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Market pumps on tariff delay fake news
Recorded: April 8, 2025 Duration: 0:57:44Space Recording
Short Summary
In today's discussion, Bitcoin's volatility was highlighted as it surged to $81K amid tariff news, while the NFT market showed signs of recovery with Pudgy Penguins leading the charge. The migration of builders to Dubai and BlackRock's market insights indicate significant trends in the crypto landscape, alongside the emergence of meme coins like Fartcoin and Remus.
Full Transcription
Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the modern market where every day we discuss everything
to do with the modern market. That is the crypto market, the NFT market, and how to
hopefully navigate the Trump presidential market and everything that is coming out of
the white house today. We loaded up a discussion. We have Bitcoin jumping straight to 81 K from
76 K on a tariff delay, fake news it settled back at 79k we're going to
talk blackrock ceo saying stock markets could fall another 20 but um could be a buying opportunity
most ceos believe they are in a recession right now we're also going to be getting back to some
on-chain activity finally barcoin is outperforming and remus which is the name given to a dire wolf brought back from
extinction ran to nine million dollars um looking forward to rahim's explanation on what on earth
is going on there i will provide no explanation up front we've also got the latest on price action
on crypto and nfts as usual plus the general chats on where we think the market is going
today i've got legendary and rahim with me in the co-host seats we're ready to get into it just a
reminder friends nothing that we say is financial advice this market is very very risky and everything
is very unpredictable so please perceive the caution exercise your own judgment and do your
own research with that out of the way rahim it's, it's the 8th of April. How are you doing?
GM, GM, everybody.
It's been super awesome, kind of getting back into routines.
Dubai summer is hitting.
That's not very exciting.
But there's a lot of people been moving to Dubai.
There's a lot of stuff happening, especially with like token getting closer.
Met some market makers yesterday.
Met some a bunch of friends like a couple of days ago like it honestly feels like the energy in real life
crypto people is just like so much more energized than like crypto twitter right now and stuff it's
kind of nice to see that a lot is happening around token in dubai so looking forward to that so so
far so good to say that's pretty exciting uh and you're saying a lot
of people are actually moving moving there as well like making the move what's your sense when
people when you ask people what the kind of key reason was without going too philosophical deep
like what's what's the kind of key reasons that you think people are making that jump at the moment
so i remember like two until two years ago i would say like a lot of people that were moving to Dubai were mostly like consumers and traders.
I feel like in the last year and a half, I've seen like a lot of builders move here and a lot of like hedge funds and VCs.
And I think that's been like a big shift. And like the overarching common statement is that like everyone's like pretty afraid of EU regulation a lot of it is just like
not working out for like builders in the European Union so we've had like a massive influx of people
just moving from there and there's just like a lot of investment coming from Qatar Saudi Arabia
Dubai so like a lot of builders are like you know what hub is here investment is here so
it's time to maybe take that leap.
Interesting.
I do say sometimes that when you dig down deep enough,
the answer is always tax.
And I think that is, might be one of the reasons.
However, I genuinely think that there are additional reasons going on as well.
So yeah, fine, it's a favorable tax environment.
That is the go-to thing that people think,
but there's a lot more going on there
than people probably give credit for, I think. So i wanted to give you a chance to share that uh legendary
what's going on your side how are things before we get into the headlines today
jim jim doing quite well i'm excited that we are slowly turning into a political show because that
means we can talk a bit more macroeconomics on the one hand.
On the other hand, we had this short pre-show discussion where we were saying, what does
this actually mean that we're talking more like politics and all of those things that
are happening?
You made the point, maybe it's the result that crypto is an asset class that's becoming
more mature.
And now it's important to talk about all those exogenous factors having influence on
that i was thinking yes that is certainly true to a very large extent but maybe there's also a part
of me that's a bit more cynical that says there's nothing inherently interesting in crypto to talk
about these days because this stuff is so dominating and overshadowing everything else
that we simply cannot really
have the classical show where we have three main headlines to pick out from the industry
because they are just not there at the moment.
So we have to talk about this more exogenous stuff that has this massive influence on our
industry.
Yeah, it's an interesting, very, very interesting point.
It's kind of like a catch 22 situation where it can't be any more interesting stuff because everyone is waiting for this stuff to play out. But this stuff, who knows how long it's going to take to play out. Therefore, there can't be any more interesting stuff.
We seem to be at a standstill in some ways, but the thing that I'm kind of interested to talk about as we get towards the end of today's show, yes, we're going to do the tariff stuff.
Yes, we're going to talk macro, as is incredibly important to do, and we will do that today.
Interesting, interested to get into Rahim's section towards the end where we talk Fartcoin and Remus.
Look, I know they're just on chain.
It's just like a daily runner potentially, but I think it's interesting to observe that happening
after the period of time that we've just been through
and see what we think, see what we think,
because I think that on chain activity is pretty important
and can be a useful indicator when things start to pick back up,
when people feel a bit more confident
to start to take more risk, I think.
So very intrigued for that conversation.
Anything else, boys,
before we get into any final reflections there?
I'm excited for Rahim's part as well,
because given that I'm now in my biohacking era,
I have explored that use a bit more from a quote unquote,
scientific background. So I'm quite curious to see what Rahim will say on the on chain side of things.
And they might have some additional comments to make on that.
Yeah, I love that. I'm excited. I'm excited for the discussion as well.
We have basically provided no explanation. Remus is is i guess i did the name given to a dire
wolf brought back from extinction if you if you have missed that piece of news from yesterday
there was a corresponding meme coin but as you said ryan will talk um a little bit more about
that later and maybe legendary is going to be providing the scientific basis for all of this
um uh too so we're looking forward to that conversation.
