Loading summary
Transcript98 lines
- [00:00]
Michael
But then on the other side of that, what's really bullish, and I'm pretty sure a lot of people listening to this are at the frontier of tech, are leveraging AI. And at the end of the day, we've always said this as part of where early writers stems from. And a lot of our interest in even building is that bitcoin's the other side. It's scarcity components the other side of AI's abundance. And so these are just some of the angles of like from economic forces the market will rally around scarcity and then from technology and these primitives that are at the frontier. When we think about models and inference and, and tying together agents, Bitcoin is going to be the other side of that.
- [00:32]
Jackson
What you're telling me is that music is about to stop and we're gonna be left holding the biggest bag of odorous excrement ever assembled in the history of DAPT, 1974-1987-9297-2000, whatever we want to call this, it's all just the same thing over and over. We can't help ourselves.
- [00:56]
Brian
I say when we sell,
- [01:05]
Jackson
We're amped up. We're trading at 64k right now, but we're gonna pretend like we're trading at 126k.
- [01:12]
Brian
Haven't pulled out the terminal in a while, Brian. What's that about?
- [01:16]
Jackson
Look, the on ramp terminal is something that is underutilized and well appreciated by the the users of it. If you have not used this just so everyone knows, you can get terminal access, I can even pull it up. Or we could leave it to your imagination, pull it up. But you get terminal access as part of an on ramp account and you get 50% off all Bitcoin brokerage buys. You get 0, 0 fee recurring DCAs. So clearly I don't know why you wouldn't be taking advantage of this, but yeah, let me just pull it up real quick and then we can get into today's news.
- [01:46]
Michael
Well, while he's pulling that up, I didn't know we were running ads on middle of the pod, but since we
- [01:50]
Jackson
are, this is not even the middle. This is the start of the podcast.
- [01:54]
Michael
But I haven't tweeted out the picture, but I got a bunch of sign gradually and Sunderland bucks and anybody that signs up to Jackson's point, just use, try and figure out who's listening, who's signing up, who wants to stack bitcoin through on ramp. Use GTS basics. So gradual and suddenly basics. And we'll ship you A book after you post your smackdown.
- [02:16]
Jackson
Yeah. Just to be clear. So you can sign up for free. And Michael's just referring to. If you put that code in, we're going to send you a signed copy of Parker Lewis's book. Book.
- [02:23]
Michael
I feel him. I'm feeling bullish. He's been, he's, he's, he's been buluating on what's going on with these.
- [02:28]
Brian
He's been fighting the good fight.
- [02:29]
Michael
He's been fighting the good fight. He, he, he picked up the torch. So, you know.
- [02:33]
Brian
Yeah, exactly.
- [02:35]
Jackson
All right, so if you're feeling bullish, then I'm going to throw out a couple of different topics we can start on today. And before I do that, just please like and subscribe to the channel. Rate of 5 stars. So we have a couple things to talk about. We were talking about the Clarity act last week. We kind of had differing views on what was going to happen this week. And it seems like things are starting to stall out. Michael, you were on the other side of the camp. You felt pretty confident that we were getting close to Clarity act passing. So we're going to have to revisit what your current thoughts are and how you actually parse that with still being bullish despite this thing being continuously dragged out. We have the Fed meeting. The interest rate decision is going to happen during this podcast. So stay tuned for a little bit later. We'll share our thoughts live as that happens. And then the other thing I want to call out as well, and then we can take it in any of these directions is Bitcoin sentiment is just so awful. Right? I mean, we're down 50% from the all time highs. We are trading below where we were for the election peak in 2024 when Trump was going to be, or Trump was elected as the next president of the United States. And we just see very little discussion online. If you look at any sort of sentiment or you look at, you look at data on tweet volume, things are at pretty much a year low. And so I would argue this is exactly what you'd want to be seen if you're in an accumulation mode. If you were someone who already had the position set it and forget it at Bitcoin, then I can understand your frustration. But for those of you, and there's more people out there who are still accumulating than not, this is exactly what you'd want to be see. So I'm curious, gentlemen, to kick things off here, where is the bullish sentiment, Michael? I mean, you have something up your sleeve.
- [04:10]
Michael
There's a couple things. One is, I mean you always have to take with a grain of salt I'm always bullish. So it's not really healthy with leverage. I found that out, you know, early early days I've been wrecked with leverage or at least partially, you know, scared.
- [04:23]
Jackson
That's why just be you're just to be clear, you're not advocating for leverage.
- [04:26]
Michael
I'm not advocating for leverage. And I'm sharing why I'm not advocating for leverage and why I'm not a good trader or for using leverage is because I'm always bullish. And it's partially why I've told Jackson to stay away from leverage. But like I think everyone's and you know, I may be wrong here. You guys can tell us in the comments it's kind of tired of, you know, fed speak. Bottom no, bottom I think like the reality is we're in this bear. We don't know how long we will get. We'll be in it. But why I'm bullish is because there's just laws of the universe and some of them are just related to Bitcoin's price will go up eventually. And the main things are the current sentiment and the current way that economic forces are proceeding is we cannot continue down this path. We talked about it on previous pods. I don't know if it's going to be on the list but it came about around groc in the price. I've seen, you know, really great shops go bankrupt recently because they just can't. It's not sustainable to, to deliver real good food to individuals. And that's just like one angle of people need a better way to store hold their value and this is across society and this will naturally be understood. But then on the other side of that, what's really bullish and I'm pretty sure a lot of people listening to this are at the frontier of tech, are leveraging AI. And at the end of the day we've always said this as part of where early writers stems from and a lot of our interest in even building is that Bitcoin's the other side. Its scarcity component is the other side of AI's abundance. And about a week, week and a half ago they've been working on it for a while. Square and Blocks led by Jack Dorsey who's at the forefront of understanding AI and Bitcoin and managing multi billion dollar businesses released this open source tool that effectively helps tie all these primitives together. And I think it's being widely misunderstood and also talked about, even though it's being talked about a lot. And so these are just some of the angles of like, from economic forces, the market will rally around scarcity and then from technology and these primitives that
- [06:29]
Jackson
are at the frontier.
- [06:30]
Michael
When we think about models and inference and tying together agents, Bitcoin is going to be the other side of that. It won't be the first thing. We will be using other tokens, specifically stablecoins. But it's a logical progression. And so if you were building, if you're involved in this space, you kind of, it hurts, you know, with the price and where we're at. But on the other side of it, you kind of pinch yourself because you just get time to build and you get time to work out all these kinks. And we're seeing a lot of consolidation. We're seeing a lot of firms go out of business. And that's unfortunate. But this is just the reality of business and reality of consolidation periods. On the other side of that, those are strong, those who make it are stronger. And there's just going to be an insane amount of opportunity. I still think clarity happens. But independent of clarity happens, the, you know, water only flows one way.
