Is This The Everything Rally?

1. Is This The Everything Rally?

In a bubble. My personal philosophy is that it's always better to sell early than to sell late. The reason that it's easier to sell early than to sell late is both psychological and also just general market technicals. It's always staircase up, elevator down. I know what you're about to say. I know what everyone's about to say, Avi: “This feels like an elevator up. What are you talking about?” Trust me, when you see what happens on the way down, you're going to realize that we're on the stairs.

Escalator up, elevator down.

It's like—okay, maybe elevator up, skydive down, whatever. Use whatever analogy you want. All I can tell you is it's not going to be pretty.

It is now 10:01 p.m. Markets are ripping: NASDAQ is up 1.43%, the S&P is up 1%, and the panickers are on suicide watch, as they always are. This is what I like to call, Jonah, a lockout rally. A lockout rally is when people get bearish and decide to sell everything at the bottom, and psychologically they've sold it for a good reason.

Sometimes you sell just because of price action. If you sell just because of price action, it's pretty easy to get back in. This is common trader psychology, which is why I'll offer a suggestion for how to fix this and not get bearish in about 2 minutes. The way that you succeed is by forgetting things—forgetting what you've done in the past—and making sure that every day when you wake up, you make a decision based on the current data.

A lot of people can't do that. I can't do it effectively all the time. Stanley Druckenmiller can't do it. Jonah can't do it. None of us can do it. But you really need to try, because what ends up happening is, if you sell based on price action and price action alone, you can get back in. The price reverted, so you can say, “Okay, the price reverted.” But if you sell for what you believe is a fundamental reason—the fundamental reason being that the Iran war will escalate, the United States is losing the war, the Strait of Hormuz is blocked, and this will cause a global recession—when your story that you've created in your head doesn't play out, most people just double down.

Most people say, “Okay, well, it will happen, and this rally is a bear-market rally. This is just a blip.” But the reality is, we're at all-time highs now. So now you have a double whammy, Jonah. Not only do you have people who sold because of what they call a “fundamental reason,” which is the Iran war, but you also have the psychological pain of buying at all-time highs. Nobody likes to buy at all-time highs. But it is very important to remember that buying all-time highs and buying strength is one of the best, most repeatable strategies that you can use in the markets over and over and over again.

One of the reasons that it works is because it's so psychologically difficult for most people to take advantage of it. That's really the whole reason: you can find an edge by betting against people's psychological biases, and this is a big psychological bias. When I'm looking at the markets, I'm seeing a few things here. I'm seeing, finally, Bitcoin above $81K, which we want to talk about. Altcoins are ripping left and right. I mean, look at TON, up 24% today. It's probably going to keep going, and we're going to talk about that later in the podcast.

Everything is looking pretty rosy. We're getting incredible moves from Intel and AMD. AMD crushed earnings. SanDisk was an amazing buy post-earnings, because it went down 10%, then rebounded, and is now up 35% in a week. What we're seeing across the board is the narrative of the AI bubble getting pricked and popped, because revenues are catching up.

Bubbles tend to form when perception outpaces fundamentals. That's when bubbles form: when the perception of reality is far ahead of what's actually happening. What we have right now is a situation where the perception and the dreams are actually behind what's happening. I think it was 1.5% of the population that actively pays $20 a month for an AI subscription.

Everybody I know pays for an AI subscription, or 3 or 5.

Because we're in a bubble. We're in a tiny little bubble in a tiny little world, and there's a big world out there.

Yeah.

2. Latest On Iran

I'm feeling quite good about the markets. In general, this has not been a normal week, Jonah. This has been a crazy week. If I look at my portfolio—let me check that—I think this week alone it's up like 15% in my stock portfolio. Okay, 10%, not 15%, but still up 10% in a week. This tells you that people are still massively sidelined and that you, as a prudent investor, need to start looking at what's happening.

We just announced that we have a 14-pager, courtesy of Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff. I like that the Iranians finally agreed to negotiate with the Jews. We sent J.D. Vance. You know what they said? They said—

He's not Jewish enough.

Not this guy. No. Bring back the Jews. Then I sent the Jews. A lot of people say I'm the best friend of the Jews. J.D. Vance was too ugly and fat to get anything done.

You know what was not on my bingo card, Avi?

Tell me.

When I was younger, Jared Kushner becoming arguably one of the greatest peacemakers—a Nobel Peace Prize candidate—of our time was not on my bingo card. I always thought of that family as New York nepo real estate wealth: a little bit smarmy, good at deals, good at venture capital, maybe good at buying skyscrapers. They're not the crew I would have expected to bring together the Abraham Accords, Lebanon, and possibly Iran. This is pretty wild.

I just want to make a couple of comments on what you just said, though, because you had a lot of valuable content in there. The first thing is that being sidelined because of fundamental risk to your capital is a very rational reason to lighten up. My portfolio is also at all-time highs. I'm feeling pretty proud of myself, which usually precedes a slap in the face.

But for now, I’m going to celebrate here in my room with the flamingo wallpaper, feeling happy. I think basically what’s going on is what I’ve been hammering on on this podcast for quite some time, which is: fade everything except socialism.

