Are We Still in a Bull Market?

Yeah, this is my childhood bear.

This is your childhood bear.

Yeah, he gives great hugs. Give it a try.

If you're feeling a little sad about the market, put his arms around your neck.

Oh, arms. Okay, hold on.

Put the mic down.

1. Trading Twilight Zone

Yeah, it gives good hugs. It's the kind of fuzzy bear you need in a bear market.

All right. What's up, everybody? Jonah, it's good to be sitting on your couch, I have to say.

The casting couch.

2. Harvesting Losses & EOY Strategies

Let's not. We've got this beautiful bear here to symbolize our views. It's a beautiful white bear, not like your typical bear—

Grizzly bear.

Because we think it's going to be a bit of a weird bear market.

Yeah, it definitely feels like one, doesn't it, though? This is not a bull market, is it? It's struggling to rally. I think what I want to hear your take on is that it gets a little bit weird for the rest of December: de-risking, tax-loss harvesting. Maybe CTAs are just pushing markets lower because nobody else is doing anything other than protecting P&L. Then January is when we can maybe start actually trading again. For now, it's just going to be random price action for the next 3 weeks.

Yeah, I think that's unfortunately true. We got bullish at the beginning of December, basically at the end of November, on that massive crash. I thought that we could get a nice little bounce to 105 or 110. We could really rally up. Maybe ETH would get to 3,400 or 3,600.

I think what I've realized is that we're sort of in decay mode right now, unfortunately. I thought that the first 2 weeks of December, maybe the first 3 weeks, could be good. But the closer that you get to the end of the year, if prices are down, people are going to be selling to harvest those tax losses. That's the thing. It happens.

I remember this so clearly. Post-FTX was the actual bottom of the market, where everything sold off ridiculously. I remember Solana trading at 7 bucks. This was the last 3 days of the year. Every fund and every person took advantage of the fact that there's no wash-trading rule in crypto. You sell, collect your losses, and then immediately buy it back in the new calendar year.

That loophole is still in effect, right?

Still in effect.

Wow.

That's why I think people should be aware of it. If you're trying to trade, maybe take the last week of December off, or short into the last week of December. There are a lot of things that are down this year.

Basically, the way that I think about it is that the more down it is, and the more unrealized losses you think people have on this coin, the harder it's going to fall.

Yeah. In terms of unrealized losses, there's a lot to think through here. But I guess first, let's talk about not trading when trading is too hard to do. You and I have not been Bitcoin maximalists, but we've been heavily advocating for this being the cycle of Bitcoin. Since we started the pod, we advocated for GBTC. It was all about the ETF trade, the macro upswing, and the thesis. Bitcoin had the best risk-reward on the board.

We've advocated for not being 10% Bitcoin and 90% altcoins—if anything, closer to the opposite. That's still kind of how I'm set up. I'm just giving Icy, the polar bear, a little scratch there. I like it.

He's really cute. I'm not going to lie.

Yeah, this is my childhood bear.

This is your childhood bear.

Yeah, he gives great hugs. Give it a try.

Hold on. If you're feeling a little sad about the market now, put his arms around your neck.

Arms. Okay, hold on.

Put the mic down.

Yeah, it gives good hugs. It's the kind of fuzzy bear you need in a bear market. His name's Icy.

15 minutes of fame here.

Basically, what's going on is that I've kept a relatively small allocation to altcoins this whole time because of our general views. But I think that—oh man, the comments are getting ridiculous.

Yeah, these are good. There's one comment in there I want to address just because I think it's important. And it's not the casting. It's not the casting couch one, Jonah. It wasn't the casting couch one. That's the one I wanted not to talk about. [laughter] It's the guy with the username Suka Blyat. It's a Russian curse.

Yeah. Horrible curse, actually. What's wrong with you, man? That's very, very offensive to Russians out there.

Anyway, Suka Blyat says, “Didn't BTC peak at the end of December in 2017?” And guess what? Suka Blyat is right. It did peak at the end of December.

But the difference between what I was talking about in 2022 and what we're talking about here is that BTC was down in 2022 and in 2025 so far. In 2017, BTC was up massively, so there was no incentive. There was no tax loss to harvest.

Here's a super-quick example. If you buy something at $100 and it goes to $150 and you sell it, you owe taxes on that $50 gain, right? You owe 30% or 35%, or whatever short-term capital gains is, on that $50 of gain.

If it goes down by $50 and you go from $100 to $50, you can take that as a loss and basically write it off against other gains. What that means is that there's an incentive not to sell if something is up at the end of the year. If you think it's going to go higher, there's no reason to incur that tax bill.

If it goes down, there's an incentive to sell and buy it back if you think it's going to go higher. In traditional markets, there's something called wash trading. If you sell something and buy it within a 30-day period, the same asset, then you still owe, I believe, taxes on that. I believe you still owe taxes on that.

There are loopholes to that, though. You can sell SPY, the S&P 500 ETF, and then buy the Vanguard one that does the exact same thing within seconds, and you actually benefit from the harvest.

True. There are loopholes, but, for example, with a single-name stock—

But in general, yeah, you're absolutely right.

Like a single-name stock, you can't sell Robinhood at a loss and then buy it back and claim that loss against your income. It's not going to work.

With crypto, because it's still not regulated, you can do that. There's no wash-sale rule, which means that there are all these weird things that happen toward the end of the year with respect to crypto, especially when it's down.

One particularly good strategy for the young, enterprising listener might be to look at what is down the most that you think people are sitting on large unrealized losses on. I think this is mainly a VC-fund or hedge-fund thing, because retail tends to buy and sell a lot, so the cost basis just comes down as the asset goes down. But if there's anything out there that you think people are sitting on large unrealized losses on—like, I don't know, TIA, for example—maybe that's a good short at the end of the year.

Yeah, it's a good idea. I did my own fair share of tax-loss harvesting already by getting rid of the CryptoPunk. You know, you live in a high-tax jurisdiction, it's a good time to tax-loss harvest, and many people do. So, yeah, tax-loss harvesting is going to happen. Another thing that happens in traditional markets—

3. Jonah’s CryptoPunk Trade

What happened to that CryptoPunk? Can you share the full trade with us?

Yeah, sure. I bought it around the peak in November 2021 because I liked it. I wanted an avatar. I thought avatars were an amazing new innovation for the digital world. People are terminally online. Your avatar is kind of your online character.

I loved this CryptoPunk. I thought, “You know what? I only need 1 NFT. I'm going to go large.” The reason why I bought it was that I'm not the kind of trader who learns very much from mistakes on tiny size, where I lose $1,000. After many years of institutional trading, I need to feel things in order to learn stuff.

I thought, “I'm probably making a mistake, but I'm going to learn more from this than I will from any other big crypto transaction.” I didn't think it was going to go straight to zero. I had this feeling that CryptoPunks would endure across multiple cycles.

So I bought it for—let's just say that I didn't buy it with cash that was sitting in my checking account. That money was already in crypto. My cost basis was lower than what it might look like on CryptoPunks.app—much lower—but at the same time, it was still a big-ticket purchase.

