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Ten31 Timestamp: Going Vertical · TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast

• 0:00
  Good morning, Mr. Arnold. How are we?
• 0:03
  Doing well. Great Mother's Day. Bullying all the moms out there.
• 0:07
  Doing good.
• 0:08
  I know Mother's Day is gone. You know you have your one day, but you know we're going to throw it out to all the mothers out there who listen.
• 0:12
  I know there are tens of thousands of you listening as you take care of your families.
• 0:18
  Thank you. Thank you for being a mother.
• 0:20
  Most important job in the world.
• 0:22
  Second most important job is trying to read the tea leaves of what the hell is going on in the world
• 0:26
  as we barrel towards a digital economy built on a gentic commerce,
• 0:32
  a multipolar geopolitical world that seems to be fraying at the seams
• 0:36
  in an increasingly chaotic global financial system that is backed by fiat currency
• 0:41
  that is being, I don't want to say attacked, but it's being,
• 0:46
  there's a new competitor on the block, it's called Bitcoin.
• 0:48
  And we've been doing this podcast for, I think we're officially past the point where it becomes a habit.
• 0:55
  I think we've done, I think 21 days makes a habit.
• 0:58
  Have we had 21 episodes?
• 1:00
  I don't think.
• 1:01
  Probably not.
• 1:01
  That'd be good for the memes, but I don't think so yet.
• 1:03
  Not yet, but we're almost there.
• 1:05
  Point being, we've been making calls on this show, which is a recap of John Arnold's 1031 timestamp newsletter.
• 1:12
  So really John's been making calls in the newsletter that we've been recapping.
• 1:15
  that have really been hitting pretty hard and coming to fruition. And we've seen a
• 1:21
  continuation of that, particularly with the Apple Intel news that dropped last week over the weekend.
• 1:28
  But before we get into that, I think just staying on the theme of the meta war that we've been
• 1:33
  talking about, the US really trying to pull levers to get asymmetrical leverage in the geopolitical
• 1:38
  realm, particularly against China. And we have some data in from independent refiners imported
• 1:45
  oil refining margins out of China. It's not looking good for them, which would signal that
• 1:50
  the U.S. actions in the Middle East, if we believe this meta war is going on behind the scenes,
• 1:58
  are very successful for U.S. leverage. Yeah. We monitor the situation so all the moms out there
• 2:07
  can do the most important job in the world. And I think the situation monitoring has certainly,
• 2:13
  the patterns emerging from that, I think are getting more and more clear. You know, my usual
• 2:18
  caveats apply that nothing is ever set in stone and everything's path dependent and probabilistic
• 2:22
  and things can always go a bunch of different ways. But yeah, I definitely think the last,
• 2:27
  you know, six months have pointed pretty clearly in one direction on a variety of these data points.
• 2:30
  And we just keep kind of getting more and more. And, you know, I titled the timestamp this week
• 2:36
  going vertical. And then we're going to talk about, I think, three vertical charts that I saw
• 2:41
  this week, you know, in a world where we're just getting more and more of them every day, seemingly.
• 2:46
  And this is the first one, a fairly notable chart out of Zero Hedge, highlighting the margins for
• 2:52
  independent oil refiners in China. These are commonly referred to as teapot refiners. They're
• 2:57
  like semi under the umbrella of government and kind of semi do the bidding of government,
• 3:03
  semi-independent, historically very big buyer of Iranian oil, sanctioned Iranian oil. And they are
• 3:09
  currently undergoing a fairly notable trend shift over the relative to the last 10 years
• 3:15
  of deeply negative margins as spiking input costs are not allowed to be passed on fully to Canadian
• 3:22
  users in China. Take all Chinese data with like a bit of a grain of salt as there's a lot of kind
• 3:28
  of uncertainty and manipulation. And frankly, like, you know, manipulation both in the Chinese
• 3:31
  government, but also like from people who have an ax to grind, you know, in the West presenting the
• 3:35
  data. So it's all, you know, a big grain of salt in all of this. But this is a notable enough move
• 3:40
  that I thought it was definitely very meaningful and worth talking about. Because, you know, if
• 3:45
  it's directionally true, I think it points exactly to an outcome that I think you'd be naive to
• 3:51
  believe certain parties in the US were not anticipating or, you know, trying to trying to
• 3:57
  create by doing what the DOW has done in the last couple of months in the Persian Gulf and throwing
• 4:05
  a major net oil importer into relative disarray. It's definitely the case that from what we can
• 4:12
  tell, China has significant petroleum reserves. I think they were probably more aggressive and
• 4:18
  more forward-looking in stocking up over the last five to 10 years relative to the U.S. following
• 4:24
  the massive SPR drain of 2022.
