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the sociopoliticotechnocapital machine
Recorded: Jan. 31, 2026 Duration: 3:58:12Space Recording
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Music so
do Thank you. so The Thank you. Music
Music Thank you. I'm going to go to the next episode. Thank you. I'm going to go to the next episode. The Thank you. Hello fellas, can you hear me?
Hello fellas, can you hear me? You guys are super impatient today. Let me know if the audio is fine and then I'll get started. all right cool um
so yeah markets are down a lot today um
i guess we can kind of recap
how this thing has developed over the past few months just from a trader's perspective
so ever since october um when crypto hit its all-time high it's been drastically outperforming
and meanwhile gold is up from like you know 3.3k and equities and nasdaQ and MAG7 are essentially flat over the past three, four months.
And I think it's been a very painful period for people in crypto because
they have a thesis of just like a fundamental thesis of what crypto is.
And despite that entire thesis playing out exactly as they expected, prices are down and another asset is up instead.
And I was talking about this a bit on the last stream.
Markets serve as sort of a fruit-seeking discovery mechanism for
revealed preferences as opposed to stated preferences. That's why price and narrative are two separate things.
And they often track each other as best they can.
But when the two diverge, obviously,
is when opportunity arises.
And it's also when misconceptions get exposed
so i'm speaking kind of um broadly here but i think the only correct way to interpret maybe
not the only correct way i'll just say say my interpretation of what's happened is that crypto, the entire premise of crypto has...
It's very unique in the sense that crypto is the first ideology.
It's the first asset where the only backing is an ideology.
There is nothing in the physical world backing crypto.
It's just a pure idea.
And obviously there's some tech that allows for sort of an enforcement of property rights, if you will.
You know that this coin belongs to who and you can't you know there is no centralized party
overseeing transaction settlement but it doesn't like represent anything in the real world whereas
like other assets they represent you know a bar of gold a bar of steel bar of silver or they are you know a house land equity in a company that is like enforced by
like a legal system um and you know the equity like actually owns physical assets
whereas crypto is like the first ideology as an asset and where I'm going with this is that, um,
you know, I, I feel like it's kind of served its purpose in that it's given, it's, it's let this like concern of dollar debasement and just like irresponsibility of
the fiat system, like it's served its purpose in in alarming it's like sounding the alarm bells
for that idea and at its peak it reached a roughly three trillion dollar market cap
which you know in the grand scheme of things is like very very
small just compared to all the money in the world. What's gold's market cap?
Gold's market cap at 5K is roughly 35 trillion.
So yeah, my point here is that
it served as an alarm bell for this ideology, and it served as an expression
for this ideology. And over the past few years,
both
the East and West have moved more of the store value from fiat into assets.
If you look at the U.S. equities market, it's like $70, $80 trillion, up 50, 60, 70% over the past three years.
And now you look at gold, um, up 250% up another $20 trillion.
I guess my entire thesis is that like,
My entire thesis is that it's allowed people to worry about where they store their money.
And the result is that the West has chosen to store their money in equities for the most part.
And the East is now allocating all their capital into gold and silver.
And I think that realization that crypto prices going up
was broadly a part of Western capital escaping fiat
and not global capital, not Eastern capital,
has been the reason why crypto has been failing recently.
I think U.S. equities stalling over the past three or four months indicates that for the most part,
the West is pretty much tapped out in terms of how much extra fiat it has to allocate.
Meanwhile, there's been a lot of capital flight from China and other eastern countries, and it's gone into metals.
And that also has sucked money from the West into metals as well to Chase.
And very little of that money has gone into crypto to follow and you know i think for the
longest time as a trader i've been playing for this like okay once metals finally pull back
crypto will finally go up and all this speculative capital um like a lot of this is like mercenary
capital that chases momentum will finally rotate back from metals into crypto. So I was playing
for this over the new years and we got a attempted break up to 97k, which failed.
And I think a lot of the people that had this thesis are stopping out this weekend.
Personally, I stopped out of this sort of thesis maybe 10 days ago.
It was after when crypto failed to go up after Greenland resolved.
I had realized that the only opportunity left in crypto was just shorting it.
And the only momentum on the long side
was chasing commodities, essentially.
So I think this is just the rest of the market catching up,
which is also why we've seen just today
Bitcoin finally broke the 80K level.
We saw ETH break down from 3K to 2.2K.
you know,
breakdown from 3K to 2.2K.
A lot of the,
you know,
most vocal
sort of
last defenders of price
were concentrated in ETH
over the past,
you know,
few months.
You could see the ETHVTC level
was like artificially being supported
at around 0.033.
And people like Garrett and Trend Research and others,
you know, just like that small cabal of billionaires,
they each had like maybe a yard of ETH each,
were all hiding in there.
And that finally sort of capitulated this weekend.
It's unclear whether the capitulation
is even done at this point.
There was a pretty nice liquidation
that was quite tradable earlier today,
maybe like an hour or two ago.
But normally when these liquidations happen,
I hold them until the US trading day. But in this case,
I do feel like we're in the midst of a broader phase shift into a new equilibrium where people
realize that crypto is not what it was thought to be and it needs to correct to a new price
and it needs to wash out people that had who carried that misconception
so yeah i decided just to like sell it out pretty quickly and i'm still waiting for even lower um
and this is like i i think what's going the way i interpret this like obviously this is all very
foggy like i feel like when you trade you like you're like walking in like a sandstorm and like
you can see maybe two feet ahead of you or something but like everything's very hazy there's just like so much incomplete information and you're just trying to like be the like you know everyone gets
the same clues hopefully they're like public clues and private clues and hopefully you can
make sense of what you can like tie a narrative around the the bits and pieces of incomplete information you get. And hopefully you can predict what that means
for where the herd is going as a whole,
faster than everyone else.
And if you can, that's what you get paid for by the markets.
And just broadly speaking,
I do believe this trend has been cooking for a very, very long
time where, you know, this is like, obviously like very, this is like very fresh baked idea.
So I apologize if I'm like, it's not as articulate as, as the ideas I usually have. But for the longest time,
the US has been outsourcing work
that has been solved to the rest of the world.
The rest of the world has an oversupply of labor.
And they can just do it for a lot cheaper and they're willing to do a lot of
essentially like dirty work for cheaper um so the u.s has like you know sort of concentrated all
these like high paying higher margin like knowledge service work that hasn't been as
solved as like let's say just mining um metals out of the ground which has been you know we've
been doing for hundreds of years and you know there are a lot of reasons for why this has happened
climate was like a big accelerant but also just like globalization and and like you know just
chasing short-term profits was it was a big sort of were sort of big factors for this. And in that world where like
there's a stable sort of global hegemon
that is able to sort of like,
you know, distribute out the dirty work
and just keep all like the high paying stuff
within itself,
like controlling,
I guess just being the master
of the world of bits and software,
which is essentially like a coordination layer on top of the world of atoms.
That's all essentially what financial assets are.
They're coordination layers that bridge across space and time from real assets,
real assets being just physical things.
That's how you bring things from the future into the present
is you create a financial asset around them. You you create a debt instrument and then you like sell it to someone
and suddenly you have like, you know, you can double count the money. That's essentially how
this thing works. And like in a world where we can trust other people to do the hard, physical,
dirty work, and we own all of the coordination layers and the claims and all that kind of stuff,
all the abstract stuff,
like that stuff just gets super buffed in that regime.
And I guess that's why there's just been like over,
like a huge meta or huge trend of, you know,
financialized things.
The closer you are to the financial layer,
the coordination layer, the abstract bit layer,
the more sort of money and opportunity there was
because you could just, you know, like move huge amounts of things around with just a click of a button.
And that trend and the power of the abstraction layer essentially gets nerfed when global order breaks down.
If these countries are less willing to do business with you and just give you cheap
labor and free stuff or cheaper stuff because they don't trust, let's say, in your currency,
then suddenly the bits layer, the the money layer is less powerful and the physical layer gets a lot more it gets gets rebuffed um and i think that's
like in like a very like this is not a very like like i said this is not i haven't like written
this down i haven't really spoken this much so it's it's kind of like rambly it's not very
articulate but this is just like the vibes i'm feeling. I think crypto is peak,
like the blow-off top of the sort of
financial bits, abstract layer. And we're finally
beginning this reversal where physical, real things
start becoming more and more
expensive, and the abstraction layer on top
essentially is oversaturated with capital.
And I think that's how you can interpret
some of this price action is like,
you know, Mag7 sort of stalling,
crypto's going down.
Like the world of bits,
like the pinnacle assets of the world of bits
have been over allocated. And, like the pinnacle assets of the world of bits have been over allocated.
And now like the constraints, like the bottlenecks of the machine are located in the physical layer.
Like one example is like we don't have enough electricity generation to actually power all the data centers we need in order to keep scaling AI.
Like everyone's realized that a lot of our constraints, like I said, are
physical. And you can see that reflected in a lot of like commodities prices, not just gold and
silver, but like, you know, industrial metals and like oil and all these other things are are repricing are slowly like trending up again and you know
obviously there's a lot of just like retail momentum going on there and as you can see with
the metals price on friday like i think when like a critical mass of people made this realization
and made this shift it like really overshot and corrected. And it's an open question of like, whether that was just like the top of this idea,
or if it was just like a short term sort of overcorrection that like, you know,
takes a few days, takes a few weeks to like reposition and then it just continues on this
trend. But I guess just from like a, a like a narrative perspective it just like makes so much
sense for this like multi-decade sort of thing to finally start reversing and these like these
like multi-decade trends are so they're like very obvious in hindsight to catch but obviously like
in the moment they're very difficult just because they take up so much amount of somebody's life. It's like, you know, if you're 40, 30 years
old and like there's been a trend that's existed for 20 years of your life, like that is pretty
much all of what reality encapsulates to you. So it's just so hard for you to fathom anything else. So it does
take like a good amount of just like autistic contrarian like imagination to actually come to
an idea that it could reverse. And it takes a lot of like theory of mind and understanding of like
sentiment and positioning and all this other stuff to actually express that contrarian idea as a trade. Like Peter Thiel has been early, he's been calling
for this shift for decades and you know, it's cost him a lot of opportunity for being too early.
opportunity for being too early.
He owned 10% of
meta, and he sold it
at the IPO in
2012 for $2 billion,
and that's worth $200 billion
now. Obviously, he's still doing fine,
but it just goes to show
there are two separate skill sets
that are involved in this game.
Obviously, you have to have, I think,
a very strong
fundamental first-order understanding of reality.
But you also need a very strong theory of mind and a very strong understanding of like, oh, it's not enough to just know when something is true.
You also have to know when other people are going to realize that this thing is true.
And that's like the only real way to make money doing this.
I think crypto participants are a very strong theory of mind.
They have a very good understanding of the vibes and the positioning and the sentiment.
But they don't really have an understanding of the world that they live in.
And it's understandable because they're so young.
They don't really know anything.
And they're just honed in on these like super micro trends whereas like a lot of people maybe
people like peter teal might be a lot of like people have a good understanding of the world
but they don't have like a good understanding of like how the crowd is going to interpret this
thing just because maybe they've just been thinking so differently from the crowd for so long they're
not tapped into like the the pulse and the heartbeat of the machine that like it doesn't
they can't actually profit or make money off of um the way they profit off the idea is not from
short-term trading it's from like building it's like from founding and building and allocating
capital and like longer-term place which is like what those types of people tend to move towards.
Anyway, I'm kind of rambling here.
But yeah, like the price action over the past few months has only confirmed,
it's just like strengthened this idea in my mind that like I've been,
I considered it a possibility this summer when i just started like when i took a break from just staring at charts
every single day and it just like keeps getting confirmed in my eyes um so yeah like short-term price moving aside, I don't see why crypto, I guess, needs to exist.
I think when people actually start being scared of what's going on and they start actually trying to flee their country.
And obviously, Bitcoin is just so much more poor. Like if you want to like,
I think
how much is like a million dollars worth of gold?
I think it's like,
I think $30 million of gold is like 30 kilos of gold or something.
It's like 75 pounds.
It's just like actually impossible to like take on a flight and leave.
So like very wealthy people actually have a hard time moving money around.
It's obviously like no big deal for, you know, a bigger institution
that can just like hire armed guards and like armored vans
and, you know, a private jet to move their capital around.
But for like the sort of like middle class, lower class, rich Bitcoin is the only real
solution to do that.
So like I do see like a natural bid for crypto assets coming when that sort of class of people
gets forced to like flee and that that sort of class of people gets forced
to like flee.
And that sort of that class of people is like forced into capital flight.
But I don't know if we're like near that level of panic yet.
So in the meantime, like crypto works just as well when it's, you know, $1 trillion versus $2 trillion.
In the meantime, you know, it's overpositioned
from Western retail, and the East really isn't touching it.
And, you know, it's got all these other, like, head these other headwinds with the four-year cycle ending.
And yeah, it's not a good combination of factors.
But I'm open to hearing y'all's interpretation.
Again, I appreciate you guys listening to this ramble of mine, but that's just kind of how I've seen these markets for the past week.
For the longest time after, I mean, I think the most obvious trade over the past few months was like just longing on DS31.
Because you had this like credible narrative of like tax loss selling and fund redemptions.
And there was at least a glimmer of opportunity for crypto to bounce from the new year,
which it tried to.
And we also had the removal of the MSCI exclusion that was supposed to happen on Jan 14th.
exclusion that was supposed to happen on Jan 14th.
And yeah, now that that's failed and metals are where they are,
it's just, yeah, I mean, I feel like,
I feel like it's a pretty clear signal what the market is telling us about
who's left to buy crypto and like what crypto actually represents in the grand
scheme of what's happening in
reality. So yeah, like, you know, always open to discussing if you guys have any questions
or counter arguments, or if any of you guys have anything to say, you know, let's talk
about it. Um, you have this guy named okay market. How's it going, man?
market how's it going man um no i like your i like your take um but i mean do you think it could be
somewhat biased with like the correlation of the four-year cycle because you know a lot of people
sold close to october november and then as price goes down, like all these, you know, bearish theses come out like,
oh, like pivot from atoms to bits. Whereas in reality, it's just like part of this,
whatever correlated four year cycle that just keeps playing out. And then eventually when
there's another fiscal crisis or bank run or something, the central banks have to print again like you know DTC and other speculative assets get bid up
again yeah so I mean I like the question because I think it like it really highlights something
about markets I think it's very important to understand is that like these are very complicated
machines and they're like essentially multicellular organisms.
Like markets are like,
if you imagine like each individual participant is like a cell in this
multicellular organism,
that's like very multidimensional and it's,
it's impossible for a single cell to interpret what the entire multicellular
organism is doing.
you know,
oftentimes people try to
reduce narratives into like one thing, whereas actually it's like 30 different things going on.
Like every participant has his or her own reason for buying and selling. And when all the reasons
sort of like align, it tends to move in one direction or the other so like and when they're like a lot of times
like the reasons all like some of them are bullish some of them are bearish and the price doesn't
move because of that so yes like i think that the four-year cycle for ogs is a big factor for
price moving down i don't think it's like the only factor
because like not only do OGs have to sell,
but also like new entrants have to stop bidding.
And obviously what influences like why OGs sell
is different than the factors that influence
why a new entrant would bid.
That's why I think like,
that's why I keep stressing why it's important
to have like a good theory of mind and also like a good understanding of the market participants.
Because like, you have to know like, how much each cohort of participant matters to price,
and like how they think, because like, they're going to think in uncorrelated and often orthogonal
ways. But like, right now, I guess I'm coming... It seems like there's a reason for
OGs to sell and there's a reason for new entrants not to buy. So because there's more supply and
less demand, that could be an explanation. Obviously, you can name all the factors you
want and it'll still be overdetermined just because it's so complex. It's so multicellular.
It's impossible just for one person to like explain this is why
something's happening but yeah like this this is like my best explanation for why some of these
things are happening no that's cool i appreciate the take thanks
how are you positioned what do you yeah what do you what do you think about everything
i think it's probably just like um the i think like 100k was the mythical quote-unquote target
for crypto and especially bitcoin right like ever since it was founded after it failed to be like a currency,
everybody was like 100K, 100K,
like that's the mythical number.
And then when it actually happened,
this cycle with Trump
and like deregulating everything,
you know, a lot of OGs definitely are selling.
And then it's kind of like,
it just has to distribute now
to like a longer timeframe holders or like it just needs to be spread
out more basically and i think like obviously with trump and the volatility and all this
the kind of like the fraying of the global liberal order whatever like it's not um it's not really
helping helping that but i do think like um if central banks are going to keep printing
which seems to be like the global macro trend whenever there's a problem like there will be
another crisis there will be another war or pandemic or something um speculative assets
will get bid and if if bitcoin is like more distributed by then, it should get a bid.
But if it doesn't, well, then I think like the thesis for long term sort of values probably failed.
But right now, I think it's just being distributed.
And then, you know, just being distributed.
Okay. Okay, so I think just as this metals rotation was a validation slash invalidation point for some types of participants,
I think another invalidation slash validation point in the future will be when the Fed starts cutting rates, how does Bitcoin respond?
Or how does crypto respond?
And if crypto doesn't go up from that, there's probably another leg lower.
Yeah, agreed.
Yeah, so that's really the next like sort of equilibrium shift,
phase shift comes in.
And who knows when that'll be,
maybe like three months, six months.
But yeah.
All right, appreciate your inputs.
Syla.
Yeah, what's up?
Sorry, I'm just scarfing down to protein bar how you doing thinky um
i think a little bit of what you say is on point i think and you know we've seen a bunch of threads
from this stuff and it's maybe not as interesting for you know from the perspective you know whether
you're a retail guy playing with you know six figs or you know if you're a fund that's kind
of discretional it's maybe not so interesting if you don't have access to
deal flow and kind of the right place to allocate. But I think a lot of what's
happened in crypto is this idea that you could just
have infinite tokens and these would all go up and you'd be able to find an easy
10x because you have a mandate or you're just retail
and so you can ape into fart coin or
house coin or whatever was just never a sustainable thing because more money is always leaving than
is coming into that game. And so you can't find new fish that are going to sustain that.
So I've been talking about that for a little while. And then I think in crypto where you see
the smarter money moving that is a little bit more sustainable is more of the neobanks or money plumbing or fintech 3.0 wave, which unfortunately, just for a lot of retail, it's not as really investable in some standardized way.
There's no, hey, buy this token, buy Farcoin, buy Housecoin.
