We Predicted Crypto's FUTURE in 2026 (The Giver)

Yo yo yo.

Hey, can you hear me?

I can. You hear me? All right.

Yeah, you look good.

Thanks, man. Your PFP looks nice. The Giver, man—a mythical guest land. I wasn't sure I would ever get it. How are you, dude?

Honestly, the last few days have been pretty tough. Markets, personal, a little bit of everything.

I'm just recovering from my clavicle getting brutally frame-mogged by an ASU frat leader. [laughter]

Oh, that was awesome, dude.

I'm hyped, man. Let's go. Welcome to the stream. Can you give us a quick intro into as much lore as you want to share? Who are you? I'm an avid reader, first-time caller to the Substack. What's your lore, as much as you want to share?

Sure, happy to. First of all, big fan. Humble to be on.

I actually remember earlier this year, I think you made a pretty personal video about taking a change in direction with your content, and I really admired that at the time. Big props to you, man. I think you've been working really hard, and you're just attacking every day. I think that's wonderful.

Thanks, man. I appreciate that.

Maybe just to share a little bit about myself: I wouldn't say I'm anyone special. I think it's by a lot of circumstance and [snorts] a lot of luck that enough people care to hear what I have to say.

I ventured into crypto in 2021, kind of in the middle of the year. I didn't really know what I was doing, but through the wonderful land of DeFi, I got pretty interested in rehypothecation. I got really interested in NFTs. It was just this wonderful— it was like this wonderful Wizard of Oz, going down the rabbit hole and feeling like there was some mystique and magic to things.

That kind of hooked me for a little bit, until I saw the uglier part and the hubris involved with stuff like Luna and FTX. I definitely wasn't a trader, hardly an investor—just there. I didn't really get into crypto or the market seriously until some point in Q2 or Q3 of 2024, and it's been a ride since.

My background is in finance. I did investment banking coming out of college and have worked across a few private equity firms, most recently at a megafund looking at opportunistic, special-situation stuff. I'll leave it there and open to questions.

I don't do a lot of real scripting here, so I'm just going to go off what you just said. That feeling of 2021—you said it was like wizardry, where every day there was some new rabbit hole, NFTs and DeFi. It was this wondrous, lustful feeling of crypto. It was magical, and it went on for a long time, man.

It went on all of 2021 and all of 2022. 2023 happened, and then it went on for a little bit in 2024, like the end of 2024. But it definitely felt darker, grayer, scummier, and scammier.

Trader Main's in here. Thanks for the sub, Shadow Man, we love you. It almost feels like that has evaporated from crypto around February 10th, 2026, or thereabouts. It feels extra heightened because AI right now has this mystique about it, where every day there's some new thing. For crypto participants, it feels like you're sort of left naked—the tides come in, and you're stranded there naked.

Are you feeling this in AI right now? Do you feel like that magic has been ported over into another industry, or is this just part of the crypto cycle and how it works?

1. Crypto Feels Solved

I think I have a slightly different direction in how I see things. I think the conclusion is similar, in that crypto and BTC, as a result, feel a bit more solved than they did back in maybe 2021.

I think there are a few reasons for this. Personally, I've spent much more time looking at these assets in the last few years, so compared to before, today's world is going to feel a lot more intuitive just as a result of the time expended.

Broadly speaking, I think something really interesting with crypto markets—and this is away from the point that you made about AI, though I'm happy to jump back into that later—is that we have, I'll put it this way: if you look at any market or any asset, it's kind of in its infancy, and you're predicting or looking at this as a hockey-stick growth curve. People call it a J-curve.

Yeah.

Pretty much anything could happen. Any stochastic event, anything random, could happen during the early stage of an asset's life cycle, and the TAMP, or total addressable market, can go up as a result of anything.

But as it matures and enters that parabola, I think you need a little bit more. One really interesting part about the 2021 market versus today's market is that we have a positive—or the lack of a false positive, I'll put it that way—of what crypto looks like when there is a lot of liquidity in the system.

We also have this pocket in the last few years of what crypto looks like when it's, quote-unquote, at full scale and there isn't as much liquidity. Because of the precedents we're able to observe, it does feel a little bit more solved.

Again, maybe that's a personal thing for me, but I think today BTC is mostly just an extension of certain macro tailwinds. It reprices really quickly when there's demand for it. Whether or not it's able to sustain that pump is probably a larger indication of the health of markets, or what themes are particularly interesting for people.

I like the “solved” framing, and I don't know if I'm interpreting it differently than you are. But when I was around in 2021, I was super early, so I didn't have a great understanding of what was happening. Most of our narratives were around crypto having a common enemy, right? We were fighting Gensler, we were fighting the administration, and we were fighting institutional acceptance and adoption.

It was always, “It's going to happen. We're going to get adopted. We're going to get ETFs.” We got everything you could ever imagine or want as a crypto—I'm not sure if everyone would have wanted it, but as a speculator, that's what you wanted. You wanted ETFs.

Then the Trump administration comes in and says, “Fuck it, mine all the Bitcoin in America.” Everything you could ever want as a pure price speculator happens, and then we get our blow-off top, if we want to call it that, at $126,000. Now we sit here at $67,000 and some change, and crypto feels a little lost to me right now.

There's a lack of narrative and a lack of what's next. To throw it back to you, and maybe you can take this wherever you want and set the stage a little bit: what do you think has happened to crypto, but Bitcoin specifically, over the last couple of months to get us where we are right now?

That's a lot of questions. That's the gully, right?

The gully, Giver. Gully.

