What Does AI Mean For Your Future?

You should be saving every dollar that you possibly can. You should be reducing your spend as much as possible, and you should live like a bug person for the next 3–4 years and shove all of your money into the markets.

Because my take—and this is where I differ from the doomers—is that the doomers always go straight to AGI. The doomers go straight to, “Hey, if AI really takes off in the next 2–3 years, then that means unemployment is going to explode massively and things are going to get really bad, and politically the environment is going to get horrible.” But my take is different.

Avi, what's going on?

We're streaming. We're streaming. Why don't we wait a little bit for the people to roll in?

Whenever I say “we're streaming,” I think of that scene in Old School, which is still my all-time number-one favorite comedy, where Will Ferrell says, “We're streaking.” And there's no one streaking. It's just him.

I have no idea what you're talking about.

No, you're kidding. I'm not that old, dude. You've never seen Old School?

I have no clue what you're talking about, dude.

I'm so jealous. I wish I could see Old School for the first time. I remember the first time I saw Old School. It was 2003. I took my high school girlfriend to the movies, and we went to see Old School, and it was just side-splitting, crying, hilarious laughter.

It basically ushered in a new era of comedy, that movie. It was the whole Frat Pack—Will Ferrell and Vince Vaughn. It was the first time they ever did that, and so it was totally fresh and new. Before Wedding Crashers, before that style of comedy took off with The 40-Year-Old Virgin and This Is the End, that was the OG hilarious comedy. It was incredible.

I mean, I remember that era of comedy.

How have you not seen Old School?

Is this a Judd Apatow-type thing?

Judd Apatow is definitely inspired by this. This is Todd Phillips, the guy who eventually went on to direct Joker. Basically, Todd Phillips's first big comedy was Road Trip. This is his second, and this is where he just took it into the stratosphere. Then The Hangover was the series that made him.

Well, obviously I've seen The Hangover.

Yeah, but Todd Phillips is a comedic genius. He's basically the best comedy director of our time.

You know what? The beginning—

The beginning of this podcast, I think, is going to go down as one of the most fucked-up riffs we've ever had.

I think it was good, honestly. We're human beings, after all. We do things outside of crypto, like watch movies and take walks in the hills. It's normal.

You know what I did last night, by the way? It seems like we should probably wait just another 2 minutes. Guess what I did last night, Jonah?

What did you do last night?

I went to my first Broadway musical.

That's really cute. Mine was back in '03. What was your first?

I saw The Book of Mormon. I feel like you, as a musical talent, have been to your fair share, huh?

Yeah. My favorite play I've ever seen was in London at the National Theatre. It's The Lehman Trilogy. That's highly recommended for anybody, especially if you can catch one of the original actors in there. These guys are like—they've been knighted by the Queen. They're that good.

The best musical—Broadway musical—I've ever seen, I think, is the first act of Hamilton.

The Lehman Trilogy?

Yeah. Best play of all time, in my opinion. It doesn't get any better than that.

Wait a second. The Lehman Trilogy is about Lehman Brothers? There's a play about Lehman Brothers?

Yeah, and it's the best play I've ever seen in my life. It's unbelievable. Avi, if you have a chance to see it, go see it. It blew my mind. I've never had such an emotional reaction to any sort of entertainment.

The fact that I worked there is irrelevant. The last minute of it is about the crash. The whole thing is more about Jewish immigrants starting a business in America.

Of course it is. Of course they're Jewish.

Of course they're Jewish.

Well, we're never going to escape the allegations, Jonah.

No, we're not. So let's just lean into them.

Let's lean into them.

There have been a tremendous amount of allegations levied recently against this concept of AI optimism. All the doomers have come out in force, basically saying, “Hey, guys, you have 2 years to escape the permanent underclass. If you don't hypergamble your way to success, everything is over for you.”