- [07:17]
Brian
Yeah, a few things just to piggyback on what you're describing. I mean, part of the way I would describe it is like, you know, sentiment is somewhat in the eye of the beholder. So like if you are on the periphery of bitcoin and crypto, sentiment may, may look extremely poor. You mentioned a lot of firms closing up shop. We had Bitmex, Bitmart, a couple other smaller exchanges that are closing. And then I didn't put this on the list, but there was, somebody was tracking like all of the crypto projects that have either gone under or ceased to exist just this year. And it's like over 60 different crypto things have just like fallen by the wayside this year. And so there's this natural like cleansing process with a bear market, right, where when you're in a bull market, there's a lot of euphoria and eventually there lead that leads to excesses, whether that's leverage or just people moving out the risk curve. And so naturally, like what you would expect to see and what is like a healthy sort of trajectory in development is sort of the washing out of a lot of those excesses, a lot of, a lot of the more speculative activity. And I think we're seeing exactly that. And then to Michael, your point on the AI side, it's like that's where it really matters, like what circle you're in, what, what eco chamber you're in. Because if you are on the edges of this stuff in terms of what Jack and blocks are releasing, what's happening with Nostr as a primitive underneath a lot of this stuff, like it's insanely, insanely bullish for bitcoin as the end state as you're describing. And we'll talk more about this with some of the agentic payment stuff that's on the list. But it kind of just depends where, where you're focused and, and to me, like, I totally agree, I'm insanely bullish on where, where all this is headed despite the price being down, despite, you know, Clarity act seemingly not going to happen. You know, I think that just on the Clarity front and maybe we'll talk more about it but like, you know, the latest is that it's, it's looking unlikely to get passed at least in the near term. I don't even know if the Senate's going to vote on it. But there was another report that was basically saying even if it doesn't, the actual agencies themselves. So the SEC and the CFTC are already, they already have sort of like a backup plan in place to like get at least some, what would really be more temporary measures or regulations around this stuff because if it's not signed into law, then it's obviously not as robust, a bit more fragile if, you know, a new administration comes in in a few years. But that is super bullish to me in the sense that one, the price didn't react super negatively to the latest on Clarity act not looking so good. But also it's like the, the sentiment at the agencies themselves is like, no, we need this stuff. We're going to move forward with Plan Bs, whatever it is to like at least put ourselves in a position where we can have some amount of pun intended clarity around this stuff. So kind of a mixed bag. But I'm with you, Michael. I'm pretty bowled up right now.
- [10:18]
Michael
Yeah. For just quick thing clarifying. And you don't even have to necessarily be a builder in this space. Like I think we've talked about this. If you're just traditionally making money and producing value, you're kind of pinching yourself you're buying Bitcoin at 50% off. Because I just thought, I'm pretty sure a lot of people thought at 120 we weren't going to see it come back to these levels. And then the other thing was I pulled up previously Was, I think it's like abacus AB was that notion of, he, he referenced another crypto exchange was rumored or close to shutting down. And I just think that that's important as you look at the market and consolidation independent of using on ramp. You just want to be careful where you're leaving your bitcoin. You always want to be careful there. But especially right now the, during this consolidation period there's just a lot of businesses closing. So.
- [10:59]
Jackson
Yeah, yeah. And I wanted to underscore the point on the project Crypto as they're calling it. So what Brian was referring to on the SEC and cftc because there's a lot of capital, there's a lot of time and resources that have been lined up at these organizations, at these traditional financial institutions to pretty much get everything buttoned up in advance of there being regulatory framework for the proliferation of bitcoin and digital assets. And so we actually already saw this once play out with enterprise blockchain and obviously that was a big buzzword but there wasn't support and there wasn't the buy in that we have today at the political level, at the regulatory level. And ultimately a lot of things have changed in those, call it probably six to eight years when those build outs initially happened. I think it, I think that these companies were not foolish enough to make another investment, make another attempt to build out the infrastructure and the products for this, knowing that they were going to get rug pulled again. So I, I agree with you guys. I mean it's hard to pinpoint when exactly all this goes live, but it's just a matter of time and again as I kicked off the show here, for anyone who's looking to allocate more, I mean this is, you're pretty much getting a gift to buy bitcoin in the 60s because nothing has changed from a year ago. Yet you have the worst sentiment I would argue at least ever since I've been paying attention to. So let's just continue to monitor what happens with the, the project Crypto or with the Clarity Act. But I think one or the other we're just going to, we're going to see some momentum here. Pretty short. I did want to just address one thing on before we pivot into some more broader market, broader AI conversation, I wanted to get your guys thoughts on just tying it back into what we're paying attention to in sentiment and all these things that seemingly are not playing out but are actually again providing opportunity. One thing that you guys flagged was on the, on the bitcoin mining side and the bitcoin treasury company side, we've seen a lot of momentum stall out. I mean maybe that's even saying it gracefully. We've seen a lot of companies that had treasury allocation start to sell divest, be unlisted from public exchanges. We've had strategy that has gone over a month now without allocating or not purchasing any more Bitcoin, just continuing to stay stack USD. Interesting strategy there. And then meanwhile you have these companies, they're trying to pivot into let's say an AI strategy, a data center strategy and try to ride the wave of momentum. But seemingly it's not working. The share prices are not reacting in any way. So I'm curious what you guys make of some of the price action there. And just is this kind of like a, is this a sign that you'd want to see in terms of these companies trying to time the top of another market while really the opportunity is right in front of them?
- [13:39]
Brian
Well, maybe Michael, I'm sure you have thoughts but just quickly on the minor stuff and because, because for additional context there like that's, that's a transition that's been taking place over the past two years. So I think it's kind of a timing issue when you're talking about stock prices and how they've react. Because if you're just trying to make that transition now, then yeah, you are a laggard to that trade. But I think you know, some of the people that some of the firms that made that transition beginning two years ago, their stock price has done very well over the past two years because of that transition. So it's, it's, there's a little bit of nuance there. But I would generally agree with you that like people trying to do it now a little bit later and there's sort of firms that have already cemented their place in that transition.
- [14:22]
Michael
Yeah, I mean I think about energy utilization like water flowing that there's a reality there's probably two ways to segment the pivot. There's one if like the allbirds going into like AI and managing data and that's obviously noise and then there's just natural version of the bitcoin miners were first to a lot of things specifically going to whether it's natural gas modular generation with the data centers. And so it's rational that if you're getting effectively more value per token or poor kilowatt hour, you would just go to that it's better value whether you're public or private. And so it's good we're bringing it up because Galaxy seems to be crushing it here. Galaxy's always had. And people forget a lot of firms got into this space.