2. The Bitcoin Hangover

I think I'll start at a high level. I don't think there's anything systematically wrong with Bitcoin, although it would be very fair for people to feel that way, given that it's down 50% in the span of 3 or 4 months. It's very natural to have that reaction.

I would say the most primitive thought that grounds my assumption that nothing is wrong with crypto is that what we're experiencing is closer to the fatigue that comes with recovery. I don't know if recovery is the right word. The analogy I would use here is that you're out with your boys, and you're trying to mog everyone in the club, SMV chat, fishing, et cetera.

You're having a great time. If you're drinking, maybe that's going to make the night feel a little bit grander. I certainly don't condone this, but maybe you're dabbling in some powder or taking some drugs that might make the night go more smoothly and make it more fun.

But the next day, whatever you put in your body, you pulled forward some of the happiness that you otherwise would have had, and your body is just recovering. Whether you're sleeping or hungover, it's just recovery. It's your body telling you that there's an equilibrium state over the span of many days.

If you look at it on a per-day ratio—“Why am I feeling so bad today? I didn't do anything bad today. Everything that I did that was indulgent was yesterday”—then you might feel a little bit differently.

But if you look at the grand scheme of things, generally speaking, whether it was conscious or not, you made a trade-off: “I'm going to have a really great night tonight at the expense of not feeling that great tomorrow, maybe not being as productive as I would want to be, or falling off a little bit at work.”

To me, I think this captures the broader backdrop of something like Bitcoin. Since the BTC ETFs, there have been some really explosive variables that have stimulated a lot of demand during this period of time to pull forward—I'll use that word—demand.

Yes.

Right. In the sense that, for example, I think the treasury company is a great way to think about this. A treasury company, I think, is—you know, I've referred to it in the past as being a price-agnostic buyer. They're unlike speculators such as myself or yourself, who naturally—I think people get a little more excited when price goes up and a little more pessimistic when price goes down. It's very natural; it's very human.

But when you have something like MicroStrategy, some of these other BTC ETFs, or some of these other BTC companies that are just kind of happy to add wherever, regardless of where the lines are, right? They're not looking at the 200-week moving average, although they might, obviously. But the point is that they're just kind of happy to bid, and their happiness to bid is directly proportional to how much money they're receiving. How much money is available is then directly proportional to how much excitement there is in the market. So naturally, they're going to be hot buyers as a result.

And what this means, again, in the grand scheme of things—likening this back to what I was saying earlier—is that when you have this kind of mix of agnostic buying, but also somewhat impulsive buying, and if people are free to disagree, but if you view it as pulling forward demand that would have otherwise come naturally, then let's say, on average—I don't know what the actual average weekly inflow is for BTC ETFs, but for the sake of example, let's say it's $150 million or $200 million. I think that number is incredibly off, so don't quote me on that, but let's just say that's the average run rate if something like MicroStrategy did not exist. But MicroStrategy does exist.

Perhaps we're trained in finance to try to value future things at the present and try to ascribe a growth multiple or value for what that is today. What if MicroStrategy, for whatever quantum of funds that it's been able to deploy, whether it's $20 billion or $30 billion, is reflective of the next 12 or 18 months of what otherwise would have happened on an organic level, but just hastened, having pushed BTC up so fast in a relatively short amount of time that it also went from $60K to $125K?

I think that explains some of the wonky demand, which is—you know, commodities like silver, right? We typically think of these in boom-bust cycles. Price is a reflexive signal, so when it goes up, producers want to produce more to fill those gaps. But there is a time lag where maybe your facilities are not fully ramped up to get as much silver out of the ground as you otherwise would have been able to if you had known that the price of silver was going to double. Some facilities are maybe not economic unless the price of silver is at a certain amount, and then you ramp up these facilities and get a lot of supply.

By the way, this is no comment on silver. I'm just using this example. But then you effectively bring up a lot of supply, and the demand for the good is actually less than it was a quarter ago because price is lower. So people aren't that interested; that reflexive loop is slowing down.

I just think BTC has gone through a lot of these boom-bust cycles that have gone kind of unnoticed and have been subtle, but they've all been centered around this idea of kind of a panic bid or accelerating demand. Other than that, I would say it's just some of the price action that we've seen over the previous week has been push-pulls with the lack of excess liquidity in the system, again compared with something like 2021.

The intro analogy was the most understandable Giver analogy maybe ever. So thank you for explaining it in collab terms. I actually haven't really heard the pulling-demand-forward thought process, but I think it makes a lot of sense when you think about what happened and why there is this lack of demand: it just overextended, and now we're below the mean, essentially.

I mean, I think a16z had an interesting tweet. I don't know how much I agree with it, but it was something along the lines of, “You've had 18 months to think about your asset allocation.”

Allocate however you want, and now everyone dies.

Yeah. But everyone has the signal to sell now. I think that captures the sentiment well, which is that, if you just think about it as a singular theme—which is probably unfair—but in isolation, the run hot trade has had a lot of months to percolate.

Consistent with what you said earlier, if you decide to view $126K as this blow-off top, some of the factors that drove that and took place in the last month were the Fed resuming its cutting cycle, the rush for inflationary assets getting a little bit hotter in the US, and a really, really, really—possibly the most dovish prime minister ever—winning unexpectedly in Japan and promising a lot of fiscal stimulus. I mean, these are, respectively, the 2 biggest economies in the world.

Whoops. Sorry, my fellow. Can you hear me?

Yeah, you're good.

Sorry, but yeah, I was about to say these are 2 very large economies, the largest from an equity and bond market perspective, respectively. So you pretty much had these 2 countries. It's kind of similar to what Aiden Ross said about Solana at the top, which is like, hey, it's the Trump coin. What could be bigger than the Trump coin at Solana $300?