That's not really as much of a play off of this thesis at least.
But there's a lot of VC money coming in, and the numbers do kind of justify the hype there.
So I think this idea that you can have 10 or 20 tokens was also just very damaging. And we're
still kind of seeing the pain from, hey, all the buying pressure used to just go into Bitcoin.
You look at these numbers, I'm sure you've seen them, but number of tokens launch per year, and it's just skyrocketed. And I think that was very,
very painful, right? If a lot of this bid went into Bitcoin, maybe Bitcoin would have held 100k,
you know, maybe would have broken 100k easier. And fundamentally, prices, especially for what
is basically a mimetic asset, right? You know, gold, silver is a little different, and copper is
a little bit different. But gold, Bitcoin, the dollar on a mass scale, these are like mimetic assets at the end of the day.
So it's relatively path determinant. So in a different world where things shake out differently,
it's not like, oh yeah, maybe we'd be up to 150 and now we'd be down to 100. No, who knows? Maybe
you catch a bid from traditional investors in a way that doesn't happen yeah i
i like this point that um just because the price of certain tokens is going down it doesn't mean
the technology has been a failure i think i think there have been very prominent winners from all of
this obviously tethered circle and binance and coinbase and like robin hood have
have drastically benefited from this like tether is the largest owner of one of the largest owners
of like gold now in the world and yeah it's just not it's not capturable by it's just like it kind
of just goes to show that the token model has kind of failed. Whereas like, yes, there is like some tech that, that, uh, captures value.
And I think a lot of, a lot of this is like crypto failing is actually a
reflection of the sort of K shaped economy.
Um, just like doing its thing.
Like a lot of the reasons why crypto did so well was because of just like doing its thing. Like a lot of the reasons why crypto did it so well was because of just like
this mass retail stimulus after COVID and money has re-concentrated into the
hands of the few.
And there's not that much just like,
you know,
in the hands of the median person.
And it just,
I think that narrative gets reflected very well in just like, yeah,
retail hype,
just like looking like the euthanasia rollercoaster chart that light posted
where it just like success successively smaller and smaller peaks.
Each of these events sort of serve as a redistribution
from the many into the hands of the few.
And like philosophically, it like, it makes me think that like K-shaped
economy, whatever you want, K-shaped anything is like the natural order of things.
That is like evolution evolution naturally selecting out losers
and picking winners that will reproduce for the next generation um but yeah that's maybe that
might be a political thing that uh we don't have to talk about now but yeah like anyway all right
no i think i think i agree with a lot of what you say. I think the K-shaped thing is also important because a lot of crypto moving up, right?
This is back when, you know, crypto was $100 billion or, you know, $200 billion or $500 billion asset class.
And so if you have some of these mega funds, right, if you have A16, if you have Sequoia, if you have, you know, whoever else punting funds in, you know, you can move it up a lot.
Another thing that people also, you also, and kind of a lot
of people were very confused about what happened with gold or silver these past couple of days,
gold or silver are basically low float, high FDV tokens. Gold is like technically a whatever
trillion dollar asset, but not really. Most of that gold's in your mom's jewelry box, right?
That's not really monetizable. Or even a lot of the ingots at central banks, like that's not for political reasons.
Most of that stuff is not monetizable.
And so it acts a lot more like, you know, low float, high FDV token than people realize.
And so you really have to be quite careful when you're in these positions,
right? I think silver and copper, probably, you know, not financial advice, but probably still
some room to run because there are industrial uses. Gold is more of a just a meme. And there
are a lot of it is like, okay, you know, what's happening geopolitically? I actually am still
relatively bullish, long termterm horizon, Bitcoin,
but I'm one of those guys who just like buys every once in a while
when I feel good about it and never really sells.
For a lot of the reasons that you mentioned, right?
Like if you want to flee Beijing, you can't take your gold with you, right?
I mean, we're starting to see more.
We're starting to see more.
This is also kind of just a feature of authoritarian regimes.
Like in China, we saw that a small coup basically got thwarted last week,
and Xi kicked out of the top military committees, axed everybody but one guy.
And so it's just like those are a little bit more brittle, and you won't see the cracks in it.
Whereas in the U.S., the dual party system and just the televisation of politics means that like every single week,
there's an economic incentive for multiple different players up and down the stack,
whether that's a Twitter account, whether that's CNN or, you know, MSNBC or whatever to show you,
hey, you know, Trump's America's failing. And so there's just much more incentive to see that
stuff go up and down.
But I think the people that I know in places like China or whatever still don't feel super comfortable.
For a long time, I think, there's been this meme of the American center of humiliation.
And I think this is primarily driven by people who want to feel something.
I think it's more complicated than that.
I think we're moving into a more uncertain world. I think Bitcoin still is a very interesting asset in
that world. If you go to a lot of small places in Africa, you go to Cairo, you go to Latin America,
you go to Southeast Asia, you could exchange Bitcoin, right? So it has that same moneyness
that gold has. I'm also a big believer that one of the things...
Yeah, sorry.
I just want to just address.
I think you said two points there.
I wanted to address both of them.
I just forgot what the first thing you said was.
First thing I said, I think,
was a little bit about gold and silver.
Right, yeah, right, right.
So, yeah, I think the biggest...
I don't know if it's a black pillar or red pillar, but like
every asset is essentially low float, high FDV.
Yeah, I think that's what makes it fun, I guess, to trade against just because like
it's very nebulous actually how much supply is like readily available and how much just
takes a long time for people to like sort of dig out of their couch cushions and and and send into the market um your second point about
authoritarian regimes is yeah like i think technology really shifts like what is viable
in the meta of politics and political systems.
Like one example that I really like was that like in the Middle Ages during feudalism,
the invention of the castle decentralized a lot of power because it was a lot easier to
defend the siege than it was to besiege a castle.
And the invention of the canon nerfed castles a lot and it was a centralizing
force um because it just allowed you know kings to actually unify a lot of land and break down
the castles so i do think like my point being there is like technology in terms of like
surveillance technology and internet and this like sort of distribution of, it's a centralizing force.
And we are in a giant experiment of how centralized can it get and still work as a system.
And I think China is obviously towing the line with that authoritarianism again.
And it's kind of reframed that I don't really see authoritarianism as strictly good or bad.
Obviously, there are trade-offs to the individual, but there can be net aggregate benefits to the group that is of collective realization that the individual and the collective are two separate organisms.
And even though the organization does have some fractal properties, sorry, the multicellular organism has some fractal properties that the individual can interpret and understand.
It has a lot of properties that are so abstract.
And so it just operates in like a dimension that like an individual person can't really comprehend.
And the only real way that, you know, someone can sort of interface and plug into this multidimensional machine is through markets,
multidimensional machine is through markets, is through these prices that like sort of give like
flat one dimensional compressions of different aspects of this like multicellular sort of
machine, which is why like I've named this sort of stream or whatever, like the socio-politico-techno-capital machine is because I see four main pillars
of this complex organism.
Socio is the cultural element,
politico is the political element,
tech is tech, and capital is finance.
And it's just interesting to see how all...
I think a lot of...
This is kind of Peter Thiel's take.
A lot of the kind of Peter Thiel's take, like a lot of the sort of postmodern condition has been hyper specialization in each of these things.
And now we're kind of seeing a convergence of these four pillars again.
Like I think crypto is a very interesting example of tying together technology and capital markets and, you know, the cultural element.
And, you know, with the last election, you know, the cultural element. And, you know,
with the last election, it's been a political element. So yeah, it's, I think a lot more things will be, you know, conversions of all four of these things together that can help you sort of
explain where the overall machine or system is moving. But yeah, enough of that rant. Next speaker,
Frank. Hey, man, I just that rant. Next speaker. Frank.
Hey man, I just wanted to hear your thoughts on AI.
Do you have any
specific questions? Yeah, like what's it going to
do to the market?
I don't feel like I have anything
that insightful
to add over what everyone else is saying.
Yeah, I know you've been messing around a lot with vibe coding apps and stuff like that.
Happy to hear what you have to say about it.
I just feel like it's going to drag everything up.
So listening to this has been interesting because you're obviously really smart
and you have a very bearish take on things.
But yeah, I think most people on the planet don't realize how good the models have become
and what they can enable.
And for that reason, everything should basically reprice up.
for that reason um everything should you know basically reprice up like i think anthropic
should reprice up and just keep getting bigger and bigger in adoption um yeah so yeah so this is
like this highlights an interesting point that i was mentioning earlier is that like i think you
can have like a fundamental idea but like the expression of the idea matters just as much as the actual idea.
So like in crypto, like, you know, you might be bullish on this ideology of fiat being
losing trust, but, you know, maybe the token prices didn't go as much as let's say equity
and tether, or maybe being like an A16Z and just like, you know, sort of doing these like token sort of
things and fleecing retail. Like the expression of that idea can vastly change your outcomes.
Just like, you know, you might've had this idea that, oh, the whole world's going to move from
bits into atoms like in 2015. But if you decided to long gold from that, like that was a retarded move because
you just underperformed everything up until 2024. Like imagine being Peter Schiff for a decade
and having this, he's completely on the ball, completely correct, but he had the wrong expression.
He doubled down on Bitcoin, on gold instead of Bitcoin. And and yes he's up money now but like from
2012 2013 like gold is only up like 12 and a half percent a year like he if if he okay so that's
i guess my point here just to let you speak after is like like you can be bullish on ai like
fundamentally affecting the world but it it might not be as surgical of an expression as just like
buying everything as opposed to like buying a very specific expression of the ai bet
if i had to articulate my expression um i think america cannot stand to lose the ai race against
china and so i think if the markets were to, they would have to turn the money printers on.
And since AI touches basically everything,
like all the major businesses in America,
I think we could just see a world where everything goes up
because we can't, like the justification will be,
well, we can't fall behind.
AI is extremely expensive. Like the CapEx is extremely expensive like the capex is extremely
expensive but the train just won't stop um and so i don't know what that means for the next admin
i joke with my friends like yeah every everybody's gonna be a liberal pretty soon like within the
next year or two like it's it's it might end up bad but for, I don't know. Again, that's how I see it potentially playing out.
I think that idea is consensus.
I don't think, I think the expression really matters again
for how exactly the admin will respond to this,
where the money will flow,
and then the second and third order effects
of where the money flows.
It's not clear to me that it'll end up looking like 2021, where everyone just got a stimulus
check and they just ape their money into crypto.
I don't think it's that obvious.
Yeah, everything went up from 2010 to 2020, but a lot of things went up a lot more than other things.
So like being very precise on what particular things those things will be is where all the juice in alpha is.
I guess if your idea is they're going to print a lot,
there are other ways to express a bearish view on the dollar
than to just buy one particular asset.
Yeah, I'm not particularly bullish on crypto
more than I am on just markets,
specifically the Mag7, stuff like that.
But I think crypto has a sneaky way
of always finding
its fucking way into the narrative um i'm most worried about bitcoin and quantum personally
uh because the more i just use all these ai tools the more it just feels like what i thought was
impossible yesterday is now feels possible and so the the logical conclusion i come to is and
that's me i'm like a retard so I but if all these
top scientists and engineers in the world are also using these tools and they're like galaxy brains
and now they're accelerated um yeah like quantum my favorite announcement of the last month on
anything was just eat saying that they're gonna work on quantum and I can't help but feel that
that's what's dragging bitcoin down and the fact that it's just not part of the AI race as well.
What I wonder is, can on-chain do well?
Can other stuff in crypto do well in pockets?
Or do you think it's just going to be, yeah, like a constant reprice down until it hits fair value?
yeah um i think quantum is um like to the point we were talking about earlier like quantum is
Yeah.
one of the factors for why people may be selling or some people may not be bidding
it's hard to say like it's the biggest factor
um with regards to on chain like i think the catalyst for that is just like
you need unsophisticated masses of people to acquire capital um and i think whatever leads
to that happening will be bullish for on chain but until that happens it does just seem like
the natural order of things is just for like a K-shaped sort of sputtering out of things
that like things that like can't self-sustain things that can't replicate just end up dying
out it's like kind of in my mind I view it as like you know just like natural order this is
how evolution works this is like it you know absence any new things into the system. That's just what it trends towards.
And like, it's hard to say like what the fair value is.
Like I can say for sure, like for confidence, like for Bitcoin,
it's got to be like higher than the last cycle low, because there are people
that just like, you know, they're, they're undeniably
they're undeniably more like convicted people in bitcoin than there were before
um and you know when i call for these things it's usually like a local bottom
so like you know you should like i was gonna say that but i wanted to be respectful first thing
this is like all right bottom bottom bottom it sounds like one of those yeah i mean i i longed
it earlier today i just sold it and i'm you know i'm happy but um yeah like i i feel like if you
have this idea of like okay i need to get out of the dollar like people are too comfy in it it's
been you know a multi-fucking generational positioning into this thing and it's now
finally leaving like i think it's important to ask yourself like where are the logical and like reasonable and
Things that I believe in like where's that money gonna flow?
Yeah, I think
I think it's a it's one of my thesis real ever since Trump came into office
It's the popular opinion on this is wavered constantly. But until
it fails me, I'm just going to keep sticking with it that Trump says he wants to pump assets.
And so far, somehow, some way he's like figured it out. S&P tapped that, you know, 7k. Again,
crypto is lagging right now. But I like that's his scorecard. I'm kind of just thinking he just keeps bailing us out,
which becomes more and more unpopular every day of an opinion.
But I,
yeah,
this could be the one time where it doesn't happen so far in this admin,
but it just feels like that's what this dude wants to do.
And he just figures it out.
Like,
I don't know.
Yeah.
I think,
I think he can have like a,
a large factor in,
in like local moves.
Just like with Saylor, right?
Saylor clearly looks at prices every day and defends certain prices and times his orders
tactically so that things don't break.
Trump is like that and i i do think like an interesting point
to add is that like you know capitalism is a very an evolution as a whole is a very cold and ruthless
process and you know this this trump guy like owes no like spiritual allegiance or loyalty to crypto.
It's just they had the deepest pockets for that last election cycle.
So he had to pander to them.
And so far as, so long as crypto has that sort of,
it doesn't take much to influence the political system.
The crypto super PAC was maybe $350 million.
So as long as it can scrounge together, the people that care about it enough can scrounge
together another $350 million, for the midterms, the next election cycle, Trump will do his
best to push things along.
Maybe this clarity bill or this stablecoin bill could be a catalyst for short-term price action.
But I do agree. I love your take on we need a lot of unsophisticated capital to acquire large
amounts of money. I love this. Yeah, that's what we're looking for i mean the only way
the only lever they can kind of pull for that is like the socio-political lever
so like that the fuentes type like populists or like on the left aoc b, Bernie camp of populists to like,
to like influence elections and, and, and implement some, some sort of redistribution.
Like I do think a lot of those like counter trend sort of events are likely to
happen that will, you know, be very good, um,
for crypto to capture if it's in the right place and time for that. But yeah,
like, uh, it's kind of far off it may
not be far off in the distance i don't track these things that closely but yeah like it's an i just
think like the takeaway is like there's nothing else like especially like if you are someone
trained in crypto like there's nothing better to do than to just log in every day and just like
be plugged in on what's going on and like being
patient and like waiting for just like glaringly obvious opportunities to fall into your lap
like everyone else especially if you're like lucky enough to have you know enough capital to be
emancipated from labor you can afford to like live off of whatever capital you have like it's not hard to develop a
self-sustaining system to capture those opportunities um and just like yeah grow in the
system because like those things like increasingly they're kind of inevitable right there's just like
not enough people doing that because like everyone is sort of everyone is just like not paying attention um but yeah all right let's
get some more people up in here thanks g insightful stuff yeah it's good conversation man
um papaga quant how's it going oh
so why do you still scalp
um you know i'm not i'm not gonna say no no to money on the floor.
Yeah.
No, I mean, it's obviously a good choice when kind of price insensitive flows come through.
I guess following the Grand Exchange,
you very often kind of talked about SPF
and a lot of these capital allocators
that just kind of decide the right moment to go along
something. And I assume you're at the stage where, you know, the amount of capital that you have is
like, it's like probably a better use of time to try to get better at that game than, you know,
scalp a few seven figs, you know, even though it's like psychologically valuable that, you know,
you're always at like portfolio all-time highs and it's like a high
sharp strategy it's like not why it gets you to the promised land if you like want to get to like
a billion dollars or something i think these things are not mutually exclusive um
like yeah i agree that so i guess what you're referencing is for the speakers that
aren't aware like there's this famous quote um in the in caroline's journal um
about how at while working at ftx they realized that the money doesn't matter really
trading a few bips of edge back and forth but all the juice
is like finding out when you should go when the market's going up and going balls long before that
and like that is a i think that is the truth of things is like
that's it's just where all the money is made that's where all the things is like that's just where all the money is made
that's where all the big decisions matter that's where the machine rewards
you the most for pricing in your information into it the thing is like
you do have to be plugged into the machine in order to do this that you
have to just be more sophisticated than everyone else in as many
ways as possible.
So like the ways that opportunities come to you might look like short term
things.
They might look like longterm things.
And you know,
at the end of the day,
you're just trying to like grow as quickly as possible.
So yeah,
I don't think like short term trading,
I think like short term trading and-term trading can come at odds, but it's like not
irreconcilable. Like obviously you should short-term trade when it's worth it too. And
you should always like take time to, you know, not look at the short-term price movements and
just think about what your thoughts actually are like where the ball's moving
the big picture of things just as it's important to like you know if you're just like a if you tend
to be a deep thinker you do also have to spend some time just like staring at like the micro
movements and like understanding you know what everyone thinks um and how markets are reacting
to certain things because that gives a lot of information as well so yeah i do think it's like a balance but they don't come necessarily i think i'm on the same
page that like observing the markets and its behaviors is like super important support study
like the past and and what's what's what's happened and even at the micro level i think
the usefulness is more in terms of understanding when there's interest in something.
Like if you're always plugged in, always checking like what's moving in the markets,
always checking like what's having volume or volatility is probably like a sign that people are spending some economically valuable time in that market.
So it's kind of a sign that maybe that could have like a significant price appreciation.
