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UNDER EXPOSED: Crypto and The Donroe Doctrine
Recorded: Jan. 6, 2026 Duration: 1:01:30Space Recording
Short Summary
In a dynamic start to 2026, the crypto market is witnessing significant movements driven by geopolitical events, new token launches, and emerging trends. Bitcoin's recent surge, alongside the launch of innovative projects like Lighter and Trove, signals a robust growth trajectory in the crypto space.
Full Transcription
Thank you. All right. I hello everyone and welcome to another episode of underexposed our weekly macro show hitting all
the biggest topics and trends impacting crypto and web 3. Today is Tuesday, January 6th, 2026.
Folks, first show of the year.
We are back.
2026.
Off to a bang.
Literally and figuratively.
Trump captured Maduro.
Markets seem to have liked it, at least so far.
And today we're asking, will the Roaring Twenties keep roaring?
We're going to break it down on today's show.
I'm your host, Tyler D. No D's in the house.
He is on Baby Watch.
I don't know if we had the update.
I don't know if Baby D's has come through or not.
Our thoughts are with him and his wife.
But we've got Peter Jennings and Jeeves on with us here today.
Peter, GM, how you doing? How was your break?
GM, yeah, it was a magical was magical time holidays are super fun young kids uh we're all kind of in that mix um i feel like four to
eight is kind of the magic time around christmas so we're in that sweet spot uh it was a ton of
fun with the family and uh yeah just really focused on being healthy and yeah, excited to chat about the
markets.
I've been spending quite a bit of time with Cloud Code and other AI things working specifically
on asset allocation of investing.
So excited to chat with you guys.
Nice.
I'm excited to dig into that.
The last time we talked, you had mentioned some of the clog coding that you were
doing. So curious to hear more. I'm in that sweet spot as well. It's kind of hit me over the last
week or two. The kids are five and six. Just love the magic of Christmas. They're also developing
their own personalities. They're cracking jokes. They're doing funny things. It is
a really fun time in trying to kind of cling on to these days the best I can.
Jeeps, I want to welcome you back to the show.
It's been a while, my friend.
Almost a month since we talked.
Probably the longest we've gone without time.
Yeah, spend some time, man.
Spend some time.
How are you?
Break is good.
I've been rehabbing my knee before my ACL.
So a lot of time was just relaxing.
Finally at the point where I can go out on some hikes with my son.
It was good out on the bike.
The weather's been unseasonably warm in Colorado.
We've had like 60 to 70 degree days pretty regularly.
So I've been outside a lot, which has been really nice.
That's good for the soul.
We had a nice little warm stretch after what was a terrible December here in Chicago.
I was off for a couple weeks, and I was keeping up with markets a little bit.
There really wasn't much to keep up with.
Today was probably the longest stretch I've had off, really, since I started at Lucky
Trader back in September, 22, and felt very rejuvenated and ready to get back at it.
And 2026, I don't know if you guys feel it.
It feels like a motivating year.
It does not feel like the year to be retired or soft retired sipping Mai Tais on the beach.
It feels like the year to be kind of grinding, building, getting out there, doing something.
So it feels like there's something in the air and happy to get back at it.
Folks.
We're going to get into the show here in a minute.
A few housekeeping items.
We're live on kick and X as always.
You can catch the full stream over there and eat giveaways are back in
2026.
We're going to do one $500 giveaway here today.
You need to be signed up for you.
You need to be,
you will need to have registered with that morning minute affiliate code to
make sure you are eligible for that.
We'll do it at the end of today's show,
the code casino never dies.
So check that out.
Make sure you enter that.
And as always,
our quick disclosure,
the opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the speakers and do not
reflect the views or opinions of any organizations they are associated with.
We are here to share insights, provoke thought, and maybe even stir some debate.
But this is not, I repeat, not financial advice.
While we talk about markets, investments, and trends, remember, your financial decisions should be made with the help of your own research or with advice from a licensed professional.
All right, well, let's get into it. I will kind of kick us off here. And I think the, the biggest macro news and things impacting markets has to be Trump and
Venezuela and the, the early start to, to 2026 here,
the surprise strike that happened, what was it? Friday night,
Saturday morning went capture Maduro.
He's already back in the U.S. now on trial for some drug-related charges and others.
At the end of the year, Bitcoin had been down only. And effectively, once we turned over to 2026, it flipped.
And we basically just grinded up from 86K to 94K.
We sold off a little bit here, but the last hour or so, actually,
we rejected off 94, 94.5.
But still looking at the year-to-date numbers, Bitcoin up 6%, 92.5.
ETH up 9%, 3244.
XRP is actually leading the way up 24%, 227.
And Solana outpacing Bitcoin and ETH up 11%, 139.
It was in the 140s here this morning.
But still, the Venezuela news seems to be the biggest.
Stocks were at an all-time high yesterday.
Peter, I'll kick it over to you.
I think Venezuela, the biggest story so far of the year.
Kind of curious for your thoughts on that or perhaps on how it impacts markets.
Has it changed your outlook in any way already?
I'm trying to consume as much content as I can around this.
There's a lot of perspectives.
There's so many different things at play.
I think the broad high-level macro impact is on oil. And basically,
China was getting a lot of cheap oil from Venezuela. And I think that was probably the
biggest motivating factor here. You're getting some wild comments from the Trump administration,
like this is our hemisphere. It does feel like we're ratcheting up all these World War III vibes.
So from a macro perspective, that makes Bitcoin and gold a little bit more interesting.
But yeah, the oil play here is fascinating.
And I do think the Trump admin can thread the needle perfectly.
They can figure out a way to, you know, set up
infrastructures to get this oil. That will be a huge deflationary force and obviously hurt their
enemies, China and Iran, by not letting them get this cheap sanctioned oil. So I think that's
broadly the main point here. Obviously, you know, the admin's going to point to the drugs and
everything else. It's fascinating. And it's just another item.
