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QT Ending... Wen QE? Gold/Silver Bull Market? 📈 The Aggregated Ep. 142
Recorded: Dec. 12, 2025 Duration: 2:28:36Space Recording
Short Summary
Stratex is launching a yield strategy marketplace on Base and Flare, partnering with Flare Forward to enhance community engagement and raise funds for innovative DeFi solutions. This reflects a broader trend of growth and collaboration in the crypto space, emphasizing yield generation and community-driven initiatives.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Music Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Music Thank you. Music so
gmgm everyone GMG and everyone.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Good to see everybody here.
Are we still waiting on a couple people to join the show?
Are we still waiting on a couple people to join the show?
So most of our confirmed guests are in hour two and three.
So we've got, you know, kind of an open forum going for the first hour.
All right.
How's everyone doing?
Good.
I'm just trying not to die.
What's going on with you, bro?
Yeah, I feel a little bit bad today, but yeah, definitely got...
There's like a...
They're called a super flu in the UK just now.
It doesn't feel super.
Nice.
Yeah, it's been going around here where I'm at, which is, I mean, I'm on the other side of the world.
But in Arizona, it's pretty bad.
Like everyone here is sick.
My kids were sick.
It was crazy.
Cindy and I were in Asia and, uh,
we had a layover in China and everybody on the plane was like coughing and sneezing around us. And we're like, Oh, we're totally fucked. Uh,
totally fucked.
And her friend had just gotten
whooping cough
from China the week before.
And we were like,
oh shit, this is the Wuhan whooping cough flight.
We're fucked.
That was the first thing you said to me
when I met you in Singapore.
I shook your hand and said hello
I'd not seen you in a few months and you said oh wait we've got this terrible super virus
I was like great
We've got the Wuhan whooping cough
No we were fine it was minor
I barely felt sick for a little bit but yeah when we were when we were on that plane, it was worrisome.
Everyone around you is coughing.
Yeah, I actually think there's, like, a psychosemantic element to that.
When you're on a flight, like, one guy starts coughing and then, like, ten people.
Because they don't catch it that quickly.
So it must be, like, a psychological thing.
And then before you know it, like, half the plane is coughing.
I really don't.
Like, it's happened to me before. I just don't believe that it's like genuine
you know what I mean
it's like a social contagion
some placebo type
thing yeah like maybe like a few people
have a cop but the odds of you getting onto a
flight with like a hundred people
like very low
I don't know maybe stuff spreads faster in China because it's so dense.
Get that Wuhan whooping cough.
Anyways, I was up early this morning. I went and got some blood work done.
Excited to see all those values. How's everyone else doing?
Aztec, you sound a little tired.
Darren is sick and dying.
Yeah, definitely.
I've been cooking on LitVM.
It's been a very long week.
We're gearing up for the testnet.
So we're trying to get all the teams ready.
And I was hoping to go to testnet by the end
of this month. Might push into next year.
Have you tried taking a sensor bean?
You love the part, man.
I need a sensor bean, bro.
If I had a sensor bean, I'd be
super sane right now, for sure.
Man, we gotta retweet the space guys we're getting like a slow trickle here uh we gotta get that algorithm going yeah i noticed that i i was i'm like looking uh at at the numbers it looks pretty
uh looks like we're like definitely lower than we usually are.
These are rookie numbers.
Yeah, we need to share and get more people in here.
I'm going to give it a retweet right now.
Yeah, same here.
We need Jordan to come do the Kamehameha.
Yeah.
They're retweeted
There's something slightly unnerving about your profile picture
I can't put my finger on it
I think it's just because I'm so used to seeing
Goku as Goku
And now he's kind of got your face
And I also know you as a person
There's like something like Uncanny Valley
About it, I don't know exactly what it is
It's a touch scary
Yeah, and I keep
catching it out of the corner of my eye oh yeah I think I'm never one was
definitely the best work for it I wanted to do something totally wacky but
obviously listen Jack ball Z kind of you do a Leicester profile picture,
but that looks way better.
Actually, I was thinking about it.
There's a collection.
It's like an ordinal collection called Litecoin Chads,
and they gave me, I don't know,
it's like a founding collection piece, and it's
He-Man, but in like a
Lester version with his sword.
It's actually pretty cool. I was thinking about using
that one.
Might switch it up later.
By the power of Grayskull.
What did you say?
Yeah, yeah.
By the power of Grayskull.
Grayskull, yeah.
Have you watched Human?
Yeah, a little.
So it was, like, not as popular.
So I was born in 94.
So, like, it was kind of, like, not as popular by the time I started watching a lot of cartoons around the year 2000.
But it was still popular enough to occasionally be shown on TV. Um, but yeah, I've, I've watched bits and bobs,
but not like I'm not a fanatic. So, so I was not a fanatic. It was like, I don't know. It was a
boy's show, I think, but for Halloween this year, I had a group costume so my fiance was skeletor i was evil lynn and our
friends were um he-man and she-ra nice did he was he-man like a huge jack dude he had like one of
those suits you know like yeah like yeah like those like muscle suits that he put on. Yeah, it was awesome.
It was great.
I'm following everyone in the audience,
especially since we have a small audience to start.
This is like the smallest audience I've ever seen us have this far in.
I think it might be because we started an hour late.
Oh, that's right.
Yeah, maybe all our regulars were like,
what the hell, man?
You guys cancelled on us.
It's all good.
They'll flow in, I'm sure.
I was just actually doing an interview.
I should have given this space a shout-out.
Who did you interview with?
So, obviously, those of you that don't know,
I co-founded Stratex,
which is a yield strategy marketplace
that we're deploying.
We've deployed on base, and we're also going to be deploying on Flare.
The yield strategy marketplace.
Yes, the one on elements.
So I was interviewing with Flare Forward, which is a YouTube channel,
and they also have some Twitter presence that deals with Flare ecosystem projects
and just is a community initiative.
Incredible group of guys. And so shout out to flare forward um really really cool guys and they really care about the community there so and they also build some cool stuff they're working on some
stuff right now and they're talking about deploying yield strats on the marketplace when we go live so
pretty cool um see i was interviewing them
very cool man well i don't think uh any any of the our planned guests have actually shown up yet
uh uh it's mainly like uh friends so let's uh let's just uh our lda friends uh let So let's just, or LDA friends, let's jump in
or what do you guys think?
Yeah, man, I would love
to get into some of the
gold and silver stuff. I think that would be pretty interesting.
Like, what's driving that.
Yeah, so just so
you know, yeah, we can totally do that, whatever
you guys want to do. Just so you know,
the way that the schedule is going to work is that at the one hour mark, when we're one hour into the show, Anthem Blanchard is going to come on.
And he is, well, Rock, you know who he is.
I'm not sure if anybody else knows who he is, but he comes from a legacy family.
They should.
Yeah, he had a gold-backed token for a while there.
He has a legacy in the gold industry.
So we've got an expert coming in there.
And then I think it's at the two-hour mark,
we will have Black Swan Capital coming in coming or black swan capitalist coming in and uh you know
they also have expertise in macro as well as precious metals so yeah so just so everyone is
aware we do have if you want to do gold talk about gold the whole time that's obviously whatever you
want but yeah at um in one hour and then in two hours, we have some people with some expertise coming.
I mean, I'll stick to the script so that we keep it like kind of fresh.
Because I see how you've written out everything.
So I guess let's start with this then.
Wait, real quick, Aztec.
Everyone, retweet.
We're starting to get some momentum here.
Still a little slow for this show, but we got 62 people.
So retweet your friend groups too.
Let's bring some new audience members in.
Let your family know.
This is actually a really interesting one, even for non-crypto people.
We're going to be talking about macro, the rates, the economy, all this kind of stuff gold silver it's an interesting topic i
think everybody in the world should be at least somewhat interested in this and if i can divert
enough attention from from that for a second i would love to also discuss ai because it's a
topic that's been on my mind kind of relentlessly for the last uh last few months so i'm down for a little side track on
that for sure yeah well i was just thinking if we've got some guests coming for the for the
schedule topic a little later it might be interesting um but not but if you if you don't
want to derail the topics then we can stick to that of course no actually i love ai it's funny
because we were on a space yesterday rock anduck, and AI kind of took over towards the end.
And everyone was trying to,
or it was Warren was trying to close down with you.
And they were like,
let's just start an episode about AI later on
because it was getting juicy.
But I mean,
maybe it's some incredible stuff. I mean, maybe... It's some incredible stuff.
I mean, every
day I'm more bullish. It's crazy.
Yeah.
So, I guess
because I volunteered this topic, I may as well
kick us off on AI if you'll
indulge me for a few minutes.
Yeah, let's do it, bro.
Audience, also comment.
You want to hear about AI? You want to hear about economy? Let us know in the audience you you want to hear about ai you want to hear
about economy let us know in the audience what you want to hear about or if you have any questions
and we'll we'll get to the questions early today i know sometimes we wait till the end
we'll do it real early darren will keep us on point yeah definitely um and and tag us as well
if you want specific uh hosts to answer because to answer because someone might say something that you want to piggyback on.
Yep.
And one more kind of bookkeeping, housecleaning type thing.
Get your shoes on and go out for a walk, guys.
I've been telling people for years it's like the best thing you can do if you're on a call,
if you're listening to a Spaces, speaking on a Spaces, business calls, whatever, go walk.
Just walking on calls yesterday, I walked 12 miles.
It's a half a marathon.
So get out there and walk.
We've got an amber weather warning for wind.
So I'd probably manage 24 on that time.
Dude, you know that you're kind of in a similar part of the world to me and uh i did we had a red warning the other day
because there was some very severe storm storm bram that blew in and uh i managed to do 19
kilometers that day in the storm it was the most ridiculous walk i've ever had i was like leaning
over like almost horizontally to make progress at some points,
but that was pretty good.
It was like three hours.
Good times.
I know nothing about that, man.
I'm in Arizona in the desert.
All we have is sunshine.
We joke about shoveling sunshine here because we have no snow.
So jealous. But then at the same time
i'm like pale as snow and so if i was in arizona i'd find that much worse than walking around in
the storm by the way i just looked 19 uh kilometers is 11.8 miles so basically the
the same that i walked yesterday that's that's a crazy amount of walking. Well, you should see my...
Anyway, this is like massive stuff.
You should see...
Next time we meet,
I'm going to show you my Apple fitness app
because I do like 15 to 20 kilometers every day now.
I've been doing it for like eight weeks, wasn't I?
Hell yeah.
My phone says that I did...
Mega steps and...
My phone says that I did 911 steps yesterday.
Yeah, you're real.
Big boy.
Big boy numbers.
It's a lot for a panda.
It's a lot for a panda.
That actually is.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That was it.
You got to get to that bum, dude.
So, Jack, what are you thinking about AI, man?
Right. So, to get off the walk thinking about AI, man? Right.
So, to get off the walking for a minute.
All right.
So, I've been like – I fell down a bit of a rabbit hole as of late.
Obviously, you guys know that I'm generally interested in AI.
But I had some thoughts recently, and it made me think, like about this. And I've decided to basically go all in on AI alignment
for the past couple of months.
And that's been a really big focus of mine.
Essentially, the conclusion that I've come to is that
if you look at the rate of progress
that we're making with AI,
if you look at some of the Arc dashboards
and some of the other stuff that people use to measure the benchmark rates
of like, you know, Claude and Gemini and ChatGPT and so on,
the progress is very massive.
And if you look at 5.2, which Sam Altman just released
some of the dashboard data on that yesterday,
it's like getting very close to what one might describe
as the early start of AGI.
Now, if you plot that out a little bit further,
so let's say we're at the end of 2025 now,
we're getting something that looks like,
certainly on certain benchmarks,
we're getting to the point where it looks like
we're going to start to have true AGI systems within the next three years, probably.
And that's not over-optimistic. That's pretty realistic by looking at the benchmark increases.
And you understand the amount of resources that's going into this.
Now, AGI now, generally across the globe, is diverting a massive amount of attention and resources from everything else.
So if you look at the way the market's valuing the companies that are involved in AI,
they're all trillion dollar valuations for the big players.
If you look at the core focus politically, you've got the Genesis mission in the United States.
The UK just signed some memorandum with Google to do AI-based education, amongst a bunch of other things um if you look at the
number of research papers that have been published in the last two years oh on that on that you said
education uh you're saying uk what is uk doing uh i've not read in depth about this because it just
broke like a few hours ago but they signed some memorandum with google to utilize some of their ai
uh components in in education,
whether that's AI.
