GoodAlexander：AI接管、末日周期、加密及更多 | TG播客

And boom. Good Alexander is back on stream. Glad to see you again, dude. How are you?

I'm fine. How are you?

I'm okay, friend. A lot has changed since we held that first stream. A lot of things happened. A pile of tokens depreciated to zero.

This is true. Simply admit it. GOAT—the GOAT was destroyed. Pump.fun—

Don't get carried away. Bitcoin is at $100,000. They say we should have just gone all in on Bitcoin and forgotten everything. What were they saying?

That's all true, dude, but let's dot the i's. You know, I told everyone at the start of the stream, “Bitcoin rose by 1%.” I think I saw some people start smiling, so it's time to invite Alexander to spoil your life—or at least, that's how we feel.

Do you want to start with a short presentation for newcomers who aren't familiar with you? Then we can move on to more interesting things.

Sure. I worked in traditional finance, at Citi FX, and at Palantir. I worked at a hedge fund, and then I came to crypto because I founded an advertising company. I sold the advertising company and started running advertising for cryptocurrency projects. I became more and more involved in this space.

I moved to Puerto Rico, where I studied the issue of attention and its flow into crypto. I'm also very interested in AI because it's replacing search—Google search, you know? I was running all this advertising on Google, so I got into AI and crypto fairly early.

Since then, I founded a project with my brothers, so I guess I'm now a crypto founder. I used to mainly trade with my own money when I moved to Puerto Rico. Now there's a whole team of people, and my brother created a coin as well. So, yes, I'm in crypto.

I still trade to some extent, but it's not the main thing anymore. Apparently, I've also become a public XRP fan. I've been watching it for a long time and publicly voiced that view after the AI madness in crypto.

I realized that Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, had actually launched this whole thesis about agents in 2023. He seemed to have thought about it a lot. He was too early.

My older brother worked for me as a researcher because we had positions in TAO, Render, and other projects. We said, “Dude, you need to understand these things, because we've invested in them, but we don't know what any of them do.”

Then we realized, “Oh, this doesn't work as well as we thought.” My brother became a crypto founder, and I said, “Dude, we can't run a research business if you just read every post about every cryptocurrency.”

So I published some material about TAO. It was fairly negative, actually. I wrote that subnets were a good investment, but the base protocol was not. So, yeah, that's probably enough detail. I'll stop there.

No, that's perfect. Usually my trading looks the same: “Okay, I have 3% of this coin. I guess I should go to the website and find out what it does.”

By the way, your brother—no, that's the wrong choice, man. Yes, wrong choice. Your brother is very clever. I listened to several of your Spaces. You spent a lot of time with him over several weeks, and they were really cool.

I have many questions about specific things we can discuss, but I don't know where to begin. I'm curious: when did you show up, somewhere around November or December 2024? I knew then that you weren't feeling well. You were the most eloquent, crazy AI enthusiast in the middle of the AI madness in crypto, and I was very fascinated by that.

I think you gave me a lot of perspective on the scale of what we were talking about. Although I think the crypto AI hype has slowed down, the global hype around AI has accelerated significantly.

I'm curious, in general, how much your vision of all this has changed over the last year—from when we talked about GOAT and Truth Terminal to where we are now?

I would say that it has changed quite significantly. At the highest level, I think crypto hasn't covered most of the AI use cases, if at all. The goal is social power, right?

People mostly don't use crypto to purchase computational capacity through blockchains. They don't really use stablecoins for transactions between agents. That was one of the big initial theses: that we should use stablecoins for transactions between agents. That's what I promoted, and that's what Coinbase promoted. Everyone thought this trend would happen.

Of course, this hasn't stopped venture capital investors from investing $500 million in Matt Wing's startup[?], obviously assuming that this will become true in the future. But, as of today, it hasn't happened.

With Solana DePIN, the initial thesis was that Solana doesn't generate enough fees to pay for its operations, and there was hope that DePIN would become a more stable source of fee revenue beyond speculation. But that didn't happen either.

When you look at this space and visit some of these projects, the energy is quite low. My position has become a little tougher because I think artificial intelligence can interact with the blockchain space, but it will probably be completely different from what people imagine.

