Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
The Conversation
Recorded: Dec. 28, 2025 Duration: 2:59:34Space Recording
Short Summary
In a lively discussion, participants explored the evolving landscape of gaming, highlighting significant trends such as the rise of microtransactions, security vulnerabilities in digital wallets, and the impact of player engagement on the gaming economy. The conversation underscored the need for improved security measures and innovative monetization strategies as the industry adapts to changing player expectations.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. yo
testing
okay seems to be working
that's pretty good
right
almost forgot that I was uh that I needed to do this
today because like the holidays and everything
just kind of like messed kind of messed with the
entire schedule, kind of. It was really
funny.
So yeah, we sew back.
Yeah, let's see.
Maybe we'll bring more some up. Who knows? Maybe
he has got something interesting to yap about
as well. I got some
things, including a big
hack that's been going on
on a video game, Rainbow Six Siege.
It's really fucking funny.
Not sure if anyone has seen it.
But, uh,
there's a big, uh, so basically
what happens, well,
Ubisoft
has been hacked, right?
And so a bunch
of people gave
in-game currency,
in-game gun skins, all this
kind of shit to
a ton of players, basically.
And they've been just
unbanning people as well.
There's a whole bunch of chaos. And it's not even
one singular group, which is the best
part. It's really fucking confusing.
I read a post by VX Underground about this
and I'm like, dude, this is just fucking
like, what is even going on here?
It seems very disorganized,
and it's really funny. I have no idea
how they even did the things that they did, but they
potentially compromised some of the tooling
that is used for moderation
in the game itself.
So I don't know what exactly they did,
but it's crazy.
They cost a lot of damage.
It was real funny.
A lot of hacks this time.
Like you saw the Trust Wallet hack the other day too, right?
You got to get it up at the end of the year, you know?
All the little bits.
Molson, what's up, dude?
Not too much, man.
Just chilling.
What game got hacked that was Ubisoft?
Rainbow Six Siege.
Is that like a Tom Clancy game?
Yes.
Yes, it is.
Wow.
I didn't know those were still a thing.
Right, right.
And there was money in that game?
I remember that just being a first-person shooter. It is a first-person shooter, and there is money in that game. I remember that just being a first-person shooter.
It is a first-person shooter, and there is money in the game.
There's currency you can buy shit with.
Like gun skins and things like that.
Pretty popular.
For instance, you got these...
I forgot what it's called.
Some of those skins, they're called Black Ice, for instance.
And they make your gun look a certain way, and they're super, super
sought after. There's, like, some skins that you can't
get anymore. There's, like, various bits
and various little bits and things, you know?
Like, every game kind of,
like, has this path where they start
off as something, like, super simple, and then eventually
they just improve upon the game by
adding in, uh, basically
MTXs, like, or just microtransaction
stuff, right?
Like for instance, you can just like multiple,
like people like abstraction
and they like to express their identity.
And so you just add customization
and things like that
so that you can actually facilitate that abstraction.
And that's what like most games do
with like microtransactions, right?
Like even with Path of Exile or something like that,
there's no change to the inherent function of a gun.
It's just that the optics of it are changed.
Then you can brag to somebody about how you got the coolest gun,
or the streamer runs around with a specific type of gun.
And then the viewer looks at it and goes,
holy shit, that's the rare one, I know what that is.
And I know how difficult that is to get, right?
So it's like, that's a real fascinating thing
that most games are doing.
So now, you kind of have that going on,
and eventually, you have a situation like this,
where there's a ton of these items,
and then you can do real damage with that
by just giving them out for free.
It's kind of funny.
Of course, you've got to roll the shit back eventually,
but still, I thought it was really funny to see this.
What's amazing is if you had told game developers
and game users maybe 20 maybe 15 years
ago that all their favorite games could be free to play and just totally sustained by people buying
cosmetic items like within the same game space like everyone would have thought you were insane
but now increasingly i learned today for the first time that like skins
with like cosmetics and stuff like that or even a thing in first person shooters i didn't know that
wait what you wait wait hang on a second repeat that you you you'd like today years old
no i'm saying if you had told people 20 years ago that that you could that you wouldn't have to pay like a monthly fee in order to pay to
play your game and that you could be playing for free and all the game development would be paid
for by other people buying cosmetic items in the game that didn't change the gameplay people would
have told you it's crazy and what's wild to me is like this is
it started maybe with like mmorpgs like uh like world of warcraft i guess and then i guess it
made its way to like uh mobas like dota like dota's free to play i think but um but and then
i now it's in first person shooters and it and it's just crazy, like, how powerful the economics are of
just letting people, like, show their identity, but also show their status through what they buy.
Yeah, I mean, look, if you, I think it would, I think that one of the reasons why this kind of
stuff was insane back then was because you didn't have the technology necessary to kind of, like,
facilitate these kinds of things. You know, the internet was still kind of like 20 years ago the internet was still kind of a thing that was
scaling you know some people weren't even on it and it was like this almost alien landscape that
people didn't understand you could see that from hollywood right like you have a movie like hackers
or some shit come out and it's like okay this is really like this is what the average person
understands the internet to be some sort of weird mystical bullshit, which is, of course, bullshit, right?
And so, because the tech wasn't there, that's why I think it might have been insane.
But it does make a lot of sense.
I mean, why would you buy, like, a Lamborghini or a Bugatti or any of these things?
Because you want to flex off to somebody, not just the speed of the car.
If you wanted the speed of a car, you could do other things, right?
If you wanted just pure speed, there are, like, better ways to go about this.
But if you wanted to flex your
purchasing power
effectively, then you do that.
The same thing as StarCraft, for instance,
is doing that very, very well, actually.
StarCraft? They're doing it even to...
Yes. I think StarCraft, is it StarCraft?
Or is it the other one? StarCitizen! StarCitizen!
My bad. No, not StarCraft. StarCitizen.
It's like, wait a minute. No, no, that's the wrong game.
No, no, StarCit Citizen is doing this very well.
They have, like, a shit ton of spaceships and such, and you can buy them.
And actually, they do it in this way, where unless you have spent a certain amount of
money, you don't even get access to some of the ships that you could buy.
It's really funny.
But what...
So, like, they take it even a level higher.
Wait, you were saying that you have to buy shit in order to access
other shit, yes.
If you haven't bought
a certain amount of valuable items,
then you don't even get access to other valuable
items. You're kind of stuck
at your tier. They're all valuable
in terms of
signaling to other people. They're not actually
valuable in terms of making you more
powerful in the game, right?
Well, they do.
Oh yeah, I know.
That's definitely utility. The purchasing
power is definitely utility. That's not
cosmetic at all. I mean, it's partially cosmetic,
but it mainly just makes you super powerful
as well. That's the bit. You've got like fucking
Saudi princes and princesses
just fucking sitting there and just purchasing
every new capital ship that comes out because because they've already purchased like probably millions of dollars
of shit then they already have access to like the highest tiers of the thing they can directly
purchase whatever new thing is coming out it's kind of funny yeah it's a big economy too it's
awesome so personally i have nothing against it the so that reminds me of two things i only
remember the first right now but sorry that I had a baby about three weeks ago,
and it's making noise in the background, and I'm holding it.
No, it's fine.
It's fine. It's encouraged.
You can take something that works in one space,
which is life with Lamborghinis and Louis Vuitton bags,
and then you can move it to another space like video games.
You can make a lot of money.
And it's an innovation.
But the thing that I was going to ask you is,
was the infrastructure really not there on the internet 15 to 20 years ago?
Because I think it was.
Because if you were playing EverQuest or World of Warcraft,
your credit card could have been used
to be purchasing micro items it seems more like the obstacle was like no one had really tried it
yet or like is stripe like something that is needed to make all this stuff happen it seems
more like something that people just hadn't tried at that point than an infrastructure issue.
Fuck, I couldn't get back in the XA.
Okay, there we go. Now I'm back in it.
Yeah, I think a lot of the infrastructure was there, but it also is kind of insane
to try and make it as
scale as it is today for a lot of things.
Like payment systems, yeah, sure, it's one thing,
but how exactly do you add an item to a game?
It's like, hey, you have physical copies, for instance, for video games, that's an item to the game it's like hey you have physical copies for instance for video games that's how things used
to be sold like you have physical copies for everything so now if i unlock an item in the
game on the physical copy it is part of the inherent function of the game like that was
going to happen no matter what it's like hey i'm gonna you know complete the test the item was
already there but i've now unlocked the ability to use that item right and then maybe you have
some multiplayer adjacent things as well it's only like after most of this kind of stuff became
a more of like a service side thing most games just became more of a service side thing that
actually microtransactions made a lot of sense and you can actually see that something like halo
infinite is very very badly optimized in this exact respect because whenever you load into it
It's very, very badly optimized in this exact respect,
because whenever you load into it,
a lot of the stuff that deals with your microtransaction customization,
they don't even load in.
They just load in over time,
and you have to sit there for basically two minutes
until all the bits are in, depending on how much stuff you have,
and then you can actually start playing the game,
because before that happens, it just doesn't load up any maps.
So, yeah, that's another little interesting bit
that I thought was funny.
Whereas something like Campaign, for instance,
is more...
Halo Infinite's Campaign is more like the almost local thing,
because you can play it locally,
and you can also play it in multiplayer as well,
so you just invite somebody in.
Mostly like Minecraft as well,
which can be local, whereas multiplayer as well.
I think maybe it's a little bit of both that people weren't really used to this but also I
think it may have just been kind of a technology problem as well right because you you would just
buy the physical copy of a game and then play with your friends and did like a LAN party right
you wouldn't actually do most of the stuff over the internet like we do today like I think that
a lot of these things are very unusual. It's
just that everything's been happening so fast, we kind of feel like it's always been there. Like,
even Discord, for instance, I only started using Discord, like, what was it, seven years ago,
right? Like, I started using it seven years ago. For me, it feels like it's always been there,
you know? But it's a very recent thing. Like, it's not even 10 years, right? And for some other
people, it's only been like a year, and they like the app, they use the app. And same thing here with X. Like I've only been using
this since 2021. That's like now four years. And I feel like I've always been using it my entire
life. I even have more ability and more skill and using the app than most people have that signed
up in 2010. So it's like all of these things, you just kind of think about, okay, so is it a,
like, what is it? Is it an adoption issue? Maybe I think back then it was definitely an adoption issue as well,
like what you said, right?
I think it's partially the technology bit, but also the adoption bits.
And specifically on the adoption bit,
I think the technology comes in as well because most of the stuff wasn't even
online and you need everything to be online so you can validate whether or
not somebody actually has a skin and to even like make sure,
make sure you can facilitate the transaction itself yeah like technology comes out and then humans like change
their behavior and then when humans change their behavior that actually enables new infrastructure
to come out like an example might even be like so the internet comes out and then people try
grocery delivery with a web van and it doesn't really work but then eventually humans change their
behavior enough such that grocery delivery online starts to work stuff
like that and it just keeps going and going and going yeah safety checks and
all this kind of shit that's another like usually with new technologies it
takes a while to adopt as well because people are not really gonna like use it as much in the beginning especially the ones who are actually
going to build the the system that people are going to be using like say for instance with
halo there's an interesting thing that's happening right now they're actually going to be using
for the first time unreal engine for their next game which is combat evolved but actually combat
the the remake of combat evolved basically that's coming out in 2026.
And the thing is, I'm actually a huge fan of Unreal Engine.
I actually think it's a really, really good engine.
Something like Arc Raiders, which we've been playing,
works very, very well.
In comparison to some of the other games,
it reminds me of what games,
like what old games are like running on modern compute.
That kind of is what it's like.
You have like 500 frames per second if you really wanted to do it and it's like really really awesome especially with me i
just have to like kind of crank some things down because otherwise it just takes over my entire
computer and just like sucks out all the resources so like it's really cool it's really cool that we
can see a game actually working and something like our creators is an unreal engine game and a lot of people give unreal engine a lot of shit because many p many um many companies build unoptimized versions right and so if it's
unoptimized and not well done then of course even though the engine is amazing um the performance
is going to be complete ass and therefore people will think that the game is ass or that the engine
is ass which you know the game is ass not the engine. So one of the problems with this adoption here
is that you're going to have a lot of slop makers, first and foremost,
and then you'll have a few winners, like ArcGraders, for instance,
where the game and the engine is actually, like, you know, used properly.
Because even with Halo Infinite, what they're using
is effectively a modernized version of the fucking quick engine,
which has been around for a very long period of time which also explains why it's very buggy in very specific ways why it has a ton of memory leaks and all this kind of shit one of the worst
bits of it all being object-oriented programming right like object-oriented stuff is a kind of
brain rot that destroys your computer over time and this kind of stuff is like
hey finally we have a solution for this with all these different engines but it takes the time
until it's fully utilized and there's a great example that people can follow like i think
our creators probably will even accelerate the unreal engine adoption a whole bunch more because
people can see oh shit this stuff actually can work.
This could be really good.
It can run really well if you know what you're doing.
So I think many others will be following suit.
And, I mean, Halo is definitely doing so,
even though they have issues now with AI.
That's another thing as well.
They're trying to integrate AI into everything,
which is another interesting kind of technology to integrate,
which I'm actually not so hyped about.
So has there, speaking of AI, have there been moments in the development of video game 3D
rendering engines like there have been in AI? Like, did someone ever like, quote unquote,
deep seek a video game engine in the sense that someone figured out a way
to do the same thing with significantly less resources. Because for me from the outside
looking in, it just seems like, like, you know, the RAM and the processors on all this hardware
just keeps getting better and better and better. yet somehow the video games just keep on absorbing all of those resources so like has there ever been a
moment where people just like oh here's a here's a way to do the same thing that we've been doing
but like the 20% the the cost and the computational power and then everyone kind of switches to that
and you end up with excess resources on the computer. Well, there's where there's movements like this, we have an engine
and rust, for instance, that's pretty good. So people working on that, it's just that it's not
being utilized at the moment. I think the best option that we have right now that's like scaled,
which you can be using, which you can be using for games, which can be used for games, sorry,
now would be basically the Unreal Engine.
It's really good. Like for what it does and for the visuals that it gives you, I think it's really
good. It's the next step, pretty much. I think a lot of people should pivot more towards that.
The only bits that are problematic are like physics simulations, I think. I'm not sure exactly how
you'd facilitate that because, you know, you have other engines that are more capable, like you look
like a Battlefield 6, for instance, they have like pretty decent simulation. Although I will take that because, you know, you have other engines that are more capable. Like, you look like a Battlefield 6, for instance.
They have, like, pretty decent simulation.
Although, I will say that something like, wasn't it Battlefield 4 that was, like, really, really cool?
That's, like, even still holds up today?
I think Battlefield 4 is a great example.
Like, if they were to improve, perhaps, that a little bit, then you wouldn't get, like, the disaster that was Battlefield.
Like, what was the other Battlefield? The one with, like, 2042? Yeah, 2042. Yeah disaster that was Battlefield. What was the other Battlefield?
The one with 2042?
Yeah, 2042.
Yeah, that was the buggy.
Yeah, that was full of bugs.
It was busted as fuck.
So I think that wasn't really nice.
So I think maybe out of the old engines,
we could learn something,
but I think they're largely obsolete now.
There's a lot of issues that are encountered with older engines
where I think we're kind of like reaching the limit of improvement,
where basically we're just improving the hardware,
and that's why something like the source engine works so well today
is because, well, it's designed to be super efficient
for what was back then, the compute.
Now we just have better compute, and that's why it runs so well.
It's not that it's better in a sense. It that it's simpler or more basic i think would be make would make more sense
to say it's basic right so i think the deep seek equivalent of what like these engines are even the
modernized engines would just be unreal engine honestly like the physics in there are actually
pretty decent um i'm not sure exactly how you would make
realistic physics simulations happen.
I haven't looked into that yet. I'll look into that
a little bit, but so far
visually at least, and functionally,
it's very... it's pretty good.
Does anyone
try to design the hardware
and the software at the
exact same time like I think
Apple does? in video games
no because like what do you okay hang on a second what do you mean exactly like design the hardware
so i'm just i'm out of my area so i'm gonna say dumb things but so it a time, Apple was buying
designs for the chips
it was using from ARM
or ARM.
It's my understanding
that they now are not
doing that. They designed
their own chips
for the hardware
that they
run.
Nobody's doing that. That would be insane run... Or something like that. Yeah, no, no.
Nobody's doing that because it's completely... That would be insane.
You can't do that.
Why is that insane?
Well, first of all, you have to come up with your own hardware.
That's an insanely tall order.
Manufacturing it, you're not going to be doing that yourself.
You're just going to be outsourcing that one to TSMC.
That's why if you look at all of these other companies,
what they do is they use existing computes. They don't make their
own computes because it's, like, fucking impossible.
It costs way too much and the effort is insane.
And plus, on top of it, okay, let's say
I have generated, let's say I've, like, created
the, um, let's say I've created the
hardware, right? Okay, cool. Now you've created the hardware.
Now you have to create your microcode for it. Now you have to create
optimizations for how the hardware is
going to be used. You're basically going to be
taking whatever NVIDIA's business model is,
and you're going to try and effectively copy them for video games
even though they are literally the video game company.
You can't do that.
I mean, you could try, and then you can fail spectacularly
or pull it off if you're like fucking Chinese or something,
but even they use the existing Western computes
and eventually will pivot to ASICs.
So I'm not saying that this is easy or anything,
but from an economic standpoint,
Apple is doing that, right?
And then that's one.
And then two, the video game industry
is so big economically
that it's not unreasonable to think
that this will actually be achieved at some point.
I mean, look, that it's not unreasonable to think that this will actually be achieved at some point i mean look the the reason why apple is so successful is because it already has captured
the dominance like what initial gaming company is like going to come out with their own compute
i think the only ones that have a chance yeah like i was about to mention that like valve has
the only one that has like a a shot at this but I still don't think that... Their whole thing is optimizing their usage of the compute.
That's what they're doing, because it's the best thing that you can do, is optimize your usage of the compute.
Because the compute is actually pretty damn good.
There's actually not much that you need to change about it.