And then I guess what happened over time is two things. The first is I liked the punk less and less as time went on. Some art that I have, I never get tired of; I like it more and more as time goes on. Other art I just get sick of, and this one was falling into that category. I didn't enjoy it.

Why did you stop enjoying the pixelated version of yourself? I'm curious about this. I want to interject something: most people tie their identity to their CryptoPunk. Does that not happen to you?

No. No.

Like, it was you?

No, I didn't tie my identity to it. If anything, I felt like it was forced. I felt like I was trying too hard to be crypto-cool.

And crypto is no longer cool.

I don't care. It was never cool in my circles. It was more that it felt like I was trying too hard. It didn't really feel like me. I wasn't like 6529, who became the punk. But even then, I still thought it was a cool-looking avatar.

One, I got tired of it. Two, when you're tired of a piece of art, it just becomes a trade. It's nothing. There's no emotional connection to it anymore. It's like, am I going to make money holding this, or should I get out of it?

The cold, hard reality was that if I ate this large loss now, during this year when I have other gains and live in a high-tax jurisdiction, I'd basically get back 40% of the loss. I get to recover whatever I sold it for—$200,000. So it was basically a $400,000 liquidity event for me that would have been locked up holding this thing.

And I think what I realized, just in terms of thinking about punks as a trade, is that Bitcoin has rallied 500%, and CryptoPunks are down 70% or 80%. I think what that tells you is, while CryptoPunks will always be part of a niche community, part of the crypto thing, it was very much a 2021 meta. It's not like punks are just crypto. Maybe EtherRocks are crypto, but punks aren't.

Realizing that made me think, okay, why sit through this for another cycle? There are just too many punks. There are 10,000 of them. There's always going to be somebody rage-quitting their punk, harvesting tax losses for very reasonable reasons. I just don't want to sit on this anymore. I'd rather have the $400,000 to put into Bitcoin, Hyperliquid, Aster, or something else.

I think if there's one thing that I've generally learned about crypto, it's that once a meta is over, it doesn't really come back, in a sense.

Right?

Interesting.

Once the ICO boom is over, ICOs didn't really come back. Once DeFi exploded in 2020, DeFi has never come back. NFTs exploded in 2021; they never came back.

What ends up happening is, for example, with NFTs, if you look at the broad market, there are a few that are up. Pudgy Penguins did pretty well. I think likely Mades did pretty well over the last 2 years. But the vast majority of things trended to zero and stayed at zero.

When you're in the middle of a meta, if you think it's a bubble, you should probably understand that once the bubble pops, that specific sub-meta is probably not coming back. The only things that keep coming back are Bitcoin and Ethereum. Those are sort of the only two things that keep coming back.

Even if you look at the L2 trade that happened in 2020–2021, it never came back. So I guess when it comes to NFTs, people always ask me, “Will NFTs make a comeback?” I don't think we're ever going to see what happened in 2021. It's just never going to happen again.

But that doesn't mean that every NFT is totally useless and is going to go to zero. It's the equivalent of asking, “Will art come back?”

Some art.

Some art. Not all art. It's like asking, “Will oil paintings rally again?” Maybe some of them will, but 99.9% won't. And will Picassos ever explode like they did post his death?

I don't know.

No, maybe not.

But some will.

I mean, I think what's going on here is that people—society, for now—prefer physical art to digital art. We're just not so terminally online yet as a species that you need to have an incredible digital art collection and live in basically a Ready Player One-style shipping container in a junkyard in real life.

Your digital presence takes far less priority than your physical presence still. Maybe that'll change in 20 years, but I don't want to ride my punk to zero in the meantime unless it's something that just makes my heart feel this emotional connection, like maybe some physical pieces of art that I have.

4. Real vs Digital World

I think there are certain things that are just always going to be better in physical form than in digital form. That's not true with most things; most things have transitioned to digital form. Basically, anyone below the age of 30 lives like their entire conception of reality exists in the digital world. All of it exists online. It's their everyday interactions, where they get their dopamine from, where they spend their time. It's the online world.

And the online world itself translates to the physical world. If you meet somebody who's 27 or 26 years old and talk to them, they'll—

Do you do that, Avi? Do you know any of these people?

Well, I'm 30. Not that far off.

Tell me about them.

Let's just say I've met some people in the last few years of my life who are younger than me, and they're just permanently online. These are the people making references to things that happen on Twitter. Their life exists online, and then when they come into the real world, they discuss the online happenings.

Right.

This is maybe just because I'm around so many crypto-natives that this is the case, but it's also increasingly true among random people that I'll meet in New York. They'll have this mentality toward the world where their entire work is online. Basically, every facet of their existence is online, and when they come to see you in person, they are bringing that online self to you.

What that means is that relationships, work, content in terms of reading and writing, and communication have all moved online.

There are some things that you can't replicate, right? The flex is still offline. Having an NFT is not a flex anymore. What's a flex is, “I've done so well in my career that I can bring you into my large house,” or, “Check out this sweet car that I have, or this wonderful piece of art, this instrument.” It's not, “Look at this NFT that I've made my Slack logo at the hedge fund that I work at.”

Correct. And yeah, not a flex at all. I remember when I first bought my EtherRock, which I still own and still hold. I'm getting people—actually, I'm getting offers for it.

I think the EtherRock is the first NFT. That one will persist.

It's also just that there are only 100.

Yeah, that's the difference.

There are only 100 of them. They hit a peak of $3 million a rock, which was totally insane. I don't think we're ever going to get back there, but I could see $1 million, $2 million a rock at some point. I could see that at some point in the future.

Tell us the story of why you bought that while we're talking here. This is so much better IRL, by the way. Speaking of physical, this is great.

Oh, it's so good to be here. Jonah, you've got a beautiful house.

Thank you.

It's nice to be out in LA, out of my cramped little New York apartment and the 35-degree weather, and into the beauty of LA.

Should we open the door here? The weather's beautiful out there.

Yeah, we can. Let me do that.

Keep going. Keep out-pining here.

But on the EtherRock thing, I've talked about this on other podcasts, but I think the core of it is that it's a community at the end of the day. I don't even view it as necessarily a piece of art. I view it as an access ticket to a community of some of the most interesting and successful people in the industry.

Because who is spending $300,000 on a rock? Who's doing that? It's basically people who can afford to.

Well, the Punks Discord was supposed to be like that, but it's a dark place. It's a dark place.

The issue with the Punks is that there are 10,000 Punks. Not everybody bought into it as a high-ticket investor. Some people bought into it as a low-ticket investor.

I think that groups stop working, in my personal opinion, above 60 people. Even 100 is kind of pushing it. 100 is workable, but it's very difficult to have a cohesive culture and also have individual relationships with every member of that group. Once you get past 100, once you get to 500, everything's an abstraction. It's an abstraction.

Zuckerberg used to talk about this. He had some comment about how we've done studies that say that a human being can only have 100 close friends, but Facebook allows you to scale that to 10 trillion.

Dude, if I closed my eyes, I might actually think you're Zuckerberg. My impression isn't that good.