We're going to do all the tariff stuff first, but before we get there, let's get you up to speed
with everything that's happening in the market itself. We've got, starting with the majors,
we've got Bitcoin up almost a couple of percent to 79K. We've got ETH up 5% to 1.5K. We've got
XRP up 6% to 1.9. BNB is up a couple to 557 solana is up almost nine
percent to 108 so green across the board bouncing from what was obviously an astonishingly bad
set of few red days in a row on the meme coin side of things doge is also up eight percent
pepe is up three percent trump is up two percent bonk is up five barcoin as we as we noted outperforming everything up 25 even on the week is up nine
percent got spx uh which is down six percent uh whiff is up a couple of percent so actually
they're kind of they may be bouncing these majors i'm sorry these memes but if anything they're
only marginally ahead of the majors which does beg the question what's the point in having this kind
of risk if they're going to move in the same way artcoin being the obvious obvious exception
completely outperforming absolutely everything actually mog is up 17 as well uh so that is interesting to note getting into the
headlines themselves we have uh bitcoin jumping straight to 81k yesterday it was 76k at the time
there was that new there was that tweet that talked about a tariff delay and it ended up
up being fake news it was pretty much dismissed by the white house pretty quickly after
bitcoin's then settled at 79k
but very interesting to see bitcoin react so strongly on fake news reminded me very much of
the etf fake announcement if you remember that back in january and the market completely sent
it was fake then we corrected but it showed where the pent-up demand was and what it was waiting
for so i thought that was intriguing also we've got blackrock ceo coming out yesterday saying the stock markets could fall
another 20 he believes most ceos believes they are in a recession right now he did go on to say
that he's probably a buying opportunity so we'll touch on that fartcoin outperformed plus 25 and
remus as we said the name given to a dire wolf brought back from extinction runs to nine
million dollars if you're watching on screen with us remember live on x video and youtube too
this is the first dire wolf owl in over 10 000 years um this this uh wolf was extinct and now
now they've managed to bring it back so uh intrigued to dive into that
in a bit some notable price action uh along with fart coin being up 25 percent tit coin is also up
25 percent interestingly bearer chain has dropped another 10 to 3.86 that's actually an all-time low
it's just crazy how fast these markets are moving at the moment there's only maximum seven to ten
days ago where we're
talking about all the crazy yield on bearer chain how exciting it all was and i still think all that
stuff is going on so it's still potentially very exciting but to hit an all-time low just
seems like our fingers have just snapped once and that's where we are i was like okay cool i did not
realize it was that low so quick so i just wanted to bring that up
so that's on the normal price action side legendary is there anything we need to know on the nft side
yeah one quick comment before i move to the nfts you know what this makes me think when we have
sonic polka dot not polka sonic bear chain being very exciting for a brief moment in time
having attractive yields and then we move on to
farm the next L2. But I'm actually really excited for some of those stablecoin-based
chains to drop, which we have talked about on the show. I don't need to worry about that. It's the
same thing with ETH. We talked about ETH as we had the founder on the show, right? And I have
vouched seven-ish ETH, and I'm down on that already more than 30%.
I'm just excited for an environment that is very stable, no pun intended.
Moving on to the NFT side of things, though.
We've seen a bit of a recovery yesterday, so most of the things are actually up.
This time, however, it's not the Bored Apes which are leading this.
It is the Pudgies and the little Pudgies.
They are up 8% for the little ones.
Pudgies themselves, the big ones, up 2.5%.
Also a significant move in the latest collections, which is up 5.6%.
And interesting to connect that to your bear chain news is
because we've spoken about it yesterday.
The steady teddies are still very, very steady.
Yes.
And I'm kind of repeating myself from yesterday.
They are down another 6% over the last 24 hours, but they're still up 45% over
the last week and still holding strong at this 167 bearer floor now.
Good stuff.
Steady teddies doing what they are supposed to do according to
their name um getting into the rest of the rub 3 roundup there's a few more interesting things
going on today the picture upgrade for eth has been announced to be may the 7th so that's in
around a month's time xrp leveraged etf is going to go live before the spot etf has even been
approved well that was interesting to note.
World Liberty Fire prepares for an airdrop by proposing a vote
to distribute a small amount of USD1 to World Liberty Fire holders.
Remember, that's the organization run by the Trump administration,
not the Trump administration, the Trump family's business endeavor.
Aerodrome announced flight school
which is a v-aero airdrop for users who lock more than 2.5k aero remember that's the kind of main
decks on base which gets the most volume pakistan announced former binance ceo cz as a crypto
advisor these jobs are pretty pretty interesting at the moment strategy reveals a q1 unrealized losses of 5.91
billion dollars they've obviously been buying at the tops sailor has routinely said he's very happy
to buy at all periods of time um but that does mean their q1 stuff means they're down a little
eth btc ratio broke beneath 0.02 for the first time in a long time as the lowest point since February 2020.
Pretty savage price action for ETH. Ex-Kraken employees buy a majority stake in real estate
company with plans to use company treasury to buy Sol and Solana validators. I'm very interested to
see different companies pursue like a micro strategy playbook, but for other assets like
B revenue generating and what are you going to do with your profits?
And then finally, this is cool on the IP side,
little pudgies announced a casting call for a new YouTube show,
seeking to license 50 little pudgies for this submission.
So that's pretty fun.
That's the web,
the roundup to get up to speed with everything else that's happening in the
space before we get to the main conversation on tariffs and wolves
and blackrock uh legendary what's catching your attention more generally and then i want to come
to rahim too definitely the ex kraken news because it's something where i had a change of heart like
a couple months ago i would have said this is cool to see more companies trying to do this playbook
we had the e-treasury as a main headline for a biotech company just a couple of weeks ago.