What could be bigger than effectively the 2 largest economies telling everyone that they're about to run it extremely hot? Meanwhile, the US has actually been doing that iteratively over the last 6 months, not just September in isolation. So I think if you look at it from that perspective—and you don't have to, but if you decide to—the BTC, quote-unquote, blow-off top kind of makes a little bit more sense from that regard.

I also think there were a lot of unique variables, because you kind of need both sides of the story to make it work, right? I think lower demand by itself probably doesn't necessitate a $50K drop. I think there were probably some unique supply factors that contributed as well. A lot of something that went really unnoticed, I think, is that on October 10th, which is obviously D-Day for crypto, a lot of people attributed the fall to the sudden tariffs that were announced, and I think that's appropriate to some extent.

I will say that the removal of the tariffs a few weeks later didn't contribute to the same type of price action upward, so I think that loses a little bit of grace from that perspective. Something I wanted to note is that there was a memo shared on October 10th effectively thinking about removing MicroStrategy from the MSCI index as well. But it was, you know, like I said—

It hasn't happened. No, that decision is still delayed or deferred. But I think stuff like that—again, some of the really catastrophic price action on October 10th, looking back to the four-year cycle stuff, G Quantum[?]—I think there was a lot of stuff that came in at once.

Generally speaking, you don't get really explosive moves—2-sigma, 3-sigma, 4-sigma, 5-sigma, I don't know—you don't get them without this cauldron of many ingredients coming in at the same time. It's like you're cooking a soup, right? So that's kind of how I view the last few months or weeks.

To the Aiden Ross analogy—which, yeah, looking back, that's one of the clips of all time. I don't know what adjective to throw before it, but it's one of the clips of all time—you look at the macro conditions and you're like, how could it get bigger than what it was? How could it get bigger than what it was? What does that look like? Does everybody need to suffer first, and do markets need to just expand and take time to be in limbo for a little bit?

To follow up on that analogy, how could it get bigger? I think, in an absolute sense, comparing it to what it was in September or October, being larger than that would be quite hard.

I'm not an expert in plumbing, but that is my sense. So perhaps it's appropriate to think about BTC having a cap kind of there for now, you know, until being able to prove otherwise. Of course, I would say, though, that I think there is reason for optimism because, like I said, if you follow this logic, a lot of the move starts making a little bit more sense.

In some ways, that's good; in some ways, it's bad. I think in some ways that is good because it kind of maybe smooths out the curve a little bit, and there's nothing inherently wrong with Bitcoin. I think people tend to like these really—I don't know if extreme is the right word—really…

I think people like to attribute really volatile price action to really exceptional events. I think it’s maybe some sort of simplistic or easy way to connect the dots: something big happens, so something big must have also happened as a result. Price has to have a reason, sort of thing.

Exactly. Exactly.

And so, like I said, I think it’s just a small accumulation of a lot of small things happening on the surface. Some of it was complacent positioning. Some of it was, for example, Trump’s TACO. I think that’s a good one, too: for months, the market was groomed and cultivated to effectively ignore any and all policy decisions being made or explained through the White House.

That’s why it’s not unfair to think that, if you look at at least 8 months of backtesting, throughout those months you could kind of expect that whatever Donald Trump or Scott Bessent said, the markets would just go higher. The problem is that I think you eventually get on this slippery slope, and I think that’s kind of what happened in the last few weeks with Warsh, in a sense, as well.

Again, I think people had this TACO-ish mindset. This isn’t specific to crypto; this is across all risk assets. I think people probably underappreciated the meaningfulness of the regime shift that it signaled. Now, whether or not Warsh is bad for risk assets in practice, and whether he’ll actually be able to implement what he advertises, is a completely different question.

I think that is probably, for me, the biggest theme for 2026 as it pertains to thinking about positive price action on Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin, for example, could easily reverse back to $80,000 to $90,000 in the next 6 months if there were a credible reason to believe that what has been marketed in the domain for Warsh is not actually coming to light at least as quickly as markets think it is, or that it’s just not happening at all. That’s kind of the barbell that I’m thinking about with Bitcoin.

God, 6 months.

I’m assuming a range. I’m assuming a range. I wouldn’t think so much about that.

To press on that, then, what is your framework and thinking for the impact Warsh is going to have long-tail on risk assets, specifically Bitcoin? You can cover whatever you want.

That’s a good question. Maybe, just for the viewers who are a little bit lighter on Kevin Warsh, I think maybe to start off I’ll say that what makes Warsh unique, at least relative to existing candidates like Powell and other Fed candidates who could have been chosen as chairman, is that he has this really unique perspective where he’s not hawkish in the traditional sense. Actually, in the traditional sense, he would be categorized as dovish because he wants lower rates.

He does want lower rates.

I mean, again, everything that I’m saying, by the way, is just from his biography. Whatever backroom deals you think he has with Trump, I’ll leave you to speculate on that. But, in essence, he wants lower rates.

He thinks that the inability to have lower rates in the economy is because of the overly omnipotent weight that the Fed balance sheet has had in markets, and that it’s bloated. He thinks it’s actually crowding out the private sector’s ability to compete because of all the excess money in the system.

His ideology is that he wants lower rates, and the way to get to lower rates without creating inflation is by taking money out of the system simultaneously. I think that’s the simplest way of explaining that.

Just to reference why that’s bad for Bitcoin, I think of Bitcoin, and I think other people would as well, as the sponge for excess dollars in the system. When there isn’t anything productive to do with those dollars and they’re just sitting there idle, Bitcoin is a good capture for them; it’s like a sponge.