Can you say, “So I killed this goat myself, and you're going to be eating it?”

No. No, I'm not going to say that.

5. Best Places to Live

Go on, though. So, okay, basically, communities don't scale. NFTs—crypto is a great community coordination and creation mechanism, and NFTs are 1 iteration of that. So, I guess your point, Avi, is that the NFT community has to be small; otherwise, it's not going to be effective. Is that kind of what you're saying?

I think that's 100% correct.

Okay.

This is the bear couch. This is fun, man. This is great. This is really great.

These are my quants. [laughter]

This is hilarious.

If Jonah is so smart, then why does he hate Florida? Let's talk about that.

Why? How do I put this? If you can't make it in LA and you can't make it in New York, and you have a sub-100 IQ, then Florida's a great place.

Have you ever played the Florida Man game? You know the game?

Yeah, it's a great game. They consistently do the craziest things down there.

No, it's basically what you do: You Google “Florida Man” and then the date of your birthday, and you see what horrendous Florida Man article there was on your birthday.

Oh, really? No, I haven't done that. We should do that later in the podcast. We can do that later. Mine is something like “Florida Man tries to take on alligator and loses” or something.

First of all, I think it's actually a sign of intelligence. Would you rather be hot or would you rather be cold?

Cold, because you can put on a jacket.

100%. I would actually much rather live in a place that sometimes is 35° to 40° than live in a place where, during the summer, there's literally nothing. You just have to sit inside.

The summer starts in March and it ends—it's so bad. Also, the flying cockroaches. It's below the Tropic of Cancer. That weather, that level of humidity and heat, cooks people's brains. It makes you less intelligent. It makes you slow. It makes you lazy. And first of all, Miami is very ugly. This is just my take in general. Miami is actually not a pretty place.

No. Also, the quality of people in Florida, I think, although it is changing, is still an issue. There is a lot of improvement happening there because hedge funds are moving in and smarter people are starting to move down there, mainly because of governance issues.

It's really a governance thing at the end of the day.

Yeah.

So that's slowly changing. You know what? Look, every time somebody tells me about why they like Florida, I'm like, “You like Florida for the wrong reason.” There's only 1 reason I like Florida, and that's taxes and governance. Those are the reasons.

Okay, 2 reasons: taxes and governance. If you like Florida for any other reason than that—

That's cope. That's pure cope.

The weather is not better than New York weather. I'm sorry. Tell me.

No, it's worse. It's way worse in Miami than in New York. I agree with you. You get, “Oh, my God, I'm so cold.” Put on a jacket. Go and buy a down jacket and walk around, and you'll be completely fine.

Now, what I will say is, I get it when people move to parts of Florida. A great friend of mine moved to Jacksonville, and he's from Sarasota. I understand when you move to a dirt-cheap, incredible beach town if that's your thing.

For sure. Or Destin is actually a very, very nice and cheap place.

If you're moving for quality of life and you're saying, “Okay, I make $150,000. I'm going to live in Fort Lauderdale or some random place—”

Tallahassee.

My uncle lived in Tallahassee for a long time, and I went to visit him. Aside from the cockroaches that live in the toilets and then fly out at you when you open the lid—real jungle.

You know, for a very low price, you can get a nice, kind of beachy or jungly life if that's your thing, if you're in that little niche. But the people who are like, “Oh, I'm delighted to pay $8,000 per square foot to live in some third-tier neighborhood in Miami”—I don't get that.

Maybe all of this is just Miami hate at the end of the day.

Yeah, it's just Miami.

I think this might just be Miami hate. But also, it is hate among the people who look at me and say, “How come you live in New York? It's so cold?”

They say that about me, too. They're like, “Well, LA is so much worse than Florida.” I'm like, “Why? It's better in literally every way except the taxes and governance.” And they're like, “Well, yeah, but taxes and governance.” I'm like, “Well, fine, whatever. Have you considered making more money?”

Yeah, just move to LA. LA is the best. New York is also the best. New York is—

I think New York is just better for single people, for people looking to have a little bit of fun. LA is much better for families.

Yeah, for kids. And what I'll say is that my great-grandmother actually retired to Boca Raton—

Where all Jews go to retire and die.

And I do like Boca, but for stints, for a little bit. The 1 thing that I'll end this Miami hate tirade on is that if you're old, you like warmth. If you're old, you can't deal with the cold because then your joints ache and they creak, and it's hard to move around. Once you hit 75 years old, by all means, love Florida.

Yeah, by all means. But prior to 75, if you like Florida, I'm going to question you.

I 100% agree. [snorts] Somebody just wrote, “Worst casting couch episode ever.”

Yeah, I'm sorry, guys. This isn't going to be one of your normal episodes.

No, it's just a couch episode. It's not a casting couch episode. Just a normal couch. We have a divider.

This is our victim.

Yeah.

Okay, going back to actual trading and investing.

Yeah, we should probably talk about that stuff, which is important.

Any tickers or metals you would be bullish on?

I'm still ridiculously bullish on Robinhood. I think that this is a no-brainer trade for the next 5 years. I'm also still very bullish on Tesla for the robotics thesis.

This is the only clean way to get exposure to that.

Currently, Tesla is the only clean way to get exposure to the robotics thesis. Tesla is 1 of those things that, if you told me it drew down 50%, I wouldn't be surprised, because it doesn't have—this is what we were talking about before, right? Google has cash flows. It's trading at a pretty reasonable price-to-sales ratio. Tesla is just totally out of whack, just completely out of whack.

Tesla is Bitcoin. Crypto educates you on how to trade Tesla, how to ride that—

If you want exposure to the robotics thesis, Tesla is the way to do it. Tesla is doing well, and I am very bullish on equities for all the reasons that we discussed on the last podcast. I mean, Trump knows that he needs to support the stock market. We both agree he's going to support the stock market. He wants to put a new Fed chair in. He wants to cut rates. He probably wants to expand the balance sheet. He wants to continue to spend money, and he probably doesn't care what happens after the 4 years.

He may take steps to radically increase inflation in the United States over the next 4 years.

Just mortgage our nation's future for his own glory.

Mortgage our nation's future. And that makes me very bullish on commodities still.

Commodities have an issue.

Okay. This dovetails nicely with our buddy Santiago’s tweet about valuation models for ETH. Is ETH a commodity? Is crypto a commodity? Let’s talk about commodities for a second. I want to get your take on all this. First, will commodities rip if Trump does some sort of inflationary stimulus measure?

The answer is not necessarily. It’s way more complicated than that. I would not get bullish on the GSCI or the BCOM, which are the 2 big commodities indices, if I knew that stimulus packages were going to hit the market, especially on the retail side. The first thing you do in that scenario is buy Bitcoin, or maybe you buy the Nasdaq—stuff like that—or you buy Tesla, things that are disconnected from some valuation model but are a bet on the future that retail can access.

Bitcoin’s a bet on alternative reserve currencies. You could bet on AI stuff via Google or the Nasdaq. You can bet on humanoid robotics via TSLA. I think commodities would be the wrong bet. You might get lucky for 20%, but a broad basket of commodities has this issue: in commodities, the solution for high prices is high prices, right? Production will come out of the woodwork for most commodities.