For example, my brother's project is a coin with a Proof-of-Work mechanism. Ambient uses artificial intelligence to implement what's called Proof of Logits. Proof of Logits is similar to Bitcoin block mining, except that you run AI instead.

I'm enthusiastic about that. My friend David runs the project. You actually spoke to David.

Oh, exactly. By the way, I really like this guy. He's my guy. I really like him.

Yes, David is excellent. He's one of my—

Oh, he's in Puerto Rico, right?

Yes. We've been locked here for too long. We're trying to escape.

Yeah, the number is constantly growing. Sorry, right? You have to correct everything he says.

But, yeah, I'm very excited about what David is working on. Essentially, it's the use of crypto as a funding mechanism for GPU costs.

In general, I would say the most extreme example of the intersection between crypto and AI is Galaxy Digital. Galaxy Digital is doing these large-scale operations in data centers and hopes, in my view, that this connects with its crypto business.

CoreWeave, at first, were Ethereum miners. You probably talked to Vance from Framework.

No, but it would be worth it.

He's like a whale in Polygon, and he's very successful. His fund, in my opinion, has the highest DPI in crypto. He invested in CoreWeave because they were Ethereum miners.

In the public markets, if you look at companies like IREN, they trade at around 30 times revenue. IREN traded somewhere around 26 or 27 times revenue. Traditional Bitcoin miners trade at most around 7 or 8 times revenue.

Public markets clearly appreciate the AI story, and you have this mining history through CoreWeave. In fact, if you go back to Jensen Huang, the founder of Nvidia, he says, “For the first time, I was able to explain Nvidia to my mom through Ethereum mining.” He says, “I'm connecting the graphics card chip to the socket and getting money. I can finally explain to my mother what I'm doing with Nvidia.”

Ethereum mining and Proof-of-Work were actually early intersections with AI. They are current intersections with AI in the public markets, but in the crypto markets there aren't really many AI-based Proof-of-Work projects. That's the big bet I'm making on one side.

The more secondary point is that, when we first started talking, I was extremely enthusiastic about the possibility that AI agents would actually manage a fully sovereign economy and interact with one another. But it seems that this won't happen soon, judging by current trends.

It still looks fairly likely, especially in light of the launch of Sora. Essentially, Sora is a paradigm shift in the quality of content that AI-based systems can generate.

What we found in my own cryptocurrency project is that AI is very effective for a lot of things. A lot of people use it for customer support, but it's extremely effective for any work involving a DAO, right? Any situation where you need to coordinate a large group of people to execute a particular task is a situation where AI is extremely effective.

If you think about it, I think many people underestimate how much AI can do. It can say, “Okay, here are 70 people interacting with an agent. What if one of those 70 people was an expert on CoreWeave, while another person opened a position in CoreWeave?” Then the CoreWeave expert could reinforce the idea, explain it better, and post it on social networks.

I think the interesting thing about crypto and AI is that crypto can turn AI into a multiplayer game. ChatGPT is a single-player game, right? You're just locked in a chat with ChatGPT. You communicate with it one-on-one. Vibe coding is a single-player game as well. Crypto is somewhat anthropomorphic. The whole premise of vibe coding is that there is a person who says, “Hey, I want this to happen,” and you're essentially telling the computer what to do.

The more interesting dynamic in crypto and AI, in my opinion, is that it can turn AI into a multiplayer game controlled by crowds. Have you ever played StarCraft?

No, but I know what it is. It's like that, right?

Yes. In StarCraft, there are pylons or Overlords. In general, there are a bunch of low-level units—a kind of centralized collective mind.

Yes. Hmm, you know, the idea behind AI is that you have 25 people who, separately, may not be that interesting, but as part of a group can be quite effective. I think we all understand that this applies to our group chats in Telegram, right? It’s as if we’re all trapped in Telegram group chats. We know that, separately, our ideas may not be that interesting, but it’s actually quite good to be in a group of 26 people who are constantly sharing alpha.

That’s why I think the most realistic and least risky application of artificial intelligence in crypto is basically this. My perception of crypto is that speculation is still where all the money is spinning, true? It’s like prediction markets, centralized exchanges, Solana. Honestly, Pump.fun is not dead, despite the fact that people think it’s dead. It’s not actually dead; it has just rolled back a little.