InVideo, it has these issues, but you can largely get around them,
and you don't really need to worry about a lot of the other stuff that comes with
these these types of chips so like it's it's a it's more a software issue for games it's more
of a software issue than it is actually a hardware issue right like the hardware issue only now is a
real thing because um sam altman decided and by the way it's funny that i've been like warning
people for years hey you guys know that this guy's gonna absolutely rape the market right
he's gonna destroy fucking everything because he's gonna realize that he can't win with a fucking company so he's just gonna make everybody
else like incapable of doing their thing by fucking like buying everything up i said this
nobody believed me but now it's happened and now you have a gaming compute crisis so yeah now your
ram is like fucking 300x what it once was and now you're like oh hey guys everything's fine it's
like very much so not and also all the open AI shells have been oddly quiet. It's like, hmm,
yeah, it kind of happens when the entire
population hates your very
cells you're made out of.
Because you fuck the economy, it's pretty bad.
You probably want to shit up.
So, yeah, no,
it's only recently
become an actual compute problem, I think,
because before you could just optimize your way out of it.
But it's just that people didn't bother to do so because there wasn't actually
a compute problem, we could just bought more RAM. You know, like, that was the thing. But
now you can't fucking buy any more RAM because we don't have infinite money, man.
Yeah, well, yeah, or we don't have infinite supply, right? There's like a supply cap in
the short term.
Well, right now it's not even like a supply cap necessarily.
Like the reason why you have these RAM shortages is because like the,
there's like a huge demand for it out of the AI section of things.
And so even with things like, even with things like NVMe,
the NVMe SSDs and all like the stuff that's in your computer,
that stuff is affected as well because they're using similar manufacturing processes to create
the same thing. And so they basically are converting
all of these, you know,
Fernand Flash chips, so they're converting all of the fab lines
into that. So it's kind of...
That's causing
a lot of issues. That's causing
a lot of issues right now.
That's why the RAM is going up like crazy, because they figured out,
hey, you can use RAM for this.
And so they basically go, hey, why don't we just buy up all the fucking RAM, which is what OpenAI did, which then caused a crisis.
And people were like, well, OpenAI doesn't know how to use that shit.
That's right.
But the same thing also applies to kind of everybody else.
But they can figure it out, because they are all the talent, and they don't have all the talent to OpenAI.
So the OpenAI decided, hmm, to preserve our own existence, we should probably, like, buy all that shit up,
even though we're not going to use it.
And that's that.
That's actually going to be, like, one of the major things
that basically these companies will just, like, buy up all the computes
and leave it in the fucking warehouse
so that the competition literally doesn't have compute that's available.
Which is also kind of funny, because in a sense,
you actually would be expediting the Chinese, like,
in their development.
Like, think about this.
I know a lot of people harp on about China this, China that,
and their endless superiority and all this bullshit,
and a lot of it's unfounded.
But on this exact front, for instance, this is going to be a major risk,
because the US companies are going to be harming themselves effectively,
because what happens when there is no more compute for you to buy,
because all the fucking big companies have bought it up.
So that they can compete against each other without actually doing anything.
How are you going to get compute?
Well, someone's going to have to supply it.
You're not going to be able to make it yourself.
Not at scale or at cost.
You're going to get that shit from China.
Exactly. And they're going to do it.
They're going to do it. They're already doing it.
They're not going to make the best either. Not by a long shot. I think, however, they're going to do it. They're already doing it. They're not going to make the best either,
not by a long shot. I think, however,
they're going to get very close. And maybe
the thing that you were saying about,
hey, maybe there's going to be a different type of hardware for your
gaming, maybe that'll come
about because they're just going to be using something
that's ASIC-based.
The hardware problem is just how do you get it
to be networked properly without
many latency issues that occur
due to the physical nature of how you're going to have to network the ASICs. Yeah, Huawei did it,
right? They did it for phones, I'm pretty sure. I mean, they're not video games, but like they
have the Harmony OS and like increasingly apps are running on that. So that's not our lens
credence to what you're saying yeah like I mean
I haven't used that many Chinese computers
like I've usually used the only Chinese
computers I've used are like using foreign components
but I must say on the hardware
end of things they usually put things together pretty well
just depends on the price you pay of course
the only Chinese computers I've used
are the clock and the abacus
bruh
that's crazy those are OGh. That's crazy.
Those are OG Chinese computers.
That's crazy, man.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's interesting.
Actually, I went to a Xiaomi store recently,
and I didn't use a Xiaomi phone,
but I bought a scale,
and I played with their monitors and shit.
And the quality was not there.
It kind of underwhelmed me.
But maybe, you know, I haven't driven the car, and I haven't used the phones.
So I've got to give them another chance.
But the prices were, like, crazy cheap.
So that was cool.
I haven't used their phones.
I've used their computers before.
I've used one of their gaming PCs with a...
Xiaomi makes gaming PCs?
Yeah.
I didn't know that.
Used to.
They make everything, dude.
It's crazy.
Yeah, like their PCs are very simple.
It was one of those like really well-made, I must say.
It had like a 20, 2050 in it.
I used at the time.
It was pretty cheap, but it wasn't that bad
it did what it was supposed to do
it had this really nice
metal
cover, it was really good
really bricky, it was a fucking brick
you could knock somebody out with a fucking thing and it would still work
type of thing, it was pretty good
it was a fucking brick with a computer
I mean, people
should know more about that guy.
The guy who founded Xiaomi,
the way he got his start was with an e-commerce company,
which he sold to Amazon.
And then he started making...
He's changed the game in a whole bunch of ways
that were done in China first.
He was pre-selling hardware
in a way that people in America weren't.
He's making cars, all sorts of different things.
I feel like there are a ton of business lessons in Xiaomi
that people in the West, myself included,
haven't really had a chance to learn.
Someone needs to investigate that.
Make it teach us all.
I'm going to look into this guy when I get the chance.
I'm just saying.
His name is
Le... I don't know how to say it.
Le-Yun?
Yeah, L-E-I and then
J-U-N is his second name.
I think Le-Yun is correct.
No, no, it's not.
It's Jun. Or John? n is his second yeah i think lei yun is is correct no no it's not it's it's jun it's what's it john no it's it's it's jun it's like it's like a hard j okay yeah he um and the cool the interesting
thing about him is he's not like the typical like the typical chinese entrepreneur is more like the BYD guy who you never see.
But this guy,
he's kind of like a wild man.
There's some weird videos of him
going to India, just speaking
broken English, trying to sell his
phones. I don't know. He's just an interesting
person.
Yeah.
Look here.
Nice. Their car yeah look here nice their car had the fastest
the fastest
time of any car
in the world on this like famous
track in Germany which is
I think pretty impressive
which car
I think it's the Xiaomi
like SU7 it's the Xiaomi like SU7?
It's a sports car.
Hmm.
Interesting.
I haven't looked at that.
Let me see if I can
dig it up. He like occasionally posts on
Twitter.
X. There we go.
Yeah.
I mean, even Grok
still thinks that some posts are tweets,
let's be honest.
like last like i um i put a post into the like you know you have the analysis feature
on grok where you can like you to take a post and you ask it hey well what is this
and it sometimes pulls so for instance if you did a repost then it goes through it and it says oh
hey this is a tweet, right?
It's kind of funny.
And actually, I think there's still this error.
Let me see if there's any reposts on this space and I can actually look if it's still there.
Speaking of the Grok analysis button.
Well, yeah, I don't know. I posted about that i was like hey guys we need a button in the top
right corner and it like i put a red circle for where it should be and then the post went viral
and then they put the grok analysis button on the post so um you know so i'm 100 percent 100% responsible for any success X has for anything.
So here's what, can you guys still hear me?
Yeah.
Okay, cool.
So can you still hear me now?
Yes, you can.
Yes.
All right, sorry.
I switched out of one app to another. So Xiaomi's SU7 Ultra set multiple lap records at Germany's,
Adrian, you can come in and fix my language here,
Nürburgring Nordschleife track, including the fastest production.
Can you show me the thing?
Oh, yeah, I'll DM it to you, but it's not from,
I'm not using X, Grok right now.
This was perplexity.
Okay.
Just like copy-paste that's in in my DMs.
Yeah.
This is so confusing. It's like putting me
to chat, and then it's like, well, which
chat do I need to go to?
I don't actually use perplexity anymore.
It's kind of funny anymore I actually don't use
any AI for browsing
maybe like Rock I do use that
occasionally
but for most stuff I still go very manual
I'm actually very manual these days
I'm using AI less and less and less
people use AI
for like
they replace their thinking with it
for me I just use it to look up facts.
It's an insanely game.
Yeah, yeah, looking shit up is good, too,
but it will have a bias there as well,
so you should remember, and not only just remember,
but also advance your ability to look shit up yourself.
Yeah.
Because, like, it will just, like, give you
whatever is in line with its utility function, right?
So, or, like, system problems, as we like to refer to today.
Nobody says the word's utility function anymore.
Like, if somebody doesn't tell you
about the utility function,
then they don't know what the fuck they're talking about.
They're just like one of these people who came in lately.
But like, you know, nobody thinks about the utility function.
So like, okay, hey, you have a system prompt,
you have a utility function, boom, boom, boom, there you go.
It's supposed to like represent a certain image of the world
and it's going to take whatever it can find
to basically do exactly that.
So that's one of the risks that you'll have
with like say agentic browsing or any of those like AI related bullshit. So it's like, you'll have that
likely as a risk. Now with Grok, they kind of like made it so that it's independent. Although
sometimes I found even with nutrition, there's like some issues where it basically takes more
of the average mindset on the thing, which is of course completely incorrect, which of course it
could be forgiven for that because it's like, okay, you know, there's a lot of junk science out there that even most
scientists in the space don't even understand. It's like, hey, we believe that this substance
over here doesn't actually cause any problems for you, even though it really, really does.
It's just like, back in the day, we made a study to confirm that it doesn't kill you immediately,
and it's not healthier than the actual thing that we had before to replace it with, but,
you know, it's whatever. Yeah, that's really funny. Like you, you, you set up a gentic commerce.
So then you have like an AI agent that's supposed to go shop for you.
And you're like, all right, so these are my dimensions.
I want a stylish shirt.
I want it to, uh, and it's gotta have a collar.
And then the AI agents like, okay, I got you, bro.
And I look what I purchased for you.
And then it gets sent back to you.
You like open up the package all excited.
And it's like,
because of its utility function,
it's sure.
That's like made of like a hundred percent,
like,
like PET bottles that have been recycled.
And it says like black lives matter on it because.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Something like that.
It does make sense. It does make sense it does make sense with the
oh yeah recycled plastics is another thing we can get into at some point I
hate that fucking shit so much it's so bullshit plastic doesn't make any sense
well it does sometimes no it doesn't like so just burn it no you're wrong
yeah well okay so you're not wrong but you're referring to the recycling of, like, products that have already been used in the market.
Like, you can sometimes feed, like, some used plastics into new injection molded products.
Like, you can.
And then also at the factory itself, like, whenever you make an injection molded product, you don't actually just make
the thing that you see. So there's this thing called a sprue, which is, it's hard to explain,
but it's like the plastic flows through a pipe and the pipe is attached to the product that you're
making. So there's like a pipe with plastic flowing through
it. And the pipe goes to two different cups and each of the cups are made of plastic.
And so the cups come out of the machine. You're like, okay, cool. I got two great cups, but also
the pipe hardens. And so you get this plastic pipe, which is called a sprue. And that can be
grounded up in the factory and oftentimes just put right back into
the machine and so that's another form of plastic recycling and it does work like decently
decently well yeah because it hasn't been everything yeah well because it hasn't been
like extensively used yes what i'm specifically referring to is the recycling as we currently
know it's and that is not in the factory not in the clean setting but for but for used products, yes, I'm thinking about the used products
and that's what it's supposed to be used for most of the time.
This kind of stuff has happened for ages.
You're not going to just throw away the plastic that is perfectly usable
because it's expensive.
It doesn't make sense to waste money, right?
So that is logical, but what is illogical is using these products
that are already finished, like, hey, here's a plastic bottle
and trying to recycle that because a lot of the recycled plastic is even more unstable than the virgin plastic,
which is unstable enough as it is.
And really, food products should not really be interacting with plastic at all.
Plastic should not really be close to food products, actually.
It's a really big problem.
It's just that the exposure is supposedly not as bad,
even though there are a lot of indicators otherwise.
So, you know, whatever.
Because, you know, we come into contact with plastic everywhere.
Anything for even your milk cartons, your canned water, anything.
It's like fucking plastic.
It's like either plastic, which is like PET or some shit like that,
that is coating the inside
of it, or it's just like some sort of epoxy resin type thing, which it's also...
Like, even if you get your milk in a glass bottle, like, the pipes that were used to drain the milk
from the cow's udders are not only plastic, but like some of the worst plastic you can imagine.
So it's just, it's totally unavoidable i did send you the the little i think the exposure from it i think the exposure is
limited in those cases so it's like it's still excusable to a certain extent um it's just that
when it's like sitting in an environment for quite a like say for instance milk you fill it into like
a a uh plastic well not really plastic but you know it is plastic so most uh paper paper
contains so you have cartons of milk right which are like you know largely paper-based but the
inside is a uh is is lined with a foil um like metal foil and plastic film that then basically
prevents the milk from like exiting or like having any kind of compromise to it at all like you know
the quality of the product is not compromised
because it's insulated very well.
It's the same reason why you have that with cans
and other things as well.
So you're trying to make sure that the product itself
is not impacted by the environment,
but also the product itself does not impact the container.
Which is also why when we have cans,
we actually have the cans lined with some sort of plastic
or some sort of epoxy because we don't want the product that's contained within the can affecting the can itself right um and
therefore the can affecting the product's quality and then you're changing the taste or like making
it poisonous or something because you know it's rusting uh so it's like that's in there that's
unavoidable and i think that is like a bad form of exposure whereas like if just going through some
like plastic pipes for like fucking 10 seconds it it's not going to be as bad.
Yeah.
I mean,
avoid heat plus plastic plus food,
avoid sunlight plus plastic plus food.
But like you're,
if you've ever had a cavity,
like those,
the,
what the,
the filling that they use to fill the cavity is,
is plastic,
you know?
Yes.
That's why they use UV in it, right?
Because it's like the filling that they use is a precursor to the polymer itself,
which then gets polymerized with the UV.
It's the same stuff that you put on your nails.
Like, you know, say if you're a significant other.
Speak for yourself.
You know.
Well, I don't use it on my nails.
I use it on my other products.
But yeah, I work with this kind of use all my other products but yeah this is actually i work
with this kind of stuff so i know exactly what this is it's just a more industrial more
and uh different like version of it it's largely used for printing but like
yeah like that's that's some exposure that you'll have you know if you have it in your teeth
that's some exposure is that exposure bad i don't know yeah i don't I don't know either I mean I went
to this I think it's largely inactive it's not as plastic in a nature of life
as the as the these these softener as you'd like to call it in there to make
some more flexible and doesn't make a break even if you flex it you know
because like actually plastic tends to break over time if you flex it a whole
bunch that's like why most plastic pots like that's why most pots that are
bendable are not made out of plastic
they're actually made out of metal
like springs and things like that because if you made it out of plastic
then over time it would just
kind of break
I know a decent amount
about that
it's really hard
it's so hard to get plastic to do
what you want and then
if you get it to do what you want it plastic to do what you want. And then if you get it to do what you want,
it doesn't do what you want for very long.
And then it degrades over time.
And it's like in the name,
right?
Like plastic means like change,
like changeable.
Right.
So like you have this thing that's called changeable and you're like,
you want it to be static,
not plastic.
Unchanged.
Yeah.
It's just like, it's not going. Unchanged. Yeah, it's just like it's not gonna work for you
Oh, bro, this whole conversation is like it's a horrible. It's like a horrible like prompt for my brain
It's just like I'm it's like I'm alternating between like microplastic induced erectile dysfunction
And like all the problems I have at work with like plastics not working. Let's go back talking to cars about cars.
Yeah, yeah. Although I mean, I'm actually interested in these kinds of things because
I want to understand how they work. But largely, what I see with plastics are working out very well
is just that I see how these products tend to get damaged by using it. Because like, I've used a lot
of older technologies where they tried to use plastic as much as possible and you can see the limitations
of it like you know where things bend
and shit like that and it just fucking rips
apart and they go ah yeah that's the previous version
compared to the newer version it's like oh yeah you're just using
fucking metal springs man
yeah well obviously
though you can't use metal springs for everything
like there's lots of things where you
can't use metal for it so
you know what can you do so it makes sense to just have things be a of things where you can't use metal for it. So, you know, what can you do?
So it makes sense to just have things be a little modular so you can clip
them in and out so that the damage over time is like minimized.
Cause like for the,
for those kinds of hooks that they use for these clip things,
those hooks themselves don't have as much,
like they aren't used as much.
So you're kind of like,
okay.
And they only break after like the hot,
the,
the 200th or 500th use,
which you're not really going to be experiencing
because the amount of times you're going to be using a certain panel, for instance,
is going to be one out of every 100 hours of usage, depending.
Which is also funny because my mouse, for instance, has batteries, right?
And it needs to exchange those batteries.
It has a plastic cover on it that I need to remove in order to get it.
What does it use to keep the plastic in place? It doesn't use a plastic hook. It uses magnets,
right? Because, like, you know, if you were to use a plastic hook, you have to keep removing it,
putting it back in. And because you have to do it so many times, what ends up happening is that the
little hook that retains the lid, the cover, will then effectively break. Because, you know,
you can't, like, bend it back and forth more than a certain amount of times, because, you know,
it's just, like, fucking rips, because you, like, have micro tears, I know, you kind of like bend it back and forth more than a certain amount of times because it's just like rips because you like have micro tears,
I think, in it. Each and every single time you try to bend the plastic is like a little micro
tear. It gets worse and worse and worse and worse and worse. It's like, is it a micro crack or is
it a micro tear? I feel like it's kind of both. What is it? What do you what do you think it is?
Like, you know, when you bend plastic, you have like this weird, like white line there and it
gets worse and worse every single
time what is that is that a micro tear is that a micro crack or is it both i i don't know um to be
honest with you uh my understanding of that and i don't have like a academic understanding of any
of this i have like a more practical understanding of it and even that's not that good but like i thought it's just the
the molecules are rearranging themselves well that sounds that's so vague i don't know i mean
sometimes it can be sometimes plastic just cracks and sometimes plastic plastic like stretches and
tears and so depending on but i don't know when they bend, it becomes white.