If you know someone who hates Trump, they hate this.
If you know someone who loves Trump, they probably support this.
So just another polarizing item on the docket.
I don't want to talk politics, but from a macro perspective,
I think the biggest thing to pay attention to is oil.
And I was surprised to see oil kind of rise in price initially. But I guess it makes sense given
kind of the supply factor in the short term here. And we'll see what happens long term. That's
really the big thing is, will they be able to set up infrastructure here to get oil out of
Venezuela? So we'll see. Definitely one of the biggest impacts of this.
I have a few thoughts, but Jeeves,
I'm curious for your reactions.
I'll defer to you, kind of same question.
Yeah, the Dunro Doctrine, as it's been termed.
You know, the original Monroe Doctrine
goes back to like the early 1800s
and basically it was like the US just saying,
leave us alone.
Like, you know, don't bother us over here.
And it's clear Trump does want to effectively set up the United States in a great position
for national security.
I think like headlines will at least try and make the case of, oh, this is just about oil.
But to Peter's point, like it is partially about oil, but it'll take, I think I was saying
like, you know, a number of years before we can actually update
the infrastructure, get the oil out of the ground and start producing barrels.
I think I'd seen something like they went from producing 4 million barrels to 1 million.
So production has dropped 75% in the span of like 20 years, which is not a good direction
to be going in.
In short, I don't know.
I actually think there's like positive implications here.
Like is it, one, it's a huge show of force by the United States going in and extracting someone.
Like did you guys watch the videos on how this was actually done?
Oh, I haven't.
It's pretty gnarly like what went on.
Like we, you know, flew a bunch of planes over for noise coverage,
took out the electricity,
the team was in and out, grabbed him.
I think it just shows just how precise
the United States military can be if they want to be.
And so I think it helps from a national security standpoint.
It's concerning in some ways.
I'd also read this really hurts China's opportunity to go take Taiwan
because they are so reliant on Venezuelan oil.
Now, with the reduction in oil, at least in the short term,
it hurts the probability of that happening.
So I don't know.
Crypto seems to like it.
Mark, the crypto didn't blink at all. I think crypto actually went up over the weekend, which was pretty interesting.
And then markets have been doing great. At least we're great yesterday. We'll see what happens
from here. I'm mostly concerned with how China's going to retaliate. We're in the middle of a big
trade war with them. That's probably my biggest concern. I think a fair concern.
My personal view, I don't think we're
going to get a huge blowback from that. But certainly we'll see. I don't have any insight
into that specifically. On the crypto's resilience, I made the mistake of checking my phone at 1 a.m.
on Saturday, if that's when it was, right as this was all happening. And then I wasn't able to go
back to sleep. So I was kind of monitoring the situation live from one to four. And I was tracking Bitcoin price actions. It really did not dip.
I think it was, I think it was like 89, eight, it dipped to like 89, four, and then immediately got
right back up and then kind of started grinding up. And then also it became clear, of course,
the first hour or two, you're like, Oh no, like, is this the start of a war?
Like what's happening? It became pretty clear pretty quickly that it was kind of a precision strike in and out situation.
I think once markets realized that that had helped as well.
I think as from the impacts from my point of view, I think Trump, it's a bit of a kind of flexing military strength.
I think Trump, it's a bit of a kind of flexing military strength, right?
I think there's been talks about the weakening American empires.
That is not a weak army that can carry out a strike like that.
And then the Don Roe Doctrine, tongue in cheek.
But there is something to that, right?
And I'm not in the camp of like, let's just go take over Greenland.
But resources are going to be increasingly important in the AI age.
We don't have nuclear up and running yet.
So we will have to get our hands on as many resources as possible to continue to fight, especially with China leaps and bounds ahead of us in energy production right now.
So if there's a way to work with Greenland and work with other powers in the Western hemisphere,
I feel like they've done the math.
That's my view.
And maybe I'm totally wrong.
And maybe this is just the acts of a rash human being. But on the other side of me,
like,
is this the calculated path?
They know this is what has to happen to get the energy blocks in place to
sustain the next five to 10 years.
I think it's definitely that. you know what else is wild uh speaking of greenland i was gonna bring this up 11 chance we invade greenland
uh according to polymarket what do you get what do you guys think obviously low volume
we'll disclaimer here but what what side would you take 89 cents on the no or 11 cents on the yes?
I think I would take the no.
I think we can politically handle this one.
I don't think we need to invade them. The people of Greenland, from what I'm saying,
want the U.S. to come put them into conservatorship.
I don't even know what it would look like.
Yeah, I don't think.
I'm on no on invasion.
But if there's another market for like will we have a partnership in place?
Well, Acquire is a different market.
It's got to happen.
Acquire, what's that mean?
Yeah, let's take a look.
Officially announces that Green will come under U.S. sovereignty.
So this is – so here's where you could have a peaceful deal come into place perhaps.
And I don't know what their motivations are, if that's even possible.
Mark's having 11%.
So I'm more interested in this one at 11% than the invade.
I don't think we're going to invade.
I think it would be like a referendum of independence they they can just vote on it yeah and i think we'd probably
push them in that direction to say like all right take a vote like let let the united states make
their case and then let denmark take their case on it greenland's a pretty strategic
piece of the land.
Yeah.
I don't think we would.
I do not think the United States would attack a NATO country or occupy a NATO country unwillingly.
Are you, Jennings?
Are you on the yes here?
No, I wouldn't bet the yes here.
It's too aligned with our other allies,
but that the Rubio line about this is our hemisphere is just wild to me.
It's just such a crazy time.
And I guess that's just the nature of where we are in the world right now.
I guess it's always a crazy time,
but being on social media, watching all the geopolitical stuff,
it's just, it's just crazy.
Have you guys read the book Breakneck?
Or have you like looked into this at all?
No. I've not.