1. AI Doomerism And Job Displacement

What do you think of that take, Jo? This has been percolating through. There's a thread on Twitter that went super viral about how everything is going to change in the next 2 years. What's your take? Was this the Shumer thread or the Mechanism Capital guy thread?

This was the Shumer thread.

Yeah, that one went super viral. I thought it was AI slop.

I thought so too, but—

The reason why I thought it was AI slop was because it was so woo-woo. There was no conclusion. It was like, “AI will change everything, and they're not telling you, and you don't know what's going to change, but they do.” It's like, well, tell us what the hell's going to change—and he didn't say.

Basically, my views on this are evolving rapidly. Okay, fine, I wasn't giving him enough credit. There were some takeaways. Like—

There were genuine takeaways. He gave you—

He was like, “Short businesses that sell human time. Buy businesses that either own the means of AI production or the commodities that go into AI,” like power and GPU compute. The other takeaway is that everyone's screwed.

But, in a nutshell, my views on AI have evolved. At first, when I saw ChatGPT and all of the hype around AGI, I thought, “This is just a fundraising ploy. It's cool. It's a chatbot. We're not going to have technology that's replacing humans en masse anytime soon.” This is just like every other Luddite panic attack for the last 5,000 years of human history, where it's like, “No, we shouldn't invent the wheel because that will put human chariot carriers out of work,” right? I just dismissed it.

Now, the more I use AI, the more I'm like, I think there's something to it. I subscribe to ChatGPT and Gemini, and we use Claude Code for the 1000x Terminal—that's the expensive one. Basically, there's no reason to hire entry-level people who aren't utterly elite in some sort of intellectual or talent-type capacity.

I think that's going to create social unrest. I don't expect all knowledge work to be replaced by AI, but once humanoid robotics show up and put a whole bunch of blue-collar people out of work—drivers, cleaning ladies, whatever—plus a bunch of young people who didn't go to maybe a top 5-to-10 university having a much harder time getting a high-quality job, I think there'll be some real problems.

Ultimately, I think the conclusion is going to be that there will be redistribution voted into the political spectrum—socialism.

2. AI Doomerism Cont.

I think so. My take on this is sort of nuanced, but it agrees with you very far out. I think the key is that I agree with you far out; I don't necessarily agree with what you're saying right now.

For the first time, let's take a step back. What does technology do? At the end of the day, technology provides leverage to a human.

3. The AI Investment Strategy

If you go back 100 years and you wanted to start building a company that produced cars, and you were Ford, you needed to hire tens of thousands of people to go assemble your cars, right? As technology advances, it becomes a lot easier to produce cars. The number of people that you need shrinks and shrinks and shrinks and shrinks because suddenly you're able to do with 1 person what took 10 people or 100 people decades ago.

And that's really what AI is doing right now. It's providing leverage and reducing the number of people it takes to produce the same amount of output. Over time, what we've found and what we're seeing right now is that productivity—high-level metrics of productivity—are way up, right? The number of apps launched on the Apple App Store, that metric has gone absolutely vertical. The number of GitHub commits has gone absolutely vertical.

What about the number of meme coins and shitcoins launched? Just kidding. Keep going.

That's also gone totally vertical, and AI shitcoins and things have gone completely vertical too, right? But what I'm trying to articulate very specifically is that we're actually only at the beginning stage of this process. There are a lot of people that I speak to day to day because I'm 30. The people who are going to be the most impacted by this are the ones with low-level skills.

It's the people below the age of 25. It's recent college graduates. Those are the most replaceable people by far. For them, the crisis is coming very quickly, in my personal opinion. For you, the under-25-year-old, your crisis is here. For me and you, Jonah, the 30-plus with skills, the crisis is much further out.

When you have hard skills—let's say you built a career for yourself, you've built a network, you know people—that's valuable in itself. Obviously, you're going to have an easier time navigating this world than somebody fresh out of college who just got their CS degree. Maybe you graduated college as an electrician, and that job is going to last for a really long time because there are all these regulatory hurdles, and it's a physical job.