• 4:26
  We did not even come back close to the high water mark.
• 4:29
  And so we're not in a fantastic position there,
• 4:31
  but we do have the advantage of being a major net exporter
• 4:34
  of various crude products.
• 4:36
  So once again, just highlighting this kind of meaningful asymmetry,
• 4:40
  the two poles, to the extent that we want to entertain the analysis
• 4:43
  that those two poles are getting more and more opposed.
• 4:46
  Yeah, and I think now that we have the luxury of the ability
• 4:52
  The ability to look back retrospectively on this war and again if we're running down this thesis and if we want to appease it just thinking about the war in Iran starting at the end of February many people saying hey why is the US getting dragged into this war it seems like we're fighting on behalf of Israel.
• 5:10
  this is not what I want as an American citizen. I was told no more Middle East wars. But if you look
• 5:16
  at the sort of scheduling of the meeting that President Trump had in order with President Xi
• 5:24
  of China, it was originally scheduled for late March, early April, and that got postponed to
• 5:31
  this week. And so they're going to meet later this week. And again, running with this analysis,
• 5:35
  Maybe Trump was looking at the war with Iran back in late February, early March as a way to sort of send a message to President Xi before these meetings.
• 5:47
  And it looks like they're happening today, as John said.
• 5:50
  Look at this chart.
• 5:51
  It's not looking great for the refineries within China.
• 5:54
  And as we can see, their crude oil imports have fallen significantly.
• 5:57
  And I would not be shocked if we come to find when the history books are written, ultimately by the victors, who knows that this was more calculated than people understand.
• 6:09
  Because you have the meetings originally, start the war, postpone the meetings, let the ability for data to gather and come in.
• 6:17
  And of course, the week of this meeting between President Xi and President Trump, it seems like Trump's going to have a ton of leverage.
• 6:24
  Yeah, definitely. Probably more leverage than people expected, you know, six months ago. And I think it's important to highlight once again, like not endorsing any of this, not necessarily happy about a lot of it, but just trying to objectively analyze it as clearly as possible.
• 6:41
  And I think, you know, I still see the narrative that the the CIA, Mossad, whatever nexus is kind of driving this, the deep state, as it were.
• 6:51
  And the deep state means different things depending on whether your guy is in office or not.
• 6:55
  But in any case, the the people who think in, you know, 20, 50 year increments somehow didn't know that the first response to striking Iran would be that the straightforward moves is closed, even though the the national security strategy document that was released late last year specifically listed keeping the straightforward moves open as a key priority for the for the U.S.
• 7:14
  Despite the fact that it's never been closed. Like so you're telling, you know, I think there are a lot of people out there who still want to believe that, like the U.S. is just flabbergasted that this happened.
• 7:22
  And it's like, I mean, come on guys, come on.
• 7:24
  Like the pieces are, I think, aligning, you know, pretty well again, it may or may not
• 7:28
  work.
• 7:29
  There going to be blowback and downstream issues But I I think to as a as a you know an investor and analyst of the markets as someone who just trying to protect a portfolio that you do yourself a disservice by maintaining a narrative that the people who are really behind the levers of power are that stupid and lack foresight to that degree
• 7:50
  particularly when they were very explicitly signaling it six months ago.
• 7:54
  But in any case, you're seeing the impact already here on Chinese crude imports.
• 7:59
  You could say that's because of, you know, they're choosing to drain, you know, the SPR instead of importing, you know, much more costly oil.
