Latest / What Bitcoin Did / Arthur Hayes: The Bitcoin Liquidity Wave Is Here
Transcript
- 0:00The violence, all this stuff, it only gets worse.
- 0:04The value of energy, of money, has been so perverted and debased by politicians and governments.
- 0:11Part of that's the fault of the people themselves.
- 0:13Like, the question with this kind of thing is always, like, where are they going to get
- 0:16the money from?
- 0:17Do you think this is just countries around the world are going to have to print money
- 0:19to do this?
- 0:20Yes, because I don't think people want to pay more taxes.
- 0:22It's one thing to say, here's a problem, let's tax you more for it.
- 0:26And they're like, well, what the fuck?
- 0:27I've been paying billions and trillions of dollars of taxes over the last decades.
- 0:31And now you're saying I got to pay more taxes because you made all these investment decisions
- 0:35that didn't do anything for our national security or for our security of food and fertilizer
- 0:41and commodities.
- 0:42Fuck that.
- 0:42You're out of power.
- 0:43Give me the next guy who says I'm not going to pay any taxes.
- 0:45Trust the process.
- 0:46The money will be printed.
- 0:48The things might get up or down.
- 0:50But at the end of the day, until you see politicians campaigning on austerity, don't worry about
- 0:55money not being printed.
- 0:57Arthur Hayes, it is good to have you back on the show, man.
- 1:03The last time we recorded was in Miami while Pete was still at the wheel.
- 1:07But it's been a while. How have you been?
- 1:09Excellent. You know, well, markets go up, markets go down.
- 1:12I'm still here, surviving.
- 1:14Markets go up, markets go down.
- 1:15But I read your piece recently, and you said that the bull market started when the U.S. bombed Iran.
- 1:22So do you think the bottom is in now and we're back in a bull market for Bitcoin?
- 1:26Yes, I do. And I think that there is an AI fear for deflation. And I still think that that particular scenario is playing out. Workers are getting fired. You know, people are adjusting to what it means when you have the highest earning workers on average, at least in an advanced economy like the United States.
- 1:45you know the bottom 10 20 percent of them are going to lose their jobs and a lot of these tech
- 1:49companies and um sort of businesses that are optimizing for a cost structure that doesn't need
- 1:55these type of knowledge workers i think that's continuing to happen and that's going to be a
- 1:58drag on the credit situation but the war has catalyzed governments around the world especially
- 2:06you know united states and china that they need to spend more on defense which now includes ai
- 2:13because AI has been roped into national security in both countries.
- 2:18And countries need to rebuild redundancies in their supply chains
- 2:23for commodities and electricity and all these sorts of things.
- 2:27And that's starting in the United States.
- 2:29China has been doing this self-sufficiency drive in earnest since 2018
- 2:33when Trump started the first trade war with China.
- 2:35And the rest of the world is waking up to the fact that
- 2:38they need to invest in their own defense, in their own supply chains
- 2:42because you can't have, you know,
- 2:45you can't have your fertilizer, your oil,
- 2:48all these things coming through this one particular choke point
- 2:51in the Persian Gulf.
- 2:52It's not like the Persian Gulf has changed in any way, shape, or form
- 2:55since we have been civilized humans
- 2:57for however many hundreds of thousands of years.
- 2:59There's always been a Persian Gulf choke point.
- 3:01It's just people have ignored it
- 3:02because it was convenient to do so and it was cheaper.
- 3:04But now there's no other option.
- 3:06Regardless of what you believe
- 3:07in terms of the right or wrongness of this particular war,
- 3:10Or if you're still in the Philippines and you no longer have energy because you didn't feel like diversifying your supply chain, well, you might be losing your seat at the table in terms of a politician because you didn't make these choices.
- 3:24And so, Cartier's going to start investing in this stuff, and that's highly inflationary.
- 3:29Why do you think that the world has overlooked that single choke point?
- 3:32Because is this really to do with the American hegemony?
- 3:35So like if you're Europe and I mean, Europe don't rely on gas or oil through that straight, but like Asia do. Is it because they know that like the U.S. are going to be keeping things in line and keeping things going? And now that trust has broken down. That's why we're seeing the problems with that choke point.
- 3:48yeah I mean if you put yourself in the politician's shoes you could say okay well I can believe in the
- 3:54system that's been in place since the end of World War II where essentially the United States
- 3:59guarantees free navigation for those for most countries around the world and you can move your
- 4:05stuff and it doesn't cost you anything extra and that's you know doesn't really cost you anything
- 4:09extra in terms of budget outweighs or you can invest in building your own refineries or invest
- 4:18in maybe building the capacity to accept crude oil
- 4:21or different commodities from other parts of the world
- 4:23or have trading ties with random countries in South America
- 4:27so that you can get your commodities from somewhere else
- 4:30that doesn't flow through the choke point,
- 4:33and that costs you extra money.
- 4:35And now you've got to find this money.
- 4:37Either you tax your people more, you inflate,
- 4:40or whatever you have to do to get that money
- 4:42and make those choices.
- 4:43Those are hard political choices to make,
- 4:45saying, hey, we need to spend more money,
- 4:46given that there's this cheaper option right here
- 4:48and we can just use, you know, suppliers in the Gulf.
- 4:52And we assume that everything is going to work out okay.
- 4:54And I think that's the shattering of that assumption.
- 4:56Regardless of whether or not in two weeks' time
- 4:59Trump and the IRGC come to some sort of deal
- 5:01and the strait is reopened or not, it doesn't matter.
- 5:04If you are a politician and you have experienced
- 5:06this last eight or nine weeks of disruption,
- 5:10you can't go back to that same illusion.
- 5:12And that's the point where people have to rethink
- 5:15Think about how their supply chains work for all these different commodities.
- 5:19So in some ways, is it a little bit like when the U.S. froze Russian treasuries in like,
- 5:24even if they unfroze them, they still like that has now set a precedent.
- 5:28And we know that that can happen again.
- 5:29So instead of having to rely on this, we're going to see countries build out,
- 5:32you know, nuclear energy or refineries or whatever it is and start spending in their
- 5:36own country rather than just relying on these things that have existed since World War II.
- 5:41Exactly.
- 5:41The assumption has been shattered.
- 5:42And again, we can go back to similar sort of volumes to the straight, but you can't, you know, now you have the ability, the political capital say, hey, look, look what happened in the last nine months.
- 5:53You know, we had to go work from home.
- 5:55We had to, you know, curtail flights.
- 5:58And wouldn't it be better if we had our own sort of more redundant supply chain?
- 6:02We should have multiple suppliers of these things, or we should build out our domestic refining capabilities so that our citizens aren't stranded on this island in the middle of nowhere.