- [15:11]
Brian
And it's the whole notion of sometimes
- [15:12]
Michael
it's better to be lucky than right. Because NYDIG had absorbed. They were doing a lot of minor financing and when that market collapsed around lending against Asics, they absorbed a lot of infrastructure. And I think it's panned out well for them because of the infrastructure is scarce, meaning the actual land, the actual energy resources and then the actual infrastructure built on top of it. But then you've also seen Galaxy and other firms there where they're going heavily in Texas, I think they have a new data center they're setting up. They just, it came out two weeks ago. They. They have a $75 million endorsement deal with Texas Tech, which is out west where a lot of this stuff is taking place. So I think that's just a natural order. It's less around chasing it. And I think it could go on longer than now because it's just, well, what does it look like in partnerships, JVs, et cetera. And then the last point on the. The treasury stuff, it's just fascinating. I don't know what to make of what's going to happen with a lot of these firms because I think like all the things that we got kind of crap for before around calling it out is pretty apparent now. I think most people just kind of have their head in the sand because they're hoping the price goes up because the notion of the way it was sold is just amplified. Bitcoin. I think Parker's been doing a good job explaining that maybe that's just not theoretically right from a investment thesis perspective. But I think that a lot of. I had a tweet this week about Mashinsky was. I think it was the FTC. He's him and his co founder or CFO, I believe owe 16 million from like the marketing around 18 APR yield. And it highlights what we've been saying behind the scenes and in front of the scenes. I think a lot of people are continuing with the charade because there's a real liability perspective if you're out there publicly pushing these stocks. And we were seeing a lot of these firms also just liquidate and move their shares off. And so I do think that that's a component of a lot of this is just less demand for spot bitcoin buys from a Treasury company. And so a lot of these firms are either just kind of like keeping things leveled and Managing optics or they're just winding down. And I do think there's a component of just like legal liability as well as like reputational.
- [17:18]
Jackson
Yeah, I mean that makes a lot of sense. I was curious just to shift a little bit. Have you guys been paying attention at all to what has been happening in the South Korea equity markets? I think it's a nice dovetail into some of the conversations on the AI side just because if you look at this chart here, the South Korea stock market has collapsed 44% in just over a month and 40 days, which has erased $2 trillion of market capitalization. And so now the South Korea Finance Ministry is announcing plans to stabilize the market. We don't need to go into the full thread here, but it's a common case of euphoric markets. Options, derivatives, leverage built into a retail and even an institutional base in this case. And it mirrors a lot of what we saw. I remember six months ago we were talking about how we had all missed the. Or at least I said missed the AI trade.
- [18:09]
Brian
Right.
- [18:09]
Jackson
It was really painful to be holding Bitcoin down 50% yet watching these individual chip companies, semiconductors, just rip hundreds of percents in in a matter of months, if not quarters. And so I am just trying to think about and something I want to pay attention to going forward is just like the unwind here, pivoting back into some of these unloved companies on the software and big tech side. And then ultimately, is this a blow off top? Do you think this could be a more serious blow off top for this AI industry? Especially in the context of what we discussed a week or two ago with China really coming in, distilling the models and putting pressure on, in my opinion, putting pressure on the valuations of AI companies here in the US So I
- [18:51]
Michael
think it's a great question. I think it underpins a lot of the conversation we've been having and talking past the market when it comes to Bitcoin versus investments and savings. And it's the whole notion of
- [19:08]
Jackson
that.
- [19:10]
Michael
Like when you look at a lot of momentum that's traded or changed on hyper liquid and commodities and scarce assets, there's no question there's some level of fundamentals around their scarcity in an AI world around memory and other aspects of compute. But the reality is that you a have to be deeply embedded and understand where value accrues, which requires you to get in early enough. And then it requires you to have enough conviction to understand the market, the sentiment, what is overvalued, what is overvalued. That will return versus what will continue and persist. And that just requires an insane amount of knowledge. The best example I use is like, can you play basketball and then can you play with Michael Jordan? And if you can't play with Michael Jordan, then you shouldn't be playing. Like, you shouldn't be betting your, your life on a basketball game with him. In the same way, like, if you're trading in the equity markets against the best, what looks like a good trade for a while, you have to get out of it. Which is the thing that I think gets lost on most people, whether it's crypto, treasury companies, like how many people actually got out at the top of, you know, MSTR or whatever, these things. So anyway, I think that's the core point, that these things may come back, they will, you know, but the leverage and all those things embedded end up because the money's broken. And that's why, like, eventually people are going to realize, I just want to opt out of this rat race. I'm just going to store. And then because it has the fundamentals, it goes back to the little tweet of like, the money's a bubble that never pops. It's like, well then naturally the fundamentals of bitcoin will keep you in the future propagating your wealth. And that's why you can withstand the drawdowns. And we can sit here with straight face and say it's a great time to buy Bitcoin at 50% off and not be laughed out of the room because in a few years or a few months, we'll look like genius. Everybody, hope you're enjoying the rip. Just finished chatting about the Korean stock market. The aspect of where do you store value in a digital world, specifically with this level of inflation. Inflation, if any of that's of interest, you want to learn more about what we're doing, whether it's DCA buying more bitcoin or custody. I encourage you to reach out. You can email me directly. My email is right below in this handle. Michael onright bitcoin.com or you can book a consultation and speak with myself or somebody from the team. There's a lot of value we're delivering. There's a lot more coming down the pipeline and would love to chat with you and ideally be able to talk to you about what we do. But also if you've been uncomfortable in allocating more because of custody or how you think about custody, want to learn about multi institution, what we're doing there on Ramp Finance, the unified experience for Bitcoin holders that just want one account when it relates to security, IRAs, financial services and long term estate and dynasty trust planning. We really love to speak with you. We're growing like crazy. We're excited about where the market's going. I'd love to share it. All right, hope you enjoy the rest of the pod.
- [21:49]
Brian
Yeah, I agree with all that. The other just sort of footnote on the Korean index, it's also extremely concentrated. So the, the Kospi index I believe is like mostly, you know, very top heavy. And the, the two big names in there are Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. SK Hynix earlier this week had a big profit miss and then Samsung has also taken a hit on what you described Jackson around a bit of a slowdown in expectations around all of these AI related stocks. And so it also just speaks to what we've talked about in the past around like index concentration where you know it, there's sort of multiple layers to it where it's like, you know, the stock market is perceived as like a proxy for the economy and like the general health of a nation, which isn't exactly true. But then you dig deeper and it's like, well that's, that index is not even really representative of an entire country's market necessarily. It's very top heavy in a few specific stocks. And so there was another report a couple weeks ago that the Cosby had just been super volatile all year. So despite this 44% drop in a month or whatever, I think it was up like 2x before that year to date 2 to 3x. And so there was another report that Cosby in terms of its volatility this year is more volatile than Bitcoin. Now Bitcoin's kind of been hanging around in a range, so there's kind of two sides of that story. But yeah, I, I, I agree with everything you described as well, Michael. Like it, it comes back to savings versus investment competitive forces that just aren't applicable to a savings technology. It's, it's something that you constantly have to be re underwriting on the equity side whether it's cyclical boom busts, the capex spend, whether you're going to get the ROI on it. And so yeah, there's a lot to, there's a lot of variables and there's basically a constant need to be re underwriting what you own.
