The Commodity Shift, Credit Crisis & Bitcoin | Eric Yakes

We're getting closer to an inflection point. There's no escape valve when it's globally coordinated. This is it. And the escape valve means it deflates. And it can't deflate. Or it's over. The commodity trend is an opting out of the credit game. If you can manipulate the paper, you can manipulate the allocation. These crises happen when the reality departs from what's on paper. Then that'll cause like a panic. Are you saying you think this could be the start of a financial crisis?

We've seen stressors. We've seen people pulling money out. Nobody wants to admit reality for systemic reasons. Someone's going to have to print the difference. Debt's everywhere. It's cracking in all these different areas. If there's going to be printing, it's going to be the hardest printing they've ever done. There isn't much of another option. Nuclear options, aggression, fourth turning type vibes. Really what's happening is we're restructuring how we organize.

Where are these technology investors and gold bugs going to be rotating once they feel like they're really getting to peak euphoria? I think Bitcoin's a very strong answer for that. And everything about the thesis for Bitcoin is playing out perfectly. I think it comes from Sovereign's next. I just think we're going to start seeing more and more headlines. Once Bitcoin gets into the $5 trillion market cap range, that could be the suddenly moment. It's a sweet background. The space, man.

The space. This place is cool. It is cool.

This is the best Bitcoin citadel. I don't want to say it, but it's up there. I like the park in Nashville.

parks all right just been at presidio that's real nice the what makes us different well we're a 6 000 square foot building and well what's really cool about this organization is it was completely just like a bottom-up thing it was our bit devs that got big and we were like what if we try to get a place and everybody started like pitching in work and pitching in money built up a balance she found this place grew our member base large enough and and it's cool because everybody like

contributes in all these different ways and that's basically led to us having our own self-hosted website like we have a server running downstairs 24 7 we have our own forum running on it we have a gpu rack for self-hosting ai models so we can run our own llms here locally um not cheap but we have like the technical expertise of our members to do that and we heat the floors with Bitcoin miners. We have a hot tub in the back heated with Bitcoin miners. Yeah, I saw that. That's cool.

A bunch of shit that we've created. It's a nice hot tub too. I remember being in Nashville for their energy summit and that was the first time I'd seen that. They had a hot tub there where it was heated by miners. It was snowing. It was like the worst weather Nashville had had in years and there's like a load of Bitcoin and sat in a hot tub outside the park. It's kind of fucking awesome. But that one's nice.

Yeah, this is like a full-blown, real hot tub heated with Bitcoin miners and we just like hang out at it in the middle of the day. we'll do a quick, quick little dip. That's awesome. Do you know what's funny about like the Bitcoin spaces is they had like a real moment after COVID where everyone was like migrating from

New York and California. And it was like people going to Austin and Nashville. And then it feels like people have slowly moved away back to like maybe where they were living before or whatever. And with like traveling to make the show, it makes it a lot harder because it used to be like you'd go to Nashville and everyone lived in Nashville. But like now, like I've just done a day in LA, day in San Francisco, I'm here for two days and I'm going somewhere else. Like,

I just need the Bitcoin communities to build out again. Well, it's funny from your perspective as a podcaster too, because how many other, like how many other areas could you be a podcaster in and have a local community hub that exists in a city for the people that you're generally talking to? Yeah. I don't know. Like if you're into tech, I guess you've got the value, like Silicon Valley.

You have Silicon Valley, but it's like, if you go to New York and you're like, I want to, you know, interview X people. That's where all the finance guys are. Yeah, yeah. But like, you can go to like a company, but there's not like community organizations. No, that's true. You know? Yeah. That's what's cool. It's just like, here's the place that all the people I want to interview are probably hanging out at anyways.

Yeah. I think what PubKey do is really cool in the sense that they've got something else that's not just like co-working, hangout. Like, I think, do you think these are going to be sustainable long-term?

It depends. For us and anybody listening, we need sponsors and donations. That always helps us. Are you for profit? No. So we've filed for our federal nonprofit status. We're expecting that to go through within a few months. That was the decision we chose because we were different. Like when we started this thing, you know, we, I, you know, we were just like, we want it to be cool. We don't, we don't care about

it being, you know, some massive new thing. We, we want to have smart people working here and like big projects to come. But at the end of the day, we just want it to be something that's like truly community member run. Yeah, that was a cool thing about it. Nobody controls it. And we reelect our board every year. So like that nonprofit, you know, bottom up decentralized type approach to this, I think it's what makes us like different. The for profit model is cool, too. I don't know if

it's the most profitable for profit model in the world. But it is a way that I think has been working for now. The way that we kind of viewed it is the way that we run things around here, we just run things like a nonprofit. Cause we did have that question. We're like, okay, if we were to go the for-profit route with an organization like this, how would we do it? And the answer we quickly got to is like, how do we even divide up who owns this?

And we're just like, I'm like, I never want to even go that direction. Cause it's like the community on it really. Right. It's just like, how much, how much do I deserve? How much do you deserve? And we're kind of just like, that doesn't matter. And the second that becomes a part of this, it's going to ruin what we have. Yeah. Like we don't even want to have those conversations.

Yeah. it's um when i first heard about this before i'd come and i knew it was like you doing it and tyler and i was like this is just gonna be like a gross frat house but it's actually really nice it's yeah it's really nice yeah it's funny it's got a nice woman's touch in here yeah it does it's not like your house right it's not like where i live yeah where eric lives is basically just a mattress on the floor a really nice area around my mattress on the floor yeah it's a very nice house yeah um

anyway man we should get into it uh the world's going fucking crazy right now it's going crazy What's your read on everything? Because I've been doing a lot of shows. I think the Iran war has changed everything when it comes to macro stuff. I just did a show with Nick Bartier, and he was like, you kind of have to throw your models out and reassess the entire thing. How are you reassessing things now?

I think one way I would guess I would push back on that is I feel like, I'm not sure exactly what Nick said, but we've seen a lot of these variables with long-term. If we were to rewind back to 2019, Bitcoin community 2020, 2021 periods, kind of right in there.

Under when, you know, when the Biden administration sanctioned Russia, you know, that's when everybody's like, okay, this whole multipolarity thesis that wasn't that popularized yet had existed within people that were very focused on geopolitics, wasn't that popularized. But when Biden cut off Russia from the Swift system, then it was like every blogger in the world was like, okay, now we're fracturing into this multipolar world. Here's the implications of that.

And the implications where people are going to own more commodities. So I think from that perspective, like high level broad strokes, what we're seeing today, what is it? Fracturing multipolar world, people are buying more commodities. So I don't think structurally a lot of those things have changed. But yeah, obviously a lot's changed this year. The commodity shift, like with gold obviously being like the front runner of that, happened before this though.

And like since this war kicked off, like the interesting part is that they're basically talking to Russia now being like, maybe you can come back in. Right. Was gold run up basically the market predicting this more chaotic time? Or do you think they're sort of separate events? Yeah, it's interesting.

um i to start i'll give a cop-out answer of saying that not a cop-out answer i just think the reality is like people always want to associate a micro market trend with a broader price uh okay what are you calling a micro market trend there so so what i'm saying is that how do we attribute the gold rally to like one specific thing right it's a confluence of a lot of factors that have been driving this. And I think it's the long-term trends where, like, let's go back further than

this gold trend last year. Let's go back to, you know, post-GFC. And we've seen like a structural increase in commodity ownership across major sovereign entities globally since that point in time. We've seen a structural reduction in US treasuries in a lot of different, you know, categories for FX settlement, different trading relationships, you know, reserve holdings. That's all, that's all been happening. It's a question of like, what's kind of the inflection

point for a lot of it. And then last year we started to see a run up in gold. And like most people say that that's attributed to like, we've, we've witnessed that central banks and, you know,

sovereigns around the world are buying more of it. Um, so is it, we predicted the war or is it that, um trump is an aggressor yeah in a lot of different ways and people which is kind of the same thing right exactly people so like we can categorically assume some of these things by the political behavior that we're seeing from people and and i think that you know that's a lot of it it's really just we're getting closer to an inflection point um and and we want to own

commodities and that's that's been a that's historically um been the case you know when Zoltan Pozar was writing about this and he had all these viral posts going off when he was at Credit Suisse talking about some of these fracturing trends when we were having like supply chain shocks, et cetera, et cetera. You know, that was the thesis. It remains today. I think that it's simply just getting more exacerbated at this point in time.

So like the major structural trends happening this year, like we had the Japanese credit crisis right at the beginning, but when did that start? That started in 2024. So that was known information, right? People were like, okay, there's a regime change in Japan. We're not like this net buyer. We're not like the US's treasury bitch basically anymore. And that's what it always was. And that structurally changed their economy to where they were the largest holder of treasury, still are.

But the relationship with like new demand has changed and they've been tapering that off. Bitcoin is.