You really don’t see these other options being used, even for stablecoins. Even in Argentina, where we say, “Oh yes, there’s this big exit in stablecoins,” even now that the United States is saving Argentina, the basic option for using stablecoins in Argentina is arbitrage on the black market, in currencies, right? So even now, when there’s this story about stablecoin adoption, after all, it’s still speculation.

That’s why I think an interesting new primitive in crypto is that we’re seeing on-chain securities. The SEC is changing its policy about trading various securities. A lot of money comes through stablecoins in pursuit of profit, and I think we’re really at the early stage of developing on-chain stocks.

Brian Armstrong said today that he had talked to people in the Senate. Sergey Nazarov, the founder of Chainlink, also talked to Chuck Schumer. It seems that there’s bipartisan support, even despite the threat of a government shutdown, to push through the Senate a version of the CLARITY Act—or, as it actually is, an infrastructure act—that would provide a lot of regulatory clarity for on-chain shares.

Yes.

My view on privacy coins, and how I was talking about Railgun in the Ethereum space, is connected to this. Of course, I was on a panel discussion at Token2049 with Mert, who is obsessed with Zcash.

When you really study the history of Zcash, you ask, “Okay, why specifically Zcash and not Monero?” Monero is the “good old” privacy coin that is actually used by criminals, right? It’s directly associated with crime. Zcash, on the other hand, isn’t really about crime. You think, “Okay, why isn’t Zcash associated with criminality?”

Zcash reached a special agreement with exchanges, so the exits, or off-ramps, aren’t actually fully private. If you talk to the founder of Monero, he’ll say, “Yes, Zcash sold out,” and so on. I’m like, “Okay, yes, but the argument would really be right if you were running a criminal enterprise, right?” You think, “Of course it’s worth using Monero if you sell drugs or something like that.”

That leads to the question: why would you prefer Zcash over Monero? It’s because you’re not trying to sell drugs. You’re essentially trying to have financial privacy—on-chain financial privacy—on the Solana blockchain. That’s why Mert promotes Zcash.

Yes, that’s right.

At the basic level, if everyone has private stablecoins on Solana, and there are a lot of stocks there, and all of this is new, and it also happens on Ethereum, this is the same story as with Railgun, right? If you have private stablecoins on Ethereum and private funds, that creates a completely different dynamic for how trading works.

You know, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the hedge-fund industry. I used to work in long-short funds, and all the smart ones go to the pod shops, right? A pod shop, for those who don’t know, is a fund with many managers.

It so happens that there’s so much compliance and so much nonsense that we have to deal with as a fund. Every deal I made, every time I earned money on stock options or on some specific trade, I had to write a whole-page compliance report because they said, “Oh yeah, why did you open this option? Did you talk with the leadership before doing this trade?”

A significant part of your life is complete nonsense. As a manager of a small fund, you may find yourself on the other side of all sorts of rules, and you simply can’t do this. You literally can’t do this. You need 2 compliance managers with salaries of $250,000 per year. Good luck to you as a small fund.

So it happened that everyone went to multi-manager funds, right? Because multi-manager funds have their own compliance departments. If you look at the number of new hedge funds, it just collapsed, right?

Now, with the new Trump administration, you think, “Okay, full financial deregulation.” We’re deregulating banks. We’re reducing their capital requirements. We’re doing things that are market-friendly, such as reducing the cost of overnight repo. They may be restoring balance-sheet expansion.

This is all great if you look at the financial sector. Bank bonuses will be at historical highs because policy for banks has become extremely profitable—specifically for big institutional banks.

Therefore, when you look at crypto, AI, and their intersection, you understand, “Okay, exactly. A significant event will occur: an increase in on-chain trading in valuable securities and bonds, right?”

Many of you may have heard of Canton Network. There are people who earn millions of dollars per year just by being validators in Canton. You should become a validator in the Canton Network. Canton involves Goldman Sachs, Tradeweb, and serious institutions.

I don’t even really know what it is.

Yes, I don’t really know what it is either. Canton is essentially this: if you’re familiar with the bond market, it was, for a long time, extraordinarily inefficient.