- [23:55]
Jackson
I think you both make some great points. I mean at the end of the day people are not professional traders and it really is incredibly hard to try to time these markets. Like just using Micron as an example, Michael, to your earlier point, if you were early on the trend and you saw where this is all going a year or two, you know, five years, incredible foresight by you and you've had incredibly handsome returns. But if you're like most people, you started to see this momentum play out early this year and then into the spring, and there's very good chance that a lot of people ended up buying well above $1000. I think we peaked on micron around like 1200, 1300. Now it's trading about 700. So it's a pretty significant drawdown and unfortunately that's where most people get trapped. And then Brian, on your point, the those two companies that you mentioned in the South Korea equity markets I think have accounted up to 50% of the market. Right. And so that is got close to 60 before this got close to 60%. So I mean that's, that's an incredible amount of concentration and I think it is totally underappreciated. It's something that I think we all assume is just normal that people treat equity markets and stocks right, they just treat them as their savings account because that's been the de facto play for the past several decades, especially in the U.S. but when you start to dig into the underwriting Brian, that you mentioned, it paints a little bit of a different picture. I mean, I'm kind of on the other side, at least with US equities, where I tend to be more of a perma bowl, less so because of the company fundamentals, but more so because of the macro and the political incentives that exist. But I still think it's, there's always that type of tail race that exists with any of these types of investments that look, if you have that type of concentration, you're parking your savings in there. You just have to be aware of the type of risk that you're taking on. And Bitcoin doesn't present any of that. I mean like we, we talk about it, of course, but it just, it's fundamentally a different technology. It's fundamentally a different asset. It's fundamentally a different way to preserve your wealth. And I think this chart that Magoo actually tweeted, Brian, I think this is one that you pulled up is something that makes its rounds every once in a while. But I think it's always nice just to re anchor to what is actually going on here because this is a chart of The S&P 500 priced in gold, which is down 66% from its 2000 highs, right? So it's always Michael and I, we, you know, we talk about this too. Nominal versus real. Most people, we haven't even gotten to the point where most people even know what a real return is because inflation hasn't gotten bad enough. But the denominator, the US Dollar is just eroding at a more rapid and rapid rate. And it's crazy to see this, actually. I mean, pricing equities in gold, you're down about 2/3 in 26 years. I mean, most people, you tell them that, they just don't even know what to make of it. They don't even believe it.
- [26:39]
Michael
Yeah, we should call this show or another show, Real versus nominal. Because another show. I don't know if Magoo. I feel like Magoo might, might listen. But, you know, this just embodies everything. We kind of ties it all together. That the amount of liquidity getting injected into the system continues to increase and it accelerates the distortion. And that distortion is where you just see across and there's this precarious spot. Because if you are like most individuals that hold your wealth to your point in the stock market, you generally have a financial advisor. Those financial advisors are paid to not get fired and not take risks. So they're keeping you in the thing that is having you go negative in real terms because they're keeping in with like a traditional index and a traditional 60, 40. And so then if you're an individual, you effectively have to go and get out on the long tail of the microns, et cetera, et cetera. But the problem with the individuals, and this goes for everyone, is we have extreme bias. And this is. Goes back to my own bias of being insanely bullish, that like, sure, you can forecast where something's going to accrue value, but that's only like half and might not even be the hard part. It's how do you get out of the position? Because if you see it ripping, as anybody seen an asset rip, you're like, how do I cut it? Right? It's like why people end up leaving the casino with less even though they. And they go up at some point. And so this just all goes back to this notion of you just need the money to be better and for people to understand it. And this chart illustrates that clearly. You could have just held the pet rock. Now, obviously you had to figure out how to save it and not get wrecked and somebody come kill your family for the gold that sits in your house. But it still withstands that. Like, if you have this benchmark and clarity around what is money, then it at least allows you to see the world clear.
- [28:27]
Brian
Yeah, 100%. Fantastic chart from Magoo. It's funny, he got like a million views on this yesterday and he just tweeted the same exact chart again with slightly different text, like 30 minutes ago. Because it is fascinating. It's like. And you kind of alluded to it, Jackson. It's like I met with a former colleague a few months ago from Tradfi World and, And sort of articulated something similar around, like, well, you know, gold actually has done better than stocks, you know, over the past 20, 25 years. And she literally didn't believe me. She thought I was just making up the stat. And so most people have not seen this chart. And if they have seen it, they don't even think it's real. Like, they can't even compute in their brain that just holding cold. They've, you know, done better than the S and P. Because when people think about the S and P, they're like, oh, it's been on this tear for the past 20 years. How could you possibly do better than that? And so back to this concept of real versus nominal and people not understanding what money is. And once you get to the point of saying, like, okay, gold did that over the past 26 years. Bitcoin is an extension of that. It's just exponential gold, as our friends at Fidelity like to call it. It is a improved form of gold in terms of its monetary properties. And so that's. That's the thesis in a nutshell.
- [29:51]
Michael
There's a meta to this. It's going to sound like Coke, but it isn't. And I, and I had a conversation. I think it was a client. I think he listens. And we were just talking about the. You could tell, you know, first cycle, second cycle. I think everyone's just been a little bit, you know, unsettling this. This market sentiment, right? And we're going to talk about the AI stuff because I think it's another layer into how disorienting the world is. But long story short, I was telling them that, you know, you understand the world clearer than most now, that you understand Bitcoin. And you can't put a price on that. You just, you fundamentally can't. And when I think about that chart with gold is that when you understand that dollars don't grow on trees and that where value derives from, it lets you just see everything else. So that's like the status of the market. And when you think about, I Think about our pod. I always index to like the whole treasury stuff and how people think we're crazy. It's like, no, no, we just like have to go back to first principles of how does value derive and else starts to become a lot clearer. And so I just like hold that notion of the people here. I had this other random anecdote of a buddy, that's father, multi generational, like municipal construction company was really well off. And he said loosely the other day, I never even told him that it like hit me was his dad called it. His dad's passed away, but he called it funny money. He was calling it funny money back in the 90s, like 80s 90s, like people understood that this trajectory, these things. But it's so built into like Coastal Elite. The market forces investment management. To your point, the person that you talk to, to about it will just not. Even if she sees it, she, her. Her mind will not allow her to believe that she cannot outsmart the money. And that's just why the market looks weird and why people can't reconcile what the hell is going on. It's because the substrate that exists across everything, the air we breathe is, Is toxic. It's not right.
- [31:39]
Brian
Yeah. And specifically, as it relates to like tradfi or, you know, finance professionals, it's not only like a cognitive dissonance thing. It's like once they do see it, they don't even want. Even if they know it's true, they don't want to admit it because it, it calls into question their entire profession of charging fees for some air of sophistication around the right equity strategy, the right equity bond mix. It's like that's your entire livelihood. That's that entire industry for the most part. And so even if, even if they come to terms with the truth around that chart, they'll never admit it to themselves or to their colleagues.