I think it’s actually interesting because Kevin Warsh has said himself that Bitcoin is useful as a barometer to understand how well he or the Fed is doing in guiding policy. He has pretty much said directly—you can kind of infer it if you read between the lines—that if Bitcoin is doing well, it means we’re not doing our job.

We’re doing a bad job, yeah. I think he said that in the interview.

I don’t think he said it as gruesomely as that, but, yeah, I think it’s pretty clear.

The way that I think about trading in general—and I’ll liken this back here—is that there are always two sides to a move. Let’s use a buyback as an example. Let’s use the Ethena coin buyback as an example.

Okay.

Back when things were good there, there was the reflexivity involved with this sticker shock. Markets were pricing something more ideal; maybe there wasn’t an event being priced in, and suddenly there was an unexpected event. People had to really quickly come to a decision on what fair market value was, and that can be a really powerful driver for price discovery.

Then there’s the persistent impact of something like whether there are actual dollars coming in to buy that asset, et cetera. I think the same principle applies here. Because of things like TACO, and because of the notion that Donnie wants markets to always be doing well, there was probably this idea that these chosen assets would perform regardless of what was happening at the Fed.

But I think people probably failed to appreciate just how impactful this was, because we’ve effectively been in an ample-reserves system where bank reserves as a percentage of GDP have been, I think, over 10% for the last decade. It’s generally been an only-going-up number ever since 2008.

You, me, your mom, my mom—everyone who’s pretty much a finance professional under the age of 50—we’ve all lived in an era of pretty free money, with a lot of dollars coming into the system. Here’s this guy—we don’t know if he’s credible or not—coming in and saying he’s going to do the exact reverse. That’s going to be pretty impactful in markets. Maybe I’ll leave it there for now.

On the—you said a lot of things, but I saw this tweet today, or maybe yesterday. I’m not going to frame this as articulately as I should, but it basically said that, with the Trump-chosen assets, you get this feeling of diminishing returns. How long is Trump able to direct the Mandate of Heaven to make certain assets go up?

Bitcoin going down may be a leading indicator that Trump’s ability to make the markets go up is less credible and loses power—a function of dilution as time goes on here. Do you think that’s something that’s going to be attributed to equity markets and the chosen Trump stocks as time goes on?

That’s a good question. Let’s evaluate this under the assumption that the midterms are going to go swimmingly and that there’s no change in control over the remaining Trump term.

I would say that I don’t think Bitcoin is—yeah, I’ll be candid. I don’t think Trump really cares about cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin, frankly. I think my sense is that he tried to leverage this voter base, and it worked. To be fair, he’s fulfilled his promise of introducing an SPR, so I don’t think he’s been misleading.

I think his perspective—and this is an entirely different can of worms, or Pandora’s box—is that what he really cares about today is making America great again. I’ll start with that. But I think his perspective of what a great America looks like is this idyllic version where America is very self-sufficient in every domain.

I think a lot of the origin behind at least the current Trump regime is his experience with COVID during the last term. I think he probably felt like he himself, and the U.S. as a result, were quite powerless when all these global supply chains got cut off.

Yes.

Remember earlier when I said that, when you have an event happen, everyone has to kind of lock in on what the fair market value of that asset is? I think that event happened with COVID, where everyone—Trump especially, but also a lot of people in his administration—realized just how dependent the U.S. economy had grown on China.

Not just on global trade, but specifically on China. In this term, I think a lot of what he’s been trying to do is effectively build up America. America has, over the last 2 or 3 decades, become a much more service-focused economy versus back in the 1950s and 1960s—much more blue-collar.

You know, the Rust Belt, all that stuff. You get what I’m saying.

Yeah, of course.

Over this period of time, through factors like the cost of labor, a lot of that naturally got ported over to China or developing countries. I think Trump realized, again, how dependent some industries in the US had become on that as a result. I also think he got quite smart by talking with some of these tech moguls about AI and understanding that this is a really powerful theme to get smart on over the next 5 or 10 years.

The bottleneck to the US becoming dominant in this is that there’s the past, present, and future. There’s an effort to rectify some of the moves that have been made in the past, but there’s also an effort to think about the future. If AI becomes—and it already is, but if it continues to be—this really intense trade, what is actually the bottleneck? Is it labor? Is it expertise? It’s not. It’s actually critical minerals, stuff like cobalt, and all the stuff that produces semiconductors.

I think everything that we’ve seen in the last 12 months has mostly been a push to get up to speed in all these regards. My sense is that this will continue, because everything that we’ve seen so far does not suggest that it would stop. Even in the really small stuff, like Liberation Day 2.0 back in July, when he was sending letters to all these Asian countries—not just Asian countries, but countries in general—there was this transshipment clause where, if you try to reroute your stuff through China, there’s an extra 30% tariff.

Small things like that have fed into the mix. I just think that he wants a really independent America, and if that’s a theme, and you think that markets are mostly just a political utility, I think that theme continues to make sense to play out over his remaining term. Again, I was under the assumption that he’s going to win the midterms. If you don’t think that, then that’s probably your main bogey.

3. From Bits To Atoms

Let’s assume yes for the sake of the conversation. That brings me to the thesis, narrative, or framing that I’ve heard more in the past 2 weeks than I’ve ever heard in my entire life combined: this concept of bits to atoms.

Crypto Twitter is funny because it’s hard to tell: are we early, do we live in a bubble, do we reflect the sentiment of the broader population—a little bit of all 3, none of the 3? I don’t really know. But it feels like everyone everywhere is talking about bits to atoms.