I don't know what that is exactly.
I'm not sure.
I mean, it looks like it's just flaking apart really is what it looks like.
Like it's kind of cracking and ripping at the same time.
Yeah.
Brain flaking apart.
Yeah. I don't know.
I've had, I've had little plastic.
So I, my company makes plastic parts and I, I've had them like snap apart and I've also had them mostly
just like stretch and uh kind of like more like you say like just slowly lose their their flexibility
and their spring like springiness I forget what the the right word is. But again, I've also had them just like snap.
And it depends not only on how many times you've used them, but also the temperature at which you
cooked the plastic, the pressure under which the plastic was when it was being processed.
And then also how much humidity was in the air what the out the temperature of the
room was where the machine which was running the plastic like what additives did you put in the
plastic like plastic is much less science than it is it's almost like cooking it's like you're
baking bread it's it's really it's really hard and then there's all sorts of like non-linear
unpredictable things that
happen. Have you ever considered
like filling
consumable liquids into plastic?
Have you ever thought about like that?
Yes.
Because that'll open up a very interesting
set of realizations about what kind of
water you're drinking.
At least it didn't for me because you have to
add things into the water itself
to prevent the plastic from creating a taste
in it, just like a blocker compound.
I did not know that.
Well, yeah, you have to put
something, your water will taste
kind of weird and bitter-y
if you, like it will have this actual
plastic taste if you don't add a certain
compound into it. Nobody talks about it,
it's really funny. I know about it from personal experience.
So is there a compound in the water
that we drink that comes out of the
pipes? Because those...
I mean, there's stuff in there by default,
but not like what is in a
plastic water bottle. So in a plastic water bottle,
you have a certain compound in there that's
more often referred to as the blocker compound.
And it's actually a precursor compound
to ACE-K, or saccharin.
The kind of stuff that's in the artificial sweeteners that are like Coke Zero and Diet Coke.
I did not know that.
That's wild.
So on top of the plastic causing cancer, that's also the blocker compound that you're drinking.
And you're drinking quite a lot of it actually to the amount that would actually cause cancer.
It's kind of funny.
Well, it's not funny.
Obviously, it's fucking horrifying.
But, you know.
So do you only need that for PET?
Because, like, I'll get water.
Yes. Right?
Oh, yeah. PET. Well, basically any kind of
plastic bottle, pretty much.
It depends on the...
You mean, like, the disposable plastic bottles, not the reusable ones.
Because the reusable one, I can, like,
fill water from the tap into
a, like, Nalgene or a
plastic container. Yeah, yeah yeah i think the more i think
the more wobbly it is basically like those guys there's like these uh non-transparent forms of
plastic that are extremely durable like you can leave that shit out in the sun it doesn't like
you know fall apart for like many many years like that kind of shit no no you don't need that because
you're not actually going to be bottling things in that. Yeah, it's interesting, right? Because
you want
to use a glass bottle for your baby
and stuff like that, but you also don't want
to drop a glass bottle. There's so many things.
Ah, that's bullshit.
That's just bullshit. The fear of dropping the bottle.
Like, okay, fuck it, who cares? There's a bunch of shards
on the ground. Sweep them up.
I agree completely, but I'm also
married to a woman you know so
then you tell your woman don't worry kitten get glass bottle and if it falls it's not going to
be a big issue we'll just sweep it up you're gonna clean it up but it'll be no big deal
i'm not cleaning it and the amount of times that glass is dropped on the ground everybody makes a
big drama out of it you know glass drops on ground on ground, I look at the ground and I go,
okay, nobody moved, let me get my phone out,
I take the phone, turn the torch on, and
kind of put it there so you kind of see the ground,
you know, linear, and it's like,
now we see where all the shards are, now we can
sweep that shit up, and no issue.
The amount of times I've dropped a glass on the ground is crazy.
I work with glass, so it's like, I don't fucking
care anymore.
It's really, it's really, yeah, however,
I will say, though, it's really fucked when you're dealing with
pressurized containers, though. That's the,
that's not fun anymore. That's really
fucking dangerous. You mean plus glass
because you can get the shards? Yeah, so for instance,
yeah, for instance, let's say you have sparkling water
in a glass, and that shit drops on the ground, and it chatters,
that's a fucking bomb, dude. It's, like, not fun
at all. That's not fun. Like, that,
that, that is not fun. Like, that is not fun.
That sounds very fun.
It sounds fun to, like, experience at a distance.
But what happened was it was kind of funny.
Like, I dropped it. It was, I had a bottle that was standing there, right?
And we were doing things with it.
And then the bottle just kind of tipped over.
And we didn't even throw it or anything.
It just literally just tipped over and fell flat on its side.
And then exploded and, like, sent a whole bunch of shards in my leg. It was, like, bleeding anything. It just literally just tipped over and fell flat on its side and then exploded
and sent a whole bunch of shards in my leg.
It was bleeding out. It was kind of funny.
That makes me want to
combine Mentos
with Pepsi or Coca-Cola.
Hey, hey. No, no, no, no, no.
Actually,
if you really wanted to maximize your impact, you should
put it in... Oh, no, I really wanted to maximize your impact you should put it in oh no i'm gonna shut up in an airplane no dude that's so much worse no just fucking like
dude one of the worst things don't do this by the way but i think this would be really really bad
so borosilicate for instance if you were to fill like say coca-cola into borosilicate and put your
mentos in it and screw the lid on uh basically there's like borosilicate and put your gementos in it and screw the lid on. Basically, borosilicate is this glass that's usually used in lab environments,
because it's really clear, very stable, but it's also exceedingly brittle.
That's one of the other bits as well. It's exceedingly brittle.
And actually, to make borosilicate glass containers,
the parts, it's really difficult to bend this kind of stuff,
so it's made out of multiple parts.
So let's say, for instance, you're trying to make a bottle.
You're actually dealing with a cylinder, and you have a cap at the end of it.
And then you have the actual neck of the bottle, which has like a cup looking thing that's attached to the neck.
That is kind of attached to the bottle itself.
Sometimes it depends on the manufacturing process you use.
Sometimes it's just the neck of the bottle itself.
It's not actually the whole piece of it. But normally you just deal with manufacturing a cylinder and adding a cap at the end of the neck at the bottle itself. It's not actually the whole piece of it. But normally, you just deal with manufacturing a cylinder and adding a cap at the end of the neck at the top, right?
And so both of those have weaknesses. They have stress points, right? And if those stress points
are like, you know, stressed, then they will be the first to fail. So let's say, for instance,
you increase the pressure in something like that type of cylinder, what ends up happening is that
the bottom flies out. I've actually seen this happen in real time. It's really fucking freaky.
You just be picking up the bottle and it's like,
it's really fucked up.
Yeah, that makes sense.
But then again,
these are pressurized
things, okay? This is like, it requires a lot of pressure.
It's like, it's...
Your baby bottle is gonna be fine.
Most bottles are made out of borosilicate,
right? So that's also something
I'm gonna to say.
So when it does shatter, it does shatter.
But it's, like, really difficult to get it to do that.
It's not going to, like, fly apart.
And if you were, like, super, super worried about that,
just get something made out of super flint.
That one's so fucking stable that if it's thick enough,
you could drop it on the fucking ground and nothing happens, man.
What's it called? Super flint?
Yeah, super flint.
You'll have difficulty finding Dutch in the U.S., though,
because they don't make the purest versions of it there.
If you want super clear Super Flint,
you can only get it out of China.
Man.
Yeah, I know. It's kind of gay.
Yeah, I read about that in creatine. Your creatine either comes from China
or one company in the European Union.
So it's like, it's not just like rare earth magnets.
It's just like all sorts of shit.
Yeah, yeah.
You'd be surprised by what else comes from other countries.
Hey, like what about your Italian bags?
Do you like your nice Italian bag?
Did you know that it only counts as Italian
if you like actually make a transformative step to it? Like, I don't
know, let's say I put a zip on my pants,
dude, and now it's Italian pants,
even though 80% of the pants were manufactured
in China.
So now you pay, like, $2,000 for the
$200 bit. It's kind of funny.
Yeah. Honestly, if you
buy, like, if you buy a whole bunch of these, like, weird
luxury items from these super established brands
are kind of a retard. I'm gonna be honest with you you deserve to get fucked it's like
i get them i understand i understand like louis vuitton i understand all these like
and it annoys me that there's like a grand and shitification of their products but at the same
time if you're like just status hungry you want to buy that shit then you just go oh well i mean
hey i'm just buying it for the status well you're buying it for the sales you're not buying it for
the utility but if you want to sale say that you're buying it for the status. Well, you're buying it for the status. You're not buying it for the utility. But if you want a sale, say that you're buying it for the utility,
utility being like to actually use the thing itself,
not just use it for status,
then you're full of shit.
The one time my mentor who sold clothes
like went to a factory in China
and he was like looking at the products
that were being made on the assembly line
and he picked them up
and it just said like made in Italy.
And he like showed it to the Chinese boss and he just like shr, and it just said, like, made in Italy, and he, like, showed it to the Chinese
boss, and he just, like, shrugged.
He was just like, yeah, you know, it is what it is.
We do, we do this in China.
We help him out, you know, we help
him out.
Yeah, yeah, right. He's just sewing the tag
on so that when they add the zipper a little
bit later, you know, they don't have to
do it.
Personally, if it personally
if it's me if it's me and somebody asked me like i was if i would work at the fucking chinese factory
and the dude come i was like hey do you know that this is happening i'm like yeah 100 i was like hey
but don't you think this is wrong nah not really i mean you're manufacturing it here and you're
adding the last final process and in italy honestly if the italians want to prevent this
from happening they can refine their laws but their laws aren't really that clever.
So that's on them, man.
Like, the companies will do whatever they must in order to spend the least amount of money on making the product that makes the most amount of money.
And you can't fault them for that.
I will simply go ahead and say that.
I actually don't think that's a problem.
I think what a problem is is that you haven't defined your laws properly. And look, here's the thing.
If you made it so that your laws state that the final transformation happening in Italy makes it an Italian product, well, guess what?
It is actually by the definition of the law, an Italian product from an Italian company made in
China. What's the deal? What's the big deal? If you can't redefine your laws differently so that
it's like 100% made in Italy, then that's on you. I't care i don't i don't get this bullshit like it's just
pissing me off even if you don't kind of like play that technically legal but like kind of
borderline unethical game of like adding a zipper whatever there are factories in in in italy that
are just like 100 chinese workers they're like in their cities dedicated to that.
Yeah, you may as well just like call it a Chinese product at that.
I mean, like what makes it an Italian product at the end of the day?
It's like a ship of Theseus argument, which is ironic given that, you know, it's Greek in nature.
So it's like, you know, again, like I don't really care.
I don't really care.
It's like it's the same concept.
It's the same concept like how the how the U S is supposed to operate.
And that's to assimilate all of the talent,
which is why like a lot of people,
they don't know how to reconcile this.
They say they don't want anybody coming into the U S.
They don't understand that the U S was entirely built off of like the
successes of the people that were brought in all of the talent that was
brought in.
That was literally the entire idea of it.
It's like the land that's colonized where you bring all the things in,
then you make the opportunity,
the real thing.
Right.
That's like,
that was like always a thing right now. We're just like bringing in people who are retards, of course, but like the land that's colonized, where you bring all the things in, then you make the opportunity the real thing. That was always a thing.
Right now, we're just bringing in people who are retards, of course.
But if you say, for
instance, hey, whose math team is going
to win this year? Is it the
American-Chinese team, or is it the Chinese team?
So it's
like, they're both kind of the same. It's both
just like Chinese fighting AIDS themselves,
effectively, because you've got the Chinese on the American team.
They're just the Chinese-Americans, which is, you know,
well, what is an American, right?
Yeah, people talk about that not only for math, but also for AI, right?
Like, our Chinese can out-beat their Chinese.
Exactly.
That was kind of funny.
Like, Dolphins says,
we got to beat the communists at making AI.
We got to beat them. Let's call the communists at making AI we gotta beat them
let's call the communists
let's go to beat the communists
in fucking China
I like that
at this point you kind of ask yourself
what is fucking Italian product
and what is an American
these are very similar definitions
where you go through the thing
is it culturally the thing
or is it biblically
accurate like I don't know and this is this is the these are the problems you
run into eventually you have to like confront them the Chinese have started
to I'm talking too much I'll let but let Chad speak but the once a one last thing
the Chinese have started to make like luxury goods and and I don't just make
luxury goods but they like actually have their own make like luxury goods and, and I don't just make luxury goods,
but they like actually have their own brands of luxury goods.
I couldn't help but notice there are like tons and tons of like actually
women in the audience.
we chase them all out with that unreal engine conversation.
But,
the,
so there's like,
yeah,
you're scaring all the hoes,
Adrian.
talk about unreal engine and object-oriented brain rot.
Hold on.
Let me bring it back.
Let me bring these hoes back in.
Just kidding, guys.
There's a brand called Song.
I don't know how they put it.
It's Song and then M-O-N-T.
And it's like it's an organic, indigenous, native Chinese brand that has gotten popular.
And it's like a luxury kit. And it's like 100% Chinese. And that has like gotten like popular and it's
like a luxury kit and it's like 100% Chinese and I don't know I think that's interesting
interesting yeah no I know about the luxury products because I use them myself so um there's
like the specific shirt that I wanted right that has like a so there's a kind of trick that you
can do with fabric to make it look
kind of 3D, like that it's...
They kind of like press it a certain way
so that it actually is 3D and it stays this way,
right? Like even though you've changed nothing about the threading
itself, you can kind of like...
Actually, there's some of it where you do change the threading
a little bit, but it's very precise and very, very well made
and it's made out of a very specific type of cotton.
And you really can't get
that from any of the other fashion brands. So you're running around with what is effectively like a
very unique type of shirt you know people go hey man that's really nice where'd you get that kind
of thing you say well i got it from china and immediately like there's a kind of a shock it
like goes through because it's a really well-made type of product and so for me i don't really care
where it's from i just care about the fact that it's like it's it's not going to kill me and that
it actually looks proper and that doesn't make my bank account disappear. These are the types
of things that I commonly care about.
If I want something to make my bank account go lower, it's probably going to
be a watch, and that's going to be for the
purpose of
value storage. I would say
buy a certain type of watch for value storage. Like, hey, you have
a $100,000 watch that if you ever needed to
leave the country, you could just dip.
And have some sort of
tradable in case things go south, right?
Like, that's a smart decision,
but, like, for something like clothes,
it's not really that much
because it's very person-specific,
and, you know, it's like that.
But basically, I think with Chinese products,
they've been really working on it.
I mean, hey, you have to understand,
technically all luxury products
are kind of Chinese products
if you dig down far enough, so they've already been doing it. Now they're just doing it themselves for themselves
and their own companies as opposed to the other companies, which they've been doing this for
years. I mean, how do you think they know all of the processes? How do you think they know all of
the little bits and pieces? Well, because the Western fashion companies have been outsourcing
to them for so long and so much that, is there a difference anymore?
The answer is no.
And if there is a difference, the quality of the product is actually better because there are their own specifications and they're much more precise.
Dude, I got to say this.
I've been trying to say it for a minute.
I went to italy
in october and i bought an italian leather jacket from an indian dude
okay that works too then that's funny i wanted to tell you a leather jacket from an indian dude in
italy was he hindu you know He was like a steak-eating,
Italian, leather-selling Hindu.
Yeah, man.
He was totally about the life.
Over in Florence, they had the leather market.
And this dude was...
He was totally Indian.
He'd probably been off the boat for like two minutes.
His accent was thicker than Siraj's.
Damn, dude.
He probably didn't know what he was selling.
I'm sure that the jacket I bought
just had the zipper put on in Italy
and that's it.
The rest of it, I'm sure, came from somewhere else.
Yeah.
Ah, yeah. But interesting. ah yeah
but interesting
so I prefer
in higher luxury brands I prefer Gucci
and I use Gucci
wallets specifically because they're the only
ones that I can find that can last
for over five years
and it does look kind of cool when you rip out the gucci wallet brad full of honeys
i mean that's pretty rad i guess that's what you're into me not so much
besides like that that that that money is best for me to be honest
oh you're still young enough you
you have utility and stuff I'm
I'm an old man bro
it's just a little different you know
I think I think that my future
kind of looks very similar
very similar to the Warren Buffett future
you know what I mean
so I think
I think I kind of stay the way I am to be honest you know what i mean so i i think morning for three dollars and 17 cents i i think i would
kind of stay the way i am to be honest you know i do like some luxury guys but it's not the
it's not the primary motivation for me my primary motivation is entirely utility like it the reason
why i do anything is all because of the utility like i don't even like eating for instance and
i don't like eating certain things i eat those things and I feel good eating those things because I know that those things do good things for me
right like it's it's if I didn't if I didn't know I have to eat or like something bad was going to
happen to me if I didn't eat I wouldn't eat like I just even if I'm hungry I don't really feel like
the desire to eat because I could just like you know walk into something else because the process
makes you weak and it fills you up with stuff and you kind of like can't do certain types of tasks anymore after that, depending on what you have eaten, like the higher amount of carbs you get, the worse it gets.
It's like, you know, and then I do need a higher amount of carbs because like my brain consumes all that.
I need to eat a certain amount of protein, otherwise muscle descales and all this kind of shit.
So it's like for me, it's all utility.
My entire life has always been about utility.
So I guess maybe I'm just like that kind of dude.
You know what I mean?
Maybe some aspects of that will change.
Who knows?
Maybe there's going to be some sort of character development.
I just don't really see that happening as much.
I mean, we're going to see next year.
We're going to enter more of a quantitative analysis arc for next year is what I'm thinking.
Because it's already happening.
I feel as though that the quantitative analysis bit is very valuable.
Even though I think a lot of people are getting out of it
because the world is becoming inherently unpredictable.
I think still, if you do have a good understanding of it,
you can understand our arbitrage, for instance,
and make a lot out of that.
People have just forgotten that
because they have this blind hatred for George Soros.
They don't actually understand how does a person like that become successful
or how does anybody else become does a person like that become successful,
or how does anybody else become successful.
It's like, you know, stuff like that.
So I'm just going to look at things more quantitatively going forward.
And, yeah.
You kind of can't, I feel like.