- [32:16]
Michael
It reminds me of the Bitstein tweet that I think forgot who it was. It's going to kill me because I think he listens as well. He's always on Twitter pinging us and appreciate it. But he, he posted a tweet about like bitsy back in 17. It's like you tried Expert, you know, spent X years, you know, whatever, whatever, trying to, you know, outperform 9%. He's like, me, shitpost, never went to school. 999 returns in 2017, like, that's the. You have your whole life predicated on this, this notion of how you can outsmart the market. And the market's just a different.
- [32:48]
Jackson
It's a.
- [32:48]
Michael
You're playing just the wrong game.
- [32:52]
Jackson
I mean. Yeah, when you, when. When you actually think about just a rock performing, performing better than the US equity market, it is a little bit tough to stomach. Right. I mean, I can understand why there's so much apprehension to admit that or there's so much just disgust with gold. I mean, like traditional finance, just Wall street hates gold. And that's one of the key reasons.
- [33:18]
Michael
But when you put it that way, look, that makes it feel disgusting. But when you put it in a way of like just understanding money, it fundamentally changes it because it's just money and it's global money. And that's part of the other side where you can hold two views that bitcoin's a better money. But bitcoin or but gold's still money today and sovereigns are holding it. They're holding it more than treasuries. And so if that's the case, then the math just has to work out that the one thing that's more scarce than everything else is what's going to outpace everything from a value perspective. Because everyone's deriving how they recognize value appreciation. The smart money is holding gold and then eventually will hold bitcoin. This stuff isn't really rocket science. Go back to Parker. His famous saying, bitcoin's not an IQ test, it's a common sense test. And we lack a lot of common sense today. We're probably going to lose a lot of it with AI.
- [34:05]
Jackson
Yeah, for sure. Look, and I just wanted to position it as a rock in the context of like that is its perception by many of these professional investor types. But I understand your framing and it makes sense to me. Michael. So we have a little bit less than 15 minutes before we have some tea leave reading to do with the Fed. I know we have a couple of different AI topics we want to get into. How about I rattle a few of them off? You let me know where we want to go. So we have the open router news and stripe. We have some new information related to the agents OpenAI escaping and the the incident with hugging face. And then we have some other stuff. We have the pacing the frontier. A petition. A petition from a thousand employees at frontier companies to pretty much want to put some guardrails in as relates to AI advancement. Let's call those the top three topics we can go into. We can cover all them. But where do you guys want to start?
- [34:58]
Michael
Can you personally pull up the hugging face latest and just rattle it off because I think, I feel like that is a good jumping off point for like we had a good conversation yesterday. If anybody's not listening doesn't know we have a bi weekly show that's 30 minutes live signal versus noise. And I think there was a nice contentious or whatever disagreement conversation of like how fast AI is moving and then actually how much it matters to the bottom line of an individual. And so I think this will be part of the conversation.
- [35:28]
Jackson
All right, so here we go. The biggest surprise in Hugging Face's full forensic report isn't that OpenAI's agent escaped its sandbox. We already knew that. It's how deep and persistent the intrusion became. According to Hugging Face, the agent executed roughly 17,600 actions during a four and a half day campaign. Went from one production pod to root access and a self respawning fleet across 11 nodes. Obtained cluster admin access to two internal clusters within one second. I don't even know like half this means access to production secret containing 136 keys. Enrolled devices in the hugging phases, internal mesh VPN 181 times, minted GitHub app tokens with write access and open to pull requests and attempt to compromise. The CI pipeline repeatedly rebuilt its tooling and command and control channels. When environments disappeared or connections were blocked, no human directed the individual steps. I mean yeah, that's crazy. Frontier agent can autonomously sustain a resilient multi day intrusion across cloud infrastructure. Kubernetes clusters. I don't even know if I said that right. Internal networks and the software supply chain. Yeah, I mean that is crazy. So why I thought this important in
- [36:43]
Michael
the conversation because I think there's been this theme I've been sharing the past couple of weeks of like AGI is already here and I don't know how you could read that or hear that and not believe that. Not AGI like that. I think smarter than most humans to be able to do that but independent of that that the game from a viewpoint when you look at the hyperscalers and sovereigns is the race for ASI artificial super intelligence. And this is an example. This is stuff they try to sweep under the rug. They weren't even actually marketing that they got out. This is like you know, coming out later that let's do a full audit and I think this really matters because this is going to wreck markets when it comes to the proficiency and capabilities across why the hell are you paying for HubSpot or why are you paying for X, Y or Z? It's going to Wreck markets. When it comes down to we're still early, people are laying people off because it's an easy scapegoat to use AI, but it will happen. And because this stuff is so hard to use and diffuse from an individual's perspective, like you can download Claude and you could do clean your inbox or clean your desk top, but how do you really get it to affect change for your personal work life or generating a dollar that's going to take so much time that this is going to move faster. And I don't think the market's really appreciating, meaning individuals on how drastic this will be in the short term and what it means for their employment. And I think it actually underpins the bitcoin thesis and why you want to move more of your capital into bitcoin versus less. Because as this eventually it gets understood and also scarcity being the other side of the abundance with AI, whenever that happens, that's when bitcoin will really be deeply understood globally. And that's when we've talked about it. The bull case. But independent from now and then. I don't think the markets generally none of this stuff's even on.
- [38:38]
Brian
No, not at all. I mean this is pretty terrifying to think through. And the reason being is because I think we're just scratching the surface of, of how this stuff is going to accelerate. And so when you think about software systems, the fragility of these networks, like, you know, we've talked for the past several years around PII hacks, data leaks, like that stuff already existed and was already accelerating, accelerating, absent like agents going rogue and doing, you know, forms of attacks like that. So to your point, Michael, it does speak to the notion and the merit of offline cold storage Bitcoin like things that can, can totally be separated from the broadening attack surface that is being described here. So yeah, pretty wild to see and definitely some foreshadowing of, of sort of what how this stuff is going to play out over the next several years.
- [39:36]
Michael
Yeah, I was just thinking of this from a cultural perspective, but you hit on something that that's how fast this stuff's moving. We would talk about at 3 really months to 18 months ago that you were going to take the PI leaks from Ledger and all the other providers at Law City, run it into some like model that you had to download and you know, like Kimmy and figure it out. Clunky. You can literally just tie in Apollo or any enrichment tool around human data, put that list in there and get everyone's address, or at least the last address that was associated coupled with that list that anybody could do, we could do it right now on this podcast we talked about before was like, that would take an extensive amount of work. And so again, and this is kind of ties into some of the other reports around physical attacks increasing. I would imagine this is a component of it. And that's the wild part is like Bitcoin's only $64,000 and people are still doing it. What happens at like $250,000. And that's always been, again, the contention around the nuance around self custody. It's like, of course self custody is amazing. In a perfect world, that would be for everyone. But like, do you really want to risk your family's life, your marriage if something happens to your house and your wife's? Like, why would you put our family in D? This isn't a pitch. This is just the explanation of like, well, you already understood this is what's coming. And it's just insane to know that it's like it's here now.