Oh, beautiful.
Yeah.
They've been pretty negative.
I feel like the UK has not been very positive on AI.
But another one in education is El Salvador now is, oh, I'm sorry.
That's not AI.
That's Bitcoin.
They're teaching Bitcoin to anyone over the age of seven in school now.
They're teaching Bitcoin to anyone over the age of seven in school now. They're teaching Bitcoin to.
So the way this is going, we've got a realistic prospect of an AGI like system within the next three to five years.
We've got all the governmental institutions in the major developing countries focusing their resources in a Manhattan Project style effort into developing AGI and ASI.
And we have all of the, basically, the youth,
the research-focused youth that are publishing papers
for their doctorates and so on,
are massively and disproportionately focusing on AI.
Basically, the net of the brain talent of the human race
is focused on this.
There's been 100,000 research papers in the last couple of years published just on AI alone and deep learning. So what you can conclude from that
is that we are going to get, with 100%, not 100% certainty, because you should never say that,
but with a high degree of certainty, you should say, you can say that we're going to get an AGI
like system within the next few years. Now, what should a
pragmatic person do when faced with disinformation? Because a lot of people are kind of ignoring this
or they're head in the sands or they're worried about the risks because the risks are pretty
massive. You've got, you know, even according to the people that run the AI companies, you've got something like a 1 in 20 to a 1 in 5 chance that the AI is misaligned and is not good for humanity.
But it's being built anyway.
And there's basically, we're past the event horizon of the gravitational well that's going to pull us into building this.
well that's going to pull us into building this. We've already passed that because the economic
incentives, the brain drain incentives and the political incentives are now aligned in a straight
line to us developing this in the fastest timeline possible. So we know it's going to happen. Now the
next thing you've got to think is how does one compete or keep up in a world
that has super intelligent AI systems?
Well, the answer to that, whether you like it or not,
is some form of singularity.
So if you go back to the literature on this from Ray Kurzweil
and many people that have written on this,
essentially the singularity thesis is that
at a certain point humanity will need to implement very advanced wearable, I say wearable to put it
mildly, but probably implanted tech that's very very smart to give them extra processing power
to keep up with the AI and that's probably going to all need to happen very quickly because as the
ai gets smarter and smarter the likelihood that it runs away from us in terms of capability
uh is increases exponentially as it starts to self-reinforce its own uh growth and so there's
a very slim window maybe only a few years where we can do this so that
all means some pretty big changes coming which is really interesting and one idea that i've had
recently i apologize if anybody else has thought of this before me but i thought of it after some
some thoughts about this is that instead of focusing on UBI because of AI related job losses what we
should instead focus on is UBI which is a different I which is instead of universal basic income so
basically we take the productivity from the AI companies and we give it out as a dividend to
the rest of humanity for the fact that they can't get a job because the AI is doing all their previous roles. What we do instead is we take a universal basic
intelligence approach. And so we give everybody access to as much AI tech as possible so that
they can keep up. So imagine if instead of getting a check from the government for a few thousand dollars a month because you're unemployed, you get a 200-point IQ boost.
And so now you can be employed in a variety of fields, and that IQ boost can be modulated as the tech gets better and better.
And so suddenly the world doesn't leave you behind.
Suddenly you can be a full and active participant in the world.
you can be a full and active participant in the world and when we talk about you know things like
encouraging human flourishing across every strata of humanity on earth these are the types of things
that that really matter because ai is uh it's now at the point we are like it's inevitable that
we're going to get true uh and strong ai in the next few years there's too much resources there's
too much human brain power going into it and that's an interesting thought like i this is
jumping i wanted to find agi for everyone that might not know so like for instance right now we uh a n i so artificial narrow intelligence which is is like a very like uh it's a i designed and
trained for a specific limited task or set of tasks um however like even even the a i today
is in my opinion in many cases putting together putting together information and doing things that are higher
level that people can do, which is really crazy because what Jack was talking about
is AGI, artificial general intelligence, which people are saying is coming in the next couple
years.
And it's AI with human level cognitive abilities capable of
understanding learning and applying intelligence to solve any problem like a
human so I guess like the AI becomes more human and can like start learning
in a human type way and taking on more having cognitive abilities and then
lastly what's supposed to come after that which just sounds
insane is artificial super intelligence asi jack was mentioning that and that's like a
a hypothetical ai that vastly surpasses human intelligence and ability across all domains
including creativity general wisdom and that and problem solving. That will come very quickly after AGI because you'll get
basically the feedback
loop that ensues when the AI
can effectively
improve its own code on an exponential
basis and suddenly the
loop between
GPT 5.1 and 5.2 which
might take 6 to 12 months
currently might take 6 to 12
minutes or 6 to 12 days.
And so you can see it just gets quicker and quicker and quicker
until basically the AI is very much removed
from what we can do cognitively.
And so this is why I would urge all the listeners
to start thinking about this practically.
This isn't about how you will
earn a living or anything on that scale that will be important i think probably
need to think like more bigger than that and essentially what could be accomplished if this
is aligned with us and what could be lost if it's not aligned with us because this is a problem
that we're all going to have to confront
as a society in the next few years.
There's so many things that we don't know,
and humans are so good at solving problems,
and also so many things,
there's so many things that we think are going to be major problems
and then turn out we were totally wrong.
Like, humans are so smart, and we're so good at solving things but we're not
good at predicting long term uh what's going to happen so um for example we thought um you know
we were going to have so much population growth that we were going to outgrow the whole world
and you know the earth would be unsustainable because there are too many humans but now we're
seeing the trend in all developed nations,
which eventually all countries become developed nations.
But the trend is less fertility, less babies,
and downward populations.
In a lot of countries,
the only reason their populations are stable is immigration.
Otherwise, a lot of countries would have lower populations.
And so we thought there
would be huge population bursts and booms, and it would be the terrible thing. And everyone's like,
you know, China had the one child policy and all these things. And now we're seeing it's
actually the opposite. We thought we would have global cooling. Now they think global warming.
And then now just recently a paper came out showing maybe they were right. We will have global cooling.
So humans are just like not, we panic so much about things.
And we forget that we're able to solve stuff.
And a lot of time, we're wrong about the long term of things.
With that being said, I do think AI, there is a pretty high risk that it will cause serious job disruption.
Maybe it's short term.
Maybe we, yeah, I think you could make that argument.
Yeah.
It's kind of hard to say, but it seems like yes.
So yeah.
How do we solve it?
Is it UBI?
That greatly fears me.
As a libertarian, the last thing i want is
like mass welfare basically suggestion of ubi uh with a different eye which is yeah so if if if
neuralink works well and we can integrate ai into us That's another potential solution to this problem is, okay, humans suck now because we're just dumb monkeys and the robots are just 100 times smarter than us.
Well, what's better, a super robot or a human with the super robot implanted in its brain?
Maybe it's the super human.
You could do that on a limited basis now without neural link
so universal basic i sorry universal basic guy universal basic intelligence now could be
implemented on a pilot basis by giving people free subscriptions to like chat gpt pro for example
and uh like including that in education and schools and stuff so you're getting people to
use the tools that they have now and then just scale that as the tech gets better um and i think like one of the biggest bottlenecks
that is going to slow this down is the energy component so these data centers are using
tremendous amounts of power and the grid that we have is not really going to scale in the way that they need it to.
So the end result of this basically needs to be co-located power and data centers.
So you have a nuclear reactor that only feeds the data center, and it's not connected to the grid.
So it's not going to have to suffer through the 50-year-old infrastructure that exists in some of these places.
And it's not drawing power from like
ordinary power generation from so it's going to like cause blackouts in cities and stuff
um and then you can scale much quicker but the problem is all of that like takes people to build
and so if true agi might be possible in two years well can you build enough nuclear power plants and solar or whatever
else you need to power these massive data centers to get the agi even if you know how to do it
that might not be possible in two years because we just like might not be able to marshal the
resources to build all the stuff or it might take five years to build that and i think the biggest
bottleneck right now for this is energy it's not scaling the actual uh tech itself
yeah i mean on the energy front there's no reason we can't scale energy it's we know how to do it
it scales it's not like you know bitcoin where you know there's these artificial limits on
scaling there's no scaling limit to our energy production other than if we,
if we place artificial limits, which we have been right. Countries around the world have
artificially placed limits on energy scaling to curb, um, glow, you know, climate change. And so
like you look at the graph, I always recommend it. Everybody remembers this graph.
But if you look up China versus US versus Europe,
energy growth chart,
and you'll see how crazy it is.
China is not placing those artificial limitations.
China is growing 50 times faster than the US
and Europe,
actually infinitely faster than Europe because Europe is actually declining in energy production, which is insane. How do you as a society decline in
energy production? That's full artard. I'm sorry, I'll say it. I understand we're trying to be
environmentally friendly and I consider myself in some ways an environmentalist, but to go in a
10 or 15 year period to reduce your energy production, you are destining your society for
poverty and struggle. It's crazy. China's doing it right. Oddly, the communist country, the CCP,
they're doing it right. They're growing energy massively and their people are, their GDP is going up. Their people's GDP per capita is going
up. They're opening up a more free market there, which is ironic. But energy production is something
we can solve. And with new technologies, it'll be easier and easier to solve. And with people
finally, I think getting over the anxiety of Chernobyl and Fukushima and World War II and these things,
now people are a lot more open to nuclear.
There's a lot of people who've been saying we've got to build nuclear for a long time,
but it's hard to swing public discourse.
The nuclear tech now with the small module nuclear reactors is just far safer than it used to be as well.
It's so much safer.
It was a lot more safer and cleaner.
So there's a system now where they basically entom the fuel rods at the start when they built the reactor.
And then they don't even need to take them anywhere.
They're just done, basically.
They just stay where they are, and that's how you move on.
It's a really interesting you move on it's like a really
interesting way of doing it and this is the time reusing the old spent another method is they
take the old spent rods and they reuse them in a different type of reactor
yeah the one thing i was saying so like you mentioned it doesn't scale
so it does scale the only problem with that is just like the um the physical
building of the reactor sometimes takes time like we in the uk uh i don't live in the uk anymore but
like the uk announced some some program to build small modular nuclear reactors and the timeline
they were looking at for building them was i believe like five to 10 years. I might be wrong on this.
You said the UK?
Yeah.
Yeah, well, that's because that's 100% regulations.
80% of that time is regulation.
It takes longer to get the permits for nuclear in most parts of the world
than it takes to build the nuclear.
In China, they're building them in like two years.
I think maybe less in some cases.
I think I've even heard as low as a year and a half.
One of the main reasons why the data centers use so much power
is the cooling element.
And so an interesting kind of solution to this
that was proposed recently by some really innovative people that do this kind of AI engineering
stuff, is they proposed, if they can solve the engineering problem
of getting the data centers to function in space.
Man, I was waiting to talk about this one. This is so exciting.
Basically, you get infinite free cooling because the background temperature of
space is like four degrees Kelvin.
Like crazy low temperature, basically, not four degrees Kelvin, that's accurate, but like very low is my point.
And then so you've got, so if you stick a radiator on the back of the data center, it just radiates infinite heat.
So that's not a problem.
And also solar, I don't know if you know this, but solar in space, because it's not got the atmosphere to go through,
is vastly more efficient, like 10 times more efficient than it is on Earth.
And I think, depending where you put it,
I've heard, I don't know if this lines up, but it's 24-7 sun.
So if you put it on, uh, yeah,
cause the,
cause the day,
well on the moon,
for example,
cause it's,
I think it's like,
what is it?
Geotidally or whatever,
something,
something locked to the.
Yeah.
If you,
so yeah,
the moon is,
geotidally locked.
So one side of it always faces away from the earth,
but it depends what you do.