- 6:11like Australia had to do with going to Singapore to beg for jet fuel and other refined products
- 6:16because China said, you know, we were going to keep all this stuff for ourselves. So I think
- 6:20that political discussion can happen. And there's a willingness to suffer the inflation, at least
- 6:26from a political standpoint, to rebuild your supply chain so that you aren't held hostage by
- 6:31a decision between, you know, Trump and the IRGC. But like the question with this kind of thing is
- 6:37always like, where are they going to get the money from? Do you think this is just countries around
- 6:41the world are going to have to print money to do this. Yes, because I don't think people want to
- 6:45pay more taxes at the end of the day, right? It's one thing to say, here's a problem. Let's tax you
- 6:50more for it. People are, well, I've been paying all these taxes, regardless of what the tax rate
- 6:54is around the world. And where'd it go? I don't know, maybe the politicians stole it. Maybe they
- 7:00did Green New Deal or some other nonsense. And they're like, well, what the fuck? I've been
- 7:03paying billions and trillions of dollars of taxes over the last decades. And now you're saying I
- 7:08to pay more taxes because you made all these investment decisions that, you know, didn't do
- 7:12anything for our national security or for our security of food and fertilizer and commodities.
- 7:17Fuck that. You're out of power. Give me the next guy who says I'm not going to pay taxes. And so I
- 7:21think that people are not for that type of tax, the overt tax, then they'll just do the covert
- 7:26tax, the inflationary tax, the printing the money, the, you know, the banking system printing the
- 7:31money or the central banks printing the money. It's funny, like even as a Bitcoiner, I understand
- 7:37the sort of insidious nature of inflation.
- 7:40But in Australia recently,
- 7:41they've brought in
- 7:42or they're bringing in a new capital gains tax.
- 7:45And I'm like,
- 7:45I would much rather just deal with the inflation
- 7:47rather than pay a huge capital gains tax
- 7:50whenever I sell an asset.
- 7:51Like in some ways,
- 7:52it's the least painful option,
- 7:54even though I know it's still bad.
- 7:55Does that make sense?
- 7:57Yeah, I mean, I guess that's because you own an asset
- 7:59which you believe is going to perform well
- 8:01in this scenario.
- 8:02I think most people,
- 8:04you know, they're not crypto investors.
- 8:06They barely own any stocks.
- 8:07They probably don't even own their own residence.
- 8:09And, you know, yeah, an extra tax is like, fuck, I can't afford, you know, a pound of beef at the supermarket.
- 8:15Right. It's it's kind of that way.
- 8:17So, well, OK, fine, I'll just deal with the inflation thing that's going to happen in the back end.
- 8:20Or it gets so apathetic they don't even notice.
- 8:24Is there any like which of the countries that will come out of this?
- 8:26Well, is it basically just the energy rich countries that are going to be strong on the other side of this?
- 8:32Yeah, I mean, countries that are self-sufficient in terms of capital and resources.
- 8:37will do well. And that's a very short list. Not even the United States is going to do well. Yes,
- 8:44Americans are not going to starve because of whatever happens in the street of Hormuz,
- 8:49but that doesn't mean that inflation is going to continue decimating the social fabric of America
- 8:54and inequality that this is going to sponsor is going to continue to decimate the social fabric
- 8:58of America. There's going to be lots of American losers, if you will, but again,
- 9:02and they're not going to be starving like Bangladeshis.
- 9:06So you think that that sort of K-shaped economy is only going to get worse?
- 9:10Yeah, I think that is a feature of this particular, you know, if you want to call it late-stage capitalism or whatever you want to call it, that's not going anywhere.
- 9:19You're not seeing it, you know.
- 9:20I think that's going to be a catalyzing feature for opposition to Donald Trump and the Team Red Republicans.
- 9:26Whether or not the Team Blue Democrats are going to succeed in that message, we're going to see.
- 9:30But, you know, if you take a look at Trump's polling numbers and what is he getting killed on, it's affordability.
- 9:35It's inflation.
- 9:36Same thing that Biden got killed on.
- 9:38This is what ends the run of the Republicans.
- 9:42So Trump's going to have to come up with an answer for this.
- 9:44Otherwise, you know, his team is going to get absolutely decimated in the upcoming midterm elections.
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- 12:13It's one of those funny things as a Bitcoiner, like, you can see, like, I can believe what
- 12:18you're saying like i can see this coming um and on the other side of it i'm like well it's going
- 12:23to be a ton of liquidity it's probably going to be good for bitcoin but it's like it's also terrible
- 12:26for the world and i don't want to see it happen even though i know that i'm probably on the right
- 12:30side of the trade when it does um do you think that like this next bull run for bitcoin is going
- 12:35to be all about liquidity because if like there's always a narrative right and like in in the 2020
- 12:402021 sort of bull market it was all about stimulus after covid and then we had like the institutional
- 12:45wave and we had ETFs in 24, 25. Like, do you think this is all about liquidity or is it always all
- 12:50about liquidity? I mean, if you listen to anything I write or on stage, I'm always saying it's always
- 12:55about liquidity. We put a different wrap on it. We have to put a narrative on it. You know,
- 13:00me and every other commentator out there, because people don't really understand how banks and
- 13:03factory reserve systems work. But at the end of the day, it's all about liquidity. And the
- 13:09politicians have to tell it something different every time too, because, you know, they don't
- 13:13want people understanding that when they talk about all these esoteric programs or these acronyms,
- 13:19and they're really saying, we're going to print some more money and spend it on something. And
- 13:22there's going to be more losers and winners in this scenario. But please don't understand that
- 13:28that means inflation It means something other than that So and I know that you do talk about liquidity all the time Do you think Bitcoin does need liquidity to go up Because in the 2025 bull run like the Fed was
- 13:41drawing down its balance sheet almost the entire time, but Bitcoin still performed pretty well.
- 13:45It obviously didn't do as well as sort of tech stocks and gold, but it still did well.
- 13:49Well, I think that's a hangover from the two and a half trillion that was injected in the economy
- 13:53from the decline of the reverse repo program in the US. So yeah, so Powell had rates at five and
- 13:59a half short end or whatever from 2022 to certainly 2024 when they started cutting rates.
- 14:04But at the same time, due to the way that the U.S. Treasury was issuing short term debt,
- 14:10more so than long term debt, that actually drew two and a half trillion dollars of liquidity
- 14:13into the financial markets.
- 14:15And that's why you had a rally in stocks, Bitcoin, real estate.
- 14:18Everything was going up, even though you had short end rates, the highest they've been
- 14:22since the 1980s.
- 14:24Okay.
- 14:24Can you explain that to me?
- 14:25Because I don't know if I fully understand.
- 14:26Is that because the short-term debt is more money-like in the economy than long-duration debt?
- 14:33So basically, due to the COVID stimulus program, you had however many trillions of dollars were printed.
- 14:41And a lot of people basically shoved that into the banking system and money market funds.
- 14:49They said, OK, I've got all this money.
- 14:51I don't need it to spend anything.
- 14:53Let me just earn the 5.5%.
- 14:56in a money market fund,
- 14:57which is higher than what I get at a commercial bank,
- 14:59at least in the United States.
- 15:01And so the money market funds had all this money.