Isn’t that just an argument to buy miners—to buy commodity miners, to buy copper miners?

We’ve talked about this a lot. I think, yes, you buy miners as opposed to the raw commodity in the BCOM, but miner stocks always seem kind of abused. I don’t know why they don’t trade very well on multiples.

I don’t know the space well enough to definitively say whether you buy miners or not. Maybe you’re right on broad-basket commodities, but I do think Trump is offering us specific opportunities to make investments in things that are very clearly in the interest of national security, or in his interest, also buoyed by potential inflation. Trump gives us trades pretty regularly, which is kind of nice. We’re going to get one next year, I think.

For example, when he took a stake in Intel, it was kind of a no-brainer looking back on it.

Wink, wink, nudge, nudge: buy. You should probably buy some Intel.

And they signed contracts with the U.S. government. He keeps talking about how China has basically started a soft war over rare-earth minerals right now. One of my larger positions is in an ETF called REMX, which is a holdings ETF for all of the U.S.-based rare-earth mineral companies that I think we’re going to have to support in order to fight this war.

I like that one.

I’m super bullish on REMX. I have, I think, 5% of my portfolio in it.

That’s a real trade right there.

6. Altcoins & Midterms

Yeah. It’s a serious trade. The reason we’re talking about these ETF trades, though, is because it feels like—going back to what I was trying to say at the beginning of the pod, before we got sidetracked into the Florida space—we’re mostly in Bitcoin and crypto. What little altcoin trading I’ve done this year outside of Hyperliquid has not gone well. I haven’t really done that well trading alts in this environment, which has been quasi-bearish, leaking lower.

Quasi—I’m going to rub the nose here—quasi-bearish.

Basically, when you’re not seeing the ball well in any market, you’re supposed to take a step back. You’re not supposed to trade more frantically or play on tilt. You’re supposed to hug the bear, take a step back, and reevaluate.

Embrace the bear. Let the bear embrace you. Do I need a hug?

What I’m realizing here is that until crypto gets serious uptake, these valuations are going to be unsustainable. The only good altcoin trades are going to be those dangerous things that never worked in the past, like shorting alts—Aptos versus Bitcoin.

Aside from that, since we’re crypto traders emotionally, we like to get long things. We don’t like to get short things. Our favorite altcoins right now are outside of crypto. They’re like REMX. That’s basically an altcoin Trump trade.

A Trump trade that I like is just being long Bitcoin as next year rolls around. Hassett is ridiculously bullish on crypto. The market doesn’t understand that. The market isn’t pricing that in.

I’m a little worried that the market is pricing in a bunch of stimulus next year for Trump to kind of bail himself out of a bad midterm outcome. If that doesn’t happen—if Trump doesn’t deliver on that—I’m worried about the downside, because there’s definitely something priced into that. I think the midterms are the number 1 threat in my mind in terms of the market, because the market—you’re 100% right—is leaning a lot on Trump’s ability to guide it. If the midterms come back bad, then logically Trump’s agenda is going to be much tougher to implement.

Yeah.

The only thing that gives me a little bit of pause—and this, by the way, isn’t me being a Trump supporter—is that Trump is acting extrajudicially in a lot of different ways. That’s not a good thing.

Judiciously.

No, like outside of the system.

Oh, extrajudicially.

That’s what I said.

Okay. You said “judicially,” and then I realized you meant “extrajudicial,” like outside.

You missed the “extra.”

Oh, chat, back me up. I did say “extra.” Definitely said “extra.” It’s okay, Jonah. You don’t listen, man. Wait, do you pronounce “buoyed” as “booed”?

What? Get out of our chat.

“Booed.”

No, it’s “buoyed.”

“Buoyed.” He didn’t say it.

No. What are you talking about? I definitely said it.

I love streaming.

Maybe Jonah was right. I said it in my head. Anyway, he’s acting outside of the justice system. He’s acting outside of the confines of what theoretically should confine the executive branch. It’s actually very possible that he does end up implementing an agenda and moving forward with things even if the Democrats control Congress, because the reality is Congress isn’t doing anything, right?

They haven’t done anything since—I think the last sweeping piece of legislation that got done with a 60-vote, beat-the-filibuster margin was Obamacare. What was that, 2012? It feels like Congress has basically been doing nothing.

7. Our Healthcare Sucks

Obamacare sucks, by the way. I’m navigating the insurance world. I recently, thank God, got insurance because I’m self-employed. I had to go to the New York marketplace. I had to look for insurance, and it was all very complicated and ridiculously expensive. I’m paying $1,000 a month for minimal coverage.

Don’t even get me started on what it takes for the family. It’s crazy.

It’s insane.

Yeah. Oh, my God. Yeah, I can’t imagine. So, you also had to go through a private broker?

Yeah. I don’t understand why it works this way. In France, my wife’s French, and we spend a lot of time there. You literally just go to the dentist, the doctor, the optometrist, whatever, and at the end you have this green Carte Vitale health card and you just swipe that, and it’s all free. There’s no upfront cash, there’s no negotiating with brokers, and the price of everything is rational.

Our system, unfortunately, is the worst of both worlds. It’s a heavily regulated industry that isn’t fully government-run and isn’t fully compensated, but isn’t fully capitalist. You end up in this absolute Frankenstein labyrinth where some parts of it are government-run and some parts are private, the insurance companies exert power and the government exerts power, and everyone’s just fighting all the time. There’s no actually good system here.

Which is also, by the way, if you’re bullish on dysfunction in the insurance world, go buy United Healthcare. What a chart on that one. It just sold off like crazy, actually.

Really?

Yeah. I’ve got to pull it up, but it had a huge drawdown.

There are some charts I wish I could get long, but I can’t. Fines—government fines—that’s just up and to the right. M2 money supply is a chart you can get long now via Bitcoin. I still think that holds.

Yeah, look at that.

Healthcare dysfunction. How do we get long that? UnitedHealthcare went from $600 to $324 this year?

Sounds like a buy. And $324 is exactly where it was in 2020, right before that massive run-up. I actually think this is a pretty good place to get back in if you’re bullish on healthcare dysfunction in the United States.

I’m bullish on healthcare.

It’s funny. I guess Luigi had some sort of impact.

Yeah, that guy. He’s kind of a folk hero, isn’t he?

He is a folk hero. It tells you about our times—our times being consumed by populism, which is very good for trading.

Yeah.

For a long time, trading was very boring, actually, and you would know this better than me, but I basically heard it from all my mentors. From 2012 to 2020, that 8-year period, it was fun. Oil was fun, but broader markets were not. Broader markets were just—yeah, there were little things here and there, but basically, 2020 to 2025 has been Twilight Zone, absolute insanity. Tremendous volatility. I can’t believe this is happening every 3 months. Basically, for 8 years, you didn’t really have that.

Yeah. Basically, from the end of the financial crisis up until COVID was a real dud. It was kind of the “nothing ever happens” era, the end of history.