Okay, so I've been watching a bunch of videos from the writer of this book.
So the book's called Breakneck, China's Quest to Engineer the Future.
And it's written by this guy named Dan Wang.
And he's doing the tours right now.
So you can go on YouTube and look him up.
He was just on with Balaji. And he writes about basically how the United States
is primarily a lawyerly society
and how China is primarily an engineering society.
And because of that,
it puts China in a significantly better position
than the United States to just do things.
Whereas in the US,
because we're a lawyerly society,
there's always a ton of
roadblocks. And he points to the example of high-speed rail in America versus China.
We started at the same exact time, around 2008. The US couldn't even complete a small batch
in California, went significantly over budget. And during that period, China was able to connect
to most of its major cities via high-speed rail. Now, there's good and bad that comes with that.
The bad being they engineer their people and their society, COVID, for example. But his point is that
they're going to be able to out-manufacture us. Anyway, watching his videos and then reading up
more on China, I'm realizing as I'm watching Trump and Rubio and all these folks speak about
this is our hemisphere, stay out of it, blah, blah, blah.
What they're really doing is saying,
China, get out of our business.
China now has partnerships in place
with a number of Latin American countries,
African countries, and other places.
They have 18 partnerships with large ports across the globe.
I think four or five of them are the military set.
And they actually just put out their
first uh offshore military base in booty and so i've grown increasingly concerned with china where
they're going what they're doing and every time i'm watching the administration now they're all
they're doing is posturing on china i think that's the right read. And generally my, my view as well, it was interesting
to see what the planes are going into the middle East so that there's more chess pieces on the
board in the middle East as well. Um, I want to pull this back, I guess before we come all the
way back, I think the other reaction is, so do you think these actions,
the Donro doctrine is a key theme of 2026.
Does it change midterms?
I think when we,
when our last show,
Peter,
I think one of your macro views was perhaps pump first half of the year,
but then it gets more,
more volatile into midterms.
Dems were leading the way that it's pretty much unchanged.
So Dems were 80% to win the house.
They're at 78 right now.
So post Venezuela doesn't seem to have been much of a change.
Do you think a,
I guess,
do you think the move will be popular for the Trump slash Republican base?
Do you see anything that would change this?
It's just more polarizing.
Same thing. People who support
the Trump admin love it.
People who don't support him
or think he's Hitler
or whatever,
they think this is the worst thing in the world
and they're supporting Maduro.
You saw the videos where the Venezuelan people like super happy and then the protesters were like, save Maduro.
It's just so outrageous.
So to me, it's just another polarizing event.
And now the middle, like the people who could be swung, I'm not sure how much they care about this.
I think generally on the margins,
the thing that's really going to swing things is the economy. And we're going to see literally
every single possible thing that the admin can do to try to stoke the economy in the first half of
this year, which is my base case coming into the year. I think I articulated it on our last show
that I expect a really strong Q1 for risk assets. I think that
we'll see a lot of stimulus. We'll have a new Fed chair. There's going to be basically everything
we can to kind of pump the economy. And then I think we'll see some concerns. This chart kind
of stays where it is. And I'm not sure what we'll see here in terms of the house. I haven't really
seen that move, but it is a market that I'm consistently watching.
So in the event that Dems take the house, I think you'll start to see some concerns in the markets and then we'll see how the year ends.
But my base case is strong for start of the year.
People start to price in the Dems winning the house and future, you know, admin changes potentially. and that'll be priced into the markets.
So I'm obviously going to change my mind.
We'll see what other data points we get, but this just is kind of par for the course.
And we're seeing it so far.
Stocks ripping, crypto's doing well.
And I think we'll see a lot of gas poured on the fire to really try to amp up the economy
as much as possible.
Specifically, I bet we see some form of big stimulus to people.
Yeah, I would agree with that.
And I personally feel like three big things have changed.
Politically, Trump pulling out this kind of surprise Venezuela strike, and then the Somali
fraud that went viral seems like a lot of the nationwide fraud is just starting to – like we're at the tip of the iceberg.
And it does seem like it leans a little bit more dim.
And again, I'm not trying to make a political statement, but objectively it does seem that way.
So you have a potentially pro-Republican move there, a potentially negative Democrat headline with the fraud.
And then the third one,
which we haven't really talked about,
is it does feel like
the AI singularity,
the AI step change
kind of happened in the last month.
Right?
I think anyone who's been on Twitter
the last two to three weeks,
like the clawed explosion,
the vibe coding explosion, feels like it has ratcheted up a level.
And I talked about this a little bit on FOMO hour,
but I think there's still a cohort who,
who thinks like the whole AI movement is fraudulent and it's not as good.
It's smoke and mirrors.
And I think we're starting to get to the point where it's too good to,
to, to fade.
And even then the non-believers will be forced to believe.
And that feels like a tailwind for at least the mag seven AI trade and
enough to, to boost markets.
Curious Peter,
your experience vibe coding,
how it's been.
And do you have any thoughts on that? that as a trend, as a change?
Yeah, you hit on the Somali fraud thing,
which I think we should talk about at some point.
I think that's probably a bigger political thing.
And again, that's a bit polarizing,
but I think that did swing things more than this Venezuela news.
In terms of AI, I mean, I couldn't be more bullish.
Just using it in my day-to-day life more and more is making me exponentially, literally,
and people use exponentially too often. My productivity is really starting to skyrocket.
So that's being applied across the board for people. I think it's really going to be impactful
from an enterprise software perspective.
And then the big theme that hopefully plays out this year and in the coming years,
that's great for society is, you know, physically, I specifically automation with cars.
It's remarkable how much better the Teslas are getting, you know, month over month.