- 15:03And what they can do is they can park that money
- 15:05at the Federal Reserve and they can earn a rate,
- 15:08which is pretty much commiserate
- 15:10with the Fed Fund's effective rate.
- 15:13There's a bit of nuance around that,
- 15:15but essentially the Fed guarantees,
- 15:18if you give us money into this facility,
- 15:20we give you a rate.
- 15:21And they have to do this to be able to pin
- 15:23or manipulate short-term rates
- 15:25at the level that they want them to be at.
- 15:28So the money market funds have $2.5 trillion
- 15:29and invested with the Fed.
- 15:32And this is very good for money market funds.
- 15:35They get a rate, everyone's happy, right?
- 15:37So at the same time in 2022, end of 2022,
- 15:42the Fed's raising rates.
- 15:45And again, there's another affordability issue,
- 15:48but the U.S. economy needs assets to go up.
- 15:52Rich people need capital gains taxes to pay taxes.
- 15:54You know, rich people pay most of the taxes in the United States.
- 15:57And, you know, they fund all the politicians.
- 16:00And so Biden and Yellen at the time came up with a scheme where, okay, we need to juice
- 16:06the markets.
- 16:07We can't reduce rates.
- 16:09We can't do quantitative easing because everybody's hip to that.
- 16:11That's inflationary.
- 16:12Well, you've got this inert money, $2.5 trillion sitting on the Fed balance sheet.
- 16:16How do we get that off the Fed balance sheet and into the global U.S. dollar money markets?
- 16:22Okay, well, I know that these money market funds will keep the money at the Fed because
- 16:26the rate that the Fed pays them is higher than the rate that the U.S. Treasury is offering
- 16:29on a short-term treasury bill.
- 16:31So a bill is anything less than one year in maturity.
- 16:34So if I increase the supply of something, the price goes down, yield goes up.
- 16:40So Yellen said, okay, instead of issuing more long-term debt, 10-year bonds, something like
- 16:45that, I'm going to issue a fuck ton of short-term treasury bills.
- 16:50and if the bills rate goes above this reverse repo program rate,
- 16:54then a money market fund who is profit maximizing
- 16:56will say, okay, I'm going to take my money off the Fed
- 16:59and I'm going to put it in the U.S. Treasury.
- 17:00Now your credit profile of default doesn't change.
- 17:02You're still, the U.S. government's still paying you money.
- 17:05It's a different arm of the U.S. government,
- 17:06but the U.S. government's still paying you money.
- 17:08But when I put money into a Treasury bill,
- 17:11now that gets rehypothecated through the financial system
- 17:14and that's added liquidity to the overall system.
- 17:18And so you had essentially, as the U.S. Treasury issued more and more treasury bills starting in late 2022, you had the money market funds pulling money out of the Federal Reserve reverse repo program.
- 17:29You can chart this on Bloomberg or any other, you know, you can go on the FRED system.
- 17:33It's an open source data system.
- 17:34You can see this phenomenon.
- 17:36And you're going to see this program go from about two and a half trillion dollars till the start of, you know, 2025 down to zero.
- 17:43and you can chart bitcoin gold stocks real estate everything goes up because you injected two and a
- 17:51half trillion dollars of stimulus into the global markets even with rates at the levels that they
- 17:56were at and so that was the way in which you know the 2022 bottom to 2025 high was powered
- 18:02was this particular phenomenon and i remember i know that percent was making a big deal about
- 18:08how yellen had been issuing everything at the short end and then he came in and kind of just
- 18:13did the same thing. Is that just because there's no sort of demand for long-term debt?
- 18:20Yes. Nobody wants to own 10-year treasury bonds. Obviously, Besant was correct in what he was
- 18:26saying. Hey, short-term rates are low by historical standards. Yellen, you're an idiot.
- 18:32Why didn't you issue a bunch of 10-year, 20-year, 30-year bonds? But the problem is the liquidity
- 18:39at that long end is there is no liquidity.
- 18:41So all the while the Fed is supposedly
- 18:43doing quantitative tightening,
- 18:44which they were, the balance sheet was falling,
- 18:47the Fed never sold anything longer than a 10-year bond.
- 18:52In fact, they actually bought this debt.
- 18:54So at the same time the Fed balance sheet
- 18:56overall is decreasing,
- 18:57the Fed knows at the long end of the U.S. trading market
- 18:59is so fucked that they need to do quantitative easing
- 19:02on the back end of the curve.
- 19:05And obviously, you know,
- 19:06Yellen and Hunter Staffers are not idiots.
- 19:08They knew this too.
- 19:09They knew I can't increase the issuance at the long end.
- 19:12I'm going to lose control of that.
- 19:13So the only answer is short term bills.
- 19:15That's what everybody wants.
- 19:16Everybody wants a cash like instrument guaranteed by the government.
- 19:20And so I'm going to issue debt there.
- 19:21And I know I have a lot of takers for that particular tenor of debt.
- 19:26And so that's what she did.
- 19:27And when Besson gets in the seat and he's got the same directive from above, hey, I need
- 19:32lower cost of debt because I have my set of programs that I want to fund.
- 19:37doesn't necessarily mean the same ones that the Democrats want to find.
- 19:40But again, the Republicans print money just as much as the Democrats do.
- 19:44Trump has the same message to the Treasury Secretary,
- 19:46make my shit as affordable as possible.
- 19:48So we have to do the same policies as Yellen.
- 19:51And this goes into my, you know, discussion about Kevin Warsh.
- 19:56Everyone's like, oh, he's a hawk.
- 19:57Yeah, he's a hawk when he doesn't have to be a hawk,
- 19:59when he's just spouting off his mouth.
- 20:01Put him in the seat.
- 20:02Put him in policy with all the constraints that that comes from
- 20:05and the director from above,
- 20:06which is make sure the treasury market's functioning,
- 20:09make sure that I can fund these wars
- 20:11and this industrialization effort.
- 20:13Okay, what are you going to do, Warsh?
- 20:15He's going to do the same thing, Paul,
- 20:17whether it's just hold rates, print money.
- 20:19He is not going to sell bonds
- 20:22and materially reduce the side of the Fed's balance sheet
- 20:26because he can't.
- 20:27He's got all the institutional constraints upon him
- 20:29as he sits in this chair.
- 20:30And so it doesn't matter the political party,
- 20:33what they said before,
- 20:35when they get in the seat
- 20:35and they see the state of the finances
- 20:37and the directive from above hasn't changed.
- 20:39It's I've got to fund this stuff.
- 20:41The actions are the same.
- 20:43But I mean, he is in such a tricky spot now coming in
- 20:45because like he's obviously got a ton of pressure
- 20:47from Trump and the administration to cut rates.
- 20:50But with this war going on,
- 20:51like I don't see how he can.
- 20:53Do you think he will?
- 20:55Maybe I think what they're going to try to do
- 20:56is hold rates as long as they can.
- 20:58They're not going to increase them.
- 20:59They're not going to decrease them.
- 21:00And you see if by luck of the draw,
- 21:03they can get through this without the 10 years spiking
- 21:05to like, you know, five and a half, 6%.