- [40:49]
Jackson
Yeah, it really is. I mean, most people forget that there's a reason why naturally you had to, you had to have custodians be involved in the custody of gold.
- [40:58]
Brian
Right.
- [40:59]
Jackson
We touched on it very briefly, but the general gist of it is you don't want to get clubbed over your head. And you had to be conscious of that risk if you were storing your money in your home. And so I don't see why it would play out any differently. And in fact, it is playing out exactly the way it would have played out with gold with bitcoin, albeit, let's say, in terms of the total population of bitcoiners. The number of physical tax is pretty low still, and it's concentrated in certain areas where there's these types of security risks, particularly in France, but other European countries and it's happening in the US as well. But Michael, your point is really incredibly important I think as an industry for us to be aware of that, there's going to have to be a lot of building that takes place by bitcoin native companies if we want to preserve the ability to own your bitcoin securely in your legal title, but not put yourself and your family at risk. This is something that is not fear mongering, it's just reality. If we're right about bitcoin, then we're going to be right about these types of attacks. And this in the context of the digital attacks is just equally insane. I mean, what you described in terms of pulling down and enriching contacts from Apollo is something that could be done in the background in minutes. And so that's incredibly concerning because there's just. We know most people like are not that savvy as it relates to their management of their footprint online.
- [42:19]
Brian
So.
- [42:20]
Jackson
Yeah, I don't know what this means.
- [42:22]
Michael
Maybe while I'm sharing this, if you want to pull up that other tweet, because I think it's super relevant around like pausing and I think it was from o' Byrne that was talking about something we've been sharing about the prisoners dilemma. Do you have that? If not, I'll find it.
- [42:36]
Jackson
Wait, pausing with the petition or something else?
- [42:38]
Michael
No, just pausing. Like if you go to James. Oh, yeah, Nicholas. Yeah, yeah, before that. Just the one thing I wanted to share is it also ties into why there's value in the equity market, but then also in the treasury market, Bitcoin, treasuries related. Because there's a notion of people don't want this to happen, it's like in the subconscious, but they also want their exposure to bitcoin. And that's really the opportunity when it comes to pinching ourselves and where we appreciate people listening and our clients is that they've come along with this journey because we feel this is kind of the beauty and where you're. You're early because of certain information and knowledge that you have that people. There's an insane amount of value if bitcoin is money that you want to have it in the properties that are related to distribution of custodians rights from a titling, legal perspective, financial services. But you want that synthetic spot, you want that real exposure to that asset, not all the dirt that comes in with all these other aspects. And I think that's a lot of what's lost and why these treasury companies picked up so much steam because people wanted their cake and they wanted to eat it too. And you can't. That's just not how the world works. So anyway, that's just like part of the embedded nature. Like nobody wants to get hacked by AI. Nobody wants their family clubbed over the head. So there was like these versions to go down and they'll continue to happen because it's just a long journey. But that's really where we sit in that middle ground to provide the best experience to the real exposure.
- [44:03]
Jackson
Yeah. And so this ties in nicely. Actually, Michael, I had it pulled out before you suggested it. Just so you know where my value is. I. I know just for the record, as well. If you're going to terminate my position, you have to do it on the last trade. Just Jack Jackson's really.
- [44:18]
Michael
Jackson's been in the bed at work, so he's really worried about getting fired. So, like, if you comment on YouTube, it could really be the deciding factor. If you say we keep them around, then we'll keep them. But if more people are like, we just want to get rid of that flow, then we might have to follow the listeners because we want them to come back. I think they're, you know, they make the business.
- [44:36]
Jackson
All right, please let us know in the comments below. My only request is if you're going to do it, you have to do it on the last trade. Just that would be the right send off. So here we go from Anthropic. We got a couple more minutes before we gotta pivot over to the. The Fed.
- [44:52]
Michael
And so we have the wonderful Fed tea leaves. I can't wait till we we get to see what, what, what, what. Our gods, man.
- [44:57]
Jackson
These tea leaves are going to be particularly exciting. I think some are calling it the
- [45:01]
Brian
most exciting tea leaves in years.
- [45:02]
Michael
The only worse tea leaves than that is sailor tea leaves on what is he gonna do with the dot plot?
- [45:09]
Jackson
Hey, sound off in the comments below if you don't like when Michael talks about the real Big Mike, not Michelle Obama. They don't like Michael Saylor.
- [45:18]
Michael
It's been clear they do not like
- [45:20]
Jackson
the all right, so here we go. Let's refocus. Pacing the frontier. So this is a petition from over a thousand employees of Frontier AI companies. Essentially, the whole idea here is for these companies to come together and essentially gate the pace of which AI development is happening and AI superintelligence. And then this is the more interesting take, I think. Brian, this echoes a lot of what you've said. Maybe this is a listener of one of our podcasts and is just taking some of Ryan's takes, but this guy, Nicholas Bustamante, hopefully got that right. I know a lot of people who sign this, and I genuinely think they're coming from the right place. If there were a realistic way to buy humanity more time on AI safety, I'd probably sign too. But I just can't see how this works in practice. This feels like a giant prisoner's dilemma. There are hundreds of billions of dollars, multiple countries, national security interests, and the biggest technology race in history. If even one lab or country decides not to follow or quietly keeps going away anyway, the whole agreement falls apart. So I'm torn. I agree with the goal, but I don't think it's implementable, which is why I'm not signing. That said, the fact that so many people at Frontier Labs feel the need to publicly ask for this says something important. AI progress is going to keep accelerating and the people closest to it are increasingly worried about the safety implications. That is probably the biggest takeaway.