So like,
uh, uh a like an a
softer way to do this now is to put something in orbit like a satellite that has a data center on
it because we know how to do that because there's thousands of satellites in orbit
and we could do like a small version of this as a pilot the interesting thing about this problem
is that all of those issues of how to get a data center into space are known problem
they're known known problems so like you know that what the challenges are and you know what
you would have to do to make that successful with the current technology that we have now
so that's like a solvable problem and ultimately the the data centers needed for asi will probably
need to be in space because the power generation requirements
will be so vast that you will need to use the sun which conveniently for for us and all other
life forms that live around stars is putting out more power than the civilization could ever use
on like a minute-to-minute basis so there's like plenty of energy
and it's free and it's just emanating from the sun on a second by second basis so we don't need to
why not put the energy under the ocean like in the ocean uh you're talking about like uh
geothermal it's harder to capture if you're talking about geothermal
like from the core of the earth there's a lot of energy in the core of the earth
the core of the earth is a i think a fission reactor yeah of course it is fission or fusion
fission yeah and there are there's geothermal energy now that we can utilize but the problem is
when you're talking about cosmic scales of like we're going to build an asi
and like power humanity to go into the cosmos and explore for like thousands of years you need to
get to the level of technology that is capturing energy from the star because that's the biggest
source of energy that we know um and and there's loads of stars everywhere so we can definitely
like that's hey jack check this out uh i'll put some numbers
behind uh the concept you're saying so you said the sun emits more energy than we use on earth or
could ever use uh anyone want to guess what the the amount of energy that the sun is emitting that
we can capture versus uh what we use on earth i'll i'll let you think for a second put a number in
your head okay it's 21 21 trillion times more than right so and this is my point right there's
a solution there it's right in front of us we can all see it with our naked eye uh we should just
engineer to tap that it's like uh if you find out that you live in an oil-rich state
and then the state decides to not pursue oil production
and to pursue wind for some reason,
you would think, why don't they just use the oil?
It makes lots of sense.
We all know it's there.
It's technology that we have.
And this is like an interesting engineering problem
that's going to need to be solved.
But it also frees up space on Earth for human habitation.
So you could, if you want to build AGI and ASI, you could cover the world in data centers and nuclear power plants, but it'd be a shitty place to live.
Or you could shoot all that up into space and have the AI aid you in building out infrastructure
so that it can power its data centers absent of the Earth.
And the Earth could be inhabited by humans
that get to benefit from this kind of AI abundance.
I mean, then you have to put,
you have to fly all the machinery up into space.
I mean, that's going to have its own cost as well.
Yeah, it's going take it's so jeff
bezos uh go ahead yeah it seems super problematic putting stuff in space and like especially with
like i don't even believe in space but but like if if uh if that was like real
i don't even want to i don't even want to i don't even want to go down that rabbit hole. But the point is, even if I did, it sounds super problematic trying to put huge pieces of machinery in space that basically has to operate over years and then be maintenanced.
And with our current space capabilities, i would think that's going to be
super hard i what what makes most sense to me is just do what like many people in europe have done
like in i think like in switzerland where they're using clean energy from the earth and
they're building like nuclear plants that are like cooled by
uh the earth and all all this like crazy stuff and it's all underground um harvest this ton of
energy if i can just cut in on that that point right i want to impress on the audience here and
and you guys like how how quickly things are going to progress so jen jensen the uh the ceo of navidea
was just interviewed um by he was actually on joe rogan's podcast um and he and he's like the guy
that would know right they're building the chips for this stuff they're like uh as deep into this
stuff as you can get and his belief is that within the next few years 90 of
all knowledge that humans have access to will have been generated by ai so that means that
we will get we will basically have nine times more information or ten times more information
than we have now um so that's like the the breakthroughs that are going to happen over
the next five to ten years
are going to make like anything that we're doing now look infantile so when we talk about like
it's hard to shoot things up into space like yeah but it's not going to be for very long
as soon as we get meaningful progress on ai which is happening now they're going to the problems
that are going to be solved very quickly by this is going to be mind-blowing. Things are going to get really hard.
I think it'll take some time to get the cost of launching stuff
into space down.
And there are physics limitations, like the cost of fuel
because you can't make electric rockets, et cetera.
So Bezos is predicting 10 to 20 years before it becomes a beneficial cost to put energy and data centers in space.
Elon thinks it'll be faster than that.
I don't remember his exact timeline, but his is much sooner.
Both of them have rocket companies that can put these things in space.
companies that can put these things in space. So one of the things, so there's rumors that
SpaceX is going to IPO at 1.5 trillion, raising 30 billion. I think some of that might be more
than rumors. Maybe it's publicly some of it, but they're going to raise 30 billion at 1.5 trillion
valuation. By the way, that would give Musk a value, an added value to his wealth of like 750 billion because he owns 40%.
What is it? 700 billion because he owns 40% of SpaceX still. So now Elon could become a
trillionaire multiple ways. But anyways, so they've been bringing it just in the first,
I don't know what, five to 10 years of SpaceX's existence.
They brought the cost of moving payloads into space, like per weight, they do it by weight.
They brought the cost down by 90% compared to previous rocket companies and governments.
That cost is continuing to decline as they make these rockets more and more reusable and larger
uh and larger payloads per launch um the other thing so that that so the cost of putting these
things in space is going to get cheaper uh the other thing is uh you can build them in space
so you can it sounds like a big old like way of just getting a higher valuation.
Sure.
There's some hype.
Yeah.
But I think it's a realistic thing eventually.
Humans can dream big and we can accomplish things.
I think a lot of people thought EVs were retarded when Elon was first pushing them.
I mean, I feel like people don't remember just 10 years ago when I would tell everyone about how these EVs are going to be amazing.
Elon is the man.
You guys got to believe in this guy.
And everyone laughed at him.
No one believed me when I said EVs were going to be a thing.
Even now, probably 50% of the population thinks they're stupid evs were going to be a thing even now probably 50 of the
population thinks they're stupid uh i believe that they're things like like even evs bro like
it's the same thing as like you know when you're looking at the carbon footprint it's the same
thing pretty practically as well it's not just about carbon footprints though there's a lot what
else what's the they're just drastic in every single way they're better except
for they don't sound cool like some old muscle car they i mean they are less emissions over the
lifetime even including the manufacturing and the you know removing of the batteries by the way now
they're recycling most of these batteries um so that system has gotten really strong. Tesla sells its carbon credits, I believe.
And so when they look at the environmental costs, they might be factoring in the fact
that they're selling carbon credits to Ferrari.
And so Tesla's taking some of the carbon debt from the, you know, more less environmentally
friendly car companies onto its own balance sheet to make money.
This is that you're getting into
more i think this is maybe gonna get that conversation's complicated and maybe too
in depth for this but into the weeds but so okay electric cars the key points they don't have
moving parts they don't break down they don't there's almost nothing that goes wrong on them
um me and cindy both had teslas
we gave them to my parents when we moved to puerto rico um they still have them so or one of them so
we uh we still drive that when we're here uh these things just don't break down they don't use there
are people who've had teslas for 15 years who've never got a brake change because of the regenerative
braking instead of uh you know putting metal against ceramic or
metal against metal to slow down you recharge your car that alone is a huge efficiency increase
even if you do recharge your car surely there is a ceramic on metal component to the braking no
there is there is normal brakes on the car you don't use them so they never go bad if you're
driving the car like a normal person, like normal,
if you're not racing around, you never use the brakes.
So you actually just use the gas pedal.
So I looked it up.
This is crazy.
This is blowing my mind.
They're fucking incredible.
I'm going to blow your mind 10 times right now.
So, yes, Teslas have maintenance needs,
though fewer routine ones like oil changes.
Common issues involve faster tire wear, suspension problems,
and potential electronic display failures in older models.
But they generally have lower overall maintenance costs.
Drastically less.
Drastically less.
It costs less to buy a Tesla than a Honda Civic after maintenance costs.
There's no oil changes.
There's no transmission fluid.
There's no...
You have electrical issues in the outer parts.
Rarely.
Think about what is more maintenance,
a mechanical object or an electric object?
They're just, does your phone have maintenance?
No, right?
Because it's purely electric.
That's what Teslas are going for.
There's no, do you know how many parts are in a car?
Anyone who's worked on cars,
I used to work on all my gas cars growing up.
I did all my own oil changes.
I rebuilt my jet ski engine. There's so many fucking parts in cars. I used to work on all my gas cars growing up. I did all my own oil changes. I rebuilt my jet ski engine.
There's so many fucking parts in cars.
Teslas don't have parts.
I think we're like way off the main subject, right?
Like the main,
what's the main thing that we're talking about here?
Like the whole thing with AI.
And then,
and then,
and then we're talking about like, uh, space.
So I think to tie it all together, my point is when Elon makes these predictions, people
should listen, feel free to be skeptic, doubt him, doubt his timelines or whatever. But
if Elon makes these kinds of bold predictions and starts betting hundreds of billions of
dollars on them, everybody should sit back, take a moment and listen to what he's saying.
Because the guy is hitting home run
after home run.
I mean, EVs, it's
very clear the world is going to EVs.
Would you argue against that,
Aztec? Do you think we're not going to go to EVs?
I don't know.
Like, being honest, I have no clue.
Like, it's not like even, I don't even care. Have you driven one?
They're fucking incredible.
I don't even care about cars.
It's like going from a flip phone to an iPhone.
That's the difference when you drive a Tesla.
And a lot of other cars are copying them now and integrating.
So I guess back on like
the the energy side of things like i i would think that that what makes most sense is like
creating more nuclear um and also creating uh in in places that makes the most sense
advancements on solar power and then uh all over the world
where it also makes sense hydropower which is what i was referring to earlier it's like a clean
way of creating these mass amount of energy uh with its renewable energy, its clean energy.
And so if you want to power AI, use these methods.
I would say scale what we currently have on the earth,
which is just free-flowing.
And that's what I think.
I'm just putting it out there.
I bet you that these industries will be much bigger.
Unless, of course, the government does what it does,
which works with crony capitalism, works with their friends, and pushes a certain type of energy faster than these others
that are super capable and should be able to scale with AI.
Yeah. capable and should be able to scale with ai yeah i totally agree i mean like look my main point with all this stuff is um i'm a techno optimist i generally think that humans will leverage whatever tools they have available
at the time to solve all of our problems in the long run.
With each generation, we get new problems to solve, and each generation meets and exceeds those problems, and that's how we progress.
I think this one is a doozy, though.
If we can solve this problem, if we can get the energy we need and the component parts to build the data centers to get something that is know is true agi or asi i think the rate that we scale
is going to be mind-blowing and the problems that we can solve in the short term are gonna
it's gonna very quickly go from like something that's kind of nice it's like a chatbot that you
can use to make spreadsheets and stuff to something that can manage very very complicated tasks and do
lots and lots of work very quickly.
And that's going to be pretty fucking cool.
And we're all here for it.
We're all alive.
I mean, we're already kind of there.
I think a lot of this will be adoption of the technology once it's there.
Like, people are typically lazy and or just don't use stuff as well as they could
because, like, typically AI would use it better than them.
For example, like, earlier on got ChatGPT, like Mrs. Panda for her Christmas wants like
an infrared sauna and I was like well I don't want to go like figure out which one's the best.
So I, like ChatGPT has like an agent mode mode i don't know if anyone actually uses that but i was like hey like i want you to go out find like these are the specs of the infrared
sauna that i roughly want go search the internet for like the best kind of this these specs and
then just get me back with the costs and then tell me which one's the best and then it just
went out and done it took 29 minutes so 29 minutes that I didn't have to use.
It was calculating for 29 minutes?
Yeah.
Yeah, no, you can actually see it,
like checking through the different websites,
accepting the cookies and stuff.
Like, I think, you know,
you can give it very complicated tasks now.
And this is, Darren, no offense,
but, like, it can do, it can do like way way way bigger things
oh yeah i mean i sometimes use it to just look at the efficiency of like the apys i just give it the
the form uh like link for a page give it the analytics and tell it to look at the fees
generated versus the apys versus all the other so there's something called the um i can't remember
the name for this but it's something like the capability utilization gap
which is where and if anybody knows this in the audience please like put it in the in the uh
in the comments but basically it's the the difference between what the model is capable
of doing and what people use it for so like most people use chat gbt for like give me a recipe for
red velvet cake or like tell me
where i can go to dinner and that like really truly it's like using a bazooka to kill a fly
because it's using a ton of energy to get that query out the data center and then you've got
this giga brain that you can point that's like probably got like something equivalent to 150
iq currently that you point in a very simple task. But with agent mode, as you elucidated,
you can give it basically like a large complicated problem,
like create me a programmable model of, you know,
basically how technology is going to advance over the next 50 years
and give it a bunch of parameters.
You can write a prompt that's like a thousand words long if you want
with every detail ironed out and then it'll go away and work on that for a long period
of time and the length of time that it can do those tasks is getting longer and longer i think
i read that the current model can do like seven hours on a task if you if you really want it to
i don't know and it used to only be like 5 or 10 minutes before it got weirdly sidetracked.