But basically, the people we've referred to in the past as the laptop-class bourgeoisie are in the most trouble: the people who would have graduated college, gone to work at Bain, BCG, or McKinsey, and then, 6 years later, tried to start their own company; the people who were business analysts at Capital One. I was one of them for about 3 and a half seconds, but still.

What's in your wallet?

They were always so proud of the Jennifer Garner commercials.

Were you the business analyst who decided that we're going to receive 3 pieces of spam snail mail per week at every home in America?

Trying to get people—

But they were not about it.

Too many, obviously.

Exactly. Okay, keep going. So the question is: What do you tell those people? What's an actionable thing? Let's say you're listening to this podcast and you're just hearing this doomerism, and you're like, "What the fuck do I do?"

My take is that basically you should be saving every dollar that you possibly can. You should be reducing your spending as much as possible, and you should live like a bug person for the next 3 to 4 years and shove all of your money into the markets. My take is different, and this is where I differ from the doomers.

The doomers always go straight to AGI. The doomers go straight to, "Hey, if AI really takes off in the next 2 to 3 years, then that means unemployment is going to explode massively, things are going to get really bad, and politically the environment is going to get horrible." But my take is different. I think AGI might be—let's say it's even 7 years out—the next 3 years of our life, which is a long time. Even 1 year is a long time; 2 years is a long time.

The productivity gains are going to be enormous, and the amount of capital that these large businesses that are producing AI, selling and providing the infrastructure for AI, building data centers and the hard assets needed to provide this energy and build these monstrous warehouses are going to accumulate until AGI is released and the political environment shifts is going to be astronomical.

I 100% agree with Andrew Kang's article in this case: we're reaching a point of massive exponential growth. Basically, up until AGI really, really, really displaces a tremendous amount of people, it's going to impact the lowest-spending segment of society first anyway, so it's not going to impact the bottom line.

If you look at general spending, 50% of all spending is done by people in the top 10%, and the people in the top 10% are the people least likely to be impacted by AI. I don't buy the argument at all, in any way, shape, or form, that we're going to have a massive collapse in earnings because of high unemployment, because the people who are going to start being unemployed over the next 2 to 3 years are the people who aren't spending money anyway.

Right.

And so my take on this is that you need to be as invested as possible in the markets. You need to be as invested as possible in hard assets. Otherwise, you're going to be left behind. I hate to say it that way, but I do think it's true.

4. Bitcoin Crash & Crypto’s Dotcom Moment

This does require a bit of a shift in mentality and behavior, which is why the article that's going giga-viral—I think it was too long, candidly, for what it was—but it did have some very good advice in there. If you're young or if you're coming up, make it your goal to know and learn as much about AI as possible so that you can leverage yourself in the next 2 to 3 years and make yourself so much more valuable to that company.

Build that network. Get that coffee with that person. Become an indispensable part of your company so that when everyone's indispensable, at least you've proven yourself more competent than the rest, and somehow maybe you'll get to stick around, right? So that's really what it is. I mean, I'll stop my monologue there.

No, no, no. It's a great monologue. I mostly agree with your take. I have a few things. The "make yourself indispensable" thing precedes AI. But yes, if you're not actively figuring out how to use AI to make yourself indispensable now, somebody else will have that leverage and make you dispensable. So I get that point. I think it's kind of a tired trope, though.

The beauty of being young is that my first year as a professional person out of college was at Lehman Brothers. Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, so my second year was at Barclays Capital because they bought Lehman Brothers' assets, including me, out of bankruptcy. Then Barclays proceeded to fire 15,000 people. I'm going somewhere with this.

Firing 15,000 people is a big job, right?

5. Two Megatrends Reshaping Markets

So they basically had the Bobs from Office Space, like consultants, reinterviewing the entire workforce every Friday. So I'd have to reinterview for my job every Friday. My quote was like, "I'm young. I'm the most technically capable person on the credit trading floor. After you fire somebody, who would you rather have figuring out their spreadsheets—the old guy or me? Obviously me."