Why? Well, let’s take it back to, as I usually do on this pod, a commodities analogy. Whenever there’s a complex situation with an open-ended formula—the equation whose output is the price of oil has many inputs, obviously, same with gas, same with power—you could become overwhelmed by it, or you could just become reductionist and try to say, “What’s the pivot point under which this whole question about my position really becomes binary?”

For me, the question is, in terms of the current market—and this goes back exactly to what you’re saying—are the causes of the sell-off temporary and transient, or are they structural, fundamental, and long-term? In commodity-speak, usually you want to think of things as being a supply shock, a demand shock, a structural supply trend, or a structural demand trend.

Trends you can ride; shocks you fade, right? You can get absolutely carted out on a stretcher fading a shock if you get in too early or if you fade it with the wrong trade expression, which is why it’s so dangerous. It’s also why people like the best expressers of trades and the best timers of trades end up becoming centimillionaires or billionaires in commodities markets, because that’s where all the money is. Then, just surviving and riding trends over time amplifies that money.

Basically, I looked at Iran, as did you, and we were like, “This isn’t going to matter forever, right? This isn’t World War III.” Okay, it’s a shock, not a trend. Fade it. Did I fade it a little too early? Sure. But did I fade it with the right trade expression? Hell yes.

No, I didn’t sell a bunch of $90 calls on crude oil. I went and bought assets I like, including SPY, computer-chip stocks, and all this other stuff, and now they’re all just blasting through all-time highs. Even the stuff that I didn’t do so well buying is still pretty close to all-time highs. So I’m sort of, at the risk of sounding obnoxious, at this point I would like to do a victory lap and say: fade the blips, ride the trend.

Now, what does a supply shock look like in commodities? It looks like Ukraine—a bunch of oil disappears for a temporary amount of time. Iran is just another temporary disappearance of oil. What does a trend look like? An increase in supply would be like 2014, when shale technology really brought a lot of oil to the market in a way that wasn’t temporary. It’s like, this oil is here to stay. It kind of broke OPEC. Prices went from $110 Brent during the Libya era down to $30 Brent in 2016, $27 Brent.

A demand trend would be like China suddenly lifting a billion people out of poverty in the early 2000s. There was a lot of new, fresh demand that wasn’t going to go away associated with that trend. So, to me, the only bearish mega-trend for risk assets would be a sort of global sweep of political mandates for redistribution—political mandates that say it’s okay for governments to take people’s money and give it to people who are needier than the people who have the money. That would be pretty bearish for assets. I don’t see that coming for a while, and I can’t think of any other really bearish trends to ride.

All I can think of are bullish trends to ride. If 1% of the world’s population pays for a constant, never-resting PhD intern to work for them all the time, what if that number goes to 5% or 10%? What does that do to SPY? What does that do to Micron stock? What does it do to Nvidia stock? That’s a bullish trend, right?

You just ask yourself: imagine yourself as a surfer. Is this a wave where I’m just going to paddle in, stand up on the board, and ride it, or does this wave look a little unridable and temporary, and maybe I should duck-dive through it? Iran was one of those where you duck-dive, and AI and all the other turbo-capitalist trends in the backdrop feel like you paddle in, stand on the board, and have the time of your life. What do you think?

No, I 100% agree with everything that you just said, and I think it’s important as a trader to always understand that you need to set your time horizons effectively in order to trade well. A lot of discussions in trading where somebody disagrees with another person often just come down to a difference in horizons.

I can say to somebody, “What do you mean? I’m not bearish on the Iran war at all.” The market goes down 10% from peak to trough.

Trough, right?

Trough. Sorry. Trough. I feel like Candace Owens is going to be clipped. Somebody clip that. I feel like Candace Owens. Somebody’s going to compile all the times that I’ve said words incorrectly.

It’s okay. I’m here to spell-check you. That’s what older people do.

Yeah. No, I’m just so young and silly, Jonah. You can’t expect me to get everything right all the time. Peak to trough.

Side question. No, I was going somewhere. Don’t distract me. I have ADHD. If you distract me, I’m going to completely forget my point.

And it’s all time horizon, right? You can say, “Yes, I’m bearish right now.” This is what a lot of people on Twitter don’t get, which is why they’ll often come after traders. They’ll be like, “Oh, you said you were bullish.” I’m like, “Yes, I was bullish. I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you exactly what time period.”

3. AI Supercycle & Exponential Change

By the way, we did say 4 to 6 weeks was a time period in which the Iran war would probably be over. There wasn’t really any meaningful insight there other than just believing that Trump probably had a plan, and it turned out that he did, and it was reasonably concluded within 4 to 6 weeks. Obviously, there are some loose ends to tie up.

4. New Intro/New Vibes

Long story short, you have to set your time horizons. Right now, we are in a moment of exponential change. The entire world is shifting, and in 2 to 3 years the world is going to look very different from how it looks today. The amount of AI tooling that we’re going to have, the amount of compute that is going to be built out, the energy demands, and the global economy are all going to be very different in 3 years than they are today. My take on this is that you just need to ride that mega-trend and find opportunities to come in.