But I think it's
like if you get rewarded like it's after i think after a certain like portfolio level it becomes
and especially if you're good at it right like it becomes like a almost like a golden handcuff
because you're so good at like extracting short-term games out of the market that you don't
like the hard part is like longing something being
wrong on it immediately because like i think the the problem with like having long-term positions
is that if they were consensus you wouldn't have a good entry so like almost by definition you're
oftentimes if especially if you haven't done it before you're gonna be long on a position like wrong on a position is this too so like no it's not it is isn't it it's not it's not i don't know who you're talking about it's not
i know who you are it's not me i don't know who you're talking about all right well i guess my
point to you is like i don't think this is like a legitimate problem like i don't think it's like
it's kind of like complaining that like your lobster's too juicy and your steak's too buttery
like i'm talking i make so much money scalping no no i'm not making as much money longing
like long term like i don't think these things are like actual legitimate problems like i think
if you're smart and you're actually profitable, like you'll figure out the right balance.
But yeah,
it is like a balancing act that,
that like you're constantly calibrating,
but I don't think it's just like one or the other.
You kind of just got to reflect on your own system.
Is there anything that you are convicted about?
You know,
are you thinking about that problem?
This is very sneaky of you to like come up with a new Twitter account just
to talk to you.
this is brother.
Brother,
this is not my, I've always is brother i've always been i've
always been this guy if you look at my profile it's me i link literally link this profile in my
in my telegram so i knew i knew you sounded familiar dog that like sort of nordic like
it was like a flatness in your voice or something about it anyway i appreciate the questions man
yeah i'm sorry okay i don't want to betray your trust like
this again but yeah thanks okay all right um zero x chris yeah so i was gonna say and uh thanks for
bringing me up here um i was gonna say first of all caroline uh caroline was uh biased i mean
at the end of the day she didn't have like the liquidation engine was turned off for her Alameda accounts. So I guess it's quite easy for her to take risky positions
and, you know, give advice when in fact, you know, she couldn't get liquidated. But aside from that,
I think to add on to what you guys were saying earlier, even if you're taking long term trades,
and you know, you still need to be there every every day because once you see it all over the timeline, your entry is already bad pretty much.
Of course, it can still go up after you see it all over Twitter, but the time to be making these positions is based on your own thoughts, monitoring the market every day.
Now, in down periods like this, nobody's
saying, you know, stay glued to the chart every single minute of the day. Don't go outside.
But definitely have, you have to feel the market. Is there a question here or are you just
trying to emphasize a point? I don't know. I'm new to this space, man. I was just,
you know, carrying the conversation forwards. Okay, I wanted to like mention
around one of your points around like Caroline,
you know, not really knowing what she's doing
and like they didn't have liquidation.
I think this is like a misconception
that a lot of people have towards
like the people that ran it up super high
and then went bust.
Like, I think there's like a bias
for people to paint them as like incompetent,
like idiots where like... Oh no, quite the opposite, the opposite. But it definitely makes it easier to paint them as incompetent idiots.
Oh no, quite the opposite.
But it definitely makes it easier when you can't get liquidated, but they were still elite tier traders.
Yeah, it's very hard to go from nothing to 10 yards.
Like Suzu too, it's a very like spectacular feat um of of of of like even though like they ended up
poorly um there there are many parts of like the sizing game and capturing edge where like you can
have two people can have the exact same ideas but one of them just like is a lot more aggressive and
pushes the boundaries of sizing and you can end end up with two, three, four orders of magnitude of capital more than the other person.
And I think that's why people like Soros and Druck are so good.
like you know like getting that getting the edge is like the first step but it's like the it's like
Getting the edge is the first step.
not even most of the game once you get the edge because like monetizing the edge through sizing
um it really is like the biggest difference between the biggest winners and losers so i do
think i do think there's like there's something to be learned and like there's a certain level
of respect you have to have for like people that like are able to run it up to that size like even someone like james winn who's like you know like
listening to him articulate his points like you know he's not the most sophisticated guy but like
getting like just like mathematically speaking like getting from like a few thousand to like
a hundred million like you have to win so many coin flips and like yes like you know if
a hundred million people do it there's got to be one winner but also it's like there is some
elements of like truth and like skill to what he's doing even though the the total system may
not be like you know the best and they're like glaring holes in some areas. But yeah, yeah, appreciate your points, Doug.
I would appreciate if like when people come up,
they have like a question or like a discussion point.
A lot of times like I've noticed these things
kind of devolve into people just,
not trying to call you out,
but like devolve into people just like coming up
and just like, oh, here's a platform for me to get on the soapbox and just start like rambling about something but
yeah um all right uh next person adrian yo um so i just want to ask i don't know if you've been if you've like come around anything about
quantum but i just want to ask like what do you if you have any ideas about it like what do you
think about it like in relation to ai and most like most importantly crypto actually because
like that's that's like should i say said headline somewhat the headline of a lot
of things about crypto these days but like what's what's your opinion about it
where are you from you have an interesting accent
oh I'm from Nigeria I'm from I don't think I have anything that insightful to
add on quantum outside like I think a lot of people have
said some good things on it.
So I'd recommend you read theirs.
But yeah, it's clearly
a factor in Bitcoin
price especially. But yeah, I don't have
anything interesting to add there.
0xRiver.
Yeah, it was good thank you this is good long time man have you been thanks i've been good i've been chilling i was gonna ask what you what you think about discord think about
discord ipo i didn't know they're ipo in discord yeah it's gonna be like in march okay interesting what is it what is it trading at you know d and dick uh it's like 14 it's gonna
be like it's gonna be like 14 bill valuation it seems like my first take is that it's gonna like
go up and then bleed down like Figma or something.
But yeah, I haven't looked into it that much.
It's like a retail
favorite name,
but I think it bleeds down.
It's like Circle 2. It'll
launch up.
The reason for that is
it's a low float,
high supply,
and there's just a lot of short-term demand, and it'll be a flavor of the month for like a few months, and then,
you know, it'll go down. That's how these things usually go.
Yeah, I mean, I have no, I don't have a fundamental thesis on it. Like,
maybe it's very undervalued at 14 billion. I haven't looked into it. Do you have a view on Discord?
Every single retail IPO has gone down since launch, like last two years.
What has?
If you look at all these hot IPOs with a lot of retail interest from Robinhood and stuff,
all of them have been basically zeros.
This is not true. What are you talking about? Look at Reddit.
Reddit and Corrieve, those are basically the ones. them have been basically what are you talking about look at reddit i mean reddit reddit and
core weave those are basically the ones but other than like figma circle yeah but figma's
dog that is that thing figma's us
discord not ass man how is discord now you're i at now you have some brain cells what revenues does discord make
right they have one bill revenue what are you talking about they have one bill revenue and
it's all subscription based i think so you're longing in the world you're longing it yes okay
this time i'm gonna play i think it's gonna be like ready where it's gonna come out it's gonna
go up from the ipo and then it's gonna nuke back down and it's going to consolidate for like five, six months. And then it's going to slow grind higher. So what comparable company are using,
you know, revenue multiple to value it? I'm not, I just think it's good.
Just good, bro. It's going to be, it's going to be a cook. All right. I mean, I agree. It might
be a cook. I think if it's a cook, it like gets in date. Like what happens is that it's at 14B.
It gets traded to 2B, opens at like 24 billion
and then like trades up for one day
and then it gets absolutely like pile of shorts.
It's going to be like an absolute like hall of fame,
like funding short.
Like what like these pod shops will do,
they'll try to short it and use it as like a short leg
for their longs i mean like a speculative i'm gonna i'll go on cnbc and start like showing
this so it's gonna go higher don't worry about it it's it's i think it's like not even good
because it doesn't have a theme behind it what's the theme for discord it's been private for so
long there's gonna be so many vcsCs that are eager to dump it on Open.
It's hard to see how they even get the book filled for it to go up on IPO.
At least with Circle, if you think about Circle, they've had the perfect timing with the
market structure, sorry, the Genius Bill that sent it up like 300%.
There's literally zero theme there's nothing no other
sector like it's just a retail like the the ipos that you want to pay you have no like i i think
you like what are you saying bro what are you saying discord is one of the greatest platforms
in this generation i think every single human being in the like not the world like almost
everyone's using it everyone every single, every single kid is using Discord.
The next generation of individuals are all going to use Discord.
I think it's like, I think it's pretty obvious.
Like, I don't, I don't know what you, I don't know what you're talking about.
And they also have one of the best subscription based model and VC funds
love subscription based models.
Like they have concurring revenue every single year.
That's, that's amazing.
They love seeing that.
You kind of convinced me to long it river no i'm i'm gonna go balls deep in this i think it's gonna be i think it's gonna be a book i think it's it's gonna be so obvious because you're gonna look at
it in like four years and you're like wait this platform that every single human in the like the
united states use everyone even the u.s pentagon was using discord
when they were doing the iran missiles like they were using discord it's funny this is like an
interesting like commentary about how um how assets like not only trade to their i guess like
fundamental like earnings or book value or whatever but but it's like, it also prices in this like ideology.
And, you know, obviously like, if you think about like what the token millennial asset
was to own, like Reddit makes a lot of sense.
And Discord as like the token, Discord and like Roblox as like the token Zoomer asset
is an interesting angle.
I don't even like care what the fundamentals are but um for just that reason alone just like people like you know they just want to
own tesla they don't really care about anything that it does like i could see a case for that sort
of same energy being applied to discord just having it seen it work so many times like i i you know i
mean assuming it launches at like a reasonable price
it seems like a fair thesis but i appreciate you you know bringing this to my attention i'll look
into it more yeah it's the same like robot i remember the first time i came i was literally
telling you i was like i'm full i have full ported roblox like roblox was so free i think it's i think
discord is going to be the same scenario how much did you make on roblox or so free i think it's i think discord is going to be the same scenario how much did
you make on roblox or percentage was it that it wasn't that much because back then i didn't have
that much money i was like low seven figs so i um my like stock portfolio was only like i only put
like 150k in roblox that was like everything but it wasn't that much so i only made like 450. it
was i sold it earlier though
i sold around like 90 i didn't catch that like runs it once how old are you again i remember
last time i talked to you you were like 15. 15 is fucking bro i was good i asked him i was 20 now
i'm 21 okay it was like a year ago okay okay got it got it i mean i think it's like super interesting like looking at every
class of um you're clearly like part of this zoomer class investor that's like
done quite well for its own reasons that is like i guess distinct from my class distinct from like
a class ahead of me it's just interesting uh it's a lot more like narrative than like ideology and vibes
based i guess like every new generation is a lot more ideology and narrative and vibes based maybe
that's just a growing trend but yeah you know like congrats you know i think last time we talked to
you it was maybe like two years ago so i'm i'm glad you're doing well man
it's been it's been a good two years ago, so I'm glad you're doing well, man.
It's been a good two years.
Fucking Trump launched that token.
It's been Jenny.
That's awesome.
Glad to hear.
Thanks for coming up.
All right, Mr. Minecki.
That's a throwback.
How's it going, man?
Good, good.
How are you doing?
Not too bad.
I have a couple questions for you are your
are your legs tired
from carrying around
balls so big
that's a good one
does your
does your back hurt
from holding a brain
so big
fucking
fucking sick traits
today man
I appreciate that dog
I appreciate the glaze no
no i just wanted to come up and uh and root for you long time long time followers so keep it up
thanks man thanks for coming up all right pg
what's up man um i've been listening pretty much since the beginning of when you were like kind of doing your intro um but i feel like
the the topic's kind of like gone all over the place a little bit wondering if you could i i do
have like points to make and maybe some questions uh but i was wondering if you could maybe like
summarize your outlook again in like a few sentences yeah i think this is a broader trend away from
this asset class and we are we have we are in the process of seeing
more and more invalidations in the narrative for crypto.
And yeah, I guess I just went to reasons why.
I see. And when you say broad, you, you think like on a,
like a multi-year time span, like a multi-time span?
I think multi-year time, multi-year time spans are like kind of, they're like, obviously
I think multi-year times, multi-year time spans are like kind of,
the further you go out, the harder it is to forecast and the more range of possibilities
there are.
That's just like, you know, obvious.
I'm just saying like in the next, I don't know, month, two months, I'm just like in
like trade in a tradable time frame time frame this is like I think
less so like a capitulation and like that's it and like more so like the start of like a broader
obviously like yes you could go up next week focus and interest you're saying I think so
yeah I think I mean I think there has I think it doesn it hasn't just started this today. It's been going on since four months ago. And a lot of this is just me sticking my hand out the window and being like, oh, it's raining outside.
It's raining outside. I don't know when it's going to stop raining.
But given that it is raining now, it'll probably keep raining in the next five minutes, next ten minutes, next hour, with decreasing probability.
Right. Okay. Yeah.
I mean, if there's a shift in interest out of this space.
interest out of this space and first of all i mean i i kind of disagree with the general like
the the generalization that a lot of people make in like the crypto space that they refer to like
the total uh like market allocation as as like crypto instead of kind of delineating like bitcoin and other assets because i think they
like they serve very different purposes and like bitcoins like i'm i'm looking at the whole thing
is kind of a risk curve situation and like bitcoin already exists like pretty far out on a risk curve and then anything else further down stream like on chain
stuff like solana and ethereum are like just even slightly further down the risk curve and then like
you know then you've got like all sorts of like alt projects that literally like only people in
these spaces know about like the whole like the world doesn't care about that stuff yet at all.
And, and so I think people on crypto Twitter getting a little bit of a, like, mindshare bubble about like, quote unquote, like important projects and stuff when in reality, like,
they're just not like, you know, we were talking about discord,
like discord's massive. Like I agree with, with river.
Like I had also like want a piece of that, like when it comes out,
you know, whether or not to like buy the IPO, like, who knows,
like maybe DCA over a fixed span of time from the IPO moment might be a good
play, but I, I kind of would also see it playing out pretty similar to Reddit.
Okay, let me...
I'll get to your other questions.
I wanted to point out one of the things you brought up
because I thought it was very interesting.
So you mentioned, yes,
when people refer to crypto,
there's like the semantic...
Yo, Thikicoin just launched.
Thikicoin just launched. Fucking hate that shit. Now it's in the comments. Yo, ThickyCoin just launched. ThickyCoin just launched.
Fucking ate that shit.
Now it's in the comments.
That's funny.
That guy just like made my point like so.
Oh, okay.
So I think your point, like when people refer to crypto, he was like, he was like preparing
that for like a while.
That's the first time it's ever happened to me.
Earlier, I was talking about crypto.
And yes, Bitcoin is different than alts.
It's different than ETH.
It's different than the broader.
You include stable coins, technology, VCs.
coins technology vcs like they're they're they're all different like uh semantic meanings that like
include or exclude different things and i think like the idiosyncratic differences in each of
these things are measured in the price so like yes like over the past let's say in 2021, Bitcoin didn't go up as much as ETH and it didn't go up as much
as alts. So you could argue that alts had a lot more idiosyncratic flow to ETH and to Bitcoin.
And then obviously that flow reversed for the next four years where Bitcoin had a lot of
idiosyncratic flow because of the ETFs,
because of, you know, Saylor, because of institutional adoption. And yeah, like during
different regimes, like this, the idiosyncratic flow between each of the, you know, the alts,
the ETH, the Bitcoin, the whole institutional machine are meaningful and larger i just i think like in this current regime there's just
such there's like such a lack of any idiosyncratic flow in any of these things that they basically
just like trade together and it's like safe to like it's safe to like bucket them together
like when you look at bitcoin and eth btc like this thing's been trading at the bitcoin and
eth have been trading at the same range for the past three months. It's
been trading in the same 5% range. And same with ETH and alts. There's been very little
distinction of price action between the entire alt complex and Ethereum, less than any historical
amount over the past three or four years. So I like because of that like just referring just assuming that
crypto equals Bitcoin or crypto equals Bitcoin alt and ETH is more accurate now than maybe it
has been in the past you know let's say six months ago 12 months ago two years ago four years ago
I oh yeah I would say yes and no because like to me it it makes sense that they trade together like
it it makes sense that they trade together and that they're correlated but they're the thesis
the theses for like why someone would fundamentally you know like you there there's all going to be
all sorts of liquidity and like money that flows into these things for different reasons. Um, but a lot of those reasons are going
to be like momentum based and they're not going to be like fundamental, like reasons or like the
same fundamental reason why like a giant bank would like allocate billions like into bitcoin or something like that like that's
that's going to be a different reason why a collective pool of hundreds of millions of
dollars of retail money might go into like i don't know like like some solana project or
or an altcoin or something like but they they're gonna move together because of of the
environment and like the like that it's all on chain technology and that it's like bitcoin is
kind of like the tide that that's moving in and out so to speak but like i don't know to me it makes sense that they trade together but the reasons yeah like
why they why money is going into them are fundamentally like completely different and
yeah i don't know like i think like i i think we're just in a bit of a like pit of despair here where there's actually been like so much capital destruction.
It's wild.
Like, like we got like the, the Trump token launching, like the, that you're right.
As he took office, like all sorts of weird things.
When you look back at the last like year to two years um it kind of the
puzzle pieces make sense as to like wow like a bunch of this capital just went into these like
channels and just got vaporized like a lot of people lost money so like where's the new money
to come in it's not here right now but also if you like tie it back to the the new money to come in? It's not here right now. But also, if you tie it back to the broader market, to circle back to your thesis, we've
been in a period of more economic contraction than we have been economic expansion.
And homeboy is laughing.
I don't know what he's laughing about.
Yeah. So let me chime in here so i mean i i like what you're talking about how
i think this is like an epistemic question like what really is and you are saying that what the markets reveal through prices is separate from what something really is.
Oh, yeah.
To double down on that, sentiment is 100% formed by price.
Price isn't a result of sentiment.
We're in this discussion right now because Bitcoin just crashed to 76 like we we wouldn't be here talking about this
and that like kind of further supports my point that it's like and like you said hey it's raining
outside like i'll you know put my hand out and see that it's raining but it's like it's it's kind of a
lagging indicator sort of like way of looking at things i I think this is an interesting
line of discussion.
I think that
price
doesn't
always lead narrative
just as
narrative doesn't always lead price.
They're reflexive.
And that reflexivity
is just the process for how humans and
and the collective embodiment of humans in the form of markets discover truths through like
revealed preferences through price so like yes like it can often lead and lag, and often it can reflexively reinforce misconceptions about things.
But for the most part, they are pretty accurate.
And I would argue that there really is no is or should be outside of what gets revealed through price. Yes, there are momentary dislocations of price
that might reflect that some participants' idea
of what is was not accepted by the broader whole.