But now I'm starting to think it's actually this copy past the playbook of strategy did it with
Bitcoin. So now this company is going to be used as a shell by that cryptocurrency. And I just
don't think this is a very sustainable thing to do in the long run.
This is why I'm now more excited when we have the actual companies adding BTC, adding whatever
cryptocurrency to the treasury who have an ongoing business model, which then means they
can be successful, prosper, and if they like, so add more to their stashes than those quote
unquote shell companies
that are copying strategy and just doing the same playbook but with another currency
so you think doing it with any other currency is pointless because every other currency is
too risky or you just think what's the view the view is just that i don't think this will
keep people interested.
It worked because strategy is the first one.
It does it with the biggest one.
But if you now have some real estate company buying Solana,
you have some God knows hairdresser buying HBAR.
I just don't think this is going to be very,
very interesting in the long run to the market,
especially as you will see strategies
and established company and they've been doing that for years it's different but for the other
ones you will then see just a high premium on the net asset value and like okay why shouldn't i just
buy solana why shouldn't i just buy the solana etf once that thing is live i feel like with strategy
the market is still valuing that way above the BTC spot price.
And that's what the market does.
That's obviously fine, but I just don't think this playbook
will work out with
a copypasta company, so try to do the same.
Interesting.
Fair enough. That's an interesting take.
Rahim, what's catching
your attention? Any comments there or anything
else that you're interested in before we get into the main
stuff today?
I am very appalled by the lack of reaction not just by the entire twitter timeline but even you guys about how everyone just like kind of passed over this whole fake news the cnbc 90 day
pause tariff thing that came out yesterday like i reading, I don't know if you guys saw the Kubesi letter tweet, but in a matter of three minutes, they added about $3 trillion in market
cap from its lows for S&P 500. And like based on like fake news. And I was like, that's a colossal
amount of money. We talk about like scams in like crypto and like, you know, like the timeline is
like crazy about it it's people are
very passionately like calling out people it's probably because people are directly invested in
that but i was like it's pretty crazy of how people are just like like this keeps on happening over
and over again you spoke about the the etf gary gensler tweets that happened last year january and
now you have these fake news like it's absolutely insane to me that we just like
pretend like yep fake news happened let's move on it's okay like no investigation nothing pretty
crazy i'm like pretty like three trillion dollars that's a lot of money indeed i was actually going
back yesterday to look up the etf fake news one i was like how did that actually play out like what what was it that
happened and it was literally i mean it's unbelievable like if you actually cast your
minds back it's unbelievable that the sec account one day before the announcement was supposed to
happen was hacked in some way and that tweet went out just i think it ended up it was only 24 hours before
the other tweet was was going out so in a sense it didn't have like huge ramifications in a way
because it was like 24 hours between the fake tweet and the real one and in the end it all
happened as it was supposed to i think but it is it is crazy um and then you
also had some other coin telegraph ones right where coin telegraph of i think it was coin
telegraph out of the the the media tweets which have kind of really moved the markets aggressively
um but i think the the deeper issue that it speaks to i guess rahim is people people
really take what they see and this is something i've realized in the in general in this in the
space like the level of rigor that we would have been expected to research stuff as a as a lawyer
at a law firm i've just noticed in general whether it comes to research whether it comes to even
deal making most people this is like an observation on everyone and I don't know if this is negative
or positive it's just my observation people don't I think they just it's not that they don't care
it's just that they're more more like open just like yeah things will be fine things will be fine
like I'm just going to go with it whether that that's on the research side, whether that's even on the deal-making side. Whereas
when you're coming from that kind of academic, it's not even academic background, it's a
specifically legal background where every sentence needs to like be joined up and you can actually
get, it can actually be a negative thing because you're always trying to nail things down and make things perfect and that can actually lead you to being too
what's the word too too slow too perfectionist too paralyzed because you can't make a decision
whereas i feel like other people are far more flowing with it and and you know there's pros
and cons to both to both ways any reflections there yeah it's kind of yeah i kind of to a sorry i'm just jumping real quick it's kind of scary to a... Sorry, Rahim, just to
jump in real quick. It's kind of scary to a certain
extent because ultimately, look at this
stuff and we'll cover it in the menus,
right? So if you said, oh, no, I'm
going to wait and see if this is a fake news or not
because I don't think this will end so fast,
you would have missed out on the gains,
A, and B, the
people who bought it because they're like, yeah, I don't
care. That's the news.
It will trend.
It will go viral.
It doesn't matter if it's fake or not.
Let's buy it.
You are still up more than if you had not bought that
because the market, yes, sold it off,
but it did not sell it off to the level that it was before.
Not 100% of the buyers were like,
oh, fuck, this news is fake,
so let's sell 100% of what I just bought.
They were like, meh.
Might as well hold it because we're up a bit and we only correct
it down a bit.
I mean, I know other stuff has moved as well.
And there might be additional reasons that are going on at the same time.
It's a bit of a dangerous predicament on the one hand.