At some point, I do believe very wholeheartedly that this does turn into a bubble. We are both practical individuals. We know that when you have new technology, there’s a great book, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital. Great book. There is always a period of time where financial capital lags behind the technological revolution and doesn’t invest enough in it.

Right now, for example, we are seeing every single memory stock, every single CPU stock, and every single GPU stock—Nvidia, Intel, AMD, all of them, SanDisk—they’re all crushing earnings.

And the reason is that the Street doesn’t understand or doesn’t appreciate exactly what’s happening. They don’t have a good grasp on it. People are underestimating the impact of AI on the economy, still, even today.

You and me, and probably most of the listeners to this show, live in a bubble where everyone around us is well aware of what’s happening. They understand that we’re at what Andrew Kang coined the exponential horizon, which is that things are going to change very quickly, very fast. But the rest of the world hasn’t caught up yet.

I want to get to a very concrete point, and you can get out your notebook and write this down. The first time that there is an earnings miss from one of these companies will mark a massive downturn in this sector. That’s because it means that we finally overinvested or finally became overly optimistic relative to the fundamentals.

You have to look at really 3 things that could end this rally. One is that inflation comes roaring back, that oil stays elevated high enough that we’re going to have to raise rates. Wars are going to have to come in there, and that would suck. I don’t think it’s very likely for that to happen in the short term.

Let’s say oil stays elevated for the next 2 months. Inflation starts creeping up. I think we’re at 3.3%. Maybe, if we go to 4%, we’re fucked, in my personal opinion. Consumer spending in the top 10% collapses, which is not happening because the stock market’s going up, which means consumer spending is probably going to go up.

The rich, contrary to popular belief, do not have that much of a higher savings rate than the general public. This is a misconception that was debunked. The third thing is that, let’s say we finally get overinvested in the market. Things go up 2x from here. Suddenly, SanDisk grows at 10%, but the Street has bet on it growing 20%, and we finally get that pullback because that is an indication that we’ve overinvested in the market.

Until then, you’re probably supposed to be long AI, everything related to AI. You’re supposed to be long energy, and you’re supposed to be long crypto, but we’ll get to that.

There are so many things happening in the crypto market that are just incredible right now, including TAO ripping, Bitcoin not selling off on this Saylor news, and some big VC raise. Then I want to talk about the Korean market too, but go ahead. I want to hear your take.

Yeah, I was just going to say one quick point on your earnings blowouts. You're saying it's because things are getting quite hot and crazy, they're going to stay that way for a while, and people just don't understand, which I agree with. But I think the more important feature is that when earnings miss or beat, they're beating or missing something. What is that something? It's the projection of a human who works for a very old-school legacy institution.

When it's, "Oh, my God, Micron stock beats earnings," it's beating the published prediction of CJ Muse at Cantor Fitzgerald, Timothy Arcuri at UBS, or Blaine Curtis at Jefferies. I didn't even know that UBS was still a bank after the fucking crazy blowup that they had. Who are these people? Why do their opinions matter?

UBS. I mean, basically, my point here, Avi, is that these guys have an incentive structure, right? These dudes earn 6 to 7 figures a year to sit at these old banks. They live in Connecticut, commute into the city, go into Grand Central Station, walk to work with the rest of the haircuts, and do their life and their predictions. Their predictions are not—there's no reward for bold moves here.

If you're at the top of the projections for the earnings pack and you miss, if you're an outlier and you're wrong, you get fired because your investors hate you. If you're just middle of the road, middle of the pack, and Micron stock drastically outperforms the pack, then those guys who I just referenced, along with their colleagues and gals, get to collectively come out and say, "Wow, what a crazy market we're in. This is wild. Unbelievable. We were overweight."

You can be overweight and be wrong by 50%, and you can still claim you're right. So that's how research analysts work. They have this really weird, perverse incentive structure.

The opportunity that sets up for you and me as retail investors is that the big passive pools of trillions of dollars listen to these guys, because those passive pools are controlled by people who also get fired if they're wrong, but don't get fired if they're wrong as part of the pack. They get fired if they're wrong for being an outlier, not if they're wrong as part of a pack. That incentive structure basically creates this mega opportunity for people who actually have a little bit of risk tolerance, can think outside the box, can be outliers, and have outlier projections.

And I also think that, to your point about the first time one of these things misses, you should start lightening up pretty quickly. I completely agree with that, because the army of suits I referenced earlier, who create these earnings projections that get beaten or missed every quarter by these big semiconductor companies, are going to be riding the trend. The herd is just Group Think Inc. That herd is just going to be—

Group Think Inc. I like that. Can we clip that as just, "It's just Group Think Inc."?

Yeah, Group Think Inc. is going to be like—

Don't join Group Think Inc.

Group Think Inc. is going to be riding the trend and betting that earnings continue to crush long after they shouldn't be crushing anymore. That may be years from now, but you can bet that Group Think Inc. is not going to be the first to get bearish, Avi. That's my point.

I think that's one mega pocket of opportunity for guys like you and me and other people out there. Just like an earnings beat, a crazy earnings crush is more the analyst industry's fault and less some wild, transformational thing about human society consuming more computer chips than it used to. The estimates should be a lot higher, but nobody wants to be an outlier, is what I'm trying to say.