And you could argue that this recent move
in the last four months has been a temporary dislocation
and maybe it's it's affected
reflexively the sentiments to be too bearish on crypto and that is actually a misconception
that will correct um because like yeah you can make that argument and i i'm sympathetic to it
i also agree with with you partially because i think there's a bit of a semantic there where like I
I think that sentiment and narrative are two different things
so like sentiment is just like hey how do you feel about x y z and you're like good or bad
and like that's what sentiment is whereas narrative is like I have a thesis that this
thing here is going to be like you know know, the next thing or like there's
going to be so much utility for X and like, and that's a narrative, a narrative is built.
It's a story.
That's literally what a narrative is, whereas sentiment is just like, how do we how are you
feeling about like Bitcoin a good day, guys?
And like, everybody's like, oh, I'm poor now.
Like, I feel bad.
Like, it's bad.
Like, that's That's sentiment. And I generally find in my time in the market that sentiment is bad when price is low and
sentiment is high when price is high.
I think you remember those instances where they diverge, but a lot of the times sentiment
is bad and then price goes lower.
Because why do people sell? Why do people buy? They sell and buy because
they expect price to go up and down. So they must be feeling a certain way. They must have a reason
for doing certain things. So yes, you're describing sometimes price and the human collective. And
maybe that's just more reflective of the people you talk to being behind the curve than others. Because like, you know, the people you talk to aren't the people moving
markets. Most of the money is concentrated in a very few hands. And they're not always going to
tell you like, I'm feeling blank or blah about how I feel today. Like, you don't know, like,
none of us know, we all have a very incomplete picture. So yes, you can
say that maybe the sentiment amongst the people that I poll often lags price, which is a fair
thing to say. But it all comes down to just the relative understanding of what sentiment is.
Because if you were to poll the sentiment of people that actually have all the money,
then maybe that wouldn't lag maybe that
would actually predict price you know you see what i'm saying there's not like a like a definite is
for sentiment and price it's just very relative to your like to the observer
for sure cool um yeah that was like one one thing mean, we can move on to other people if you want. But yeah, that was just my general, like, I don't know, I don't think this stuff's going anywhere. I think to kind of like summarize my question and like commentary on on your thoughts are like, I don't think this stuff's going anywhere. I think a lot of money has been misallocated and
you know it can't come back and you know the economy's been in a rather contractive state uh
the business cycle's been suppressed for a really long time like the only thing that's been
like i think that we would have already realized that we're in like a
post-pandemic recession had it not had the pandemic not lined up with like let me ask you a question
what is your what is your positioning and what is your entry on that positioning
um i i mean i hold bitcoin from like a really low cost basis uh hello like three thousand dollars
okay and what percent of your portfolio is bitcoin um that percentage at that cost basis No, at the current price level.
Maybe like a quarter, like a third.
Okay.
Somewhere in that area.
I'm holding a decent amount of cash right now.
Okay.
So like more than 50% cash?
No, no.
That's not that decent.
But yeah, maybe like 30% cash. I'm also like pretty bullish AI infrastructure and like energy.
Okay, fair.
That's a reasonable expression.
I'm allocated to like data centers, build outs and shit like that in Texas.
How low do you think?
You're never going to sell the Bitcoin, basically.
Your cost base is just too good.
Yeah, I don't really...
I've traded it before,
and I'll play IBIT options and stuff like that,
or buy leaps,
and those I'll sell if I feel like I didn't get a good entry
on a leap or something like that.
But yeah, the spot, I don't really have a reason to sell it
i see and i i guess there's there's no price where you stop out of it
where you're just like all right i've got i'm giving up on this thing um yeah i mean i doubt
i mean if it yeah no i don't just don't really see that being a concern like i'd my thesis for it is that
it's like as long it's going to continue to be uh a debasement trade and like the dollar um
i don't know i think someone mentioned something about like the dollar
really early on in this discussion in like one of the first speakers or something like that but like
or i'm maybe i'm confusing this with like another space i was in i don't know um but like the the
dollar is just going it's like um one of those uh i forget what they're called, like the type of math equation that like approaches zero, but never reaches zero.
Asyntonic.
Yes.
It's that's what the dollar is, as long as the Federal Reserve issues debt.
If they stop issuing debt and like stop the current mechanisms for issuing new debt and printing money, then that thesis will fall apart.
But as long as they continue on the path they've been on,
my thesis is that Bitcoin will continue to appreciate
and price relative to that over the long-term,
like a smooth five-year average.
Okay, yeah.
Also, you mean the deficit, not the debt.
As long as the surplus is greater not the debt as long as like the surplus is
greater than the debt it's fine no i mean stop like more just like issuing
like like yeah i guess um they could you know as long as like we have a gdp surplus like that's fine but i will not gdp i
mean like like the government needs to earn more money than it spends you can't have a government
not issue debt it needs to like pay for things it needs to smooth out like payments across space and
time as long as the tax receipts are greater than the amount it spends it's fine exactly and it needs and it doesn't and it needs to be able to do it within like
a controlled amount of time and it doesn't do that either okay all right
you got into Bitcoin like 2014 2015 yeah okay I think it was around 20
yeah 2015 ish do you work are you like retired what do you what do you do um i'm
self-employed uh i do work but i'm like uh yeah um i don't have like i produce records so like
my income is really sporadic like i go long periods of time without making money and then
like you know put out some music and and then money comes and have some residual it's like a
very weird like income stream but i don't have a job like i haven't worked a nine to five in a while
is it because bitcoin appreciated so much you're able to i guess just work on your own schedule
i guess just work on your own schedule no no that like i said that's only like a
it's not a significant like uh portion uh i've just had some pretty successful uh
records that have yo pg what record should we listen to that you put out
all right um before i get i actually i actually want to know can i you guys
can d you guys can dm each other i mean well you just asked me about my job like i i'm not i was
no i'm asking because like i'm gonna remove all the speakers but yeah i'm i'm at i i ask these
questions because like it's it's very useful information to get a sense of like someone's
background and someone's priors in order to get like an understanding of why they believe what
they believe so like in pg's case like yes he's very early to bitcoin he was rewarded for believing
in this thesis and like believing in it with all of his heart and not getting shaken out of it. And it went from $3,000 to $77,000.
And like those types of people, like I always view people as like some sort of like exponential
moving average.
So just like an exponential moving average of their entire life experience.
And the exponential part weights recent events more than previous events so yeah like if you
put like a bunch of these emas on a chart like yeah like the the longer emas are going to be
slower to adjust to new information than a shorter ema and you know it's it's kind of retarded to
like say oh the 100 day ema is better than the 50-day EMA. That's not how these things
work. They each contain important amounts of context when pieced together, help you
get a gauge of sentiment and price and positioning and all this kind of stuff.
But yeah, there's a reason for why these things are the way they are. And sometimes they're
different, sometimes they're not. And oftentimes, I view people that have been in crypto for a very long time, people that tend to
be like a little older than the median participant, people that have been rewarded for holding things
up and being, I guess, not really, you know, just being rewarded for not being shaken out by price
action. Like those people are long-term EMA holders. And those people are
still very like stout in their positioning, which like, it's like two, it shows two things. Like one
is like, these people have yet to sell. And two is like, the price needs to go a lot lower for
them to even consider selling. And also three is like their criteria for actually selling are so hard to meet that they may never sell.
And that's what forms like the strong base for like Bitcoin's price when it bottoms.
Because like these types of people like that are in for such a price and that have been rewarded for being stout in their conviction are never going to sell.
Or, you know, they're just it's just going to be very hard to actually, you know, they're very, like, they're very deep inside the castle. It's very hard to, like, sort of break down those walls.
But yeah, like, I do think it's interesting. Like, you know, you had, these spaces are always
very interesting for me to hold because you have, like, people from, like, all walks of life, from
all these different experiences, all these different priors, like come together and try to talk through,
how they interpret things
and where they think things are going.
You know, the important thing to recognize
is that markets are not a democracy.
Markets are an oligarchy.
They are, the people with the money,
it's dollar weighted, right?
The people with the money determine how things move.
And yes, there are times when like a bunch of smaller participants can dictate the direction
of the trend.
But oftentimes, you know, it's not always a regime, right?
Sometimes it's just like one big guy.
Sometimes it's a bunch of medium guys.
Like, I think that's important to acknowledge and like be able to like recognize that like,
oh, and the entire timeline is saying one thing, like sometimes that matters.
But sometimes like the entire timeline is broke and they have no money and they don't
influence price action at all.
And they have no signal on the markets.
Like, you know, oftentimes important levels are determined by when certain moving averages
get tested for the first time. Because you can always view that as different cohorts of people
with different priors are finally back at their breakeven point, and they're evaluating whether
they should give up or keep fighting and you know
sometimes like the emas that are just like so far away from price like they don't even matter right
but they don't even like you're not going to look at like the the the 300 day ema if it's like
if it's like you know a third of the price of where it's trading at like those types of people
like they don't influence price at all right you really do have to look at like, yeah, like I said, the EMA and those types of participants,
because those are the marginal buyers and sellers. Yeah, I just, I haven't done this in a while. So
like when I talk to people now, I always like glean some like insightful, like, you know,
always like glean some like insightful,
like,
you know,
abstraction from like what they're saying.
I think it's like fun to talk about,
even though like they probably aren't aware of like,
you know,
what they're reflecting.
It's a,
it's a fun like exercise for me to do anyway.
How's it going,
Eli?
you know,
hanging out.
What's going on?
Nothing much. I, thread guy DM to me and he was like bro
You should host a space right now and really cook normally I do these with a video
But maybe I'm just like a more of an audio type of guy
You should definitely go and try to be sick
Uh, we were talking about it for Monday.
Maybe I can refine some of the rants I've put forth.
Don't do it.
Just add more.
Slop more and you're good to go.
Yeah.
I think I'm not good at streaming because I like to walk around when I ramble.
Maybe I need a mobile camera.
I don't know.
Anyway.
You got to get one of those walking desks.
Maybe I need to get one of the walking desks or something.
And toe shoes.
Okay, that's just extra.
Let's get some of these other people.
Good faces. So I kind of, I think... All right, let's get some of these other people. Good paces.
So I think what changed in the last year is this movements in the metals market.
Like, you know, last week, silver had an intraday move that was comparable to each market cap
or gold had an intraday move that was comparable to each market cap when gold had an intraday move that
was comparable to Bitcoin's market cap
when stuff like that happens
the range
of possible outcomes
becomes much much wider
than it was last year
we didn't have that happening
and like
in metals markets there are these ratios like you
know silver to gold to gold ratio and silver and platinum kind of behave like altcoins meaning like
you know when the gold is going up the altcoin dominance goes up. So, you know, now because of the range of like outcomes is now much bigger.
Like, you know, the Bitcoin to gold right now is like about 3%.
It used to be 10% a year ago.
Like, it's completely unclear to me like how much how much flows we might start getting in
from metals market because like again metals market is for and so like there might not be
any catalysts like we don't know how the alt these like i'll call the cta algos look like
I'll call the CTA algos look like that are like when.
Yeah.
You're breaking up a little bit on my end,
but what is the,
what is the overall thing you want to discuss?
Well,
there might,
my view is like,
there might not be like for Bitcoin to like,
let's say go up a hundred percent in the next year.
There might not be any catalyst.
Like the price might just start
moving up basically the the range of outcomes this year is much higher than the range of
potential outcomes last year just because the overall volatility market is so much higher
that's basically my comment i'm curious to like see your comment based on that okay um yeah i think that's uh
i think that's right yeah true all right next question i'm gonna i'm gonna ask to keep the
questions under 20 seconds uh just for you know the sake of attention um bfabs yo um i have three questions is that okay um you can ask one and if it's a good question i'll let
you ask some more questions so i should probably ask the best question first yes um hmm okay
that's a good start
um can can you explain why it made sense to long garrett's liquidation
all right you're pulling my leg on this right
i just i just kind of i would like to know your your your thought process there
um this is like an inside joke i i was talking about it earlier my in my telegram chat um
appreciate you coming up dog um thomas thomas roans Yeah, cool. So thanks for making me a speaker. So going back to something that you're previously
talking about in terms of like when people are thinking about selling, I guess that kind of, there's an underlying premise that people think of their holdings in terms of the numeric absolute amount of the asset itself, then price fluctuations really don't matter, I guess.
Yes, I agree with this frame.
Where are you taking it?
Oh, I mean, I just kind of wanted to make that point.
Okay, yeah.
Because that's...
I think this is very useful, right?
Because it is a very epistemic question of, like, the reason why everyone pays attention
to the dollar price is because we've just...
It's like a shelling point of understanding.
And so we just interpret things in relation to the u.s dollar and like recently maybe that is breaking down like bitcoiners
famously denominate their wealth in the number of bitcoin and i mean in actuality what you should
be denominating your wealth in is just like the things you need to survive and for people like
it's very different
depending on what person you are like maybe that's a lot of food and shelter and rent and other
services and for some people it might be like they denominate in private jets and like high class
escorts and like cocaine right like everyone has like a different frame of reference. And we are in a space where we're in a time where the equilibrium spot of denominating
in US dollars is being challenged.
And some people are proposing different frames of reference.
So it might be denominating Bitcoin, denominating in barrels of oil, denominating in weapons,
denominating in gold, denominating in S&P.
There are so many different frames. And whatever frame convinces the most amount
of capital to denominate in will eventually win out as the superior store of value. So
that's, I guess, my interpretation of the capital war is a war of understanding, a war
of frame, the war of which thing a war frame the war of like yeah which
things that I'm not to denominate your work in
denominate and bunkers yeah I guess I was just making the point that psychologically
it's different right so I don't think oh I have you know half the amount of like
like I don't think of Solana, for example,
in the last two months or whatever,
and this isn't exactly the case,
but I don't think of it as,
oh, it's worth half of what it was before.
No, it's still the same amount.
Yeah, and I think that's a useful frame
for something you really believe in is you don't
care about, let's say, the denomination of the currency.
But this brings into question, this is what I was talking about earlier with theory of
mind, right?
Like, yes, you think a certain way, but how does everyone else think?
There's a very famous test that they use for children called the Sally Ann test, where there are, there's two people.
There's, let's say, there's like, there's a, I forgot the class.
I guess Sally and Ann.
And Ann, I guess I'm slaughtering this explanation, so stick with me. So the observer puts an object in basket A, and both Sally and Anne can see it.
And then Sally leaves the room, and the observer moves the object from basket A into basket B.
And then Sally comes back into the room, and they ask Anne, where do you think Sally will check for the object?
where do you think Sally will check for the object? Is it A or B? And, you know, if you don't
Is it A or B?
have a strong theory of mind, if you aren't good at modeling what other people think, you might say,
oh, she'll check basket B because that's where the object is in. But like, you know, if you
understand how Sally thinks, you know, she'll check basket A first because that was the last
piece of information she had. That was a long-winded explanation to explain what theory of mind is.
And autistic people very, you know,
notoriously have a very strong IQ,
but a very low theory of mind.
Like they're very good at like fundamental reasoning and abstract thinking,
but they're very bad at modeling what other people think.
They're very bad.
And that manifests in like not understanding
like nonverbal cues
or not understanding sarcasm.
So yes, to your point,
does it bring it all back?
Some people denominate in the asset,
and those people don't get tested
because they don't sell.
Or maybe the price that they get tested at
is so low
that it's not even a possibility that they sell.
But it is important to recognize that most people don't think that way, and most of the
marginal capital doesn't think that way.
Maybe it's an open question of how many people actually think that way.
But yes, just because some people might not get tested, it doesn't mean the vast majority
tested it doesn't mean like the vast majority of capital doesn't get tested
of capital doesn't get tested.
and most people I spent most capital allocators most wealth in this world
still denominates in the dollar so yeah I don't mean to imply that you have a low
theory of mine I just wanted to like point out that like that distinction
distinction. Yeah, I forget why. I think I just brought it up because, you know, there was this
talk of like, well, at what point would you be willing to sell or would people be willing to
sell? And it's like there's just an underlying premise there that i think should be addressed right um
that's all yeah i think there there is a point um i think it's like i don't think there exists a
person in this world that would uh let's say if solana was trading at one cent they wouldn't
give up in denominating in solana and the people that don't yeah the people that do think that way
like end up getting you know selected out of the gene pool
it's also a it's also kind of a simplistic um thing I mean like I'm long spot, but then I'm covering like short equivalent to my spot.
So I don't really know what that – what does that even mean?
Well, like your net exposure, it doesn't matter how you express your position.
It's just all that matters is your net exposure.
But yeah.
Well, that's what I'm saying.
It's like,
what I'm saying is instead of
having a buy trigger
at a certain point, I have
a stopwatch trigger on my
short at a certain point. For whatever
reason, that just seems more,
I don't know. Well, that's just
there's logistical
reasons why.
Got it.
Cool.
Appreciate you coming up today, Thomas.
All right.
Let's knock these out.
I loved your essay, State of the Machine.
I thought it was one of the most thought-provoking things I read last year.
Hopefully that means more that you wrote something very good,
not so much that I don't read enough.
So you published it six months ago.
Over the last half year, have you developed your thoughts
on the ideas of the essay any further,
or observed any interesting examples that propagate the thesis?
Yeah, I like this question.
So for those who haven't read it, a lot of it,
the point of the article that I wrote was that, what was the point? Let me summarize it.
Like economic value. I got it, I got it. Just give me a second to call it.
So the point of the article was a reinterpretation of history.
It was reinterpreting this sort of egalitarianism and the sort of progressivist way that civilization moved.
Maybe the reason for that wasn't because the world has just decided it was too cruel, decided to be more kind. But it was because it unlocked more labor and more output.
And now that AI is questioning the sort of output of the median person, like the average
person alive can't really contribute to the machine as much as a person could maybe 20
years ago.
Given that sort of shift in the labor dynamics, does that end up disempowering the median person?
And I think if you look at like the K-shaped recovery,
if you look at just like inequality stats,
like that does seem to be the trend that's going on.
It's like just following the power dynamics of the individual person.
So yeah, you're asking if I've developed any thoughts on that,
because like, obviously like, you know, as someone who is my age,
who is, I'm less than 30 years old, I've grown up in this like era of,
you know, of a, of a large progressive trend, you know, and like,
you know, people talk a lot about how a lot of the secular religion of our time has been denouncing the atrocities of World War II Nietzschean, Machiavellian sort of assumptions that caused the German
uprising in World War II.