And on the other hand, I'm honestly surprised we have not seen yet a large scale, high effort
fake news attempt at something like where you see a fake cnn video with a deep fake trump
announcing something more dramatic see more news pages being hacked so that it has like a bit
longer of a lifespan than just two minutes i'm honestly surprised that most of the like hacking
we see and fake news efforts are like rather low effort here's a tweet because i hacked someone
i hacked the sec i mean that's probably
not low effort to do that but the media delivery strategy of fake news is pretty basic so far
literally not everyone's got your sora plus claude plus various llms convening is that what
you're looking for you're looking for them to collaborate with various llms otherwise it's not good enough probably yeah that's that's the game
plan yeah uh rahim you wanted to have a final take i think yeah i think that's a very spot-on
take ledge i think you're absolutely right it's crazy of how we've excelled so much on the ai
front but you haven't you don't see as much of like fake content or fake videos circulating
around to essentially expedite information like
this but i think like yeah i think that's a great great thing to think about i just think just adding
to what like ledge was saying it's also that philosophical discussion right like we moved
from the early 2000 from the age of information to age of curation of information and now you have
so many like news medias and news channels and half of them probably piggyback off of like other news channels and stuff.
So they don't even have their own sources.
So at some point you're like, okay, if I'm going to research on it, where the hell am I going to research?
Like if my direct line of communication between the White House is a media company and if that media company is not like giving me right information, who am I supposed to do?
Like text the cryptocurrencies are like, who am i supposed to do like text the cryptocurrencies are like what am i supposed to do so yeah it's a very weird thing but like i really hope at some point
we come up with ways to just like dive into it investigate into it because i feel like yeah we
just you we talk about like rugs and stuff and everything and people who take money and like
flee away or like rug the project but like you just don't know of how many people behind the
screens are shorting or longing these markets and putting these news outs and it completely goes under the
radar as whoops these are leveraged traders they're going to leverage trade you just don't
know how much money these people make and this is such a big issue right and i think it's something
we see in the media every day and you in particular be will see that when you research
the news and you try to find the original source of something.
You will have a media house, you will have a newspaper, online publication who's quoting, well, this information comes from an article that our colleagues at, say, Cointelegraph have written.
And Cointelegraph is like, I'm just making up, I'm not saying that Cointelegraph has been doing that, I'm just using names now.
I'm just using names now.
Cointelegraph is saying, well, Coindesk has written that, and so on and so forth.
Coindelgrap is saying, well, Coindesk has written that,
and so on and so forth.
Then you find the original article,
which is just quoting someone who posted a post on X.
And you think, oh, I saw it in three newspapers.
It needs to be legit.
But they're all quoting one another,
and nobody did some original research on that.
I mean, now that you say that,
I can't even remember what the source for this one was.
And frankly, I don't even know what the source
for saying that it was fake was.
Could have been like fake, fake denial.
Yeah, who knows?
It's a complicated one.
But as you say, doing your own research and getting to the source as quick as possible,
still value in that kind of core skill still um to figure out like what the right play
to make is so that is that interesting conversation we're going to actually touch on that a little bit
more again when we do the bigger analysis of the price movements we've also got an interesting
segment we're going to be talking about yes the fake news pump also the developments with uh
besant and the Japan negotiations.
Going to do a little focus on China because increasingly that's coming into focus.
And then also a little bit of stuff on the military budget, which I think is pretty important
too.
That'll take the majority of the show.
Looking forward to get into that conversation in just a moment.
Before we get there, let's get to our partner segment for today.
We're doing our Polkadot explorations.
Love a little gaming segment, Legendary.
Let's get into it.
Let's dive into gaming on Polkadot.
In 2024, the Web3 gaming studio Mythical Games
has completed its transition from Ethereum to Polkadot
and created the Mythos Superchain.
And there's two Mythical Games major, major launches that we're expecting for 2025.
Game number one is Pudgy Party. That's a game we already have talked about. It's a mobile game
featuring, obviously, the popular Pudgy Penguins IP, launching globally on both iOS and Android
this summer. And unlike the more competitive games, Pudgy Party is emphasizing inclusive
gameplay where players team up to dodge obstacles, complete collaborative missions, and unlock shared rewards.
The cool thing is that you can use your own Pudgy.
You can customize the NFT characters and build around that.
The second flagship game by Mythic Games is FIFA Rivals.
Players build and manage soccer clubs, engage in strategic player trading,
complete thrilling real-time matches.
And that game is, as the name is giving it away,
developed in partnership with FIFA,
also a free-to-play mobile game
and also expected to launch this summer.
And John Linden, who is the CEO of Mythical Games,
believes that the game could actually attract
more than 100 million players globally,
which then makes a lot of sense to build this on top of Polkadot
because you definitely need that scalable infrastructure.
Personally, I'm quite excited to see both of those games come to life
and get my hands on them this summer.
Big thanks to Polkadot for sponsoring this segment
and stay tuned for more weekly explorations.
This one looks sick.
I think all three of us are pudgy penguin holders
so that's pretty cool i know legendary there was some other games where your penguin's been
integrated to stuff already i think it's really cool to like to roll that out to other people as
well to allow people to participate in that way and i'm a big football fan too so i'm excited to
see how they they what they build out with fifa funky our resident polka
dot expert chime in here which of these games you did you want to comment on what's the deal
well i just wanted to ask you b if you've played one of their other big hits that has existed for
a while which is uh nfl rivals so they have a game that's in the iowa store and i think on google play
as well that's an nfl based game and know that you're a big nfl fan so if you haven't checked that one out while you guys are waiting for a pudgy party
and for the fifa rivals game nfl rivals has been out for a couple years excellent i need i need
that nfl fix i'm i like nfl so much funky and for the people who don't know it might sound like i
wouldn't like nfl because i'm when we talk about football for me football is soccer right
but i like nfl so much that i'll watch the nfl i'll watch the nfl discussion programs like now in april or may despite the season won't be back until whenever it is september or october they
have nothing to talk about maybe they talk a little bit about the draft maybe they talk about
i don't know they're literally just filling up it's the equivalent of when if we were running a crypto show with
no market to talk about basically um but i'll even watch it in the off season so uh i'm excited to
try that out gonna take a look thanks for that funk um right when i get to the main stuff today
we have a lot to discuss i want to set you up for this ledge as look there's so much going on at
the moment and we're doing our best to like give people little segments of what we think are the
most important things led today we thought the fake news pump we found interesting
besant's negotiations besant's increased importance plus his his revelations about
the negotiations with japan Also, China is coming
more into focus, we want to talk about that. And slipping into the conversation is this record
military budget. So all of this relative to the market, everything is super relevant to us at the
moment. Let's take it away. What do we need to know? Yesterday was one of the most chaotic trading
days we have ever seen a lot of things have happened, so let's break them down step by step.