Yeah.
It used to refuse to count to a million if you asked it.
And also, remember
how quickly it works.
So you've seen,
because you mentioned earlier
about looking at the logs,
so you could see what it was doing at each
minute, you'll notice that it's
faster than you would do those tasks.
So when you watch the logs come through,
sometimes they're very quick at parsing information.
And so that seven hours isn't really seven hours of human work.
It's like 50 hours of focused human work
because it's rattling through things so quickly.
And that's right now.
And that's going to get way better with
ChargedGVT 5.2 and it's going to get way better
with the next version of Grok.
And you go like two or three versions down the line
and you've got something that is
really, really powerful and useful.
So I
got a question for you guys. Do you guys
actually think that AI
will be better at everything that a human can do in the future?
Yes.
I think pretty much.
Better than a human that doesn't use AI.
But if you combine a human with AI, then maybe that's the hard one.
Like if you use Neuralink or...
I think it was breaking up there for a second.
What were you saying?
I said, I think yes.
And I think it's not a matter of if, it's when.
And I think that when timeline is...
I think maybe we get to...
It's better than humans at 90% of tasks within...
I don't know. I'm just making up numbers here, guys,
but 90% of all tasks, it's better than humans
within five to 10 years, maybe, maybe 15.
And to get better than humans at all tasks, I don't know.
Is it 20 years, 50 years, 100?
There may be very very specific things humans are
the best
human in the world, the best PhD
and whatever
is better.
What about things that
every human can do
like love? I think they'll be better
at love. I think they'll be way better
at love. Aztec, I think
that what you're saying is like, I don't know if you've ever seen, you guys, if you've ever read anything that I've ever written, you know that I was obsessed with this TV show called The Good Place.
Aztec, have you ever seen that show?
Yeah, yeah.
I watched a bit of it.
And then I started.
Okay.
So towards the.
It's in Arizona or something.
Yeah, yeah.
She's from.
Or they mentioned Arizona. She's from Arizona. Yeah. Yeah. She's from. Or they mentioned Arizona.
She's from Arizona.
Yeah.
The main character is from Arizona.
Okay.
So I bring that up because I think that it ties to something that you're saying.
And I always thought that that show was about the advancement of technology, by the way.
Right.
So that that was like an undercurrent in the, in the show.
So, so towards the end of the show, they, they finally get to the good place, right? And there
are a bunch of architects and people who run the afterlife. And the problem that they have is that
because they're not human, they don't know how to make things better for humans. They don't
understand what humans like and what humans don't like and they like even though they can
understand it conceptually they don't understand it practically so i think to answer your question
as tech that humans will always be necessary for human relatability um like ai can't just run a
world for humans because it won't it will need some anyway you know what i'm saying right like
ai pointless yeah like and and ai cannot it cannot fully uh replace us isn't it's like
pointless so like the thing that like about this discussion is like i i think like people over hype the future and like think
too highly of ai like even at super intelligence where people imagine that it's like in god mode
i think that it still serves us on many levels and that like even a person that doesn't
artificially augment their body in any way is still going to be relevant in the future for many, many reasons.
And so like, I'm not worried about these things or like, so like one of the things I wanted to talk about earlier on with Jack, when you brought up like ASI, your version of, or sorry.
UB intelligence. Basic. UB intelligence.
Basic, UB, yeah, universal basic intelligence is like,
I do like the idea in a way, but not when you start saying,
not if it includes augmentation,
because I don't think we need to augment.
I do agree that we should have access to as much uh artificial
intelligence as we can and that should become cheaper and cheaper for us and that should it
makes sense for companies or the government to maybe even but as such as if it's like you're already augmented so like it think about this
if but not not in the way that i'm talking about i'm talking about like
but hold on hold on hold on hold on 50 years ago just real quick jack 50 years ago
if you told like or when cell phones first came, or even in the first 10 years of cell phones, maybe even the first 15 years,
if you told someone, you know,
oh, if you don't use a phone
or a personal computer in the future,
you won't be able to keep up with other people.
They would say, nah, I don't think so.
I think, you know, yeah, they'll be cool maybe,
but I don't think, you know,
someone without
it won't be able to keep up that's what's going to happen with with augmentation and ai i think
i'm not i mean it's already there you have to realize a cell phone is a part of our body we
are cyborgs already yeah i just i just don't think that so like the thing is is a lot of the things
that you're going to bring up and especially if you talk about the phone or, you know, the typewriter or the internet, et cetera, whatever, these are all tools.
I agree that people should be open-minded to using tools like as something that is an extension of a person, but I don't believe that we should be so worried about becoming the tool
like i think what what's what's being discussed here when you when you get further into what you
guys are actually talking about is literally you're not talking about like i'm augmented
because i have a phone in my hand i have a tool in my hand you're talking about becoming the phone
becoming the ai and i don't think that's i think like the adaptability of humans
has to come into play here like if i if you go to like a seven year old right now
and get them to make this like the hand signal for a phone like we are all of us because we're
all old as balls we'll just have like pinky out thumb up like make a little phone signal in our
hand kids don't do that anymore that's not how they see a phone they just think like a little phone signal in our hand. Kids don't do that anymore. That's not how they see a phone. They just think like a little square in your hand.
Like people don't actually like,
if you grow up in a certain environment,
it's very, very easy to just think that that's normal.
Like if you grew up in like just a very small room,
you've just got a phone all the time.
Like you'll adapt to that very easily.
So I have like two points on this oh no
same we wanted so the first point is on um the augmentation side and sort of like kind of vis-a-vis
iphone versus dumb phone
unfortunately i i suspect that this won't be that optional. And it will be, like, look, this stuff is always going to be optional.
So you can always go and live in a cabin in the woods right now
because you can reject technology entirely.
Everything's that optional.
No, this is what I'm saying.
So there's always a degree to which things are optional, right?
But if you are in a society that is very, very complex,
like some societies are today,
and you choose not to interact with technology,
you do get left behind.
It's harder to find work.
It's harder to meet people.
It's harder to keep in touch.
It's harder to understand.
It's harder to pay for things.
And so if you run that clock forward very much so,
like we've got 100 times the technology we have today,
if you're not keeping up with that,
you're going to struggle to interact with that society.
An example would be if you hate technology,
currently you can pay cash for things
and not interact with any technology.
If that's the case in 100 years and society's
cashless and stuff and you just hate tech then that's you're going to struggle now there's
obviously going to be scenarios where you can interact with other people that feel the same
way and the same way that amish people live today um so this is like gonna be and they're
amish live better than most people bro the way that society progresses
is often in an arms race style fashion which is like you know there's some kid at school that has
access to something that's better than everybody else and you know they start doing better and get
better employment opportunities and then suddenly everybody else's parents want their kids to have
that thing and i can just see this going in a direction where like as soon as augmentation tech
is is fashionable and people start using it it gets very hard for you to justify keeping that
from your kids because if they're suddenly in an environment where you know the next kid's twice as
smart as they are or twice as strong or twice as fast it becomes very difficult to be a kid a natural
kid in that environment and so you would in theory what you would do is if you felt strongly about
that you would silo your kid away and send him to like a natural school but then if society in
general is moving on without you you kind of disadvantaging your kids by not taking them
down that route and i'm not advocating for this.
I don't think it's like computers.
My parents hated that I was on computers all the time.
And they tried to take my computer away from me several times
because I was just on it too much.
Do you know how much that early, you know,
me studying the internet and computers and programming,
you know, in the 90s, how much that paid off in my life?
But they were scared of it, you know in the 90s how much that paid off in my life they but they were scared of it you know yeah and imagine this trend like times by a thousand because society is much
more technologically advanced like we're looking at this having seen you know that computers go
through like big kind of beige boxes that stay in your living room and takes up loads of space
to like a little iphone in your pocket but imagine that like you
know times 100 where the text just intuitive and it's all around you and it's so much better than
than what we've got now it'll just be very difficult to avoid it is my point and i i'm like
i i agree that it's uh yeah so i was just gonna say look my like general worldview is one of a pragmatist and so i i try and spend as little time as possible thinking about how i feel about
things i just try and kind of decide like which way the world is likely to go
and then try and go with the flow because if you if you spend a lot of energy trying to fight
against things you can miss out on a lot of opportunity just based on that and so like i generally am uncomfortable with the idea of things like augmentation tech
on a fundamental level but if the whole world is going in that direction and there's like a feedback
loop where the tech's getting better and better and you need it to keep up i'm not going to fight
that by like saying no i don't want i feel I feel like someone's mom in the audience is like,
and if your friend ate poop,
would you eat the poop too?
But it's different.
It's different.
It's different.
If your friend jumped off a bridge.
Let's rephrase that.
If your friend ate poop, would you eat poop?
If your friend ate poop and it gave him superhuman powers
and he became 10 times richer than you and better at life in every way, would you eat poop? If your friend ate poop and it gave him superhuman powers and he became 10 times richer than you
and better at life in every way,
would you eat poop?
I'd eat the poop.
But are you richer?
From AI?
Certainly.
Someone who doesn't use AI.
If you put a graph of people who don't use AI in 10 years
and people who do,
the people who don't use AI are going to be significantly poorer.
Hopefully you guys understand that I'm definitely playing devil's advocate yeah i love it i appreciate it but but let me let me
take it a step further because are you really richer because you know as i'm a big ai guy i
use that all the time and i use all the technology and i'm on you know i'm a futurist so that's that's
just how it is but the thing is is like i'm still skeptical and i'm also i don't
drink the kool-aid i don't care what anyone says i do what i think makes sense and like uh and i
i think about things in my own way so when while doing that yeah i understand ai is amazing and
then you know people make all this wealth and all this, but then I like compare that to like the Amish that was brought up recently.
And I look at their way of life.
They have like a lot less things, but they're a lot more healthier than the average person that has internet in the United States.
For instance, they have a more fulfilled and happy life.
uh they're fulfilled and happy life um and i look at the tribes different uh tribes all around the
world that have a hut they have a fireplace that's where they cook their food they go hunt and if you
people go to these tribes and they interview them they do research on them you know they try to
understand like like you know why don't you
want to do xyz or whatever and and and they notice that they're happy they have a great life
they're healthy their bodies are like much more uh in in tune with like nature and they're they're
stronger than the average person and would you on that would go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah. Just to finish the point is, are you really richer?
Are you really richer? Like for what matters in life?
I guess I, okay. Well, first I want to ask, well, okay. I'll answer your question to me. Yes. I,
I think I'm, but I'm weird. I think even, let's use like a hypothetical example.
If you told me I could be-
Richer, happier, healthier.
If you told me I could increase my happiness
from 100 to 110 by going and living in the woods
and living this simple life
and forgetting everything I know about society,
I wouldn't do it.
I like the life I live.
I love the life I live.
Even if it's stressful, right?
Even if technically maybe
your cortisol levels are higher when you're running a company or doing hard things uh but
i like that struggle i'd take being a little less happy uh to do the things we do in the world and
explore the things we're exploring and to build the new frontiers i i i don't know i embrace this life i embrace digital i embrace
technology so is it actually our destiny to build these things so every everything you know
everything that's existed so okay here's some kool-aid for you so every organism that's existed
as has attempted to basically you know all of its environment in some way to make it conducive to produce more organisms over time.
The compounding effects of like several improvements and genetic variation has meant that there's been evolution over a period of time.
We're the kind of apex of that natural evolution.
And we've developed, we seem to be attempting to develop digital intelligence
maybe maybe that's kind of like the point of us is that we're meant to give birth to this like
super intelligent thing and here's the thing right if we get this right this will be like
you know a pretty incredible thing
that will carry us for thousands of years,
thousands of generations and improve everybody's life.
If we get it wrong, it could be pretty catastrophic.
But it's interesting, this idea,
when you listen to a lot of the heads of these big AI companies,
one of the things that a lot of them have in common
is this idea of like, you know,
it's kind of like humanity's destiny to build this stuff and so my whole point with this is like approaching it
pragmatically if you've got a bunch of the power players on the planet a bunch of the prime movers
that are involved in this and that they're sucking they're aggregating tons of resources
and tons of mind sharing to building this stuff then the direction of
humanity is going in this direction so what we should do is like technologists and futurists
is try and understand what that looks like and what's likely to happen over the next few years
and then position ourselves accordingly i i don't agree with augmenting our bodies by physically
like implanting things and becoming the tool
becoming the ai i believe in yes like use the ai but use it in ways that uh basically augment
your life in a healthy way i think we both kind of and like i like and i'm just being real like
i didn't really care what you on says like i like him i respect him as a person but i i'm not gonna put his neurochimp in my head like and like i don't i and to answer
my own question i don't think people are actually happier wealthier um and uh and all the other things I was talking about necessarily.