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Just from a total left-curve take on the Japan stuff, the idea of the carry trade, which was, you know, worked for years and years and years, how can that happen? Like, how can that keep going forever? That doesn't seem, that seems like the market has to fill that gap at some point. Sure, sure. It's a question. And that's what happened with Japan. Why did they shift?

inflation finally started to become persistently higher for them yeah and that was always the idea was that like uh i think where people go wrong is they'll look at an economy in isolation and they'll say like okay if this variable happens and we would expect this other variable to happen you know we would expect inflation to emerge if they keep just like printing and printing money and you know buying up a bunch of assets with it and keeping interest rates artificially low

but it comes down to that's just one variable it comes down to what else is impact in this country um why would we have suppressed prices and there's a lot of variables for like the type of economy they are what their outputs are where they can kind of export some of those characteristics that normally would happen domestically now they're happening in a foreign way um so like i think like the left curve take on japan is really just carry trade existed because

inflation didn't react to this because of the nature of their economy. And because of that, they were the perfect person to be the US Treasury buyer for a long period of time. And now that that's starting to shift, we are getting into this environment where it's like, okay, well, where is the demand for the Treasury is going to come from? And then when we start to see cracks in the market and we say, okay, well, what's going to be happening next? And we start

to see persistent inflation pressures on them as well. And we start to see, you know, they're just as dependent on commodities as the U.S. is. And that's not good for them in an inflationary environment. So this commodity shock that we're kind of witnessing from the war, the way that I kind of look at this in like a simple way is just there's like white collar economies and then there's blue collar economies and the blue collar economies are winning for a lot of reasons other

than like commodities are good. Um, AI plays into that as well. And they're not subject to the same, um, creative destruction that I think can emerge from some of that. So one of the things that I'm not quite sure of is what this Iran war means for the petrodollar, because like, if you're talking about like buyers of treasuries, then that's one of the large buyers of treasuries right there.

Maybe it's worth like explaining exactly what the petrodollar system is. And if you think this have an impact on that? Like, do you think this is going to push people to start settling oil in,

you know, Chinese one or whatever? Yeah. Um, petrodollar system is really simply put, um, and it, and I think it's helpful to understand it in a broader context of what was happening, but, you know, as the, when the U S kind of emerged post-World War one is like a, a de facto, a global hegemon for the dollar, but not de jour post-World War two, we were de jour,

Or that period of time is one where the gold leaving England, coming to the US, making us much stronger, a capitalist economy, technological innovation, rapid growth, all these variables that made us a very wealthy country. And then our currency gets more and more entrenched because we proved to be a dominant global military power. And people are like, okay, well, we kind of become this paternalistic state to take care of the world.

And we came up with different ways where the fundamental trait is if you guys, we're going to have the strongest military in the world because we have the wealth, the capability, expertise, et cetera, to do this. because of freedom and we built a capitalistic economy and we protected property rights. Here we are. We're powerful now. We're going to protect all the trade routes. We're going to have the strongest military in the world. In exchange, you guys conduct trade in our currency. That's

the broad trend. And then there's different ways that that has existed throughout the world. And a lot of contract denomination happens outside of oil in the US dollar, in pretty much everything in the most dominant form. The question of how we measure that comes through different variables, like foreign exchange, trade volumes, contract denominations, credit market denominations. And then we've watched that kind of like structurally decline.

Now that the largest you could argue in terms of trade is petroleum products and that fundamental commodity. And then a lot of that's coming from and happening through the Middle East.

and we through the petrodollar have entrenched that system with an agreement with saudi arabia however many decades ago and say you know we're going to conduct trade in the u.s dollar and then the u.s says we're going to protect those routes and ensure that you know um opec etc is going to get the things they want to allow oil trade to to work for the world and and that's something that's good it's deeply entrenched the dollar i think that you know when we're fighting wars in the

Middle East, it's ultimately to protect our interests within that system. And I think that's what's overlooked when people think about geopolitics. You know, there's a really good

book. I've mentioned this a few times. I think I mentioned it on this podcast before, but there's a really good book called Geopolitical Alpha by Marco Papich, which is a great way of like getting a framework for how to like say, I'm an investor and I want to think about geopolitics and apply what I think in one of the kind of fallacies that I think a lot of people fall into when they're discussing geopolitics think people always think in terms of what other countries want and like

that's good that's the first step but you know you don't make decisions based off just what you want I want a lot of things it's what you can actually it's what you can actually get which means what are you constrained by and if you can understand what people want and what they're constrained by then you have like a reasonable framework for trying to think through okay here's here's what actually could be happening here. And here's what we could expect other countries to be doing.

And I think that in Marco, he was one of the guys who like popularized this like multipolarity concept within geopolitics. When we kind of apply this framework of like what different countries are constrained by and what the US is constrained by, I think it becomes a little bit, you know, clear to people that we have some economies in the world that have been playing this commodity game for a period of time. And then we have some economies in the world

who've been playing this credit game for a period of time. So the constraints to the U.S. is not

really that like we don't have enough guns. What's really hard is to point your guns at markets and say make treasuries more valuable you know that that's a constraint for us now and i think that you know this why is this a constraint for us it's a constraint because you know as many people who listen to this podcast probably are well aware of when nixon repealed the gold standard in 1971 and we had the famous nixon shock and we went on to a fiat denominate system and since we've had

globally coordinated central banking policy that's expanded debt through governments and and more broadly in private systems as well to the largest proportion against gdp it been in history um so debts at all highs And for the first time what novel we had debt be very high before proportional to GDP But for the first time, it's globally coordinated. It's universal. And that means that there's no escape valve when it's globally coordinated. This is it. And the escape valve means it deflates.

And it can't deflate or it's over. And it can't deflate or it's over. And so that's what's really unique is you could play this game where it's like, um, before it's just like, okay, well it can have an escape valve and the value can move somewhere else. But now it's just like, we're talking about the world here. So that's, that's, what's different. That's what makes it so much bigger. And, um, and it's similar to like, you, you can use a similar argument, um, however, for dollar

dominance. And, and I think that that's one of like when people are like, okay, well, you know, treasuries have to go bust. Look at what the government's doing. Look at our federal deficit spending, et cetera. The question's like, okay, well, if you think about it as like a simple market and you say, what's the demand for US treasuries? Where do they exist? The reality is,

is we haven't consumed that entire market. So if there were, say, for some reason, some large potential buyer of treasuries, maybe it's somebody like a Russia where we say, okay, we want to let you back in. And then that all of a sudden unlocks quite a bit more demand for our debt, unless we've consumed that entire market. But would they ever come back in size knowing that at any point? Probably not. They can just be shut off. Probably not. I don't know what the

inflection point is, right? But what I'm saying is more that until we've consumed, like until the entire world owns US Treasury, the system can expand around demand for it. Like that variable still exists, which means that we can still export our own inflation to other countries. And so that's kind of like the other side, I guess, of it, is that that isn't fully consumed

at one dimension of it. But the reality of that, everybody's kind of acting in accordance with this new system that's highly levered, the most levered in history, that hasn't gone away. So ever since we've kind of gone this direction, we've expanded credit to these levels. Now we're in a position where the only alternative for people is, you know, some sort of alternative system playing these credit games. And that's where the commodity trend has come in.

The commodity trend is an opting out of the credit game. And proportionately so. So like tying this back to gold running up last year, like structurally, that's what we're seeing is just a greater inflection point in people playing the commodity game. To be expected, you know, this has been talked about for decades. Everybody's just been waiting for what is the when World War Three? What's the inflection point? When people get desperate, they have to do things like this.

And and we have to protect these types of systems. So there's nothing I would say that at a high level has been necessarily surprising. It's kind of been an eventuality is the way I viewed a lot of this. But maybe Trump sped that timeline up a little bit. Exactly. Trump can act as like a catalyst with a lot of this. And then there's arguments for, you know, how he's even able to handle some of it.

But with the debt, like you're saying this is like a global issue now and there's no escape valve. Like what options do they have? So if that all deflates, the system breaks down, it's over. They can try and grow their way out of debt. Maybe AI is a catalyst in that. Or I guess they can inflate away the debt. Are they basically the only options they have? Because defaulting on it, the game's over as well, right? Yeah, 100%.

It's like defaulting is just like, they're playing a game where the costs to what they're doing aren't their own. So that means that it's like, you know, it's like you're playing a video game and your character dies and like you don't die. Like that's kind of the game they're playing where. So you take that to the end. You know, you're going to take as much risk with that character as you want for the most part. Like obviously it impacts you because you lose the game and you don't want that.

but um i i think because there's a misalignment of the consequences of their decision making that uh that that will ultimately lead them to taking on you know as much risk as possible to try to beat the game basically do you put any real probability on them actually being able to grow themselves out of this debt yeah okay so i guess i'll let's get into the ai question

so but before that i think like to recap it's just like you know us japan and then iran and then credit fracturing that's stemming from all of this um and we think about all the credit that exists we think about consumer credit we think about job losses this ties into the ai piece um you know the job loss report in like february of like 90 000 or whatever it was

that was big. The block announcement, that surprised me. I was of the mindset that when that announcement happened, that we would start seeing this in about a year. So to be fair, and I think this is one of those, well, actually, but I think their headcount was huge. I think it was probably, this was like an excuse to cut headcount. Although I think it also very clearly shows the trend. I think there's kind of, there's two sides of that story.

Yeah. Well, the reason I think that I agree that there's like the actually like they were bloated on headcount type argument. Maybe they were, maybe they weren't. Like I think it is a little tricky to totally say, but regardless, like. It's quite a positive spin to put on it for the market that you're actually getting rid of these people. Exactly my point. Exactly my point. It's a positive spin for the market.