Well, no, okay, you can, but what I was thinking recently after seeing recent government statistics,
I don't think government statistics at least in like the
in the u.s i've been more different from reality in my lifetime than now
what do you mean
what do i mean like like like 4.3 percent gdp growth crime being down everywhere um statistically like i'm just not
seeing that well you can lie a lot about statistics and with statistics right that's
the quantitative aspect right it's like hey what kind of crime has gone down you know it's like well I mean but
like also like CPI right that wasn't even pushed for like multiple months
because of the government shutdown I just like yeah I'm like it's it's with
them even with the even with the inflation data right like people but
the inflation data is out and then you have all these, like, weird influencer accounts on X.
They go like, oh, well, look, see?
The inflation isn't so bad.
The grocery price doesn't go up.
I'm like, well, probably the reason why you don't see that
is because all of the fucking bits were missing off the fucking chart!
They literally refused to fill that out.
They fucking were missing more than 60 of the bullshit
so you can lie with statistics right like it's it's it's it's totally possible right it impacts
your ability to do quantitative stuff what i'm seeing in the and it's yeah what i'm seeing with
inflation the inflation has decreased but has been offset by the tariffs so anything that the
inflation may have come down on has been, the
tariffs have at least matched, if not
been more. Does stuff
still cost the same or more, is what I
see in everyday life here.
The stuff
I think where you have
additional costs, there are many factors.
For instance,
like,
okay, so for various many types of groceries, yes,
definitely things have gone up.
And it's not even like necessarily because of the tariffs.
That's just going to, that was just going to go up regardless because of the dog shit
policies that they have around manufacturing and bringing those types of things in.
But also like on the front of comp on the front of compute, like I bought my graphics
card before the tariffs came in.
Now that graphics card
is all the way up.
I don't think so. I think that's exempted.
No, my graphics card is increased because of the
tariffs. Because of the fucking big tariffs cards.
It actually increased the price.
I don't think so. I think they exempted it.
My fucking 5090. My fucking 5090 has gone up.
Talking 5090 has gone up.
Let me...
There's also components within it,
so that's the other bit.
They're exempt.
Retailers confirmed, tariffs are really cost price-runs and models seeing increased numbers
of housing or even thousands, supply chain disruptions like NSI, ISS, rush of graphics
cards, getting new tariffs, deadlines, creating inventory uncertainty.
Yeah.
So, like, I wrote an article a while back that was like, hey, these tariff policies are
bad and we we're gonna have
problems and this that and the other thing and then people were like well we didn't have that
many problems so you were wrong but like what people didn't realize is like for a lot of the
areas where we were gonna have problems they just put in the exemptions so um yes after the issue coming out. But the price is still above that what it was
before. Right, but
it's not necessarily directly a specific tariff.
Yeah, so in this case it's actually a little bit of a funny situation because
even the threat of tariffs has increased the cost of it
basically. It's not only that.
So let's say 25 to 40% of your business is subject to tariffs,
and the other percent of your business is not subject to tariffs.
All of 2025 was just like, at my company, it was just focusing on tariffs.
So whatever cost-cutting measures or, like,
operational improvements that we wanted to engage,
it would have, like, kept prices lower or whatever.
Like, all that got thrown out the window because of the tariffs.
And so, you know, that's another reason why, like, costs go up.
Like, everything was – and then there's, like, even psychological reasons.
Like, if you have a business and like tariffs come in and
like you just like don't you're like i'm tired of this i don't do this anymore it's just so much
work it's like underappreciated i'm not even making that much money fuck it i'm just gonna
raise prices and so there are all sorts of different like reasons why this tariff thing
like increased prices even beyond just the simple cost go up.
The uncertainty, right? If there's more uncertainty, there's more risk. People need
to be compensated for risk. They do that by raising prices. Yeah, absolutely. A good real
world example of that is we have a friend on here, the gardener, and he works for a large
And he works for a large furniture distributor, I'll say.
And so they've closed half of their business in the last 90 days because the price of furniture has went through the roof with these tariffs, right? You're talking about most of them where it's perceived, but then there are some cases of actual increases where people just can't make a margin anymore and have to go out of business.
It's terrible.
Yeah, it's both for sure.
A lot of our products had tariffs all year, and it was horrible, actually.
We paid something like over $200,000 worth of tariffs in 2025.
And then the cherry on top is at the end of the year,
customs put three of our containers through intensive customs exams,
which cost like $5,000 to $6,000 each, and they delay the containers.
And it just drove me up a wall because I knew that everyone was cheating on tariffs, we weren't cheating on tariffs and we had paid all this tariff money. And then three
containers in a row right before Christmas, when we're selling toys, they put intensive examinations
on them. And it was just so frustrating and just so stupid and pointless and no strategy and yeah yeah it is definitely a thing um and depending on what industry you're
in you're affected differently um so i have certainly i'm in the car business right so
that's my main my main thing is the car business so uh obviously i haven't seen it in cars car
prices um you know they are what they are.
They put exemptions, I think, on car prices.
Yeah, they did.
And so they didn't want to do that.
But still, I mean, you want to bring the manufacturing back.
I understand that.
And we've outsourced it for so long.
We need some of the manufacturing to be here, especially on our high-tech stuff.
Like we need to move some of that out of Taiwan.
I mean, I get all that.
But there are some things that the administration did not take into account
where it would hurt business owners on a level that they didn't foresee
or if they did foresee it, they didn't care.
One of the two definitely happened because I know some guys
who are getting killed by these things.
Yeah, I agree completely.
There are lots of good reasons to bring manufacturing back and all sorts of things.
It just wasn't done in a way that was smart, one, and then two,
as far as I can tell, it just didn't really work.
So, yeah, that's it.
We'll see what happens.
Hopefully, I don't even know if this thing is going to continue,
but I'm just kind of done with it, if that makes sense.
It is what it is.
I don't want to deal with it anymore, but I might have to.
Well, I feel like right now, how I feel is I feel like these tariffs are holding us back.
I feel like they're absolutely holding the economy back if they just dump them just put a moratorium
every tariff for the next 12 months then let's revisit it I think it would do a lot of good for
the economy I don't know I mean I don't at this point I don't care if they're tariffs or there aren't tariffs the main thing that drives me the
most crazy is just the lack of city okay so like you want tariffs okay cool like codify that into
a law that will be hard to undo you don't want tariffs okay cool codify that into a law that
will be hard to undo what we can't have is these things, whether it's with tariffs or TikTok, where just like every two months or every three months,
like there's this like buildup, like, is it going to happen? Is it not going to happen?
And then something crazy happens. Like Chinese tariffs went from 50%. No, they went from like
20% to 50% to 145% to 30% to 20%. And now there's a timer where it's only going to be 20% for so long.
And some tariffs are going up, we know, like in semiconductors. And it's just like,
just like stop, just like make a plan, stick with it, and just stop changing things all the time.
Because every time you change, it creates a cost. Yes, and nothing's worse for any market than uncertainty.
And they're creating a ton of uncertainty that's unnecessary right now, I think.
Yeah, I mean, manufacturing is all about precision and making good quality products repeatedly.
You can't have variability, iPhone to iPhone, Tesla to Tesla or whatever. And just like constantly injecting this uncertainty
and change is just like totally antithetical to manufacturing. And like, as an example,
they're like, oh yeah, we're going to bring the factories back. Like, what do you think would
happen to the guy who decided to open a factory when Chinese tariffs were like over 100%?
That person got totally wiped out because tariffs are now back
down to 20%. And so it's just like the whole, the whole way it was done was just so poorly done.
And I'm not saying that like we shouldn't have manufacturing in America. I totally think we
should. I think we should like do a whole bunch of stuff differently. But just like the execution on it was so horrible.
And I think if me or you ran our businesses that way, we'd be out of business, right?
So, I mean, businesses are built on consistency.
And our government is not operating with any level of consistency right now.
of consistency right now.
I'll say that.
I'll say that.
Yeah, that's such a good point.
Yeah, that's such a good point.
Like, imagine if you went to your customers
and be like, yeah,
like the prices for whatever you buy
are now up by like 145%.
Like, everyone's going to be like, fuck off.
But, you know, what can you do?
All right, guys, I'm going gonna sign out it was nice talking to you
see you
see you dude
that was a fun way to start off I think
oh I got something
I got something
I see Grant in the audience
I want to bring you up real quick and ask you something about silver prices.
Thank God.
I gots to know.
I gots to know what your take on it is.
If you're comfortable talking about it, that is.
If not, then it's fine.
I totally get it.
And he's accepted.
Let's go.
You're testing. Can you hear me?
I think Grant's still connecting.
Yeah, sorry about that.
Excellent. Just to give a – first of all, I appreciate the conversation about creating the uncertainty.
However, Trump is having to do with the tariffs what he needs to do to negotiate a fair deal.
And if you guys want certainty right now, I mean, a couple of you guys, I know you guys are running companies and you're negotiating contracts. Sometimes you have to, you know, use extreme situations and stacking in a negotiations in order for this
country to get actually what it wants.
True.
I don't, I don't think anybody,
nobody suffered this Christmas because of the tariffs.
I mean, Christmas sales are up.
So people are buying TVs and appliances and electronics and cars and fucking Christmas season was off the hook.
So the tariffs definitely have not killed anything there.
Now, most of the shit you guys buy is, you know, built overseas right now.
None of our furniture is built in this country anymore
because the tariffs went one way. We lost the entire furniture industry over the last 50 years
because the tariffs were one way. They were, you know, against America and free to every other
country. And we lost all our furniture manufacturing, all of it.
North Carolina was the furniture hub of this part of the world.
It's all gone because of bad deals made by Democrat and Republican presidents
over the last 25 years.
So sometimes you got to go back and ask for more than you want
in order to get what exactly what you want. And, and is there going to be some pain? Yeah,
but that's not why our groceries are more expensive. Most of our groceries have come down.
Electricity is more expensive right now. Interest rates have to come down. For everybody that complains about the
tariffs, what you ought to be bitching about is a 6% interest rate on the best money in the world.
We should have the lowest interest rates on planet Earth. We're the dominant currency.
We should consistently make sure that the American consumer, because that's where we are, we're a consumer nation,
can buy cars and homes at the lowest interest rates,
cost of money possible.
I definitely see that in a car business, Grant.
I mean, in a car business,
this interest rates are killing these people, bro.
You guys got crushed.
RVs, motorcycles, new car dealerships,
used car dealerships.
Kia sales are off 52% in this country.
Inventories have swollen.
How big are your inventories, Chad?
Dude, they're at least 50% more than they should be
or that they were three years ago.
Yeah.
Housing sales are non-existent.
Non-existent.
To sell a home today, it has to be a new home
and the interest rate has to be subsidized by the new home builder.
If you own a home, you can't subsidize the interest rate, or at least you don't feel like you can.
You could, actually, but the only homes that are being sold in this country are subsidized by the home builder, and they're subsidizing by buying down the interest rate.
And this is killing local – like, I know the tariffs are an issue for people, right?
But fuck, you don't have to buy a rubber duck.
You know, when the rubber duck gets too expensive, don't buy it.
When it gets too expensive, if you really want it, build it yourself.
And we have to get back to that place where America can actually build its own shit and be independent of other countries.
My two cents or whatever, whatever it's worth.
I 100% agree.
We got to bring the manufacturing back.
I think I mentioned that earlier.
I'm not sure if you're in here,
but I understand we got to bring the manufacturing back for sure.
That's priority one, I guess, is that.
Or, you know, the tariffs work both ways,
or they don't cut us off go to europe and see if you can find a ford truck anywhere on any road
not existent buddy dude because you know what they'd be they'd be like 250 000 there
also they're kind of shit that's that's the other that's the other aspect well i drive a ford truck
easy killer look i love i love the big trucks dude well you know so where i am right now uh so i live in a third world country this is one thing
out of the way which is kind of like what fiji is which i'm pretty sure like that cat's out the
bag on that so i can actually say where i live um one of the things we do around here is we cannot
use any of these things not just because they're expensive as shit, but they're also very unreliable. The reason why we use different types of trucks here is because the parts are readily available.
Maintenance isn't prohibitively expensive and also mechanically unsound.
That's another aspect.
So we just use fucking sino trucks, a ton of them.
It's one of the most prolific trucks here anything like it's just chinese cyno truck right because the
mechanics of it are very very simple they're not basic they're simple and they last long you could
just abuse this machine you could do things to it it'll just power through it whereas you try that
with uh some uh you try that with uh many other established companies it becomes a big issue like for instance we have had German machinery here and it fails at
higher rates than the Chinese machinery for instance of the same type and most
of the time like that machinery is even is being used even more than the
European machinery and it's like we have a lot of issues in that regard so i think one
of the reasons why you see like these types of trucks not being used as widely is not just because
they're like expensive as shit it's because maybe they're not even the best ones either
right that's that's another aspect like i'm not saying i'm not shitting on the company because of
the nature of the company i'm just saying that that's how it is from like a maintenance perspective
and a mechanics perspective that's that's what i know at least right from what we're using here even like local cars themselves like everybody drives a toyota like they drive a
hylix because you know yeah yeah but if you go to china and buy a toyota right i think you can get a
ev right well you can get a toyota ev in, not Japan, for like $15,000.
You can get a Camry there for $24,000.
That same car costs $30,000-plus in America.
We have a tariff coming back.
Well, regardless, find a good car then.
Pick a good car, a good product.
Okay?
Coming back in, they get banged.
And then you got states like New York and, and,
and, and California, I'll pick on the big two. They, they, they will pay 13% in state income
taxes, but complain about a 13% tax on another country tariff going out that way. What, why,
why can, why do we have to pay taxes here
on our products and services
that we buy here?
Why do the American people
complain about the tariff on China
or Vietnam,
but we won't complain about our own taxes?
Because you're consuming
a lot more Chinese products
than you're paying cumulative taxes
a lot of the time.
Although, at some total, I think.
I would rather
pay a tariff
on things that I buy
than pay a tax on
income that I earn.
Yeah, I agree with that. I agree with that.
I'm just saying that for the average consumer,
they're more exposed to
tariffs on products because they consume a lot more than they are to taxes on their income.
Because they don't make that much.
No, no.
Yeah, but they're paying taxes on all their income.
Hopefully, they're not spending all their income.
Well, they are spending all their income.
That's the big problem.
Most of the savings.
That's a different issue.
Yeah, I know.
I'm not I know.
I'm not denying that.
I'm not denying that.
Yeah.
That's a degenerate,
you know,
if storm makes 200 grand,
he spends it all.
Well,
that's fucking storm's problem.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I do think it's interesting.
I don't go ahead.
I know you're an old car guy,
man.
And,
so something else you want to talk about pricing on vehicles and how they're cheaper in other countries is our EPA regs and the things they have to do these cars to get them into the country cost so much money.
And we're literally one of the few countries that is even fooling with that crap.
Meanwhile, they're cutting exhaust off everything else running straight co2 whatever you know and uh the consumer it puts the
consumer not only at a disadvantage but then they're paying a ton more for every vehicle
because we got these stupid regulations yeah that's also true what do we think about the
certain types of Chinese EVs
being bad what do we think about that
not trying to throw shade here or anything like that
that's not my intention of this I'm just trying to get a general
gist of what we make of this
and especially you Chad what do you think of that
yeah I mean I'm all for free markets
you know if they can make
a product then they can compete let them compete you know I 100 all for free markets, you know. If they can make a product and they can compete, let them compete, you know.
I 100% believe in that.
And, you know, if they make a product that's crap, then nobody will buy it.
It's like it'll go the way that you go, bro.
I know you probably don't know what that is.
It's way before your time.
But there was, you know, cars have come and gone.
And car manufacturers have come and gone through the years.
And what the ones that stay around are the ones that create a good product for the money.
It's true. Yeah.
I just think that like perhaps the one of the reasons why we have like there's their bans on these types of cars in the US is because like they manufacture them at a pretty decent quality,
but also at a price that is so low that I don't think that many of the US companies can actually
compete, right? Like you'd need to have like very large tariffs on these guys. I actually would say
that if you wanted to use tariffs, you could just like put it on those cars to basically make them
about as expensive as the American car. If you wanted to kind of work it this way.
It wouldn't necessarily be free market as much,
but if you absolutely had to,
if there was no other way,
and you wanted to go the extreme route,
I think that's one of the ways you could do it.
Because otherwise, your local market,
your local manufacturer is not going to be able to keep up.
You're not going to be able to keep up.
You could probably cause a bunch of problems
for the Chinese car makers
by introducing a la EU,
you know, like the certain types of regulations
that make them conform to things
that are kind of unrealistic in some ways
and then kind of limit their ability
to scale into the US market that way.
But that won't stop them for very much long either.
So it would make more sense to just say, hey, hey we're gonna have a shit ton of that stuff sold anyways
we'll just put up the tariff so much that it is it still retains its competitive price point to
it to an extent but not at the extent that it exists without tariffs basically right does that
make sense?
Yeah, I think that's a great way to look at it personally.
And it could be an approach that would absolutely work as well.
I'm open for anything that works.
The bottom line is my concern is for the people that make less than $150,000 in this country a year, those are my consumers.
And so my consumers are hurting, right? And if I can get them some relief, it would help my businesses.
So ultimately, that's what's important to me personally.
What do you think Christmas sales and things were impacted by the almost $2,000 that were given to servicemen?
Yeah, so yesterday, man, the day after Christmas, a serviceman was in there buying a vehicle from us.
And I hollered at him.
I was like, hey, man, you putting down that $1,776?
$76? He said, you know it, dog.
He said, you know it, dog.
It was about to ask that.
It was by the asset.
When Grant was mentioning that sales
were up, it's like, I wonder how much of that is actually due
to that check
coming in for people, which is actually
supposed to be for housing. Remember?
They actually garnished it from housing. They had billions of
dollars for
subsidizing
housing costs.
Housing costs, stuff for groceries and things like that.
They actually garnished that and then turn that into what is this this this
check that all the service all the servicemen got
yeah that's a good thing yeah that's a good thing they did and listen one thing about servicemen we
know they're generally young dudes they're going to the money they're gonna put that money they're right back into the economy uh they they are definitely doing that from from my perspective
yeah and it's not it's not i don't think it was like a volume that is concerning enough for it
to cause actual like inflations if if actual inflation like if you wanted to look at something
that would have been more inflation heavy the ten thousand dollar stimulus check remember that shit that was crazy like people are like ten thousand dollars they're talking paypal's like
running around with money i'm like those lines out of my dealership literal lines to buy cars
when they did that like i'm telling you i had a friend of mine who was like in the 70s he walked
into my dealership one day says my god you got a super spreader event going around, going on in here.