Oh, and by the way, I can do everything from answering the phone to doing actual trades and making you money because I'm young. I'm not going to be too good to go do back-office work or answer the phone for people, but I can also make you money. It's a no-brainer to keep me, and I'm the cheapest, right?

Making yourself indispensable was something that was ingrained into my mind early in my career. So when it's, "The special advice for the era of AI is: make yourself indispensable with AI," I kind of feel that preceded AI. Now, you're not wrong about the fact that AI is going to create wealth for asset holders. I actually tweeted this, right? I tweeted, "Buy hard assets. Yield curve control is coming."

The implication there is that AI is probably going to accrue value to AI-native companies that are already running the S&P 500. That tweet went viral, right? It got 120,000 views. Not crazy viral, but viral enough.

Basically, my point here is: during COVID, when COVID first broke out, once they started printing money, I said the best thing you can do is take out leverage and buy hard assets. I bought a house back then. It was the best trade—one of the best trades—of my life, were it not for the fact that somebody who maybe is America's biggest unconvicted white-collar criminal became my tenant. But other than that, the asset value was great.

I bought it with leverage. I took out more leverage and bought Bitcoin. I bought the S&P—the index—at $2,400, and it's just all been an amazing trade. Everything's tripled.

But the thing is, we're in another one of those times, except there hasn't been a huge crash that gives you the dip to buy. Instead, there's just some tinder that has been doused in gasoline and lit on fire in the form of this new technology. So now is kind of the last—if you could even call it—a plateau before I think assets go really parabolic and labor goes south.

Now, the ultimate impact of that, as we've seen through—name your historical revolution that creates inequality—is socialism, redistribution of wealth. But I actually take your point that that's going to be a knock-on effect of the trade, the clear and present trade, which is: borrow money, buy stuff, right? Like, if you don't—

I mean, you're not supposed to—

I don't think you're supposed to take out too much leverage. But right now, money is cheap relative to the amount of capital that's going to be consolidated by the things that are building our future.

When I say “buy the things that are building our future,” I mean very specifically energy, because the demand for energy is going to go through the roof.

Be careful buying physical commodity energy, though, because there’s a ton of supply.

There’s a ton of supply, but energy usage is going to go through the roof, and I think companies that benefit from energy usage going through the roof are going to do well.

Personally, I’ve got to say something on this. I’m a commodities guy. The worst thing you can do as a trader, especially a commodities trader, is be right and make no money or lose money. Like, if your thesis—

Well, I think that’s—

Yeah, it’s like, as traders in general, right? Would you rather be right, or would you rather make money?

Right?

Being wrong and losing money is actually way better than being right and losing money, because if you’re wrong and you lose money, it’s because my thesis was invalidated somehow, and I learned from that and moved on. If you’re right and you lose money, shame on you.

There are so many opportunities in this market to be dead right about AI, dead right about energy consumption, and lose money. If you’re saying, “Energy consumption’s going up. I’m going to buy natural gas on the highs,” and then the cold snap ends and natural gas plummets, shame on you.

Basically, what I’m saying here is that the way you express the energy trade—some of these trades are extremely hard to express. “Demand for compute is going up. How do I put that on?” Maybe Bitcoin, you know? You have to really think through these things. My point here is that expression of the trade is so critical. Go on, Avi. I’m sorry I interrupted you.

I agree. I guess the question is, let’s say my expression of the trade, personally, is that I want to buy assets that are as close to that fire hose as possible. At the same time, I’ve held a thesis for months now that, while we have this massive AI productivity boom going on and this massive capex spending that’s about to happen from all these companies—Meta, Amazon, and Google—they’re spending a ton of money building out these data centers in-house, we’re having a fundamental shift in geopolitics away from the unipolar world of the U.S. to the multipolar world of today.