Everybody's saying you got Mark Andreessen running around like, oh, no, we're not eliminating jobs. We're eliminating tasks. Yeah. It's like, no, look at the numbers. And they're just going to get worse. Like, because jobs emerge as contracts and employers don't care as much. Like employers want to eliminate contracts because contracts cost money. Yeah. And I don't see how we argue against that. So yeah, there's definitely a lot of people talking out of both sides of their mouth on this.

But the interesting piece of that is that like for every company now in Silicon Valley, that's like, shit, our head counts too high. This is costing us a fortune. Yeah. They can now do it in a way where it'll probably bump their share price. Yeah. can be like, we're getting rid of these people, not because we're struggling, but because of AI, bro. Totally. Yeah. AI, bro. And then we're AI native. We lay off our employees. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. And like, so like that job loss trying to scary, that's a huge question mark for people right now, I think. And, and then we had like the private credit crash as well alongside this.

Yep. And like that, I think is, that's another huge question mark. I'd say like AI, huge question mark private credit huge question mark and the reason private credit's a huge question mark is it's a very easy thing uh for people to point their fingers at like it's a very because if if there's not that much information on something then it means it's not a complex topic for people to understand so it's easy for people to say oh look at that because it's just like oh there's not

a lot of transparency in that market it's like you know people estimate it's a shadow banking market so like people are estimating size around like two to three trillion of this thing um 20% of that market is like publicly filed report earnings. Um, and then like 10% of that is like, um, actual like publicly traded liquid. So the rest of the market is just like a private black box. Like, you know, us being a venture capital fund, we have an LP base who's aware of the

investments we're making. We report our portfolio companies on our website, but if we didn't do that nobody knows you don't have to you have to be an investor to know our information yeah so like the intelligent investor the guy who has the best perspective in private credit is a guy who's invested in every private credit fund in the country and gets reports from all these guys yeah maybe that guy exists um but it's really hard to actually know what's going on that said

people draw parallels to gfc and they say well look at this um here's markdowns and certain assets how big are these category of assets is there more it's a very easy thing in the same way that private credit has persistently expanded as long as it has. Like, you know, I remember five years ago when I would, you know, for like fundraising for venture capital fund, we go to the TradFi bro

type things. And I'm at an RIA summit and all these guys are just like large RIAs managing on behalf of, you know, high net worth and institutional type clients and private credit, private credit, private credit. It's free money, you know, 11 to 14%. It's like no risk.

there's this really funny post from Chamath last year basically saying that about private credit he's full of good takes he's just always he's the canary in the coal mine on everything and uh and it was basically that it was a bunch of people hopping on stage like we're getting our you know clients private credit you know it and like that's been persisting and persisting and like i remember being at that summit back in like 2020 and be like oh god you know because it's all

these people talk about and it just becomes like this huge narrative the reality is is we can't look into like Michael Burry and the big short, right? Uh, he was able to pull a bunch of mortgage value and like these guys, you got to go run around and look at these homes and talk to people. And that gives you enough of a sense of like, Oh, this, these things are trash. That's hard to do in private credit because it's everywhere. You know, credit is everywhere. What's the different

types who owns what? Um, there's definitely very large categories that we can look into,

but it's not all publicly reported. So for the same reason it can persist for a long time is the same reason people can get scared very easily about it because they look at this like okay these guys just gated their fund that's bad um these guys are changing credit terms here oh they just marked that one to zero like there's a bunch of things we're gonna be like that's bad but to be like oh private credit's gonna completely collapse still gonna be hard to say so it could be very

much bank run type mechanics just because everybody gets fearful which is why the narrative needs to be managed publicly. So there's a ton of pressure on people to make sure that they're not causing fear about it. But in any event, that's a question mark is kind of how I view it. It could very much be another financial crisis. But you know, nobody just really knows we can look at like 20% of the market and start making bets on a few things based off that. I did a show with Jeff Snyder

recently, and he was talking about this private credit issue. And he was saying that he's not sure. but there's like, there is just maybe small signs that this could escalate into being like an actual financial crisis. Exactly, yeah. I mean, gating funds, the amount of write downs that they've had, like these are serious numbers.

It's intuitive to people who have looked at this market and like, I think when you're on the inside talking to a lot of people that allocate to these things, like when you talk to financial allocators, these are guys who are working with the person who has a lot of money directly and they're saying, we're gonna allocate you X percentage into venture capital, X percentage into head funds, X percentage into the stock market. And they kind of form financial opinions on a lot of things.

I think I kind of have a bit of a thesis that like financial crises are driven by allocators just because they have a very bird's eye view of everything, enough to think they know about them and enough to also completely not understand like all the categories that they're allocating into. But their actions can spark something. But their actions are actually consequential in terms of what gets allocated to.

These are the people at the summit who are all like, you know, pushing all their money in private credit because these people rely on paper. They rely on what's on paper because they don't want to have the expertise to go look under the hood to have the time to go look under the hood. And the games, the guys who are like a guy running a private credit fund who's taking on a lot of risk, how is he thinking about things?

He's like, well, you know, I'm going to get my probably like one in 10 type terms on my fund and I want to raise and report good numbers to these people because that means more money comes in the door. Historically speaking, you know, we've been able to manage this like open-ended fund or closed-ended fund at, you know, or open-ended funds at like, you know, 10% of the

flow will ever withdraw. So as long as we can stay pretty liquid on some of our investments for that, I'm just like printing money on my 1% fee and then, you know, we'll make some money on the carry upside. But like, they're not thinking in terms of am I starting a financial crisis and taking on too much risk? They're thinking in terms of I want to have a big fund where I make a lot

of money. A lot of guys are thinking this way. And and so I think that the managers, if they see good paper and they do their due diligence, but they don't know about these actual investments. And all they see is on paper, if you know, some of these mortgages look good or some of these business loans look good, that that's good. The thing that keeps me up at night is the idea of a critical error with my Bitcoin cold storage. And this is where AnchorWatch comes in. With AnchorWatch,

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But my question there would be like, so I understand their incentive is they want to make money on their fund. And to do that, they have to bring in more capital. They have to invest more capital. But when does the investments that they're making go from being investments to sort of malinvestments? Yeah. Like what changes that? When there's a phone call one day, that I can't pay. Like it's, it is the, when you think about any sort of transaction, like we invest in startups, we do due diligence.

When we make an investment, you know, when you invest in a founder, three months into it, you figure out reality, you know, after the investment, you get a lot closer to like, okay, here's some of the like the skeletons in the closet. Here's some of the major problems. That's just the reality of any investment. Due diligence is a really hard thing unless you're incredibly patient.

I think the only way to really be incredibly patient and do it is to be incredibly rich those are the guys you can sit they don't have to do a deal they can sit around they don't have to make a living they can sit around and then they just like sit there get to know people learn about situations and then like when a home run just emerges out of nowhere it's like let's go do that I think for everybody else there's more of a you know there's a need to allocate capital and um

And I think from that perspective, it changes some of the incentives. Like due diligence is just something where you're never going to get everything. And when you don't have as much of an incentive because the check that you're receiving doesn't care as much. They just care about certain things on paper. If you say they're good loans and they're good loans and they look at some credit rating agencies, we've seen the perverse incentives that exist within credit rating agencies.

If you can manipulate the paper, you can manipulate the allocation. That's kind of what it comes down to.

and and then these crises happen when the reality departs from what's on paper and there's always very few people actually doing that due diligence that's what like michael burry was doing is actually trying to figure out how do i match paper with reality and nobody's going to be able to do all of that within private credit but if enough people get fearful and spooked and like if that 20 of the publicly reported market really does go into like you know 45 withdrawals

on like a major black rock or blackstone fund within that area then that'll cause like a panic So I don't know what you're saying here. Are you saying you think this could be the start of the financial crisis? Certainly. What I'm saying is that there's some sort of like, I'm saying a bunch of hand wavy bullshit because that's all you can say. Like all you can say right now, because we don't have enough in the numbers, is that we've seen stressors.

We've seen people pulling money out. We've seen increasing credit terms on things where like, like the arguments, it's called like with, with credits, It's like either you're in like a covenant light type situation where there's not a lot of restrictions on the credit. And like, that's one of the arguments people say about private credit. It's true of a lot of things in credit.

Since I was, you know, a budding analyst coming out of college, people have been talking about the covenant light environment within credit. And things have been going up since then. But nonetheless, it is true. And then they start like changing the terms on these things where people aren't paying back. There's something called like a pick note, a payment and kind note.

um and that means you have an option instead of paying your debt in cash you can pay it with more debt okay and there's like things like that are increasing so there's all these little variables we're looking at that basically say people don't have the money and people aren't able to get their money out as easily from these funds and they're marking some of the loans down but like during the great financial crisis like that was the problem if you kind of remember um

in the big short when like Steve Carell is, you know, like what the hell, this whole thing's crumbling and these things are staying marked to market, right? Or they're not being marked to market right now. They're saying this thing's worth like 90 cents on the dollar. This thing's not worth anything. And like, that's what we're going to see on paper is like, nobody wants to do this because the more- Norm wants to admit the reality of it. Nobody wants to admit reality for systemic reasons too.

So this started with like, how can these countries around the world grow themselves out of debt? Is what you're saying here, if this is the case, then not only can they not grow themselves out, but debt's going to increase because someone's going to have to print the difference. Yeah, it's just like somebody's going to have to print the difference. I think that it's more important to understand that the high-level things are easy. It's to the broader points I was making. Debt's everywhere.