You look at the vehicles to express atoms, and it’s basically just turbo-bullish, up-only. I looked at the TSM chart today and thought, “Oh my God, what have I been doing?” Buying Hyperliquid.

My question on bits to atoms is: how much gas is left in the trade, and what is the best way to express it? Is this just going to be the theme of—

I’ll add this: the thing that’s ironic about bits to atoms is that it feels like we’re enhancing or focusing on atoms for the purpose of bits existing, so that AI and software can proliferate further. That makes it a little bit confusing to fully wrap your head around. But how much gas is left on the atoms trade, and what is the best vehicle to express it?

4. The AI Trade Reality

I don’t honestly think I have an answer. I wouldn’t say I’m smart enough in that domain to provide a coherent answer. I do have some broader thoughts on the AI trade.

Rip it.

I do think that the 2 areas of concern for me are—again, this is not a recommendation in either direction—that Twitter, for example, is a very chronically online space. We are in a closed system, and what we read or see continually gets reinforced because there’s a very small percentage of us. The danger is that things we think matter may not actually reach a Schelling point globally for them to be as impactful as we think they are.

I think that’s the first area of concern for me. I don’t know whether that’s true, because you can also look at it the other way. There are 2 sides to it, which is that we’re so early to this mattering, and as a result, we’re so early in this J-curve because no one else has realized it, so there’s much more room to go. I think that’s the other side of the coin.

My second area of caution kind of answers the latter part of that a little bit. If that were the case, would Nvidia be close to 10% of the S&P 500 today compared to 5 years ago? Today, I think it’s 11 or 12 times the size, which implicitly means that 5 years ago, the entire market had underestimated its impact by more than 90% in terms of the relevance that something like Nvidia or AI would have to the market. There’s been a lot of growth in that domain. That’s objective.

Moving forward, I think there’s a bit of both. I think the disruption from AI is meaningful.

I think that’s probably a little bit underappreciated—just basic stuff, like how good Claude and ChatGPT have gotten in the span of months or years. I do think that probably not enough people have recognized this as it pertains to investable layers, or that things feel underpriced versus overpriced. Personally, I don’t know if I buy into that story. I think it’s fairly priced. I think it’s fairly priced relative to the times that we’re in.

Going back to Nvidia as an example, the entire AI industry as a percentage of the market is really a pseudo-question of what percentage you think it deserves relative to every other industry out there. Is it a quarter? Is it a third? Is that where it should be?

I do think that owning the robot, or owning the system, is a little bit overhyped. It doesn’t mean that it can’t rip higher, of course. But I’ll pause there.

This is the question, right? Figuring it out is hard to do on Twitter. I agree, because you’re dealing with a very controlled variable, if you will, where everyone shares similar day-to-day experiences, is terminally online, probably spends more time online than not, and is hyper-exposed to these things. Therefore, you’re extraordinarily sensitive to them.

It’s really hard to figure out: am I crazy, are they crazy, or are we both crazy? Even within the terminally online crowd, there’s that discussion. This article—I don’t know if you saw it—this big article that came out the other day about AI—

Yeah, I read it before.

It’s 50 million views, and everyone’s split down the middle between, “This is insane. Stop what you’re doing. Read this right now,” and, “Everyone’s known this. Why is this a big deal? Why are people glorifying this AI slop, this word-salad article?”

Are we saying the same thing? Are we both in agreement that this is the greatest thing ever? What are we even fighting about? What’s even the discussion? Where’s the nuance? Are we just desperately hoping that this thing is going to change the world, or is it actually going to happen? To your point, we’re so early that we can’t even really think about how early we are yet.

No commentary on markets or whether something is fairly priced—this is just a more qualitative point. I think that particular piece, and how we should be prepared for it, is a little bit hyperbolic.

It makes me think of how everyone thought that Bluetooth headsets, having something with a little clip around your ear, would be really big because it frees up your hands and is super convenient, but for one reason or another, it never caught on. Obviously, that is not completely what is happening here.

But using the Moneyball quote, “If he’s a good pitcher, why does he not get good?” I would say that AI is already at the point where it can easily replace very robotic functions—stuff like checking out your groceries. The easiest job to replace with AI, in my mind, is something like an executive assistant.

Yeah, cool. I can do it. Completely unneeded—

Right now.

Now, my experience with this—and it could be skewed because I’m in the finance world—is that there has been no replacement of EAs, of executive assistants, of pretty much any level across any industry that I’ve seen. I think there are 2 things happening with the AI trade.

The first is that we are on this quest of self-development and creation. I think people—and rightfully so, I think scientists—are really just trying to push the edge of what is possible, and a lot of resources are going into trying to test and see what the next frontier is.

Before, it was, “Can ChatGPT solve 6 + 7?” Now it’s AI recursively writing code itself to fix itself and be self-sufficient.

So I think people are just innately curious to see what’s possible, but the question of whether this is needed, whether it has product-market fit, or whether people actually care hasn’t really been answered.

I don’t know if that’s a question that’s actually been asked yet, so that’s one area of hesitation. The second thing, going back to the example I was illustrating earlier with the executive assistant, is that there are a lot of industries where AI as a substitute—as a pure replacement—sounds really interesting in theory, just like the Bluetooth headset, but underappreciates the importance of human connection.

For example, executive assistants are easily made redundant. You could say they’re still employed because people are very reluctant to change, which is certainly possible. But I also think EAs aren’t retained based on whether they’re getting you the best coffee, writing the best emails, or scheduling the best meetings. They’re a layer of accountability and a layer of human touch that makes everything a little bit better, so we’re not all working in our own silos.