You have the China sphere of influence, the Russia sphere of influence, the European sphere of influence, and the American sphere of influence. If you just take a step back for a second, that’s really why we’re spending so much time on our hemisphere: We’ve decided to give up on the rest of the world. We’re spending all of our time on the Americas now.

I think that’s why—maybe that’s even why Bad Bunny was the performer at the Super Bowl. We’re trying to think about that. We’ll get there, but we’re trying to appeal to the—

But you’re the Puerto Rican on the podcast. What did you think as the—

Puerto Rican?

I am no longer Puerto Rican. I have left my Puerto Rican days behind. But I do go back there, and I do love it. I love my fellow former Puerto Ricans. As of today, I am a happy and proud East Coast Jew in New York.

I wish I was there during the Super Bowl. That would have been awesome to go back—

I thought you were dancing around at halftime and—

We’re doing the weave. We’re doing the little Trump weave here.

Yeah. Let’s weave it back to the original point, which was that you have these 2 megatrends occurring right now. You have this AI megatrend and this geopolitical megatrend. The question is, how do you fit your allocation in there, and how do you make as much money as possible?

I think one thing is to have 12- to 18-month time horizons on a lot of these trades and be able to stomach some of the volatility around those trades. Maybe you can even find things that are crossovers. You’ve talked about uranium and rare-earth minerals, and those are good crossovers, because uranium is going to be very critical to powering the next stage of energy production, especially in Europe.

You also have things like who’s going to consolidate all the power. I think people like Google and Amazon—maybe probably not Facebook, but maybe just Google and Amazon, candidly—because they’re at the forefront. Then, if you can potentially get some private investments in robotics companies, or maybe take a chunk of Anthropic if you can get an SPV in it, that could be interesting.

But really, I think most of the opportunities here are in the public markets. Then you want to say, “What else benefits?” It’s energy and industrials, I think, as well. That’s really my portfolio right now. That’s really it: Who’s going to be needed?

If you’re building—if you’re spending $500 billion on building data centers—you’re going to need some people to build those data centers for you, and those people are going to benefit massively.

Yeah. I disagree with one thing. I agree with everything you said except for the fact that most of the alpha is in the public markets. I think the trade expression needs to be a little bit more elegant than that, frankly.

If you’re a young person looking for a way to benefit from this trade with zero effort and maybe make 50% to 100% over a 2-year time frame, which would be an awesome return, then yeah, I agree with you: public markets.

But if you’re trying to turn this into the kind of wealth-creation event that crypto was, maybe, in 2017 or 2021, I think you’ve got to go private. What I mean by that is, how does a commodity trade work? Data centers need energy, so let’s examine that thesis and break it apart for a second.

There’s a big spend coming. That spend is kind of fragmented, because a data center being built in Virginia isn’t going to impact the price of gas in Vermont. Let’s break it down.

There are 3 kinds of commodities. There are commodities that are mined from the earth—literally dug out of the ground with holes—like oil and gas. Then there are manufactured commodities, like when you take oil and put it through a manufacturing plant called a refinery and create gasoline.

There’s no gasoline buried underground. You have to make it. You have to manufacture it. Neither oil nor gasoline is particularly useful in and of itself, right? Native Americans used oil as tar to put together canoes, but other than that, there’s really no use case. You have to manufacture it into gasoline.

What are you going to do with gasoline? Light it on fire? That doesn’t help. You have to put it through another refining process—another manufacturing process—in a portable manufacturing refinery system called an internal combustion engine to turn gasoline into the useful commodity called locomotion.

All right. Data centers need the useful commodity. They drink that up. It’s called electricity. I don’t necessarily think that the right trade is to invest in the mined commodity, which is natural gas, that’s powering most of this stuff, because natural gas is largely driven by other factors.