It's cracking in all these different areas. We're looking at different pockets of it and trying to see where it's cracking earliest. Multiple variables combined is usually what creates structural drawdowns. we can see it at a geopolitical level that there's inflationary things happening, which puts us in a very tight position as it relates to Fed policy going forward.

Because if we have to tighten under an inflationary environment, it's a precise opposite thing that we'll need when credit is contracting. Hard place in Iraq they going to print I think we all know that I think we prove that in 2020 And there really no other option that they going to have through some of it So that what the white economies are going to have to do because of their exposure to debt. And then the commodity-based economies are going to be growing a lot of wealth.

So the movement from credit to commodities is the huge structural shift for everyone. That's the trade. So it seems like we're in a hell of a predicament where if the private credit market is breaking down, if inflation is ramping up again because of like oil prices, which an oil is an input to almost everything in the economy. Yeah. And alongside that, we've got like the geopolitical uncertainty of what's happening in the world, like Trump throwing wild cards out left, right and center.

Like, do you think we have a big print this year? So here's the argument against. Give me the argument for first. I mean, we've just done it on the private credit side, but do you think that is the sort of, is that your base case?

I think that when we look at like the, I think if we look at job losses and consumer leverage, like if you go look at the like consumer credit chart on Fred type consumer credit Fred, and then type per capita after two, whether you look at it in absolute terms or per capita, it's just up. It's crazy. So everybody has more debt than ever. Because no one owns anything. And everybody's getting laid off. And everybody in the US is like, you know, generally speaking, some sort of like email job.

And those are worthless. And they've been worthless for a long time. I've thought they're worthless for a long time. It's just credit makes it easy for companies to let those exist. But with AI, it's just way more obvious how much worth, how worthless they are. This, the labor market is going to change everything.

um and that's just why why was powell kind of holding out i think on a lot of the tightening was because he was following a lot of what was happening in the labor market and i think he was saying that the labor market's really strong and and i think that all changes like so there we have the consumer we have private credit we have geopolitical tensions that are inflationary um so that creates a balance it creates if there's going to be printing it's

going to be the hardest printing they've ever done um but nonetheless there there isn't much of another option. And, you know, nuclear options, aggression, forth-turning type vibes are things

that I think come from being in a hard place in Iraq. That's the stage. The thing that saves us, the thing that, you know, Scott Bassett was saying about when we were announcing, you know, an increase on deficit spending with the Trump administration, you know, last year, was like, we're going to grow our way out of it. Yep. It was cool. I really like him. He's definitely smart. Yeah. Yeah. He's smart. He'll say shit like that. And he, you know, threatens to punch people in the face.

It's so funny. My guy. Yeah. My guy, dude. He's just like another dude, you know, trying to manage the most indebted country in the world. But like, I don't feel like we've got into how they would possibly grow their way out of it. Cause I know I keep dancing around it. It's because yeah. Yeah. I know they want to bring a load of production back to the US maybe that will happen and that's I guess more blue collar jobs which won't be taken by AI as quickly but is AI the only way out of this?

It depends on what happens with productivity because what we don't understand yet are the second order effects of AI and I think people are framing a lot of those in a negative sense because it's easy I feel like everybody's been very or at least from the commentary I've seen egocentric about their perspective on AI In what way? From the perspective, we think about it in terms of like, will AI take over humans? And like, will we be controlled by AI?

And people talking about that, I think from more of like a macro perspective, or not macro perspective, I think a pragmatic view of it is that we kind of know, I have a different case, which we can get into at the end. It's not as important of like what intelligence might actually be and what it means when an AI is actually like, you know, going to be conscious or something to us. But putting all that aside, it's just like, okay, we know AI is increasing.

We know the rate's going to increase significantly more. We know the smarter it gets, the smarter it can increase its improvement because we're developing through it now. So like anything that's software. AI is building the next AI. AI is building the next AI. That's an exponential growth curve. So that's like, whoa, and everybody's freaked out.

And I don't know if it's as much of a cause to be freaked out as much as, like what I'm trying to think about is what's a second order impact on industry? It's not just like, okay, people get laid off, but it's what changes in the cost structure of things. How are we going? Because really what's happening is we're restructuring how we organize.

Like if we look at from the inception of like the corporation to like these very old century old forms of construction and property rights that we've had amongst people, that's changing.

that's the thing where we're saying can i start a business as a single person now and run it and become wealthy doing that what's my cost structure i mean we see it as a venture fund all the time um we talk to our founders and we're talking about raises it's very like practical tangible things where they're saying we we're doing this raise where we initially wanted to allocate you know x percentage of the proceeds towards multiple developer hires we don't need those anymore

startups are just one of the most efficient things that you could be looking at it's like very easy the costs are so much lower so that there could be a new model emerging for the individual to be an entrepreneur yep and and then we're witnessing how people organize around that so people are like okay well if i'm gonna run it myself and you see all these posts going viral of like ai slop about how to use ai people saying here's here's how you prompt best but there are

really valuable things in all of this because now the skill set is changing to how do I get the outputs using the English language from this LLM model? I just did a show with Jesse Posner on this yesterday from Vora. And he said something really interesting there as well, where he was basically saying the developers we have today are not going to be people that are good at vibe coding because it's all about language now. And he thinks it's like the philosophers that are going to have the

next leg basically. Totally. Yeah. People who are strong linguists, I think that's an interesting take. Um, I, I don't know if I'm now mattering coding. Totally. Totally. I think with, yeah, it's interesting how much, yeah, semantics matter in coding because semantics are inherent to the training. That's interesting. Yeah. And that makes a ton of sense, right? So there's, there's knock on effects like that that we're going to be looking at how many English majors

that were like, you know, starving artists working as a barista at a coffee shop. Maybe they're going to be exceptional vibe coders, you know, things like that. That's a second order effect. What happens to startups? Like when we look at it, the way I see it now is that the marginal cost, any sort of industry, you want to go start anything. There is some sort of upfront cost that it takes you to do that. Got to hire these people, got to raise this amount of money. Some

are much easier than others. At one end of the spectrum, you just have like, you know, starting up a services business. You do consulting. I just go talk to people if they like my advice, they pay me money. Not a lot of fixed startup costs. The other end of the spectrum, we have something like starting a bank where you got to go spend millions of dollars to get a federal charter to even begin to play in the game and a million other things you got to worry about.

The fixed cost to participate in something is kind of at an aggregate level dropping off a cliff. And for businesses within software, it's completely dropping off a cliff. So much so that it may not even be a business anymore because individuals can create that in the same way that you don't have a service for cleaning because it's so easy for you to clean or something.

There's all these different things that we do every day and that's kind of what software is becoming is something that it's gonna become so simple we may not even need to outsource it. So that trend has so many knock-on implications for other industries and people and how we structure and organize. And I think what's really interesting for us is how we've been looking at AI as it relates to founders for having a playbook of different hierarchies and structures.

We're in the experimentation phase with all that this year. I think next year it's going to be a lot more tangible. I'm not letting you get away without answering how we grow our way out of debt, because I think you've just done some of the groundwork for it. But what has to happen? What has to happen is that the cost of things and the pro so okay, let me let

me make it simple. So. We need to have some sort of you know exponential increase in productivity and wealth.

um meaning that um so you have like a cob douglas production function that's your you know macro economics 101 productivity within an economy um and and that has the you know amount of capital in the economy the amount of labor the changes in growth within those times uh technological productivity and what labor times labor and capital times technological productivity is this variable that is like from the macro you know astrologer economist types is just like a plug

it's just to say like here's what the output was we we know that um labor and capital we estimate around here okay so technological productivity must be this variable to get our output to this Um, so it's just like the, that's kind of how we'll like think about growth within an economy. And, um, and I think, so it's that technological productivity variables where we say, okay, the multiplier of the technology we use means that for any hour I spend trying to accomplish a task,

um, technology allows me to do it much more quickly. You know, that's obvious to all of us for a million different things that we do. And in the greater that increases, the more it multiplies our economic growth. And, and that question means because less capital in gives you more output because of technological deflation. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Less, less can, less could mean more. Yeah. Depending on what the variable is. Um, but like all else equal increase it the same amount equals

more. Um, okay. So the same amount of labor and capital will create more output. Yep. And, um, And in that view, I think what it means is that if we think about it for how did the U.S. grow in the first place in terms of us protecting property rights and extracting native commodity resources that we have and building engineering and capital around that, there's all these different industries that we grew very rapidly.

and then moving into the age of technology, we've been the preeminent power in the world, so much so that we created far more competitive industries in the U.S. that have effectively drained human capital from all the other countries. Where do the smart, wealthy send their kids from China? They send them to the U.S. to go to our top schools. Or Cambridge or Oxford. Yeah, U.S. is probably a bit better as a thing. But you know what I mean?

like there's so much brain drain into these economies and you know for a period of time it was wall street and then tech showed up and then now it's tech and uh and we've just been a world leader within those categories so what's the impact on our gdp from all of that that's the question uh when we have companies like you know meta etc all growing here um it's it's a major impact on our gdp so for us like we have this ai arms race right now if there were and maybe there

won't. But if there were a very dominant, um, us AI provider globally, then that means a massive amount of a wealth will accrue within the U S because everybody's going to use it for their needs. So let's assume that we end up in an oligopolistic market for AI and two of the four most dominant providers are in the U S and, uh, and they control 70% of the market. Then the wealth productivity that accrues to us, and that means ultimately the tax receipts to pay off the deficit, let's say it

doubles GDP, doubles tax receipts, all of this changes the calculus of our deficit. All of a sudden we have a little bit more wiggle room than we did before. And what does that mean in terms, if we do have some sort of increase in productivity like that, what does it mean? Well, I see a bunch of businesses right now where sure people are getting laid off, but what does it mean? It means

their cost structures are going down. So if we were to assume that the operating costs of every business in the U S is, you know, roughly like 20% of their capital structure for, um, small business, maybe 30%, then what happens if that requires 10% of what it needed before? How much more profit margin does everybody have now? Um, how, what does that mean in terms of how

much cheaper they can now sell you goods for? Yeah. See, this is where I struggle and I, I don't I don't feel like I'm a very doomer person, but I can't see how there's not a really tricky interim period in this. Oh, it's going to be horrible. Because let's say GDP is going up rapidly because of all this boost in productivity, but at the same time, there's huge job losses because AI is replacing people.