Yeah. And so I think that entire psychology—you articulated it extremely well. That is why I'm using that as a barometer for when the bubble is going to, quote unquote, pop. That actually is very important, and I do think that you probably can't wait for it to get exactly there. You probably need to wait for them to only beat earnings by a little bit.

In a bubble, my personal philosophy is that it's always better to sell early than to sell late. One day you wake up, and the reason that it's easier to sell early than to sell late is both psychological and just general market technical. It's always staircase up, elevator down.

Escalator up, elevator down.

That's—it's like, okay, maybe elevator up, skydive down, whatever analogy you want. All I can tell you is it's not going to be pretty. It's going to be extremely ugly, and you're not going to like it. You're not going to sleep well. Your hair is going to start falling out. So I just think it's better early.

I somehow got really lucky. I'm 31 years old. I just turned 31 a few weeks ago, I guess, 2 weeks ago, and I still got some hair. It's real. It's not a wig.

Nice. I got fake hair up top. I got a hair transplant when I was 36.

You got a hair transplant? Wait, you went to Turkey?

No, just the south of France, where we spend summers.

It's the best 6 grand you—who gets a hair transplant in the south of France? What are you?

I'm a guy with a French wife and a connection to France. Put it this way, dude: you could die completely bald or die with all your hair and $6,000 less. To me, it seemed like the most obvious trade.

I didn't factor in the 10 minutes of excruciating, dire agony at the beginning, when they put 1,000 shots of Novocaine into your scalp. That was pretty terrifying and unexpected. I was like, "We have hair. Oh, my God. This is the worst moment of my life." But after that, I just fell asleep, woke up, watched Netflix, and they just sort of harvested and planted. It's like agriculture, basically.

5. Download On The Korean Market

I don't know how we got on this topic, but the point here—sorry, the point very specifically is that what I'm seeing right now is not massive signs of froth. I am starting to see some bubble-like behavior in the markets, very specifically the Korean market, and I want to talk about the Korean market.

I don't know if you saw, but through Interactive Brokers you can now trade Korean tickers. Korean tickers are effectively a string of numbers. So when you go and look at the Korean market, you'll look at Samsung, and Samsung will be something like 1834267. You're buying stock 1834267. Very silly.

Oh, how Korean.

Yeah, very, very Korean. I think they do it to stop you from having tribal associations with these companies and all that. It makes it a little gang-style. That's what they want.

Samsung is up 14%. SK Hynix is up 10.6%. We're looking right now at a market that is going absolutely bananas. The question is why?

If you go back 1 month, everyone was very bullish on—or bearish on—Korea. The reason they were bearish on Korea is because Korea was uniquely affected by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. All of its energy costs were going to go through the roof.

But what does Korea have? Korea has memory. It produces packaging. It produces racks. It produces all of the unglamorous infrastructure that makes AI run.

SK Hynix recently said that chip demand is exceeding manufacturing capacity. These people are making a lot of money. Q1 revenue rose 198% to 52.6 trillion won, and operating profit reached 37.6 won.

This is because the AI trade is taking off, and people are realizing that all these Korean companies—the Korean market, basically, has 44% of the KOSPI by value related to these types of stocks that are producing all this memory apparatus and all the infrastructure apparatus for AI.

I started this rant by saying I'm seeing signs of froth. Why am I saying that? We've seen leverage—margin loans in the Korean market double over the last year. That's a little scary. It's the same way that when you trade Bitcoin, if a move is driven exclusively by open interest, you start to get really nervous.

Is there real buying, or is it just gambling? Are these people long-term holders of this asset, or are they just going to chuck it at the first sign of weakness? Is it a shock or a trend?

Right. And the thing is that when you have a lot of leverage in the system, you can have massive divergence between fundamentals and price in both directions. If we far outstrip price to the upside—if revenue rises 19.8% but the stock goes up 500%...

60% because of leverage on the way down, obviously, you're going to lose a lot. So I'm watching the leverage in Korea as sort of a barometer for how to approach trading in general in the US stock market as well. If they get over their skis, you might see, because of the leverage contained in that market, that it might be a leading indicator. I'm not saying that if the Korean market comes down, you should get out of every position that you have in the US market, but I'm watching that market for a leverage unwind. If we get, you know, a 15%–20% down day in the Korean market, maybe that is equivalent to saying, hey, that's a good proxy for people in the US also being over their skis, and you have to watch out. So I'm really looking at the Korean market.

What's kind of funny is that CT got into trading the Korean market at the beginning of this year, and everyone's like, “Oh, when CT gets into something, that means it's over.”

Not true.

Not anymore. It used to be true. Not anymore. The reason is because everyone else is slow. CT catches trends and narratives. Crypto traders, memecoin traders, you trend guys—you are talented at chasing narratives.

Unfortunately, that is the way this market is going. This market is just all about reading headlines, reacting to headlines, and then allocating capital based on short-term trends. If you're actively trading, that has been a phenomenal strategy. The reality is that the rest of the world is not used to doing this. We're used to doing this. We're used to punting NEAR because they put out an AI blog post that said, “We're going to really ramp up AI,” and it doesn't mean anything and it's total nonsense, but we buy it anyway and sell it 4 days later. This is kind of what's happening in this market now, and it's really incredible.