Wealthier I think is objective.
Happiness is harder to calculate.
But wealthier, we are 100% wealthier than previous generations
before they used all these different types of wealth as well.
I'm not talking about previous generations.
I was talking about necessarily the other person down the street or the other, the tribe that's, you know, a couple hours away from you.
I don't necessarily think we are happier or healthier or wealthier than them because like what is real wealth at the end of the day when you really look at it?
It's not the digital currency.
I mean, it's not necessarily that
digital currency that's you know on your ledger it it could be just life itself your kids your
your wife but my bitcoin makes me happy and i'm not being facetious here i mean knowing that i
have that i have bitcoin that's been sitting there for almost 11 years that is that i no matter what
happens to me in life i'm safe and i'm secure that i mean like an old miser i like that technology
yeah i stack my gold too here's the thing and speaking of we're supposed to be talking about
silver and gold here and we do have gary in the audience gary cardone uh if you do want to jump
up gary let us know i've sent you an invite to speak.
Good to see you, brother.
We also have Luke came on stage.
But Jack, go ahead and finish with your thought there,
and then we'll let Luke say hi.
I just want to finish two points,
and then I'll relinquish to the Golden Soul discussion.
So the first point is, as Seth,
you mentioned about real wealth and what that means.
And I agree, there's lots of different types of wealth.
Like, people talk about, there and what that means. And I agree, there's lots of different types of wealth.
Like people talk about, there's this old parable about this tribe basically.
And they go and like some of the, this was like during the colonial days and the Western settlers would go to the tribesmen and say, you know,
if you, instead of just going fishing for the fish you need every day,
you could, you know, you could go out there and catch a few fish. then if you if you do that you can improve your boat and then you could get some
more fishermen and then over time you could build up like a group of fishermen and then
and then you could retire and the guy goes and what do i do then and and you know the western
guy goes well then you can sit and relax and do what you want and he's like well i'll do that now
so yeah there's lots of different types of work. And then it's kind of like a circular thing
where we have freedom when we're born
and then we work to gain the freedom again.
So we can, yeah.
So there's that.
I really think, like, so my,
as I haven't said now, like, I, you know,
how I look at things, but, like,
I think every person has a mission. It's their own personal mission.
And, and like, there will probably be people that, that, uh,
their mission is to be as fully futurist. And for some reason, that's,
that's their mission in life.
I don't think that because that's your mission in life or that's what you're called to do,
that the next person that is not supposed to be a futurist, but has a more simple life,
let's say, to what you believe is what life is supposed to be, makes them less rich or happy.
supposed to be makes them less rich, uh, or happy.
And, and I, I do think that like in many cases, the more that futurists and hardworking people
become, they actually become less happy, uh, like truly, uh, in a way, but, but, but, but more,
uh, fulfilled.
So like there's trade-offs to a lot of things.
I just think that like at the end of the day, I'm definitely not drinking any Kool-Aid. I'm
going to look at things objectively. I don't really care what Elon says. Like I'll use AI,
not putting it in my body. I'm not becoming AI. And I think it's already in your body.
You don't realize it. I think the, a phone is a part, it is an extension of your body.
I mean, now, is it a big difference if it's going beaming through your eyes or if it's beaming through a little electrical conductor?
Okay, yeah, it's different.
I know it's weird and crazy to get a fucking chip in you.
It's fucking psycho, right?
But is it really that much different?
You're already, you're just downloading
the data from the phone at a very slow rate and if i have a chip in my brain i could download it
a hundred or a thousand times the rate right it just becomes even on this eventually medicine
will be made by ai just specifically curated for you yeah yeah and by the way you're gonna
ingest but like so just to tie this back to the ubi
wait wait hold on i want to i want to answer uh uh something aztec said before you do that
so you you said you know if you want to be like a tribe or someone that's like you know living
off the land and people still do that right but the fact but the real fact of the matter is most people who were peaceful and wanted to live
off the land if the the warring tribe next to them killed them and they don't exist anymore
they're extinct so their bloodline is gone so i think in a world where you don't if you want to
just be like peaceful and you don't want to keep up with competition uh you're just going to get
left behind if you're a traitor that's still trying to trade off
of just like watching the news or reading the paper,
but you're not using trading tools,
you're probably gonna not do as well
as the people who are using more advanced trading tools.
And in every aspect of life.
I mean, look at sports, the NBA, MLB, UFC,
these are sciences now. It's not, you don't train the same as you used to
train. You're using all kinds of technologies and all kinds of, you know, techniques and data. And
so I just, I don't know. I think, I don't think like for me, as you said, if your mission is to
integrate all of the technology, that's not my mission. It's's this is a means to my ends and to me embracing
technology has helped me reach the ends i'm looking for which there's lots of ends that
i'm looking for taking care of my family having security changing the world taking down big
government technology has been great for me in all these areas i think what aztec's really getting
at though is he wants the will to choose
and not be forced into anything
and for each person to have that agency.
And so this is where the concept of universal basic intelligence
is so important.
So I would love it if people stopped talking about UBI
in the sense of giving money out to people
based on AI
productivity that they've got no control over and they can't understand. Instead, if you give them
the ability to have access to intelligence when they choose and how they choose, then you give
them personal agency back. If they want to go get a job in a huge corporate environment, they can
speak the language and they can keep up because they've got that huge productivity boost that AI gives.
You know, this was one of Elon's original missions when he founded, named, and did all three of the investment rounds for OpenAI.
That was part of his mission was to get AI to everyone.
My whole thing right now is I think we're focusing on the wrong things with UBI.
If we go after universal basic intelligence instead
and we basically give these tools as a public good
to the whole of humanity,
suddenly a guy that's perhaps not very educated,
that's grew up in a third world country
in some substandard environment,
can now access, if he chooses, a 200-point IQ boost
so he can keep up with the modern era
in some of the most technologically advanced environments in the world.
You said to me a long time ago about you prefer,
in terms of tool use, you prefer when people get a hand up,
not a hand out, I think you said.
It was something like that.
But it stuck with me.
I think that's a concept that we should instead of leaving people behind and saying like look
you know you're a truck driver and you'll never be able to understand this stuff because you can't
code or whatever instead we should say okay you're a truck driver here's a an incredible new tool that
you can use to do all kinds of different work now and it's free and that's our productive society has
provided that for you so you can have the opportunity to pursue whatever you want to
pursue and use it or don't it's your choice so my my call to action on this is like let's go after
universal basic intelligence rather than universal basic income it's really interesting concept like
i said from the beginning when you first said it i think it's really interesting as long as we as people and you know this isn't like forced
on us or or like people are looking down on others that uh don't want to participate
i think you can't stop that though because i think people should i you can't
i think you will be looked down on you'll be a you'll be a dumb monkey if you don't have
the assistance of ai it's like a lot of people before cars i it might be i think but i think
i don't know i'm an optimist i like to embrace and and be positive about it and think of the
good parts of it like you know a lot, you know, if you told people before,
hey, if you don't use electricity,
you're gonna be looked down on,
you're gonna be left behind.
And everyone, not some, everyone, 99% of people was like, fuck that, I'm not touching that electricity.
And now if you don't use electricity,
you're a fucking weirdo and you're not gonna get anywhere.
Same with cars, same with the internet,
same with computers, same with phones,
it'll be same with AI.
Rocks and AI races.
Fully agree. I just
think what I'm saying is that
people shouldn't be looked down on. Not that
they won't be looked down on.
Oh no, I'm judging.
Yeah, me too.
Like, my father just
started using WhatsApp.
So I looked down on him the whole time for not using WhatsApp.
Now he's doing that. So you should be looked down. No, just kidding.
But the thing is, at some point, if you don't go with the time, you will be left behind.
Like I see that with often you have elderly people that get scammed via phone calls
because they don't know how the system works.
And the same will be with all the other stuff.
You will just be left behind.
And I think it will be similar to,
I'm not sure if you know in Matrix,
when they download, for example,
the karate movies or the karate stuff
into Neon's mind.
And then all of a sudden,
he's the best karate fighter
or karate fighter, however you say that.
And that will be the same.
Like I will sit here and say like, oh, it would be nice if I would be a mechanical engineer
and then I just download it into my brain and then it will work.
I think it will be similar at some point.
I mean, we're at a stage already where I can just hit some prompts and know the answers
to every single thing in the universe almost.
Not that it's right 100%.
That's on the other hand.
But it will be that way.
And if it's directly wired in my brain, like I would love to have a list of, for example,
if I ask myself, oh, where did you take that photo?
And then I just Google it in my brain and know the answer
because i would have forgotten it or uh oh what was that movie called from blah blah blah and
then you just google it in your brain that will be the case at one day i i think would also eat
the poop that that's yeah and i think that is like basically eating the poop and the reason why
is because whose truth are you downloading into your brain
yeah are you like you know you think you're getting the best version of the thing that
you're trying to download but it could be what they want you to have downloaded this is why
it needs to be decentralized and there could be compromises there could be yes so like what i'm getting at is
if that's the future i hope that there is still ways of identifying truth because like i'll put
out that i don't like people talk about like people talk about like speak your truth there's
only one truth that so the the thing is, is there's just reality
and there's one truth. So like what gets scary to me is that you are totally open at that point
to be programmed. However, the machine or the Hive deems
is how you should be programmed
and you're allowing yourself to be programmed
at that point in the future.
I don't know about that, man.
There needs to be access points.
There also needs to be doors that you can shut down
and there will be, like you could say,
okay, they just have access to layer one of my brain,
layer two of my brain, and then it will be the same like it will be nowadays with youtube the algorithm will put it
like the best of if i if i google how to fix a sink i will get some of the best videos just by
looking at it and then i just use the rest part of my brain that's still working to figure out
which one is the best video of course they will they will try to influence you, but they do the same already.
Like right now, we have like 100 people in this room.
Everyone's phone is listening to what we're saying.
And most likely tomorrow, I will get an ad for Neuralink, get it now or something like this.
I mean, that's already happening.
You're already manipulated.
Do it now.
Do it now. This has it now this is this has
always happened this has always been the case going back to like edward benays who was a famous
psychologist that used to create adverts in the 1950s and 60s like this is this is manipulating
human perception in order to sell them products has literally always happened and i think whatever
happens with ai the fact that it's being built in a multipolar way
in the sense that China's competing with the US,
I think that's good because what we really need
is basically like open source, verifiable,
non-partisan AI that everybody agrees
is speaking the truth as best as we understand it
at the time and any party can dispute things uh like if it just basically doesn't fit with their
worldview um you will need open yeah and I think this is where our industry can actually help a lot
with this so the the ethos that we have in the cypherpunk movement with regards to open source, like tech and freedom of information and verifiability, I think is very important.
And it fills me with a lot of optimism that these two trends have intersected.
The fact that we have, you know, this big push in the finance industry for decentralized tech at the same time as we have the AI being built,
I think is very good. And I would like to see more of those two kind of convergent trends coming
together and making something that we can all rely on and we can all believe it. Like imagine if it
was run on a node system the same way that, you know, proof of state runs so that any anybody can
dispute any of the facts in the network at any one time. And there's like penalties for, you know proof of state runs so that any anybody can dispute any of the facts in the network at
any one time and there's like penalties for you know if a model does something wrong basically
they get slashed in the same way that that happens now within d5 these are the types of
approaches we need to be taking to maintain information security for everybody yes it's
hard these are yes yes i'm clapping my hands again oh and this this is exactly so this is what i hope for everybody. Yeah. These are hard conversations.
I'm clapping my hands, man.
Oh, and this is exactly,
so this is what I hope,
and that's why I'm here doing what I'm doing.
I'm here to challenge the status quo.
I'm here to disrupt the status quo.
I'm here to help shape the future
and keep it as base as possible
because I think a lot of people drink a lot of Kool-Aid and they're not really thinking
about what they're saying.
And people need to really think critically about the future very hard.
And if we don't, we are going to be totally taken over.
We're going to be programmed.
We're going to be slaves of the hive or the the what's that
rocos basilis whatever you know like and look at i'm not i'm not for that so i'm here to stand
against it and to uh hopefully work with people and do my little good in my part of the world to
help save humanity and and be there for everyone's
hearts, minds, and souls.