I said, no, man, I gotta, I'm spreading this money.
And we still got a lot, dude, not gonna lie, dude.
That was an awesome time.
I think cause so many people had like liquidity and it was so much
money to be made, you know, it was really awesome.
It was, I mean, it was concerning.
I will say that much for like, from the inflation perspective, it was
wildly concerning, but I still thought it was pretty funny. Yeah, it was concerning, I will say that much. From the inflation perspective, it was wildly concerning,
but I still thought it was pretty funny.
Yeah, it was great.
It was great for me.
I made more money in those two years than I'd ever made in all my life.
Yes.
For me, I wasn't capable of doing that.
I wasn't really around as much at the time.
So, yeah. of doing that I wasn't really around as much at the time so yeah I still have to
establish myself like the the finance bit only came around this year right so I
would have made a ton money that that back then too if I had the intelligence
but I had a bit of a I didn't't have a head start, you know? At that point, I was only on the internet for like three years.
Lots to learn.
Yeah, you've come up quick, though.
I think...
I see we lost Grant, man,
but that was totally rad that he come up and talk to us a little bit.
Yeah, absolutely.
I actually just wanted to get his thoughts on Silver.
He completely brushed that aside, which is interesting.
I don't know why, but that's whatever.
I think it's because of the Bitcoin bit bit uh specifically because you'd have to like
talk about what Bitcoin is and you'd have to talk about like why it's not going up as much as like
all the other things are going up as well so like because right now effectively what people call the
boomer coins which are rare earth minerals like just metals and things like that are going up in
value because people see the actual value in it and I've i've i've tried to so on bitcoin like
i've said this many many times like probably people can point to like 2023 and 24 as like
years in which i've said that bitcoin is likely a digital gold but i've largely i will say i will
need to kind of pivot away from that in a sense because i don't think that digital gold from that
like it fits that description of bitcoin anymore um there were
things that could have been done to it at the time when i first spoke about bitcoin being the digital
gold uh and none of those things ended up being done so i think that a lot of the people who talk
a big game about what bitcoin is and what could what it could become have uh uh how did I say this? Spectacularly dropped the ball
on the whole operation.
And that has led to significant damage
on that front as well, I think.
So it's, for me, I've never bought any Bitcoin.
I've never bought any crypto in general, really.
Like, there's no record of that whatsoever.
The only crypto that I have was just given,
you know, as per maybe as an exchange for service
or anything like that.
I couldn't see myself buying crypto, to be honest.
And I don't really advocate for people to buy it either.
And if you are going to buy it, you can use it as a form of service exchange.
Like one thing I liked about Bitcoin specifically was the fact that I had it in my wallet.
And I could go to somebody and be like, hey, I want a little Mac Mini.
And I gave him Bitcoins and now I have a Mac Mini. It's like, that's pretty cool. Right. But that's what,
that's what it is for me. It's not a, it's not a, I don't really see it as a form of value storage.
I just see it as a form of value exchange, uh, that is somewhat untraceable. You know,
it's still very much so traceable if you really wanted to do it. Like if you wanted to get
something that's more privacy focused and you really wanted to play it very dark web-esque, not saying that you should, by the way, but if you
wanted to, then you'd have to probably go for something like more narrow, right? So it's like
bitcoins themselves largely is just like a, it's like a slightly more untraceable form of digital
fiat, basically. It's, I call it the digital fiat because it kind of is that way in a sense.
What does it have it backing for itself?
It doesn't really have that many things backing it.
But other than
limited supply, but also
it's largely speculative value that keeps the price
action going as it currently
exists. And once that speculative value
gets impacted, you will largely
see that effect. Like for instance,
you look at Bitcoin, what was it last year at? It was like 80k, 90k, and that was. Like, for instance, you know, you look at Bitcoin,
what was it last year at?
It was like, you know, 80K, 90K,
and that was kind of like back where it once was.
It's kind of volatile, right?
Like, you don't want a currency to be volatile.
It's one of the biggest problems of Bitcoin, actually,
is the volatility of it.
That being said, I do hold it myself,
and I don't see myself selling it
because I haven't sold crypto either.
The only time I've ever done anything with crypto
is to exchange it for something else of value be it's computation or like some sort of service
whatever like i i don't see it as like a thing that i i see as a form of value storage to be
honest i just see it as a medium of exchange um so like the investment thesis is just like hey
would you invest in the united states dollar you You probably would, but only within the confines of saying that I hold United States dollars so that it
can exchange them for other things. That's kind of what you do. When you have United States dollars
in your bank account, you hold them there because you see yourself exchanging them for something
else of value in the short term. And if you don't see yourself doing that, where do you put your
United States dollars? You put them in the stock market, you put them there, and you hope that
your bet on a specific stock, because you know, that's the better speculative value, like your
bet, your speculation pays off so that you make more dollars, because the dollar itself is not
going to go down or up, or maybe is actually going to go down value. Well, like, the stock likely has,
you know, the potential to go up and to do so quite massively and quite impactfully, right? So
you go ahead and do that. But just to kind of say, you know, looking at Bitcoin as a digital
like gold, I think that that moment has largely passed, I think. There's potential for it to kind
of retain its dominance, which I definitely think it will. So I don't think it's like a massive bear case.
I just feel sort of indifferent about it at the moment.
And we'll have to start listening to reason on the subject
because it's like, you know,
I think it's unreasonable to say that it's a digital gold.
I think it is more reasonable to say
it's one of the best forms of,
one of the most valuable forms of value exchange as a currency.
It's a good currency.
I will say it's a really good currency.
Aside from the speculative, the volatility, right?
The volatility aspect is probably one of the only bits about it
that are problematic for it being a currency.
Like, a good currency needs to be stable first and foremost, right?
And it is not exactly stable.
It is kind of stable, but it depends on what time frame you're using.
And, you know, so it's like,
yeah, if you wanted
something that's stable, just hold a
fucking stable coin, you know?
But,
yeah, that's just
kind of how to see it. It's a good currency.
I think it's a good currency.
I think Chad Rugg probably, because of probably
the app crash on his end.
Let me bring him back up again.
This happens with spaces.
You have random crashes and things.
It does its thing.
I'll see if I can bring him back up again.
It's either that
or he has his earphones
and he touches them.
He's got the Galaxy Buds
type of thing going on so you like touches them back
then you could boot him from the space by accident that could happen yeah so
but yeah just I thought I'd just articulate that and that's for the
boomer coins there's a lot of speculation right now in metals and
we're reaching we're gonna have very very 1980s levels of price action, I think.
This is an interesting thing. Just look at what the 1980s were like after the gold row, the increase in value on gold and things like that.
Silver itself is also an interesting case of this, very similar to this as well.
this very similar to this well there's some speculative value associated with it because
There's some speculative value associated with it because of the idea of a solid-state battery.
of the idea of a solid-state battery is lots of skepticism on solid-state battery like you know
silver anodes like it could be a good thing like it could be real actually that's the thing it's
like hey how real is it could it be like a quantum computer like if it's a quantum computer it's
useless but like if it's real then it's awesome so that's kind of what we've got going on right now.
I'm just trying to guess which thing is best.
And honestly, you'd have made more... If you wanted to say, okay, let's say I wanted to find something
as a store of value or as a way to increase the value
of whatever coin I have,
then your best bet would not have been gold or silver.
It would have just been fucking micron, man. Like silver itself, you know, hold it, held it like, you know, years back.
Yes. But if, say, Hey, um, you say I want to invest in something now. And, you know,
you looked at the Ram prices going up, going up just fucking back up micron because you already know that that shit's going to go up right so i've made more profit with
micron than i would have done with silver hypothetically so and in terms of bitcoin
looking at that price action i mean i'm in the minus i'm in the minus man personally i'm in the minus I'm in the minus, man Personally, I'm in the minus
A little bit
I'm not going to sugarcoat it
To sugarcoat this would be disingenuous
And would be
Delusional at best
And disingenuous at worst
I'm not going to do that
I'm not going to lie to you
I'm not going to lie to you about that
But yeah, that would be my current thought to do that. I'm not going to lie to you. I'm not going to lie to you about that.
But yeah, that would be my current thought on the Bitcoin whole thing.
I think it's a very rational
take. It's not a bearish take. I think it's
a rational take. I'm not being bearish
on the thing itself.
I'm just saying that
it's still something that will have value in the future i think um you could
get into it if you like but personally i just don't recommend it to be honest not with volatility
you may as well just like scope out what things are actually useful and you'll have much more
uh quantitative reasoning behind that than you would if you just looked at bitcoin you say oh
i think it's gonna go up like i i think it's to go up is just not really rational. It's kind of stupid, right?
You look at it and you go, oh, it's going to go up because limited supply and somebody's got to
store their value. I'm like, that's not enough. That's not enough. There's not actually not,
like, you're thinking, you think that in an economy where people are insane, you think that
the people are going to make a sane decision? That's not going to happen, right? You're going to make insane decisions. And so you ask
yourself, well, what is the most insane decision right now? Well, the most insane decision, which
is also the one that is most logical, would be to start doing price gouging on like memory chips,
where you just like buy up a shit ton of memory chips, or like, you know, old technology, and you
do a harvesting of RAM. And you didn't use that as a way to like a basically price gouge.
It's fucking unethical shit, clearly,
but that would be one of the insane, insane things you could do.
But the sane thing to do would be to say, well, who makes the RAM?
You go look at companies like Micron and SK Hynix
and you put your money into those guys, right?
And then you go, okay, well, that's more rational
because there's an actual quantitative reason behind that.
Whereas for like investing in something like Bitcoin,
it's really not that much. And for me in terms of silver, there's like a lot of utility for silver.
But if one of the main speculative drivers is the fact that people think they're going to be
silver anode batteries, that's not enough for me. That is really not enough. I see price,
I see number go up and I see FOMO, right? But I don't see it as valuable enough for me to get in.
I don't have the cash necessary to do that. If I
did have the cash, I'd probably just run it as an experiment
just to get in and see if I can, like, you know, maintain
a position and, you know, increase
the value of it, but I just, I'm
kind of broke, to be honest, so it's
not something I can afford doing.
So that would be my, like, quantitative on the Bitcoin
silver aspect and, like,
rare earth animals and shit.
It is actually pretty funny.
Micron is also technically price gouging a bit.
They're not increasing supply fast enough.
Well, they're playing it smart.
So they're increasing supply.
Well, they can't increase the supply because right now all of that is taken up by manufacturing bits for the AI thing.
Because it makes more sense to manufacture stuff for AI than it does
for the consumer. You're actually going to be making more money. So they're not necessarily
price gouging. They're just... I was on their earnings call and they were asked several times
why they're not increasing supply as much. And they were trying to play it carefully,
basically, is the way they put it.
Which is actually probably a bit smart, because you never know what if it turns down,
and all of a sudden you've got this massive supply of massive capex.
But yeah, Micron's playing it interestingly smart.
Well, at the same time, also, I think that maybe even if you increase the supply,
how many people are actually still going to be buying this stuff now at this price?
Can you actually supply enough for the price
to go down?
At the same time
do you even want the price to go down?
What if
No, definitely not.
Their margins are going like crazy.
But yeah, I agree with you.
With Bitcoin, the thing that always was there was the next big hype, right?
And the last big hype that we've seen was the US government buying up a bunch of Bitcoin, right?
Well, they didn't even buy the Bitcoins.
They just got the Bitcoin from shit.
Yeah.
That was like, that was like, I think you're kind of running a dysfunctional, you'd be running, you're be running a dysfunctional assumption or like you're making a dysfunctional assumption of saying, hey, the value of my product is that it's the anti-fiat, but it's only its value is entirely dependent on like the most institutional institution putting fiat into it.
on like the most institutional institution putting fiat into it.
Like that is just crazy work to me, man.
If you're saying, oh, it's supposed to beat fiat,
it's like, okay, well then it's relying off of fiat to stay alive though.
And that's what crypto is, for instance.
Crypto is all about like getting fiat to be put into the system
so that you can take it out of the system.
And people disagree with this.
And I'm like, where's the money coming from?
I disagree with this.
Actually, I disagree with this. i'm like where's the money coming from i disagree with this actually i disagree with this that was uh but that's not regular crypto we actually had a space
uh it's a no-hetic order about this today the the stable coin thing is literally twisting
incentives here it actually incentivizes banks to put deposits into a stable coin that they issue
um which is kind of funny yeah the, but it's a stablecoin.
It's a stablecoin.
It's not crypto.
It's not supposed to replace anything.
It could replace fiat with it, but it's not what crypto is by the definition of what
usually people see as crypto.
A stablecoin is a different game.
It's not Bitcoin.
It's a stablecoin.
Yeah, you're talking about regular...
Well, unless you're talking about utility coins like Ethereum, Polygons, or Solana.
Solana.
If you're talking about, like, the meme coins or, like, project-based coins, I agree with you.
They definitely, a lot of it needs the coins to kind of...
A Solana is a meme coin to me.
It's a meme coin. It's a meme chain.
Solana, you need it to run operations... Solana is a meme coin to me. It's a meme coin. It's a meme chain. Solana, you need it to run operations over Solana.
Solana is one of the leading networks that Visa is doing stuff on Solana.
Well, yeah, of course, but I still think it's largely a meme chain.
I hate it so much.
It creates, it has created, it's worse than Ethereum.
I've always disliked Ethereum for what it is and what it facilitates.
But Solana is doing basically what Ethereum
is doing, just much faster and much worse.
Like if
you were to have
like Thanos' glove with all the Infinity
Stones and you were to snap your fingers and
made Solana disappear, the
global GDP would increase.
Or maybe
not actually.
Why do you say so?
Why do you say so?
Out of pure curiosity.
I'm neutral in this land.
But I'm just curious.
So imagine gambling.
Basically imagine gambling
except that
anybody
who has the compute is basically the house. That's
kind of what it's like. Like, you can rig the game for yourself by being faster than
everyone else, pretty much. It's just purely degeneracy. And it's actually so speculative
in nature that you can have, like, price action where it drops fucking 60% in, like, a day.
That's a meme coin, man.
That is meme.
That is not real.
Like, if you can have...
Like, that actually happened once.
There was some sort of thing that happened.
I forgot exactly what it was.
But all of a sudden,
the fucking value of it decreased by 60% overnight.
I was like, what the fuck just happened here and
then it kind of recovered so that it was like 10 20% right something I will say
kind of coin does that like I give shit I give Bitcoin ship for being like
volatile here like that's meme coin bro yeah that's meme coin levels of volatility i mean the one thing i will
say all the coins are still kind of driven a lot by hype over top of it not utility um it is kind
of funny i mean like if you think about it right so bitcoin got a brand right it's the first the
first coin and everything it's a bit of notorious that way um but if you think about it like poly
market that has nothing to do with bitcoin it doesn't use bitcoin uh uses polygon or use dc
built on polygon again and it's like so but polygon is in the shitter you know one of the
biggest crypto apps is uh kind of on it and then same thing with like Solana is, Solana got a brand to be fast
and there's like some hope that it will actually
build a very fast
network, but I think it's going down the wrong route
to be honest. Well, the thing is
you could build
and they should have actually built
especially in the case of
like Polymarket, they should have built
their own blockchain, they should have built their own
thing. They just decided
to go the easy route, which is understandable, by
the way. It's totally understandable by using
an existing architecture for something.
And I think the one that they chose is actually really good
for their purpose specifically, and also
the memetics attached to it, was actually a good
idea, right, for their specific case.
However, I think that it would have been better
if you would have created
a blockchain specifically for prediction markets and just facilitated all prediction markets via it, as opposed to using other blockchains that are dependent on other things.
It's like it doesn't make any sense.
Well, I mean, it's like saying a tech company should build its own cloud, right, and maintain its own server infrastructure.
That's the biggest thing, right?
It should, actually. A lot of them should, yes them should yes depends what do you think google's doing like well yeah but
hold on i'm talking about smaller tech companies i'm not talking about behemoths right google
offers a public cloud so amazon microsoft oracle but it's like if you gotta if you're like uh
i mean i know that even yahoo had their own thing
they tried the one thing but like if you're a smaller company you're just until for a while
you're just going to be basically renting infrastructure well yes but setting up your own
blockchain isn't necessarily depending on what depending on its nature by the way big caveat
because if you're going to set up something as inefficient as like Solana, you'll need a supercomputer to run a singular node.
Like, that's just not, you know, and it's still, that is just as it is, right? That's like, you're
needing a supercomputer to run this thing as it is. You're not needing a supercomputer to, you know,
actually super compute. So like when it gets used massively, that's, we're not even talking about
that yet, right? So you just need it just on its own.
You need something super capable to run this thing.
So it's very inefficient.
Whereas with something like what you could have built for Polymarket,
maybe you could have done something that's much more efficient,
so you wouldn't have the need for that much hardware.
And if you did, in fact, use all that hardware,
you would make better use of it than if you were for fucking Solana for instance
where a singular node gets completely
clogged because it's just a supercomputer
that needs to eventually supercompute
even though it's already super computing
because of the very nature of the node itself
as it exists
and you could have
outsourced it as well, it's like saying hey guys
we need people that hold a node.
We're going to build a prediction market on this thing.
Maybe it's a bit of a total order because you would have to rely off
people seeing value in the fact that there's going to be a prediction market
that actually works out.
But I think that people in crypto at large
would have actually understood this to be a thing that would work out
because they'd bet on anything.
They'd bet on anything.
So I think that there would have actually been that understanding.
Otherwise, there would not be CalShe, there would not be Polymarket,
there wouldn't be any of these things.
There's multiple prediction market companies.
There's probably going to be a third one, actually, that's there as well.
And it would be funny if there would be one that actually uses its own blockchain,
where you'd go, hey, computational data markets, all this kind of shit, right?