The history of Bloomberg, by the way, is that on trading floors in the 1980s, people smoked cigars and recorded all their deals on tickets. What happened was that the tickets caught fire because people dropped cigar ash on the tickets. Bloomberg ran around saying, “Hey, you have to stop setting fire to these. You have to subscribe to Bloomberg, and you can do all your deals here. We have all this data on bonds.”

That lasted until the 2010s. The bond market wasn’t really electronic until 2 companies called Tradeweb and MarketAxess entered the market and started trading bonds electronically. Stock markets had already been electronic since the late 1990s, right? So the bond market took forever to become electronic.

The problem with bonds, compared with crypto or stocks, is that there are an incredible number of them, right? Coca-Cola has about 60 different bonds, and MicroStrategy has a bunch of different bonds. They even have several types of shares, like STRC. Bond liquidity is structurally lower.

Previously, you essentially needed real human traders to match large orders of any size in the corporate bond market. This is, of course, very inefficient. Bonds actually have an even greater advantage from blockchain settlement than stocks, right?

Suddenly, you can start trading directly between people with same-day settlement on the network. Canton is relevant for privacy because it uses ZK-based encryption. If you talk to a financial institution or a bond trader, the most important thing they’ll say is, “Dude, my orders should not be intercepted.”

If I trade in large volumes of bonds, I might trade once a month. I might trade twice a week at most, right? This isn’t high-frequency trading. If someone sees how my wallet moves, you don’t want to be on Hyperliquid doing a bond deal, right? Someone will say, “Yeah, he’s buying Coca-Cola bonds.” Then they’ll widen your spreads. There aren’t that many Coca-Cola bonds in circulation.

That’s why there was an over-the-counter market. Essentially, a private blockchain provides settlement for fixed-income trading and private trading capital. It’s not only more efficient; it’s also more private. You could have a whole new hedge-fund industry appear on the network, right?

Because of the completely new regulatory regime under Trump, I think the market reflects this to a significant extent. The best-performing tokens are tokenized stock exchanges, among the best-performing instruments in the private market. It’s like Canton.

This is really a completely different market from the one we started working in, when it was mainly retail. The intersection of AI and the current crypto market is speculative, right?

Yes.

It’s a question of how groups of people exchange information, coordinate the exchange of data, work together effectively, strengthen market narratives, and analyze things more efficiently.

That is the current intersection of AI and crypto. I think the crypto market and capital markets are now a multiplayer game. AI makes it a more effective multiplayer game.

And this is a bit similar to the Wild West because, in my opinion, crypto is now solid PVP, right? Since new capital is not coming in, altcoins simply trade terribly.

The real collapse began with MicroStrategy because the initial PVE scenario was supposed to be that MicroStrategy would be added to the S&P index, right? It should have happened, but it didn’t. As a result, all these DAOs that were launched around these altcoins traded terribly, and most DAOs did not work. Namely, DAOs were supposed to become a source of capital for large parts of the altcoin market.

So now we’re in this PVP hell, right, where new capital doesn’t arrive. For new capital to arrive, first of all, we need the December 19 meeting between MicroStrategy and the S&P committee. Obviously, this is very important.

But secondly, we need an option for using blockchains to interact with capital markets, and we already know what that looks like, right? It’s like private trading of various securities and real-world assets, or RWAs, on-chain. This is essentially the most useful part, or the same “bullish” market that, I think, may start and depend heavily on these features.

So, you want to have a certain financial exposure in cryptocurrency directly now. Okay, there’s a lot here that can be said. Firstly, that was an incredible speech. Your token speech was wonderful. It was very interesting to hear how these exchanges demonstrate crazy results, and I want to discuss your views on stablecoins and how they lead to hyperspeculation.

But one more question about AI: when, if at all, will these AI macro flows into stocks be transferred to cryptocurrency? Because so far, it seems that nothing is happening. It feels like each of the “Magnificent 7”—all these big companies traded on the stock exchange—just keeps growing. And crypto seems frozen. Bitcoin, you know, is losing to gold, the S&P, and everything else. Crypto is frankly losing compared to them.

So when will these flows get here, if they even will?