I have a slightly different angle on the Korean market. Korea is basically overweight oil 2.0, which is semiconductor stocks—SK Hynix, Samsung, et cetera—and they're short oil. Oil ripped. Semiconductor stocks are ripping. So the oil shock is temporary, so that's going to subside. The memory rally: will it subside or not?

We talked a little bit about this on MTS, but I'll just reiterate it here for our listeners, and then we should probably give an update on what happened with our podcast and why everything looks different. Basically, this is sort of a rule of thumb in the memory market: when forward 12 months of physical chip demand is, let's call it, unmet—meaning the market is undersupplied by 5%–10%—the price of memory doubles. When it's undersupplied by 15%–20%, the price of memory triples. When it's undersupplied by 25%–30%, memory prices quadruple.

Right now, the memory supply-and-demand balance for the forward 12 months is undersupplied by somewhere between 45% and 50%. So this is, who knows, like a 5x-plus—I would say a 400%–700% return—that we're expecting in profits for these things within the chip market. To me, I think Samsung and SK Hynix are ridiculously underpriced. Even though SK Hynix is already up 500% off the lows of last year, I think it will rally another 500%, or it could. I think you're safe for at least the first 50%–100% rally from here. I think it's an easy 2-bagger.

Yeah, just to clarify, I'm not worried about the market at all, in any way, shape, or form, right now. In fact, I'm so bullish I can't see straight, to use a term that Jonah used to say all the time before Bitcoin went down 70%.

50%.

But still bullish anyway.

Just wounded.

Bullish. I can't see straight. I'm so wounded. If you're an OG listener, you know that term. Raise your hand in the chat if you're an OG and you remember that.

Anyway, where was I going with this? I'm not bearish. I'm saying I'm so bullish that I am constantly on the lookout for reasons not to be bullish, because I personally find it very uncomfortable to be this bullish constantly. I'm trying to generate a list for our listeners of things they should keep in mind and look at when they're thinking about how to exit these positions, because the reality is you haven't made money until you've sold.

I feel this way with Intel. I'll give you a story. I've been talking about Intel for a long time. I've been very bullish on Intel. I put a substantial amount of my portfolio into it, which is why this year has been so good for me. Baruch Hashem, thank you for that. I bought Intel at an average price of $42, and I sold half of my position at $70 because $70 was my original target for Intel. I had set that target when I bought it, and I'd been holding Intel since before the Iran war—or I held it through the Iran war—and I had set it prior to the rise of agents.

I knew that agents were a thing. I understood the concept that the rise in agents was going to lead to a massive amount of CPU demand. For those who don't know, I'll give a very quick overview of the difference between a GPU and a CPU. A CPU is a good general-purpose machine, whereas GPUs perform specialized tasks much better than CPUs.

That's wrong. Can I clarify?

Yeah, go ahead.

GPUs are generalized for the task of parallel computing, whether that's rendering graphics, inference, or training. A specialized chip is called an ASIC or a TPU, which Google uses. But GPUs are still quite general.

They're in the middle. There are ASICs, which are specialized; there are GPUs in the middle; and then there are CPUs. We could get really into this. I didn't want to really go down that rabbit hole, but basically GPUs are the best for a lot of the matrix multiplication that you need in order to run the models.

The models live on GPUs. Your ChatGPTs and Claudes of the world—the model itself is running on these GPUs, and that's why there's demand for GPUs. That's why there's more demand for compute when you're actually running the model itself. But agents are just taking the output of the model, formatting it, sending it back and forth, and communicating with you.

An agent kind of sits in the middle, where it gets an output from the model that's running on GPUs, and then it has to perform a bunch of things, like send you the output through Telegram, make an API call to your email, and format the text in the right way. All of that is most cost-efficient when done with CPUs. When you look at the world of agents blowing up, you look at the world of CPUs blowing up. Obviously, Intel produces CPUs. That's a major line of business for them.

I didn't necessarily update my priors. That's why I sold half the position at $70, because there was this explosion of AI agents and I hadn't really factored that in. So it's very important to constantly be rewriting your positions. I think if I had fully grasped that before, I probably wouldn't have sold half at $70. I'm just sharing an L with you guys. Not everybody trades perfectly. I still kept half, and I still hold half my position today, which, by the way, is now equivalent in size to the position that I held at $70 because it went up so much. But I did want to share that with you guys.

That was a great call. I wouldn't call that an L. It just maybe wasn't as much of a W as you would have wanted. You called that early. You called it dead right, and you called it publicly. So I think you deserve your flowers for that one.

6. Update On 1000x

You know what else? You know what else is ripping, Javi?

You know what else is ripping? We have 2,340 viewers live right now. The 1000x pod is ripping. Should we talk about what happened there briefly?

7. Michael Selloor

Yeah, I guess now that we have you guys held hostage and we're 41 minutes in, the people who are here probably want to know. Basically, we used to be part of Blockworks. We are no longer part of Blockworks. We love them. They did a great job producing for us for many years. But basically, we have decided in conjunction with them that it's best for us to go strike out on our own.