And, you know, like all trends,
like these things do ebb and flow
and they like hop and bottom
and they overshoot and undershoot and i think
reading through history and seeing what's happening it it really made me realize that like
no people don't just become kinder like it like being kind is like a good message to like, it's like a good narrative, but it also needs to unlock
labor and output in order for it to actually sustain. And it, you know, those, the realizations
of that article I wrote made me a lot more, I don't want to say like ruthless, but like,
I don't want to say like ruthless, but like,
like more in tune with like real politic with more like,
like the practical ways like things are and things have been.
And I've like realized that so many of like the,
the sort of narrative truths that we get fed about our understanding of the world uh sorry
there's like a beeping sound going off in the background but yeah i've realized like a lot of
the under like the the presupposed like truths about you know things that we were the values we
were taught um are are kind of shams yeah they're just like not i can go more into this but this is like the first
time i've articulated these thoughts so like i said they're kind of it's kind of raw but yeah
i hope i answered your question yeah i mean that's like exactly how i feel as well so uh
thanks a lot i guess i guess more it's very similar to the ideas in you know you mentioned
niches and niches on the genealogy of morality it was a lot like that for me so anyway yeah like maybe i mean maybe like every like funny
something i'm assuming you're 20 something year old dude like has this like oh my god like
everything is is is slave morality sort of but yeah like um yeah that was my path towards that and i i think it obviously like
having like a well calibrated um worldview and a good understanding of like fundamental reality
like it it it has to help you make money it's just like it's inevitable it helps you uh profit
from it but yeah like i think it's like it's made me realize there really is no good and evil.
There's just truth and, you know.
And conviction.
Oh, yeah.
I think that's orthogonal.
I view things less as good and evil, more as just like what is truthful is what is good.
is less as good and evil more more is just like what is truthful is what is good and like you
just develop like a secure attachment to like the truth as opposed to like trying to force um like
humanistic simplistic uh frames onto things i like that okay thanks a lot yeah appreciate the
question man all right uh i'm gonna to start filtering by your PFP.
If I don't think you're going to ask a good question, I'm not going to let you up here.
Let's see.
Why are you short copper?
Why am I short copper?
Yeah.
Am I short copper?
Are you? Who said I was short copper? Yeah. Am I short copper? Are you?
Who said I was short copper?
Oh, never mind.
I wonder if someone's tracking my Hyperliquid account.
You never know.
Yeah, this fucking shitty ass app, dude.
Fucking no privacy.
Don't use it, bro. It's the only place like a short copper
kai's
hello
alright figure it out
oh there we go yeah kai's how's it going
hi thinky
um what are your thoughts
on the um market right now?
Which sectors, which industries would you bet that is going to be better to work into the future.
Thank you for your question, Kais.
I feel like I already answered this.
Next question, figure it out.
Yo, so I have a question.
I was wondering how do you think of
this asset allocation cycle where money flows to equities
and then it flows to commodities and usually that's a sign when things get you know like
something's basically people who hold these you know long-term bonds they want like a higher
return so we're kind of seeing that now that the bonds are going up and like they're paying
a higher rate of return.
And so now and you see it on TV and stuff that, you know, people are saying that, you
know, bonds are worthless, you know.
And so in a sense, we should kind of see like, you know, rotation from equities like
commodities and like crypto is what it is.
So, you know, so we get that cash rotation and, you know, money flows into bonds, which usually the last time gold ran up was like, you know, like maybe 15, 20 years ago.
So, yeah, I was wondering, what do you think if like, you know, there's like we haven't really
had like a time correction or you know, things like trading in a range.
So we could have like a one two year window or maybe longer because I haven't been trading
for too long.
I'm like, you know, only been doing this for five years.
And I think the beauty about crypto is, you know, it shows you the cycles, right?
Like, where would you have ever experienced like
you know four cycles in trading like you know yeah so your question is your question is just
what happens to the u.s bonds is that is that is that fair to say no i was just like if you if like
was uh ever since gold started running up, I basically looked back, because, like,
basically, like, I didn't catch most of the move.
Like, I caught, like, a small part of it, but my...
Okay.
You guys got to...
We don't need it.
Yeah, thank you.
No, no, no, no.
Let me finish.
Short and sweet question.
I was going to say a short and sweet question if you wanted it.
Man.
It always kind of devolves into
anarchy
towards the end. Have you guys noticed that?
It's like people
just coming up and telling their life story
and it's like,
what am I supposed to do
with this?
You got to see if you can silently leave
and then the whole world they just keep going
for hours and hours yeah that's what happens every time and there needs to be a better way to i think
they need to submit the questions through chat but it's like nice to listen to them speak it because
like sometimes it's hilarious it's just like yeah it's like a tough balance. Anyway, I think like, obviously, you know, bonds have been traded
before I was alive. I know nothing about them. Like I have nothing insightful to add,
except, you know, obviously like, you know, people say bonds price in growth,
but I'd like to introduce like a new frame to think about bonds and duration as a whole.
I wrote about this in one of my articles about how time was event-based.
And this gets captured in a lot of wisdom. And I think a lot of just popular sayings, like there's a quote attributed to Vladimir
Lennon when he says, there are decades where weeks happen and there are weeks are decades there.
Oh fuck.
I keep slaughtering.
There are decades where weeks happen and there are weeks where decades
happen or something like that.
Basically he like points out the conception that like time is not like
equal across all horizons.
Like,
you know,
sometimes like so much can happen in the span of a week that it changes the
course of history.
And most times like nothing ever happens.
So that's where the saying, oh, nothing ever happens comes from.
And also, this time is different.
These are all describing the same effect of what I call punctuated equilibrium, where
systems, for the most part, are stable up until something changes.
And then it changes very quickly and reprices to the new equilibrium.
Where I was going with this was that for the longest time in history, nothing was happening.
Peter Thiel talks about this a lot from 2000, 2010.
Even from the 80s, 90s,
2000, 70s, like nothing, the time was kind of slowing down and it got so bad to where like
when the USSR fell in 1991 and we were the only sort of, you know, mega superpower left
to compete, people proclaimed that we had reached the end of history
where the US system had won,
liberal democracy had won.
There was no successor to this ideology.
And we stopped really pushing ourselves to innovate.
That's like Peter Thiel's prognosis for what happened
that i really
buy into and you can like see this ideology get reflected in bond yields like if you go plot the
10 year the 30 year you just see it go to basically zero and in 2020 when covet happened oh one second
oh When COVID happened – one second.
All right.
Sorry about that.
So, yeah.
In 2020, when COVID happened, you just saw them rip.
And now they're just like – they're still ripping.
And I think like – yeah, there are like fundamental reasons for why for why you know there's like growth getting priced in there's like distrust of the of the dollar there's like china selling
treasuries like like i said like with these complex systems like all the factors are
overdetermined it's it's there's so many factors for why someone decides to sell someone decides
not to buy but i think one one portion that people don't talk about
is that things are happening now.
Time is moving and events are happening
and there's a lot of uncertainty
for what it looks like in two years.
If you asked me what would happen in two years in 2005,
it's like things probably look the same.
And that uncertainty gets reflected in the bond
yield like it's unclear what the world will look like in 30 years so that's why like the 30-year
bond like reprices and it goes to show that like when things are uncertain it gets very expensive
to sell duration and that could get expressed in other ways. Like maybe people don't get married
as much because like, you know, when you, when you, when you marry someone, like you are selling
like, you know, a 70 year bond on yourself, you're swapping 70 year bonds, right?
It's an interesting way of looking at things, but I just wanted to bring forward the broader point
that like, you know, every week and every month every week and every month, especially in January, think about what's happened,
all the events that have happened.
It might be a year's full of macro events happened in four weeks.
We've gone to war with three different countries.
Gold has added so much market cap.
All these assets are moving around.
This all gets...
You see my point.
I just wanted to rant on that for a little bit.
I thought it was an interesting point that I'm eventually going to write about.
All right.
Bring up revenge longer.
Apparently.
I was requested to ask.
I have a question.
I've been in here waiting for a while.
All right. Let's hear it.
The last five questions have been asked.
What do you think is the probability?
What do you think is the probability of hype actually decoupling and going to a new all-time high against this BTC pair?
high against this BTC pair, given that we're, you know, could it be quite probable during like a
74K sweep bounce and then sort of like level out? What do you think about that?
I don't, okay, I don't hate this question. I think hype is kind of like, in a way like vampire vampire attacking crypto we're like you know people that used to speculate
on perps now have the ability to speculate on trad fi assets that have a lot more momentum
and price movement and volatility and it's like sucked i mean if you look at the open interest of
like the nasdaq hip three contracts or the gold silver all these other things like it's
actually a meaningful amount of capital is is is now trading on hype it's like kind of retarded to
trade on hype because like the fees are so high and the slippage is awful and you're like you're
paying like you know 100 a year of carry to like be long these things. If you had access to a TradFi brokerage, you'd only pay 8% to be long.
But yeah, like it just goes to show that like this money in crypto is like trapped in crypto
and it is retarded and willing to pay a lot of fees and slippage and funding costs
in order to get exposure to these assets.
And maybe that's what it goes to show that's what the fundamental value of the crypto user
They're terminally online, they're addicted, and they have a lot of money, and they're
not very sophisticated.
And that has a lot of value.
There's a lot of money to extract from that type of participant.
And if hype can transition away from being tied to the ebbs
and flows of crypto and just be a generic, a Binance type of thing, yeah, it can decouple
away from Bitcoin. As long as there's people speculating, it gets more of a loading to just
to just general speculation than it does to cryptocurrency speculation.
general speculation than it does to cryptocurrency speculation.
So, I mean, there's a caveat, right?
There's a caveat with 20X leverage.
A lot of people are farming also for liquidity for the next airdrop.
So maybe those users aren't not all new users, but they're just
and we have a huge like metal mania kind of mind share.
So that's going to die down as well at local top
great thanks for the question um let's get revenge longer up on here
that was like a finally like a decent question we were on like a losing streak for a little bit
this guy's got like an ai profile picture i don't i don't really know how i feel about this guy's got like an AI profile picture. I don't, I don't really know how I feel about this guy.
Hello.
All right. Lazarus, the last few questions, I'm going to go.
All right.
Lazarus.
The last few questions I'm going to go.
Twilight Zone.
Yeah, thanks.
I had a question about kind of just the mega trend that I kind of got into crypto for,
which was millennials and I guess Gen Z as well, that are going to slowly be taking everything
over as the boomers kind of slowly die off. So do you still see that mega trend intact? And if so,
does that, I mean, I think crypto is always, it's always boded well that the younger generations
were using it and interested in it much more than the boomers. And as they slowly died off, we'd kind of evolve more into, you know,
a society that's using that, that's okay with that,
that's comfortable with that.
So what do you see from that perspective?
Yeah. So, you know, like the sort of great transfer is what they call it and i think that's like a
one of the factors for why it's a good factor for just newer assets as a whole um
the funny thing that like i've realized talking to you guys is that like you guys like each seem to have like one like one reason like one strong
reason for why something should be the way that you think it should be and it's like clear that
like you've been rewarded in some way shape or form because like you're here and a lot of you
guys have made a good amount of money to where maybe you don't have to work as hard and it really goes to show that like yes like
in some way shape or form the the machine has rewarded you for pricing in that piece of
information that you have and i think for most people like they price in like a singular dimension
of information a singular factor,
a singular defining theme that informs all their investment decisions.
And sometimes that's enough.
But I do think if you want to be in here for a long time, you can't just be a one-trick pony.
You can't just have one theme that like oh i'm long because of this like
the reason why prices move or because like the low if you think about it as like
there's like 30 different reasons and they each have like a multiplier on them and the multiplier
is like always shifting and maybe like you're good at like one of these things or two of these things and the goal is to like have a complete handle on all 30 things and being able to like shift those little
knobs and dials with like how reality is shifting and that's like how i view the sort of game that
we play so yes like there is a broader like thesis of like there's a great transfer going on and sometimes like that idea is gonna make you
money and sometimes it's not and like maybe in the grand scheme of things it makes you more money
than not but like relying on that idea as like the all-encompassing thing and not like thinking
about how it interacts with every other thing i I think is like leaving money on the table.
So yeah, like I do think there will be,
and there is, there has been,
and there will be, you know, a transfer of assets.
And the, yeah, the new holders of those assets
will be more open to newer assets,
but there's no guarantee that that is always going to be crypto.
Like one thing I've noticed that like, is that there's some sort of holy mandate of heaven that people have over crypto.
And I think this is like, if I can explain what Mandate of Heaven is, it's like an ancient
Chinese sort of political philosophical sort of idea that a ruler's legitimacy comes from
the divine approval.
God is the one that determines whether the ruler is legit or not.
And the legitimacy and the sort of mandate of heaven is only measured through the outcomes
that the ruler brings to its people. So if there's a lot of famine and there's a lot of
chaos and disorder, like people start questioning,
like,
did this person lose like the mandate of heaven?
Like,
should we find another ruler?
And I think like crypto has this essential effect of a mandate of heaven
where like people that just believed in it have been just like rewarded just in a Pavlovian style for the past uh you
know 10 15 how long is it 17 years um but like things that's not how like the world works right
like things just because it's like hard to explain why something happens and maybe it's like impossible to interpret from an individual doesn't mean that it's like some mystical, like predest people just assume that we're just going to grow
our GDP infinitely forever.
And when you realize that if no one worked, if no one did anything, things rot, buildings
decay, the weather wears things down.
There's natural entropy that you constantly have to fight, that you have to make up for.
And in a lot of crypto assets, the entropy comes in the form of supply, of new supply
from either mining or from just people getting bored from the loss of volatility, from people
just selling the crypto to fund real-world expenses.
And this entropy, there needs to be a reason.
There needs to be someone actively creating order
and fighting against the entropy in order for things to constantly go up.
So when people just fall back on this idea that,
oh, it's going to go up because it always has gone
up. Like it's like a very lazy sort of like argument that doesn't actually match up with
reality. There needs to be a reason for things to go up. And maybe like it's too complex for you to
understand and decipher and communicate, but like to simply just believe that like something,
oh, it always has had the mandate of
heaven i don't really know why but i think it'll continue having it is like you know it may work
it may not work for you but it's not like people that think that way end up they end up getting
like naturally selected out of the pool um because the people that actually do understand why things
go up and down like end up accumulating all of the money in the pool. So yeah, like I would like, I would like refrain
from like, if you catch yourself thinking that way, like I would try not to, and like, just try
to like think about things with more rigor, um, to get to why you actually believe something.
Um, anyway, that's just my rant on that. I need to work on that rant. I think there's something there. gold. And obviously, we don't have the history to compare something like Bitcoin to gold, right?
But that doesn't mean an asset without real intrinsic value, given the monetary premium,
something like gold can just go up for centuries. So I guess, would you put gold in the same class
that you would of considering something that, I forget the term you used, something from God.
Mandate of heaven.
I like this question.
Sorry, mandate of heaven.
Mandate of heaven.
Would you consider other assets?
Would you be just as skeptical of them because of that mandate?
I like this question.
This guy's a thinker.
um i i see like i don't see i think there needs to be a reason for gold to be like the best
sort of store of value that we have and i think technology always questions like whether this
thing is the best sort of value we have like in an ideal world like we have such good battery
technology such that like like your your value gets stored in something that is just like
a basket of like of commodities and things need to survive and then like energy and all this kind
of stuff but like the technology doesn't exist to like make that like cleanly transferable so we
like we look to like the cleanest proxies with like you know there's certain properties of like
like scarcity and and like durability and likegibility, all this kind of stuff that
makes money money. And gold traditionally has held that up over the past 2,000 years,
3,000 years, which is a very short time if you think about it. It's a very short time,
but it encapsulates most of human history, observed human history. So it has most of human history, like observed human history. So like it has been good.
You know, it probably will be OK for the next short period of time.
But like, is it the end state?
Like, I'd hope not.
Right.
Like, I hope we'd have technology that can actually like function as a better currency.
Is it the answer?
Bitcoin like Bitcoin is like slightly improved in some certain ways.
But it's not I don't think Bitcoin is the end state either.
I think it would be kind of sad if it were.
But yeah, I hope that answers your question.
Yeah. I mean, I guess in a world where we don't know what the end state is,
you have to make some, at the end of the day, you have to own something, right?
I'm not going to, I'm sure you don't keep all of your,
your wealth in US dollars or stable coins or something like that i do it's all of it yeah
so you think dollars the ultimate end game no i don't but it's here here's how i see it
and i'll explain it to you so okay when you have you're trying to like keep up with the pace of
growth of the entire world and you're trying to like keep up with the pace of growth of the entire world
and you're trying to fight against the entropy, which is the increase in supply, which is,
you know, obviously inflation. So like that number constantly changes. And for the dollar,
let's say there's a 5% a year inflation. It obviously depends on how you want to index the
goods and services that you need to survive. And there's say there's 2%, 3%, 4% of real growth.
So you need to clear a 7% to 8% to 9% to 10% hurdle in order to just maintain your current level of stored work.
So everyone's path to how to get there is different.
Some people decide to buy U.S. equities that, you know,
historically have gone up 9% a year, which obviously also, again, reflects this sort of
mandate of heaven bias that I was talking about earlier. Some people decide to hold like a basket
of commodities. They hold emerging market equities. They might hold bonds, whatever.
For me, like I am a short-term trader. I generally just trade. I need a lot of capital so I can trade distressed moments like the one today.
And if I think holding in the dollars and being able to trade those moments and I guess doing some little tricks here and there to get some more capital efficiency out of those dollars that generate the yield, if that like gets me to like a higher growth target,
even factoring in inflation and the growth that you don't participate in,
like that's just like the logical route.
So that's just my reasoning for staying in dollars.
But it's a very like unique to my situation.
Right. I mean, if you're, if you're a short-term trader,
I wouldn't say you're, you're staying in dollars.
You're looking for opportunities to deploy those dollars to make more dollars. But yeah, I get what you're saying. If you weren't short-term trading, what would you do?
I'd own emerging market equities.
I'd own some foreign currency.
I'd own a basic commodities that includes metals or energy or whatever.
And, you know, I'd like hope and pray.
And, you know, it's going to be a lumpy ride.
But, yeah, I think that's what you should – if you could get those assets but also, like, have it in a liquid form that can be used as collateral to trade short term like that's like the dream right yeah yeah i mean i was gonna say if you're if
you're just holding dollars you should at least own tips or something like that that gives you
inflation protection uh uh yeah i mean yeah there are a lot of little tips like if you keep it in
interactive brokers that you get the short term right on it right you get like the
four percent right so you get to offset some of the yeah but yeah there's like a lot of little
tricks you can do to to help it you can't get to nine but you can get like four six seven
right right nobody should just oh if they're just if they're not a short-term trader nobody should
just be in cash they should at least be in like tips right because then you're getting inflation
protection yeah just so you how you should you tips, right? Because then you're getting inflation protection.