And companies are getting way more efficient, selling products cheaper, making the same profit. Those two things can happen at the same time. And if you have a massive layoff in jobs, jobs, people don't own their homes, they don't own their cars, they have credit card debt. If people start defaulting on all that debt, then you go into financial crisis and it doesn't need to be that many people. Totally. So how do you get through that interim step?

Well, let's simplify the model down a little bit and take a lot of the terms out of it. What happens when you have one group of people controlling a valuable resource that's going up rapidly and valuable, and then you have other people whose resource they control is dropping off a cliff in value. They end up working for the people that are going up in value. But they're not hiring. Maybe. I don't know. But it could lead to a UBI situation. There's not an argument against it.

I get told off this in the comments being like, why are you pro-UBI? I'm not pro-UBI in any way. I don't see what other option they're going to have. It could be far too drastic. I think the problem with like structural changes is I think that the reality is, is that AI is going to change a lot of things. But for you, if I'm a 45 year old white collar guy who has a job in marketing at a company, and my job's gone, what am I going to do?

And people say you'll retrain, you'll learn to use AI, like, bullshit. Well, you can learn to use AI. But there's a bunch of other things you can do. You can literally go to a trade school and literally be a plumber. Yeah. South Park already did an episode on this like five years ago of like all the like white collar guys, like working for the plumbers and stuff. And like, and like, you know, there's tons of things like that that will happen. I think there, but there's, there's plenty of jobs.

It's weird though. Cause like, what does, like, I think if you, if you're a plumber right now, you've picked a great career. And I think it's awesome. But like, do you think that like lawyers are going to want to become plumbers? Oh, they're not going to want it. I don't think any of this happens cause they want it. So what does that do to society? like as a, as a whole? Um, I think a good bet on some of this is to like get really long,

you know, exposure to like alcohol and things like that. Exactly. Yeah. This is like, I totally agree. Yeah. It'll, it'll be like an economy of despair. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, there's going to be a lot of, I'm not saying that there's not gonna be massive structural shifts and things won't

change, but the reality is, is like people adapt and like people will learn new skills. So there's retraining there's also learning ai um and then you pair that with how much cheaper things are going to be able to be produced with i mean the second we do get a robotics uh once we crack robotics pretty efficiently which is probably not very far away it's not that far away that's when costs drop off a cliff that's when it becomes that's when being a plumber doesn't even work

anymore there's going to be a lot of yeah there's going to be a lot and then that's when we get to a state where it's just like okay most like things just become so cheap it's very easy there's going to be this handful of things that you know ai still can't do and it's probably just going to be a question of like who wants to some of those are going to be commoditized some of those might not be i think of the commoditized ones it's just a question of who feels like putting in the time

to do it and it's kind of like yeah i want a little bit extra money but everything's so damn cheap um but if i get a little bit extra money i could go to this thing yeah i'll put in the time into the commodity commoditizing and the non-commoditized is going to be more like highly academic things that people you know you're not getting out of school until you're like 35 Because if I asked you in 10 years, do you think you'll have like an AI robot guy in your house?

As much as I would think, I don't know. I still drive cars from the 90s and I love them. Okay. Do you think more than 50% of Americans will? Yeah, if it's economic. I view it as something that's probably just because there's such a materials cost to it. It's probably something that's just not going to be economic for a long time. Like, I think it'll be possible to have good robots. I think it's not going to be that economic and widespread to have robots for people for a period of time.

Okay. Because the materials cost is high. Whereas, like, with LLM, it's compute that's the expensive part, but it's, you know, just software really is what you're buying. Because my question really is, like, if you do get to that point and that AI robot in your house can do the plumbing for you, it just needs a download from the mothership. Like, at that point, what jobs are left in the economy? I agree. And I guess the point is like, because that's all speculation.

The point is, if you assume that happens at some point in the future, how does fiat move from the system that we live in today to that system? Can it survive that change? I don't think so. I don't think this is, okay. So yeah, let's like tie this to Bitcoin.

so no I don't think it can delay I think it can delay fiat I think the major exponential trend that we're going to witness from this as it relates to Bitcoin is as this economy restructures the order of an organization is completely changed the scale of it, the flatness of it the volume of it Like as all of these characteristics fundamentally change. And we have an economy where decisions are being made by non-people. And I think that, you know, people have talked about this ad nauseum, right?

And this was something that's been around for a long time where people are talking about, what about Bitcoin payments with AI? And is this an inflection point that you pair this with the whole macro environment we talked about at the beginning of this? It makes a lot of sense to people.

to use bitcoin now i think when this first there's two things i'll give my uh devil's advocate take and then where i kind of think now but when this narrative first started emerging people like ai is gonna use bitcoin it's best money for ai um you know i was just like well bullshit like um the reality is is that like these llms aren't decision makers they're trained they'll use whatever you tell them to use they'll use yeah yeah so and that's i was i was kind of alluding to this earlier

of like my take on like what will be intelligence for ai i think the reality is is like because this is important because it decides what is a true decision or not um to say that when you work with an LLM I think it it I kind of ironically teaches you more about how people work when you think about what's the memory context window I'm dealing with with a person very real thing. I've noticed it as I've gotten older. I feel like I just have like the memory of a fish.

Yeah, like I'll like whenever because you get novel pilot more and I'll like go into my room and I'll be like, what the hell did I go in here to get and I have to like, you know, when I was younger, I didn't do that as much. So like my memory context window, or I don't know, like there's things my gray matter is not as prevalent as it was when I was 25. Like I was smarter at 25. Fundamentally, I

was less experienced and knowledgeable, but my like engine was a bit faster. I think that and you kind of think about how people work more and you realize like, oh, this structure of an LLM and then you think about training and you're like, okay, well, there's this like training in the model that makes it like

no matter what produces outbooks. That's basically what your genetics are. Like your genetics are just like these kind of like unchangeable things that are like hardwired into you, but you can provide a context that makes it respond differently in different situations. And in like when people started creating these open claw instances, it was kind of like you're raising a kid and you're just like for sure things I say to it. And

the first like few things in the context window and what it what I ask it to do. All these things have either direct or indirect impacts on how I build this. Like a genius teenager that's not great at making decisions. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And it's not, and you have to like give it all the right, and you have to give it a ton of context. You have to teach it all these things. It's like you're raising a kid. So it has this genetics. That's the model you're plugging into.

And then you got to raise it right. And then once it kind of gets mature is when you're kind of dealing with this. So like we're, we're, we're kind of learning all that and it's cool because it does seem very human-like. But I think to truly, like the missing piece, to truly have independent decision-making from these to where they would, you know, when people are scared about this like AI future of control, is they need to have an incentive. And I don't think that they

have a true fundamental incentive yet. People are like, AI says that it wants to be a person. It's

just like, well, AI just is repeating an average of things. Oh yeah. It's talked about. But a true incentive would be if there is a way and this is like you know call it wherever but well the fact that we naturally have a nervous system that produces pain and pleasure that makes us human that makes us say this is good this is bad and and we behave in ways that are exist from that reward mechanism so if we can produce you know some sort of whether it's directly that or something

akin to that in decision making and then you know and it's and it's consuming its own data in the real world like we do and not just the data that's being force fed to it. Now we're talking about an independent person basically with its own motivations that are determined by pain and pleasure systems. Um, so will that come? Yeah, but I'm not, I'm not too concerned about any of that

happening near term. And then to tie this back to what money is it going to use? It's going to use the money that's most practical for the people that are leveraging the agents for what they use. And I think that I don't think that's a bad thing for Bitcoin. I think that stable coins are very obvious. And like all the VCs are like stable coins and money of AI, stable coins and money of AI, because we own stable coin companies. And obviously it's true that it is in a lot of different ways.

But when we pair this with the global geopolitical environment that we've been talking about this whole episode, and we say fractured system, Some people want to use commodities, et cetera. It's like, okay, and then why would large scale institutions, whether it's through AI or themselves directly want to use money that can be blacklisted and censored? We basically like it.