• 8:06
  You could also say it's independent refiners, you know, responding to the fact that they can't actually pass on cost fully by, you know, lowering imports.
• 8:13
  But either way, China is definitely still, you know, maintaining this posture of strength.
• 8:18
  And certainly they have many, many cards to play.
• 8:20
  You saw, it's not on here, but you saw last week for the first time, China basically explicitly told refiners and various other companies to not worry about,
• 8:29
  U.S. Treasury sanctions on Iranian oil. And so I think that's kind of a posturing that they're in
• 8:35
  a great position. Some of the actions that they also took, though, last week, I think point to
• 8:39
  maybe a little more hedging on that top headline, especially, you know, telling banks to pause
• 8:44
  loans to sanction refiners. Right. So it's kind of talking out of both sides of their mouth there.
• 8:47
  And then to your point on the Trump G meeting, you know, ahead of that, apparently, again,
• 8:52
  you take all these headlines with a grain of salt, but sources say, you know, for whatever
• 8:55
  that's worth that China behind the scenes is, you know, pressing Iran to, to, to wind this down,
• 9:00
  find a, find a compromise and get Hormuz opened again, which would not suggest, you know, a desire
• 9:06
  to see this or an ability to kind of watch this go on forever. Right. So yeah, I think these are
• 9:10
  all kind of meaningful data points in that whole, in that whole story. And again, I think it would
• 9:15
  behoove everyone, every investor, every kind of anyone looking at the markets to just think
• 9:20
  carefully about the constraints and incentives and goals of all the actors at play in like kind
• 9:24
  of an honest way. Completely agree. And I mean, we're just going to keep going down the list here
• 9:31
  because he's going vertical. And the next chart we have is the Intel stock chart, which you were
• 9:39
  sending screenshots of many different charts over the weekend, but this was one of them.
• 9:45
  It's pretty astonishing how vertical this one, but again, it confirms something that we've been
• 9:51
  talking about for some time on this show, particularly, which is you have this massive
• 9:57
  effort to re-industrialize the US manufacturing base, bring the supply chains home. Obviously,
• 10:05
  the Trump administration took a stake in Intel last year, and people were wondering what they
• 10:11
  were going to do with it or how they were going to try to use that stake to influence what's going
• 10:16
  on at Intel and their chip production. And lo and behold, we had some news again, I think a week
• 10:22
  before this meeting between President Trump and President Xi very intentionally that the government
• 10:29
  is pressuring and it seems like Apple and Intel are on board saying that Apple should be using
• 10:36
  Intel chips in their products, which hasn't been the case for many decades. Apple famously uses
• 10:42
  TSMC, which is obviously a hotbed topic in the geopolitical realm, because TSMC obviously is
• 10:50
  headquartered in Taiwan, which is becoming more contested as stakes continue to increase. And so
• 10:56
  just another, I think, massive chess move leading up to this negotiation with Xi by the Trump
• 11:03
  administration. And again, a confirmation of the fact that we are really not kidding or not
• 11:12
  hitting when we say we're going to re-industrialize or at least attempt to re-industrialize the U.S.
• 11:15
  economy. Yeah, I think that's right. I remember, I don't think we're doing the show yet, but I
• 11:20
  remember writing about the newsletter. And I think we talked about it on Bitcoin Alpha, RIP, the
• 11:24
  predecessor of the show. When the initial Intel deal came out in September of the administration
• 11:31
  converting grants to equity, a stock popped, then you can barely even see that pop on the chart now.