I think you want to focus, for most of this AI shit, on the manufactured commodity node in that system I just described. Maybe it’s public utilities in the locations where there’s a big data center build. Maybe it’s literally going out and buying shares in larger construction companies that do data center builds.

Or maybe, if you’re an entrepreneurial young person who didn’t go to college and you want to make a bunch of money off AI, you go and start a construction company in one of these places, hire a bunch of local technicians, organize that, and become a general contractor. There are all kinds of different ways to work at the manual level.

That’s true. There are a lot of different ways to do that. In my tweet, what I said specifically is, “Own the machine.” I think the easiest way for the vast majority of people is probably not going to be starting a construction company, although that’s a great idea if you have the resources.

6. Ads (Kraken)

I actually know of a startup that I’m invested in through a fund I put money into. It’s run by a likely former Anduril employee, and what they do specifically is provide physical security to data centers. Data centers are filled with extremely valuable objects. They’re filled with a lot of things that a lot of criminals would love to get their hands on and sell on secondary markets.

Physical security for data centers is a hugely underrated part of all this. He sort of tapped into that. He was like, “Okay, this is going to be very important,” and built an entire company around it.

He went to VCs, raised a ton of money, and now he actually has a pretty phenomenal product. And so if you can provide a service to the machine, that's also huge. Maybe you should be thinking about that as well.

Sorry, re-explain what the product is exactly.

It's providing physical security. They basically set up a system: they'll set up special cameras and special security systems. Imagine you're trying to steal something from the Louvre and they have laser trip wires, that kind of stuff. They'll have sci-fi-level security mechanisms to basically make sure that if anything—even the smallest thing—goes a little bit haywire, you'll see it. Maybe a wolf runs past your data center; you'll know exactly what happened, right? It'll tell you exactly what's going on at any moment, and so it makes it very difficult for people to come in there and steal.

I just set one of those up in my house.

It's a really good business, and he's securing a ton of value.

The AI can differentiate humans from cats. When it's a human, I guess I don't have the automated AI machine-gun turret from James Cameron's movie Aliens that kills all the aliens, but short of actual AI death bots, I've got all that. I got it installed last week. That's a good business, actually.

And it's in an area that people don't necessarily think about. So maybe you, the listener, can try to think: What are some areas that aren't being served right now that we can come up with that maybe we can provide for your local data center?

One of my friends—another example—made a killing, an absolute killing. What he did was hire a bunch of college students and basically get them to research random warehouses on the outskirts of what was likely Des Moines, Iowa, and call up the owners of these warehouses, who very frequently happen to be 65-year-old guys who used the warehouse to store corn, and negotiate buyouts without telling them what they're buying it out for. He'd buy it out, retrofit it to be like an Amazon warehouse or a data center, and then basically flip it for a 5-to-10x after the retrofitting, right?

There are all these little things that I think you can do that people don't necessarily think about to try to take advantage of the boom. But the reality is that, for the vast majority of people, the best use of your time is to get the highest-paying job that you possibly can right now. Utilize AI tools in your day-to-day to be able to actually get to that next level and get some respect in your workplace, because I think AI tools are underutilized. Three, make sure that you're investing in the markets.

I think this is where it sort of separates out a little bit. Passive investing right now—I'm not sure passive investing in index funds is the right approach, because the capital concentration will continue. And I know this has been happening for a long time, and everyone gets up in your grill and says, “Well, no, the Mag 7 has been driving returns for the last 4 years, so you're just repeating something that's already happening.”

What I'm saying to you is, you could have said that 2 years ago, buddy. It was true 2 years ago. It was true 1 year ago. It was true 6 days ago, and yet it still keeps happening. The reason that it keeps happening is because it's an unfightable megatrend. It's like trying to fight the ocean right now. Capital concentration is the name of the game right now. This is going to continue.

You can scream at the top of your lungs that the Mag 7 is going to underperform, and they might underperform for 3 to 6 months, but they're going to outperform all other tech companies. Tech might rerate a little bit, but the companies that are at the top of the game are going to continue to accumulate, and that's just, unfortunately, the reality of the situation.