That's what tether is tether something that it's blacklisted and censored and that isn't solving a very like very important problem for international money transfer because it isn't final settlement a stable coin is not final settlement it's settlement of receipt that is effectively backed by the reserves of a company like tether which are you know holdings in US cash and cash equivalents and golden Bitcoin which is sweet but but nonetheless like

that that is not a revolutionary system that's not something where if I'm trying operate independently within an economy, whether I'm a large scale sovereign that has a conflict of interest with the US or if I'm, you know, an individual person who wants to freely conduct what I'm doing. That's not valuable. On top of that, I I'm expecting that and I think it'll

take a long time. I'm expecting that there's going to be like a credential layer that starts getting added to stable coins and like that's what makes people want to use stable coins in Bitcoin today when they're with an agent. is it doesn't require credentials. And I was making this point on X that any sort of system that doesn't require credentials is the agent type of system. Yeah. Because when you go play

with these agents, you're like, oh, damn it. Like I got to go get an email to use this shit. They're like, what's the thing where I don't have to get an email and I don't have to have all these credentials just to use a software app. And whether if that doesn't exist today, there's going to be a whole economy of it that does eventually. And we're starting to already see that happen and it's happening at a rapid pace. So there's like an agent economy emerging that doesn't require credentials.

That is an interesting case for Noster. Totally. And that's what's really cool about Noster is I think that the non-credentialed version of pseudonyms under- You just give them a public-private keypad and off you go. Boom, it's easy. And there's all these other startups being like, here, let's use these old email-based protocol systems to conduct this. And just like, dude, this system's- It's fundamentally better. It's flatter. It's simpler. It allows agents to operate in a certain way.

So that could be- I remember when Dorsey was making the point about Nostra after it took off. He's like, look, it's a hobbyist thing that we care about today. I believe there's some sort of use case coming. I don't know what it is, but there will be some sort of use case coming. It's like, this could be it. That would be super cool. So the hard thing is like, whenever you talk to like your AI, whichever LM you use, like it knows about you.

So like mine knows that I'm into Bitcoin because I talk to about it all the time. So if I ask it to try and give me like an unbiased take on what the best form of money is, it's probably going to come back with Bitcoin. But I know BPI just did a report on this and it was saying like AI overwhelmingly picks Bitcoin as the sort of preferred choice of money. Yeah. If you asked a completely unbiased, clean slate LLM that question, is that an inevitable answer?

Because like they can't pick gold, they can't use gold. Like there has to be something digital and Bitcoin obviously in our opinion and I think the facts are on our side is the best form of money.

I think the one problem, the one reason that i think in an unbiased way that you would want to use something like a stable coin is just simply acceptability like that's that's the number one reason that and that's that's the best problem to have like that we all own a stake in bitcoin um and we benefit from it growing i love the fact that we're early into bitcoin i love the fact that it's not as accepted yet because

that gives me the ability to invest in more people that will accept it over time that's the edge That's the edge. So it's the best possible problem. I think the last time I was on this podcast, I was making the point. It's like being able to invest in LeBron James's career when he was in high school. It's just like everything else is there. All the fundamentals, all the characteristics you want. It's just early and young.

So that's ideal, but it does make it, I think, a less desirable form of money for an AI today. And that's fine.

let them let's get everything set up on stable coin rails and then all of a sudden we have an entire economy running on stable coin rails that everybody wants to use because everybody wants to use agents for everything so we're going to watch this whole shift into commerce happening through that type of economy and guess what it's using it's using payments where you are producing a signature you're producing a signature that's verifying your digital address you're using

digital signatures to sign payments. That's like, that's the rail. That's the new economy. Sure. It's some sort of stable coin that's issued on a bunch of different types of blockchains. But the reality is, is we're getting everybody away from taking a credit card and typing the number of the credit card in to digital signature button. And, and that means that it is this easy

to start paying in Bitcoin. And that's all that matters because now we've just opened the flood So if we have a huge, um, we have a very wide transition of capital into this agent type economy and everybody's leveraging stable coins. I just view that as one of the largest, uh, um, that is going to be one of the largest ways to open access to commerce and capital within this system.

And this is, this is like a broader point for, I think the way that I view Bitcoin adoption, that's gotten more nuanced over the years is just when we say we're still early, it's like, okay, so what makes us late? What creates that environment of where things are actually late? When do we cross the chasm? When do we cross the chasm? What needs to exist are avenues, because what does Bitcoin need? Bitcoin needs capital to flow into it. How do we get capital

to flow into it? Well, there's a litany of areas around the world where capital exists. how do we ingrain that into Bitcoin? This agent economy example could be a major one. But if we go and we isolate, what are the largest capital pools? And how do we get institutions, regulations, leadership, all of these different variables that impact whether or not it's easy for that capital to move in and out of Bitcoin? That's the step that we're all fighting right now.

You know, that's what's valuable about what all these treasury companies are doing, is that they're fighting in capital markets. They're creating more capital access towards Bitcoin. It's not in the way that everybody would want in like Bitcoin world. Guess what? There's more of that coming because there's a lot more pools of capital and there's a lot more other people that are going to fight and they're going to make money off of it because they're spending hours of their time.

And if they didn't make money off of it, that would suck because then people aren't going to do it. We're not going to get the access to the capital. And so that's the idea is we're creating avenues for people to ultimately say, if you want to transfer this to Bitcoin, it's easy. And getting people on digital signature payments is like massive for the money global

vision of Bitcoin and the economy over time. So if you take into account the fact that there's going to be a really rough interim period if AI does start replacing jobs in a meaningful way, on the other side of that, we have AI agents potentially using Bitcoin, that becoming its whole

new economy. Is AI the way that we move to hyper-Bitcoinization? I could see what I think. So we've, yeah, to answer it in short form, yes, I think it's a major catalyst. And I think we've kind of answered this like productivity side of it, right? There's a few other interesting things about it. Well, we've answered productivity. We've talked about here's how it could restructure the way an organization works.

I think one of the last very interesting inflection points is what it's going to do to open source software. Well, everything is going to have to be open source. Exactly. And it's not going to matter as much anymore because proprietary software is just not that valuable anymore. So that's interesting because open source has always been valuable for X, Y, and Z reasons.

But it's had a bit of a tragedy of the commons that always existed, where you had a very, very small number of developers that were pushing the vast majority of the most impactful open source projects. And then a bunch of other people that just kind of, you know, are like barnacles on the ship. They're just kind of leaning on them. And it always felt like a very hobbyist, like ethical thing to do. Hobbyist ethical. Yeah, exactly.

It wasn't something where we had some, here's some persistent growing business model around this. And the question was, and the problem, because it was this natural tragedy of the commons where you have a common resource and some people consume it too much without giving back to it. That was always, you needed to donate to open source and people would contribute their work. And there was an incentive. The incentive as a developer is like, I want to go work in a certain area of software.

I'm going to start contributing to open source projects. in the same way where you're like, if I want to be an influencer online, I'm going to go give out a bunch of free content until I have a million followers, then I'll start making money off of it. Yeah. Kind of like that. So that's a good incentive that allowed it to be a very large thriving ecosystem, but it doesn't mean that there's not an issue because code is easier than shit posting, you know, pictures of yourself or whatever.

So it wasn't quite that easy because you still have to manage code bases and that was kind of the problem. But now that the marginal cost of production for code has dropped off a cliff. It's like, how does that change open source? And it changes everything because now the labor costs associated with it's almost nil. And they're creating these own like, you know, there's like the agent GitHub now. And agents are just kind of interacting around this.

But I think the reality is, is like the majority of software is probably just going to be like an open source common resource, like utility almost for people. And- Because if not, if you have a closed source piece of software that is very expensive and very valuable, we're going to be, if we're not already at the point, And we're going to be at the point very soon where you can go to your AI agent, look at this and build at me. Totally. And it will just spin that up for you in a few hours.

Totally. And like, where's it going to even like that? And we think that's going to happen in a year. Yeah. Where's it going to be at five years? We can't even, you know, we don't even know. And it's like, cool. So like software is just like, software is like air. Yeah. You know, like that's where we're heading. And I think that that's cool because it actually changes the open source community, I think, in a lot of ways for the better. We'll see new business models emerge.

The business models in open source software traditionally were like, you have some sort of like open core or like the core of the software is open. Other people are using that, but then you have extra features or you have like a freemium type model for it, or you have like a managed services. And I think that'll be the big thing is like, cool, there's going to be a ton of open source software up there. You're a business. We'll package it specifically for like your needs around something. Because like for me, I have a million things I have to do every day.

You just want something to work. I need something to work and not think about. I don't have the bandwidth to think about these things. There's still going to be people doing that that are going to say, like, I don't have the bandwidth to vibe code and fuck around with whatever the software is. But still, even in that scenario, it's going to drive the cost of that software down. Totally.

So it'll be like a lot of like consulting type businesses that I think emerge around AI agents that are managing some of this. And that'll be the way to monetize open source in a lot of ways. So that's pretty cool. I think that'll create like, what, and I think, what does that mean for productivity? There's a lot of people that have made, before I used to be very pro like intellectual property rights before I got involved in this industry. And then I kind of learned about the, you know,

a lot of the perverse incentives that exist. Like, I think when you think about the idea of like, oh, if you create something, you know, the fundamental idea for property rights, If you create something and you can't control it, then it's going to kill the incentive to create the thing in the first place. We want to protect intellectual IP for people in the U.S. because we want people to create intellectual IP in the U.S.