The most specific answer is that I think MicroStrategy will be added to the S&P 500 index in December, and that will be the first direct “flow,” right?

Bitcoin already demonstrates a high correlation with the Nasdaq compared with gold, and Bitcoin is actually at minimum volatility relative to gold, even after the recent gold sell-off. In short, from a volatility perspective, Bitcoin’s situation doesn’t look very good.

Nevertheless, IBIT, BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF, continues to receive capital inflows. Its shares outstanding have actually doubled year over year. So there is demand for cryptocurrencies from traditional finance.

But I think the second major catalyst is that Phantom Wallet already has on-chain equities, right? They already exist, but the total value locked in these assets is very small.

The reason is that there are these strange and clever structures in the equity market that prevent these mirrored tokens from working. Terra tried to do this in 2021, but they were disqualified. But, you know, once we approve on-chain equities through legislation in the Senate and Trump signs it, they will become a major topic.

Therefore, if you look at it from the perspective of the user interface, there are 2 ways in which money from Nvidia may flow into Bitcoin.

First of all, Nvidia has the largest weight in the S&P 500, right? It’s the biggest stock in the S&P. So if the S&P is growing, money isn’t necessarily flowing into Bitcoin because MicroStrategy isn’t included in the S&P, right?

Second, traders who call options on Nvidia need a more comfortable interface for converting Robinhood earnings directly into cryptocurrency. Robinhood is opening more opportunities for crypto trading. Hyperliquid just got listed on Robinhood. Robinhood will increasingly serve as a bridge between American investors in stocks and investments in cryptocurrency.

But the last and probably most important point is that, once there’s a large-scale opportunity to invest in stocks on-chain—in their digital representations—there are many people who would prefer that.

This is actually a structural problem with stablecoins and shares. When you own a share, it happens through the strange clearinghouse system that we invented back in the 1960s and 1970s, where there are T+1 and T+2 settlements. There’s a process for moving the share certificate, and you actually don’t own the share; you only own its reflection at the broker. If your broker goes bankrupt, maybe you’re insured and maybe not, but you don’t actually own the share.

Likewise with stablecoins: if there’s a run on the bank, would you rather have stablecoins, especially if they have a connection with the Fed or some implicit guarantee?

That’s why they didn’t want stablecoins to generate yield, because they’re afraid of runs on banks. The same goes for CBDCs. The main fear of CBDCs is that people say, “If you can directly store cash and receive income from it, then why the hell would you keep money in the bank?”

So there’s a structural advantage to blockchain assets. That’s exactly why banks are trying to lobby against the Senate bill. They’re saying, “Hey, I’m a little worried about our deposits.”

If Trump wants $3.7 trillion in stablecoins, will that work out with JPMorgan? I think the real flow from stocks into crypto will start when it becomes normal to hold large balances in stablecoins, shares, and cryptocurrencies in a single wallet.

You want large balances sitting in Phantom Wallet, from which you can easily move from Nvidia to Solana. That isn’t possible now, is it? There’s a huge gap in the user-friendly interface and financial infrastructure, which requires a lot of transfers: withdraw Tether into dollars, make one bank transfer, then another, and only then buy shares.

Let me give you a counter-question because you’ve mentioned this a few times. You’re talking about tokenized shares on networks. I heard this “bear pill”—one sentence from someone a week or 2 ago, after 10/10—and I still think about it.

My question is: if everyone in the world has permissionless access to purchase tokenized shares on Solana on-chain, then who the hell is going to buy our altcoins? If you can just buy Nvidia and all these publicly traded companies in the United States, who will buy our altcoins?

Yes, I think it’s a good question, and the answer is simple enough, isn’t it?

Ethereum quarter over quarter is already deflationary, which hasn’t happened for a long time, and that’s because it’s essentially relatively efficient. Even Bitcoin isn’t like that, you know. Solana is very far from it.

But if you have massive growth in on-chain shares, you could imagine a world in which Solana generates many fees. In that situation, even gold—gold is an asset worth $28 trillion—could be compared differently.

The main answer is that crypto becomes safer as it gets more on-chain fees. These on-chain fees should grow sharply as soon as more on-chain activity appears.