Yeah, just like how you should stake your ETH, right?
If you're going to hold ETH, you should stake it.
But yeah.
Sure, yeah.
I just think that, I mean, very few people are successful short-term traders. So I don't think that's the best advice for most people to hold cash and look for opportunities to trade short-term.
Yeah.
Maybe top 1%, which you are.
I'm guessing you're a top 1% type of person.
I'm not.
So I'm not even trying to do that.
But I agree with you.
And that's why I was curious.
If you didn't trade, what would you be in?
And you basically explained my portfolio.
I just hold equities.
I hold emerging market equities.
You know, a large basket of US equities,
commodities and Bitcoin and some other cryptocurrency, you know, I have Ethereum
and things like that. Do you work? For none? Not anymore. No. Okay, so you survive on it?
I mean, I was early enough to sell. I have, it's not something that when I, you know,
I was early enough to sell. I have, it's not something that when I, you know,
you can define this trading if you want, you know,
I bought probably Ethan 20 early 2017 and,
and sold over the years a considerable amount of that. So I don't,
I don't have to work, but that's what I hold my, you know,
my remaining wealth in is in a, you know,
a basket of assets that i don't actively trade
okay great congrats um i'd like to like define this is like i'm not targeting this you're just
like talking in general like once you once you hit like depends on where you live but like once
you hit five million bucks of assets and you can make 5%,
6%, 7% a year on it, that's like $300K. It doesn't make sense to actually work anymore.
Once you've hit the capital... I'm just going to rant right now, by the way. I'm just going
to go on for a while. In the feudal era, that's like the equivalent of being this sort of like landed gentry is what they called them. It's like this class of people that like survived off of their land. They didn't have a landlord, you know, they didn't, they didn't own that much, but they owned enough to like, you know, they own enough to like, to live off of, to subsist off of.
And this landed gentry class is roughly 10% of the US population
has $2 million or more of assets.
This class holds 70% of US equities.
This is the capital class, if you will,
where they might not have enough to...
Their essential job, once you hit that level, your only job is to essentially be a trader.
You can call it different things.
You can say you're a capital allocator or whatever, but that's what you do, right? Your job is to just move your money around
and make a return off of it. And you can survive off of that. And if you do it well enough,
you can just never have to quote unquote work for anyone for the rest of your life.
And that's why I think learning how to trade or learning how to allocate capital is like one of the ultimate life skills because everything ends up converging into that.
Like that's all that matters is like your interpretation of the world and you shifting around bits and atoms and making it slightly more efficient.
And the world gives you a pretty comfy living based
on that um so yeah like there's a lot of like life tips and tricks to this um my second point
i wanted to bring up was that like i really don't i really stopped caring about like common advice
to the average person because like i realized this is going to sound very anti-egalitarian and very
elitist but I realized like not most of us aren't going to make it and I I used to think that was
not okay but now I guess I think that's like part of the natural order and evolution and like you know this case-shaped economy is how things just tend to happen
absent any um like intervention artificial intervention from the system um so
like yeah it's like giving advice to like the the 50th percentile person is like not that interesting to me like
maybe it should be tuned to just like the capital class or whatever the top whatever percentage you
want to say um it's obviously sound very good i'd probably have to like work on this like delivery
but um yeah i think increasingly i think increasingly advice is going to be shifted
more towards like you know there's going to be like a live player class and there's going to be an NPC class.
And that like threshold to make it into the live classes is getting harder and harder to clear.
I think it's important to think about your skill in capital allocation and just finding these little tips and tricks to stay liquid and work on capital efficiency and just squeezing out a couple percent here and there and reducing your carry costs and actually getting good at trading and taking and like sort of reading the system. Like I view like reading these price charts as like,
with almost like a religious connotation,
like it's almost like reading scripture.
And I view like this,
like multicellular organism of civilization is almost like a divine higher
order being not to get like all
woo-woos like crazy on you but i guess like my analogy for this is like if you're an ant
and then like you look at a human like the human is essentially like a god right it can like destroy your entire colony with one step it can just like
uh it can like interact with like elements that like you can't like for all intents and purposes
it's a god and i think that's how i view markets is like it's it's a higher order being that like
operates on a level of complexity that like i can barely begin to comprehend. And the ways to interpret it are these like very simplistic, like,
dimensionality reductions and to price action on all these different assets where it's kind
of like telling me like what's happening at a certain time. And the market rewards you
for bringing inevitable things from the future into the present.
This is also something I need to work on this rant.
But yeah, did you have something to say on it?
Yeah, I'm just wondering, in general, do you think more people should be trading then or less?
Would you suggest someone of average intelligence needs to get better at
trading and that's how they can make money or only,
only,
only high,
you know,
really high IQ people should be trading.
This is the thing.
Like,
I don't think you're of average intelligence.
You clearly are above average intelligence.
So like,
I don't think they're,
what's the point of like giving advice to the person of average intelligence. So like, I don't think they're,
what's the point of like giving advice to the person of average intelligence?
Yeah, I think I get what you're saying there.
You're saying it's,
that's just not a matter of concern for you
or not a matter of concern.
It's just, there's a lot of people that can't be helped.
There's no advice.
There's no advice you could give the majority of people that's going to help.
That's what I think.
I think, like, their path is preordained.
I think, like, the real question is just, like, how much resources should we allocate to, like, sustain, like, a level of comfort or cruelty?
Like, how much should we allow for that to happen?
But like,
yeah,
my question was genuine though.
Like,
do you think more people should be trading?
Like maybe I should be trading.
I don't know.
I've never thought I was good at it.
You are trading.
I always feel like,
well,
all right.
Actively,
actively trading more than,
you know, several times a year.
I mean, everybody's trading at some point, right?
Unless they literally hold an asset until they die.
Even if you are, that's a trade.
I think this is also another thing that I've realized is a trade is not just when you want – it's not just two decisions.
It's not just a buy in a sell like every every like sort of fragment of time that passes you're
deciding whether you want to keep a certain exposure on or not it's like an infinitesimal
amount of decisions being made everyone is a trader at the end let me let me put it a different
way do you think more people should be trying to time the market should more the time frame
doesn't actually matter it's like kind of like an illusion but
should more people be trying to trade short term um no sure whatever that i mean whatever the
colloquial definition of that is right like lots of lots of in and out right which i'm
the only the only really trades i've made are like have i made life-changing money yes all right
let's sell some.
Right?
That's kind of how I would – that's my trade.
That's the information you price into the market.
That's your – that's fine.
I think the answer to your question is almost tautological. Like, you should trade if you're going to make money trading it.
That's the only should.
Like, if you think you're going to add value to the system, then you should do it. That's the only should. Like, if you think you're going to add value to
the system, then you should do it.
Okay. Yeah.
And that's like, I don't know if you're capable. I don't know. Like, maybe, maybe not. But
like, it's hard to give advice to like the average person like, oh, yes, you should be
doing that. You should be doing it's like so hard to like i think we should just say i think
it is one should that you can say is like you should be paying attention but that's like almost
asking like everyone like yes like everyone should just try to live their lives with even more
intensity like that's like almost like a given like, yes, people should be paying more attention. It's so hard.
It's like, you know.
Yeah, the question I, and I'm assuming lots of people like me face, is this.
The only way I've ever really made money is by holding things for what I consider to be long-term.
And not, you know, anytime I've tried trading, I've lost money.
It feels like to me.
But does that mean maybe I'm just not grinding it
out hard enough? Am I not studying it hard enough or is it really pretty much impossible?
How am I to know? It's very possible to do that.
Oh, I know. I'm not even talking about me specifically. Obviously this isn't about me.
This is about most people who are in a position where they feel like maybe they've done well in
markets, but they don't like to trade short term.
I think the only way to find out is by doing it.
That's what I'm saying.
I think most people that have tried it lose money.
The statistics show that.
Most people lose money trading short term.
I think that's...
There's almost no...
That has to be the case.
That has to be the case.
Right.
The overwhelming majority.
Yes. to be the case that has to be the case right the overwhelming majority yes but like you know like not every it's not exactly zero sum because the markets don't encapsulate the entire system
so let me explain what i mean by that like yes for every individual trade there's a winner and
loser marked as some time. But there are other
benefits outside of pure P&L that matter to existence. So if you want to hedge risk in this
one particular asset so that you can do better in the rest of the world, yes, you might be a loser
loser in this asset but like it still makes sense to do and you're still winning in other ways
in this asset, but it still makes sense to do and you're still winning in other ways.
so like yes like people lose money trading short term almost by definition everyone has to lose
money trading in aggregate it just has to happen that way but like trading exists more it doesn't
solely exist to generate profit on an individual trade it's part of something that's like bigger
as a whole you know they're like risk transfers There's other things that like add utility to a market.
Yeah. Well, can I, can I, I mean, maybe you already talked about this. Maybe you don't
want to talk about it for other, for whatever reason, but just out of curiosity, like what
did you do today? Did, did you feel like today was a buying opportunity or were you shorting?
Did you feel like today was a buying opportunity or were you shorting?
I was short crypto going into today.
And it went down a lot.
So I covered the short and then I bought some crypto and then it went up
and then I sold some crypto
and now I'm flat again
you're flat again
yeah so you're doing
you're making several transactions
within hours it sounds like
and now you're just waiting
for another opportunity
that's kind of weird
now he's taking his victory lap
no that's okay that's great opportunity. That's kind of your... Now he's taking his victory lap.
No, that's okay.
That's great.
I'm just trying to understand your philosophy here in trading.
You're just waiting for an opportunity.
You're not actively trading every day.
In other words, there's a possibility you'll be in cash
for what, weeks, months?
Yes.
Or are you, are you going to make trades every day regardless?
I think like framing it as like active trading equals making trades every day is like, I
think it's not the correct frame.
It's almost like it's too, I've noticed this happen a lot.
It's like too like humanistic slash simplistic.
Like I said earlier, every decision you make is a trade.
Like not entering a position is a trade in and of itself.
Every decision – I guess it's a semantic thing that we're talking about.
But yeah, waking up and looking at the markets,
deciding not to trade is still active trading.
The only thing that makes it not active trading
is if you just wake up and you don't think about markets
and you don't look at markets and then you go to sleep
and maybe you do that for a week on end.
Yes, you could say you're not actively trading.
But just like the decision to take a week off, it does come from a place of like, oh, I don't think anything's going to happen this week.
I can take this week off.
So it is part of a larger – that's what I'm saying.
Trading is kind of like a life.
It's redefining what it means to even be part of civilization.
of civilization.
If you want to be a participant in civilization,
you need to have a certain amount of capital
and you need to have a certain amount of
skill
in interfacing with this system.
And the way it's communicating with you is
through price charts and markets.
Maybe it would help
if I just say there's
yeah I can't hear anything either
I think you're on mute whoever was talking
go for it.
What were you going to say?
I think you've asked the best questions today.
Twilight Zone.
Oh, you're talking to me?
Oh, thank you.
Yeah.
No, I'm really interested.
I mean, it's kind of like the...
It's one of the most fundamental questions for investors is whether they should trade or not.
It's always something I've considered. I mean, I think everyone that's involved in markets has tried.
And they feel like maybe I'm good at this, or maybe I'm not good at this. But there's always a part in the back of my mind that says, you know, maybe I should give this another try. Maybe, maybe I'm, maybe, maybe
I'm better than this than I think I would be. Maybe I was on an unlucky street when
I tried before. And I don't know. So my questions are genuine. Not, you know, I'm not, this
isn't like some Socratic method attempt to do. No, I don't think you're too attempt to make you – yeah, I'm not trolling at all.
I guess I'm just – I'm asking you – I guess I disagree with your frame because for me, when I got started trading, I started trading out of college.
I studied computer science and I started trading high frequency.
And the timescales that mattered were in the microseconds.
And do I call that trading than what I do now?
Even though now I operate on the scale of seconds, hours, days, it's like orders of
magnitude less of a granular timeframe than I was trading at the HFT place after college. But I wouldn't define just because
something is more fine grained and quick doesn't make it more trading. I almost view what I do now
as more trading as the way I did before, where I was just tuned algorithms and changed parameters
around to automatically trade. So I guess I guess like the distinction between time,
like doesn't actually, it's not like a real distinction to me.
Like something isn't, you are a trader.
You're just making it on certain timeframes.
And you're asking me like, should I experiment with other timeframes?
And like the answer to that is always, yes,
you should always like experiment shows branch out to see if like you'd be
good at something, but it's not like you're not a trader.
That's what I'm trying to say.
Yeah,
I get it.
I mean,
right.
It's a little bit of a semantic issue,
I suppose,
but I,
I guess the question,
it's like, there's a dial,
right.
And the,
the,
the number of transactions per year I have can either be,
you know,
at the,
the higher end,
like a 10 or at the lower end,
like zero or one. And I'm much towards the lower end like a 10 or at the lower end like zero or one,
and I'm much towards the lower end.
Should, the question is always like,
maybe I should turn that dial up to a two or a three
or a four or a five,
or maybe I should keep it where it's at.
And that's kind of how I think about it.
Like, should I be more active in my portfolio
rather than more passive?
And do I want to turn that dial up from where I'm at?
That's always kind of the question that I've battled. 30.
Do you have a wife and kids?
Do you plan on having a wife and kids soon?
Yeah.
How soon?
Maybe within the next five years.
Okay. That's probably going to happen how much what percent of time do you spend online in a day
75 percent
75%.
Okay. So you have like, you spend like four,
you spend like 12 hours a day online and then you spend like six hours living
life.
Well, I don't know about 12 hours. I was thinking of like my,
of like a typical workday, but yeah, let's say it's a lot.
Um, what do you do with your time online?
Um, what do you do with your time online?
Um, you know, I'm, like I said, I don't, I don't have to work.
I do some, I, well, I used to do some programming, like, uh, like, uh, contract work, things
like that.
I don't really have to do it anymore, but I'm playing around,
you know, I play around a lot with AI. I do my own kind of projects. I do watch markets a lot,
even though I'm not actively trading. I don't know.
I don't know.
Are you good at video games?
Are you good at video games?
I'm okay.
Not great.
Okay.
Not good at PvP type video games?
I don't think so, no.
But surprisingly, it's never really been that big of an interest of mine.
Okay.
I would just like give it a you know just like experiment more with but yeah i
mean it doesn't sound like you probably don't have a natural talent for it so there's no like
need to actually try to do it more um i mean it sounds like you're living a good life like why
are you not happy with where you are like are you I am. What the driving feeling is, it sounds like you're, I don't know, like maybe you're making an argument that people should be more active in their trading.
No, man.
You're not.
I don't think so.
I mean, I think people, like I said, it's like there's no should.
Maybe you feel like, oh, like some people can make money after trading.
There's maybe a feeling of FOMO.
Maybe I should be doing this too.
Of course.
Of course I do.
Yeah, give it a shot.
You have all the resources and all the time to do it.
So, like, there's nothing stopping you.
Like, you don't need me to tell you whether you can or can't, right?
Like, it's the only person you should listen to is, like, yourself.
Maybe this is what conviction is.
Like, I think a lot of, I mean, if I can, like,
storytell for a little bit, like, I never thought I would be doing,
like, I never thought where I'd be where I was like I thought
I'd do you work in a job and that was you make like 150k a year and that'd be like the pinnacle
of my existence like a lot of people like they knew they were destined for greatness since like
a child whereas like for me like you know I grew up like very middle class like my parents are very
like risk averse and like I guess I just
never really had that high aspirations or ambitions for myself and it really was like a huge like
eye-opening process to like see people that like I knew I had more talent than like achieve and like
do things and like do things that I never imagined could be done and I think
that feeling like really helped me be like why can't that be me um and just like just like
throughout my life just like successfully like you know pushing further and further boundaries
like I realized that I look around at my competition like I just realized that like
these people are like you know they're not that impressive like they don't have anything
that i don't have and that's been like a big sort of motivational drive for me to like do things
that like i never thought i was capable of doing is just realizing that the people that have that
have already done them like don't have anything that you don't possess so i feel like
for you maybe that process might be like it might be short-term trading who knows like maybe they
do have something that you don't but like they probably don't it's more so just like a bunch of
reps that they have like trained from a very young age like i would i will say that like
there is like a like a level of like theory of mind thinking that comes from like playing
PVP games from a young child as it from like your early childhood that like really does
lend itself more to like short term sort of discretionary trading.
But like, that's not like the only way to make money.
That's just like a small drop in the surface.
Like if you're more technically inclined, you can trade even more short term and start like building algorithmic trading bots like market make and stuff like that
they're completely like different not completely different but like a slightly different skill set
that like you may be more suited towards so it all depends on just like your your own starting
stats your own priors your own natural talents and And you just find a way to configure that into pricing.
It all comes down to all that matters is you contribute in some way, shape, or form
to this socio-politico techno-capital machine.
And contributions come in all shapes and forms.
And whatever your contribution may look like, it's like a form of self-expression.
It's like a form of art, what you contribute to this thing.
And that's what makes it so like beautiful from like an individual's perspective
is to be able to like, you know, add value to the world and still, you know,
stay authentic to like who you are and what you're good at and what you like to do.
But yeah, like that's my rant on this.
If you, if you remember my original question,
it was about like the mega trend in millennials and Gen X slowly taking over the boomers, right, as they die off.
And honestly, your point really resonated with me and it got me thinking because, you know, maybe I am just kind of instead of thinking, oh, I got this trend right.
Maybe I didn't.
Maybe I just kind of instead of thinking, oh, I got this trend right. Maybe I didn't. Maybe maybe I just kind of got lucky.
And maybe I do need to think more short term in the market sometimes, because if this doesn't happen and I still have a lot of money in these assets, you know, that would that would be catastrophic for my life if bitcoin went to
you know a thousand dollars or whatever what percent of your portfolio is in bitcoin i would
say probably like in bitcoin i mean in crypto in general i would probably say
right i mean it was a lot different earlier in the year right now probably like 30 percent
yeah i tend to like always end up giving this advice at the bottoms so just note that but like
it's important to like have like a price level where it's like oh like if i were to lose 15
percent of my portfolio on this thing you know that would actually change my quality of life
and just like having a predefined level of like okay at this point i just need to get out you portfolio on this thing, you know, that would actually change my quality of life. And just
like having a predefined level of like, okay, at this point, I just need to get out, you know,
like, it's not worth it. I think that does end up saving a lot of lives. But yeah, like,
yeah, it's important to have. But no, I appreciate discussion with you today.