It really made a huge leap last year and it's remarkable how
that's improving and then um i have a lot of friends who specifically are investing in robotics
i have a couple private investments there and uh humanoid robotics are making real progress
so i just feel like there's a huge amount of uh momentum and kind of to tie it back together
Venezuela the biggest bottleneck right now is energy and so I think we're
making huge investments there and I think you know making sure we have the
energy to power this is a national security issue and that's what that's
what's happening so I don't think it's I don't think it's – I don't think it's – I think people will point to it like, oh, look at the CapEx.
It's too much too fast.
This is going to be a bubble.
I'm firmly in the camp that this makes sense, and it's going to be a huge tailwind for markets overall.
And there would certainly be some ups and downs, but I'm really optimistic about where things are going um just using the
stuff every day it's a shame we're so behind in nuclear because we we had the capability we could
be running and we've been a nuclear bull on the show for years still have a nuclear i ccj a bunch
of these stocks uh still a nuclear bull it's crazy to me that we didn't. Yeah. We'll get there. That changes. We'll get there. I like the, I like the,
the nuclear trade, the uranium trade robotics.
Clearly it looks like it's starting to,
I don't think it's added step change yet. Clearly huge progress.
I think my read on it is on an individual level.
They're starting to get there, but we're not at like mass production yet.
That's where this will get more interesting.
You talked about self-driving.
What I learned yesterday is that NVIDIA has a 7,000 person self-driving team.
I didn't even know they were in that sector.
And they've got 7,000 people working on it.
I saw they're going to power.
They're effectively releasing their own self-driving tech.
They're going to pilot it with Mercedes SLG,
I believe starting maybe as soon as this year,
but they've got some catching up to do,
but huge market, clearly where the winds are going.
So we talked about it.
It's out there.
How do you trade it?
If you are a believer in the AI boom, if you're a believer in Claude having leveled up, but you don't want to program, this is not your thing.
But you want to trade at some capacity.
How do you express that trade?
Long Google, long Tesla is probably the cleanest trade.
trade. Oracle's interesting. To play devil's advocate, if you look at how the debt is trading
Oracle is interesting.
on Oracle, it's trading like junk because of all their commitments with OpenAI. And I think a lot
of people are pointing to that with that being an issue that OpenAI has all these promises on
spend and not going to be able to deliver that. And that's priced in Oracle's debt.
But that debt is more thinly traded than a lot of these equities.
So that's something to pay attention to as well.
I think Oracle is an interesting one to pay attention to if you wanted to go more contrarian
than Tesla and Google.
Of course, NVIDIA is another, you know, that's the chalkest answer that you could have.
But I think Oracle is an interesting one to pay attention to
if you wanted to basically express optimism around open AI.
And I do think one thing that is a little concerning,
but I'm not as concerned broadly,
but what people will say in terms of the CapEx being overdone,
the returns on the improvements on the LLMs
is not as dramatic as we saw in the past.
The improvements are only getting a little bit better now.
It's still super incredible what you're capable of doing,
but the improvements were bigger in the past than they are now.
I'm not as concerned about that
because I think the big unlocks are going to be in other areas,
such as automation, physical AI, the AI getting really good with the BLMs, the visual learning models.
That's a huge, huge, huge unlock.
And I think specifically on the transportation, I do believe that we're going to live in a world, you know, 10 years from now where we get in vehicles that, you know, like the cyber cab that Tesla showed where there's, you know, tables and chairs and places to sit and be productive. And, you know, these machines just
take you where you need to go. And still to today, the leading cause of death in the United States
for people under the age of 40 is car accidents. That's insane. So you think about how much savings
there is from a human life perspective, a time perspective, and then all the health care and hospitals and everything else that come with car accidents.
So we can eliminate that. That's just a massive, massive unlock and a huge value add to society.
And fully aligned and co-signed.
We talked about Tesla FSD. I don't want to spend more time on on it but it was really just i had to experience it to really understand it and it is uh really incredible jeebs i'm curious for
your thoughts like what what macro trades are you thinking about headed in 2026 you just talked
about how to express the ai trade curious for your thoughts on that or any other macro trades
you're thinking about here yeah just let me know if I'm lagging again.
Not bad.
I agree with Jennings.
I don't think that,
I think right now it's easy to point
at the AI infrastructure build out
and think of it as a bubble
because it looks very familiar
to a lot of older bubbles that were in place.
And look, to have breakthrough innovations,
you need to have frothy investment in sectors
like this, especially for infrastructure build outs. With that said, I think you have to
start to look at what are the sectors that are adopting AI the most and seeing the highest
levels of productivity and some type of financial gain from that. And for me, it's like the
financial sector.
So you're seeing, we talked about this last year a little bit, but
you have JP Morgan coming out saying we've invested $2 billion, we're seeing $2 billion in return. I think for the bubble skeptics, we need to come out and say, here have been the fruits of this
investment in AI. And here's like either the gain or the
money saved that we're seeing from that. And that can take... I'm anticipating like by
the end of quarter one, once we start getting into earnings season, we're going to start
to hear a number of Fortune 500 companies, how they're using AI and the benefits they're
seeing. I think by midway through this year, we're going to have substantial gains and
or substantial cost savings via AI. And that just helps the bottom line. So for me, the first sector
that's adopting it rapidly is the financial sector. And that impacts a lot of people.
How that ends up sort of manifesting, I'm not sure.
How that ends up manifesting, I'm not sure.
So you're not talking about buying J.P. Morgan stock, are you?
Or is that how you express that?
It could be one way to express it.
The way I've expressed it is actually through figure stock.
So it's gone on a tear over the past few days.
And I called this out in the predictions I have for this year,
but I think Figure will increase its loan book by at least 2x this year
and start to compete with Bank of America when it comes to HELOCs.
I think they're also going to expand out their product offerings.
And look, Jenny, we were out to breakfast last week
and this was the stock
I was pitching you guys.
Like,
I think Figure is figuring out
how to blend
both AI and crypto.
Real quick.
And show true efficiencies.
I had no idea
that JP Morgan's stock
was up 38%.