- 21:06We'll see.
- 21:08I think the thing to watch is the volatility index,
- 21:12the move index, as my friends in the bond market say,
- 21:16the nominal level of rates is not the point.
- 21:18It's how fast you move up or down.
- 21:20So it's a volatility increases
- 21:22that is super bad for the treasury market.
- 21:25And that's what's going to elicit a policy response.
- 21:29So is the 10 year the one
- 21:30that we need to be paying attention to?
- 21:31Because I know the 30 year now is like well above 5%.
- 21:34In the UK, it's like nearly 6%, I think.
- 21:36In the US, it's over 5%.
- 21:37And they're like the highest levels.
- 21:39I think in the UK, it's the highest level since the late 90s.
- 21:41In the US, since just before the financial crisis.
- 21:44Like that signaling that is that, well, is that signaling that there's something wrong here?
- 21:48I mean, I think the reason why we look at the 10 years,
- 21:50because so many other financial products are priced off of that.
- 21:54Your mortgages, at least in the United States,
- 21:56your mortgage is priced off a 10-year bond,
- 21:59car loans, asset-backed securities, corporate loans.
- 22:03it's the most liquid part of the curve.
- 22:04And so therefore, all type of corporate and consumer debt is priced off of that level.
- 22:09So as that level increases, then that transmits down to the everyday person and the type of
- 22:14things that they care about in terms of credit.
- 22:16And so that's why it's super important in terms of to maintain control of that particular
- 22:20part of the curve.
- 22:22I don't think particularly Besant cares if the 30-year trade is at 10%, if the 10-year
- 22:27stays behaved at four and a half or whatever it is right now.
- 22:30do you think there's in the near future like say in the next four or five years do you think we'll
- 22:35see yield curve control in like a big western nation i think we'll see yield curve control
- 22:40i don't think it'll be called yield curve control there'll be something more opaque
- 22:45um and we'll see what it what they call it but in effect it will be yield curve control
- 22:50but it's like the the kind of question is it all roads lead back to the money printer really
- 22:55is where we're going with this.
- 22:57Yes, until the population and economy says,
- 23:00okay, I'm going to accept the leader
- 23:01who's going to come in and tell me that
- 23:03I have to make sacrifices in my standard of living,
- 23:06whether that's higher taxes or less government services,
- 23:08for things that happened even probably before I was born.
- 23:13And I have no personal,
- 23:15I didn't make any decision to spend on these things,
- 23:18but somebody before me spent all this money on stuff,
- 23:22doesn't matter what it was,
- 23:24and now I have to suffer.
- 23:25and I have to pay for it. We're humans. That just isn't going to happen. That is not a winning
- 23:30political strategy. Yes, Argentina and Miele are kind of doing this, but Argentina has been fucked
- 23:36for the last 100 years, and the population finally said, okay, we're going to try something different.
- 23:39That's not the case in the United States and a lot of advanced Western European economies.
- 23:44Yeah, getting the majority of the population to vote in a party that are saying,
- 23:47we're going to do real austerity, it's just not going to happen. Which is kind of like,
- 23:52what does happen then do we just have continued societal decline is that like i want to go from
- 23:58this right now the this angst this you know the violence all this stuff it only gets worse
- 24:05because people the other we all know the underlying cause but nobody wants to admit what it is and fix
- 24:12it they're just going to say oh it's whatever other issue they want to blame why you're upset
- 24:18about, but it's really because the value of energy of money has been so perverted and debased
- 24:24by politicians and governments. Part of that's the fault of the people themselves, that this is why
- 24:30you feel like you're going nowhere in your life. And you choose religion, or I hate the immigrants,
- 24:37or I hate people with a different accent than me, or I hate the AI, or I hate all these other things,
- 24:43but the real thing, which is why you're angry. And that's what all these different political
- 24:46parties are getting you to focus on something else other than it's really about inflation and
- 24:51your value as a human and what you produce as evidenced by what the price of money is.
- 24:56Yeah, it's always like just easier to blame a scapegoat than gets the root cause of the problem
- 25:00because the root cause of the problem isn't always easy to understand. Like when I got into Bitcoin,
- 25:04that's the first time I really understood the problem with money. And like that was by chance,
- 25:08you know, like 10 years ago, I looked at this weird internet money and then ended up here. It's
- 25:12like not everyone's necessarily going to go down that rabbit hole. Yeah, that's unfortunate. But
- 25:17again, that's I guess that's just the state of society. Yeah. Do you think we sometimes overstate
- 25:21the importance of like, or the resilience of the market? Like, you know, when oil traded like above
- 25:26100, got to 125, $130, whatever it got to, people were sort of calling for this being like
- 25:32catastrophic, the economy, things are going to start breaking and things were kind of okay.
- 25:36Like, do you think we the market is more resilient than we give it credit for?
- 25:39Yes, in many places, in most places, right? If you think about, you know, oil at $200, right? The United States is going to be fine. Things will be a little bit more expensive. Europeans, for the most part, are going to be fine, right? They could backtrack and go back and buy oil from Russia. They could, people, the euros are the second largest used currency in the world. They can print a bunch of money and buy stuff, right?
- 26:02I'm saying most of the people listening to this podcast, you are going to be fine.
- 26:07Things might be more expensive.
- 26:08You might be upset about that.
- 26:09But, you know, it's not going to be like in the Philippines and Bangladesh and parts of
- 26:13Africa where people are literally going to starve to death because there's just not enough
- 26:16to go around at that price.
- 26:18And their countries cannot print money.
- 26:20They have no sovereign savings, right?
- 26:22Nobody trusts them that they're going to buy their bond because they're going to pay them
- 26:26back later with tax revenue.
- 26:27Those people are going to starve.
- 26:28This isn't, you know, this is an academic discussion for us about inflation and scarcity and hardship. But for a lot of people around the world, they're going to starve to death. But nobody, BBC doesn't cover the starving people in Burkini Faso more so than maybe a blip on, you know, the morning news. Nobody cares, right? It's just not, there's only so much suffering the population can take before you go back to your TikTok and start scrolling your favorite cat video.
- 26:52So it's that issue that's going to happen.
- 26:56And that's unfortunate, but that's just human nature.
- 26:58How long do you think we have until it gets that dire?
- 27:01I mean if you listening to some of the commodity exports you know we at the tipping point of that in certain countries right If you live in mostly Southeast Asia and you hearing you know work from home in places like the Philippines and Thailand If you look at India right the rupee the Indian rupee is about to take out 100 like all time low for the Indian currency
- 27:21So in a sense, you have a perfect storm of things hitting a lot of these economies, right?
- 27:25A lot of these economies are back office processing centers for advanced economies.
- 27:33It's the call center people. It's this, you know, intermittent labor that's doing, you know, tasks that are cheaper to have a human do than automate. And if you have an AI that can do that better and you say, OK, well, no, you no longer have access to cheap commodities because you are just on the receiving end of whatever is able to get out of the strait.