So the answer to the question of who buys altcoins is that ETH/BTC has to grow significantly in a world where Ethereum really becomes like this, because there’s currently a problem with Bitcoin’s block rewards, right?

Imagine if all Bitcoin miners stopped working tomorrow. Let’s say they were all arrested, or who knows what. And if all gold miners also stopped working tomorrow—if they closed all the gold mines and arrested everyone in charge of gold mining—let’s assume both of those things happened.

Gold would become very expensive because people would say, “Okay, the supply of gold has decreased. Gold is a store of value.” Bitcoin would fall significantly because the network’s hash rate would collapse to zero. The possibility of a double spend on the Bitcoin network would increase significantly.

So, essentially, Bitcoin pays miners for security, while gold miners supply gold without providing any security, isn’t that right?

Structurally, Bitcoin has the following problem: it needs to pay miners, and they are being paid less and less. The question is, if you want Bitcoin to surpass gold, you need an economic reason why it will exist for 1,000 years, right? It’s very difficult to make that argument now because fees don’t cover the network’s costs.

With ETH, they’re already paying for the network’s operation. For example, ETH is already deflationary quarter over quarter. Networks based on staking are more efficient. There are ways to create highly efficient networks.

So the answer to the question of who buys altcoins is: people who want relatively more reliable money with a fixed supply against the backdrop of fiat hyperinflation.

Then crypto becomes the best asset because you think, “Okay, just compare the customer experience of gold and crypto.” We’re people of the internet, right? We spend the whole day on the internet. We earn all our money on the internet.

The idea that we will settle accounts in gold—I just imagine a situation in which we’re settling in gold. It would be like, “Quincy, you owe me money, and you have to give it to me in gold bullion.” It makes no sense.

That’s why people who own gold—why has gold increased in price so significantly? Let’s put it this way: those who own gold are people who sincerely worry that the United States can block their bank accounts.

Chinese buyers, or am I wrong?

I have a Russian friend whose family, in fact, invested all their money in American stocks. When the invasion of Ukraine started, they lost all their money, because many people don’t know this, but they were completely wiped out. Of course, Americans weren’t heavily invested in Russian stocks, but remember Yandex—it’s like the Russian Google—and its shares actually fell to zero.

Therefore, people in China and Russia are sincerely concerned that the U.S. dollar will be used as a mechanism for censorship and other things. The reality is that the crypto market, through Tether’s dominance and the dollar, has a lot of stablecoins and is a U.S.-oriented asset class. It’s not for Europeans. Europeans consider cryptocurrency a threat to their monetary sovereignty.

In China, this is actually illegal. And when you are sovereign, China is preparing to consider the possibility of pressure on Taiwan. There is an unspoken time reference for 2029, when China may be planning an invasion of Taiwan. Therefore, they need to dedollarize as much as possible. Given the Trump administration’s position regarding cryptocurrencies, it would be unwise to invest money in crypto if you are China.

One thing that, to me, people aren’t thinking about is that one reason why crypto may be trading badly is because all these export controls already exist. There are almost weekly new restrictions regarding China and software provision. Shyam Sankar, the CTO of Palantir, wrote a huge post about China being a major geopolitical problem.

The reality is that Trump fired this guy named Tim Haugh, who went to CBS and said, “There is a huge cybersecurity problem between the United States and China.” China has spent many years developing programs that aggressively target U.S. utility systems and leave backdoors in the entire internet infrastructure.

If relations between the U.S. and China escalate, undoubtedly you get a lot more hacks. You get, for example, much more active North Korean hackers compromising internet infrastructure. All these problems with Coinbase that we were talking about—hacking KYC and things like that—can become much more extreme if the world becomes ugly between us and China.

In my opinion, that also causes the correlation between the S&P 500 and Bitcoin. Gold and Bitcoin in this system are opposites. On the one hand, China buys gold because they are afraid of conflict with the United States. At the same time, people may reduce their investment in cryptocurrency or become worried about cybersecurity threats.

It’s a background factor, and we will have more clarity next week because Trump and Xi are meeting.

So far, Trump has expressed himself quite positively. Feeling positive, right?