For industries that are working in their own silos because they’ve naturally progressed that way, through things like coding and program development, those industries are much more easily replaced—completely replaced—by something like AI. I think that dichotomy is something interesting to weigh over the next 5 years.

Yeah, I guess, summarizing, it’s like: we can, but should we, and do people actually care?

Okay, I have 4 points I want to make because those are awesome. Real quick—

Clarifying question: are you using OpenClaw or not?

I’m not using OpenClaw.

Okay, you have to. I would say 3 things. I think the biggest question is: do people actually care? I don’t think anyone has actually stopped to ask this, and I think that’s an important question.

The thing I disagree with the most is the human-connection element having this super—having a moat, for lack of a better word. One point I’ll use to validate that is the remote-work transition and the lack of returning to the office. The human-connection element has been largely broken in the workforce—not by everybody, but an absurd amount of the population has already broken that social contract. They’ll take convenience over connection unless absolutely forced to.

One other thing I’ll say, not disputing it but just calling it out as I’m thinking about this while you’re discussing it, is that humans’ expectation creep with AI has been insane. I have this article pulled up—you read it—but in 2022, AI couldn’t tell you 7 times 8 confidently. In 2023, it could pass the bar. In 2024, it could write working software. In 2025, some of the best engineers in the world had handed over most of their coding to AI. Then, on February 5, 2026, Opus 4.6 and Codex 5.3 launched.

Maybe it’s the greatest thing of all time. It also brings me to thinking about Waymos. I just moved from LA, and I guess they don’t have them in New York, but on every corner of the street there are more Waymos than there are Ubers. To even think that would exist 5, 6, or 7 years ago is mind-blowing.

Then Waymo goes to court and they’re like, “Yeah, maybe—oh, wait, you lose credibility because there’s maybe some guy in the Philippines directing things or making turns on the Waymo virtually.” But the fact that we’ve even gotten to that point is mind-blowing.

There’s been this rapid expansion of AI expectation creep. With every step function of growth, we say, “Well, it actually can’t do this crazy thing yet,” even though in 2022 it couldn’t tell you 2 plus 2. I’ve noticed this in my own brain. I’ll tell it to transcribe your YouTube video, and it’s not perfect, and I’ll think, “How did it mess this up?” I’ll have it read 1,000 of your tweets and think, “Why is it not perfect?” Then I take a step back and realize that this wouldn’t even have been something I could do 6 months ago, let alone right now. I think that’s worth calling out.

5. The Generalist Advantage

I agree. It’s not to say—just to be clear—I think the labor market, throughout the entire existence of humankind, has rewarded specialization more or less. As you get more senior, you get more specialized, you get more reps and work experience, and your advisory is more prioritized as a result. If you’re a lawyer or an accountant, the more senior you are, the higher you can bill on a per-hour basis. That’s kind of the natural progression of how we think society should work.

What I think is interesting about AI being disruptive is that it potentially fragments us a little bit. Eventually, I think the goal is to have really specialized robots or technology that can do either super-menial or super-redundant tasks. The Roomba, for example—is that the thing that cleans your apartment?

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, the robot vacuum.

Yeah.

Something like a more electric version of that—or electric in the sense of dynamic. Or, for example, really dangerous jobs that carry a high risk of mortality, either in the present or through health concerns in the future: mining, fixing power lines in the sky—

That’s a good one.

Landscaping work. I think these are probably areas where AI fills a niche, and they’re areas that people would get quite excited about as well.

I think you’re a good example of this, Thread Guy. Developing an overall competency—and potentially, maybe, the labor market over the next 1, 2, or 3 decades rewarding well-roundedness a little more than it used to—could be interesting. Being a generalist, being able to agilely fit into what the market says it needs, rather than pursuing one specific craft for 50 years, is one of the more interesting markers of what’s happening here.

The second point, again using you as an example, is something that was mentioned in a stream last week: over the last 20 years, there’s been this rush, or this coming to terms with people converting social capital into financial capital. I think having social capital probably becomes a lot more important over the next 1 or 2 decades as well.

Great.

Once everything gets so commoditized—once there’s a layer of society that becomes very commoditized—it becomes even harder to differentiate yourself from your peers, other than through pure metrics like money. Fame probably becomes an interesting variable as well.

This is something I don't want to lose. Nikita Beir made this tweet and said, “Prediction: in less than 90 days, all channels that we thought were safe from spam and automation will be so flooded that they will no longer be usable in any functional sense: iMessage, phone calls, Gmail, and we'll have no way to stop it.” It does feel like, on the social-capital point, at some point—whether it's 90 days, a year, or 5 years—we cross the chasm where you're sort of locked in with what you have. You've developed trust and this social web of people that know you, that we've met and talked with, and with whom we have some sort of connection—or you haven't. I don't even say it in a doomer framing, but once you cross over, just the flood, whatever it looks like, means you're sort of locked in with what you have. I think that social-capital point is a really good one. I also think the generalist take is a good one as well. Maybe I'm going to extrapolate a couple layers to make this analogy, but I've always said this in relation to how the crypto market has rewarded generalists as well. Crypto is so fascinating because any day, especially the further out you are on the risk curve, you're trading memes, on-chain stuff, and then coins have more votes as you go up the ladder. Any day you could wake up and the business is just vamped. The earliest example I can think of is the Uniswap-Sushiswap thing, which they obviously lost. You could have this incredible product making all this money, have a lot of the token, and feel good. The next day, a competitor forks your code, launches a one-to-one product, turns fees off, and now has a new token. The business is gone. OpenC, Blur is an infamous one. Hyperliquid-Lighter is another one. It gets crazier on the memecoin front, which is like, okay, cool, you have this Mudang token, but the Penguin's more viral now, so [__] [__] your Mudang token. I think crypto traders by default have to be extremely agile. You almost never in crypto have gotten paid for delusional belief over an extended time period for one asset other than Bitcoin.