- 27:52but, you know, Europeans, Americans, Japanese, Koreans,
- 27:56they've just bought everything that they can
- 27:57on the spot market to make sure
- 27:58their population is insulated,
- 28:00then you no longer have a job
- 28:01and you no longer have commodities.
- 28:04And so that's just a recipe for maximum social unrest
- 28:08in those type of places.
- 28:09And so if this persists much longer
- 28:11and the deficit of production,
- 28:14you know, we go over that cliff, whatever that is,
- 28:16you know, pick your favorite commodity analyst.
- 28:18Some people say it's in June, July, August,
- 28:21somewhere around there.
- 28:22you know you're going to have heads in a spike politicians are going to die in a lot of these
- 28:26places there's going to be mass social protests um in places like that because they have no job
- 28:32and they have no food damn i mean that's so bleak and and like you started this at the very start
- 28:39this interview talking about like ai job losses and and whenever i have talked about that i'm
- 28:43always thinking about like the places i live like i spend a lot of time in america i live in
- 28:46australia i'm from the uk like i i'm not necessarily thinking of like the global south that much when
- 28:50and talk about that, but you're right. Like they're going to be displaced because like the,
- 28:54the only person I've ever hired from, he was from the Philippines was I had an assistant for a while.
- 28:58And like, I got rid of that system because AI is now doing that job essentially. And there's going
- 29:02to be so many people in that bracket. Um, if you take it back to like the U S or like any Western
- 29:07nation, like how disruptive do you think AI will be in the short term? Say like the next five years,
- 29:11do you think we're going to see huge job losses? I mean, I call like 20, 20, 30%, but again,
- 29:17I think it's going to be concentrated on the knowledge workers, the white-collar professionals.
- 29:24And so while, if you think about it, at least in the United States, for example, and probably
- 29:28parts of our view, you had massive dislocation of blue-collar workers starting in the 1990s
- 29:36until the present day. And only probably until recently did they have a voice in Donald Trump,
- 29:43maybe a little bit Biden, you know, pick your right of center politician in Europe and Australia,
- 29:50talking about the concerns of these blue collar workers who, you know, lost their jobs due to
- 29:55the chinification of global markets and labor force. But the white collar workers have the
- 30:03organs of power. They own, they have the media. Nobody cares about blue collar workers in the
- 30:08advanced economy. It's all about what are rich white-collar workers doing, whether from culture,
- 30:14whether from spending habits. And this is what the news cycle is really about. And so this issue
- 30:19is going to be amplified to levels that we were under custom to when you think about what happened
- 30:24from in the last past four years as China entered the global economy and sort of depressed wages
- 30:30for a lot of this work. So I think it's going to seem like it's a lot larger than it is,
- 30:35just because these are the folks
- 30:37who the New York Times writes about and cares about.
- 30:40But at the end of the day, I think it's, you know,
- 30:42we're talking probably 10 to 20%, I think,
- 30:45is the amount of knowledge workers,
- 30:47at least in this particular wave,
- 30:48that are going to lose their jobs due to AI.
- 30:50I think that's the easiest, lowest hanging fruit
- 30:52for a lot of companies.
- 30:53If you take a look at the job loss,
- 30:54and usually in the 10 to 30% range of workforce,
- 30:57when you talk about a tech company announcing
- 30:58AI rationalization, they say,
- 31:00okay, we're going to let go of a certain amount of workers.
- 31:03But I mean, even on, like,
- 31:05if you compare it to that blue collar layoff because of China, like that was bleak. Like that
- 31:09was essentially like, I think Luke Grohman calls it the economy of despair because all these people
- 31:13who lost their jobs in the Rust Belt in the US, like then comes like the opioid epidemic, which
- 31:17I think those two things are certainly related to a degree. And it's like tons of people die.
- 31:22And if that goes to the coasts, like it's, it's kind of scary.
- 31:27But I think that the coasts, at least the political system is very responsive to the
- 31:30folks on the coast. They are the technocrats that are in the government agencies, that are in the
- 31:36NGOs, that are in the policy think tanks that give the architecture for policy and the excuse for what
- 31:42you're going to do as a politician. You know, I didn't come up with this idea. The XYZ NGOs staffed
- 31:48by all the Ivy League people, they came up with this idea and I just implemented it, right? And so
- 31:52I think these people have a voice in the government. They always have. And we're going to see something
- 31:58like UBI or government handouts or progressive taxation on AI companies, like whatever the
- 32:04solution is, I think because these are the folks using their jobs and they're the ones
- 32:09that the politicians have cared about in the past, they're going to get something out of
- 32:12the system that your factory worker did not when they lost their job due to China.
- 32:17Yeah, this is something I've been thinking a lot about, because if you say roughly like,
- 32:21you know, 10, 20 percent, whatever it is, it can sound, you know, in the grand scheme
- 32:26of things, it can sound like a relatively small number, but these people don't own their homes
- 32:30outright. They don't own their cars outright. They have credit card debt. And that's a big
- 32:34enough percentage to kind of bring the system to its knees. And what does a government do in
- 32:38response to that? And I don't think UBI is a good idea, but I think
- 32:41it's the only thing that can happen to sort of save the financial
- 32:45system if we do lose 10% of workers across the country.
- 32:50Yeah. And I think if you want to think about what this is going to look like, start to listen to some of
- 32:53the, I can't pronounce her name correctly, AOC. She's a woman, congressperson from New York.
- 33:01I think she's going to be the Democratic nominee for the president in 2028. Listen to some of her
- 33:06rhetoric, and I disagree with almost everything of it, but it sounds good. She talks about,
- 33:12you know, the billionaire class not earning what they made. I think she's going to get onto this
- 33:16AI affordability narrative. You know, there's bipartisan efforts in a lot of the United States
- 33:19to say we don't want any more data centers.
- 33:22Yeah.
- 33:22And so if you think about the types of folks
- 33:24that buy into her rhetoric,
- 33:26it's highly educated people on the coast.
- 33:30These are the folks most at risk of losing their jobs,
- 33:32at least in this wave, due to AI.
- 33:34And I think she's going to be the personification of that.
- 33:37And the Democratic Party,
- 33:39those who are successful in their bid to become
- 33:41the leaders of that party going forward
- 33:43are going to lean into this affordability due to AI,
- 33:46this we want to return the economy to humans, to, you know, human labor, whatever that means in sort
- 33:54of a white color perspective. And people like her are going to get a lot of, you know, formerly
- 34:02wealthy urban workers are going to latch on to that message. That'd be very, very powerful. And
- 34:08again, they have the organs of the media of all these, this apparatus of NGOs and whatnot,
- 34:16and I think that's going to be a counter movement to sort of the Trump business person. We're going
- 34:22to optimize everything. Don't worry about it. There's going to be this utopia in the next five,
- 34:2710 years, and we're all going to have this abundance. Maybe, maybe not. Who knows? But
- 34:31that's going to be the counter message to that. And that message is going to get aped in other
- 34:36advanced Western economies around the world. Oh, okay. There's another way to counter the far
- 34:41right or the you know the tech bros and the ai bro is taking everyone's jobs let's lean into this
- 34:46type of message that aoc and folks like her are putting out there and so as with you know people
- 34:52are aping trump in a lot of um western economies i think people are going to ape aoc and the
- 34:57counter message to to that situation the thing that keeps me up at night is the idea of a critical
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- 37:41Yeah, and I can totally see like the pushback against data centers.