What we're going to try to do for you is produce far more content. We're working on something with MTS, which we can talk about, where we might end up hosting on Mondays with them. We'll host a 1000x show on their platform. I think it might be a good collaboration. But on Wednesdays and Fridays, we are going to host live streams. We're going to have more content for you.

The goal is that we're going to try to turn this into a network. Jonah and I both have had a thesis for a long time, and we kind of got our asses kicked into motion when we saw that TBPN pulled this off really well. We were thinking there is a massive opportunity to create the new-age CNBC that is social-media-native live streaming through Twitter.

We're going to be live streaming on LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok, and we're going to be clipping and pushing ourselves out there a little bit more. We are going to be introducing new shows over the course of the next year. We're hopeful that a year from now, we'll be able to stream from 8:00 a.m.

On the 1000x network, which we will be updating to a different name soon—we'll keep you abreast of that—we will be streaming from 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. every day with different topics, bringing on the best of the best in the world to talk about, whether they're top hedge fund managers or top Pokémon card traders.

I met a great SpongeBob trader, like a SpongeBob collectible trader. You might hear about that. Magic cards—basically anything.

Anything that has to do with investing and finance. Really, we're going to try to produce 3 types of content for you guys: What do you guys do with your time? What do you guys do with your money? And, hey, here's a really good story.

That's really what we're working on, and we're super excited about it. We're very grateful that you guys are listening, and to all those who are online, that you guys are along for the ride. We are super bullish on this. You can't get upside on it because we're not raising money; we're bootstrapping it.

More importantly, we're just really excited to start producing more content for you and being consistent with this. I'm turning this into a full-time job for myself, and we're going to be a lot more active with the community. We're going to blow this show up.

Basically, where I'm at with this show is, we watch TBPN, these 2 low-Rizz, milquetoast guys.

Oh, come on. Actually, I like the TBPN guys. I think—

Most importantly, Jonah, most importantly, they're not ugly. You can't be ugly in this business.

Can't be ugly.

You can't be ugly in this business. You've got to have a nice face.

Got to have a nice face.

You've got to have a nice face. So, I will say they did a great job. I don't want to talk them down.

Okay, these 2 medium-Rizz, sort-of-handsome guys, they got great guests. They were great at clipping. On their average livestream, there were like 6,000 viewers, but their clips went crazy viral, and they sold to OpenAI. I'm not sure why OpenAI bought that, but it was kind of a wake-up call for us.

Everything you've seen on the 1000x Pod up until this point—I've listened to every episode because I'm here. I love every episode, but I think we can do a lot better when we're actually all in on it the way that we are now.

Basically, what we're pioneering here is the idea that practitioners talking shop is a better way to learn how to spend your time and invest your money than the TBPN guys, who don't give me the feeling that they're actually in the arena, right? They're journalists interviewing people who are in the arena, which is cool.

You can watch sideline reporters interview NFL players after the game and be like, “What were you thinking before you made that big touchdown pass?” “I was just thinking about the team,” right? You don't get anything interesting just thinking about the past and trying to isolate the moment. You don't get the real, in-depth insight into the game versus when the 2 Kelce brothers are talking to each other. You do, right?

And that's kind of what we're doing for finance, for trading, and for trading-related, trading-adjacent things—investing. I hope I can get Greg Parker on the show, the guy who makes $30 million a year trading Magic cards out of a warehouse somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon line. I want to get people on the show who trade other stuff, not just crypto or stocks.

Basically, there's just this wide-open universe of content that the world wants to consume, and it's so rare to find traders having trading calls on a recorded line.

And so, we're going to be expanding the content to include more than just generalized discussion of what's happening in the market. We'll also talk about our frameworks, how we approach trading, and how that may help you approach trading in the future—frameworks for actually making money as opposed to just gambling it away.

One thing that really bothers me personally—this really gets under my skin, Jonah—is that as the world is getting financialized, it's actually harder to get good information on how to allocate your capital effectively. It's getting harder, not easier. The reason that it's getting harder is because there is so much noise.

It's so easy for somebody to go out there and pretend like they know something and tell you how you should invest your money. They might sound authoritative, but the reality is that they're leading you astray. You probably shouldn't be betting on the Bills or betting on the Yankees every day, right? You probably have no edge. So, how can you figure out how to generate edge? Listen to people that have actually generated edge in the past.

There are a lot of very good podcasts out there. There are podcasts that I listen to. One of my favorites is Forward Guidance, hosted by Jack Farley. That's a great podcast. I really like Ethan Choi, who's been interviewing all these top hedge fund people. There are some good podcasts out there, but there aren't enough, and I don't think they produce enough content. I'm not sure that they're as active as we will be in trying to help guide you through the process.

That's the update with the pod.

That's how we all made money.

Yep. No, don't overthink things.

8. Altseason??

Don't. It's maxing time. So, I want to talk about crypto for a second. I don't know if you guys saw, but Zcash is absolutely ripping. PONKE is absolutely ripping. Fartcoin—which only the real ones will know if you have me in notifications—I actually tweeted that I bought Fartcoin and then deleted it because I didn't want that on my timeline.