First thing we had mentioned on the fake news already,
at one point yesterday, the S&P 500 did swing from a loss of 4.7%
to a sudden gain of 3.4% within minutes,
adding $3 trillion to the market, as Rahim has said before,
before it then plunged once again.
And that was triggered by, as we have said, a fake post saying that President Trump is
considering a 90-day pause on tariffs, which ultimately was very quickly dismissed and
denied by the White House.
Yet the market had already pumped on it.
It had sold off some of those gains, but did continue to trade higher than before. Apart from this fake tariff hope or fake delay hope, a couple of more substantial
things have happened as well. One of them being the negotiations between US and Japan, which are
being led by US Treasury Secretary Scott Besant, who had said that there's been a very positive
conversation between President Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba,
and that there is 50, 60, maybe 70 countries, that is the wording that Scott Besant had used,
while at the same time looking to negotiate deals and trying to resolve those trade tensions around the Liberation Day tariffs.
those trade tensions around the Liberation Day tariffs.
Then the more massive thing
where I'm going to spend a bit more time on
is the further escalation in China.
There's two main things that happened there
that you need to know.
First of all, President Trump has warranted
to slap an additional 50% tariff in China's imports
unless China retracts their new retaliatory tariffs by today.
If implemented, that would push the total tariff
on Chinese goods
to more than 100%, 104%, to be precise.
But China did something else on top of that, another retaliation,
by halting exports of seven critical rare earth metals.
Basically, you need rare earth in almost everything that's electronic these days
in all semiconductors, phones,
everything that is being built that's an electronic device
with a semiconductor in there
needs rare metals so
they are in quite high demand
and it also
happens that China is controlling 70%
of the world's rare earth
supplies and they said
they will put a stop on seven of those
that are not to be exported for the time being
unless this situation is being cleared up.
And Beijing clearly said, and I'm quoting here,
that they are ready to fight to the end.
And they are not budging,
and they're definitely not giving in right now.
So this is definitely something we will have to report on further,
as it looks like we might see some more escalations in the tensions and trading policies between US and China.
And as you said, a very quick fourth news that's also relevant.
President Trump himself announced that he will be requesting a record-breaking $1 trillion
Pentagon budget for military spending.
And that is, and I looked up the numbers on that,
amidst what is already an all-time high for military spending. So in 2024, $2.46 trillion globally have been spent on military expenses.
If you break that down by the entire population on the world,
that means actually that every person on the world
has quote unquote, has spent $306 on military expenditures. And that number is up significantly
from 2023, where it was at 2.3 trillion. But more importantly, it is the steepest increase we've seen in now 18 years. And again, if you just
look at the absolute number, military spending globally is at an all time high. So the key
takeaways here are, on the one hand, we have positive news coming from Japan and other
countries that are signaling to find a quick end to those tariffs with Liberation Day tariffs. China-US tensions
are escalating. We have the threat to have a total of more than 100% tariffs for imports from China
to the US, as well as the rare metal situation. And then we also have a significant increase
in military spending, both from the the us but as well as globally
okay excellent set of summaries for various kind of connected things going on some more connected than others but they're all relevant in the general conversation of what is going on at the moment
so thanks for that summary a couple of directions i want to go in to add to that very much linked to each other the first is more on the
news side and then zooming out so we had this piece of news I think it was actually it was
yesterday as well actually so you mentioned China one thing that's going on at the same time just
trying to share my screen here Ledge if we can just adjust the settings we've got china
sovereign wealth fund stepping in to support stocks plunging on the trade war so um this was
the news that china intervened on monday to support domestic stocks plunging because of the
u.s tariff woes with the sovereign wealth fund increasing its holdings and equities and saying it would defend market stability. So, um, this is, you know, the Shanghai composite index lost 7% on Monday and
it's worst day in five years reeling after the additional tariffs that were
placed on it.
Uh, investors were dumping shares across the board, worried about the prospect
of increasingly vicious trade war and a global recession.
vicious trade war and a global recession um so i think on the one hand you have this this
commitment from china to defend its own market and when we were speaking about yesterday when
you're trying to abstract this out and be like why why is this relevant to people's crypto
currency bags like what is the game and i've
referenced yesterday arthur hayes talking about how in the end crypto can be a simple game sometimes
like if the money supply goes up then crypto will go up as well if there's debasement going on then
crypto will go up and i think what people or the things that we're trying to connect together here is this situation in china where it seems like they're going to need if these tariffs go ahead
in the way that they're expected they're going to get hit very very hard yes okay there's a big
discussion on what's going to go on in the states as well but just focusing on china for one second
they're going to get hit super hard and they obviously export a hell of a lot of stuff to the States.
And so the idea is that they're going to need to start to defend their own market,
and they're going to need to print in order to do that.
So that's on the one hand.