8. AI vs Main Street & Horseshoe Theory

Now, okay, let’s talk about populism for a second.

And this ties back to crypto. I think AI is going to disrupt a lot of jobs. That's not a controversial view. That's going to be bullish for the stock market because companies will be able to earn the same profits with fewer people.

That means the stock market has never been less representative of the overall economy.

Yes. So, two things. First, I think here's the trajectory. First, the stock market rips as companies become more efficient and earn a higher return on shareholder equity. Unemployment starts to tick up. Social unrest starts to tick up because you can't just be a middle manager on Zoom anymore. You have to actually do something really unique. Otherwise, you're getting replaced by ChatGPT or Gemini.

Then, basically, the army of unemployed white-collar people has no job to step into. They just get upset. They start to demand things of the government. Then you have low inflation, rising unemployment, a rising stock market, and social unrest.

That's the best recipe that I could possibly imagine for stimulus because the government will want to placate these people. Then you start to see stimulus subsidies. It may not be direct checks into people's bank accounts like during COVID, but it could just be subsidized groceries—all sorts of random market interventions to tackle the affordability crisis—and the unemployment rates will come down.

I think if you look at Twitter right now and people getting all upset about Bitcoin because they're not getting rich quick anymore, this is literally, on a very medium- to long-term basis, a stupidly bullish setup because of that. It's going to get rocky for a while, though. The big risk is that the administration pivots to doing something for Main Street at the expense of Wall Street instead of stimulus, which is—

I think that's inevitable, unfortunately, because you see it with likely Zohran Mamdani and Trump coming together and having a collegial relationship, even though Zohran calls him a fascist and Trump calls him a communist. They're at each other's throats, and it's the perfect example of horseshoe theory. I've never seen horseshoe theory quite as clearly as that, where they both agree on helping Main Street. They just—and in some parts, they agree on how.

For example, on building in New York, Trump wants to build more housing. Zohran wants to build more housing, right? They do genuinely agree on some topics. It's horseshoe theory. It's kind of crazy.

9. Trump Savings Account

The only thing, obviously, is that I think it takes a while to get there. Basically, stimulus would be bullish for Wall Street and for Main Street. What would not be bullish would be, "We're going to start penalizing or capping profit margins for grocery stores," or, "We're going to start punishing—we're going to start taking energy companies' profits and dividending them out to average unemployed people," or something. That would be bad for Wall Street, good for Main Street.

Correct. And I think part of what Trump is trying to do with the whole Trump Account is to encourage Main Street to take advantage of Wall Street, right? It's, "Let's have Main Street get access to all of the profits that Wall Street is making." And that's by encouraging people to actually put money into it.

You know what Trump doesn't understand? This is super bullish. So bullish—

It's just more money flowing into the system over time. That money is forcing itself into the system, which is amazing. One criticism that I heard about the Trump Account is, "Oh, well, we already have 529 accounts. We already have these accounts that you can open for your children," but people don't understand that it's a marketing play.

Yeah. How many Americans do you think would open a 529 and give their kids an account if they wouldn't already give their kids a retirement account in the next 5 years? Very, very, very low—like, a very low percentage. I guess that's logical, but it's a very low percentage. Whereas Trump comes out and says, "We're going to gift everyone $1,000." Everyone knows that if you're gifted something, you look into it.

The way that I used to get people into crypto was I'd send them a little bit of Bitcoin. I'd send them $10 worth of Bitcoin. I'd send them $100 worth of Bitcoin. I'd send some Ethereum over and show them how to do it. I would open an account for them and show them how to do it. That simple act of opening an account and putting some money in is going to lead to so much more investment in the stock market from the average person in this country. It's unbelievable. The fact that people don't get that is kind of crazy.

Interesting, right? I send them $10 worth of Bitcoin. I'd send them $100 worth of Bitcoin. I'd send some Ethereum over and show them how to do it. I would open an account for them and show them how to do it. That simple act of opening an account and putting some money in is going to lead to so much more investment in the stock market from the average person in this country. It's unbelievable. The fact that people don't get that is kind of crazy.

Yeah, it is nuts. Also, when he's saying, "I'm going to get basically the—what is it?—the Trump Account." I forget what it's called. Basically, what he's telling people is, wink, wink, nudge, nudge: guys, the dollar is over. The new denominator for anybody's net worth should be the S&P 500—basically, the collective net present value of 500 American value-producing entities.

I think what's crazy about this, and what Trump doesn't understand because he's a rich kid, a lifer who had everything from a silver spoon, is, okay, fine, let's say somebody gets gifted $1,000. Anyone below the median is going to just liquidate that and spend it on what they need.

Well, they can't liquidate it.

Oh, I see.

It's 18 years. You can't touch it for 18 years.

Okay. But they're going to turn 18 and liquidate it and spend it on what they need. Meanwhile, what I think Trump is misunderstanding with this whole communication, this sort of soft nudge to the world—he's been doing it since he got elected the last time in 2016—is that he's basically been talking up the stock market. Everything he does is about the stock market: making the stock market higher, new all-time highs, "Look at me," the Trump trade, the Trump rally.

What he doesn't realize is the point that Peter Thiel made: a lot of people just have negative equity in their lives. I'd say most people below the median net worth in this country have basically negative day-to-day equity. The reason why this is a problem is because the stock market—its denominator for your money—is only useful if you have money.

I think the biggest thing that he could do to stimulate the economy would be to somehow do an extrajudicial move—basically, force universities to pick up the tab for student loans. Just wipe student loans instead of the federal government paying for them, which is what Biden did. Under Biden, there was the whole meme of the plumber paying for the gender studies major's student debt.

If Trump has talked about having Harvard and Yale and Tulane and everywhere else do it, I mean, if you look at the endowments on these universities, they're huge. They're massive.

Basically, release that capital into the economy by wiping people's student debt.

Sounds a lot like communism, Jonah.

Yeah, but instead of redistributing from public equities to struggling individuals, you're redistributing from private nonprofits.

That's communism.

It is. But I think, to your point about horseshoe theory, Mamdani wants to take Procter & Gamble's profits and give them to the average working Joe. That's going to torch markets and make Main Street happy. Or take billionaires' money—take it away from the billionaires and give it to the average working Joe. Instead, what if they just hit the university system? That's what Trump on the far right is saying.

10. Investing in the Next 100x

Welcome back, everybody. The most recent comment here is: “How are you two looking at how to invest in space exploration?” There’s only one stock that I’m long, and that is RKLB. For those of you who don’t follow the private market, SpaceX, about 2 years ago, was trading at $70. You could buy it on the secondary market at around a $77 billion valuation. Today, do you want to take a guess what it’s trading at?

What’s it trading at?

$800 billion.

That’s a lot of billions.

A lot of billions. I think it’s very tough, unfortunately, to make a lot of money in this because basically all of the best stuff is private, and all of the best stuff is just SpaceX. SpaceX is kind of the trade, and I think that trade has already—I don’t want to say already played out—but it’s for sure not as juiced as it could have been otherwise. I personally invested in an SPV about a year ago.