Would you still let me up to space if I would have the Neuralink in my brain and you don't?
Or would you look down on people now that have that in their brain?
I don't look down on people, man.
Just period.
But I do disagree with people.
But I don't care what people do.
I believe people are sovereign individuals and they can do whatever they want.
So you want to put a chip in your brain, dogmit yourself, go ahead.
I think it would be fine.
It's not my business.
Rock's like the sort of guy that will be first in line for Friedman or Lincoln.
Hey, guys.
I heard my name.
I'm talking to my neighbor.
I apologize.
I'll jump back in a second.
So hey guys, not to totally parlay this
into the real topic of conversation here,
but when QE?
Yeah, we were supposed to talk gold and silver
in the second half.
Nerd Girl, are we?
Yeah, so I don't know where Anth don't know where anthem is but you guys can
transition to whatever you want what i will say is that in 25 minutes versan and vendell algera
from black swan capitalist will be here and we definitely have to do gold silver crypto macro
type then because i sort of like you know used reputation points to get them to come
okay that that's what i was trying to figure out what where are we
you guys go like you know run run amok whatever you know for the next 25 minutes but yeah when
they get here if we could get focused that would be great no
more talking about i think if you want to talk about eating poop next 24 minutes yeah please
no more maybe jack you you brought up a good one then that's not it's it's on topic like we
our title is when
our title is winchie like we haven't even like delve into it
we haven't even
delved into it.
What do you want to...
We have some scripted questions,
but I mean, what's in your mind, bro?
Get the script out the window, you know me.
Look, I think...
I want to make a general point and then
ask you guys what you think,
which is, so we've all
basically suffered through this.
I mean, I feel bad even saying this because we're meant to be like free market idealists.
And, you know, the government should have nothing to do with the market and stay out of everybody's business.
But considering that we are in the situation where, you know, interest rates set by central banks influence a lot of the business cycle.
We've all had this period now of like you know quantitative tightening that's lasted for
several years that coins the start of that coincided with you know one of the worst crypto
market crashes in history uh back when uh lunar and then eventually ftx collapsed
so we've had you know we had that big hit and then we've had the market slowly bleeding out as
the appetite for risk has dried up because the ability to borrow money
has gotten harder.
So we're now looking to see the other side of that.
As QT ends, QE begins, rates get a little easier.
So my question is, how quickly do you think this is going to turn around?
So we've had, obviously, people are taking a more cautious approach, My question is, how quickly do you think this is going to turn around?
Obviously, people are taking a more cautious approach, I think, this time because there's fears of recession on the horizon,
but it's not quite materialized yet.
And I think some of the central banks around the world are holding their breath
so that they've got all the ammunition to cut when that happens.
But yeah, just curious to hear what everybody thinks about that.
How quickly do we get to super low rate super easy policy from where we are now which is in this
kind of transitional phase so as it is like many parts of this like on on one level you have the fed you have the central banks and in all around
the world qe uh suppose like there's this version of qe that basically started the other day they
just ended quantitative tightening here in the us or with the fed uh and then there's all the
other countries and and what they're doing but then there's there the other countries and what they're doing
but then there's also like
the version of QE
that you mentioned because I read something about it but maybe
people in the audience haven't
are not mega familiar with this because it's slightly
different I think than what they've done in the past
yeah it's not even called QE
I forget
what they called it this time around. I was reading over notes from the Fed meeting or whatever it was that came out recently. It's been a busy week, so I actually don't have all the specifics. If someone does, interrupt me and let me know.
like interrupt me and let me know.
But I can tell you generally speaking,
it's not called quantitative easing
and it's essentially still money printing,
like creating liquidity for the banking system.
And that's what I know on that.
But like, I do believe that not only will there be
more rate cuts than is currently on the dot plot, that they will have to continue printing a lot more money.
I don't think there's actually charts out there that show the banking system specifically and how dry liquidity is and that the they need the the banks are having to get
loans from the fed right now because there's not enough capital you know to make to have
make loans and and run operations so that's but what i'm getting at is that's one thing, this whole QE, quantitative tightening, all that is one part of this discussion.
The other half, in my opinion, is what's actually happening in our own market.
Because I think a lot of people here, they're wondering, why is my Bitcoin the price that it is today or my altcoin?
the price that it is today or my altcoin and i i think it's definitely impacted by the macro but
on the other half it's impacted by like this space today what it's going through and there's a couple
different parts of that which is one the narratives uh are shifting and people are trying to, Bitcoin itself is trying to attach itself
to what's the next narrative for Bitcoin
and the whole space is trying to find direction.
And additionally, in the background,
there's different forces trying to unwind micro-sailor.
So like I was talking about this with michael
turpin on bid angels yesterday and and so i've been so busy i am only i'm only getting the cliff
notes so i'm not an expert on this more just like trying to keep up with everything but from what i
can see they're trying to unwind Michael Saylor.
And that's a big concern because you're talking about the price of Bitcoin being affected because of these outside factors.
And so that's a whole other part of our industry's issue right now.
So there's two parts.
There's the macro and there's the almost like silent war that's happening with...
There's also, on the note of QE, QT, stimulus stuff,
there's also talk of Trump kind of tariff dividend payments
going out at some point next year as well,
which is like direct stimulus
where citizens will get access to more capital i mean one one interesting thing
with the last cycle was that the easiest monetary policy in a in a long long time during covid
where basically all the central banks just gave out infinite money to anybody that wanted it, coincided with also individuals getting
extra capital through the stimulus program.
And so you had this moment where the system itself was awash with fresh capital on the
institutional side because the rates were so low and because the government was encouraging
borrowing. Well, and then combined, there's a third part that fucks the whole equation up there,
is that there we were producing less goods.
So we're creating massive money supply while then cutting the production of goods.
That is like a nuclear bomb recipe for inflating and balancing.
And then you would expect the hangover from that to be very long.
And it has been.
Yeah, four or five years.
We've all suffered through this kind of unwinding of that.
And it's still not fully unwound.
But I think the developed economies have got to the point
where they can't take much more punishment before they have to start.
Imagine. Go ahead. The reason why. Well i just want to like frame this for everybody because
i know we talk about this stuff quite a lot but some people maybe they don't understand the
relationship here between a central bank setting a rate and like why the prices of your altcoin or
whatever you're holding is up or down basically it comes down to risk appetite if you
can on the institutional level if you can borrow money easily to speculate your cost of doing
whatever uh investment you want to do is reduced and so that makes people generally more open to
taking risks and then if you compound that across the entire market and all the market actors within it
you end up with people certain people on the margins will then take riskier bets
and when you have an industry that's an emergent industry like crypto and the altcoins are on the
thin end of that so they're like as far out on the risk curve as you can get you then have a
disproportionate effect at the margins where suddenly because rates have dropped and it's a bit more of an easy monetary environment at the
institutional level suddenly you have the risk assets will shoot up because you know basically
like people are taking more risky bets and there's like a bunch of people doing that and when you
also include in that retail investors being flush with cash as was
the case last cycle because of the stimulus and everybody was sat at home with nothing to do
you end up with like a a perfect storm i don't know if that'll happen again this time but yeah
it's just interesting for the audience to understand like why does the fed cutting rates
why does that translate into an expectation that so you know some altcoins
going to do well well makes easy like money easier to borrow and then it's always been
a trickle-down effect and then also generally whenever they do q, they pass a bone to the general person,
you know,
out there.
It's not,
they,
they don't just give money to bailing out banks or,
you know,
companies,
et cetera.
You know,
they, they usually create some kind of um because at the
same time the average person is like i i literally was talking to someone just recently and they're
telling me that people are financing pizzas like i don't know people eat pizza all in the world
Like, I don't know if people eat pizza all over the world.
The Oreo futures thing.
There's, it's like a real thing, man.
Like there's literally on like apps, if you want to order a pizza for like your family, you can literally pay later or like do installment payments on a pizza for a Friday night, you know, with your family.
with your family so like the average person uh usually when they do qe and sell out a bunch of
stuff they usually find some kind of social uh programmers just because somebody's invented the
facility to do something doesn't mean that it's necessary so like if if that didn't exist people
would probably just still buy the same amount of pieces they just pay for them i mean like maybe there's a people okay people have
been just just to clarify here right people have been financing pizzas for as long as credit cards
have existed let's just be real that's a great yeah that's a great point yeah people have gone
on on nice out to party on a credit card yeah that's that's a great it's it's becoming more
of a thing though is the point where people are having to finance things that they used to be able to pay for.
It's a bit alarming that people are building these tools as well, like to finance.
Can I say something harsh to anyone listening who's racking up credit card debt?
Please do.
You often say harsh things.
I'll wait over the mute everyone button just in case
if yeah hey rock rock real quick i just wanted to say welcome adam uh to the show good friend
and then also uh mining stocks because that's just general good upkeep for the show to say
hi to the people that join us of course lu, Luke, you already jumped in. But before Rock
goes into this, we're all about to get spanked. I want to hear from you guys. So I'll just make
this point and then I'd love to hear from you guys. And on either the topic or whatever we've
been talking about, we've been sidetracking a bit today. But guys, okay, let me start with a quote.
Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the
world. Those who understand it, earn it. Those who don't pay it. What that means is if you are
saving your money and putting it away in investments like S&P 500 or Bitcoin or whatever
you want to save it in, gold, whatever, GameStop stock, whatever it is. If you're putting your
money away, it is compounding.
That means over time, it goes up and it snowballs
and it goes faster and faster.
If you are instead doing the other way,
which is you're going into debt to buy shit you don't need,
you are doing what Einstein said,
where it's people who don't understand compound interest.
You are paying it. You don't want to be paying compound interest. You want to be earning
compound interest. You don't want to be borrowing from future self to take pleasures with current
self. That's called a high time preference. You don't want to have a high time preference. You
want a low time preference. You want to think long-term and some easy numbers here. And this goes both ways, whether you're saving or you're spending.
If you put away, let's say you only made 50,000 a year for your whole life. You average 50,000 a
year for your whole life. I hope people will make a lot more than that, but let's just say you only
average 50,000 a year, your whole life. And you put away 20% every week, that's $10,000 a year you put away
and you put that into S&P 500. So we're not even talking Bitcoin or anything more aggressive. You
just put in S&P 500, which is average 10% with dividends for a hundred years. You will have $14
million when you are 70. Okay. Now, if you are instead not doing that and you're putting your money and you're
financing shit on credit cards, you will have spent 14 million over your lifetime on interest.
And so, uh, don't do this. It's fucking stupid. And I, and I'm in the spanking part. I don't care
what you say. You can live below your means. I fuck what excuse you're going to make right now
in your own heads, justifying it. And if anyone wants to argue this, come up on stage and we can
talk, but you can find ways to live below your means. Okay. I was worth, I was worth over my
first million. The interview, if you, you do Mark Cuban and Roxac rise in that interview,
I was living in my friend's garage for $900 a month.
My best friend from childhood, I loved it. It was great. It didn't, but I was paying $900 a month
when I was worth over my, when I first became worth over a million dollars. I, and just before
that, I was still wearing holes with shoes, shoes with holes in them. When I was in my house
or walking around my backyard
doing gardening or whatever,
I would wear my old shoes
with holes in them
to remind myself,
you know,
no matter how wealthy I got
to stay frugal.
You can always live below your means.
You can buy 10 pound bags of rice
from Walmart or Costco
for like $4.
There's all kinds of things you can do.
So if you don't think you can, I promise you can.
If I can give this like as a practical example.
So what you're saying is instead of financing pizzas,
uh, for debt, why are you ordering pizzas?
If you're in debt bundle, we should bundle a bunch of,
uh, pizza loans together into a collateralized pizza obligation.
And then we should buy that so that
we can be paid by the pizza eaters rather than being pizza eaters just make your own pizza at
home make your own pizza at home or just make some rice and chicken and broccoli it's you so
cheap you could live on like a few dollars a day there There's been kind of a...
I'm not saying everyone should,
but if you're going into debt,
then you should consider these extreme frugality measures,
austerity measures.
I mean, I think there's some factors here
that also need to be looked at.
Like, we've been sold this idea
that going to college and going to university
is going to get you a good job
when you come out into the real world.