Like,
it outperformed
all the Mac 7.
Jeez.
It's doing great.
Yeah.
The banks have been incredible.
Yeah.
They're going to be
well capitalized right now.
They're in such a great position.
Wow, figure.
Nice little 40% bump since the year closed.
Jeeps.
Yeah.
What a pick.
I'm sorry, I cut you off.
Can you elaborate on this a little bit more?
I'm not sure I understand it.
Yeah, so in short,
if you go look at like rwa.xyz,
figure is by and large the largest position.
And so this was founded by one of the SoFi founders.
The whole concept is, at least right now,
is they are doing HELOCs.
So home equity line of credits.
And what they've built out is
a really sophisticated
AI-driven underwriting process where they've lowered the underwriting costs by 95% plus
compared to traditional banks. So huge cost savings there that they can pass on to their
clients. I think they have a great marketing arm. And now they're starting to white label
that product to other banks to use. On top of that, I think it's a great marketing arm. And now they're starting to white label that product to other banks to use.
On top of that, I think it's likely you end up seeing them expand out into mortgages and
other products and start to compete and be pretty aggressive out in the lending space.
So these guys are going to fall under private credit, I believe.
Interesting.
They're that big purple one.
Yeah.
They run it all on their own chain called Providence Blockchain.
Basically what they're looking to do is actually like re-engineer the entire database for the
HELOC market.
And they created this thing called DART, which is the digital asset repository something.
And the whole idea there is like they want to create like the buy sell mark they
want to be able to issue the helox and then also have the mark on the market for helox as well
all right well it looks like uh i feel like you've talked about them before and i just didn't
register for me but wow up almost 100 on the year year. Yeah, they actually did their IPO on Robinhood,
part of it at least.
Very cool.
Yeah.
Oh, wait.
So this is where I-
Oh, September, yeah.
So I'm saying a year.
So they came out in September, wow.
So we're talking about this for months.
And look, they're like very overvalued at this point,
but I think if they're able to just grow that book
and continue growing that book,
they become very reasonably priced
and look really well over time.
And so, yeah, this is like one of my picks for this year.
I think they can continue to do well if they own that market.
Is Hood one of your picks?
I've wanted to buy a Hood, but I'm just waiting.
I'm staying really patient here.
I'd like to buy it under $100.
You almost got a shot.
I was like, I was... 106. I was dropping out of the mouth when that got a shot. I was like...
106.
I was probably at the mouth when that happened, yeah.
It was close.
How about you guys?
You guys still holding hood?
I sold options against hood kind of around the same time as you.
That was great.
And then the delta neutral trade, actually, with long hood, short hood perps,
could be if you had that option.
It's been pretty nice especially over
on lighter i've been monitoring it as well jeebs i'd also like to to get a hundred dollar entry
um so i'd like to be an owner of robin hood over time like they rolled out so many great products
last year they rolled out i i think they gave us the vision of where they want to go. And I think
it's really clear and it's compelling. They just have really big shoes to fill right now.
Well, one of their competitors had a pretty gangbusters December. And I don't think we've
talked since then, Jeebs, when Coinbase had their big product event, they announced a suite
of products. And there was a dozen items on the list from prediction markets to their,
their token sales to, to lending, you name it.
I saw Goldman just upgraded them to a buy.
Thoughts on coin stock here.
What coin stock is 67 billion hood stock.
It's one Oh seven.
So it's turning at 60%. Which do you like to outperform in 2026
let's put it that way good question do you know a couple thoughts here the first one is
i all of my crypto and all my stocks not all of them but a lot of it is on robinhood like i use
robinhood is my everything app interesting and i don't know a lot of folks that use Coinbase as their everything app.
I don't even know a lot of folks that buy crypto on Coinbase anymore.
And primarily, I use Coinbase as an off-ramp at this point.
Because USD to dollar is just free and I can just move it off pretty easily.
Coinbase, I don't have a lot of thoughts here.
I think it's really cool that Brian was on the phone with Threadguy trying to understand
consumer and understand tokens and social and all that stuff.
I think that shows that he has this really high willingness to learn.
There is...
I think if I look at some of the things that didn't really work well for them this past
year, I think Jesse just put a lot of effort into the idea of creator coins,
too much effort into it really without it having any sticking power.
I think it was just like burn after burn after burn.
And I don't know why he keeps going after it.
Do you guys have a good read on that?
Well, as an owner of the Nick Shirley coin,
I was hoping he would at least come out to talk about that one,
which he did not.
This is not the right one.
That's not the right one.
I'll find it here in a second.
But I was generally bearish on creator coins.
I have been not generally very bearish on creator coins really since they've
been out.
But when Shirley went mega,
mega viral, my thesis was
all right this is basin zora's shot like if you can't if you can't pump this one like
you should just close up the whole shop did shirley launch this token he did yeah
it's interesting that it's on base i guess the word uses unispot never mind yeah
It's interesting that it's on base.
I guess the word uses Uniswap.
Never mind.
Yeah.
And I actually traded on FOMO app.
So there's multiple ways to trade.
Why own this?
That's been my problem with creator coins this whole time.
Like, why do I want to own this?
Because you think it would go up in value and you could sell it.
Okay.
Yeah.
Outside of that, though.
What's the...
That is the sell, right?
Yeah. Just like any other... And they're meme sell, right? Yeah, just like any other.
They're meme coins, right?
Yeah, attention tokens.
So I've been disappointed with this.
I'm basically break-even here.
I bought around here on the first day,
right around $3.5 million.
Rode through a 50% pullback,
held through the Ansem spike,
which sent it up for X and then it's just sold back off.
And it looks like it's probably just going to slow grind to zero is my
current outlook.
So if it hits my entry,
I'll just exit this thing.
It's a mess.
So much power.
It's crazy.
He does.
And the fact that he touted it made me,
and I realized we're talking about a creator coin and shit coin.