- 37:44If it does get to the point where 10, 20% of people losing their jobs,
- 37:47there's going to be huge social unrest.
- 37:48And I can see the world where people start like attacking data centers,
- 37:52trying to take these things down.
- 37:53It's one of those things that whenever you talk about the near future,
- 37:58this is very hard like i think ai will be hugely important for the world but like the social unrest
- 38:04is going to come alongside it is going to be real um it's kind of terrifying yeah i mean i think
- 38:12there's always something terrifying going on in our society so yeah maybe it's true yeah that's
- 38:18true but like if um i guess everything we've spoke about there on the macro side while it kind of
- 38:24seems flippant to say it's going to be good for bitcoin it's probably going to be good for bitcoin
- 38:27Like, do you think this next bull market is going to be like unlike others?
- 38:32No, it's the same.
- 38:32It's the same ingredients.
- 38:33There's money printing.
- 38:34Why we are printing money, you can debate the cause.
- 38:38But at the end of the day, globally, not just, you know, advanced Western economies, everyone's going to try to print money.
- 38:45One of my favorite derivative traders, and I'm an LP in his fund, David Dredge, calls it the hunger games.
- 38:51Everybody's got the same problem.
- 38:53I've got to print this money to placate some particular part of my population, but there's
- 38:59only so much capital, investable capital to go around.
- 39:03There's only one United States that can issue bonds and they're going to cram it in everyone's
- 39:07throat and you've got to kind of find your crack to issue your debt.
- 39:11So it's the Hunger Games of debt issuance.
- 39:13But at the end of the day, the aggregate amount of fiat will be higher than it is today.
- 39:17And that is what powers a fixed supply asset like Bitcoin.
- 39:21I had David on the podcast a few months ago. He's awesome. But the funny thing about the last
- 39:27sort of Bitcoin bull market was it wasn't the hottest trade in the world. And previous cycles,
- 39:33I think it has been. But this one was so dominated by initially like AI stocks and I guess throughout
- 39:38AI stocks, but then also gold. Do you think Bitcoin can reclaim that sort of hottest trade?
- 39:43I mean, I think AI stocks was some of the suppliers and maybe not NVIDIA and TSMC,
- 39:50because they're such a massive entities, right?
- 39:52NVIDIA is bigger than most countries in the world
- 39:53in terms of its market cap.
- 39:57But I do think, you know,
- 39:58there's going to be the Sandisk
- 39:59of the world that went up 50x in a year, right?
- 40:01There's going to be another critical choke point
- 40:03identified in this flow chain of, you know, AI economy.
- 40:09And these stocks are going to do really, really well.
- 40:13And so, yes, if you are a stock picker
- 40:15in sort of the AI supply chain,
- 40:17I think that you will vastly outperform
- 40:19from Bitcoin.
- 40:21But again, it's not very easy.
- 40:24I've dabbled at it in my stonk portfolio,
- 40:26which is a fraction of the size of my crypto portfolio.
- 40:29But at the end, if you're talking about
- 40:32a big asset with a very simple narrative,
- 40:34is there more fiat tomorrow than today,
- 40:37therefore I go up then I think that is Bitcoin That is the beta If anything you should be performing better than Bitcoin whether it an AI stock or real estate or whatever Your performance benchmark has to be Bitcoin
- 40:49because it's a liquidity addition
- 40:51that's driving the majority of your returns.
- 40:55And so if you can't beat Bitcoin,
- 40:57then you shouldn't be investing in that.
- 41:01Because even in Bitcoin last cycle,
- 41:03it was like the treasury companies got the hype.
- 41:05It wasn't necessarily buying spot Bitcoin
- 41:07and holding it in self-custody.
- 41:08True, but look at NACA.
- 41:09It's down 99.99%.
- 41:11Like most of these treasury companies
- 41:13are terrible investments.
- 41:14Yeah.
- 41:15I mean, NACA is brutal.
- 41:17That chart is not nice to look at.
- 41:20Poor David Bailey.
- 41:22He's not poor.
- 41:24He certainly is not poor.
- 41:27Unfortunate David Bailey then.
- 41:29But so like going forward,
- 41:31what do you think the next bull market
- 41:32will look like for Bitcoin?
- 41:34Because like 126K top,
- 41:35Like, will we reclaim that quickly, do you think?
- 41:38How high do you think it can go?
- 41:40So right now, I think it's almost at the policy panic.
- 41:46And this is like the event that we all have been waiting for.
- 41:48You know, what does a policy panic look like?
- 41:50A policy panic looks like the bank term funding program in 2023 when three banks failed in
- 41:58two weeks, right?
- 41:59And overnight, Yellen and Powell essentially nationalized the entire U.S. banking system,
- 42:04right?
- 42:05It's what you call a policy panic, whatever it was.
- 42:07Yeah.
- 42:08A policy panic looks like April 10th, 2025, when Trump and Besant sort of backed off the tariffs, the maximalist tariffs almost immediately declared the 90 day ceasefire with China and all that sort of stuff.
- 42:22And then stocks and things ripped.
- 42:25And so right now we have this Iran war situation, this back and forth between Trump and the IRGC.
- 42:31And, you know, I hope you don't trade tweets because you'd be up ways, down, sideways.
- 42:36You wouldn't know which way you're going.
- 42:37So if you're basing your trading activity off of, you know, what either side said on a minute-by-minute basis.
- 42:45But the thing to watch is right now, the 10-year is at, I don't know, 4.67, 4.68%.
- 42:50The move index has rallied from, like, you know, 60s to 90s, like 85, 86.
- 42:56I haven't looked at my Bloomberg charts this morning.
- 42:58But we're in that trajectory.
- 43:01Volatility is increasing.
- 43:02The nominal level of debt is increasing.
- 43:05This scare of a sovereign debt meltdown
- 43:09in the United States and Great Britain and Japan
- 43:12and a lot of places is ever present and growing.
- 43:16And so if we get the move in next 130
- 43:19over the next days or weeks,
- 43:23we're right for a policy panic.
- 43:25Now, before that,
- 43:25we're probably gonna get some dislocation in the market, right?
- 43:27we'll see in media results in it.
- 43:29If they're not good and the market doesn't like them,
- 43:31it could be like bad news bears for a lot of AI stocks
- 43:33for a while until liquidity printer really gets going again.
- 43:37But at the end of the day,
- 43:39this is the recipe for a policy panic.
- 43:42What does that mean?
- 43:43I don't know.
- 43:44You know, there's a lot of tools at the disposal of Trump.
- 43:46Trump could literally just pull those ships out
- 43:47and say, I'm done.