• 11:37
  But I think we were talking about how this is a really kind of meaningful move and kind of
• 11:41
  opening salvo in the, what has now become very clearly and apparently U S industrial policy,
• 11:47
  right? Like it's not, you know, it was one thing like the MP materials deal in last summer, or
• 11:52
  kind of these little onesie twosie things with very small companies that, you know,
• 11:55
  have strategic positions, but that people haven't really heard of like Intel is, you know, the,
• 11:58
  the, the ultimate probably like example or, you know, paragon of like American innovation in the
• 12:05
  last hundred years, you know, one of the most important tech companies and companies full stop
• 12:08
  of all time. So for the U S government to take the stake that they did, I thought was incredibly
• 12:12
  like symbolic and, and meaningful. And, uh, you know, uh, certainly you've seen a continuation of
• 12:18
  the momentum kind of rot from that, you know, since then with that chart. Um, and I think it's,
• 12:23
  it's related to the first vertical chart insofar as it's like, to the extent that you think that
• 12:28
  the U S government is hyper-focused on effectively like buying back or resting back hegemony and,
• 12:36
  you know, uncontested hegemony and control of its own destiny on, you know, critical industries and
• 12:40
  supply chains, you know, the question you'd have to ask is like, well, what cards they have to play
• 12:45
  if China, you know, manufactures all of our, you know, uh, has a chokehold over critical minerals,
• 12:50
  has a chokehold over, you know, critical, um, defense industries and supply chains,
• 12:53
  what cards you have to play? Well, the first one is energy, right? We just talked about that.
• 12:56
  And the second one I think is capital markets, right? We have the deepest, most liquid,
• 12:59
  most desired capital markets in the world, you know, for now. And I think you have,
• 13:04
  have seen that we have, that the administration has the ability to, again, here's a great,
• 13:09
  here's a great chart kind of indicating that, right? Despite COVID, despite money printing,
• 13:15
  despite Ukraine and freezing treasuries, despite, you know, Trump being elected again, right? Many
• 13:20
  people really, really being suspicious, perhaps rightly so, of Trump and his capabilities. You
• 13:25
  know, another chart that has gone borderline vertical here is net portfolio inflows into the
• 13:30
  U.S. and U.S. markets over the last few years, right? And this is a clear, like, increase in
• 13:34
  a clear acceleration, right? The slope of that line is increasing meaningfully over the last
• 13:38
  few years. And, you know, this is another big element that I think the administration is
• 13:43
  clearly, you know, trying to weaponize. And, you know, if you flip back up one slide,
• 13:47
  I think there's a good point that Gavin Baker made, who's a really good semis analyst,
• 13:52
  probably like the best one out there, just about relative population growth kind of needed to
• 13:57
  sustain the demand that DSM is seeing unless they want to resort to massive immigration into a
• 14:03
  relatively small and homogenous country. Meanwhile, there's clear desire to have
• 14:09
  reshoring anyway. There's clear desire to have what he calls American wafers regardless. And
• 14:14
  we've got all this latent capacity with this old man in Intel who needs to get up off the mat and
• 14:20
  kind of, you know, uh, uh, do, do one more fight to see if he has it in him. All of those, all of
• 14:26
  those tailwinds, like kind of point in a certain direction. And to be very clear, like none of this
• 14:32
  has materialized yet. Like all of that chart above on Intel, that's multiple expansion, like
• 14:36
  earnings haven't meaningfully inflected revenues, not their free cashflow hasn't really meaningfully
• 14:40
  changed. It's not even totally clear. Like, you know, what chips Intel will be producing for Apple.
• 14:45
  Like, is it probably not the leading edge? Cause Intel doesn't really have anything like TSM's
• 14:49
  capacity for it. So you don't really know what the scope of it is, how meaningful it'll be long-term.