So let's take this off with a grain of salt.
But the fact that he did it and there was folks who thought Coinbase paid
him.
I don't,
he said he didn't get paid.
I'll take him at his word.
But even if he did get paid,
then that was the fact that Coinbase team was at least trying to do
something to market this,
which I took it as a positive sign.
This was the same day that a thread guy said that Armstrong had called him.
They talked for two hours.
So I thought they were going to figure this out.
It doesn't look like they have.
But pulling it back to Coinbase,
Coinbase is much bigger than creator coins.
Unfortunately, I feel like on CT, that's all we see.
Cause that's all Jesse's been talking about.
And that's, that's kind of what he's running with.
Right. But they have a bigger suite of products. On CT, that's all we see because that's all Jesse's been talking about. And that's kind of what he's running with, right?
But they have a bigger suite of products.
They're going into tokenized stocks.
I think the lending is big because they're still not really –
like if you want to take a loan against Bitcoin,
where would you go to do that right now?
Like Tether.
I don't know.
They're the biggest lender at this point okay so you would lend your bitcoin to
tether like i don't know how to click the buttons to do that i guess is what i'm saying
are you trying to lend your bitcoin out to get yield on it is that the goal no i'm just saying
like if you let's say you have five bitcoin you want to hold it forever but you also want to have
liquidity sometimes so you want to borrow against your book yeah you want to borrow against it
oh yeah they could do i think they might just work with institutions primarily
but right so that's my point you can go to it's mostly centralized yeah i mean so coinbase is
going to be a new player for that which i don't think they really were and it's different like
yeah you can it's very easy to do with like c with uh wrapped bitcoin on solana right you can
just toss in camino you can do it i think you can do this on aave i'm sure but that's different. Yeah, it's very easy to do with wrapped Bitcoin on Solana. You can just toss it in Camino.
You can do it.
I think you can do this on Aave, I'm sure.
But that's different, right?
It's a different product.
Being able to do it with your spot, Bitcoin,
inside Coinbase is a little bit of a game changer, I think.
So I was bullish on that.
That's interesting, yeah.
You know what product is in retail?
The product that I'm impressed with that I've been using a lot
is the Coinbase credit card.
If you keep $200,000 on coinbase and usdc you get up to four percent back on bitcoin so if you owe 200 grand you get four percent bitcoin on every transaction no cap
are you getting yield on that 200k as well yeah yeah that's pretty good it's not great i mean
it's three and a half percent but it's not awful. It's like a savings account.
Yeah.
It's a little below what you could get at a brokerage account.
You're getting low force, basically something that aligns with the tenure.
If you're having cash, sit idle, and whatever, Schwab, and around the brokerage.
What's Robinhood paying right now?
That's a great question.
I'm not sure.
I think it's like high threes.
Well, Peter, I might need your rough code after the show.
It's a great credit card.
It's American Express.
It's awesome.
It's a great credit card.
Does it just give you the rewards at the end of every month?
Like how does it work?
No, I think it gives you the rewards maybe daily.
Like I see the rewards
come in they come in often nice very cool either right at right there or there's some
set up period it's data i think it's almost daily
i'll have to check that out i want to we kind of i kind of went down the risk curve i want to pull
us back a little bit so we've we've talked high level. We've talked macro.
We've got about 10, 15 minutes left in the show.
I want to get maybe into a little bit more crypto action.
We talked about Bitcoin a bit.
Let's talk lighter.
You were a lighter user.
Had a big TGE event, an airdrop, on December 30th.
What were your reactions for the airdrop?
Yeah, I think it went well. I mean, I, I'm a big fan of Vlad and the team over at lighter. Um,
I think they're probably the most legitimate competition to, uh, hyper liquid. Um, I think
decks is are awesome and yeah, I thought things wouldn't go up really smoothly, but kind of did
the podcast tour again and probably things went really
smoothly.
So kudos to them and the team.
And we'll see,
we'll see how the Dex Wars play out in 2026.
There's still other options where people are farming.
The volume on lighter is sustained and done.
Okay.
Relatively since the,
the TGE.
So good for them there.
And yeah, I think that these products,
especially as we get other assets,
are going to be more and more prominent in society.
And hopefully we get more clear regulation.
But it's cool to see stocks trading gold, oil,
trade currencies on lighter.
And hopefully over time, you can speculate on more and more assets.
So there's a real use case here.
And we'll see.
I do think it's somewhat a race to the bottom in some ways with these platforms.
And there's a lot of competition.
So in that regard, that would be a bear case for holding hype and LiDAR.
But I do think they're really good products with really good teams that have
executed extremely well.
I think that's my biggest concern in this whole sector.
And this is not just lighter criticism.
We've already seen some of the farming cohort move on to the next one.
I think extended is one.
I think there's a few others that are already being farmed.
We're going to have a race to the bottom and fees to capture this market
because it's so big. And then what does that mean for the big players?
And I, on airdrop day,
I pulled up the lighter revenue chart because I was thinking like,
should I buy this or not? And I,
it did give me pause seeing their revenue fall off from the farming phase.
And it is fairly substantial.
But it was also a bad market.
I mean, everyone was basically gone this last week of December.
So I'll give them a pass.
It looks like it is grinding back up now.
Yesterday, the highest day they've had, looks like in a few weeks.
So I think that would be an interesting trend to watch.
If you're a lighter bull, I think you want to see these,
the fees and revenue go back up.
I'm making a pretty obvious statement,
but it looks like volume starting to rebound here as well.
So some fundamentals are starting to turn around.
And then now the buybacks are officially live.
Certainly that helps.
So are you guys,
you guys we talked about in the chat,
you guys said like,
Hey,
I'm really going to try to limit my decks trading.
I think it's the majority of people get crushed trading with leverage.
What's your guys's perspective kind of coming into the year now?
And how are you thinking about these platforms?
I gave it up cold Turkey.