And you'd use your own blockchain for this kind of stuff,
and you're in infrastructure and everything.'re everything well actually to be fair funny enough
i think they might end up migrating to another blockchain on top of polygon's agler um because
that a polygon's agler allows you to do cross-chain because here's the other thing it's not only about
compute it's about liquidity and being able to offer people an ability to pay usdc or polygon right and if you do your own chain you got to run liquidity pools
for those coins so um but not with agler supposedly you can just it's it's much more shared
well i mean like i said if uh if like they're going to do their own thing, I'm all, I'm all for it.
I'm all for it.
That's what I'm saying.
Yeah, I hear you.
By the way, you guys had an interesting discussion earlier about the tariffs, not to bridge too much better, but I still think we got time
to see how it all shakes out, right? We got a lot of, we got three more years at least
of the same policy to go through, so it should be good, I think.
yeah
most of the effects on what has happened
I don't think you'll be able to see within the next
like
5-10 years or something like that
a lot of people have a contention about this with me
because they think oh you know
I'm wrong but I'm like okay well what exactly
are you okay so let's say you're a country.
Put yourself in a position of one of the foreign countries
that are currently on the subject of the US.
Let's choose an easy one.
What's a country we can choose here?
Supplier?
A country?
Let's do Vietnam.
Yeah, let's do Vietnam, for instance, right?
So Vietnam, you put tariffs right? So, Vietnam,
you put tariffs on there because you assume that
these
products are all just coming out of China,
right? But now everyone
in Vietnam is going to be pissed off at you because you're effectively
trying to nuke their economy.
Then they'll probably come up with ways to prove
that, you know,
they're not using
Chinese products or Chinese machinery or any of these things. Maybe they'll come up with ways to prove that you know they're not using chinese products or chinese machinery or
any of these things maybe i'll come up with a way of solving that but what do you think all of those
people are going to think of you now as the united states because of this what they're going to end
up doing is they will be doing more business with china and other nations in asia specifically which
is what China has been
doing for years now. So before, it used to be the other way around, where 60% of China's economy was
dependent on the West. Now, it's only 40% dependent on the West. And it's shrinking,
the dependency is shrinking, right? What I'm saying is I think that all of this stuff has largely accelerated the need for the dependency to decrease even further and faster.
Because right now, people are looking at this and going,
Hey, this country has tried to nuke us all, and it's going to be capable of nuking us, lest we submit ourselves.
Okay, let's show our bellies and submit, but in the background we're going to
work on a solution to this problem so that we don't ever have to submit ever again. Wouldn't
you do the same thing? Every one of us would do the same thing. If we have some sort of thing
that's being held above our heads, we will do whatever it takes in silence to get rid of whatever
that is, to get rid of that dependency, wouldn't we? This would be your job, this would be where
your finances are held, where you live, all of these things, right? This is the thing that you do.
You will work for years, if need be, to achieve, to create the ability for you to have your freedom
from whatever the problem is that has been caused. And I think that's kind of like what we're seeing
with the US. This has pissed off a lot of these countries that are very capable, mind you, because
that's where a lot of the products came
from a lot of those countries are going to go well our dependency on the us is suicide we're
going to need to figure out a way to solve that problem yeah but there's one major issue a flaw
in that logic it's much easier to replace a supplier than to replace a buyer right you can't
just materialize a buyer but it can force supply domestically
materialized supply right so it's reduced right but it also depends on what your supply like in
order so to reduce dependency in us they gotta go find a different buyer so they've been trying to
go to europe and basically now their europe is getting flooded with chinese products right it's
not that all of a sudden their internal economy jump-started.
You know, they grew.
Their internal consumer is still struggling.
So the biggest...
Well, right.
I'm not saying that you're going to be switching consumers.
What I'm saying is you're going to be switching
the products you're making.
Because you're going to be thinking about,
well, who is going to be our actual consumer for stuff?
Like, when I say, hey,
what kind of demand do we have internally for things?
And then you start making those things instead.
And even you're going to start doing narrative engineering as well
to get the West to want these things as well,
which would otherwise just be Asia-exclusive,
which actually is happening already.
Well, yeah, but that's what I'm saying.
On the consumer side, you have to force other countries now to replace the U.S.
And the U.S. is a massive consumer. It's very difficult to do. Now you're fighting other countries.
Well, you're already forcing them. That's the, that's the bit you're already forcing them,
right? You're already forcing their hand as it is. So they're considering what the fuck do we do?
Like, who else do we supply to? And what could we supply so that we aren't dependent on the US?
And then if the US ever decides to say, Hey, we're going to make life hard for you, be like,
okay, then we're just going to stop producing this thing over here. We're going to take like maybe 20, 30% loss, but that's
fine. We will still survive and we will even thrive. If they can do that, then they're independent.
And then the US has no more power and there will be no problems. Because then if you were to say,
try to play a political game against this, then your consumers in the US will get hurt. And the
US is a very consumer-based country, right? It's entire thing is, hey, do I feel good is based on, can I buy a ton of shit without
that shit going up in value such that I can no longer afford all the shit that I want
to buy with my money?
Because it's a very consumerist type of country, right?
And so as soon as any of these conveniences go, then you'll have
a problem. So they won't even be able to put up any kind of resistance because if the consumer,
which is the majority, by the way, and that has all the economic power, that has all the voting
power, when you start to fuck with those people, then you'll have a real problem. And this is what
I'm saying. It's like at some point, the losses of another country are going to be less than the
losses of the country that's making be less than the losses of the
country that's making the threat.
But that's what I'm saying.
Not in this model, because again, you can't just materialize a consumer.
If you lose a consumer, you can materialize a buyer.
You can't force someone to be your buyer.
Now that the big guy walked away, right?
If you're a buyer, you can force very quickly to try and rebuild the supply.
It'll be expensive, more expensive, but you can do that.
You can force that.
And that was the biggest demonstration in April.
When the reason that Trump massively increased the tariffs, he wanted to demonstrate because
China started talking to Europe and everything, and they thought they're going to redirect
their ships.
And then all of a sudden, they had mass layoffs because all the ports stopped working, everything
stopped working.
And they realized that, holy shit, no, we can't just fight US and tariffs.
So they backed out.
Trump said, okay, fine, let's go continue.
But if you look at the timeline, you look at the ports stop working,
China backed out because their entire export just stopped.
They couldn't go to Europe.
They can go somewhere else.
You can't just materialize buyers.
can't just materialize buyers you can start working enforcing building supply
You can start working and forcing building supply.
yeah but also against china there it's not gonna it doesn't work right these tariffs don't work
you know they're gonna suspend all of the retaliatory tariffs right
well how do you gauge if they're working not Well, because China is supplying a lot more things
than people realize,
and China can just say,
hey, so we can take the loss.
It'll be kind of bad for our people,
but it'll be worse for yours.
So how about no deal?
And that's kind of what happened.
And what happened to the EU deal with the US, for instance?
What happened to that? deal with the US, for instance? What happened to that?
It's the same shit.
Well, sorry again, but how'd you gauge that the tariffs on their working if, because they
couldn't take the loss.
That's the, that was the whole point.
They all said, all of a sudden had a massive shock.
Their ports stopped.
They started firing off people.
Like they couldn't take that loss.
Then why are they suspending all the retaliatory tariffs?
Sorry, who is?
I think the, actually no, sorry, I think China is the one who's going to be suspending the retaliatory tariffs.
Because like, yeah, you're right, the loss can't be taken.
Yeah, and I mean like, I'm not, I do... It is kind of crazy what we see in the chaos,
to be honest.
I'll give you that.
But again,
I'm not
actually stating
long-term if you're right or wrong.
I'm just stating there's the difficulties.
So that's why I said we'll see
in three years.
Yeah, we'll see. We'll see what happens.
There's lots of stuff to be
picked apart
by the way out of pure curiosity what do you make of this whole thing um it's like what was
the trump announced 20 trillion dollars in investments by all these companies all these
things um i'm not sure what to entirely make of it because that kind of seems one on
the one side, extremely high number, which is great.
But two, it's like, how does a either way?
Yeah.
What's your opinion?
Wait, wait, can you detail that?
I'm, I'm kind of spotty on that, what you're describing.
So periodically Trump announces is like, uh, over the course of the year,
it was like $5 trillion.
And then it kept increasing and increasing as more companies,
more investments started coming in and saying it.
And I think we're $20 trillion.
So who can invest the money?
Both the domestic and foreign companies and investments in countries.
I think the latest one was added was Saudis.
It was Zayda.
I think the Saudis were the last increase.
And as for, okay, that's, as for, um, where's the money going exactly?
Supposedly in US. I mean, like that's why like i'm on i'm
on the same level i'm just standing as you i guess that's why i was yeah i'm really i'm really
confused about that i see i see all these numbers but i'm like where exactly is it going yeah yeah
that's what that's what i was effectively asking you i don't know yeah i need a list of all these things to go through one bit at a time.
Yeah, to provide
a careful economic analysis.
Oh, okay.
Funny question.
We've got 2026 coming up, right?
What's your predictions for 2026?
Five major predictions
or three, whatever, whatever number.
Oh, yeah. I mean, I already made one.
It's just going to be lots of meme war, I think, because you're going to have the,
one of the primary events that will be very annoying, annoyingly noisy, is the midterms.
So 2026 midterms are going to be quite the interesting thing, right?
So for the Republicans to secure their position in the future there, they will need to put on a ton of propaganda.
They will need to change something because a lot of people are dissatisfied at the moment,
right? It's pretty bad. So personally, I think that the midterms will be absolutely disastrous
for the Republicans,
lest they change something systemically so that it by effect isn't,
which isn't something outside of the realm of possibility.
But as it currently stands, if there are no more major changes,
then even if there are some changes,
I think the impact will be quite devastating for the Republicans in the midterms.
And to counter this, I think you're going to have a lot of mimetic stuff going on.
It'd be narrative engineering.
You're going to see probably more playing around with money.
I think just like what happened with the checks that were given out to people.
You're just going to see shifting around of things as well.
So largely, I think it will just be lots of narrative engineering for like 2026. It's going to be tons of narrative engineering on both sides. I mean, the Democrats want their power back,
clearly, and the Republicans want to retain theirs. And we've all seen what happens during
an election period, right? It just becomes mega chaos. Look at what happened. Look at what happened
last year. I mean, we could what happened look at what happened last year i
mean we could all remember the insane chaos that last year was all about right everybody's got to
pick their team and you know there's like a there's a whole thing going on so i think that's what 2026
will be like and after that it will be largely peaceful i think yeah yeah i agree with you
politics i think 2026 is going to be wild because
democrats are going to try and seize on the advantage yeah so it's going to be kind of crazy
um i mean i foresaw this happening earlier anyways i was like politics is going to become
this thing that people hate it's going to be for the masses, yeah, sure. But it is no more beneficial, I think,
to get into politics than it is to, say, get into sports somehow.
It's a weird rigged game that makes no sense.
It is annoying and full of bullshit.
And it has no real use for you.
And if anything, causes more harm than good.
And so, that's why
I decided to maximize the
noetic order, for instance.
Because I thought we could...
I'm going to stay away from politics as much as possible,
which is why 2026 is going to be a bit of an interesting challenge.
But I think there's opportunity for those
who kind of offer distractions from it, right?
Like say, hey, we don't care about these things,
but if we want to talk about these things,
we're going to do so in a manner that is objective, I think.
Right.
Like, I think even you, Andre, can agree
that whenever things get political, it's just kind of gay.
But I think that when you make an objective assessment on a thing,
it is much more interesting,
even if it has political connotations without intent.
It's much more interesting and it's much more valuable, right?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, at some point, you just want to take a step back and be like, you know what, we'll much more valuable, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah, at some point
you just want to take a step back and be like, you know what?
We'll ignore all this, right?
I learned that from last year because a lot of people
were massively delusional
about lots of things that were happening, about the
H-1B shit, and it was a major issue
and Elon doing the thing where he said
take a big step back and
fuck yourself in your own face and all this kind of shit.
People had a massive issue with this.
I think these issues are still persisting because people didn't understand what the actual issue was.
Like, you'd have somebody like me, for instance, who would say,
Hey, actually, you still technically need the program because you don't have anything better to replace it with once it's gone.
Like, what are you going to replace it with?
And they said, Oh, he's one of those people who wants
infinity immigration. It's like, nah.
Nah, it's not like that whatsoever,
man.
And I think a lot of people got confused
by that, and that caused a lot of issues.
Because it was political in nature.
It seemed political in nature, at least.
And so,
yeah.
I think that maybe that could have been structured a bit differently
like if we just had focused on the facts a little more
because there was also a ton of trolling going on
and a lot of people were angry
I think a lot of people were angry at this
right
yeah I mean a lot of people were also
kind of they make money on the hype right
so they were just increasing the hype
especially with the expanded
I remember like you were pissed as fuck, dude.
Oh, fine.
What?
During the H1B time, remember that?
Like, last year Christmas?
Yeah, early.
You were pissed.
I remember that.
I mean, I was irritated.
I wouldn't say more irritated than you were, to be honest.
I wouldn't say I was pissed. say i wasn't irritated i was just being
dramatic i thought it was funny i didn't take any of that shit seriously like i'm gonna be honest
with you i didn't take any of that seriously i just wanted to troll everybody and call him smooth
brain because that's that was just what i wanted to do at the time because it's just pissed off
i don't even remember what the discussions were, but yeah. The discussions were largely about our definitions of what like makes a country
and what like the immigration crisis was actually like.
And we couldn't come to an agreement in any of these things
because we were just kind of too focused on the, on the politics of the thing.
I think.
I would say, can you imagine that a country just holistic, like completely spent like a month discussing what makes up that country?
Like, it's like, regardless.
And I still don't understand what makes up a country.
Like, I actually came up with something.
Like, I came up with a country triangle.
Like, what makes a country?
It's like, well, it's not just its soil, but it's its people and its culture.
And it has to be all of those three things at the same time.
Like, the soil only becomes valuable
not just because there are resources there, but the combination
of culture and people is what makes a country a country.
A country can be
anything, anywhere. Singapore, for instance,
a tiny little fucking piece of shit land over there,
right? But it is an amazing country
definitionally, right?
Because of its culture and its people,
and the people operating
under that culture, right? We the people operating under that culture.
Or in line with that culture.
And so one of the big problems that I initially brought up in those many discussions was,
well, what do you define as the culture?
What is your culture?
And nobody could define it properly.
They were referring to some European shit.
I'm like, bro, you're not Europeans, bro.
None of you are Europeans. You may come from, you may
be descended from Europeans, but you're not fucking
Europeans. I'm going to put a European next to you. They're going to be
very different, believe me. Your culture is
not European, trust me.
So, you have a discussion with all these people
and you just kind of realize
that a lot of people are stupid and they don't even know
what they are. You and sure i think it's kind of ironic that me as a person who's
foreign to those people says this but i would argue that i have a very objective take because
i actually am european i came from europe and you know what i am i consider myself as a cultural
exile as the lore keeper so i will i just try to understand everything else around me,
but I'm not a particular adherent to one culture or another.
I'm just adherent to whatever the fuck works,
and will hybridize all the bits that work,
and kind of come up with my own version of this, if anything.
I will, however, if I exist in a particular country,
operate within the framework of that country as much as possible,
because clearly I came to that country as much as possible because clearly
yes i came to that country for a region for a reason right there could be aspects of economic
improvement for sure but culturally speaking me myself here where i live right now in this country
act more as a preservational force because actually know it's history more than its very
own fucking citizens who've been born here i've lived here for 40 fucking years right so it's like there was a lot of irony there's a lot of lack of knowledge on
this and that's why i think for myself because there's going to be so much narrative engineering
and all of this competition and all this political nonsense for 2026 i think it is going to be one
hell of a year for quantitative analysis.
And I mean that in a very definitional sense of the word. It's going to be
one hell of a year for quantitative analysis.
So I have picked for myself
a quite substantial fucking
challenge, so we're going to see how much
this is going to work out for me.
We're going to see how much we can actually assess
the situation as we're monitoring it
without becoming insane. But instead, if we are going to become something insane, we're going to see how much we can actually assess the situation as we're monitoring it without becoming insane.
But instead, if we are going to become something insane, we're going to become insanely good.
That's my goal set today.
The financial security and quantitative analysis are the continued goal set.
100%.
Exactly.
Speaking of which, I just completely realized.
So we're going to achieve great things.
Two great things recently happened.
We got what's called Garrett joining NASA,
and then we got Tony Bruno joining Blue, which is wild.
Tony? Tori? Tori? Hold on.
What's his first name?
I don't remember.
But I agree with Jared, but that was a good win.
Tori Bruno.
Speaking of great things, okay.
He said we're going back to the moon.
Oh, no, no, we're going to have a base on the moon.
Like one of the first things he said. This is pretty awesome.
Wow. So here's an error.
Let's do something crazy.
So let's be very objective about this.
Objectively, I think Doge was not a success.
Right? But I will say this, however.
I think Elon realized something really interesting,
and he's kind of executing on this right now.
What I perceive from the outside is that
he looked at the system
and realized that he can't prevent spending,
but perhaps could exchange the stuff
that the money's being spent on.
Because let's look at this objectively, right?
Money itself isn't really a bad thing, right?
It's where it goes to that's a bad thing.
So for instance, if you were to say,
go into debt buying something that is exceedingly useful,
it makes a lot of sense.
But going into debt to buying something that is useless,
that's a bad thing, right?
We have a definition for this, right?
So I think, for instance,
a great example of this is,
well, the Pentagon can buy some shithouse AI
to deal with their problems,
and it's going to malfunction,
or they're going to buy something else.
So in this case, they got a deal,
XAI got a deal with the Pentagon.
That's pretty awesome, right?
That's pretty fucking cool. So think and even with like defense the the with the defense industry right you got like
palmer lucky and the government contracts that guy's getting i'd rather more like this guy get
more fucking like shit that's awesome like he's doing a lot of really interesting work and i would
that this fucking giga autists get more money than anybody else. This is good. I actually think, look, myself,
when I look at the country of America and I see people inside of it complaining about the defense
budget, I'm like, you must be really clueless when you don't understand that your entire spiel is
like this empire that exerts force on the rest of the planet. How are you going to exert force
on the planet if your military, which is one of the most advanced in the entire world, the most experienced in the entire world, does not have the ability to project and execute on force successfully and unwaveringly, right?
You must preserve this.
And for that, you need a massive defense budget.