And that seems to not really be the truth for the majority of people that are out
there. And so jumping into student loan debt that comes in with directed from the government, I
think is just this inherent issue in the United States specifically on how they're farming off of,
you know, they get an education off of this. And then they're finding themselves in these types of debt cycles that are being built for them to fall into, mainly through
education and lack of understanding. So, I mean, I get maybe why people are financing these things.
They've learned to accept the debt that they've been thrown into at the interest rates that they've
had to deal with. But one thing that I think is amazing is that crypto is allowing some of these individuals,
a lot of individuals that I know, to come out of this and actually start to rebuild
some of the credit issues that they've had because they've been able to invest whatever
they could into this and not be gated by fees and other issues that you have to go through
to get into an SAP
P500 or go through Fidelity.
So I think there's something really positive to say just from that aspect of really from
a student loan or trying to get bootstrapped up and start to get educated, find a new job
and kind of step up from that.
I really do think crypto has helped a lot of individuals through that process.
It changes the way you think, most importantly.
Student loan is the gateway debt.
So if you get comfortable with taking on debt at a very early age, you're 18 basically.
So you struggle at 18 to get a debt on anything else, but they'll give you $100,000 in debt to go get a degree
that may or may not be worthwhile.
And there's no verification.
There's no checking.
You just sign the piece of paper.
You get the debt.
Great.
Potentially, your whole productive life is now going to be pissed away paying that.
It's unfortunate.
And also, when you consider the impact of like you know like jurisdictional arbitrage so
somebody can study in a very cheap location in a different country and they can get a degree that's
essentially worth the same as you in the same education but they've paid one tenth of the price
and then they can move to where you live and out compete you for the job that you thought you was
going to get for the degree that you've paid 10 times more for you realize that it's a very bad trade to drop all that money on it now at the same
time education is not the only reason
nope must be Jack.
Let's introduce mining stocks here with the image of gold and silver in his PFP.
Hello, and do you have anything you want to say about this or just tell us about yourself?
You're back, Jack.
Oh, there we are.
Sorry about that.
Hey, guys, I got to jump off, but much love aztec see you brother see you later it was great chatting yeah glad you come um so yeah so so i was just
saying i don't know how far you got in with that with that speech but my main point was um first
of all it conditions you to accept debt at a much higher level than
you probably should secondly it's given to you with no checks and balances you're just essentially
told that this is what you should do to have a successful life and you sign the paper and then
you're getting debt and second and thirdly people who live in very cheap jurisdictions that have
access to very cheap education can get the same thing you've got for a tenth of the price and then move to your area so like when you think about that from an
arbitrage point of view um it's a very very bad trade to take that trade if you want to pay you
know 100 grand 200 grand for an education the only caveat to that is education is not the only reason
you go to higher education environments networking in you know the
prestigious ivy league universities or or uh you know cambridge and oxford in the uk as an example
is invaluable and the connections that you get from going to those places might be worth more
than the education you get so there's an element of that and the experience i mean i don't i don't
hang out with a lot of people and i went to a private university uh i went to a um a junior college at first because i was poor but
uh eventually got to a private university loyal and marymount university and um i don't use my
education anymore i went to school to be a doctor and then i found bitcoin and moved out of that
path i um i don't hang out with a lot of people from my school.
The only people I hang out with from my school
is my four fraternity brothers from my pledge class.
I was just at one of their weddings the other day.
And they're some of my best friends.
So some of my friends,
but I don't really network with them for business,
but it was for me,
the most valuable thing was the experience.
The experience learning how to be a better man,
I suppose Loyola Marymount is a really good university.
And I did a lot of philanthropy,
broke some words actually with some of our philanthropy.
And I think learned to be a little more,
I don't know, balanced and have a little more class than I did
in high school as a poor kid. But so there's other benefits, but I think the problem is when you
remove the, when you add noise and distort signals. So what happens with normally, if the
government was not subsidizing education so much, which there's pros and cons to it,
but if they were not subsidizing education so much,
then every single individual would have to make the choice
with their parents,
okay, what is the degree I'm going for?
What is the job I'm trying to get?
And does it make sense for me to spend a bunch of money
or take on private loans to do this?
Is this going to make sense for me? But the problem is now government jumps in and says, we're just going to give loans
to everyone because we want everyone to have an education. Now people are saying we're getting
free money from the government or it feels free. It might not be free. And even if it is free,
someone paid for it. So our country as a whole is paying for it. But so now people, instead of going,
is this going to make me money?
Is this going to be a net positive for me?
Is this a good ROI?
There is no ROI calculation.
You're just saying the government's going to hand me this free check.
I'm going to go for free and college is good and I should make more money later.
But it's just not that simple.
And so now we've created this surplus of people with educations in fields that don't make money.
And yeah, there's a big imbalance.
Are you talking about-
And the education is more expensive now because the government subsidized it.
So ever since government started subsidizing education, the cost of it in real dollar terms has gone up like five to eight times since they started subsidizing it. Of course, that's what happens. Sorry, Adam, I think you
were speaking. Yeah, I just wanted a clarification. Are you saying that there's like grant money
that's being given out to students to go to school or this is a student loan that they're taking?
Both. Okay. Yeah. From a student loan perspective i can see honestly what
i would like to see change there is how the payments are being divvied up between principal
and interest and how much interest is actually accruing so like they're upwards of sorry is it
is he cutting out or is it me it's you but i actually have to cut in because, so Versan Aljura from Black Swan Capitalist is here.
We did kind of specifically say we were going to focus this third hour on silver, gold, and dedicated questions.
I just want to make sure that we know that we're right here at the hour.
Welcome you, Versan.
Thank you so much for being here.
And yeah, just wanted to make that acknowledgement.
Cool. Adam, if you want to wrap up,. And yeah, just wanted to make that acknowledgement. Cool.
Adam, if you want to wrap up, we'll put a bow on this topic and then we can move into
the main topic of the show.
But yeah, go ahead, Adam.
Yeah, it was more on like the fact that I think it's really kind of disgusting to see
how, like if you're going to go out and buy a house, you pay principal and insurance on
both sides of the payment. When you have a student loan payment, you can only pay interest and then pay
principal afterwards. That specific thing is what's keeping people from being able to actually
pay that off and the high interest rates that are there. If there's some subsidies that could be done
in the sense of lowering the interest rate and then splitting up the payments that are being
made so it can go into principal and interest, I like that would number one create a better economy because people are able
to get out of those uh those debt cycles much easier now credit card debt whole other situation
but yeah i'll leave i'll yield back so we can talk about gold and silver
i just wanted to cut in real quick i still think think it's ridiculous that you guys need to pay for education that much anyway.
In Germany, you can go to university without getting into debt,
like in a Trasian amount of money.
I just wanted to throw that in before we move to the next topic.
Yes, it's a topic I'm still undecided on,
whether government should pay fully for university or college or not.
I lean towards not because I just generally think government
is really bad at these things.
And even if it feels like it's free to you,
it's like, let's say the cost to go to college,
if government was not involved and you just left it completely
up to the free market was $5,000 a year.
I think that then if like maybe in Germany, what might be happening is it feels free, but in reality, each person's paying $10,000 a year.
So I don't know, and there's all kinds of caveats here, but generally government is really bad at most of these things.
And most of the time when government gets involved, the cost of goods goes up.
But education is one that I've spent so much time digging into and I just can't, I haven't
made a final decision in my own head on if it makes sense or not.
Towards not, I lean towards like maybe subsidizing only the poorest people, but like generally not subsidizing.
But anyways, there's a good argument for,
I mean, education matters, right?
It's really important.
But if you subsidize it,
you get a bunch of people going into degrees.
There's all kinds of unintended side effects.
People going into degrees that aren't
going to make any money, that aren't productive for society because it's free. It's like if the
doctor, I can do the X, Y, and Z for free because I have insurance, well, then I'm going to do X,
Y, and Z. But if I instead don't have health insurance, I'm going to be
examinations, the visits, the things that I do.
There's a signal. The signal is what's the cost to me? What is the ROI? When you obfuscate it,
when you move the cost to someone else or put it in the background or make it so complicated that
nobody understands it, then you just take everything you can get, right? If I have,
understands it then you just take everything you can get right if I have
you know maybe I don't need so much food but if I have ten thousand dollars of
food stamps I'm gonna use every dollar of it right I'm just gonna stock my
closet my pantry up I'm just making up an example here but I think free markets
create signal in Germany it's also working say now you also brought up
health insurance so I'm not getting into that topic. That's also a thing that you guys over there.
Yeah, let's not get into that. Like I said, we've got some guests here who we specifically invited for this topic. Precious metals, gold, back row. Let's steer it back onto the train tracks.
macro. Let's steer it back onto the train tracks. Okay, so we have Black Swan Capitalist. Do you
want to introduce yourself? Tell us a bit about who you are, what you do. Hey, everyone. Good
afternoon, Nicole, all of you. It's a real pleasure to finally connect. Thank you for having us on the
program. A little bit about Black Swan Capital is we're simply trend forecasters.
We try our best to kind of bridge all the changes we see happening in the world and anticipate the next move before it becomes broadcasted to the mainstream.
And that really sets the stage for us to profit immensely.
But we'll get into that a little bit later.
But, yeah, it's a real pleasure to connect
with you guys. Thank you for having us on the program. Thank you so much for being here.
So we've got your Verson, and then we also have Vandal, also from Black Swan Capitalist.
Yeah, Vandal is my brother. I'm not sure where where he is. I told him to copy the link and just
enter it. He's here.
Oh, great. Terrific.
And then mining
stocks, you still haven't said hi.
We brought you up. Was mining
stocks from the audience or, Nicole,
was he someone scheduled or Darren? From the
audience. Okay.
Hasn't said anything yet. Mining stocks,
anything to say?
Okay. So let's go to uh black swan capitalists um here so yeah what's uh what are your guys's thoughts uh where would you guys like to start would you like to talk more about uh macro qe
government spending all these kind of things or would you rather talk about gold and
silver? Well, I think it all ties in together. We might as well start with the Federal Reserve.
That's kind of the biggest news everybody's talking about. They just cut rates exactly
as we anticipated. It's just there's another reality behind the decision. This is certainly
quantitative easing and everything but name. Obviously, they're not going to call it QE because it has political baggage to the name, but the mechanics
are very identical. The Federal Reserve also announced that they were going to buy $40 billion
worth of T-bills over the next month to expand their balance sheet, and that effectively ended
quantitative easing, I'm sorry, tightening, and a reverse course back ended quantitative easing i'm sorry tightening and a reverse course
back into quantitative easing um it's just interesting because the truth about what's
happening right now what does it tell us it tells us that the economy desperately needs more liquidity
and the only way the fed can supply that liquidity is by keeping the rates this low and expanding
their balance sheets so in simple terms for both the bulls and the bears,
this is going to prepare people significantly for more money printing leading into 2026
and certainly more expansion in the debt.
And you're going to see asset prices rise because of that design.
So they're going to simply inflate every market across the board.
And that is going to justify them calling it stabilizing the system
hi everybody can you hear me yep we got you i just wanted to introduce myself uh i'm vandell
co-founder of black swan capitalist and uh yeah i just want to say thank you for inviting us on
your show it's a pleasure to be here
Thanks so much for getting here. I know we're a little bit outside of your normal
The group that you normally talk to so we were excited for you to come on
It's exciting. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. So yeah, who wants to?
wants to uh carry on from here what do you guys want to talk about so uh i guess i got a question
Carry on from here
What do you guys want to talk about?
silver has gone crazy i mean gold to me makes sense in a world of uncertainty um and crazy
monetary you know policy fiscal policy um a lot of um concern in the world after the inflation from COVID and continued lingering inflation.
The weird place the US is in where we have bad jobs market, but still high inflation that's
lingering. You have the yen carry trade stuff happening, drama happening again.
There's all kinds of weird stuff happening. So people are naturally kind of going
into gold and Bitcoin. But silver, I don't understand it as much. I know a lot of gold
bugs really like silver. I hold a good amount of silver, but just more for fun. I look at gold as
like my insurance. But why silver?
Silver is more of an industrial.
Most of the value comes from industry, right?
It's not being used as much like gold is a store of value.
Why is silver also going up?
Is it just inflation?
What else could it be?
You know, that's a really good question.
It's really hard.
I mean, honestly, I know there's industrial demand for it, of course,
but at the same time, it's a precious metal. So historically, it's been used as some form to
preserve wealth over time, but primarily it's been gold. And we all know that gold has outlasted
empires, politicians, currency resets at the end of the day. As for silver, I'll be frank with you.