And I don't plan to use any of them.
Maybe like, you know, a few hundred dollars
for just like some, you know, YOLO spins effectively.
But I don't plan to deploy any capital on any perp taxes.
Jeeps, do you have a route?
Not using anything.
I feel like we're already seeing folks back
turning out that leverage.
Nah.
What about for other assets?
Would you guys ever consider doing other assets?
Have you guys thought about the basis trade
or other strategies,
or is it just something that doesn't...
You feel like your time is better
spent elsewhere like you're the king and you're very good at the basis trade it's just not like
those train style that i'm super interested in um i think the other assets that they have are
interesting um like look like i think that perks on equities are going to be the breakout product of this year.
Yeah.
I've written about this. I think it's going to be once they get democratized and technically are legal,
then I think that these could become absolutely massive and replace a good chunk of zero-day
option volume because it makes sense. It's just a better product and retail dominates zero day options. So it makes sense that they can
go parallel there. Which is great, would be great. At that point, Jennings, I think I'd
be interested. What are the funding rates even like on currently on equity perps? Are
you doing all the trading on the terminal? Like are you using using can you even buy stocks
or is it just perps?
It's just perps.
You buy perps.
I'm not interested.
I'm not trying to express
a long view
with these perps and trying to trade.
These are very tricky markets.
My general strategy with equity investing is buy and hold good companies. There's a lot of merit
to indexing. I'm just stubborn and my prior life as a stockbroker, I love trading equities and
building a case for owning 10 to 20 companies that I'm really bullish on um but from a purpose perspective i think it's an amazing
hedging strategy and uh some of the funding rates and some of these assets have been remarkable
hood in particular has had wild wild funding rates uh yeah you're on you're on hyperliquid
where oh you're talking i'm talking lighter okay yeah a lot lighter mechanically do you like buy robin hood stock on robin hood and then short perps on lighter is
that how it would work that in theory is a group would have been a great trade over the last month
like an unbelievable trade over the last month i mean hood has had hundreds of percent APY on the short side at times.
Wow.
Very interesting.
So that's kind of where I think things are going to go is just people are going to be able to speculate more and more.
And there's a variety of ways that you can extract arbitrage across these markets.
across these markets.
And they're inefficient and they're new.
They're inefficient and they're new.
As long as there's retail
willing to just gamble
just levered long,
to me there's opportunity.
Speaking of opportunity,
it's ICO season.
Jeeps, you dabble in ICOs
here and there.
Do you have any on your radar?
I really don't. This year, I'm like
concerned about this year, guys.
A little bit.
I shared Jennings' thoughts here, but
you know, there's a...
I think you can construct
bullish and bearish takes on this year.
There's silly things, too.
You know that farmer
chart that's like, buy stocks in like the, you know, that farmer chart that's like buy stocks
in these years and sell in these years.
2026 is actually one of his recommended sell years.
So I'm kind of concerned with where midterms could go and then how it could derail Trump's
agenda.
There is a lot of things that are set to happen that will put money in the
pockets of sort of working class folks, you know, no tax on tips,
like childcare credit got expanded.
I can't, is there no tax on social security now too, or something like that?
I believe so.
I feel like I saw that.
There should be a huge incentives around having kids,
not just saying that as, you know, all this know i couldn't agree more jennings like insane incentives
instead of you know just giving money to probably like daycares
i respect your macro view there james but i don't know how it relates to like icos that are running
in january if i know sorry. I got off topic, Tyler.
We'll have a small daycare show at some point in time
or maybe just an offline conversation.
What do we have this year, Tyler?
What are the big ones coming up?
Well, Infinex is live right now
at 100 million FDV,
but with the one-year luck.
Metadale's running out their Ranger ICO.
That's happening too.
Yeah, they raised from VCs already too.
That one's interesting.
That one's going to get a lot.
That'll be oversubscribed.
This RWA perps platform called Trove
is going to start their ICO on the 8th, so Thursday.
They're ICOing at $20 million.
That's interesting.
So, my point, I'm not
telling any of those three,
but more just the
market sector
and the trend. When do you think
we get some of the bigger
awaited ones? For example, OpenSea,
Mask. Are we
going to see these this year, quarter one?
Like, is this going to happen where we start to get some Stimmy coming out
into the ecosystem again?
The token list is insanely long.
I'll try to find my tweet.
Like, there's like 40 pretty big tokens that could launch this year.
My gut read is nothing's going to launch before March.
And March through May is kind of like the peak window
where I think we will see some.
And then it's going to go quiet probably.
And then we're probably going to pick up late Q3, Q4.
I feel like that's how it typically goes.
Like OpenSea is not going to launch.
They're going to do six farming seasons.
So that puts them in like April at the earliest.
Metamask is a total wild card.
My view on PolyMarket's PolyToken is they're going to wait until after midterms.
They're going to have a blow-off midterm.
They won't want to get a distraction ahead of that with a token.
So they're there.
They'll do 2027 is my view.
I'm trying to make a ETH.
We'll,
we'll TGE soon.
That's going to be,
that'll be a multi-billion dollar TGE.
And then I don't have line.
So I mean,
pump is a huge wild card.
It will,
we'll pump even airdrop.
Like their token is live,
of course.
But. I don't know what pump is doing no one does and that's why the token fell off so hard yeah it seems pretty
concerning i i've seen like all sorts of rumors about things that are going on the token's like
slightly rebounding they have so much money like they have the capability to almost pull
like a ripple where they can just start acquiring anything they want and turn into anything that
they want what is like one point probably like 1.5 to 1.7 billion at least still
is that is that bullish or bearish having that much cash bullish very bullish
that's always been my thesis is that on the cash and we haven't talked enough about what ripple did
um you know in the whole santi uh hasib debate but i tend to lean more on the santi side
of all this and that's going to lead to you know the real projects and things are generating real
cash and revenue um doing better than things that aren't which is which we saw a lot in 25 and i
think we continue to see in 26 despite what we're seeing right now right now uh this short-term
price action uh which i wanted to make sure we hit on, is heavily correlated with wash trading and
all the taxes stuff. Because a lot of people just were like, oh, I'll sell and tax last harvest
my coins. And they did that in the beginning part of December or end of November, because they're
like, I'm going to beat the rush. And then it just kind of bled all of December. So even on like the
31st, there's plenty of tokens that you could have just sold at the end of the year to claim even more losses.