What’s the point? Why invest in this theme? To me, it just seems like asteroid mining, my friend—rare-earth minerals on asteroids. I’m actually dead serious. At some point in the next 10 to 15 years, we’ll be able to go and extract resources from space and bring them back.

I have no idea. Basically, the way that I look at these things is that I think Bitcoin is going to 10x, with a max downside of 30% to 40% at any given time. With that level of return-to-expected-volatility, my bar for space exploration, humanoid robotics—basically any theme that’s not connected to traditional valuation—is that it could potentially 100x.

You think SpaceX could?

I don’t think SpaceX could 100x, but I think RKLB could 10x to 15x.

Okay, 10x to 15x, sure. I think humanoid robotics could 100x. For example, I made an investment in a company at, I think, a $1.2 billion valuation. I think that could genuinely 100x.

So, basically, you’re just going on the potential upside. Where are you getting these investments—secondary market or Forge?

It’s mainly through SPVs that are being raised to invest directly. There’s a huge amount of appetite right now for investing in robotics companies. I think we may have already hit a peak in terms of private investments in robotics companies, because one thing that’s a general truism in the markets is that supply comes out to meet demand.

You saw this with startups. There was a tremendous amount of money that, post-Facebook and post all of these tech startups, was raised by VC funds to invest in startups and try to generate the same sort of return that Facebook had for its investors. And guess what? Silicon Valley exploded with a bunch of nonsense because people were like, “Wait a second, I can tap this money.”

Think of just how many companies raised anywhere from $1 million to $5 million to launch the newest SaaS product to connect your dog’s brain to your microwave—whatever they’re doing out there. Genuinely, the most ridiculous SaaS products in the world have been created over the last 15 years, and most of them—95% of them—are completely useless. But supply was created to meet the demand of investors who wanted to invest in tech startups. So, obviously, the same thing happened.

It’s basically what you’re saying: For these crazy themes with 5- to 10-year time horizons—space exploration, humanoid robotics, all this other stuff—

Correct.

You’re looking at private markets. But the issue with robotics—so, with tech startups—is that anybody can launch one. The bar is pretty low to build a software product. The bar is way higher to build a hardware product. It’s very difficult to build a hardware product.

Yeah. With that being said, there probably will be tons of people out there in the next 10—probably 5—years who try to raise money and then never actually end up building anything.

You just have to avoid those types of companies. I agree, SpaceX and Anduril, I think, are phenomenal. If I could get an—

That’s going to be a trillion-dollar company.

If I could get an investment into Anduril, I think they’re approaching the defense industry in exactly the right way. Nobody has taken the startup mentality to the defense industry.

Palmer Luckey is kind of an inspiring dude. I recommend listening to his podcast.

He’s an insane human—genuinely insane.

But he’s ridiculously smart. I’ve noticed that Twitter is rotting people’s brains.

11. Anduril & Palmer Lucky

Oh, really? Social media does that?

This happened with Elon, where he generated all of these crazy right-wing beliefs in his head and now believes them uncritically. It’s kind of insane to see. Listening to the podcast with Joe Rogan, I felt that Palmer Luckey had a little bit of that sort of derangement.

I think he’s got the ego, that’s for sure. There’s nobody in his life telling him no, or “You can’t do that,” or “You’re wrong.” I think that’s part of it. I don’t know if it’s social media. It might just be megalomania.

I think that’s true, but he would reference things that he saw on Twitter that weren’t necessarily completely accurate. Throwing that aside—just push that aside for a second—his approach to building companies is pretty incredible. He built Oculus, then went on, as a teenager—

As a teenager, and then went on to say, “Look, I’m going to basically radically transform the defense industry. I’m going to figure out where all of our weaknesses are and how I can hyperscale to actually provide defense for this country, this country that I love.”

It’s like, okay, well, I loved his point about building effectively modular weapons. He made this point that a tremendous amount of weapons in the United States are built in super-hyper-specific facilities that need to be built from the ground up exactly to the specification of that weapon. So the ability to scale production of these weapons is very limited.

What he’s trying to do with Anduril is basically say, “I’m going to build weapons that share parts and can be built on basically any manufacturing pipeline. I’m going to go look at all of the car-manufacturing warehouses that exist in the United States, and I’m going to make sure that the weapons that we build can be built on these machines.”

Yeah, like missiles can be built in the Ford factory.

Correct. And that, I think, is something that we missed anyway.

12. Crypto Valuation & Commodity Debate

I think that’s genius. Bullish, and let’s try to figure out a way to get long that. But back to crypto for a second: I still want to invest in crypto. I believe in crypto. I guess, since I know there’s no hope of a short-term return—in the next 3 weeks or 6 weeks—in anything in crypto, our minds are wandering a bit outside of crypto.

I guess I just don’t know. Here’s my question: This is what I’m struggling with right now, and it’s not entirely clear which path to take. On the one hand, investments like Anduril, SpaceX, maybe your Apptronik investment—you want to talk about it a little bit?—kind of compete with Bitcoin for me because they have the same long-term time frame. Bitcoin is liquid and amazing, and I have max conviction in Bitcoin.

On a shorter-term time frame, these trades don’t compute. If you’re buying Anduril in the private market, you’re paying a 30% premium over what it’s actually worth, and if you want to get out, you’re getting out at a 30% discount. So the transaction costs are huge. These aren’t short-term trades; over the long run, they compete with Bitcoin.

In the short run, there’s this really interesting debate that we should probably address about crypto because, on paper at least, we’re crypto podcasters and crypto traders. We’re just traders. We’re trying to figure out where the alpha is and discuss it live with you guys.

There’s this really interesting debate going on on CT right now, which we should probably talk about. I guess Haseeb Qureshi and Santiago Santos debated L1 valuation: Is ETH a commodity? Should it be valued? How should it be valued? Santiago is saying it should be valued on price-to-sales, that crypto can’t justify its current valuation based on the number of users that crypto has. Most of the TAM is stablecoins.

Santiago is basically talking his book, but rightly so, suggesting some very real reasons why the entire non-Bitcoin crypto space might just collapse. If that happens, there’s a trade there. We should get out of our “I can’t be short anything” mentality and be short if the space is about to get—

No, I 100% agree. I think the next big trade in crypto is to short all of these L1s.

Short—just short. But Sonic—

You need to manage shorts very effectively. Basically, the only way that I enter shorts is when that asset is up a substantial amount from its most recent base.

In commodities, I would short something that was smoothly trending down and had no reason to reverse trend. Aptos/BTC is a great pair to look at.

In crypto, you get these short squeezes pretty regularly. And so, for example, I would feel more comfortable shorting. The way that I short in crypto is, if something is trading at $5 and then it goes to $2, I short if it goes back to $3.

I would feel a lot more comfortable shorting it at $3 after it's bounced from $2 to $3 than shorting it at $4.

Obviously, you believe in wicks getting filled. I believe that I want to short inorganic price action. When I see that, I'm not only getting alpha from the trend, but I'm getting alpha from the inorganic price action—the short squeeze of that asset.