We've got to pivot to crypto at some point.

We do have to pivot to crypto after the break.

We'll talk about crypto a little bit. It's just that this was sort of the topic of the week that I think everyone was thinking about. Everyone right now is actually quite bearish on the Mag 7, and they're all citing capex issues, but people can't differentiate between downstream effects that aren't going to rerate immediately.

For example, spend on other companies for future buildout often doesn't rerate the companies that are being spent on, but it will rerate the company that's doing the spending pretty quickly. Every hedge fund now knows, and every hedge fund pays attention to, the Mag 7. Everyone now knows that they're spending a tremendous amount of money on building out.

I think that their underperformance is a reflection of that, but that has already played out, right? Their underperformance has already played out. In about 2 weeks, you're going to need a new reason for them to underperform, because that reason is going to be priced in.

Talking about Bitcoin, and Jonah ran away, but we can welcome back, buddy.

My bad. How long were you waiting for?

About 30 seconds.

Sorry.

No, no, no. Like 3 seconds—it was pretty quick. But look, obviously—

Can I get a word in edgewise here, Avi? Can I talk about crypto for a second?

Let's talk crypto.

I think the lows are in. I think that when we wicked down to what was the utter low point—$60,000—I think that was it. I don't think we're in a nuclear situation. I was talking to the Chief, and he thinks this is like 2007 for crypto and that we're going to hit the real financial crisis soon.

It does feel a little bit like that. At Lehman in '07, we were not exactly sure why the stock market, and our stock in particular, was starting to crash, but the market sniffed something that there was no obvious newswire catalyst for. It kind of feels like that right now, which is terrifying, because the market does tend to force max pain. If it creates a bunch of blowups, there will certainly be a cascade of other blowups.

Here, much like in '07, it's not like the 1997 Asian debt crisis or a particular catalyst sending markets lower, like COVID. Here, it's just, “Uh-oh, why are we puking?” Often, these are opportunities to buy. Once in a decade, there are opportunities to sell ahead of an epic, generational unwind. I don't think it's the latter, frankly. I think we're okay.

I just think Bitcoin has lost its momentum and its narrative for now. But I still think that it's the alternative money of the future. Ultimately, though, I think that what's going on here is that there's a change of hands in value from OGs and crypto natives to institutions.

Institutions have better fish to fry than crypto right now because of the momentum. Also, institutions have better fish to fry than most of crypto, which is worthless. Most tokens should be worth zero. So I think that's scaring people away from the tokens that should be worth a lot, like Bitcoin, HYPE, and a few others.

The narrative will come back because the regulatory backdrop is suddenly constructive. I think this is just going to take some time, which is annoying and painful for the impatient degenerates out there like you and me.

You know, one thing that I've been struggling with a little bit on Bitcoin is that I was under the impression that there would be more interest in buying Bitcoin at a discount, because I thought—and when your thesis is disrupted, you have to obviously make amends to it—but I thought that a crash like this, basically Bitcoin 50% off the highs, would be a very attractive entry point for a lot of institutional capital. Now you get a 100% return if it goes back to the highs.

We did defend that $60,000 level. We bounced very nicely. It was a good trade, but we sort of capped out, right? We capped out at $70,000. I think there's still a lot of people offloading. And generally, when you get a move like this, you don't immediately bounce back. There's a little bit of chop, a little bit of up and down.

Now, my personal take is that $60K is the bottom. We’re probably not going to go below that. Or, if we do, what ends up happening is the classic pattern: You go down, wick down to $60K, and then backfill the wick. We trade back down to $60K, and then that second bottom is where it bottoms out.