I'm not a big silver holder or investor. I do have a small portion of it in my portfolio that I
acquired many years ago, but I haven't been accumulating it.
Me neither.
Yeah. Primarily, I focus on gold when it comes to wealth preservation. If it's good enough for Putin and all the central banks, it's good enough for me. So it's outlasted pretty much every currency
reset, every crisis. It's been here for over 4,000 years. So when it comes to wealth preservation,
I mean, think about it. We all know we're going digital, right? The economy is shifting. Everything is becoming digitized. Eventually, everything will be tokenized. But yet, despite all of that happening, since 2009, central banks have been net buyers of physical gold.
going fully digital, why would they even be acquiring it? And the answer is pretty logical
and simple to point towards. It's simply because it's going to play a role in this new system.
So I don't see gold going away at all. And therefore, I believe that it's still going
to continue to hold and maintain its value over time, especially in a debt-based system
where they constantly keep debasing
their liabilities, printing money, debasing the currency. From a strategic wealth preservation
perspective, I think gold is a clever piece to have in anybody's portfolio. But again,
it depends on many different factors. Where you are in your financial situation, your age,
you know, how, what, what are you trying to accomplish financially in the short term and
the longterm? If you're trying to be more defensive and you have a lot of money and
you're focused more on preserving what you already have, then gold is an outstanding choice.
But if you're more focused on that asymmetric growth and upside, then it makes
sense to lean more aggressively and have a smaller portion of gold in your portfolio. But at the end
of the day, I don't think gold is going anywhere. I think it's a staple. It's here to stay. Even
as we transition into an updated financial system that runs on blockchain,
I think gold is only going to become more valuable. transition into an updated financial system that runs on blockchain,
I think gold is only going to become more valuable.
Yeah, I think so too.
I think these things are momentum.
So I think gold, if you're a bunch of countries and you're concerned,
a lot of these countries were holding dollars and bonds.
And if you're concerned about the U.S.'s,
not only our policies, our monetary and fiscal policies,
but also the weaponization of the dollar through sanctions and all the different things we do around the world, freezing assets,
and you need something more neutral, then you're going to go to gold or Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin
is actually much more neutral. And we saw that when Putin had gold with stored in the UK and
they just like took it basically when he invaded Ukraine, his oligarchs, you know, yachts and
other assets were frozen in Switzerland,
a neutral, supposed to be neutral country for 150 years. And then you have their dollars and
bonds frozen by the US. So, and their ability to move those assets across the world to frozen.
So Russia in any country that has any uncertainty about its US allegiance or even some US allies are like, well, yeah, I might be an ally today, but what about tomorrow?
So these people, these countries, for their government's sake and their people's sake, have to hold more neutral assets.
And gold is a neutral asset generally, except for the custody problem.
That is an issue.
Bitcoin solves that, but Bitcoin doesn't have as much Lindy effect.
So countries are dabbling.
They're starting to move into it, but it'll take time.
I think, though, there may be a time where,
and this may have multiple times in swings,
where you have so many countries starting to move into Bitcoin
that they all start moving in as momentum,
just like they did with gold.
And I think it's possible we'll see outflows from gold into bitcoin but i'm not sure about that maybe gold
keeps growing but it grows slower and bitcoin grows faster or maybe gold starts decreasing
and as bitcoin grows it's one of those i think yes yes i can definitely see that happening.
I still think no matter what happens at the end of the day,
I think all these big players are going to continue to accumulate gold at record levels.
I think, again, I come back to what I said before.
I think it's going to play a critical role in the new financial system.
They'll probably have some anchoring, some ratio tied to some of these digital assets. In my opinion, that's why they're
acquiring it along as well as a hedge as to what you said with the US weaponizing the dollar.
But yes, as for silver, again, I don't have too much to say on it. I think it's going to have
extreme demand going forward in the future from an industrial perspective, of course,
primarily, you know, robotics, EVs, AI, that kind of thing, chips. Yes, that's my take on silver,
at least. So I just see it rising in the future. So I want to ask you, sorry,
I didn't want to interrupt. Please go ahead. No, I want to make sure that we ask you,
so you said you see gold as wealth preservation and then other assets as for wealth generation,
for increasing value faster than gold will, right? So I want to know what it is like strategically that you're looking for in
cryptocurrencies or in just investments of any kind to make you think that they will outpace
gold and obviously the dollar. Yeah. So the way I look at it is like this. Okay.
If you're trying to position your portfolio from a medium term perspective, let's say one to three years, I think the most critical thing is deciding whether you should be more aggressive or more defensive.
So in today's environment, I think it's a risk on environment and therefore risk on assets, stocks, cryptocurrencies, digital assets are going to outperform other assets that are outside of that realm, that arena.
So simply put, I'm more focused on a very high growth strategy at the moment.
So that's why most of my portfolio kind of leans on the aggressive side, primarily focused on digital assets that I have high conviction in.
And I have a very strict list of criteria that my brother and I actually look for before investing in any digital asset.
And that's why we focus on very concentrated portfolios, a concentrated small selection of assets.
a concentrated small selection of assets, and we don't spread ourselves too thin.
Because crypto is extremely liquidity sensitive, as I'm sure you all know, which means it reacts
the most sensitively towards liquidity in the system, whether it's a liquidity injection or
contraction. So in a regime, which we're in right now, a fiscal dominated regime,
essentially what you have is monetary policy is a slave to that. And essentially we're going to
continue to fund government deficits, which is liquidity positive. On top of that, we're seeing
all the actions from central bankers monetary policy and fiscal policy actually
translate into a risk on positive environment now how long that will last is unknown of course
there's always the unknown factor uncertainty but if you're focused on the most asymmetric upside
i mean since 2009 that asset class is crypto.
That's a given. That's not an opinion. That's a fact.
Now, of course, stocks will perform very well.
Well, generally speaking, the equities market will perform well in this type of environment as well.
You're going to have more growth and upside that you can capture in a relatively short period compared to something that is considered globally more defensive or more of a hedge, such as gold.
Now, gold recently had pretty much a very parabolic move in a short period.
Now, that rarely happens.
When that happens, that's basically telling us that
something is breaking in the system and you're seeing a flight to safety.
So that's why that's occurring. But simply put, digital assets are the best risk-adjusted reward
asset class out there. The key is being strategical in how you select your digital assets.
And that's why we have very strict criteria
because we don't want to invest in something
that has a high probability of disappearing tomorrow.
So we're looking for assets that have asymmetric upside.
We always want to pay less for quality.
That's where the wealth is made.
It's by getting in early at the lows of the cycle
when prices of the asset you're interested in are actually steeply discounted. That's by getting in early at the lows of the cycle when prices of the asset you're
interested in are actually steeply discounted. That's where the move is. So we look for that
delicate balance between long-term growth potential, basically having an economic moat,
what they call, and essentially a cheap price because you always want to pay less for quality.
essentially a cheap price because you always want to pay less for quality and that's where the big
wealth is made so if you're interested in capturing a lot of the upside it's going to be in
cryptocurrencies and digital assets and then second it will be stocks generally speaking
in in these types of environments but that that will shift later on because the markets are
cyclical cyclical so it will shift later on and we could talk about that as well if you guys want
but that's my view on the current situation where where in the cycle are we in crypto do you believe
in the cycle do you think it'll stick around are we going to defy the cycle um is the cycle over what happens in 2026. yeah so the way i'm looking at it is i really try to
dial in my thesis and my strategy based on historical data but of course that doesn't
guarantee the same future performance but that's all we have
and in addition to that i look at the data today where are we in the cycle and i try to understand
how do markets behave and how does the macro environment influence different asset classes
at different times so with that said a simple answer is in the crypto cycle, in my opinion, we're in the late stages of it.
That's my opinion.
Now, we've been at the lows since 2022.
We had the whole FTX debacle.
The highs were in 2021.
We crashed down.
They pulled some narrative to justify all the price action.
And essentially, the lows of the cycle was 2022. Since then, we've been on a slow grind upwards. Of course,
Bitcoin so far has been the best performer. Outside of that, there have been select digital assets,
XRP, and of course, a few others that have even hit new all-time highs and performed very well.
But from a cycle perspective, the cycle has four stages, usually. That's how you define a cycle.
You got the accumulation phase, a markup phase, you have a peak, which is a distribution phase,
and then you have a decline, and that's the markdown phase.
So where do I think we are in the crypto cycle? I think we're in the late stages of the bull market.
And if I had to guess based on the data I'm looking at, and I have many reasons to why I
believe this, but I don't think this bull market will last beyond March. I do believe we're going
to see a significant rally in the stock market and in the crypto market between this month and
no later than March. So I see this really spilling over into Q1 2026 and probably accelerating in
February. And then I think all the chickens are going to come home to roost, all the economic
data, all the bad news. And then they're going to be able to pretty much justify the rug pull
and say, oh, this is why that happened. And I can elaborate more on that. But essentially,
we're late in the cycle. There's no doubt. That's a fact. Because from a liquidity perspective,
we're in the late stages of the liquidity cycle. That's number one, That's a fact because from a liquidity perspective, we're in the late
stages of the liquidity cycle. That's number one, despite what the Fed's doing. In addition to that,
we're in the late stages of the, well, first of all, we're in a 43 secular bull market of the
stock market. So since 1982, 1983, we've been on this upward trajectory, despite these sharp, short downturns we've had in previous recessions.
So we're late stages in that from a crypto cycle perspective.
I know there's a lot of debate whether this is a four year cycle, no longer a four year cycle.
It's a five year cycle. It, it's difficult to know at this
point. I mean, the only way you'll be able to draw a conclusion and say, okay, this was a three-year
cycle or a five-year cycle or a four-year cycle is when the cycle is over. Then we'll be able to
look back and have enough data to really conclude and say, okay, this was a five-year cycle,
or there were no more cycles. But the truth is crypto is a macro asset. Okay. Of course,
over time, select digital assets, blockchain itself will slowly decouple and evolve into
something that's not behaving like a risk on asset over time, less volatility. But as of now, it's a risk on asset,
and it is a macro asset. And that's why it has a direct correlation,
sensitivity to liquidity above a 90% correlation. So as long as we're in a debt-based system which requires constant credit creation
liquidity injections liquidity contractions when things heat up too much in the economy as long as
that exists the debt-based system I see crypto markets having cycles I don't think cycles are
going away ever because if they did it would not be a market anymore
cycles are markets are cyclical so but cycles all assets have cycles some different some and
many of them like interrelated and stuff but um you know when people are talking about cycles in
bitcoin they're typically talking about having um do you think we stick to having or is it uh
does it become more intertwined
to macro i mean you you said as a 90 correlation to liquidity so um liquidity cycles don't won't
always align with uh with having right they don't generally um i mean there's there's some
regularity there from presidential elections aligned with having but and they do try to
stimulate during midterms and these things but anyways yeah go ahead yeah yes um well i i
personally i never thought it was that happening at all i thought that had a very small small um
impact on the rewards and therefore on the supply um such a tiny degree um because if you actually
look at the data you'll see that the uh crypto cycle bitcoin particularly actually aligns with
the debt cycle and you know to really have a better better understanding of this, I think it's important to look at what happened in 2009, because a few
things occurred. And I believe, because all these things lined up perfectly to a T, you know, if it
was one thing that happened, then you could say, oh, it's a coincidence, or it's random. But if
it's two things, three things, now, now it's a pattern, okay. And it's been but if it's two things three things now now it's a pattern okay and it's been ongoing
since 2009 so for example we had the financial crisis in 08 2009 a few things happened yeah g20
leaders and barack obama calling for a new world reserve currency at the united nations or a global
alternative to the dollar that happened most people don't know about that,
but it's public information. You could verify it. Secondly, you had Bitcoin launch out of nowhere.
Third, you had a interest rate jubilee, essentially, because all central banks around
the world globally cut rates to near zero. Now, if you study the history of interest rates that hasn't
happened in the last 4 000 years so that was a very strange situation and it was a new direction
that central banks decided to go in historically it's never been done at that scale globally over 4 000 years so that happened interest rates were cut to near zero and in
addition to that what's interesting is a lot of that debt that they borrowed and that debt that
was created and pushed into the system in order to bail out the system actually a lot of it had to be refinanced a few years later. And then what
you did see is between 2013 and 14, the first Bitcoin bull run actually coincided with the
debt refinance cycle. And what's interesting is that actually coincided. Thank you.