And then staying on China more, maybe just zooming out just a touch,
because everyone is talking about being a tariff
expert or focusing on tariffs all the time ray dalio published this article i think yesterday
he's been producing a bunch of educational articles uh if only to publicize his next book
launch which i think is coming soon he always references in the articles, but they are super helpful and the books are very good. And this one yesterday he published was
saying, don't make the mistake of thinking that what's now happening is mostly about tariffs.
So tariffs are the headline, tariffs are the thing which are hitting you in the face. That's
what people are talking about. People are talking about the tariff numbers and everything going on
there. But the position that this article is taking is that this is way bigger than tariffs themselves it's about the monetary
and economic order which is breaking down it is about domestic political order which is breaking
down it is about the international geopolitical world order being broken down and there are all kinds of changes in these
forces which he speaks about in I think I can't remember the name of the book but he's the most
recent one might be how rich countries go broke or something along those lines and the idea is
that look we're at one of these pivot points in history or that's where we've been kind of moving towards for quite
some time. And yeah, you can be talking about tariffs, but one of the key ideas he has is that
as world powers move from their ascent into their decline, there's always this period of time where
the currency comes under pressure. Maybe it was a reserve value for one period of time maybe it will not be forever
and in that period of decline there's always conflict every single time as Dalio has studied
you know whether it was with the British there was a conflict whether it was with the Dutch
there was a conflict there's always a conflict as these kind of buyers go into as their superiority starts to become
challenged and so i think that is what he is urging people to consider not to get necessarily
lost in the specific numbers in the tariffs but just look a little bit bigger and that's why i
thought today it would be helpful to start looking at china focusing on china because look that's that's
the other power right that is the one that is in direct conflict and so maybe open question we need
to be keeping that conversation or just looking in that direction more reporting on it more if we
want to understand what is going on uh more fully uh ledge i want to come to you first with some
initial reaction there and then funky goes hand raisedj, I want to come to you first with some initial reaction there.
And then Funky's got his hand raised as well.
I want to come to him.
Yeah, I have quite a few thoughts on that.
Let me structure that.
So first thought is optics matter a lot in China.
And we've seen the Chinese government
or we've seen China selling of US treasuries for the last now 15 years.
They bought them at one point.
They thought it's cool to have them.
They thought it makes sense from an economic perspective.
But then they also realized it's actually not the best look to have US treasuries, US being the biggest rival in there, and they are selling off
more and more and more of the treasuries. And they reached an all time low since 2009. In the
holdings, I think they sold off another 47 billion over the last year or so. Yes, 57 billion. Exactly.
Sorry, that was the correct number according to financial times
that was sold off last year now they're holding 759 billion dollars in u.s treasuries there's
like this thing going on with the treasury sellers with this focus on how are we like positioning
ourselves and what narrative what pictures we want to paint and as part of that it's been
interesting to also see it's going to sound unrelated, but we'll connect it in a second,
on YouTube to see, what's his name?
iShowSpeed, that very famous streamer,
now being in China,
and suddenly having access to all of the coolest Chinese cars
and highlighting the features.
You have an iPhone connected to the car,
well, not an iPhone,
a phone and you connect it to the car, and you tilt the phone around, and the car. Not an iPhone. A phone and you connect it to the car.
And you tilt the phone around.
And the car does the same movements.
The car can basically stay in the same spot.
And do a full 360.
It can do many more things.
And a bunch of other American YouTubers.
Who suddenly are highlighting Chinese cars.
They did not share before.
And they had one of the flying cars.
That he could access quickly. So I do think that they are now starting to they did not share before. And they had one of the flying cars that he could access quickly.
So I do think that they are now starting to play the content game even stronger,
especially like on quote-unquote Western media,
because obviously TikTok is a whole separate thing.
And we talked about TikTok when we talked about the US portion being sold
and seeing from the OnlyFans creators to Amazon,
so many companies being interested in
that and also seeing that china is holding back to comment what will happen with that so i do think
that um i very much agree with you b there is like this larger conflict at hand and there's like this
this fight for um the the global hegemony going on and who's going to lead this is going to be
us or is going to be china tariffs are of that, but so is the entire communication.
So is the entire media strategy.
And it's so interesting to see
this push for Chinese cars and Chinese EVs
and showing what they can do.
Hitting on the YouTube and TikTok algorithm
so hard at a time
when we have the tariffs escalating
and when we have the US trying to fight
for domestic cars,
which are and which
are the ones that should be bought so I do think there's a bigger picture than just tariffs to look
at yeah very interesting I'm glad you brought up the uh the treasury situation because I think
that's something people are looking towards a lot as well I want to double click on that in a second
um we'll come to it for you for your thoughts in a second as well Rahim, but Funky your hand is raised. What's your take here? What's the weight we should be attaching
to the focus on China here? What is your take?
No, so I read the Dalio article yesterday and I want to touch on some stuff that Legendary
brought up some great data points. So what we're seeing obviously, yes, this is much tarot and the one thing i would say and i'm going to preface the rest of
my comments by stating that things of this size when we're talking about these kinds of changes
and yes there's a bit of uh fear-mongering i think in dalio's words right like these things
take sometimes decades to unravel so it's not like it's going to be overnight, all of a sudden, like the globe is going to destabilize economically, politically, so on and so forth.
It is a winding down of these things that take a long time.
Just look at the sweeping arc of history.
I'm sure you guys see that.
To Legendary's point about China, we also see the same thing with Saudi Arabia.
They've been deleveraging their balance sheet from U.S. treasuries for many years now. China is trading
with Saudi Arabia for oil directly with yuan, so they're not even using U.S. dollars as the
proxy anymore for trade. So we talk about sort of the death of the petrodollar. I think this is the
big reason why, for instance, the U. the US government is particularly keen on stablecoins being the first thing that gets legislatively approved, because it does continue sort of the US dollar hegemony across the globe.