• 14:53
  And there are a lot of questions that need to be answered there. But I think both of those,
• 14:58
  the verticality of both of those charts is telling you that like there are two very critical levers
• 15:03
  that the US has and it is kind of aggressively you know aggressively using them aggressively playing those two cards that it has And I think those charts are telling you about we seeing a
• 15:14
  phase shift, seeing a phase change, right? This is discontinuous, nonlinear changes that the
• 15:18
  market's trying to grapple with. And, you know, I think there's long-term reason to question
• 15:23
  whether there's mean reversion there, which we can talk about on both of those. But I think
• 15:28
  those two charts, especially just like tell the story of the week and really even, you know,
• 15:32
  the last few months. Yeah. And say what you will about Trump, uh, bull in a China shop,
• 15:38
  unorthodox, uncouth, maybe a little, uh, dealings with DJT and world Liberty five with his family,
• 15:46
  like a little, some people go as far as say rough, but I don't know, as an American looking
• 15:51
  at all of this, it seems like we're giving it a college try to, to actually strengthen the
• 15:57
  homeland and i know we've we've had this uh discussion about whether or not our ideological
• 16:04
  philosophical economic belief systems align with the way in which she's going about it but
• 16:10
  how do you like i'm like i'm like well proud to be an american the fact that we're bringing it all
• 16:14
  home you know it's like you're trying to at least again to your point nothing is manifested in terms
• 16:19
  of financial like the financial health of intel can apple and intel actually do something productive
• 16:26
  with each other can Intel produce the chips. That is yet to manifest, but it seems like we're giving
• 16:31
  it a college try, which I'm happy to see. I hear Toby Keith getting fired up in the background.
• 16:36
  I hear the song starting. No, I mean, I hear you and I sympathize definitely to a degree. I think
• 16:43
  even more generally, like we've spent, you know, if you've looked at a lot of these dynamics over
• 16:49
  the last 10 to 20 years in the relative fragility of the United States position on a lot of key
• 16:54
  key trends and key metrics. I think it was always just going to have to be this way,
• 16:58
  right? Like if it was either going to just, you know, it was going to be the fall of Rome,
• 17:03
  which it may still be right. But it was going to be just complete, you know, downtrend, like
• 17:07
  controlled demolition. Basically the U S becomes like, sorry to say the star European friends,
• 17:13
  but basically the U S becomes Europe over the course of the next 20 years. Right. And fully
• 17:16
  seeds it's, it's industrial capacity and it's, you know, relative influence and standing in the
• 17:21
  world, it's relative wealth in the world to, you know, up and coming players like China,
• 17:25
  or it was going to have to be something like very aggressive like this, right? There was never going
• 17:29
  to be like a, you know, a multilateral set of, you know, carefully considered agreements and
• 17:35
  white papers that led to a careful reintegration of industry in the U S you know, distributed
• 17:43
  evenly between the U S and Europe and different, different stakeholders, quote unquote, making sure
• 17:47
  we check all the ESG boxes along the way, like that was just never going to happen. There are
• 17:51
  too many interests at play on the, uh, on the, on the other side of the world for anything like that
• 17:57
  to just to actually make it through. Right. It was always going to be, if we tried that,
• 18:00
  I think it was always going to be slow played. It was always going to be, you know, wait until
• 18:04
  Trump's out of office and another guy comes in. If he's still trying to do the same thing, you know,
• 18:08
  backpedal, uh, delay, do as much as you can to make it difficult. Like if you, if you wanted,
• 18:13
  if you wanted anything like this to happen ever, like this is how it was going to happen. TBD,
• 18:18
  whether it will ultimately be net good, I think for the US TBD, whether it'll actually work. But
• 18:24
  you know, I think for a lot of analysts that have sat around saying, well, the US can't,
• 18:27
  you know, fight a war without China. Well, like, okay, we're trying. Like this is, this is how it
• 18:32
  would look if we were going to try, right? Yeah. It's a fascinating and interesting to observe
• 18:37
  and monitor the situation. It's a, it's a fun situation to monitor at the very least.
• 18:43
  Fun's one word for it.
• 18:44
  It's interesting.
• 18:46
  The old Chinese proverb is, may you live in interesting times.
• 18:49
  And we certainly do.
• 18:50
  We certainly do.
• 18:52
  We're talking about, hey, Intel, Apple, what are you going to do?
• 18:55
  Now with the emergence of AI, maybe they should just make an Andy Grove agent.
• 19:01
  Maybe they should just take everything Andy Grove did in his life while I didn't know.
• 19:05
  Make no mistakes.
• 19:06
  Load it into an LLM, make no mistakes.
• 19:08
  bring Andy Grove back from the dead in robot form.
• 19:13
  I mean, who knows?
• 19:14
  The next vertical chart is the progression of these large language models,
• 19:20
  particularly how they are performing on these benchmark tests by a meter.