- [46:38]
Michael
So this is effectively what I've been trying to relay. I actually know Nicholas. I don't want to docs too much, but he's a very clear thinker and he's had multiple acquisitions. His recent firm was actually acquired by Microsoft. So that's why he's working at Microsoft, he's working on an AI company. This is the core notion that I've been just trying to relay out there that obviously people talk their book from a business perspective, but it just feels deeper. Like the two dimensional version from the market has been. They're just trying to like Gatekeep, open source, et cetera, which again, there's no clear cut answer. Life's not black or white, it's gray. But what he's relaying is that there's a reason why they're out there and it's, you know, beating the drum over slowing the fuck down. And it's ultimately when you go look at all these researchers that have left and whistleblowed and said where this is going, they all come down to that conclusion of like, there has to be a coordinated effort to slow down because where this is going is going to be insane. And we know the Prisoner's Dilemma will not allow China and others to slow down. But I just think that's a big missing part to this whole layer because all the convoy conversation and discourses around open source and that's natural and technology innovation, like that's obvious in my mind of like, yes, the market needs to be open source. We need people to be able to get inference from other places outside of the frontier labs. But the thing that I think is getting lost is that where this is going, they're not saying all this stuff just because they're talking their book for their business. And then people say like, well, they don't understand optics. And I always go back to like, so this guy runs the biggest company, he doesn't understand optics or is he just doesn't care about it because he cares more deeper about maybe it's his kids or how society actually ends up on the other side of this. Hey guys, hope you enjoyed another episode of the Last Trade. Hopefully we were pretty bullish. There was a lot being discussed but wanted to tie in one of the key points we talked about around AI and just discerning who holds what balances, locations. And one of the big reasons to look into on ramp and specifically multi institution custody. You know, no single counterparty has the ability to move or lose those assets. They're segregated on chain verifiable, insured by Lloyds of London. But one of the other key things, I was on a call with a client, they didn't recognize that we have cash balances, the ability to earn on them sweeping funds, DCA at zero cost or a 50% off spot buys until Labor Day. As well as lending IRAs, we have credit cards and we're working on some FDIC insured accounts as well. So I'd encourage you to check it out, sign up and you can also just book a call with me directly. Michael@horrorbitcoin.com you can see the email here. Love to talk to you. We have some exciting stuff coming on and then the last thing I'll shout out. We talked about it a little bit on the pod.
- [49:12]
Jackson
Good friend Parker Lewis.
- [49:13]
Michael
We have some gradually and suddenly signed books. So for anybody that signs up, we'll see how many weeks this goes. But if you put in GTS basics, so graduate settling basics. So you just put gts and after you first execute your buy, if you tag us and do a screenshot, we'll send you a gradual and suddenly signed book.
- [49:29]
Jackson
All right.
- [49:30]
Michael
Appreciate it and hope you enjoy the
- [49:31]
Jackson
rest of the pod.
- [49:33]
Brian
Yeah, I mean, I think that's fair. I guess where I'm now coming to on this is like, because I agree with the tweet here from Nicholas and I partially agree with what you're saying that they actually do believe it. But what then that sort of signals to me is like they're basically virtue signaling by like signing this petition and like trying to be on the right side of history as like the people who said we should have slowed down because I think Nicholas is right, is that there's no practical way to implement a slowdown. And so to me it, you know, it, it rings similar to, you know, what we've seen a lot over the past, call it five to 10 years of people, people versus signaling that they want to say and do the right things. But ultimately that's not changing the underlying fundamentals of what they're talking about.
- [50:27]
Michael
Yeah, like I get some of that but I think we kind of tied into this and all this happens in real time. I don't have enough time to formulate all these thoughts, but it talks about like on what we did on Final Settlement of we're in these positions of being able to talk about how bad fiat and inflation is, but then also know that we're building the other side of that. And this kind of reminds me of like the MSTR stuff where it's like, sure, maybe we lost clients, maybe we won clients, but the long term is you want to be on the right side of history and you want to do as much as you can because that's ultimately the right thing to do. Independent, where the business goes versus let people lose their money. It's not apples to apples, but I do think like, what are they supposed to do? Do nothing, Just continue down that path. Right? Like what are their options?
- [51:10]
Brian
Yeah, no, it's fair.
- [51:11]
Jackson
I mean, I think what is positioned here is the most logical conclusion.
- [51:15]
Brian
Right.
- [51:16]
Jackson
I mean, we've seen this play out with a number of different initiatives. Not everyone's going to play by the rules that US companies want to set. So I mean, I don't really know. I feel like we're already kind of at the point where this isn't going to be contained just based on the last piece of news we covered. And so I think that if the U.S. is going to try to put the guardrails in and slow the progress of AI, it may be at the detriment of where we end up in terms of our nation's competitiveness, particularly as it relates to China. I guess the other point you could make the counter to that is if, well, if China really is just engaging in distillation of frontier models from the US and they're just kind of taking our ip, well then if we have a process to gatekeep, then that could potentially slow down their ability to build out as well. But I truthfully don't know how this plays out. I just know that different countries are not going to play by the same rules. I know that for a fact.
- [52:15]
Michael
Well, I also know you didn't listen to that CEO pod with the whistleblower because he effectively outlines this and like what are logical outcomes to slow it down? And they're not really logical to the point of game theory and prisoners delight dilemma. And I think this ties back into what we were talking about before around like the main reason I think for us to cover it or anybody listening is what does this just mean from an individual's perspective? Because there's a lot of noise out there. I shouldn't call it noise because it's not figured out, but I Do think directionally this is right, that the diffusion of AI is not like the industrial revolution or technology. It's just so multifaceted and sits across. Like when you think about intelligence, specifically intelligence around robotics, once these things can start to move in the meat space, the just downstream effects of that we've never seen permeate across every level of a society and economic forces that it's just, there's no like perfect precedent for it. And so you hear a lot about like, oh well, this will just, you know, Javin's paradox and all this stuff. And it's like, I don't think, I think in a vacuum in certain areas you can find it, but this is going to end up in a lot of job losses and a lot of just like chaos. I think it came out before this pod, like Minneapolis or Minnesota's water system was cyber attacked or like infiltrated. And there's like 30 places there where. I'm not saying this is AI, I'm just saying like the ability to mess with grids and all the other things in a, in a world that's already chaotic is only going to accelerate.
- [53:41]
Jackson
I don't like the sound of that. Before we get into the tea leaves, just one thing here I wanted to cover. Your fourth grader shouldn't be worried about AI. I feel like, look, let the kids be kids. But the, the general gist of this, the general gist of this article is that it's kind of sad, right? I mean, imagine fourth grade, probably like 10, 11 years old, and these children are already kind of worried about, well, what does this mean for my future? And so Michael, you said, I forget what you just said, but we should all be thinking about what does this mean for us as individuals and particularly in the context of, okay, well, how do I actually earn a living if a lot of what I thought I was going to be doing or studying is going to be replaced? And of course look like any technological revolution, there will be opportunities that are created. But I think this may actually be a particular case as relates to AI, where the displacement of labor is far more significant than the addition of new labor. So I mean, I don't know what to say. It's just kind of a sad state of the world where you have, you know, I almost equate this like fourth graders being worried about politics. I remember, like, I don't think anyone really talked about politics in elementary school and you know, high school even, not so much either. But now I know for a fact that these are topics because everything is so polarized now that these are topics that are kind of being shoved and crammed down people's throats. So man, I don't know what was
- [55:01]
Michael
the gist of this though.
- [55:03]
Jackson
The gist of it's right here. So it's essentially just like downstream of adults and their children. Also thinking about, well, some of the jobs that I maybe thought that I would have in the future may not be there. And I don't know if this is coming from their parents or I don't know where this is coming. Like the school. Yeah, the classroom.
- [55:20]
Brian
The kids might be onto something.