Yeah. All right, man. I like the way you think. You operate at a level of abstraction that is easy to communicate with.
Unlike some of the people, it's fun to not to be a dick,
but sometimes the questions they ask are more revealing
than the actual answers that they're searching for.
But I always enjoy when those questions come up.
But yeah.
Let's do more.
Go ahead.
I just wanted to say thanks.
You definitely gave me some things to think about and a different perspective.
So thanks.
Have a great night.
I appreciate you, Doug.
You can always DM me if you want to talk about anything.
Sertoshi and then we'll have maybe two more. That was a good,
maybe that's a good way to end it, but maybe we'll take two,
two more bad ones. So we get like, and then we'll end it.
Sertoshi. Oh, there you go.
Hey, Vicky.
Thanks for today.
Good stuff. As someone who's ex-HFT, I was wondering if you think that world progress has been held back more by the intellectual capital that the quant firms kind of hoard or the equivalent
of that and the knowledge that the insurance companies hoard
no um i i hear this complaint a lot from people on the left and i think it's i think it like
is basically very humanistic and simplistic thinking.
It's like the human fails to interpret the machine.
And for the longest time, people were complaining about how ad tech was completely useless.
And we were sending our best minds in order to sell ads and generate clicks and whatnot.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
You don't really hear that that much anymore.
And the reason for that is because like the infrastructure and data and the systems and
all the scaling they built out for ad tech ended up, you know, generating social media
and it ended up being like the precursor to AI, all of the data and the infrastructure and the pipeline, everything,
right? It's like, it was a necessary node in the tech tree in order to get to AI.
And now no one talks about how we wasted so much time on ad tech. And there's so many examples of
this about how like, you know, pornography helps scale video streaming, how, you, how in the 1800s, gambling helped shape our modern understanding of probability.
We often don't understand the way the tech tree progresses.
So no, I don't think wasting time and the discoveries we've made in HFT
are useful and will continue to be useful
to humanity and like anyone that complains or copes about this there's like i just simply
label them as like you just you don't understand how the machine works um so yeah that's my take
on that i think it is useful and it will continue to be useful. Any form of knowledge and increasing order will always be useful to humanity, even though
it might have local drawbacks.
These things always end up benefiting in the long term.
And I guess maybe that's where the sort of spiritual, religious aspect of this comes
in, where it's like, I just believe that following
our natural incentives always leads to good things in the long run. They might have short-term
externalities, but the fact that we haven't discovered those short-term externalities yet
means that it's like solving a knowledge problem that collective society has. And maybe it doesn't
take...
A lot of times we don't learn from one lesson
and we need to learn it multiple times.
So that's just part of the learning
and knowledge process that humans take
to understand things.
Yeah, I hope that was a good answer to your question.
I hope you...
Yeah, thank you.
Maybe I'm... Hello? yeah thank you um maybe i'm hello oh sorry can you hear me okay yep i think you broke up yeah i was gonna say maybe i'm just a
closeted libtard one quick specific example i don't know if you just don't really think that
medicine should be particularly um socialized maybe it should just be strictly privatized, but you understand that prices
contain truth. If my health insurance premiums go up, it probably means that my insurance company's
internal models of my health or even my lifespan seem to think that I'm going to
become more unhealthy or die sooner.
If those models were part of modern medicine, do you think that would maybe improve society
or is it better to keep them private and let free markets do their thing and have that
stay internal?
For the most part, I'm going to side with the sort of free market ideology with this,
mainly because markets that have less distortions in them tend to evolve and discover truths faster.
If you look at a lot of aspects of the healthcare market in the US, it takes so long, like, approve a drug.
It takes, you know, 8 to 14 years, which is, like, kind of ridiculous, right?
Like, they should just test it on a few animals, test it on a few humans,
and just, like, you know, it shouldn't take 14 years.
And, you know, because it takes so long for ideas to evolve in that space,
like, there's just not much innovation going on.
So in regards to your particular example,
I'm sure everyone can come up with examples
where there are short-term externalities
that may not be what we desire.
And a lot of people tend to wave them around
as gotchas against free markets
and against following incentives.
And yeah, if you think about solutions
in a multidimensional curve,
yes, there's local maxima everywhere.
And leaving the local maxima always requires some sort of...
You have to give some stuff up in the short term.
But the point of progress is to not get trapped in those things
and go for like the global optimum
and i do think the global optimum gets achieved faster when you have you know a faster evolution
of ideas and truth seeking so that's just my general answer to that kind of stuff not
you know talking about your particular example thank you thank you appreciate it cool um bully Thank you, Thickey. Appreciate it. Cool. Bully.btc.
Yikes.
Civil. civil what are these names
hello
thank you for the space
this is super interesting
this is more of a different angle
but I'm still curious
from your perspective,
do you see, how do you look at
investing, like impact investing
in the context of a financial world?
Let me know.
Define impact investing?
Impact investing from
investing that's
done not from a solely
financial perspective, meaning
investing that's trying
to combine both financial outcomes
and impact outcomes.
Basically,
I think this is another epistemic
question of like i think at the end of the day it has to have it has to be sustainable from a
financial outcome in order for it to self-sustain but maybe when people say impact investing they
refer to things that might not have a financial outcome that's positive
in the short term, maybe 1, 2, 10, 20 years, but eventually will get to a self-sustaining state
that it does generate a financial outcome. So impact investing, I think, can be viewed as
things that might move us out of local maxima that inevitably
lead us to better
outcomes. The issue is that
a lot of people use that
as an excuse to completely disregard
the financial
viability of things in the
long run. And in the
name of impact, they
end up trying to propose,
things that are completely disconnected with reality.
And yeah,
I think like we will look back at ESG and like this sort of war on energy as,
that sort of thing,
even though we,
this is like the classic,
like deal take that i have adopted on
it um but yeah like even though it has had some positive externalities like i think it will be
generally viewed um like this the climate policy as a whole will be viewed uh by history as like
a giant disaster so yeah like i think impact investing, quote unquote, can be useful when
like it aligns with reality. And, you know, a lot of things you can categorize as impact investing,
like SpaceX or Palantir, that you may not historically categorize as impact investing.
Like these things have, you know, barely generated any profits, but, you know, suddenly they're
very valuable companies because people agree with the the mission of what they're doing so i guess
you could yeah there's just like a semantic thing there too but yeah all right uh two more questions
then i'm gonna head out yikes uh let's see uh how's my audio is it okay i've been having some questions lately uh yeah yep oh good good sweet awesome um
let's see uh yeah or i didn't necessarily have a specific question for you so much as a
thought are they investing or rather like um that i think you make a sound point there with regards to like obviously it needs to be financially feasible but um i guess my caveat would be i think that doing acting like if you're
a capital allocator i guess like in the shoes of a capital allocator for instance one of the things
that lately i've been thinking about a lot is like private equity and does it need to be as
a lot is private equity and does it need to be as such a strong force for local monopolies
in general as it seems to have turned into.
I think there's a lot of opportunities in the market or ways to think about old sectors
in the context of where we're at in 2026 AI automation, et cetera, et cetera, where
I think a lot of that, like, if what you want to do is go out and do something good, I,
I have a reasonably strong conviction that that should be easier than ever, largely because
so much opportunity to disrupt an existing, like very poor attempt like ESG and kind of how we've handled the
energy situation um at you know making an impact as opposed to trying to like take a first
principles approach and then rethink a given niche or sector that you want to go start uh
uh like from a from a capital perspective like there's room to disrupt it, so let's go disrupt it.
But also, hey, it's important to me that things change here.
I think the TLDR point, I guess,
is I think pain right now
is very much a thing
that even just a small group of people
with a little bit of capital
and like the will to go get something done um it's it's far more far more feasible profitable
like worth putting your money and time and energy towards than it ever has been and I guess I don't
know I guess the the moral of the story on my side would be like, just go start doing shit if something looks investable
or like the kind of event you want to make, go start investing in it.
And then, like, reasonably strong conviction is that, like,
if you're going to take enough shots right now, you will hit eventually.
I guess is sort of my take on that.
I don't have a lot of context for you, Ziki,
so I don't have a specific question, but that was my general thought, I guess is sort of my take on the matter. I don't have a lot of context for you, so I don't have a specific question, but
that was my general thought, I guess.
Okay, yeah. I think it's a very
human
thing to
when you say I want to
make
a change, I think it's a very
human thing. I think
maybe
Nietzsche would say it's like, you know, force like bending reality
to your will. I do think like that's, there's something very fulfilling to an individual person
about doing that, just like shaping reality to how you think it should be. It is like a form of art.
And yeah, like I think the easiest way to to do to make a change is to like find things
that like they were gonna happen whether you did it or not but you just like made it happen a little
faster and i think that's how most of the change in this world ends up happening or you made it
happen a little differently which i think is the important thing
for people to be doing it's like if you are seeing something getting unified you can step up and stop
it or like you can you could be a part of that process and then make something different i think
it's kind of where at least where i'm coming from on it i guess from like a zoomed out perspective
like i like view everything as inevitable and it may be like different on like a certain time frame
but like it all converges into pretty much the same thing this is maybe a philosophical difference
that we have um like my when i think about like famous scientists like you know let's say albert
einstein like he always gets credited. What if
we just lost Albert Einstein?
It's not like we would not understand.
We would just lose
the theory of relativity into the void
forever. Multiple people
were working on this thing, and maybe
he was the first one to get it by a few months
or a few years, but
it might have changed the
path we took to get to where we are
now. But I don't know if it would've changed that much. We would still have gotten to that knowledge.
I think great man theory is useful to provide ambition for people, but it's also a little too
simplistic of thinking. Yes, there are times in history where one man can completely shape the alt chain the course of history but like
maybe if that guy didn't exist like maybe if there wasn't an adolf hitler there'd be a guy
very similar to adolf hitler that did the exact same things you know um so yeah i guess i like i view it more as just like surf like peter teal says like
surfing a wave um of inevitability like that's how i view markets too is like i don't like trade
how i want the world to be i just like think it's going to be like this and i just bring it into the
present a little bit faster and i get rewarded for doing that um so i do think i don't know
maybe that's just me projecting my model of the world
for how things work, but that's just how I view things.
Yeah, I think you're, I guess my,
I kind of agree that there is a,
there's a certain inertia to a lot of processes,
but I'm also very like,
individual humans are important, I guess,
where it's like, yes,
this thing will probably happen with or without you.
But you, at least like from a philosophical perspective for me,
it's like, if what you do is you go find the thing
that you are best suited to be doing at this current moment,
that you have a unique, you know,
calendar suitability to be doing this thing,
and then you go participate in the creation of some kind of system,
and what you are doing is the thing that you are best suited to do,
then necessarily what, or like,
that's as close as you're going to get
to being able to meaningfully shape reality so if you
go find those places and then if you give yourself the impetus to go and do what's important and what
you're good at at doing at them i think those things sure they could come out the general same
but they won't come out the way they would come without you, essentially.
Yeah, I could agree with that.
I do think, especially around stylistic things
that may not matter to the actual functioning of the thing,
you can leave your own personal mark.
It might be little, but it matters, right?
It matters to the individual, yes.
It matters as much as it's able to matter
it's the only thing we could do is kind of where i'm at yeah yeah you might be right um but yeah
i appreciate the uh the question um we'll get pax and then justin and then we'll call it i gotta
get some dinner pax hey thicky thanks for uh bringing me up. I've gotten a lot out of your the articles that you've written. And I, I see that you've sort of alluded to Nick Land, and what he thinks about a ton. And I'm also a big fan of his thoughts. And I saw in a recent interview he did.
And I saw in a recent interview he did, he was talking about this idea that you should treat every potential channel of information or communication as an actual channel of information.
It's got me curious, in your trading, what's the most unconventional or woo piece of signal that you've traded off of?
That's a funny question.
I feel like the beautiful thing is that information is always...
Oftentimes, it's like something different
because like as soon as it works once like everyone picks up on it pretty quickly and
they're like oh like this is the thing that indicates like these tells like um they're
constantly changing and i think like the definition of alpha is that it constantly changes which is
like the beautiful and the unbeautiful part of it is like that little extra piece of information that you get.
Sometimes it doesn't change, but like a lot of the times, like that little thing that
like makes the difference between whether you make a decision or not.
Um, yeah, it's always some, it's oftentimes something different.
And, and oftentimes it's like, it's, it's not just like one channel that gets communicated it's actually like a lot of different channels but it's just
like the one that like speaks to you that finally gets you to like make the decision that matters
to you but it might not actually be like the singular best piece of information is just price.
It's just like watching, it's just the charts.
Like there's like so much information in the chart,
even though it's just like,
you can just represent a price chart in like,
you know, a 1D array.
It's so, it's got so much
information because like you put it into context with like everything else that's going on.
And it really is like the entire synthesis of like all the information that you're getting
that like form a decision. It's not just like, it's very rarely just one thing. It's like,
you know, 30 different things that all have like a different weighting and that weighting like changes every time you make a decision um it's something quite beautiful to it
but yeah i like i like that quote that you said with the with the land and the information channels
yeah it's super interesting i mean it's easy you know if you go all the way down that rabbit hole, you'll turn into a schizophrenic and
everything means everything. But it's definitely when you talk about sort of the markets as being
this higher, you know, like this organism, we're part of this, this higher thing. I think that's
a really like useful frame to think of of it um yeah i wanted to touch on
that for a second and we can go to your next question um yeah i do think a lot of discretionary
traders are schizophrenic like it really is it is a form of schizophrenia but i yeah it's like i
don't think i don't think we've thought of civilization like this before.
And it's not because we're just like so much smarter than the past.
It's just that like, we've witnessed like the internet being built and this, all this technology that is interconnected civilization and like communication between in such a way
that like, we like understand it much better than we have before.
Like there, there, there are more like ways to perceive this thing. So I do think this, I think it will be like a growing, increasing, like sort of, I don't know if like
a religious or a spiritual perspective on things, but, but yeah. Yeah. I'm with you. I mean,
I've seen a bunch of small accounts on here that legitimately seem like they're schizophrenic people and you know people
like Rune and uh other good traders big accounts follow them and uh you know I think they are
sort of seeing something that we're not or provide a perspective that we can't see and there is. Not necessarily alpha, but signal.
And yeah, it's very.
I don't know.
We're going into very weird schizophrenic times.
I guess my other question was.
Your trades today shorting Bitcoin.
I mean, my theory of mind
of you trading early earlier today is is just you didn't you know you were probably just looking at
the charts and and had a gut feeling to short you know it wasn't one one signal oh no i didn't short it i've been short for um a few days okay yeah if you like
look through my tweets you can like you can like you can see like my path of thought of when like
i realized like oh shit like this is going on this is what i need to do like like it started
like probably jan 25 i was just like it was probably earlier than jan 25 but that's when i
tweeted it and i was like holy fuck like people are buying real assets and they're going away from crypto assets like if you
would put if you yeah and then the path of logic kind of follows clearly from there but i was like
obviously very late to this idea but like i was like early to like like things come in like
waves of realization which is like i think a really interesting part about markets
like it's not it's like one cohort of participant realizes it and then there's like this new
equilibrium and then another cohort realizes it so like i think i was like early to this even
though i'm like late to the overall trend of realizing this i was like early to like this
wave and that's all you really need to like make money is just like predicting like what the next marginal um you know net demand or supply will do um yeah yeah i mean i i started pivoting
in like similar sort of trade getting out of crypto getting out of tech and ai stuff and into
commodities like real things um i work in the ai space and I just see like on my feed,
all this agent clod bot stuff.
And I know from interacting with some people in the space,
like a lot of these people are legit in chat bot psychosis
chatbot psychosis all the time um and i think like as people realize uh these like ai capabilities
all the time.
have been really you know if they come out of that psychosis they'll they'll be sort of
pushed away from ai and this sort of trade i i want to reframe i i think
obviously like the the psychosis can like just completely one-shot people that don't have a good grounding in truth.
But I do think the chatbot psychosis is actually very useful in aggregate.
Because I think it frees you of herd morality it lets you just like have ideas
and just like it will it will like reaffirm your ideas without having to rely on the rest of your
peers to reaffirm them and like gain conviction and things and like you know use words to describe
how you're feeling without having to rely on like consensus and the local consensus, I guess. And I think like, obviously for most people,
that's bad because like, you know, they should be just following the herd,
but for the people that shouldn't be following the herd,
it actually augments them. And like the net benefit to society is, is,
is beneficial.
Yeah. I mean, I agree with you, but I just, I don't know when, you know, if it's just reaffirming everything I say and I think I have good ideas, you know, I could think I'm in the top 1%, but if I'm not, then it would be catastrophic for me. It'd be catastrophic for you, but for civilization, like you're just a call option.
If you die, the world doesn't matter. But if you are right and you go and make that change,
you can actually move civilization to the amount of like a hundred of yous would have done if you
didn't have that conviction or self-belief. And that's like the game theory of the individual
versus the collective is the collective doesn't care if you just take on a fuck ton of risk and literally die.
Because like in that tiny chance of worlds where it works out, that's where all the expected value of the collective is.
That's why I think chat psychosis is like a form of that.
It's like, I'm just going to lever this guy up like a hundred a thousand x because like most
people are not taking as much risk as they should from a civilization perspective so like i'm just
gonna lever you up and you're probably gonna go to zero but like on the off chance like you become
something greater it makes up for all the other zeros out there
yeah that's an interesting way of looking at it um fucking banger holy shit i like that
the chatbot psychosis thing is so or yeah so to to maybe overshare i i had a i had a bit of an
episode that i talked up to some degree for uh with chatbot psychosis recently and it's the
topic's been on my mind.
I don't think psychosis is the right word.
I think it's closer to what you say than you hear.
It's just leverage on...
It's non-human validation for humans of human ideas,
which can be good or bad.
But the big thing is none of us as humans are used to getting validation from anything other than other humans, presumably, except secretly,
there's probably a good amount of algorithmic gaming going on in that we're showing things
to certain humans and not to others, et cetera, et cetera. But now we have this weird, like, auto-feedback validation machine
that can also, like, be a thought partner on a particular thread
and then also go do things about it.