• 19:25
  And it looks like Claude Mitha,
• 19:26
  the preview that these guys got in March at least,
• 19:30
  is another step function, order of magnitude improvement
• 19:33
  in terms of what these LLMs can do.
• 19:38
  yeah i mean scaling laws are holding right like i think that's what that's what this is telling you
• 19:42
  and this is a this is like a third chart the third big chart of the week that was you know
• 19:47
  kind of going vertical and i think it's the most interesting because the other two like as i wrote
• 19:52
  about in the newsletter like are subject to like the ultimate you know laws of gravity of the supply
• 19:57
  response like the forces of supply and demand just like hate vertical charts like they the market
• 20:03
  wants to like force vertical charts to mean revert. Like when people see, you know, Intel,
• 20:08
  like new supply comes online, both in terms of like actual capacity to respond to the potential
• 20:13
  for, you know, well above market profits, new supply comes online in terms of equity issuance,
• 20:17
  right? Like you could imagine like Intel could absolutely be very economically issuing a lot of
• 20:22
  new equity against prices like this. You know, insiders can very easily make the case for,
• 20:27
  you know, taking some off the table at prices like that. And, you know, the flip side too,
• 20:30
  with China, like there are various market forces that, you know, will, will tend to kind of push
• 20:35
  that, that downward vertical line back to, back to kind of the mean. And I wrote about some of
• 20:39
  that in the piece or in the newsletter this week, but this is, this is a vertical chart that like,
• 20:43
  you know, it's one of the only vertical charts in the world that doesn't really have like an obvious
• 20:48
  market constraint to, to bring it back down. Right. There's this, this looks like a one-way
• 20:54
  function, a kind of a one-way vertical takeoff. And I think it's, you know, it's, it's telling
• 20:58
  that the meter chart on the left, right, is the mythos performance, you know, it's early,
• 21:03
  but it's literally off the charts, like they don't even show it, because it's like, so high as to be
• 21:07
  like, maybe unreliable, or not sure about it. And then the chart on the right, you can see kind of a
• 21:11
  less cropped version from an anthropic researcher. But I think this is like, you know, this is really
• 21:17
  the chart that is in some way like driving the other two. Because this is kind of like, if this
• 21:22
  continues, right? This is the next great game, like geopolitically, the thing that you have to do,
• 21:29
  if you're in, if you're in the seat in, you know, the White House or the DOW, if you're in the seat
• 21:33
  in Beijing is you have to try to be the one that owns this line. And moreover, like you're thinking
• 21:39
  that the other guy is also thinking that he needs to own the line, right? And so that starts to make
• 21:44
  certain calculations a lot more tractable. It starts to make certain decision paths, like
• 21:48
  a lot more inevitable. And, you know, the, I think it's an open question, but if you listen to a lot
• 21:54
  of, um, heavily AGI pilled people who are sitting in the Bay area right now, like there's a lot of
• 21:59
  view that this is a winner take all game or at the very least a winner take most game. And, you know,
• 22:04
  a six month lead is equivalent to like, you know, a 10 year lead in any other like conventional
• 22:08
  industry. And, you know, I think it'll be interesting to see if like open source and,
• 22:12
  you know, distilled models out of China can, can really kind of keep up with this, especially as,
• 22:17
  you know, the weights and the key data here, like become more and more like, you know,
• 22:23
  nuclear launch codes. And, you know, we're seeing more and more kind of encroachment from the
• 22:28
  government and the Department of War onto these companies and these tools. So all that is to say,
• 22:32
  like, this is, I think this really is, it tells the story of the prior two charts and, and why
• 22:37
  they happening kind of the way that they are and why they happening now And the one you know constraint that you could argue that is on kind of the growth of these charts is just the physical reality of like what needed to make more and more gains that are kind of parabolic and vertical like this
• 22:53
  But I think if you flip to the next chart or the next page, like you'll see, I think a few data