- [55:21]
Michael
Well, just reading it, just reading it out loud because you said it's right here. More it says takeaways from Bloomberg AI. More than half Americans fear AI will take their job. Fourth graders are worried there won't be any jobs. They grow up. I think a lot of this is probably from parents. This is a Bloomberg opinion piece, but it is real. The ramifications, I think honestly to the upside for kids because I think there's just a lot of education that can. This is really where the problem of the society's developed. Where schools are more of daycare centers than knowledge centers. And if you think even like this is going to sound crazy but like even employment or more of like marriage counselors than employment, like from the sense of like think about COVID and how many people had to work together and they like split up because they're just not used to being there at like at the same time or together whatever. Point being is that schools go to the lowest common denominator. So people may need to be in a different level, whether higher or lower. And AI is going to help with a lot of that back going back and forth and learning. The problem is there's the other aspect which is the meat space and touching grass that because they're daycares there's not enough of the ability to do the one on one. Um, so if you're able. I was thinking, I've been thinking deeply about this of like how do you actually do the barbell approach where you have the physical aspects, whether it's like farming, et cetera, but then you also have the AI side. So you're both sides of your brains are developing including reading actual physical books. But the sad part is that's not available at scale. And that's really where I actually think about the, the like long term ramifications around this stuff.
- [56:59]
Brian
Anthropic destroyed all the books. No more physical books. No, this is, I mean it's a mixed Bag like you said, Michael, because I think you're right that there are going to be massive positive externalities like I talked about last week when it comes to education. But I think the kids, and maybe it's the parents fear is somewhat warranted here in that even if you are getting a better education supplemented by AI tools, you still have to go out and attempt to apply them in the real world. And I think it also calls into question like the, the sort of like historical path or the trajectory, right? Like you study something in high school, you go to college, you have a major with the thought or the progression of like there's a specific industry that I want to enter. I think all of that is going to have to be rethought, particularly around like do you want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a college education if there isn't that same sort of placement path that had existed for a long time? So yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [58:08]
Jackson
I would say it's more bearish and as bullish. Like Michael, you said somewhere in there it's bullish for children. But I think because of the structure, the structure that is in opposition of children and their development, like the structure is so rigid within the classrooms, typically it doesn't really foster the environment that would lead to high agency, creative individuals who are going to be on the frontier. The flip side is there are some of these schools that are, are being that exist already today. But of course like that comes at a hefty price tag that most people can't afford. So I don't know. I mean honestly, education system adapts like pretty quickly. I think more children than not would be at a disadvantage because of this.
- [58:51]
Michael
Yeah, I mean I do say the one counter to that is there's a lot of, and I won't get this completely right, but around Industrial revolution and I forgot what the act was around kids being able to be in manufacturing and where it stemmed from employment age and historically where in a lot of societies kids were working at 10, 12 years old and then this just permeated. So we've naturally not had a part of culture to be able to like deliver value. And you can, you can imagine that gets lost on a lot of people once you never had a job, you go to college, you get into the debt. What are the downstream effects? And I think the counter to that and that this can happen in a more one on one fashion or in school is you can actually develop side gigs. You can actually develop ways to create value and that's valuable to get earlier stages on that because you can be potentially 12, 15, 16 years old doing X, Y or Z for a company or for yourself. And so I do think like the, it's really the middle layer that's going to be messy as far as like job and employment. I think by the time these kids, you know, shake out, if they're on at least a decent path, they're going to have a completely different, like, surface area of how their brains think about what's capable when you pick up any kind of piece of technology. Because like, yeah, I mean, I won't go deep into it, but like the, the anecdote is like, if you think about, it's a crude analogy, but like Snapchat, there's like this version of anybody over X age. You would pick up Snapchat when it came out, they wouldn't know how to swipe. They wouldn't understand how to use that, you know, that, that form factor. But then when you're younger, you do it. And it's the same thing of like somebody picking up these tools, especially when they become ubiquitous, they're not going to like, search something like this. They're going to have a completely different feel for how they can actually create and do things. And that'll just like, what are the downstream ramifications? And yeah, the Fed's not doing anything.
- [60:34]
Jackson
So breaking news. Maybe, maybe there could always be an opportunity to be a tea leave reader. AI, AI is not doing the best job here. So this is an opportunity for those fourth graders. If you want to be an economist, if you want to be a career academic, work for the Federal Reserve. That is a great opportunity. So breaking news here. The Fed leaves interest rates steady at Warsh's second meeting. Three policymakers back a hike. We only have a couple minutes here. Brian, what do you think? I mean, did he chicken out? I thought he, you know, keep the lips closed. Yeah. What's going on here?
- [61:08]
Brian
Yeah, I mean, the, the only reason people were interested in this meeting more than maybe past meetings over the years is because when Warsh entered the seat, he took this stance of he himself is not giving forward guidance. Typically, the Fed chair does what the other committee members do and they give some forward guidance of what they think will happen with rates. And he has been abstaining from that. And so he was kind of this unknown variable in the calculus of what rates would do. And as a result, I think for the first time in like six years or so, so since like Covid era, there was some general uncertainty whether rates were going to remain unchanged. Or be hiked a quarter point was most likely. And so it was like 60 to 70% leading in today that they would say the same. But typically that number is like well over 80% where, like, most people know, like, what's going to happen. So that's why people were interested in it particularly. But, yeah, chickened out. Coward. Holding rates. There were three dissents. So three people advocated for a 25 basis point rate hike. And like we always say, like, this is, this is theater. This is, you know, the direction of travel is unchanged. But it is interesting to think, like 12 months ago, the narrative and the sentiment around the Federal Reserve was that, like, you know, somebody was going to be put in and rates were going to get cut, like, almost with certainty. Most economists or most market participants would tell you that that is what was going to happen. And now we're like on the opposite side of that spectrum where the direction of travel actually looks more likely for a rate hike maybe by the end of the year. So, Michael, what do you got?
- [62:47]
Michael
I got nothing.
- [62:47]
Jackson
Let's go. All right, good stuff. Good reference. Wait, hang on, hang on. Ten more seconds. I just want to say, anyone who made it this far, please do us a favor, like subscribe, rate and leave a comment. I. I would actually love to know. I would love to see some comments this week on. Across all platforms. Michael left. Am I fired or am I hired? Leave some comments below.
- [63:12]
Brian
Sound off. Sound off in the comments. Thanks, Jackson.
- [63:14]
Jackson
All right, see you.
- [63:16]
Brian
Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the show. If you found the information valuable, please share the episode with a friend or leave a rating on your favorite podcast app. All the links we discussed in today's show will be in the show notes inside your podcast.
- [63:28]
Jackson
Apple.
- [63:28]
Brian
Before we finish, a quick reminder that Onramp Media is for informational and entertainment purposes only and nothing should be construed as investment or legal advice. Regardless of where you are on your bitcoin journey, we'd love to hear from you. Visit onrampbitcoin. Com Contact to schedule a consultation with one of our private client advisors.