That's what I've been talking about. I've been talking about doing this with Worldcoin for a long time. The reality of the situation, unfortunately, is that flows are all that matter. You can make an argument over and over that L1s can exist together. They're cities. They'll have monetary premium attached to them.

The reality is not true. It's not true, and it's been proven out over and over. Solana has gone sideways for 5 years. It's gone up a lot in those 5 years and down a lot in those 5 years, but basically, from the peak in 2021 to today, it's gone sideways.

The ETH chart has gone sideways since 2020, right? Or since 2021 as well—4 years. Even the absolute cream of the crop, the best and most-used L1s, have effectively gone sideways for 4 years despite massive growth. And they're legal now. How can anything else compete, right? These things actually did get some level of monetary premium associated with them.

I don't think another L1 is going to be able to accomplish that. So, I think Santi's actually right. I think people take umbrage sometimes with the way that he says things. But I would also get annoyed if I was constantly being berated by people that didn't understand what was going on.

Yeah.

I don't blame Santi for that at all. But I think people took issue with the way that he said it almost more than what he was saying itself.

But he got more engagement because of the way he said it, so I understand why.

He got a lot more engagement because of the way that he said it.

Basically, the reason why I agree with him is not because I think that most of you wouldn't make it through the first-round interview at a hedge fund, a private-equity shop, or a bank. I did, so I guess I qualify.

Congratulations, Jo.

Thank you, Avi. I guess I can comment on this because I had a pretty elite TradFi career. I think what he's suggesting is that at a low price, when the crypto space is worth a few billion or tens of billions, you can go venture-capital mode and bet on the future, and price is a multiple of the future dream state.

But at multiple trillions, you should probably look for some real, auditable financial progress in the space. I kind of agree with him. The debate that I've been having with people online is: Is ETH a commodity? Is Bitcoin a commodity? Because people are saying it's not—Bitcoin is a store of wealth. So, yeah.

This is very interesting, Jonah, because people are saying to me, “Oh, Santi's wrong. You can't use price-to-sales. That's a securities valuation metric, and look, the CFTC has classified ETH and Bitcoin as commodities, so value them on a commodities basis.” I'm like—

Bullshit.

And my response is, that's the dumbest thing you could possibly say. It's all ETH bulls that are saying this—the dumbest thing you could say if you're bullish on these assets, because on a commodities basis, all this crypto stuff is worthless, right?

A commodity is about supply and demand, and there is an infinite supply of tokens and dwindling organic demand. So, where does demand for crypto come from?

Demand comes from people that want to gamble.

Demand comes from people that want to store their wealth in something. That is a form of gambling, and then demand comes from usage of the platform.

Like gas.

Yeah.

Which is effectively what needs to become the biggest part of crypto valuations, because the gambling and the store of wealth, I think, will only work for Bitcoin. I don't think you can have multiple competing currencies at that level.

Correct.

Bitcoin is money. So, Bitcoin, let's set it aside. Bitcoin is as much of a commodity as gold, because both gold and Bitcoin are money. People call Bitcoin digital gold. I prefer to call Bitcoin Gen Z gold or millennial gold. It's the gold 2.0 for young people, right?

You can memorize 24 words and carry billions of dollars across a border with that information in your head. That's a more efficient form of gold for young people. But ultimately, I don't think that ETH is a commodity.

I think it's a company personally.

Yeah. It's a DAO that sells blockspace.

Correct. Well, the value of the DAO comes from the usage of the platform and is directly tied to the value of the platform, basically, because there's a burn. And that's the thing that I think ETH did that was really smart.

13. Fees, Infinite Blockspace & Shorting

They instituted a burn for gas. ETH can be deflationary at some point in the future if activity picks up enough to make it deflationary. The issue with ETH, I think, is that when they try to make it faster, when they work with L2s, and when they introduce ecosystems like Base and Arbitrum on top of it, it actually cannibalizes that underlying value.

It makes it harder for ETH to generate a return for its investors because you're not burning the same amount in fees. The fees are going down by 100x, and people are using these other platforms. The issue with ETH, I think, is that we haven't figured out a way in crypto in general to directly increase fees on the platform without degrading the experience of using that platform.

Either you have really high fees and huge competition for blockspace because blockspace is scarce and slow, or you have a tremendous amount of really fast transactions and a lot of blockspace. But in that case, fees are going to come down, because the activity on these platforms is twofold. It is very needed, so there are a lot of ways to make a lot of money on ETH.

Obviously, people will be able to pay a substantial amount of money to make that money. If you can make $1 million a year on ETH, maybe you're willing to pay up to $200,000 in fees.

Yeah, right. So, there's a small, select group of people that will pay extremely high fees even if blockspace is scarce. That was actually what was happening for a few years there. ETH was generating a tremendous amount in fees because people were willing to spend $500 to get their transactions through.

Idiots were willing to spend $500 to buy a $150 NFT when ETH was trading at $4,700.

People were willing to do that. Today, nobody is willing to do that.

Nobody will ever be willing to do that again, basically, because blockspace is now near-infinite for people.

Yeah. And that's really the issue, which is why I've been saying for a while that one of the greatest trades that I see right now in the market, risk-adjusted, is just going long on everything that makes money and isn't facing horrendous supply issues. We're talking about how Hyperliquid is facing a horrendous supply issue right now.

But go long anything that makes money and short all the L1s against it, and that's probably a pretty good risk-adjusted trade.

Yeah. Would you short anything that loses money against Bitcoin? If you were—I saw you were worried about short squeezes—if you could verify that there isn't a lot of OI and there aren't a lot of shorts—

100%. Then you're—let's just take my favorite—

Dead horse to beat.

Go look at the chart of Optimism and Arbitrum versus Bitcoin. Just go look at it. I think smooth, downward-sloping charts are safe to short. There are still billions of dollars to extract in shorts in this industry because these things are going to zero.

You can't have a short squeeze if there are no shorts. I think right now they're just trending lower because supply is hitting the market in spot space, not because new shorts are piling in that are going to get squeezed.

The supply thing on HYPE is that the team's unlocking and seemingly selling.

There was a comment, and I was a little skeptical of this narrative. HYPE is really underperforming the market right now, and so I think it's just best to step out of the way, wait for things to clear, and then you can get back in, because I do think—

You sound like me now, all of a sudden. Wait for it to bottom out and then start to rally again before you can get—

Yeah, I think I came around to that thesis just because you got an indication. Look, Bitcoin was up and HYPE was down. That tells you everything that you need to know about what's going on right now, which is that there's a lot of supply overhang.

Unfortunately, there's also probably a lull in trading. I haven't looked at HYPE's burn recently, but December tends to be a quiet time, and I could see people just slowing down their trading. I have new competition that's coming out.

Yeah, Aster, Lighter. That's tough out there. But I hope you guys are doing all right. Any questions from the audience before we wrap things up?

14. Answering Chat Questions

What do you think about HYPE versus Lighter?

I think that Lighter is cheaper than HYPE, as long as there's liquidity, which there is right now. I was looking at the volume charts, and Lighter's volume is very uniform, which suggests a lot of wash trading and not real volume right now, which is very common. I'm not saying that they're doing anything wrong. I'm just saying that it's indicative of potentially being that. I think that a lot of exchanges do that in the beginning and then grow into real volume later.