If it's going to take over the blockchain space, I think that that's really important to acknowledge.
that piece about Dalio and having just read a thread from punk 6529 the other day that he
brought up years ago. I think the greatest variable in all this and the destabilization,
whether it's politically, economically, so on and so forth, is what is the impact of AGI going to
have on all of this, right? Like how much is that going to radically shift everything for every
major player, both the U S for China, you know, what does it mean for them to have all these resources and these special metals to make the semiconductors and everything else every major player, both the US, for China. What does it mean for them to have all these
resources and these special medals to make the
semiconductors and everything else? This is a super
fascinating conversation. I know we don't have time to unpack
all of this, but I think it's worth
noting and something that we should probably maybe talk more
about in the Discord or
just have on another show or something like
that. I'm sure these things
that we're starting to witness are going to take time
to play out, and I'm sure we're going to have some very fruitful conversations moving forward.
Indeed. I appreciate the additional insight, Funk. As you say, big box we've kind of opened here.
Final point I wanted to make, and then maybe Rahim will come to you on this just for a thought.
The CEO of Bybit had this to share yesterday again specifically thinking on china said u.s
versus china tariff war china will try to lower the rmb to counter the tariff historically whenever
the rmb drops a lot of chinese capital flows into bitcoin bullish for bitcoin this was um quote
tweeting arthur hayes who was saying that that whatever CMY is devalued the
narrative that Chinese capital flight will flow into Bitcoin he was also saying ignore China at
your peril that is happening there Rahim any closing thoughts on this topic before we
closing thoughts on this topic before we maybe go into some more on-chain stuff.
Yeah, just to add on some of the bits that you guys already spoke about,
I was reading an article yesterday about China opposing...
So Xi and the fashion company that is born out of China,
now they operate out of Singapore and a couple of other countries,
they basically spoke about changing the supply
chain across the world to fight this whole tariff of war, where they got basically opposed
by Chinese government being like, no, you guys shouldn't do that.
So almost to the core of the fashion industry, they're like, you know what?
You don't need to worry about this.
You don't need to diversify your supply chains.
Let's keep it the way things are.
And I just think it just goes down to like exactly what you were talking about in South
like they're like not backing down.
And to see like so much focus on coming on all the different industries, whether it's
the communication industry, the tech industry, the fashion industry, the education industry.
I think it's more and more important for us to keep on what happens with China because they're clearly going all in fighting this
whole trade war. Yeah, I think that's completely right. I don't know, I'm just
reflecting now and maybe this whole, I saw a couple of tweets earlier which was
suggesting that everyone in the West underestimates China because you don't
get the full news and we've got this kind of western bias but likewise um people in china probably don't get the full uh story of
what was going on here and just got these two sets of participants in the market who are not fully
aware like if you think about some of the stuff i mean i'm definitely not as well read up on
aware like if you think about some of the stuff i mean i'm definitely not as well read up on
the stuff that's going on there um so yeah i think i think it's definitely worth it it's the biggest
conflict on the horizon if it's not on the horizon it's here immediately so it's obviously
worth understanding much better because rather than it being some kind of cold conflict where
you keep it in arm's length there's obviously something something that is going to be a tussle now, which is going to keep affecting
the markets which we operate in.
And so that is why we will continue to cover it to the extent that it is relevant to our
fart coin and Remus bags.
Moving into the next segment in that way, Brian, we've had a bit more action
on the meme coin side of things.
What's going on?
Is there some signs of life?
What's the update here?
So Fartcoin basically had like a pump
of about 25% in the last 24 hours.
Just to recap everyone,
this is a token that came out of
Truth Terminal when we had the surge of AI ecosystems in Web3. That's where this was
birthed out of on fart jokes, on humor. There were these narratives that the oldest joke that exists
on the internet are fart-based jokes and stuff. So the narrative essentially comes from that. So it's been seen,
like we've talked about this on the show a couple of times of how Fartcoin sees like ridiculous
amount of volatility over like the last couple of weeks and stuff. It's trading at like 600
million market cap. So it's been showing signs. It's like there have been like tweets around
that if you actually compare whether it's private equities, whether it's other assets, the Fartcoin at the moment is the best performing asset in the world, which is just a ridiculous idea to think about.
Which also leads us into the next meme coin that kind of blew up, which is Remus.
We've talked about AI bots and AI agents, which was the future side of tech. Now we're
talking about tech from ancient history or provenance, if you want to use those buzzwords
we use in Web3. So basically, there's this company called Colossal Biosciences. They've
been existing since 2021, raised a couple of billion dollars. They successfully brought back
extinct animals. That's what they mainly focus on. So they brought back to, they use DNAs from
fossils that are aging like 12,000, 70,000 years. And they essentially regenerated to dire wolf
on, I believe like two weeks ago, they came out with this news. They put out a video where
you can actually hear them scream. And it's considered like a big technological advancement.