I was like, "You know what?" I deleted it after 3 seconds. I was like, "No, no, no. I can't have this on my timeline." I am very, very, very, very, very bullish on alts right now. The reason I'm very bullish on alts is that they basically have no sellers left in the market.

But what specific alts am I bullish on? I'm very bullish on Zcash because I'm actually seeing a lot of whales rotate to Zcash right now, and we're seeing a lot of interest. If you remember from the beginning of this year, what Jonah and I said was that we're bullish on privacy versus memes. That's been pretty true.

I think Pepe is basically at zero relative to when we talked about it, and Zcash is only off 20% or 30% from the highs. Monero is the same way. Privacy as a narrative is not going to go away. While Zcash is very extended right now, I wouldn't necessarily say, "Go all in here."

Zcash is always one of those things that I think you want to accumulate. If we see a reversal back down to $400 or something like that, I would definitely be a big buyer.

Here's something I'm struggling with with alts. I want to ask you a question and get your take because I don't know what the hell to do here. a16z crypto just raised $2 billion. Haun Ventures, which is a crypto fund, raised $1 billion.

Does that matter for alts? VC-related projects have historically been pump-and-dumps. Are we going to see this influx of capital hit a bunch of alts? I don't know what to make of this.

I tend to think that it's probably going to be mostly growth rounds. It's probably not going to have anything to do with alts in general.

Why did they do that? Why did they raise now? It feels like crypto hasn't produced anything. Somebody tweeted that billions of VC dollars have been poured into crypto, and it hasn't produced a single useful product.

Because they can. It's simply because they can. Honestly, I don't know if I'm going to lose sponsors because of this and future sponsors, but the reality is that the vast majority of crypto products are completely useless. When I talk about buying these things, I'm talking about buying them as a trade, except for Zcash and potentially TON. We'll get to TON in a second.

TON is doing very well, and Pavel is very motivated to get this thing done. But the majority of products out there are completely useless, so I'm not really sure where they're going to allocate this money. I think the biggest exit that a16z had was Bridge. That was financial infrastructure that sold to Stripe for $1 billion. That doesn't even cover 20% of their fund.

I don't know how they keep raising this money. To me, it's like they're just lighting it on fire. But by all means, I guess, if they want to use that money to buy things in the public markets—if they want to use it to buy Bitcoin, Ethereum, TON, Fartcoin, or whatever—go for it.

I don't necessarily think that they're going to be allocating to altcoins. I don't think it's good for altcoins.

I think somebody tweeted that Multicoin has been long Zcash since February.

He probably conveniently didn't tweet about all the things they've been long since February that went down.

I'm just curious. I think there's nothing for that $3 billion that just got raised to go into, so I think they're just going to buy secondary-market tokens. What am I missing?

No, they're probably going to do growth rounds. There are companies out there that are probably, if Ripple wants to go public or something like that, maybe putting $4 billion into the Ripple ICO. I would be shocked if they're doing seed deals with this.

Maybe they're buying ZEC. Actually, you know what we're going to do? We're going to get an a16z Crypto partner on here, and we're going to ask them what the hell they're doing with that money because they need to answer our questions.

Yes, they do.

Because right now I'm very confused about what they think they can deploy $2.2 billion into. I mean, that's just silly.

Chris Dixon posted a very articulate rationale for the fund: that the infrastructure is better than ever before, that it's less fragile than it looks at the lows, and that, in historical tech cycles, this is when things usually started to get really interesting.

But that doesn't explain why you would want to deploy $2 billion into this market with literally zero apps and zero uptake. I don't know. You're right, we have to talk to somebody.

To me, if the header of our segment here is "Alt season," I can't ignore that literally $3 billion just got raised to fund new altcoins. I don't know what's going to happen with that.

Yeah, I don't think that it's going to be accretive to the alt market, but I do think that it might end up pumping the valuations of public companies that incorporate crypto. Maybe that's where they're going to allocate: maybe some Series A raises a Series B, and they're using crypto and fintech, like stablecoins, on the back end or something like that, and a16z gives them money.

For all their nonsense, they're not dumb. They probably do need to try to make money, and they know that the token market is not necessarily the best market for long-term VC investing. It's a phenomenal market for trading.

One thing I did want to talk about is that this is really good for crypto: Zcash just went up so much in such a short period of time. One of them just went up 80% in a few days. This is really good for crypto.

Everyone has been looking to equities to provide returns because crypto has not been doing anything for a very long time. We have not had pumps like this in a very long time. TON doubling in the last 2 or 3 days is a very good thing for crypto.

This is going to bring attention back to the industry. So, I'm very bullish now on money from the stock market potentially leaking back in if we get a calm-down in the markets. If the markets stop ripping so much, I think people might actually come back to trade crypto very specifically because we're finally getting the moves that we've been waiting for for a long time.

I don't think so. More importantly, Jonah, there are fundamental reasons for these moves. Pavel Durov coming back was crazy. This was one of the easiest trades I've ever seen, and I still think it's a good trade today. Maybe I'll eat my words, but Pavel coming back and basically shunting the TON Foundation to the side is exactly what basically everyone needs to do right now.