And that the reality around how people control, gatekeep, litigate, you know, if you read into like patent trolling, all these different like malincentives that come from trying to create protection over something that's hard to protect. because what truly is an idea and where truly does it come from? It's that gray area that leads to all these problems with intellectual property.

That is something that I think has created these fundamental issues that over the long term have been less than desirable, but there's never been an easy answer for it. And at least as it relates to software, we're going to answer it by kind of just eliminating the other side of the market around it and saying, well, you don't really care about those property rights anymore because they're not that valuable to you. So that's an interesting trend as to how I think it's really

going to be impacting our belief in what is a property right. And then there's all these other questions around that that start to emerge as well from, well, who owns what from AI? What is intellectual property when it's trained on your intellectual property? And I'm producing ideas because my AI told it to me and it's just going to be far too much of a great. It's a mess. Yeah. Yeah. So I think we agree on like the path. Yeah. Why does the market not agree when you look

at the price of Bitcoin and it's like $74,000 a month? People, people are so wrong about Bitcoin, man. They are so wrong. It is awesome. Like, I love it. I didn't think it would get this low. So the market doesn't agree because I think gold sucked a lot of the wind out of the sails. I think that- And the AI trade. Yeah. And the AI trade. There's a ton of capital. What people forget is that Bitcoin is a massive asset.

The culture of the buyers, I think, is still a very small minority of the world. And for that reason, when you think about there's some theoretical base of potential Bitcoin investors that exist today, whether or not they own it, but would be open to owning it. And then they have a set of constraints based around what else they could own. And I think a lot of those investors come from either technology or they were gold bugs.

so a lot of them might have moved into gold and a lot of them probably moved into this ai trade we see that in broader crypto we're like crypto is basically dying and there's just a bunch of people moving into ai from all of that yeah um and because it was never really about the project because it was never about the project exactly like it's it's those types of people have been in that in the first place they're more like mercenaries for like where is capital today okay

i'll build stuff in this area yeah and um and back in 2021 it was the most heavily invested venture capital industry in the world. So that's where they all showed up. Now they're going to the next biggest one. We'll see where they are in another five years. So I think with those two variables of AI and gold sucking the wind out of the sails, that's part of it. Uncertainty, risk-off asset. There's all these things that we can say. Everybody's been trying to... I said

this on the last podcast. Everybody's been trying to attribute a narrative. And I think the more that this year has unfolded, it's been too hard for people to. And now there's all these counter narratives. It's like, Iran war starts, risk off asset, it's going up. And it's such a question of scope. And it's just like- I agree that it's way too soon to say that. Yeah. And it is like a question of scope, but it has been interesting to see Bitcoin go up when

everything else has been going down. Totally. And that makes you think, it's trading from the capital flows of specific people within this. So as the substitute investments change, as more people are kind of like, okay, this AI trade, it's funny. Somebody posted this picture of the FTX asset ownership and how much it would be worth. I sold that. That was insane. And they'd have made billions and billions and billions of dollars.

Yeah. So it's just like, what happens when capital allocation and the valuations of these AI companies is based on very extreme expectations? Maybe it fulfills it. Maybe it's a bubble. Where's that capital? Where are these technology investors and gold bugs going to be rotating once they feel like they're really getting to peak euphoria? I think Bitcoin is a very strong answer for that. And everything about the thesis for Bitcoin is playing out perfectly.

I'm not worried about any of that at all. Credit's going to be entering the ecosystem much more in the future. I think when we get into, from a regulatory standpoint, the amount of institutions under of the Trump administration that have been getting, you know, federal charters, et cetera, to provide financing to the industry. That, well, it's been, I won't say financing, to provide financial services to the industry. That's been at historic rates. And, you know, we're...

We expect more of that to happen. And that'll change the way that I think the type of credit and the expansion of that credit and how it exists within Bitcoin. All of these variables and what I said on the last podcast is just Bitcoin is always and everywhere a major announcement away from some significant rally. More central banks participating. What happens as it fractures? Some of these, I think it comes from Sovereign's Next. I just think we're going to start seeing more and more headlines.

pretty simple thesis. World's fracturing. People want to own commodities. Bitcoin's LeBron James in high school of commodities. And it's the only one that you can permissionlessly send with final settlement in the world. Look what's happening with trade routes and settlement as we start to compete against the Eastern economies. Bitcoin just makes absolute perfect sense. The only thing it's limited by is the depth of liquidity in its capital market. If I go try to liquidate $100

billion tomorrow in Bitcoin, it's going to drastically move the market. That's not how it exists within gold. Gold, you could go liquidate 100 billion in gold and you're not going to move the market that much because it's the deepest, most liquid commodity asset in the world. Bitcoin's getting there. Best problem to have. That's what you're investing in is, will this thing that's better than gold for every other respect of its monetary characteristics

get as big as gold? That's your bet. That's an easy, easy bet to make. I think that's the best risk-adjusted bet you can be making right now. Do you think the gold trade starts rolling over into Bitcoin at some point? I find it funny that Bitcoin has been anti-gold during this, right? I think it's cool because I think it's the world waking up- Gold is sweet. Gold is sweet. This is the world waking up to needing a non-government-issued money. And that's where

Bitcoin is going to fit perfectly. But do you think at some point people think the gold trade might be running out of steam for now and start moving money into Bitcoin?

yes totally i think there's a large percentage of those people i think you know gold is kind of like the uh the the blue chip you know first mover on all of it and there's going to be a bunch of people that start to think like okay gold has now risen they're going to look at historical charts under prior regimes of gold rallies and say gold has now risen to become um this is like a fourth standard deviation outcome with how much it's it's rose proportionally over the past few years and then

they're gonna be like okay not the worst time to take money off the table you're gonna have your like you know diehards that are diehard gold bugs and they're gonna say no why i'm gonna still be right weimar yeah exactly and like and they're just gonna hold it but i mean even if it's like if let's say gold doubles over the next two years now we're talking about a 60 trillion dollar asset that's massive what if one percent of that you know moves into bitcoin that's 600 billion

on a two trillion dollar asset that's massive what if 10 of that moves into bitcoin um that's six trillion that's three times the current size of the bitcoin or that's sorry bitcoin's at a trillion right now i'm forgetting 1.3 or something yeah that's how cheap it is it's at 1.3 so it's like six times the current size of bitcoin's market cap and it doesn't mean a six times increase because it's all marginal right exactly and it's marginal so who knows how

high it could go because what if people really just don't like to sell bitcoin a lot of people really don't um so i i look at these numbers that's just that's the gold market let's look at like sovereign wealth you know let's look at the size of like private capital assets like oh you go talk to all these ras around the world right now in the u.s i go to these meetings all the time you

talk to these people. And all I do is sit there and, you know, just orange bill these guys. Um, it's always like Socratic seminar is what I have with them, where I just start asking them questions and point out contradictions and their beliefs against Bitcoin. That's the best way I think to get people open-minded about it. Um, and you do that enough and just literally none of them

understand this and they get there. I mean, I was just this past weekend with a few finance people and they just started like trying to drill me and after an hour they're like oh like i you know light bulbs around a room and and it's just everywhere still i see it all the time on the ground if you know what i'm looking at as representative of it there's a reason that such a few percentage of portfolios are still in it um the pools of capital and that are you know 20 trillion or whatever

that's in private assets and like 100 trillion that's in like more like global like or sorry uh private wealth like that is these numbers are so large They not worth talking about It really why I don spend much time thinking about the precision around them I just know there a bunch of massive numbers out there Um so many of them don get Bitcoin yet And the ones that probably do get Bitcoin haven allocated everything just because it a bit too

small for a lot of what that allocation would be. All it takes is, you know, another rally like we see. And then, you know, once Bitcoin gets into the five to trillion market cap range, that's when it starts to become okay. A lot larger organizations can take pretty large positions in it without moving the market. That's when it starts to catalyze more towards a larger asset. That

could be the suddenly moment. Yeah. So you think this is like golden opportunity, excuse the pun to buy Bitcoin where it, like when I look at the price of Bitcoin right now, I'm like, this is as good value as it's crazy. Like 70 K doesn't seem expensive anymore. I look at this now is like, this is cheap Bitcoin. It's awesome. It's awesome. Yeah. It's such

it's such a good time to be getting in. And I can't, when you, if you try to take, it's just like, okay, let's not be ideologues here. Let's assess what could destroy Bitcoin. What would be fundamentally against its structural narrative? What are the things that could like, you know, kill off any of this thesis? And that would either be it not working the way that it used to,

or some sort of new, better thing emerging. Crypto spent, you know, however many, over a decade trying to say that they could do that they can't do that hundreds of thousands of attempts yeah um you know billions and billions of dollars in funding dead uh wrong because people think it's facebook and myspace wrong you know bitcoin is a protocol at the beginning with the first mover advantage it can't be replicated once people finally get around to that is when they understand

how to look at this industry and now that we're in this position it's like um you know with the competition, you know, piece pretty much being gone. Um, and then it just like, okay, well, what's, what's something that could destroy how it works. I do believe it is pretty prevalent within the investment community on the quantum narrative. A hundred percent. Um, I, I was skeptical of it at first, simply because I wasn't spending a ton of time talking with people at

that point. I think we should be clear that this is the narrative is prevalent, not the threat is

narrative is prevalent. Yeah. Uh, yeah. Sorry to the Bitcoin or commenters in this episode that are going to go off if i say that but but the reality is is like for me talking to people in trad fi um you know i i i was just on a few calls over the past week where you know like how it works is like investors will look at me as like an expert and they'll want to like talk with me like what do you think about this in bitcoin what do you think about that in bitcoin um quantum something

that people ask yeah quantum something that is it's prevalent not just in bitcoin it's prevalent outside of this is being driven by the likes of the chmats and who won't shut up about the quantum yeah and then they and then yeah you have these big voices for all these like trad fi people that like listen to the all-in podcast and whatnot and they ask all the same questions that those guys talk about and then those guys just talk about things that pump their bags yeah it's awesome

they are like puppeteering a bunch of large people in capital like yeah it's large capital pools that they puppeteer with their narratives and um and i think that uh yeah i mean there's there's much more intelligent people. We, we, we wrote in our annual report, a section on quantum that got a ton of attention from Tradify people. So what is your take on that? Cause like for me, I've done a couple of shows on it. Um, I'm skeptical that the threat is even real in the

next, you know, short period of time at some point potentially. Um, but if that threat ever comes into existence, we're going to have plenty of warning and there's things we can do to mitigate it. But like, what's your take on it? The, the threat is just people are comparing what they call on quantum Nevin's law to Moore's law. Yep. And explain what that is for people.