It makes a lot of sense.
You want to be the country with the most amount of force if you are effectively like this empire.
I'd argue it's a delusional empire, but it's an empire nonetheless.
And so you'd need a good army, and you
need good weapons
to execute on the knowledge that you have,
the experience that you have. And so I
think something like Palmer Luckey is a great thing.
And I think that, you know,
the budget spent
on this is great, because
what he's doing is he's making certain
types of weapons not only better
but also less expensive.
Probably you've recently seen his
bit about missiles and it's like
dude, yeah, it is a really
good question. Why is it that a missile
whose components aren't particularly advanced
whose materials
aren't particularly expensive either
cost more than
a car?
How? Not even a used car,
like a car fresh off the assembly line. Luxury car sometimes even. How the fuck does that happen?
Right? And so that's a really good question. And I think if somebody like that asks themselves this question and tries to solve that problem, that's a really good thing. Because now,
with the same amount of defense,
like the same amount of budget and defense,
you're going to actually be getting more things than before.
So now spending isn't a problem.
And also, by the way, the big thing that I want to talk about is debt itself.
What is the nature of debt?
A lot of debt is actually not real.
So, how do I explain this? It's permanent debt, basically.
So a lot of the time debt is taken out, especially by governments, in a way where it is never
the intent to ever pay that debt back. Instead, what happens is you pay a fixed price annually,
Instead, what happens is you pay a fixed price annually, a percentage on that debt annually.
That's what you pay out indefinitely.
So a lot of the debt that you see that's being piled up is actually debt that cannot be resolved.
It's debt that cannot be paid out because it's designed to never be paid out.
Because the paying out of the debt is eternal interest.
That's what it is, basically. It's a fixed number, doesn't go up or doesn't go down. That's why if
you devalue your currency, actually, the problem of your debt, which is the payout that you have
to put out every year, actually decreases. That's why there's this talk of, like, devaluing things,
because you're actually decreasing the debt that you have, because your actual debt is the payout that you have to make every
single year on the debt that you've accrued.
It's not increasing, it's also not decreasing, although technically the debt is increasing
because if you take on more debt, you add another of those things where you say, hey,
I have this much in debt and I pay a certain percentage of this debt
out every single year indefinitely, right?
It's a very low percentage,
which is why it makes sense on paper, right?
But if you pile that up, you stack it up,
it becomes a problem not by the volume of debt that exists,
but by the volume of payout of that debt
that you have to make every single year, right?
That's the actual nature of the debt.
Most of that debt will never be paid off
because it's basically owed to no one. You see what I'm saying? So a lot of the discussion about debt and all
these things, it's like, I don't think people understand the nature of debt, realistically.
And I've been looking into it a little more. And it's actually quite fascinating when you look at
it as that, because personally, I don't know if that is solvable you'd have to basically disintegrate
the thing that owes
that's really it
I mean
to be honest
I don't think that's exactly the case
I've seen all those arguments
but they pop up after the fact
they don't pop up like hey
let's go do this and this is how we do it
so this is a strategy being executed
they pop up as an explanation of what happened afterwards.
No, that's a legitimate thing.
You enter into such a contract when you're taking out this debt,
and that's how the debt works.
This is the nature of that debt.
I mean, it was never going to be paid back.
Well, not exactly, right?
If you take the amount of debt we increase from 2008
to now it's insane there's no way because it never it can't be decreased that's the point
even if you the sum total of your payouts equal the amount of debt that you took on initially
the debt itself will still be there and you'll still pay out on that debt indefinitely because
the debt is eternal it's not supposed to be paid out
because it can't that's what i'm saying yeah maybe um um one thing before i forget it's not all debt
by the way but it's most of the debt and that's why there's like a steady increase and why there's
no decrease because there can't be a decrease unless you default it which is also not possible
yeah well by the way quickly paled, it is interesting what he did
because he took the missiles that are basically, you should be able to generate
in tens of thousands.
So he is going for mass manufacturing and he will drive down the prices like
crazy to do.
And then, but the most interesting thing he did recently, I swear, this guy must have like a solo battle against China.
Cause, um, you know, yeah, he got, uh, he got sanctioned personally just
recently, uh, and dual sanctioned before, but he did something unusual.
He went to Japan and put the drone together.
And then one of their trade shows said, look, this consumer drone was made a
hundred percent in Japan with a hundred percent japanese electronics now that is fascinating one but two it's like that doesn't really make business
sense the only thing that makes sense from is to show japan that hey you can stop relying on china
and that so unless i'm not seeing the strategy there this is purely like hey japan stop relying in china build your own stuff kind of funny
there is a strategy for us on the defense level of japan all of a sudden
restarts its internal manufacturing across everything to be fair
well of course japanese and english destinies are quite intertwined like i think that with with what
the us is doing like defense wise this is going to be their greatest it's going. Like, I think that with what the US is doing like, defense-wise, this is going to be
their greatest. It's going to be their greatest thing. I think that
out of all the things that they're doing,
I think all of it is going to fail in various
ways. And I think they should do
is retain dominance over space and defense.
If they can do those two things, they're securing their future.
Right. Oh, yeah.
Yeah. Um, everything
else is ass. Their food is
ass. Everything's fucking ass.
Like, it makes more sense if you were to somehow
retain. Like, you can get all of those things,
I think, and I think perhaps maybe all the food,
but you should definitely look into that, right? Specifically
that should be something that has improved massively.
Logically, by removing some of the
excessive regulation and all
the bullshit that just basically makes it
very difficult as a
farmer, and also the John Deere dog shit,
like all that, there's lots of stuff behind that.
So, with, but I think one of their biggest things
is just gonna be defense, man.
Like, defense in space.
And this is, I think, also what Elon is seeing as well.
This is why when the space data center stuff comes forward
and people go, oh yeah, this is a space data center thing. He's advocating for seeing as well. This is why when the space data center stuff comes forward and people go, oh yeah, this is a space
data center thing.
He's advocating for it as well. Because
well, you're going to have to deliver a product
up there. And who's got the biggest
rocket? Who's got the highest rate of
success on that? Who's got the most experience
on this? Who can do it for the
least amount of cost? It's Elon
and SpaceX.
So for him it makes a lot of sense.
Well, technically,
the biggest technical rocket
that's actively delivering
stuff into space
temporarily is simply
by SpaceX's choice,
which is kind of funny.
I'm sorry, stay there again.
You cut out a little bit.
So I was just making a joke.
Technically, the biggest active rocket that delivered payload into space,
actual commercial payload, is Blue Origins, New Glenn.
Although it might be smaller in mass than Falcon Heavy, to be fair.
And SpaceX's main product for massive amounts of,
for basically mass being put into space is going to be Starship.
That's their whole thing. That's why Starship
is developed.
It's not like, a lot of people look
at it, oh, this is going to be the Mars vehicle. I'm like,
well, first and foremost, it's going to be the
Earth-Moon-based infrastructure vehicle.
That's what its primary utility will be.
Actually, its first major primary
utility will be delivering Starlink satellites.
Yeah.
Because they can put way more satellites in one
go up there than they could with
rockets that they're currently using.
Falcon, Falcon Heavy.
Well, yeah. More
and cheaper. Because
here's the other kicker a lot of people don't realize.
You got
a Falcon with its second stage, you got a Falcon with a second stage.
You got new Glenn with a second stage and you got starship, but the second stage is
not really in the same second stage.
It's a trip on its own.
It is called this starship, right?
It's called ship.
No other second stage is called the ship.
So that is interesting because these vehicles were being custom
mission fit and outfitted and
just like
the space shuttles, what would
you call, what was the space shuttles called
the individual ones, the general term, I forgot
the name of it
yeah I know what you're talking about and I forgot
it myself
yeah
maybe gone on this one and i forgot it myself
maybe gone on this one
i don't remember but there was a term that they were referred to.
I checked quickly on what's it called, just Google it, and there was nothing that popped up.
What was I going to say?
But yeah, so that will create a lot of mission-specific things.
I'm curious of one thing, though.
So SpaceX is putting a lot of effort into the heat shield reentry and everything.
I'm just curious, like if you, if you go into, like, if you exaggerate the direction where everything is going, um, with the trans Astra and, uh, other asteroid
mining, Astro Forge, you inevitably gonna have fuel depots in low earth orbit.
Yes.
Or just on the moon with a mass driver or a real gun.
Yeah, but the bottom line is...
We call it a mass driver now.
I don't want to just call it fucking real gun.
But anyways, continue.
Yeah, but the point is that if that industry jumpstarts,
the fuel could be cheap enough to just refuel the Starship
and have a powered re-entry
instead of just coasting re-entry so but the amount of effort being spent on it right now
even a semi-powered re-entry to slow down just slightly at the right moment i don't know i'm just
curious if it makes sense in the near term? Because if you can slow down enough, basically the trade-off is
the damage to the heat shield versus how much you can get from the fuel depots and how much you can,
you're going to have that industry regardless, right? Because in-space refueling is going to
be from the depots. It's not going to be from the ground. Well, you have to get the fuel up there in
the first place, right? That's another bit. You have to get it up there in the first place.
You have to store it up there.
I think it would even be less expensive still to just use heat shields.
What I mean by, like, for a while, yes,
because there is no methane-based fuels in that.
Like, there's no methane in that.
So you're proposing a different type of fuel, basically.
Well, what I'm saying is that, so what transasterist plan is effectively is to pull in
these asteroids and basically take out the high volatiles, all the various gases. So oxygen at
the very least, they're going to be able to supply. Methane is a more complex thing. So maybe there's
some additional refining that'll have to be done
or synthesis of methane but yeah but in that world you effectively got fuel to come back in
but i guess maybe how is the majority of methane or earth created i assume chemically right
uh as far as i understand high compression of uh uh, um, organic matter.
This is what I understood.
Although, although methane and oil is technically different, right?
They're both hydrocarbons, but I think which one, which one is available on other,
I think, hold on one second, one second.
Cause what I'm thinking, by the way, when I said they're technically different they're definitely
different but i mean like they're generated differently i think one doesn't require organics
i don't remember which yeah and what i'm saying is that perhaps maybe if it's the one that is
being used for the rocket like could there be a future for organics where you say hey what if i
just farm that shit in zero g on the the moon or whatever. Not zero-G,
clearly, because there is gravity.
What if you could farm this kind of stuff on the moon?
You could make it there and then basically
do both things. Get the oxygen and
much of the volatiles that you need
off of the asteroids and then
the rest of it you just manufacture up there.
It might be less expensive than just
shipping it and keep bringing more
mass off of Earth, which is going to become a problem at some point, by the way.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Sorry.
Yeah, that's right.
Methane is found on the various moons and so forth.
I wonder, I'm just checking to see if there's, like, what trans-astroids are doing is the
asteroids that are within the Earth's gravity, well, it's, like, within, like, a couple thousand
kilometers. Theoretically, it's like within like a couple thousand kilometers. Um,
the radically they definitely have volatiles.
I want to see if they have methane. Um, if they do, then yeah,
you can just effectively refine it there.
Right.
But it has going to be an interesting world. Uh, next five years, a lot of things are going to change drastically. It's going to be an interesting world in the next five years a lot of things are going to change
drastically it's going to be such a different world
yeah I agree on that
I agree on that
I just don't know what it's going to look like
necessarily
the space fuel thing is
really interesting
okay what if we could turn radiation fungus into space fuel you is really interesting.
Okay, what if we could turn radiation fungus into space fuel?
That's the thing that I'm wondering right now.
You know the fungus that eats all the radiation and turns into just more of itself?
Yeah, like, what if something like that could be a thing?
Like, can you actually make the growing fast enough?
Because you make the harvesting efficient enough
and the processing of it's also by that extent
efficient enough to turn it into something that's useful for anything not just fuel but just biomass
in general yeah that should be interesting actually i was thinking about this other day by the way um
the then we're gonna have another thing i think pop up relatively, well, relatively, I don't know how soon, but you remember I did a space with a guy who's blowing like glass spheres.
He wants to blow glass spheres on the moon and so forth.
I was thinking about the fact that one of the best kind of liquids to fill a glass sphere with, even the layered one, would be water.
Even if it penetrates
um whatever amount of water will not burst the glass it's not under pressure right it's not
water is not compressible or stretchable so um which means you could theoretically have
like mini oceans are full of fish in uh orbit for right but they still have to figure out
it's after still figure out how exactly you simulate gravity. I'm
pretty sure that a lot of these things would need gravity. I don't think it's ever been done,
but could you somehow figure out whether or not they could survive that? Because plants grow very
strangely without gravity, and I wonder if there's any kind of genetic defects or anything like that
from prolonged exposure to gravity over multiple generations of plant and or fish.
That's a great question, because fish, there's two funny things here.
One, they can stabilize at a certain, uh, what's called, what do you call it?
A certain depth, right?
So there'll be, their buoyancy stabilizes them.
Um, so they're not, but at the same time, they're still feeling gravity.
Right.
Um, I wonder, and they're like, when they die, they turn upside down or
something, right.
So, uh, or on their side.
So yeah, that's an interesting test.
I wonder, can you imagine if they don't, then yeah, we'll literally have
space oceans.
It's kind of funny.
Yeah.
You'd probably have to spin them to simulate gravity of some sort.
Hey, one of the things that I'm actually most fascinated by,
and I think it's to be spoken of a whole bunch more,
is manufacturing in low gravity conditions.
We can do things that we can't do right now on Earth.
We could do those things in zero-G.
We could make materials.
What isn't discussed as commonly, which I find is a mistake and kind of an
indication of how many people lack understanding of what's going on, even the people in the fields
adjacent to it, is that people don't talk about manufacturing on the Moon as much and how I think
that the Moon itself, because of the manufacturing of it, it will facilitate the type of manufacturing
that you can do, the type of materials you can make on the Moon in these kinds of conditions, which you can't make on Earth, that that will likely facilitate our expansion to the type of manufacturing that you can do, the type of materials you can make, or the moon in these kinds of conditions,
which you can't make on Earth,
that that will likely facilitate our expansion
to the rest of the planets in this solar system.
I think we actually need the moon for that.
I think a lot of people haven't considered this
because they just simply don't care
or they just kind of listen to whatever mainstream is
and just kind of hype that up
so that the general population agrees with what they're saying.
Because to be somewhat disagreeable,
to make a complex point is not popular
and is quite risky reputationally.
For me, I don't really care,
because I'm not financed by any of those people.
I'm just financed by my community.
So it's a little different.
In my case, I just have to be interesting, actually,
which is a good thing.
So, yeah.
I think the moon is needed from the perspective of manufacturing
and just like a base in general as like an intermediary point,
like a space station basically.
We're going to need that.
So we can actually...
It is a good place to accumulate resources or supplies
for longer term missions, right?
Instead of just
putting it in orbit um i would say and it's low enough gravity that it's not too big of a gravity
well i would say so if you want to launch something into deep solar system like a titan submarine
that'd be super cool actually that's the literally the the best chance at finding life in the solar system.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, there's several icy moons that have more water than Earth, supposedly, which is wild.
Yes. Yeah, we could probably utilize that as well. I mean, there's lots of resources out there that we're not making any use of on the other planets. But also,
one of the reasons why we can't do this is because we don't have the materials
that can withstand those types of environments.
Like gas giants are very
volatile environments. Look at how volatile
it is to do re-entry on our own
planets. Can you imagine how volatile it would be on
others? It's huge.
As a matter of fact, we are relying
like SpaceX is largely relying on the fact that
the atmosphere on Mars
is not as volatile as the one here on
Earth to get its ships to work so if they
can get their ships to work in Earth's
atmosphere they can get their ships to work in Mars's atmosphere
right and so it's a
different challenge it's actually on that
front from the volatility perspective
a lesser challenge
yeah because I do believe it's
thick enough to provide enough slowing but not too thick to actually burn to cause these types
of damages yeah because like what we have right now is like this issue where basically the amount
of pressure that's created at the at the at the point of rate like it's like so there's a ton of
pressure that basically turns the air into plasma, because the heat is so
big that basically there's enough pressure.
Because the pressure is so big that the heat is so great
that it turns into plasma. That's kind of how it is.
Because when you pressurize air,
it's just...
Tons of heat gets created, basically.
We all know that. That's how
a diesel engine works, by the way. A diesel engine
works by that exact principle. Diesel engine works by
basically injecting fuel,
turning it into...
Basically, diesel engines have misters
inside of each and every single one of the rooms
where the piston is.
So the piston is there,
it basically sucks in some air,
and the mister kind of creates diesel vapor.
And then it's sealed together.
It's basically all sealed,
and then it gets super, super pressurized to the point where it heats sealed and then it gets super super pressurized
to the point where it like heats up and then it actually ignites the diesel itself right that's
how these things work it's really cool yeah the no spark no nothing yeah but that's why you need
special kind of fuel too yeah it's awesome and you need to set diesel fuel on fire it's like
good luck man it's actually quite difficult to set that shit on if you try to set diesel fuel on fire, it's like, good luck, man.
It's actually quite difficult to set that shit on fire.
You need heat to set it on fire more so than you need an actual, like, you know, flame or something like that.
It's really cool. I really like diesel. Diesel's an awesome fuel.
It's one of my favorite types of fuel.
And diesel engines in general are awesome.
They're like these things that last a ton of time.
They're so good. I love diesel engines in general are awesome. They're like these things that last a ton of time. They're so good.
I love diesel engines, man.
Small and high-powered, actually, surprisingly,
compared to gas engines, right?
Yeah.
But endurance, too, dude.
Like, crazy.
You can make those things pretty fast as well.
You know, like, diesel is kind of slept on.
You can't make it as fast as some of the other things.
It's more so power than is about speed.
You know.
People take that thing for granted, to be honest.
But I use a lot of diesel cars.
My favorite car is like old diesel.
But if I wanted just speed, and of course a gas car is like the thing.
But that's not a thing I'd use every day, right?
Use it for a joyride.
Yeah.