• 22:58
  points highlighting like what the solution to that is going to be or like what the attempted
• 23:02
  solution to that is going to be. Yeah. Sorry. I was reading up on Fermi's paradox in the
• 23:08
  great filter because as you're explaining that it's like are we just speed running towards the
• 23:12
  great filter and do we make it through um but here's the next chart it is insane and it comes
• 23:16
  down to it like you said these charts are beginning or not only beginning but are materially affecting
• 23:22
  the the physical economy and i think we'll continue to for decades as we race through or towards the
• 23:30
  great filter but uh this is isa manufacturing pmi today ai data center investment is hitting 20
• 23:36
  billion every two weeks, capital outlay estimates in the multi trillion dollars, I think approaching
• 23:42
  10 trillion dollars over the next decade. Let latest I heard. Yeah. And so I think this is the
• 23:48
  thing, right? Like if you're going to say, well, the constraint on that last vertical chart is
• 23:52
  physical reality, you know, the, how are you going, how are you going to possibly, you know,
• 23:56
  physically scale to sustain gains like that? How are you going to pay for it? And I think it's,
• 24:01
  it's very clear that whether they succeed or not, like they're going to try, right. And, you know,
• 24:06
  There's a clear push on both the private and public side to aggressively re-industrialize and to use that as an engine for what you're seeing here, earnings growth, to further support the market and to further support GDP to kind of make this all tractable.
• 24:21
  And so I think it's – to me, that's why it all ties together, right?
• 24:25
  Like there, the, the need to decouple from China in the administration's view, the need
• 24:30
  to support, um, local industry champions like Intel, that's all directly related to kind
• 24:35
  of winning this race.
• 24:36
  And this would be the only shot that the U S really has to kind of growing its way out
• 24:40
  of the debt.
• 24:40
  Right.
• 24:41
  And reestablishing, you know, some level of legitimate, um, industrial dominance that
• 24:45
  will be necessary to sustain the next hundred years of say the dollar system and the U S
• 24:50
  military.
• 24:50
  So it's all kind of like one trade.
• 24:52
  It's all kind of one chart.
• 24:53
  And thus far, again, this is TBD, but there's some pretty crazy earnings growth out of Q1 thus far.
• 25:01
  It's insane.
• 25:03
  Yeah.
• 25:03
  27.7% actual growth rate for the quarter.
• 25:07
  It will mark the highest earnings growth rate reported by the index since Q4 2021.
• 25:10
  Obviously, that's a bit of an anomaly because we're coming out of the economic lockdowns, coming from a significantly smaller baseline.
• 25:17
  And so this is, I think, it's hard to judge the Q4 2021 and think there's any signal there.
• 25:23
  But it makes it more impressive, right?
• 25:26
  Because it's like Q421 is kind of this artificially inflated number,
• 25:29
  and we're getting right up there,
• 25:30
  despite the fact that the base was not nearly as low on the prior year this time around.
• 25:35
  Yeah.
• 25:37
  Fascinating stuff.
• 25:38
  But then to your point, we're going to have this insane,
• 25:40
  I mean, to extend your point, we're going to have this insane growth,
• 25:43
  earnings, GDP, but then it's going to be very discombobulating for people
• 25:49
  because you're going to see these headline numbers at a PMI,
• 25:53
  GDP growth, revenue growth, and it seems like, oh, everything's incredible.
• 25:57
  But at the same time, we're going to see mass layoffs, it looks like.
• 26:00
  So we have a bunch of headlines here from over the weekend and last week.
• 26:04
  Kraft Hein, CEO, pushes value.
• 26:06
  Consumers are literally running out of money.
• 26:07
  So you have this juxtaposition of everything going on in the world of AI,
• 26:12
  and the real economy seems to be suffering.
• 26:16
  I think that's the big question in the way in which the AI economy is affecting the physical world.
• 26:22
  Can it produce enough blue-collar jobs, I guess you can say, to save the American consumer?
• 26:27
  I don't know.
• 26:28
  Will the deflationary effects and the productivity gains of the technology be a tsunami that no amount of blue-collar jobs can overcome?
• 26:39
  We shall see.
• 26:40
  We have Heinz and McDonald's basically saying consumers are hurting.