The way AI is moving right now and the way it's evolving feels relatively similar. The thing you get rewarded for the most is the ability to pivot and be agile because it's like, I don't know— you wake up tomorrow, what's the new thing? What just dropped? Okay, cool, Salesforce has no moat anymore, or Figma's down 90%. You don't really know what you're going to get hit with.

I actually think it's a really good point that you made, where the generalist ability to flow through niche-focused verticals is the most underappreciated skill set right now.

Yeah, I would even sharpen that a little bit more. First of all, I agree with you. I think that was a really poignant take, but I'll sharpen it even more in the sense that I think it sounds really elegant and simple, but in reality, it's very hard to execute, especially if there's pressure, simply because—[laughter]—and I'm not even, again, taking a position on the financial aspect of being a trader, because I'm certainly not, so I would never be able to speak to that.

At the end of the day, it's just about getting reps. To me, that's all it is. It's just getting reps. A salesperson will never be good if they don't get on the phone and start building reps, failing, and being okay with failure.

Going back to the example we were talking about earlier around being well-rounded, I think structurally we have increasingly been in a society where people are very afraid to fail. It is changing; I've seen that change take place in the last 5 or 10 years. But effectively, I think the route for a lot of people is that they're going to school, they're going to get a degree, and there's this pathway to success that's been carved out for them by our previous generations, and by the generation before that.

We often hit our 30s or 40s without having taken a lot of reps in lower-stakes environments, to be able to get comfortable with failure, such that you're 35 or 36, you have a wife, you have kids, and there are people who are dependent on you—people who rely on you, either financially or socially. It can be very challenging to take a significant career risk at that point if you've never consciously made one before.

That's very challenging. My perspective is actually a bit different from this narrative that's going around in LA that I've seen. Abby made a tweet today, if you saw it, about how—and actually, the X article that we're talking about says that preservation of capital is nice and important. However, if you believe in AI, AI is supposed to be really deflationary, which means that your purchasing power should be relatively intact. Those two things are kind of against each other.

The most important skill to develop as a young person is just doing adventurous new things and having the courage to take that step. I think just doing that alone really separates you. Even silly stuff like Clavicular, which we just talked about at the beginning of the stream—he's someone who's put himself out there, and he's gotten vastly rewarded for it. That's not the perfect example, but being okay with failure, grinding through that, and having grit is a skill set that people don't naturally get to build.

If you can put yourself in an environment where you get better at that, you become more well-rounded as a result. I think that is probably the best defining trait to have in an ever-evolving society.

That's sick. I also love that you love Clav. It's so awesome. I love that you love him.

Okay, I'm going to do a 180, and I'll let this be one of the last things I ask you. We're coming up on an hour, so I'll let you go in a minute, but it's going to be a loaded question and a complete 180. I want to get your take on it.

I think you have a pretty good perspective on Bitcoin and where we're going. I also think it's funny to one of your earlier takes: anytime there's a sudden price move, people are desperate to validate it via a headline. Why did this thing happen? I'm trying to stop with the “what happened, who blew up, 10/10?” It's like, bro, it's February. Let's just think about what's forward-looking from here.

The path is clear for Bitcoin. It's pretty obvious to me. I deeply believe in it. I think it has the mandate from heaven, and if you could exist long enough, you'll see $1 million Bitcoin one day.

What is the future for the rest of crypto? Everything else: Hyperliquid, the perp DEXes, the on-chain casinos, Pump.fun, Uniswap, and everything else. The on-chain token, right? We have this equity-token unlock overhang problem. Whether it's that, liquidity in the system, Bitcoin underperformance, or something else, basically no altcoin has shown an ability to survive any meaningful period of time and make a new all-time high over an extended period of time.

We're sort of stuck in no man's land. Is agentic stablecoin payments going to save us? Maybe. I don't know. Are more Moltbook-like tokenized AI experiments going to save us? Maybe. What happens to everything else in crypto that isn't Bitcoin?

6. What Survives Beyond Bitcoin

I mean, I think the market is always right. I'll start off by saying that I think many people have the idea that crypto cannot continue in its current form. I would generally agree with that, in the sense that it's actually a point we made earlier together: we used it for AI, but it's the question of what is the capacity for improvement versus whether people actually care.

I think we've seen a case study of this in crypto in the last few years. It's so sick that we have more blockchain space. It's so cool that we can run even higher TPS. It's so cool.

Yeah.

It's so cool. But I don't know if people necessarily care about the 17th L2, and I think the market has spoken as a result. I just think that it's ever-powerful in that regard.

When I say that, it's not to say that the market is always right on every minute tick or on a day-by-day basis. But zoom out, and I think we've already seen a lot of micro-adjustments. Micro-adjustments happen in crypto.

To guide the listener into what that timeline has looked like, let's call it this cycle, however you want to define it—let's say 2023–24. What was fresh and carried over from the previous cycle was that people really enjoyed altcoins and this notion that we needed more blockchains, and all these partnerships that came along with it.

It felt as if that narrative had been dismantled unfairly by stuff like FTX and LUNA, but there wasn't necessarily an inherent call to action yet on whether or not people actually cared about blockchains. That was just a continued effect, an overhang from the previous cycle.

Then the market said, you know what? We actually don't care. We've wised up a little bit to these things. It took a while, and it worked. It worked before the BTC ETF and shortly after that, and it culminated in this April peak.