They've been working on some other animals as well. I believe I read the Tasmanian tiger
and a couple of other ones. So they've been like heavily focused on bringing back extinct species,
rather fascinating to see the direction they've been going it was
funny when they posted all of this on twitter the comment section just felt like we were like it
felt like an nft project because like random people were just like posting random animal pictures and
being like oh when are you bringing this back and they would just respond to it yeah that's exactly
what we are working on right now it just seemed like you know they were just like ship posting uh there was a one particular comment of somebody asking them being like what
is the value why are you doing this how is this good for humanity and one of the reply from their
official account was that the dire wolf is important in the animal kingdom and in the
animal ecosystem and it's going to help conserve the environment which
i just thought was like such a corporate answer to give because like these wolves like haven't
existed for like 75 000 years so it's not like animal life hasn't existed but it is definitely
fascinating to see just from like a scientific point of view for people who don't know that my
background is actually in molecular sciences that's what i started so to see uh me covering something for you yeah to for me to cover something that's like biomedical related
on the market modern market show feels kind of full circle uh but yeah you know what this is
exactly what i was thinking about is when when was BitTensor or when we had the surge of AI coins,
one of the ways that our generation or the younger generation of people got exposed to this new venture
that the world was moving towards, regardless of how long it lasted, was through these AI coins.
You had all these AI bots, you had AI 16Z, you had AI XPT, a bunch of things.
And that was the exposure that everyday
degencs got into that vertical of innovation i think it's very fascinating that if you were to
being like okay i want to get exposed to the extincting animals how do i go about this how
do i go about investing in it and right now for a random degen on the internet like the only way to
invest is probably in something like Remus.
It is something that went up to 9 million market caps
and not ridiculous numbers as we would have expected a couple of months ago.
But it is just interesting to see those.
And it's sitting at 13 million right now.
So it was 9 up, literally 45 minutes ago.
So it's interesting to see the extinct animal meta now coming back, even when the trenches are dead.
So it's just a very fascinating time to see all of this come to fruition.
Yeah, I agree with you.
There's some fascinating stuff from the scientific perspective.
Lej, I think you wanted to...
I had one thing to say that I'll pass to you and we're running
out of time today uh my thought was that it's fact it's interesting there's more an observation
on meme coin investing where i think we all say with a very straight face like oh you know the
only reason you know the reason why those ai coins went up is was our generation was looking for
exposure and so obviously that was the only exposure as if that's a reasonable way to look at it like it is absolutely unreasonable i think to say that a
random meme coin is a way to get exposure to something like that's just like calling a bunch
of crap like and just giving it a name and then saying this is my exposure to a whole industry that is actually
valuable so like there's like a lot of um because i agree it's it's funny how we speak about that as
oh the way to get exposure it's like that's not exposure and the reason why i was thinking about
that is because one of the conversations we've been having privately and on the show as well
is like how do we get exposure to robotics? Like these humanoids, these robotics things.
Okay.
Tesla has public market.
You might've noticed on the timeline,
Andrew Kang and a couple of other people have kept announcing recently.
They're getting these series a deals and these humongous robotics companies.
And Oh,
wouldn't it be nice to get a slice of that,
but we can't get a slice.
I don't think the way for us to get a slice is to start the meme coins with a bunch of robot
names and then say right now this is my slice of this is my slice of the industry i mean i wouldn't
be surprised if that's something we tried to do and maybe that will be a method at some point but
it's not a real way to get exposure um which i think we very much learned from the ai coin cycle
potentially um curious for your just a quick response there rahim and then when i give give I think we very much learned from the AI coin cycle, potentially.
Curious for your just a quick response there, Rahim,
and then want to give it to Ledge.
Yeah, I think it's very important to be mindful with all of these things.
Don't ape into these things exactly.
Don't justify to yourself that this is me investing in future technology,
and I can tell my friends that I'm invested in the future of the world with these things we've seen this before so be cautious uh this is never financial advice but
like these things are just like vaporware and we just come up with different ways to justify it
yeah i think that was the reality with some of the ai stuff in particular although i'm sure there'll
be some there will be some gems uh amongst all of that but anyway that's on that side ledger wanted to
give you a chance to come in here i know you're very intrigued from the scientific side a final
thought on this topic before we close out yeah i just wanna just wanna nerd a minute about this
because i think it's super cool so the way they did it is they took dna samples from a tooth and
from a skull from the direwolf that from the dire wolf, that is.
And they basically used that to look at the genome from the dire wolf
and look at a regular gray wolf and find the differences in its genes in the DNA.
And they found about like 20 traits that make the dire wolf the dire wolf
and that make it different from the gray wolf.
And they basically were able to then
take cell salt and edit those bits of dna however you have to do that like very mindfully and
carefully because for example there's like one specific bit where you can change the the code
the of the of the gray wolf to match a die wolf's code but if you edit this in a like very specific
way that would lead to deaf and blind
gray wolves. So what they did is then they actually had to edit other genes, which remove the red
pigmentation and other pigmentation so that you get the direwolf color basically matched without
turning the poor wolf blind and deaf. And this is how they went on about this process. Then they had wolf over, which they denucleated and put in the edited cells.
And then the gestation happened and you had created the direwolf.
Also interesting to note, and maybe that's a bit of market alpha for those who did not care about my last two minutes of DNA-based rambling,
is that they have already made experiments with woolly mammoths.
And they did that on mice though.
So they basically managed to have mice that
have the coat and fur of a mammoth.
And also they're working on an elephant,
basically on an elephant surrogacy.
But for them, the gestation period is like two years. So there might be some sort of DNA altered elephant meme coin
coming to the markets in 2027.
That's maybe something to keep an eye on
to have a bit of a lighter news for the end of the show.
I mean, we've obviously had the animal coins going.
Now we need the extinct animal resurrections um that seems
to be that seems to make perfect sense uh in the universe that we live in so looking forward to that
um great show great show today guys that is our time though unfortunately remember we do this
every single day monday to friday at 7 a.m eastern time for one or live on xx video youtube and you can catch up with us on apple and spotify too uh
thanks to rahim and legendary for co-hosting with me thank you so much for joining us as usual
have a wonderful day take care and we'll be back as usual tomorrow same time same place bye