Yeah. So like Moore's law was just this belief that we're going to, you know, getting an exponentially greater degree of efficiency in computing hardware over time. But it wasn't, it wasn't a belief. It was an observed historical reality. Yep. Where 256 bit became 128, became 64, became 32, et cetera. And we kind of like witnessed that efficiency stemming from lithography within semiconductors.

and so that's cool um and then people are like nevin's law is that quantum is going to follow the same rate of efficiency being found and one's an observation one's a projection right one's an observation one is yeah it like it's a projection and it's a it's like a narrative you know um but all like i guess we'll put that aside but nonetheless like there there's kind of a false comparison i think that's being made within how the expectations of growth are going

to be happening within quantum And I think that with that there these degrees there there drivers that they look at to say that drivers are not the same thing as outcomes You know, I can look at things and I can say they're, they're, they're very like deterministic relationships in the world that we can look at. And I can say that like, you know, if I drink 50 beers, I'm going to be in a hospital, you know, like we know that's a pretty deterministic outcome for the most part within the small

margin of error. Um, and then there's very, like, there's some relationships that we aren't sure what that relationship is. And I think when we were looking at, um, these relationships 0 of quantum bits of qubits, um, and then the different types, those are kind of the drivers 1429 01:32:10,1000 --> 01:32:17,660 that people are saying represent what is the ability of a quantum computer to conduct factorization

and factorization is the output. That's what's scary. That's what could undermine cryptography. So people are saying if the rate of creation in qubits, specifically logical qubits gets high enough that factorization will be large. And I don't think we've gotten very high in terms of logical, but we have in physical. And I think it's like, so physical qubits are growing,

then eventually logical qubits are going to grow. And then eventually we're going to get to some sort of larger degree of factorization, but there's one more variable. 1437 01:32:49,1000 --> 01:32:53,720 And the other variable is the rate of error as you scale a quantum computer's factorization. And that's something where there could be a very big fundamental issue if we can't get that figured out.

Because it basically means that as you conduct higher volume over time of a quantum's calculation, that the error rates will increase almost... I won't say exponentially, but the error rate increases over time. So like the more you want to go after bigger numbers, the greater your degree of error. It's the opposite of what you want. And so with that problem, it's like I think the statistical relationship would be like heteroscedasticity. It gets more variable over time and continues to spread.

And I think that that problem is something that would certainly need to be solved. It really makes the argument that even if we do see all this qubit productivity, if they can't solve this, This could be, you know, devastating to the future productivity of quantum in terms of factorization. So then the question is, well, where are we today? Today, quantum computers can't factor above like 21. Do you know the crazy thing about that? Do you know when they did that? Hmm. 2012. Oh, okay.

I did not know that. So they factored 21 in 2012 and they've not improved since then. Right. So that's output, right? Like that's okay.

If that was 20. and there's some like weird nuance in that where they factored larger numbers but they were like basically told the solution so people put higher numbers on that but there's not actually it doing it from start to finish i think with them saying being told the solution that was actually with a much larger number that it quote-unquote factored yeah so like that was being used to say like no they've actually broken the digital signatures of some like very low grade old forms of

cryptography whatever that number required to factor was i can't recall actually true but in the reality behind it was, is like, okay, well, classical computers are actually much better at all these other things than quantum computers. So we can kind of set up a lot of the variables

of the problems using these computers. And then given those things being done by classical computers and we feed them into a quantum computer, um, that got to this, uh, uh, factorization that broke this cryptographic signature, but it was kind of like giving it the answers in advance, basically. So I don't know enough to like a pine on every detail about that, but I do know that nobody takes that seriously. And the reality is, is like the hard number I didn't know is in 2012,

but like, I mean, that's what AI told me. I think that's right. So like, but the point is, is like the outputs of it are low. So if, you know, if you're telling me like you're, you know, some sort of like genius CEO and I should partner with you. And then, you know, I talk to you and you don't know the first thing about how to strategize about a business, then I'm not going to take you that seriously. If you tell me, well, I've been reading a lot of books or I've been

getting a lot of experience and all these things. I'm like, that's great. You know, talk to me when you have a little bit more experience and strategy, and then I'll see what the outcome is. That's something that that's kind of how I view a lot of this. Is it like, I get the argument of

the purveyors who are like, this is a legitimate concern. This is something that we should be talking about and getting into Completely agree Let do that But I think when we get to not only here where we at with the risk today the expectations for how that could evolve and what the potential solutions are for it and how we can plan around that as it specifically relates to Bitcoin I'm not particularly concerned. The biggest concern about Bitcoin not adjusting to quantum

security isn't really that we can't adjust it to a form of quantum security. It's that the form that we adjusted to could be premature if we do it too quickly. And that's a major issue. And that's what's hard with the narrative as well. If people are unsure about Bitcoin because of the quantum threat and they ask a Bitcoin and the answer is very nuanced, it's like, well,

maybe these things exist in the future. If they do, we have mitigating solutions, but we don't know what they are yet because between now and then they might get much better. So we can't say definitively what the answer is. And then it's like, yeah, but this guy over here said quantum is going to break Bitcoin. It's like, that's an easy narrative. Whereas the nuanced narrative is like, we will be okay. We just can't tell you exactly what the answer is today.

Totally. Yeah, exactly. We don't know what would be the most efficient because there's a fundamental trade-off. If we have current signature schemes that exist within Bitcoin, if we implement a quantum resistant signature scheme, then that is a much less efficient scheme. So it's more data intensive. And because we have fixed block size for good reason, it's going to fill more blocks.

which means that the throughput of the Bitcoin L1 is going to be less. And that trade-off, if we were to wait, let's say, let's assume a scenario where quantum isn't a problem for the next 30 years. And maybe 10 years from now, we say, okay, quantum resistant signature schemes are some sort of mathematical breakthrough. They're so hyper-efficient. It makes zero sense. They're just as efficient in the prior signature schemes. Let's not wait. Let's just do it now.

Let's not wait. Let's do it now. That's something that'll get through consensus. Like that's something where people are like, duh, no brainer. The big risk is what does Bitcoin consensus look like in a decade? That's the other side of that argument. Because we don't know. Bitcoin consensus is a empirically observed experiment that we're all trying to decipher right now.

So we don't know what that would be, but the belief is that simply it should work in a way to where if all the interests are pretty aligned or the vast majority of interests are aligned on something and it has no cost, then it should exist. And that'll be pretty simple when it's not debatable. And we're simply just not there yet. If there was a very legitimate threat of quantum computers within the next year or so, we have backup plans to protect coins and things like that.

If you read the report from Chaincode Labs, they kind of break down two different time horizons of next two years plan and then next seven years plan for the long-term solution around signatures. And I think that's fair. And I think it's legitimate to look at and to check out BIP 360 and some of the stuff they're working on. But it's just not the most – it's totally overblown.

And I think in the investment community, if you're trying to like look at the what could destroy Bitcoin tomorrow, that this isn't the primary concern to be thinking about. I think it's FUD doesn't go away. It just changes. FUD doesn't go away. It just changes. But to be fair, I will say with quantum, there have been a decent amount of changes in quantum. Like I do understand kind of why it's coming back.

the problem with it that we put in our annual report is just like we kind of fudded ourselves normally fud is something that's created the mass media and then we have to respond to it as a community whereas this is something we kind of created that got into the mass media that we now have to go respond to as a community so we're kind of i feel like we have good responses the big question then is like what happens to the funds do we freeze all of bitcoin and that there's no

easy answer to and i mean i don't think we change anything i you can't you can't freeze all funds in my opinion totally i don't think you can but i'm not saying that that that still isn't an easy answer you know but i mean the truth is there'll be a chain split and you'll get to hold both right that's true yeah anyway eric we've gone for ages there this was awesome how long did we go i don't know like i think that was nearly two hours hell yeah let's go that was good we gotta

go play ping pong yeah let's go play some i gotta bet that danny's gonna lose some ping pong to my analyst and, uh, um, there's no chance. I can't wait to make some money. All right. Thank you, man. Let's go. Thanks.