But for me, I think it’s very, very, very possible that we just go sideways for an extended period of time. We can go sideways for a month, sort of basing. The longer we go sideways, I think the more nervous I get. What I would really like to see in order to get very bullish on Bitcoin—otherwise, I’m probably just going to sit on the sidelines for a second here—is if we get back down to that $60K level, then bounce hard again. Then you can start to say, “Okay, there’s clearly a ton of demand at $60K. There are clearly people who are willing to step in and buy it.”

Now, the narrative I think is true here is that this is the dot-com bubble burst moment for crypto. That’s what we’re experiencing. This is all of the froth, all of the nonsense. Reality has begun to set in. And this is what we’ve been saying for months and months and months and months and months: It is now time for real companies that use crypto rails to present themselves and do well.

It is only the assets that produce revenue that will get out of this. Everyone clowned me—and you, well, mostly you—because at the beginning of the year, we were like, “Ah, memes are dead.” Then memes pulled this fucking crazy move. And then what the hell did memes immediately do?

What did memes immediately do? What? They retraced the entire move and more.

And far more. This is the part that cracks me up, because on that podcast I said very specifically, if you get a pop for memes, that’s free money. You just short the fuck out of that and make money. And if you shorted the fuck out of the pop, you made money.

Right? And so this is one of those things that I think we’re just going to have to learn this lesson over and over and over. The market has changed. The market has shifted. This is no longer a market that can sustain undeserved price action. So there’s one caveat to my earlier point, though.

We were dead right about memes and about crypto—most of crypto being worthless unless it’s a real company generating revenue.

And yet, I don’t know about you, but I still lost money being long Bitcoin here. That’s an example of me being kind of right and losing money. So, shame on me. It’s just one of those punches in the face that you have to take. No, I’m not going to sell Bitcoin more than 50% off the highs. Sorry.

Also, this guy—sorry, but this guy’s the most [expletive] person. Let’s just block and ban him. Hold on. Let me—

No, hold on, because he’s like, “When you said BTC was going to $100K in January, it went to $97K. It went from like $85K to $97K.” Like, what?

Well, he’s called Jester. He literally refers to himself as a clown, so I guess maybe this is a joke.

Oh no, I’m sorry. Say, “I’m not your dad.” Tell him I’m not your dad.

Jester, I’m not your dad. I am not your dad.

You get to stay in the chat room, Jester. You don’t need to—

Yeah, you get to stay. We like you, Jester. We just brought you—

We like you, Jester.

We like you. You’re a great guy, Jester.

You’re funny. You’re a jester.

Yeah, he’s jester-maxing.

7. Final Thoughts

This guy, Blade Tennic, has written “GM” fewer than 20 times over the course of the stream. I love our community, Jonah. I love the community around trying to figure this out. This is great.

I even love this guy, Multiaxium, because he’s got a great profile picture.

Is that Jefferson?

All the way. You know what? If we go down to $45K, I will absolutely be coping the whole way.

I will happily cope.

Though it would not be the first time that Bitcoin was down 70%.

So, what do you do when it’s down 70%? Sell? No.

Bitcoin is a repeating process. History just repeats itself again and again. Apparently, the 4-year cycle is real—

Forever and ever and ever and ever.

Forever and ever and ever. And the highs will be ever less exciting. No, I’m kidding. I think we’re still on the frontier of something huge for Bitcoin over the very long term. I think it’s still early innings. I think it’s going to look insane to sell at these levels 10 years from now—generationally dumb. I hope we can just make it through this somehow. Hustling on the side, earning money on this AI boom somehow, just finding ways to survive the Bitcoin chop and not get stopped out—I think that’s kind of the name of the game here.

I’ve got to jump.

Apparently, that guy’s profile is Laplace, which I should have known because of all the Laplace transforms in my career as an engineer. But never again. Now I just look at charts and chat with you, Jonah. It’s always fun.

It’s always fun. Avi, love you, man. It’s great to see you. Survive.

This was awesome. I hope everyone’s surviving out there.

Love you guys. Love you. Later. Adios.