- 43:49Iran war, we won, goodbye.
- 43:51Sail it off, right?
- 43:52I'm going to focus on affordability and whatnot,
- 43:55you know, in the election.
- 43:56and Iran doesn't even register anymore, right?
- 43:59There's all sorts of things they can do.
- 44:01But if we want to have that explosive bull market
- 44:03in Bitcoin and other crypto assets,
- 44:05we need a policy panic.
- 44:07And I think we're almost there.
- 44:08But that doesn't mean that Bitcoin goes up.
- 44:11It could go from 75 to 70,000
- 44:13if the 10-year starts ripping towards 5%
- 44:18in a volatile fashion.
- 44:19But this is the recipe.
- 44:20We're almost at that point
- 44:22where you get this massive panic
- 44:25due to bond market fundamentals and volatility.
- 44:29And you get a massive policy response
- 44:31in the United States and other places around the world.
- 44:33And then that's it, they're done.
- 44:36They've got the excuse to do
- 44:38what they've always wanted to do.
- 44:39And now it's just, you know,
- 44:41a massive printing exercise for a year or two.
- 44:43And that's what carries Bitcoin through 126,000
- 44:46to whatever level it's going to get to on the upside
- 44:48before we come to our senses again and that goes down.
- 44:52How many more of these sort of panics
- 44:54do you think fiat can take?
- 44:55Like, because from 2007 to COVID,
- 44:58like the amount of money printing
- 44:59is like 2007 is not even on the chart.
- 45:02That was probably like a week of printing
- 45:03during COVID or something stupid like that.
- 45:05Like how many more of these can it take?
- 45:07Like when will we get to the last fiat cycle?
- 45:09Or do you think, again,
- 45:10this is more sustainable
- 45:11than people will give it credit for?
- 45:12I mean, I think fractional reserve banking
- 45:14has been around for hundreds of years.
- 45:16Like the Bank of England
- 45:17was the first episode of quantitative easing
- 45:19to save the,
- 45:20uh was it the i forgot which company it was one of the ones that was doing slavery and drug dealing
- 45:27in the in the nears wasn't like the east india company or something was it yes yeah exactly they
- 45:31were about to fail i think it was like something like 18 something whatever it was and the bank
- 45:35of england conducted the first episode of quantitative easing to save what was you know
- 45:40the biggest and hottest stock uh at the time everybody uh middle class uh english person
- 45:45owned the stock and you know there were some issues some impropriety and the stock crashed
- 45:50and the Bank of England had to come in and print money and prop it up, right?
- 45:53First instance of quantitative easing.
- 45:55We've been doing this for hundreds of years.
- 45:56We can do it for longer.
- 45:58The only thing that really stops this train is AI.
- 46:00Because if you have an energetic economy,
- 46:03which is completely different in terms of its structure
- 46:06of how knowledge is produced and consumed,
- 46:08then the whole edifice of fresh and reserved banking
- 46:12doesn't need to be there anymore.
- 46:14And I think that's what sort of brings in a change in the monetary system.
- 46:18What that change means, I don't know.
- 46:19but it's not going to be like it has been for the past two or three hundred years.
- 46:24I think that is the thing that stops fractional reserve banking and gets us to a different system.
- 46:29That saying it's better or worse is different.
- 46:32When we do get to that sort of agentic economy, do you think that the AI agents will choose Bitcoin as money?
- 46:37Or do you think, because I mean, they're not going to have a Chase Bank account.
- 46:40Like, do you think stable coins will win that race or Bitcoin or something else?
- 46:44So, I mean, I have a theory on this and I think the AI agents want, at the end of the day,
- 46:49what do ai agents eat they eat raw compute they don't eat tokens tokens is just a layer a layer
- 46:57above that and yes bitcoin bitcoin represents electricity at the end of the thing that's what
- 47:02the derivative of bitcoin is on a kilowatt hour and what work that can do and ai cares about you
- 47:08know floating port operations per second or per period of latency that is their currency so i think
- 47:14that yes, Bitcoin is probably the best approximation of that right now. There will be a AI commodity
- 47:21token that represents floating point operations per second closer than a token does. And that is
- 47:29what is going to be the currency of the AI economy. We don't have that yet. But I think that if I think
- 47:35about it in a theoretical perspective, I think that is what is coming for the AI economy. And then we'll
- 47:40price everything else off of that you know it is still might use bitcoin because you know maybe
- 47:45they need to interface with a human and the human wants bitcoin doesn't want this other currency but
- 47:48i think there is a space for that type of currency it will be cryptographic in nature it will be on a
- 47:54public blockchain it will not be a u.s dollar stable coin in my opinion yeah i mean on the
- 48:00crypto side because i like i'm i just pay attention to bitcoin but i know that you you sort of trade
- 48:05other stuff. The kind of narrative in Bitcoin circles is that the crypto trade kind of died
- 48:12in the last cycle in the sense that like, because AI took so much hype and don't get me wrong,
- 48:16it definitely took hype away from Bitcoin as well. But it looked like from the outside that
- 48:19sort of the crypto world got a little crushed with that. And they weren't, you know, again,
- 48:23like you weren't really getting the meme stock pumps, all that sort of stuff. Like,
- 48:26do you look at that, the crypto ecosystem as being slightly dead?
- 48:31No, because I think Hyperliquid was the best performing shitcoin of the last
- 48:35cycle of a particular size, right? And I think the Hyperliquid team did what they needed to do.
- 48:41And the most important thing they did was they built a successful product. A lot of people build
- 48:44successful products. The problem with most crypto projects, I say this to a lot of the companies
- 48:50that I advise, is you do not give any of the economic value created at the protocol level
- 48:55back to the token holders. In fact, you create a situation where you have a bunch of early
- 49:00investors who for no fault of their own in their own profit maximization and their own fiduciary
- 49:05duties, must dump their tokens into the market and depress the price. And so when you list your TGE,
- 49:10that's the maximum price your token's ever going to receive. Because not only do you not give any
- 49:14value back to the token holder, you have a bunch of investors you have to sell because they need
- 49:18DPI for their investors, their LPs. And so this is why tokens are down only. Hyperliquid said,
- 49:24okay, well, we're not going to have a massive VC overhang. Yes, we have a big team overhang,
- 49:30but Jeff and the team do need to get paid for the value they've created. But we're going to take
- 49:3497% of the revenues, I'm going to buy back our own token. And we're a very profitable protocol.
- 49:39As we know, trading fees from exchanges, it's the perfect killer app for crypto.