Over the next 6 to 10 months, or whatever, in the remainder of the year, these token emissions kept coming, and there was a lot of resistance because people still thought altseason would come back. People had been really underallocated to BTC as a result of this previous notion, so they were one step behind. Obviously, as a result of positioning, perhaps BTC appreciated.

Earlier, I used the word “micro-adjustment.” The way people responded to not wanting these perfectly priced assets at FDV, where the bulk of the rewards were taken by the team, market makers, insiders, and investors, was to level-set the playing field—or that was the narrative, at least—via memecoins.

You've had Pepe go to over $1 billion in Q1 of 2024. You've had ensuing memecoins like Popcat and WIF that copied that model. To me, that was this really serrated response by markets, saying that we don't want your dog shit. We know it's dog shit. We know that no one cares. So if that's the case, let's just make it so that everyone is starting, presumably, at the same level.

But then what happened as a result of that? Just like with DAOs, just like with ICOs, you might have an interesting idea to start, but then greed and hedonism start playing in, and the derivatives that spawn as a result become lower and lower quality and more and more drifty, which ultimately culminated in Trumpium coin, Libra, and all this extraction that took place.

I do think that, moving forward from that, the conclusion was: okay, memecoins are worthless. They cannot be self-sustaining. What do we care about as a result? Oh, it's revenue, it's buybacks, it's stuff that can actually buy, right? So then we ended up having this 6-to-12-month TCO meta, where everything had a TCO, or everything tried to have a TCO at least. There was this focus on coins that could have some buying presence, and that was spurred a little bit by Hyperliquid and how well that did.

But again, you have lower- and lower-quality ways of emulating that feeling, which culminated in buybacks maybe not having as much buying power as was initially thought.

Yeah. We were chasing that at the end, right?

Right, exactly. We've had everything that has spawned kind of be an answer to the previous thing that people cared about—or really did not care about—and something ensuing has happened as a result, as a market response. I do think that we've kind of run the block on rock-paper-scissors and all these manifestations.

Moving forward, I'll liken it back to the hangover example that I used earlier. We probably have to pay for our sins a little bit, considering how silly things got. But there will be a time because, given human nature, especially with something that is a very visibly online asset that doesn't have the friction of something like gold, I think crypto will always be interesting.

I think it will always be interesting as an asset class because people will always want to speculate. I actually think that people will want to speculate more in the next 20 years, and that's not necessarily a hedonism thing.

Yeah. Yeah.

Speculation can take a lot of different variations. Generally speaking, my sense is that if you call the bottom 20% of labor, you now have a lot of dollars and a lot of people on the sidelines who are looking for new forms of speculation or entertainment. Whether it's something like Beast Games or all these game shows that you're seeing on Netflix, or this higher-stakes arena, or some new game that gets formed, and some combination of the sort, I think crypto is really well positioned to continue having innovative ways of speculating on that because of how ubiquitously global it is.

My sense is that it will continue to be interesting over the next decade.

I love the conclusion. The way we got there was a surprisingly articulate walkthrough. You're right: everything was just an answer to another thing, but nothing answers the underlying problem that no one really wants to buy these things, which leaves us where we are right now—the hangover, if you will.

Giver, dude, it was awesome. We're at an hour and 15 minutes. I wasn't sure you were going to be able to stay with us this long, but I was looking forward to this one for a long time. I think you have some sick takes. I'm kind of surprised—not surprised—but you're tapped into the brain-rot, deep-internet, autist culture just as much as the high level, which is surprisingly impressive.

Dude, I really appreciate you coming on. I think you're one of the smarter posters on the app in general. Sometimes you're a little bit too high level, but it's really impressive. The Substack's incredible, and I speak on behalf of most people here when I say that I'm grateful you put out the stuff that you do for free. I think it brings a lot of benefits to a lot of people, and I appreciate your time. I'm glad we finally got to do it.

Is there any sign-off or conclusion? Anything you want to shill, anything you want to drop, anything you want to leave anyone with before you depart?

Yeah, I'm super thankful for the opportunity and a big fan. I would say, in the same vein, that we're keeping it pushing. Using you as an example is nice here. I read this interesting post recently about luck times surface area, which is that, generally speaking, people like getting excited about something.

If you're able to do something—anything—and do it consistently, a community will naturally build around you. There exists effectively something like a network, and what you're doing is increasing the surface area of what's available in your social network. You're putting yourself in a position to get lucky because someone who's viewing you, or someone who's reading my content, might think, okay, this is interesting. Maybe I'll partner with this guy at some point. Maybe I'll do something with him. Maybe it's a friend, maybe it's a romantic partner, maybe it's a future client, or someone who wants to hire you.

I generally think that if you're consistent at something, passionate about something, and keep doing it with an air of authenticity, that feeling of depth in that relationship is only going to increase. Putting yourself out there is also symbiotically putting yourself in a position to get lucky.

I think one of the things about life, and failure—the notion of failure, which I've mentioned in the past—is that there are so many things that you have so many at-bats on, just in almost every aspect of life. But most people don't take them, and they use these at-bats instead for hedonistic pursuits, sometimes stuff like gambling, for instance, like sports bets, when you can actually make a really meaningful change in your life.

Again, today, I think you're so early on in that risk curve of taking a leap of faith that we can more or less get rewarded by doing it. Shout out, Thread Guy.

Give the truth, man. Lazy Villager one, you're the truth, dude. I appreciate the love, and I really appreciate you coming on, man. You're awesome. Thank you for the time, dude.

Thanks, man. Appreciate it. Appreciate it.

All right, brother. Have a good one. Much love. Peace.