them a comment right now and ask
them if they'd be
interested in having something like this.
That'd be cool. Beautiful, yeah.
Alright, guys. We've been
on here for three and a
half hours.
It's been fun.
Yeah, you're a little bit of a slate to the DogeChain spaces.
We do need to announce the winners of the ADA.
No, it's at a different time because it's daylight savings.
It was daylight savings four days ago or something.
four days ago or something so yes again yeah well so the the u.s has daylight savings like
Again?
four weeks before everyone else because you always have to be different um uh yeah yeah so i am late
to the space i didn't know that it's all right they're they're doing like crazy degen meme stuff
so i'm not i haven't been involved in the conversations as much lately because I'm not such a degenner
Yeah, the space is taking a an interesting turn in dynamic
Yeah, so I think all right guys the winners
For that aida competition
So cool the most recent land was George Siva
hola crypto three hermit chase sad i'm gonna butcher that one and nico
stones uh janez me forever zidal and then a bunch of numbers marvy crypto on something um albashir
mm crypto and that's it so yeah i mean so it sounds like um so we gave out like what is
it 10 or 20 people 50 bucks or something or how did that work i think it was 10 people sent 100
bucks i'm sorry for mistake earlier uh thank you again rock and quick stop for uh this partnership
and we hope we both grow follow ada guys we we like when people give our audience members
money and it's in stables yeah that's in usdt will be contacted i contacted most of the people
uh already i'll be connecting another soon to be in usdt tercy people send the words and
inflex on their twitter or whatever can you give them like 50% more if they take it in your token?
We don't have
a token yet. However, we
have a campaign and we also
have an ambassador program. So if anyone
interested, you can visit our Twitter to learn more.
Cool, guys.
All right. We have some people requesting,
but we're cutting it, guys.
Cheers, everyone. That was a lot of fun.
Screw government inefficiency.
All right.
Cheers, guys.
Have a good weekend.
Thanks for coming, Michael, Two Centimieda, Minds, Craft, and everyone else who spoke,
and all the audience members, too.
Actually, here, let's call out some audience members real quick.
Man, some of you guys have been on like the whole time.
I see Rainbow.
I see Coop DeVille.
I see Big Brian.
I see Digital Fellow.
We have Dear Crypto, MBDM Crypto.
That's the dark-hearted bouncer who helps organize the show.
We got John Sharp, LDA member,
brilliant designer.
We got,
Matterfy in the audience,
solid project doing privacy stuff.
German bombshell,
ETH daily,
not fur.
I can see the thumbs up in hearts guys.
Thanks.
Ethanos plays.
We got,
who is that?
A crass null coin is giving hearts uh we got kim
we got uh validatus.com we got buybtccoin.com we got rev giving a fist uh whatever that
fist you know i don't know how you describe that uh we, we got Jimit teed. We got, uh, Eric
Boston, Desiree Patno, STFU, song jam, then doge one, I think gave some kind of emoji. Um, but I'm
not sure. Rotary, Stefan, junior King, um, baddick info, Toba, Orion, Ted, fantastic, Dana, 36, jr king um baddock info toba orion ted fantastic dana 36 mason chow happy lion welding dot soul
gave a heart and a sad face uh 11t uh is giving is waving uh welding is giving hearts now maybe
he wanted to get shouted out major gave a heart um We got Pharaoh, Roe waving. All right. With a
Solana PFP. Cheers, guys. Let's see here. Let's read some comments real quick.
Russo says, honestly, some answers in this space are right in front of us. There are certain coins
you just don't touch for a few years. They're like bamboo seedlings. Quiet now, but with time,
they go into a massive forest. With those, patience isn't just a virtue touch for a few years. They're like bamboo seedlings. Quiet now, but with time, they grow into a massive forest.
With those, patience isn't just a virtue, it's a strategy.
Then there's coins you scoop up and flip fast.
No emotional attachment.
Just in, out, onto the next.
A lot of meme coins fall in this category, but here's the real question.
The one that separates traders from survivors.
How do you know when to hold, when to let go?
Would you like me to continue this as a thread or build it out as a blog or post yeah yeah sure caruso uh rainbow says the space is proving why knowledge beats
luck in crypto every time i think i know something about trading the aggregated space humbles me real
quick rethinking my entire approach to the market thanks rainbow uh we have some incredible speakers
who come on the show um zola says how much weight do you give investors sentiment versus economic data when predicting a shift to bull or bear market?
That's a good question, but that's a whole other topic.