The 2 things that you have to look at with an exchange are what fees you're paying and then what the effective fees are based on the liquidity when you're actually trading on that exchange. Right now, I think that Lighter is probably going to be able to take some liquidity from HYPE, but I don't necessarily think that's going to be a long-term thing.

I view HYPE as the Uniswap. I basically view it as a Uniswap. There was a period of time where Uniswap performed very poorly because all of these other DEXs came out and competed with Uniswap. Uniswap went down and all these other things went up, like SushiSwap. Then, 2 years later, Uniswap is still around and these other things aren't.

That's what I think is kind of happening with HYPE now: We might find ourselves in a 6- to 12-month period where HYPE will underperform as people run these zero-fee programs and incentives. Once those incentives and zero fees run out, HYPE still has, I think—

The same thing's happening with Aerodrome, actually. I think all of these things—HYPE and Aerodrome—are a good dip buy if you believe in the long-term thesis, which for HYPE is like, hey, a—

The issue is it could go down like 60%.

Yeah, I know. So wait for it to bottom out and then start rallying, because we're not in a bull market for altcoins. We're in a raging bear market for altcoins.

But speaking of the bear market, we're in a market where, obviously, long term in crypto, a perp DEX with no KYC has value, especially one with traction like Hyperliquid. In a long-term crypto scenario, getting long AERO is basically a proxy for transactions occurring on Ethereum, which, for me, is the Aerodrome token, AERO. That's a good idea. You just can't catch the falling knife.

Once the knife stops falling and you get huge—like, to your point last week—huge volume bars, and then crickets, and then it starts to tick up a little bit, that's when you can start to feel comfortable probably buying HYPE and buying Aerodrome. These are longer-term themes.

Somebody else just above was asking, “What's the best career path in crypto?” I think that's a really relevant question because there's this guy on Twitter who published an essay, “I Just Wasted 8 Years of My Life in Crypto.” I don't know if you saw it. Did you see that?

No. What was this?

Basically, he's a guy who tried to create some kind of perp trading engine. It didn't work out. The token—it's called AO—just went down only, and now he's rage-quitting crypto. He basically published this essay, like many people in crypto are feeling. Even OGs are publishing this essay by selling their OG Bitcoin.

He published an essay saying, “I think Bitcoin's going to $1 million, but I don't believe in the space anymore. I used to believe in the Ayn Randian, libertarian ideals of decentralizing finance, but now it's just turned into one big casino, and all I did was help perpetuate gambling and extractive transaction fees. I wasted my life. I made a lot of money, but I wasted my time pushing toward an ideal that is flawed.”

I guess with that essay out there, it went super viral. It got like 2 million views, which is a lot for a post about crypto.

Yeah, but he said he made a lot of money.

Yes. And he also said Bitcoin is going to $1 million.

So he's still bullish. He just doesn't believe in the ethos of the space anymore.

So, to Simon Shockey's point here, what's the best career path in crypto? Against that backdrop, what would you recommend to people interested in working in crypto? Is there a career path in the space, or is it just buy Bitcoin and do something else?

I think that there are really 3 things that you can do here. You can either be an investor—you can be an active investor. You can be somebody that wants to go into the space: You want to trade, you want to be a VC investor, or you want to get active as a professional investor in crypto. That is a career path.

The other career path is being a builder. You think, “Okay, I'm going to go join a company, start my own company, or try to build a product in crypto.” What I would suggest to everyone going down that path specifically is: Don't compare crypto to crypto. If you want to be a builder, look at the full, broad set of tech companies. Look at the full, broad set of startups that you could possibly join.

The whole opportunity world in terms of AI, tech, and crypto. Look at all of that and try to figure out a role that you would enjoy. Don't necessarily pigeonhole yourself into—

Yeah. Not like, “Oh, crypto is ripping, so I need to build mortgages on-chain.”

Correct. Or, “Oh, somebody built a successful DEX on ETH, so I'll build one on NEAR.”

15. Ads (Kraken Pro, Peaq)

Yeah, exactly. And then the third thing is do something else with your life and then just invest in crypto because you believe in it. Just put your paycheck in every now and then. That's, I think, where today I would probably lean. If you already have a career, go down that path. If you don't already have a career—if you're 19, 20, or 22—go take that risk. Go try to be a builder.

If you want to be an investor, my best advice to you is to just start writing articles on Twitter. If you listen to this podcast, write an article. I read it, and if it's good, I will retweet it. I will hype you up. I'm happy to support you.

Same.

Go put your thoughts out there. The best way to figure out if somebody is intelligent is if they have a well-maintained Substack or a well-maintained Twitter. You read it and think to yourself, “Wow, this person has original thought. This person is a real thinker.” That is the best way to get hired and actually start a career. You can do that early.

I started a newsletter when I was 22, right out of college. That newsletter ended up getting 20,000 subscribers, and that's how I jump-started my entire career in crypto: People were like, “Oh man, this guy's not stupid.” They thought I was smart, but they thought I was not stupid.

That's a common story, actually. The week you were out on your personal leave, we had Max Bronstein on the podcast, and he, I think, started writing for Bitcoin Magazine.

Yeah, he did.

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It's a pretty common path. Writing is the path to being a professional investor. I would say if you're going to build in crypto, you basically have to assess—again, Santiago, regardless of his phrasing of things, his influence, or my thinking on this—you basically have to assess whether or not crypto beats the existing solution.

Correct. You just have to look at it as, “Am I joining a good company?” Yeah.

Does this company have a competitive edge? And crypto is part of that competitive edge.

Or I guess what you can do is back Shima Capital, scam, be early, or scam. Scamming is definitely very lucrative. There are a lot of scammers out there. We're wrapping up on this one, but I want to do a podcast one day, Jonah, where we just—

Expose the underbelly of the scamming world of crypto.

Oh yeah, there's a lot there. I just don't want to be killed.

Yeah, me neither. It actually frustrates me a little because there's so much nastiness in the deep. Zcash is up 21% today. I think it probably has to do with crime.

There's nothing else. It's not improbable that there might be an overlay of, “Oh, this is the reason why it moved. That's the reason why it moved.” The reality is, it probably moved because somebody just scored a big hack. Maybe they shoved 30 million bucks into Zcash because they're trying to hide that hack. This stuff happens all the time.

I mean, yeah. It's either a hack.

It's also a point to be bullish on Zcash: now that it's in the public consciousness, every time there's a large hack, people are just going to shove their money into Zcash.

Getting long crime is a great trade.

Crime is never going to stop. Quick hot take, Jonah: What about the quantum threat?

There is no quantum threat. As soon as that happens, the Bitcoin developer community will just fork Bitcoin to a post-quantum algorithm.

Do it in advance. But yeah—

Or even after it happens, you can just fork it to a post-quantum world.

Oh boy. Yeah, maybe that's a sign that it's time to go. I think it might be time to call it. We're getting the hook.