But diesel does love being used. A diesel engine does love being used for a long period of time
at higher speeds right that's a huge thing because you're actually supposed to burn out your engines
that's the thing you're supposed to do if you are to use if you have a diesel vehicle
you're actually supposed to run that engine for a considerable amount of time at almost max so
that basically all the carbon can be burnt out of the engine because otherwise your engine will be full of carbon and it'll run like shit so you have to basically burn it out
so that you know heats up yeah people don't talk about that so often like you know all that stuff
that comes out the end of your thing that's actually inside of your engine as well and so
if you keep idling the thing or you keep driving around like a fucking grandma then actually what
you're doing is you're literally choking out the engine's life so in order to get the engine's life
back you have to like burn it out routinely by just driving it pretty fast over a road.
Just take whatever highway you got going on and drive it for like an hour or two.
Do that like once a month.
Once or twice a month and you should be fine.
Or just get electric.
I don't have the time for that. I don't want to deal with this kind of shit.
It's like, no, yes, you can deal with this kind of shit just so I can do like a drive, whatever you have.
You know, and do it because the expenses are going to be too high.
But then again, good argument with electric.
I can't get electric around here.
That's the thing.
So for me, I run a different thing.
And that's just casual maintenance.
I mean, you're using your product correctly.
It's like saying, hey, I'm not going to shut down my computer because it's a computer.
Well, yes, your GPU needs rest.
Say, well, just get an abacus.
It's the same argument, I think.
Just the other way around.
Hold on, hold on.
Did you just compare diesel to computers
and electric to an Abacus?
Yes, I did.
I just thought it would be funny to, like, invert the meta.
Although, technically, I think electric predates
the gas engine and the diesel engine,
if I'm not mistaken.
I'm not too sure about that, actually.
One of the early cars, when there were steam engine cars,
I think one early prototype was an electric.
I'm curious. Hold on, let me see.
Okay. 1892 was the patent for the diesel engine 1884 the first uk car on an electric motor nice well electric motors are older right yeah that's what you said so this was this
was literally a horse-drawn carriage without a horse and an electric motor.
It's kind of funny.
Oh, yeah, because the first electric motor was invented by Michael Faraday in 1821.
A lot of shit happened in the 19th century, bro.
Like, it was one crazy year of innovation.
So much new shit came out, dude.
Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of much new shit came out, dude.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's a lot of chemistry.
A lot of, yeah.
It kind of feels like these years, you know, like we have so much computer innovation and shit like that.
You know, it's pretty cool.
There were crazier times.
Like imagine you were like, you're using,
imagine like you hear about the electric motor for the first time,
you know, like that'd be pretty
cool wouldn't it well also the fact that i mean like at least in u.s right you went uh at the end
of the century all of a sudden there were railroads everywhere oil was popping up electricity was
being spread like these are more monumental country level uh kind of changes are occurring
yeah personally i want to live to be 120 years old that's my, I want to live to be 120
years old. That's my thing. I want to live to be
120 years old. That would be nice.
I could do that. I'm solid.
If you can't be immortal,
just give me 120 years. That's good enough
for me.
It's like
we just got to keep watching. What's his name?
Brian Johnson?
I don't know, man.
I don't know, man. Johnson is like...
He's taking a protocol which I think
is kind of counterintuitive. I think he's making
a lot of points. I think he's like 70%
correct and 30% wrong in his approach.
That's my
take on that.
Also, he doesn't really...
There is a little bit of disingenuous
something in there. So remember, for instance, when he took
the psychedelics for the first time? And then
on stream he asked, hey, what would it be like for
someone like me to take this? And then the person
who was describing it was like, well, for someone like
you who's experienced in psychedelic,
you know, experiencing psychedelic things like that.
And then he did this thing. He fucking
did this thing with his hands and saying, ah, don't talk
about this? Bruh. You know what I mean?
Bruh.
That was crazy. I i mean the the problem
with like i like the fact that he's trying to measure everything the problem with the human
body is that you're fighting a constant regenerative mechanism so if you insert something
into the body that puts it under certain stress it will try focusing and start regenerating a lot
of things to try and kind of
get through the times, get more efficient.
And then the markers will be good.
But that's not because you did something very good to the body.
You put the body in stress, right?
That's the whole basis of like why you go to the gym, right?
It's not you putting the muscles in the stress.
But if you do that nonstop, I mean, if you constantly
move a muscle nonstop, sooner or later, the muscle will fail, right? I don't mean nonstop,
like daily. I mean, like just nonstop. So, but yeah, that's kind of an exaggerated perspective,
but yeah. And then of course, like it is, it was kind of silly where he constantly was talking about his
nighttime erections and then it turns out he was micro dosing on what was it uh
nutsy alice but something like that yeah um yeah or something it's like dude come on like
no and he was like yeah but there's no relation or whatever because there's posts on that but it's
like like well but again like back to the back to the psychedelics bit, like, why was he
telling the person not to say that?
This is a very important thing. If you have experience with
psychedelics, that's going to change your outcome.
Like, that is a very important bit, and that's
why that person was talking about it.
To then say, oh yeah, don't talk about this, it's fucking
insane. Like,
why would he hide this?
That is really bad.
Maybe I don't fully understand that.
So on the live stream,
there was a moment where
he was asking one of the people
there, like I will describe it again,
he was asking one of the people there what it would be like for him
to take the psychedelics, and then she basically
went on to explain the whole bits behind
it, including that somebody who's experienced in
traversing states of psychedelic
consciousness, for someone who's experienced and that wouldn't be as bad
and then he like basically waved his hand together to stop talking about that
i'm like what does that mean i mean we all know that he did this kind of
shit before this is true but why the fuck would he hide it that's that's very that's
disingenuous man that's really that's really problematic dude
i mean it is strange to be honest i agree by the way you describe it i'm gonna look into
that just out of curiosity and but it's also kind of like if you if you're arguing with something
or you're hiding something i mean like dude if you're applying it to your own body or your own
experience time will pass and it will affect you right you want to maximize it so you want to take
any criticism possible so you can see,
like it's not about selling the product now,
that your product you're selling will truly materialize in the next 20,
30 years.
That's what you're after.
So it's kind of, yeah.
At the same time, the biggest problem is if you're not going to,
if you're not going to be entirely honest
and super transparent with even the stuff that you've done in your
past, especially when it comes to psychedelics
and you're advocating for people that take this kind of shit,
you're going to be, this is a really bad representation
of it. Honestly, I think it's very
disingenuous.
I don't have anything personal against the guy.
I'm just saying this is a general risk thing. If I were to
do the same thing, usually, usually when I say,
hey, I tell somebody about something,
I explain this from the perspective of something that works for me.
Like, when I say, hey, by the way,
I think that a lot of people should go on a low-carb, high-protein diet, right?
They should be eating as low carbohydrates as possible.
That is not true for everyone.
That is true for a lot of people.
But, for instance, that is not true for me.
I actually need the carbohydrates. I'm a person that needs true for a lot of people. But for instance, that is not true for me.
I actually need the carbohydrates.
I'm a person that needs to eat a ton of that kind of stuff.
Because I can eat a ton of junk food, for instance, and I'd still retain my six-pack.
Because I don't put any of that weight.
And I'm a very high-energy type of person, as you can probably tell.
So, like, I'm not even really caffeinated today. I only had, like, one cup already.
So it's just kind of, when I'm going, I'm going.
And my brain doesn't slow down.
I just do whatever I do. So for me, I actually
do need a good high carbohydrate intake myself. I still need more proteins than I do carbohydrates,
but I still do definitely need carbohydrates. If I tried to like do it without that, it's not going
to work out as well for me. But it would be disingenuous for me to say, hey, everybody needs
to go on a low carb and high protein diets because you're not supposed to eat any carbs.
That would be very disingenuous
because not everyone's metabolism is the same.
And to acknowledge and to actually explain that that is the case
will save a lot of people a lot of confusion
and also will keep them from harm
because what if you're going to try and do the thing,
and I did this to myself, by the way,
where I tried to do the low-carbohydrate thing
and it didn't really work out so well for me.
I decided to then basically put the carbohydrates back in
and I started feeling a lot better
because for me and my metabolism, I cannot go without it because I
actually need all the fucking energy because I'm using it all the time. So it's a little different
for me, right? I agree. But if you don't acknowledge that, that's bad. When I went on like pure meat
diet, the one thing I did still include was pure glucose, especially when I worked out. Otherwise,
I could not work out.
I would get extremely lightheaded because there's no sugar coming into your blood from anywhere, right?
Or you have to force your liver to do chemical reactions to kind of, what is it?
Fuck, I don't remember the process name.
But the bottom line is, yeah, I completely agree with you. Um, the,
on this specific thing, um, by the way, the one other thing is that, um,
I think when I went pure meat diet and even with glucose, um,
my skin got thinner at some point.
So I had to figure out and start probably taking collagen and stuff like that. Are you one of those ectomorph people? Like you can also do the same thing that I said,
where I can like eat a ton of stuff and I don't really put on weight. Is that a thing
you can do as well? Or like what's it?
Well, yes. The only reason I hesitate is because I'm a tech guy. So I said we have
a computer the whole day. So unless I'm a pure meat diet with glucose, then I'm almost perfect.
If I'm like on the random junkiest food for like months,
then obviously my weight starts going up.
Unless I'm going to a gym, then it's perfect.
Interesting.
So you're kind of like the middle of the two things actually,
where you don't get super fat if you like just ate a little bit more,
but you would definitely notice something happening, right?
Yeah.
I mean, I feel more.
So you're more of that.
Technically like ours, even our fast foods are different, right?
From where you are to where to us.
Uh, I think U S fast food is also a bit worse to be honest.
Uh, I can, if I eat fast food for like three, four days, I'm definitely more
stress, uh, stressful and more irritable.
fast food from like where exactly um well any kind of like processed food right so even a store-bought
frozen pizza if i just eat that um like but yeah do you also fade the seed oils like me or do you
do not care about that oh i hate seed oils i tried to avoid it okay there you go that's probably it
Oh, I hate seed oils.
I tried to avoid it.
Okay, there you go.
That's probably it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Seed oils, and then there's a bunch of other stuff.
But seed oils are probably the worst,
especially the fact that they put soybean everywhere
in the past couple of years.
Now it's actually coming back out.
Now I notice that it's no longer as much soybean oil,
which is kind of cool.
Well, yeah, 100%.
Yeah, I think a lot of the people are starting to get used to it.
Even here is a funny little bit I've noticed
was that people are so against seed oils
that now many fast food chains are offering tello-based oil.
But they say tello-based
because they actually dilute the tello with fucking seed oil
just to kind of say that the year is using tello.
That's hilarious. It's insane, isn't it? So fucking seed oil. Just to kind of say that the URD is in town. That's hilarious.
It's insane, isn't it?
So there is a market for this kind of stuff.
There is a huge market.
It's awesome.
And I like that there is enough of a market for fast food chains to try and cheat.
And I think if there's more consumer awareness around this, then there will be less cheating overall.
And the quality of food will increase again
like substantially right
the customer wants what the customer wants
and an aware and educated customer is a very
powerful customer
this is what I kind of keep saying as well even with
a lot of people in the US
is what I say is like hey why are you like people
would ask me why do you think our politics are
so bad it's like well because you're all uneducated as shit
if you were educated you'd be dangerous as fuck
here's my point the educator question is dangerous and that is awesome um by the way uh sorry quick
tangent on that um one definitely like your own education your your own decisions, you got to always kind of focus on that, but here's the one funny thing I realized, um, you know, like AI
is being, oh yeah, I have video gen and everything.
It's everywhere now.
And it's kind of hard to sometimes distinguish, but that's going to be a force
effect function, this generation of kids that are growing up now that are really
This generation of kids that are growing up now that are really elementary, that
elementary, that are going to be exposed to that.
are going to be exposed to that.
Their discernment of what's real.
What's not is going to be so much better than the generation before, because
they'll be forced to, because they'll be like, ah, ha ha.
You believe this fake AI, right?
You kind of kids teasing.
It's like a social, there's like a social problem with that.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
So the, their ability to discern what's real, what's not,
based on information around them,
should go much higher than the generation before,
which is naturally a really good thing.
Yeah.
I agree with that.
I agree with that.
I think there's going to be other issues, of course,
because you have literal brain rot.
But also something that I'm seeing as well is,
I'm starting to kind of realize that there may be a secret third thing here
in that the value of
content created especially valuable content will start to take more priority and the availability
of that content because everybody copies everything will just go up and up and up and up and up right
so with that i think that the generation will be remarkably informed and one of the major things
that i am seeing is that various entities are trying to somehow figure out
how to become the source of information.
What they don't understand is you cannot inorganically
become the source of information.
It's all because of memes.
Like, even with me,
people come here because I've established myself
over a very long period of time,
but none of this is institutional at all.
This was never planned.
Yes, I don't think so.
Right? Like, as far as I'm aware, none of Whistler's placed away.
So, like, all of this is just very reactive.
So people have a source of information here,
as opposed to them just turning on fucking Fox News and watching dog shit, right?
Or CNN or any of the other slop providers, as I like to call them, though.
They're all ass.
Well, yeah, because as we've had in the past,
the set of speakers,
they're not always 100% aligned.
We're not hired or paid to be aligned.
We're just having conversations.
Exactly.
I completely agree with you on that
except on an extent i will have to say like for me for instance like with a discord server i do
like the advanced members thing every single day i do that and show up there because not only do i
like to do the conversation bits that i used to do like on spaces daily but also because you know
it does get me paid and i do need to finance like i'm not going to deny that right i'm just not
letting myself be paid by like uh these entities that are then going to control what it is that i do or do not say like i don't want to
shill things or anything like that so the only thing i'm going to be shilling is myself pretty
much and this is this is about the extent of what you get it's very organic effectively not something
that's artificial well yeah but you're being you're being paid for the content you produce by the
content consumers right that's a whole different thing yes exactly so yeah content you're produced by the content consumers, right? That's a whole different thing. Yes, exactly.
You're not being paid by some sort of big, big and shit-a-fire. That's kind of
the point, yeah.
Yeah, I agree.
Speaking of which, for all the listeners,
you're definitely going to join Discord Noatic
up there.
The Adrian Finpost.
It's kind of funny.
I tried to stay away from that Adrian, to be honest.
Because I've perhaps an addictive personality.
I was spending way too much time there.
Yeah.
I get that a lot.
Like once you're in it and you just are there,
you're just never gonna wanna like get out of it.
It's real fun.
And I actually like that.
I like producing an addictive product that's good.
Yeah, exactly. But I definitely come on producing an addictive product. That's good. Yeah, exactly.
But I definitely come on in sometimes.
Yeah, it's good.
Yeah.
By the way, what do you.
Okay.
So as far as I remember, are you in manufacturing?
Oh, yes.
So what's your big goals for like next year?
Sorry.
Say that again.
What, what like your big goals or next year? Sorry, say that again? What are your big goals for next year?
What are your goals for you trying to get?
Where are you trying to get?
Just kind of more automation and independence, really.
That's kind of what I'm after.
I've been just training the people that I have to operate on their own.
We've got different types of machines that are more reliable,
so that's pretty good. Basically, what I want to do is I want to make that system as independent as possible. So I have to do the least amount of work. That's
basically my goal. My goal always in every single system is to minimize the amount of work that
needs to be done for the most amount of good. Basically, that's the idea. And so for that,
that would be my thing, because I want to travel some places and all that kind of shit. And I don't
want to have like any kinds of problems fooling me around.
I want to make sure that those problems are self-contained,
that nothing's going to happen, so that I can be somewhere
and don't need to deal with a text somewhere halfway around
the other end of the planet, and I have to deal with stuff.
Because I have to actually go places and
check things out, because it's part of a big future plan.
So, that would be
largely my goal, I think.
Yeah, that makes sense. I have a whole bunch bunch of other goals but mainly it's very quantitative in
nature so i got both of those things working and right now we're kind of uh getting towards that
it's uh it's very good this is awesome having lots of fun yeah yeah by the way it's kind of
funny have you have you read this book called the four-Hour Workweek? No, no, I have not.
That's Tim Ferriss or something like that, right?
Something like that. What's up, Otto? It's been a while.
Yeah, it's been a while.
I think he's also the guy that wrote The 4-Hour Body or something like that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, Tim Ferriss, you're absolutely right.
Tim Ferriss, you're absolutely right.
Yes.
There's a lot of interesting concepts for perspective.
That's what I like about the book.
For example, he has the funniest perspective.
It's like his idea is that if you know how they always say that 80% of your problems come from 20% of your customers.
So he's like, wait a second, if that's true, all I could do is come from 20 of your customers so he's like wait a second if that's true
all i could do is eliminate 20 of my customers and i have 80 less issues that's not a bad trade-off
so it's also like 80 of your revenue comes from 20 of your customers yeah
yeah
but yeah it's it's it's an interesting book to consider um the four hour body i haven't
i haven't read that one um yeah well i listen to them generally but yeah
auto how you been man yeah i've been good i'm good what about you
Yeah, I've been good. What about you?
Good, good. It's been a nice busy year.
What's it called? Do you want to make a prediction for 2026?
That's not in politics, because we already covered that.
Like a prediction of what?
Is it just me or can't I hear Aude?
Just any... Oh, yeah, you can't hear him?
Yeah, yeah, he's talking.
Can you not hear me? Can't I hear anyone? You can't hear him. Yeah. Yeah. He's talking I can hear anyone
Testing
Otto is periodically speaking, so I don't think you can hear him. Do you want to drop him bring him back up? And it's silence.
Testing.
Okay, I can hear things now.
Can you hear me?
Now I can hear you, yes.
Guys, you want to take this to the Discord server?
I'm getting tired of glitches.
I'm going to be honest.
Yeah, actually, on that note, I I was gonna drop off for the night.
This is actually pretty fun. It's good to see you both. Yeah.
And Blyze, it's good to see you too.
But yeah, I'll see you guys later then.
Thanks for having me up here.
Indeed.
Yep.
No problem, man. See you around, dude.
Bye.
Alright, everybody.
We're gonna be going into...
We're doing the daily thing that we do for the advanced members. We're going to be going into, we're doing the daily thing
that we do for the advanced members.
So we're going to be going into
the Noetic Order Discord server right now.
So if you haven't already,
make sure to join.
It's discord.gg forward slash noetic.
Right up there, it's pinned.
Go click that, join that,
and then we will be there
kind of like doing a finish off session
on this basis here.
Yeah.
All right.
Everybody go there right now.
Let's go.
Boom, boom, boom, boom, yeah. Alright, everybody go there right now. Let's go. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Thank you.
Insights
P