Darren, you've got to start reminding us to read these in the middle of the show so we can actually answer these on the show.
Some of these are great questions.
Kenneth says, are tariffs becoming the go-to strategy regardless of market conditions or is there a deeper play at work?
Mind your business.
Sorry, all space is giving me extra selective listening ability.
We'll listen in and get all these intelligent and gracious hot takes later in the recording.
Callisto said joined.
I need expert opinion with the current market on what's happening with everything.
Yeah, we all do too, Callisto.
Um, let's see.
Uh, Zola says, which sectors do you think will thrive or struggle the most if we
enter a bear market? Kenneth says, are tariffs becoming the go-to strut? Oh, you already said
that, Kenneth. Dear Crypto says, the space is full of insights. I'm jotting it all down. Quick
question. How will tariffs affect crypto? Jared says, if only pull price would increase with the drama in this space. Oh, come on.
David Bora.
I'm still holding all my pull.
I believe Aglayer and all the crazy stuff they're building is going to be pretty solid once it's all ready.
Huge front things happening with Aglayer.
I think just recently, Solano was able to get plugged in.
I don't know if that's through.
I forget what that was through.
But Leroy J says, here for the expert opinions.
JJ says, another episode.
Let's fucking go.
G. Atkins says, locked in listening.
JC gave a tweet about the giveaway.
Prince Nonso says, sent in a few dollars from Tan and ETH to ADAP.
Still haven't shown.
ADAP, if you can maybe check in with Prince Nonso in the comments,
he's having trouble.
He's trying to use your app.
Lasers says, bull market.
Daniels is locked in.
Hightower says, Polygon and Rocky, hey, thanks for the discussion,
but you discussed tariffs and the U.S. trade deficit based on traditional metrics.
But aren't we missing the real export powerhouse of the 21st century, digital services?
How are hundreds of billions in surplus from cloud computing, digital ads, and streaming accounted for in the trade balance?
It's a good question.
I was actually thinking, I've been thinking about that over the last few days, Hightower.
It's a really good question.
But when China blocks us from exporting these services to them, it kind of messes with that, right?
But we do export digital services and it counts as GDP.
I'm pretty sure.
Valen says, this space is shocking, lol.
Just two people making blanket generalizations for 10 minutes.
Government workers never work hard because they spend other people's money
versus government workers work really hard,
both baiting each other to make ridiculous concessions.
Yeah, that's pretty much what it was.
Dana says,
I'm sorry,
Alex Damsker,
but you are not the only one who has worked for a country government.
And it's not okay.
What you're stating.
Someone says,
not going to lie.
I was just here to buy,
but now y'all literally handing out blueprints for winning in web three voice.
Savandu says,
Polygon is doing a lot of blockchain enhancement.
I've been hauling for five years now.
It has come down 90%, 95% from its peak.
Solana at some point was 8 to 12 USD, became 200 recently.
Why price not reflecting the innovation or the adoption?
Question two, Polygon has been used by Mumbai government for their education department mark sheets.
Geo has been partnered with Polygon that has 450 million users.
It's implementation live.
If they use the poll token for transactions
then price actually will be way higher than current token burning orion says taking the
or making the most for a company government think of parking tickets or delivering a poor product
or service alex says good alex damsker says good fight today crypto rocky great warm-up now i'm
heading to the gym um and quick swap account said a picture of crypto rocky on the
punching bag um someone said but our nfts on the brink of a bear market send help uh cory says the
guy speaking is way too rude and vulgar i'm out not sure who that was maybe it was me i don't know
uh snes says it's still a bull market tariffs isiffs is just swinging it. Enugma says let's have it.
Milo says no, we can't be an efficient producer on all things.
Someone says Stardogs rock.
Dana says few people work hard in governments in general.
Lord, why are we arguing this?
I'm not understanding Alex Damsker's point or her proposal.
Someone says fix volume.
Some we can't hear, others shouting at max volume through the speakers.
Quick swap.
Someone's voice of onto says, quick swap.
Do you discuss questions and comments also?
We're doing that right now.
Man, there's a lot of comments today.
All right, we're done, guys.
Thanks for listening to the audience.
They're the most important part of this.
So I just want to show them some respect and read.
But Darren, seriously, can we please do questions from the audience next time like throw them in as we're speaking or something
please please please yeah i was gonna just throw a few in between you and alex i was i was waiting
for a break yeah good luck all right guys have a good one thanks everyone bye-bye bye-bye
Host
Speaker
NOTAI
from
NOTAI (💙,🧡)