- 49:43So that's why it's done so well. But for various reasons, most teams choose not to copy that model,
- 49:50whether it's they need to get an investment from a large VC fund, and this is just not the way in
- 49:55which a large VC fund wants you to operate. I've gotten that pushback from a lot of projects. Well,
- 50:00you know, we have such and such brand name VC. And I, you know, and I said, yeah, we should just
- 50:04unlock all our tokens or whatever. And they said, no, no, no, we can't do that. Oh, I'm like, okay,
- 50:08well, good luck. Your coaching is going to zero. Oh no, we can't give the money back to the token
- 50:13holders because of, you know, whatever reason. Okay, great. I understand. Don't care. I'm not,
- 50:18if I'm not getting any money, I'm not going to own your token. Don only, right? And so, but
- 50:22Hyperliquid, completely different situation. And that's why it's performed so well. And so I think
- 50:28after this experiment we've been running with different ways of capital formation in the crypto
- 50:33capital market since really 2017 in the ICO bull, we as shitcoin investors have gotten a lot more
- 50:41mature and a lot more demanding. You can't just put a white paper on the internet and get our money.
- 50:47You can't just have a bunch of, I know you, yeah, you raised a hundred million dollar pre-seed round
- 50:52and you got all the coolest and baddest investors
- 50:55in the game on a cap table,
- 50:58that no longer is enough.
- 51:00I actually want to get some value as a token holder.
- 51:02And that's why Hyperliquid's done so well.
- 51:04And that's why the majority of these shit coins
- 51:06have not done well because they didn't do that.
- 51:08Their value and their, you know,
- 51:11Pomponomics is based on old ways of doing things.
- 51:15And we as crypto investors have matured.
- 51:17And finally, we care about cash flows coming to us
- 51:21as token holders, however that happens.
- 51:24Was BitMEX the first,
- 51:26like, did you create the perpetual future?
- 51:29Yes.
- 51:30So is it pretty cool to see
- 51:31like this stuff happening now?
- 51:32And even like strategy
- 51:34doing their perpetual preferreds
- 51:36and like, is it cool to see
- 51:38the thing that you created
- 51:39becoming like serious financial tools?
- 51:42I think it's great.
- 51:43You know, I'm super proud.
- 51:44I think everyone at BitMEX
- 51:45who worked on this thing back in 2016
- 51:47should be proud of the movement
- 51:49that we created, that we have
- 51:51you know centralized exchanges who are in bed with the regulators running scared because a team of 11
- 51:57people are able to out-compete them and build a better product i mean and that's also like the
- 52:02bullish side of ai is that we're going to see small teams completely disrupt huge industry and
- 52:07that is like that that's the cool side of ai like i i think it's an incredibly powerful tool i think
- 52:13it's going to there's going to be loads of social disruption that comes from it but like on the
- 52:16other side of it the the creativity and the new things we're going to have in the world is awesome
- 52:20Like I will see a billion dollar one person company at some point.
- 52:24Yeah, I think it's really cool that, you know, obviously it served a purpose.
- 52:29We have a lot of extremely intelligent people doing bullshit work.
- 52:32And I think bullshit work, at least in my context, is my accountants, my lawyers, all these types of service professionals that charge you a lot of money that do fuck all work and have this whole edifice of a system that is incomprehensible by design.
- 52:47so you have to pay them $2,000 an hour,
- 52:51we should liberate them from these shitty jobs
- 52:53and bring that intelligence back
- 52:55to doing something useful for humanity
- 52:56rather than parsing a tax code or some legal structure.
- 53:00We could have an AI do all these things
- 53:02and we have all this other human intelligence
- 53:05and creativity to do other things.
- 53:07And I think that is the techno-optimist side of things.
- 53:11And yes, unfortunately, when you lose your job,
- 53:13that's not what you think about
- 53:14when you were making a few million dollars
- 53:15as a parasitic lawyer
- 53:17and now that's no longer needed.
- 53:19But I think from a general stance
- 53:21of like the advancement of humanity as a species,
- 53:25we're liberating very smart people
- 53:27from, I think, net destructive employment.
- 53:31Yeah, it's kind of like an existential crisis
- 53:33for a decent chunk of the population who think,
- 53:35you know, you go to college, you get the degree,
- 53:37you become a lawyer, that's a job for life.
- 53:38Like even if you lose a job at one firm,
- 53:40there's always going to be other opportunities.
- 53:41And then it's like, maybe they're all gone.
- 53:44It's going to be so interesting
- 53:45to see how people like that react to it.
- 53:46Because again, like, are you going to get a 40-year-old accountant or a 40-year-old lawyer who's like in middle management of their firm retraining to do like AI tech work?
- 53:56I don't think so.
- 53:57Like, I don't know what those people do.
- 53:59They agitate politically and they get a handout.
- 54:01That's what they do.
- 54:02Again, I'm not saying that's the wrong thing to do, right?
- 54:05If we're creating all this abundance at a civilizational level, surely it shouldn't be that everyone who got displaced is now living as a pauper on the street, right?
- 54:14Essentially, it's all our data.
- 54:15our interactions as humans across
- 54:17us the world that created these AIs.
- 54:20Now, Google and Facebook might say,
- 54:21yo, but you signed that term of service
- 54:22saying that all that data is mine.
- 54:25But if we repudiate that and say,
- 54:26fuck that contract,
- 54:27like you guys have made, you know,
- 54:30so much money based on humanity as a construct.
- 54:35Therefore, we demand a chunk of that.
- 54:37And I think that's the message.
- 54:39If you want to run for political office
- 54:41in an advanced Western economy,
- 54:43that is the message that humans created Google.
- 54:46There is no LLM without human data inputs, whether that's public source data, whether that's theft of data, whether that's walled gardens. That's humans. That's humans with each other creating this data that has given these companies the ability to create these godlike intelligences. And therefore, we demand our recompense for that. I think that is a winning political message from now going forward.
- 55:12Yeah, I totally agree.
- 55:13And just from a personal perspective, there's no way that I think the 40-year-old lawyer who can't retrain losing his job has any reason to slow down on this.
- 55:20Fuck them.
- 55:21It going to be an adapt or die type situation I think Arthur this has been fucking awesome Is there anything especially on the macro side that we not talked about that you been thinking about a lot No I think it people
- 55:33just trust the process.
- 55:35The money will be printed.
- 55:36The things might get up or down,
- 55:38but at the end of the day,
- 55:40until you see politicians
- 55:41campaigning on austerity,
- 55:43don't worry about money
- 55:45not being printed.
- 55:46But use a safe amount of leverage
- 55:50if you use leverage,
- 55:51because it's going to get choppy.
- 55:53But at the end of the day,
- 55:54the trend is up.
- 55:56Yeah, we're not all Arthur Hayes.
- 55:57I think most people are best
- 55:58buying Bitcoin, holding it,
- 56:00DCAing.
- 56:02That's what I do.
- 56:02But Bitcoin is a trade.
- 56:03Like buy Bitcoin
- 56:04and avoid all this chaos.
- 56:05I guess that's the message.
- 56:07Yeah, exactly.
- 56:09Love it.
- 56:09Well, thank you so much, man.
- 56:10I appreciate you getting up early
- 56:11to do this.
- 56:13Hopefully we can do it again
- 56:14at some point.
- 56:14We'll have to try and do it
- 56:14in person again next time.
- 56:16Yes.
- 56:17Thank you.
- 56:17Awesome.
- 56:18Thank you, mate.
- 56:21you