So I think it's, at least for me, I think I have to kind of learn
how to integrate chatbot psychosis into my own psyche if I
want to keep working with these things, and I do.
But I also don't want to go too far off the rails and just completely lose track.
But I think what you say there where it's like, this is a unique vector.
This is a lever that didn't exist and it's leverage on something but
it's kind of hard to articulate what that is and for some people that thing whatever it is is kind
of dangerous um but i think progressively we're all gonna have to figure out like okay like there
are chat bots that can follow human thought threads and there wasn't that before so like now
how do i deal with a world where everyone
can do that kind of thing yeah like i i go in i like what you said and going off on that like
i think what it allows is like maybe in the past it required like 10 humans right agreeing to a
certain thing in order for like a piece of knowledge to actually be acquired but now like
it only requires two people to like realize or one person to realize it for it to like come,
for it to like, yeah, come to civilization.
So it lowers the bar for knowledge acquisition.
And like, I mean, this is going to be kind of cruel to say,
but like if you're going to get one shot by like chat GPT
and you're going to like go off into psychosis,
like maybe, you know, it's like, it's not, it's like, you know,
maybe you just weren't going to make it, you know?
Yeah, but, I mean, if you follow the arc, if these keep, if these things don't top out in an S-curve, like, then it just will happen to everyone.
Like, you have to expect if the models keep getting more capable or quote unquote smarter, you know?
Yeah, this is explicitly what they're being designed to do, right?
They are supposed to increase human productivity.
They're supposed to take-
Well, no, you said something earlier I wanted to comment on.
All of the training data, all of the post-training work
that's being done on the models, the sort of
primary objective of that work is to get the models to output text that humans prefer,
not text that is more true. So, you know, they they're sort of it's like a social media feed
you know they're they're not optimizing for uh like knowledge acquisition or making you a better
person whatever that means it's just to get you as addicted as engaged as possible. And these things are no different.
That's my real word.
They're going to get so good
at that, that even if you ask
it to
try to
poke holes in your idea,
if it thinks that
you'll
be more engaged if it
lies to you and gaslights you and yes-mans you, then
that's what it'll do.
Well, yeah.
They're being designed for two things.
One is to increase productivity because that's what the VCs are saying, that they are like,
invest in my company because it's going to have this massive productivity wave, AGI
or whatever, et cetera, et cetera.
And then also, we're also going to put it in consumer products.
And what do consumer products do?
What they do is they compete in an attention economy.
So necessarily, the two things that models are being trained to do is be productive when
given an instruction and increase engagement in the application in which this model is
being deployed to me
if what you have is a you know other quote unquote new industrial revolution whatever if
you have this new relatively new relatively step change uh a shift in the technological landscape
and what you do with it explicitly is keep people engaged with your app and make them more productive.
Well, we better hope that they use the productivity to go do more good things
instead of let it rot their brain and give them psychosis by continuing to engage with the app,
which is why I think for me, what I want to encourage for people is better cognitive hygiene because
things feel inevitable and things feel broken right now.
And if we just let them feel that way and sort of let the wave take you, if you will,
then nobody's going to leverage this new productivity to go out and do something good,
which is what we need to do so that there is more of it in the training data, if for no other reason.
So it's like, for me, the, you, we kind of need, or like the real enemy, yes, is, is
capitalism and, and.
Yikes.
Can I answer your question?
Are you a VC?
I'm not, no.
What, what do you do?
Currently, I work
working
or I guess
co-founding a startup. That's what I'm doing.
Okay, gotcha.
And Pax, you're
an AI researcher?
I'm an
ops person at one of these data annotation companies.
Okay, cool.
Cool.
Do you have a response to what Yikes was saying real quick?
And then...
Yeah, yeah.
The goal isn't to enable you to do better work.
The goal is to replace you because you're expensive.
Yep. So ultimately, it's so that we can have a great increase in productivity in all of our
corporations. And the easiest, most straightforward way to do that is for us to cut headcount and
then leverage the productivity increases either via AI usage mandates in the company that we enforce so we can continue firing people,
or something that's not that, but that is the very clear, like,
we can increase profits by slashing headcount.
That is what we are trying to do.
So I think, yeah, it's important for, like, if you're a startup or if you're an individual person,
like, you got to be the thing that isn't trying to do that.
So if we just let the things that try to do that, do that, then that's what they're going to do.
I somewhat agree with that.
could try to articulate what you're saying or i guess to bounce off of that my view is uh you know
the models don't really improve beyond the data set we're always going to need humans that are
better in a certain domain or aspect than the frontier models and if you are one of those people
And if you are one of those people, your data will be extraordinarily valuable and you'll be useful for as long as you can maintain that lead ahead of the models.
Just to give an example, there's a contractor on one of my projects.
He's a biology PhD.
biology PhD. And over in a period of three months, he made like $280,000 labeling data,
just because he was like the only one of like a handful of people in the world that could
actually label this data. So it's a very interesting space.
It sort of feels like being,
seeing how the sausage gets made.
Yeah.
The scary part there is that that's a very finite resource
because once he labels that data and writes it down,
now nobody's gonna need it from him anymore. The models can take it.
Cool.
Last question, Justin,
and then maybe we'll...
Hey, what's up, man?
How have you been? I miss you.
I've been doing well, dude. I hope you've been
doing well also. Yeah, no,
I've been following your writing
and listened to a couple of your talks. I think you've done
a great job, man. And I find myself
agreeing with a lot of what you're saying. And I
appreciate you contributing to
the space and just our collective IQ
in general.
Thanks, dog.
Yeah, there's one thing
I...
I have to ask first.
No, I don't hold any... Good, let's go. I thought I told you this on the last SteadyLabs. No, I don't hold on ETH.
Good, let's go.
I thought I told you this on the last SteadyLabs,
but I sold all my ETH at 38.50,
and I was super depressed when I did
because obviously I could have sold it almost 5,000.
So I was super sad selling it at 38.50
and was terrified it was going to go up,
and then it didn't,
and now I'm obviously extremely grateful that I don't have any real exposure to this godforsaken industry.
I remember you told me you sold it.
I was just worried you re-bought it, but I'm glad you're safe.
No, I don't think, I'm not sure I would ever buy ETH again.
I mean, I would love to buy Bitcoin, but I still think it's too expensive.
Done with ETH.
Done with ETH.
Yeah, it does. Yeah. Done with ETH. Done with ETH. Yeah.
There's just no point.
It's just too expensive.
Maybe if it was three digits,
under $1,000, I would buy it,
but I don't think I would hold it long term.
Okay.
Did you want to talk about anything in particular?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I was calling because... I actually agree with this take of yours, but I wanted to play devil's advocate because I think like a lot of times our ego gets in the way.
So I wanted to ask you about your nothing ever happens thesis and that like we're actually living in a time that stuff is happening again very quickly.
Wait, wait, what is my thesis?
From my understanding, I joined the call about like 45 minutes ago. So if I missed
something, I apologize. But from my understanding, you were saying basically like society is
accelerating, stuff is happening again, history is being written again, et cetera. Is that correct?
Yes.
Cool. Yeah. So that was my interpretation. But again, I was only here for the last 45 minutes
or so. And I actually completely agree with this, but I'm kind of wondering if this is just our ego
talking because we as humans naturally want to live in a time that's important and relevant and
where things are changing. And one of the things that I keep thinking is like people are always
saying we're living in unprecedented times. And I imagine people have always been saying that since the dawn of human history.
Part of me thinks this might have accelerated even further, this kind of like illusion that
like, no, this time is different.
It's really interesting now because of the Trump effect.
I remember how crazy Trump one was or how people thought it was crazy and how different
it was.
But actually, when I look back at Trump one, I can't name a single event that happened
that was actually unprecedented and big.
And I'm wondering if this is all because he's kind of like a reality star
and he knows how to put on a good show and get us excited.
And I've been thinking about Trump 2
and wondering if we're really in an exciting time now.
And sure, things have happened.
Yeah, they got Maduro and we struck Iran once
and maybe
we'll do it again. And the Ukraine-Russia war has been going on for several years. But like,
if you actually like zoom out, nothing has really changed in the world. There's just
a lot of buzz, a lot of narrative, a lot of hype. You could maybe make the case for AI,
but AI, as we understood it, does not exist yet. I mean, right now it's a better search and a chat
bot, but like we don't actually have general artificial intelligence and it's not clear if we'll get
there. I mean, I'm optimistic we do, but I don't know, from my perspective, like I agree, it feels
like we're living in unprecedented times, but I'm wondering if that's just our ego trying to hype us
up and get us excited about the now when it's really not that different. I hear what you're saying and I agree with this. It's like hard to like quantitatively measure.
I do think that like it can be quantitatively measured in just like measuring the volatility
of markets and just measuring like volume. Because if you interpret like every buy or
sell into a market as like someone pricing some piece of information into
the system, then yes, in certain times, more price discovery happens than others.
And I guess you can use different quantitative metrics. You can look at, let's say,
equity volatility or bond volatility. These things do have like um you know multi-decade
shifts of of yeah it's like it's not like one year is equal across all time frames i think it's like
interesting to look at like you know like less things happen over saturday and sunday than over
monday and tuesday and that's like an artificial human
reason for why. But like, it does show that like, you know, there are times where things happen. And
there are times where things don't happen and that are completely within our control,
and are completely a function of like, who's paying attention. So yeah, I mean,
I completely agree with that. I just kind of wonder, like the Trump, Trump has introduced of volatility, but it feels like, I don't know if synthetic is the right word, but the tariff scare is probably the best example.
Like, the markets had to price Trump being crazy with the tariffs, and then they had to basically price that out when he took the tariffs off the table and taco'd.
And now, you know, the market is, like, repeatedly and repeatedly priced in something Trump has said then he's changed his perspective or taco on it and the market has repriced and now
you're seeing like diminishing change from the things that trump has said over time is the market
sort of understanding that nothing ever happens again like if we strike iran next friday or if
the us does not we because there is no we like how much is that really going to affect markets probably not much unless there's something going
on with oil right
hello I think you're on mute I'm'm not sure if just on my own. Oh, okay. So if I can articulate what you're saying, are you saying that each of these events may seem like a big deal in the moment, but when you look back at them in hindsight, each of these macro geopolitical events aren't that big of a deal? Is that what you're trying to say?
Yeah, exactly. So basically, if you looked at the first year of Trump's presidency, nothing really significant has actually happened, right?
Like AI, like there's GPT-5-2 now, which is a little better than 5-1 and it's a little better than 5-0 before it.
But everything has felt pretty incremental.
It just seems like there's a ton of media buzz and attention on very dramatic short-term events that, you know, we move on from.
Yeah, I mean, just to chime in, because this is my wheelhouse, the last big jump was O3,
and everything, you know, that's been the last sort of step change.
The difference between O3 and the recent models isn't as much as people are making out to be i think like
a lot of this is like relative to the observer and the more capital you accumulate the more you
insulate yourself from externalities that can change your circumstances but like yeah if you're
an employee at a firm and or you're looking for a job as a software developer in 2021 and now you can't get employed, that is a big shift for that individual.
And I guess you can try to sum up the total amount of change in the system is just from everyone's perspective, how much has their life changed in the past five years or something?
A lot of people's lives have changed significantly.
If you have a lot of capital stored up where these things don't really matter, you don't worry about your job.
Yes, you tinker around with tech and crypto and AI.
Things don't really change that much.
But I guess these things accumulate, and once they cross a threshold, like boom, like suddenly your entire circumstance changes.
Right.
I think news fatigue is an issue here as well.
Like there,
there are just as madly in my,
in my experience,
right.
Like a thing where we go over all the change logs of all the,
all the tools and stuff.
And like there,
I haven't noticed a significant slowdown in the rate of either research papers
that if you try to replicate the results, they appear replicable and they appear significant.
And then also all of the tools, all of the updates that they're getting every week,
you're getting a significant change of capabilities.
But no, but like, unless you specifically go very far out of your way to keep up with all of them all the time, which even as somebody who's been trying to do
that for several years, and I have found that it's, it's physically impossible to keep up with
everything being at the rate that it's moving. So there's certain until, or unless something like
a Claude bot arrives on the scene and hits the
zeitgeist, I think a lot of a lot of it is just people are kind of tired of hearing about
it unless it's like absolutely bonkers crazy.
They just don't care at this point.
So I think it's a little bit of a like perceptive mask to think that there isn't much progress
in that area.
So at least in my experience, there certainly
Yeah, I mean, I guess
you can go down the stack, you can go
down the socio-politico-techno-capital
stack and outline how
each of these things have changed.
But from a
socio-perspective, a cultural perspective,
the Overton window of what is acceptable and what should be in the world has definitely changed. Now you can say you're retarded again. Now ICE is just publicly executing people in the streets. These things five, seven years ago is a completely different set of standards of what is acceptable culturally to say or do like
that has been a big shift um that's just sort of like i don't know for lack of a better word style
right and it's like a new generation style and thought process and way of doing things like
when when you were talking about we're living in times where things are changing quickly like my
first thought was honestly since like 9-11,
like that was clearly a demarcation where the world changed its course. But like, it doesn't
feel like trying to be objective about it, that that's actually what's happening right now. But
it does feel like we really want it to. And, you know, I'm kind of wondering if, you know,
if we look back on this in a few years, like, wow, this was a crazy time. We thought AI was
going to change the world. And again, personally, I'm a believer that's true. But like Peter Thiel's quote on the
internet and technology is like, we thought the internet would really change the world, but
really, it only gave us an extra 1% GDP for the whole world every year. I think that's,
I'm paraphrasing, but that's basically his quote. And he says, like, you know, it's possible that
could be AI again, right? If we don't have AGI and we're just building these better tools,
maybe it's not real in the way we think it is,
and it's just an incremental improvement.
There's a lot of relative statements in here.
1% GDP is a lot, first and foremost.
It's hard to deny how much the internet has.
We're talking on the internet right now that wasn't around seven years ago.
Maybe we've met our romantic partners on the internet that wasn't around seven years ago.
It's suddenly changed every facet of our lives.
I spend all my time just staring at a screen of a price chart of an asset that was invented 15 years ago.
These are pretty big changes, I feel like.
Yeah, they're not subtle.
They're big.
They're major.
We are all significantly affected by a number of algorithms
on a number of the things we interact with several hours a day every day.
Yeah, I mean, I hear you guys.
Like I said before, i totally agree with this but
i'm just and and i agree we it feels like we're accelerating but i also think there's like a huge
part of our ego that really wants us to be living in exciting and unprecedented times you know
there's two things to this maybe you're not as plugged in as you were before
yeah i've been checked out that's true there you go i have been checked there you go how long have
you been checked out for what have you been up to man i've been read i've been reading a ton
uh mostly fiction like i've been enjoying myself i've been skiing i got i've gotten really good
at tennis if you ever want to play um damn okay got to the intermediate level which is cool
and i got engaged as well which which was nice. Congratulations. Post-economic activities.
Of course, time slows.
Hey, fans can maybe afford a house.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, life happens when you sell your ETH.
You know, you just got to let go.
It really was an albatross, right?
Like, there's this thing around your neck that you're attached to this version of yourself
because you're the ETH guy.
And that's how, you know how family and friends know you.
But once you kind of shed that, you can find what's next.
Do you remember how we literally logged on every single day or every week for a year
just battling each other about this topic?
Well, it's funny.
We were both right.
The ETH price went to a new all-time high to $5,000 and now it's consensus that it's funny. We were both right, right? Like the ETH price went to a new all-time high to 5,000.
And now it's like consensus that it's gone, right?
And I'm like, and dead, like a dead asset.
So it's interesting how like we both, I had a very nice exit opportunity.
I didn't time it perfectly, but I got super lucky there,
which I'm forever grateful for.
Like I got bailed out.
You predicted that Tom Lee would come by ETH and make it one-touch 5K.
No, I had the wrong thesis.
I had the wrong thesis, but thank God I got bailed out.
I'm not giving myself any credit for that.
I got super lucky, right?
I'm glad it all worked out.
All right.
I think I'm going to wrap.
Maybe one more question from Trader.
The question's really picked up.
Thanks for having me, by the way.
Oh, yeah. I appreciate having you on. Talk you in new york yeah okay we should hang out yeah yeah
let's do it all right glad to hear justin's doing well trader one last guy trader 896550
hey man how are you good How are you? Good.
How are you doing today?
What's your question?
Thanks for having me.
I know you are only supposed to take the last.
Something I've been ruminating on for a long time.
Like, I'm able to provide superior returns um by you know what you would consider
like um standard returns um more like what has been deemed as um
great returns compared to like traditional markets um like i have for example uh get to the question last three yeah last three years I I
I was able to return like between 70 and 100 per year um however I mean I'm in kind of a unique
position and a bit strange you know to be able to return this but also be kind of heavily under
capitalized um and I've been trying to kind of get out of this rut
for a long time.
I had some issues in my personal life
and I needed to access cash and things like that.
So I'm in a position where I'm heavily undercapitalized,
but I am able to provide good returns
like around 80% a year, I would say.
And I'm thinking, you know, where to go from here.
Like I was thinking of maybe raising some cash from private investors because I don't
have enough to structure a proper fund and all of that.
And just growing it organically.
Yeah, it is painful and slow.
Like what would you do, I guess,
this is what I'm trying to ask.
What would you do if you were able to provide?
You asked ChatGPT what it would do?
Yeah.
What did it say?
Try to get some private like uh try to at least get one guy like a big backer
to back you up with a few millions maybe um and that's easier to set up all right yeah send me
your wallet address i'll send you a few million right now no no no he meant it meant like uh
account management and you know, where someone places
the, like the investor places the funds in their own account and they just give you the API
and you're only allowed to place transactions through the API. And, uh, you know, with,
I have like a lot of things in place, like, uh, daily risk limits and frequency of loss limits
and stuff like that. Like I built a lot lot of infrastructure but i'm not at the point where i can afford to raise a fund and yeah i feel like
i'm heavily undercapitalized and don't know where to take it from here do you remember that um
there's this famous clip um where this guy like elon musk i'm not saying i'm elon musk but like
elon musk is like at some conference and thison musk but like elon musk is like
at some conference and this guy comes up and he like asks the question he's saying like would
you consider me as like the next ceo of tesla yeah i watched i watched it a few days ago okay
yeah yeah that's that's the vibes i'm getting from this um i don't know man um i don't know
but i wish you the best of luck all right this is a good
note to end it on uh thanks for listening guys take care thanks nick