And then everything flipped right when we got to the new year.
So that's a lot of what's going on right now.
I would be skeptical of some of these, some of these alt runs.
And yeah, of course, we get on the show.
We had a lot of euphoria.
We're just straight down.
Oh, no.
Not the best,
not the best hour for the tokens here.
Yeah, my Lord.
We were just,
we had grinded.
This is the biggest sell-off in 2026 so far.
Like really since,
since here's December 31st.
Let's, let's zoom in.
And we, we basically went straight up.
It was only and i haven't
i mean i've been hosting i haven't seen any um yeah we'll have to check in on this after
can we talk about one thing really quick sure uh one other thing so one of one of the other
predictions i had for this year was around like sports gambling and prediction markets.
Just basically courts like shooting down sports prediction markets.
But I'm not going to go into that side.
What I want to go into is I think more concerning than that, which is the person who put the huge bet on it was like having capturing Maduro or US invading Venezuela, like in a very timely manner prior to the invasion.
Did you guys see this?
I did.
If true, like that type of insider information is really concerning.
That's true that like, you know, someone always knows, but that type of information can be like national security risk at this point.
How do you guys feel about that?
How are you thinking about that?
Is this going to potentially be a black eye for a pie market or prediction markets?
How do you see that working out?
It's a tricky one.
One, I don't know.
Is there any confirmation it's actually an insider?
I don't think that was a crazy bet to make.
There was a lot of signs that the U.S.
might make a move on Venezuela in January, right?
I still feel like it's non-zero as a coincidence,
but let's say it was not a coincidence.
I think you have to think about,
do you remove these kinds of markets?
I saw the take that if Maduro had been watching
the poly market line,
maybe he would have been tipped off.
It's the best content.
Absolutely the best content, these prediction markets.
And the sports thing is really interesting.
There's all sorts of cross currents from a regulatory standpoint.
Calci in particular is maximizing this regulatory arb with sports, something I'm
following extremely closely. My broad view is that we won't see significant change
over the next three years. I think it's kind of this moment in time where you have this
regulatory arbitrage and the Trump admin is heavily invested in prediction markets.
So I'd be surprised if we saw a lot of negative rulings from a regulation standpoint.
But it's inevitable that we'll need more regulation.
And it's a perfect example of another market that has significant risk and might be priced differently after the midterms.
But what we've seen from an allocation standpoint from sophisticated
investors, really sophisticated investors, I mean, you had ICE invest a bunch of money in
Polymarket. You have Sequoia and a huge list of prominent VCs investing in these assets.
Robinhood's launching their own prediction markets. Coinbase, DraftKings launch predictions.
markets, Coinbase, DraftKings launch predictions. So the cat might get out of the bag by the time
it's too, you know, people are trying to shake things up. But it's a really fascinating kind
of thing to watch and something that I'm personally spending a lot of time on.
Danny, you're close to the sports stuff. How do you see this panning out? Like,
do sports prediction markets end up,
do you think having like a favorable outcome here? I'm seeing like, you know, as it's regulated by
the states, a number of states are coming out and, you know, bringing them to court. Like,
how do you see this panning out over the next year or two?
Probably, my view is that prediction markets will win on the regulatory side. Not everything, but probably they're going to win with the current admin.
That certainly could change.
So sports specifically, you think likely will have like a favorable outcome?
Probably.
Interesting.
Appreciate your takes, your deep rear.
And more connect volume right now for them.
Huge percentage of volume.
And I specifically think in 2026, we see volume continue to skyrocket.
I would agree.
It just takes time.
The regulatory stuff takes a ton of time and you need real force on the other side.
And the states have it.
There's certainly a lot of vested parties that are going to go hard against it.
But then there's prominent parties on the other side.
And specifically, the Trump admin and the Trump family is heavily invested in these
companies.
So kind of pick your fighter.
And it's clear it's a regulatory arbitrage.
Very interesting.
I'm sure we'll talk about it more.
And I would love to go deeper on it at some point when it makes sense.
I've got some thoughts as well.
But we are a few minutes over the hour.
So I do want to be mindful of my co-hosts here and our listeners.
So let's wrap.
Let's go to our giveaway and producer Charlie.
Why don't we get the wheel up?
We'll do our quick spin.
It looks like it's going to be a tighter wheel to start the year.
Cause I don't think we've had a whole lot of folks out on yeet and
an understandable only six days into the month.
Um, but let's, uh, let's give it a whirl.
And producer Charlie said in the chat, but reminder,
if you have won in the last month, you aren't eligible. Uh, so if you,
if your name comes up, we'll have to re-spend, uh, but let's give it a go.
All right.
Maestro.
Yeah.
Maestro.
All right.
Oh, you have not won in the past month.
So that will be a clean win.
You just won $500 courtesy of our friends over at yeet producer.
Charlie will work with you after the show.
I have to take care of all of those
details.
Well,
gentlemen,
thanks for joining.
Welcome back.
Good to talk to you guys.
I love being with you guys.
It's really fun to chat.
This is great.
There's so much going on.
So good luck to everyone out there.
And yeah,
fun for next week.
All right.
Thanks to our listeners.
As always,
thanks to our friends over at yeet. We'll see you guys next week. All right. Thanks to our listeners. As always, thanks to our friends over at YEEE.
We'll see you guys next week.
Goodbye. I'm out. Thank you.
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