• 26:44
  At the same time, we have Cloudflare, Upwork, Bill, cutting anywhere between 20% and 30% of jobs.
• 26:49
  and you don't have it here.
• 26:50
  But in the industry last week, Coinbase cut, I believe, 15% of their workforce.
• 26:56
  Yeah.
• 26:56
  And I think it's, you know, it's an open question whether some of these are, you know,
• 27:01
  using kind of AI as air cover for just, you know, cutting bloat work structures.
• 27:05
  And, you know, none of the companies on here are like durably profitable and they all have
• 27:09
  decelerating growth anyway.
• 27:10
  So it's like, you know, maybe that explains a decent amount of it.
• 27:12
  But either way, like, I think you probably are seeing the early signs of it.
• 27:16
  Either way, there's this clear K-shaped economy that's, you know, only going to
• 27:19
  going to increase as all AGI pill people will, will tell you over the next, you know, 10 years,
• 27:24
  if they're right. And so just collectively, like, and this is before, by the way, you even get to,
• 27:29
  you know, robotics, like the physical AI, physically instantiated AI over, you know,
• 27:33
  10 years from now, right? Like what that does to right now, the re-industrialization of America
• 27:37
  is maybe an offset to some of this. What happens when, you know, the robots take our jobs,
• 27:41
  the physical jobs that are still available, like that's an open question. And so I think it's just
• 27:45
  like all of these headlines together make me just think like, this is how I concluded the timestamp
• 27:49
  It was just like, you know, OK, what if they're right? What if what if the AGI thesis, the government's thesis of, you know, just run it hot into building out American AI dominance?
• 27:59
  Well, that's totally right. Well, what is that going to mean for the labor market, both white collar and blue collar eventually? Right.
• 28:05
  What is that going to imply for the need for, as Elon Musk calls it, universal high income, right, or universal basic income or whatever to deal with that reality?
• 28:12
  And, you know, the flip side is like, okay, what if they're wrong? You mentioned like $10 trillion of expected, you know, infrastructure outlays being financed kind of probably increasingly creative ways. You know, what does it mean if, you know, the demand isn't ultimately there, if the products can't be integrated in the way that it, you know, would be needed for the ROI to really make sense?
• 28:32
  What does it mean if you have, you know, too big to fail AI companies and data infrastructure companies, data center companies not able to pay their bills, et cetera?
• 28:40
  Like, OK, well, that's going to create a massive hole in the national balance sheet as well.
• 28:43
  It needs to be papered over. So kind of in either side, either direction, like you get into the the the end game conclusion that number will always go up.
• 28:52
  number of dollars will always go up, right? And there will always be a supply response of dollars,
• 28:58
  right, when it's required to solve one problem or another as things get too socially volatile,
• 29:04
  too geopolitically volatile. And that increasing supply of dollars either way is going to be
• 29:07
  necessary to get us to, you know, any version of the future that the administration wants to see.
• 29:13
  And so it just kind of leaves me with like, it always comes back to Bitcoin. And that's not just
• 29:18
  like, you know, a contrivance. That's like, that's truly what we believe. It's why we believe this is
• 29:22
  in any environment over time, like the most interesting thing to be focusing on the one
• 29:26
  asset in the world that has no conceivable supply response. And I just highly recommend people go
• 29:31
  study why that's the case and build an intuition for why that's the case. This is a screenshot from
• 29:36
  Parker Lewis and Drew Bounce. I'll talk from last year. If you, I forget exactly what it's called.
• 29:42
  I think it's in search of a finite monetary policy. If you look that up, great 30 minute video to
• 29:46
  explain the intuition behind that. But ultimately, like, I think this, it's all just leading all
• 29:51
  roads will converge on and lead to exactly this kind of regardless of, you know, who in the
• 29:55
  administration is right or who in Beijing is, you know, is right or wrong. Yeah. Never boring job.
• 30:01
  We'll do this again next week. Of course it's a habit now. Enjoy your haircut. Enjoy your
• 30:06
  haircut, sir. See you guys. We'll be back.