Foundations are a relic of the past. Mike Dudas said it best: foundations were built to give plausible deniability and legal cover to the people running the projects. We don't need that anymore. Trump literally runs World Liberty Financial. You can directly run tokens as companies now. There's no reason for TON to be under a foundation.

The reason it's under a foundation is because when they tried to raise in 2019, there was a legal issue with it. They couldn't issue the token in the United States. But it was always supposed to be the Telegram token. The TON Foundation was horribly mismanaged. Sorry to everybody who worked there. It pissed money out the window.

Pavel said, "Look, I'm going to take this over and I'm actually going to make TON useful and good." If TON can trade to $7 when Pavel isn't even able to directly work on it, it can probably trade to $7 again now that he's directly working with Telegram. So, I'm very, very, very bullish on Telegram because of this.

I think all of these pops in altcoins are—trade them for sure—but none of this is going to create sustainable investment vehicles, right? There will be alpha in crypto, but nobody said it better than one Avi Felman whom I know. Basically, what you said was that crypto will be a valve for excess liquidity.

I agree with that. I don't know if there's a ton of excess liquidity right now. Rates are still a bit high, and there's an affordability crisis in the Western world. I don't know if we're going to see rampant speculation in crypto that lasts the way it has in the past.

To me, it's a little too short-term to profit from. But if you're watching the screens and you see that Pavel comes back to Telegram, by all means, profit. Try to make 100% in 7 days. I'm not throwing any shade there. I just don't think we're going to see that. I'm still so bullish on Bitcoin over the long haul.

I can't see straight. I sound like a broken record there. I think that's completely exogenous. But the rest of crypto—maybe Zcash, definitely Hyperliquid, but any of this other stuff—I think it's like, buy it for a trade, but don't set it and forget it. I don't expect a wave of people to come back to crypto.

Yeah, for sure, for most of these things. But the last thing that I'm very constructive on is VVV. Dylan really wants us to talk about this. I was going to talk about it anyway. I'm not talking about it because of you, Dylan. I'm talking because I want to talk about it, but I'll talk about it for you, too.

So, I really like VVV because, for those of you that don't know—

The best.

Effectively, think about it as a private ChatGPT. That's really what it is, and that is so ridiculously important. I mean, ridiculously important. It's actually very important infrastructure. I think that it's a good product. I think that the token has done extremely well, and they're actually driving value back to the token.

For me, I am just really on the lookout for good companies that are building important products for the world that just happen to be associated with crypto. That's what Hyperliquid is. That's what TON is now because it's associated with Telegram, and that's what I think VVV is.

I mean, imagine you can use ChatGPT and not have to be nervous about that data getting leaked. There are hundreds of things that I've probably asked ChatGPT that, if they leaked, I'd have to move to Cambodia and assume life as a monk in Angkor Wat. I probably shouldn't have asked those questions to ChatGPT, and I should probably be using VVV for all my sensitive stuff. As things scale, that's going to become far more important.

How do I build a biological weapon to—

Well, we don't want that.

My neighbor.

Anyway, your neighbor.

No, no, she's great.

Dylan is a Russian Jew. God, kill me.

He's got Dylan Donegan. He sounds like an IRA combatant.

To be fair, I love Russian Jews. I love them. I've had some tough situations with a few of them, but, in aggregate, wonderful people. Good people.

Your podcast co-host is a Russian Jew, incidentally.

What? You're a Russian Jew?

What do you think I was?

I thought you were Polish, like a Polish Ashkenazi.

Nope. Russia. Now, the part of Russia where my family goes back to is now Ukraine, but back then it was all Russia. Van Bourg—how'd you get a Van in your name?

When my grandfather, Yona Weinberg, immigrated here as a house painter, he had some issues getting hired because his name was Yona Weinberg. So, he changed to John Van Bourg and then started getting jobs.

I did not know I was working with a Russian Jew this whole time.

Antisemitism is not a new thing, Avi. It's been around.

One thing that I've been looking at recently is the fact that, after Saylor said, “Yeah, we're only here for money,” and after Saylor said that he sold, this is sort of my thesis here. One reason why I'm super constructive on the market is that Saylor came out and said that he's going to potentially be selling Bitcoin to fund Stretch.

This is very important. Why? Because for a long time, one of the reasons that people are nervous about allocating to Bitcoin—actually, a big reason that people are nervous about allocating to Bitcoin—is they're nervous that Saylor is the only marginal buyer of this asset and that he's really the driving force, and that if he stops buying or if he ever sold, the market would immediately fall apart. It keeps people away when there's concentration risk like that.

So, what I see when Saylor says, “I'm going to inoculate the market against us selling,” is really—he's genuinely inoculating. And what does inoculation mean? It's like a vaccination. He's saying, “If I sell a little bit now and I prove to you that the market doesn't fall apart, then the market actually becomes much stronger. The market generates an antibody defense to the concept of me selling, and Bitcoin can go much higher than it would have gone previously.”

So, I think that this could end up being a very good thing. I know I sent out some tweets that were a little bit tongue-in-cheek. As long as Bitcoin doesn't sell off massively—if we don't go below 78 in the next few days—I'm very bullish. I mean, I think we can see 90–95 very quickly. So, I'm very constructive on this.