Yes. He continues to say very positive things. The Chinese five-year plan just came out—the plenum—and in the text they say they are looking for a peaceful solution regarding Taiwan. Who knows? I’m not a macro trader, but I think the sword of Damocles hangs over this sphere. This is an overhang that can be eliminated, but I don’t want to make predictions.

If Trump and Xi have a very nice meeting, that’s good for stocks and very, very good for cryptocurrencies, right? Suddenly, there will be no forced buyers of gold, and risk mode is activated. We start dreaming about bolder things regarding online money.

The opposite thought—or maybe I don’t even know. This is somewhat related. I want to ask you about stablecoins, but I still have one question about AI.

This is a general feeling among many smart people with whom I communicate. Traders like Doomberg and even Peter Schiff are on opposite ends of the spectrum, but overall they have a similar opinion, except for their disagreements regarding hedging assets. They believe that we have one or two more steps before the slightest sign appears that the dominance of AI stocks is slowing down, stagnating, or, worse, moving in the opposite direction—and then everything flies to hell.

How much time do you think we have before this AI acceleration stops supporting stocks? When will we actually stagnate? Do you have an opinion on this?

Yes. Let’s assume that you are as cynical as possible. Let’s say you literally think it’s an AI bubble.

I don’t think so.

I mean, suppose you were maximally cynical and looked at the amount of market capitalization Nvidia has added since 2022. It’s about $3 trillion, plus or minus. Then you look at the amount of additional revenue it has received, and that’s hundreds of billions, not trillions.

Therefore, if you are extremely cynical, you ask: how hard is it to generate a lot of these reflexive deals? Have you seen the headlines about Oracle, OpenAI, and Nvidia, involving roughly $300 billion? You could probably create $1 trillion in total fictitious revenue before realizing that this is a common feature of bubbles—when you start issuing shares to pay revenue to yourself. It’s a 3-times effect.

One can quite imagine a world where Nvidia exceeds profit expectations for 2 years in a row, just to support the stock price, essentially reinvesting in companies that then buy its own graphics processors. You think, “Of course, maybe this is exactly what fraud looks like.”

The first time I thought, “This deal with Oracle looks incredibly suspicious,” was because Oracle had about 12% year-over-year revenue growth, and then it released an optional letter of intent for $300 billion that was entirely reflexive. Then the hockey-stick graph appears, and you’re like, “Oh my God, this is a snake eating itself.”

This is part of why I bet on proof-of-work in crypto. I think, “If it isn’t fraud, then what is it?” I’m bullish on AI, but you must always remain in a state of uncertainty. If this is a scam, proof-of-work crypto will take off.

Why proof-of-work? Because then you can simply use Nvidia GPUs to mine coins. It’s the most effective way. Nvidia already increased its revenue through Ethereum miners, so they know how to create reflexive arrangements with CoreWeave to inflate revenue.

Nvidia already has the organizational DNA to make deals with crypto companies for the artificial creation of revenue. If what you’re saying is that this is the best profitability strategy, then you spend those GPUs mining coins that are growing, forcing those coins to grow further, mining more of them, and consuming more energy. If you can find ways to use energy for the best return on investment, then this becomes a crypto proof-of-work ecosystem.

Exactly.

Why is this happening now? There aren’t enough proof-of-work AI coins. You can’t just mine them easily. That was actually the problem with Bittensor: it’s too difficult. You can’t just throw a GPU at it.

You need to build an application-level system. There was a political process for distributing network rewards. More importantly, structurally it is a network based on staking. Any network based on staking is not hardware-intensive, and that’s a structural problem with the majority of cryptocurrencies because they don’t agree with miners the way Bitcoin does.

You need hardware- and energy-intensive crypto coins—for example, AI cryptocurrencies—to create a CoreWeave pump. That’s why there are two projects. One is a project by my brother called Ambient, and there is also a project called Emada [?]. You should invite him to talk about it, but not from a cynical point of view, because he is a true believer in it.

I completely forgot the name of the other one, but it’s interesting. Another interesting bet is GPU financing—for example, GPU funding in one click from USD.AI. If that really is a reflexive revenue cycle, what better way is there than to provide loans in one click that allow people to buy a GPU? Nvidia would be delighted with that.

I don’t think we are in a reflexive cycle. I personally don’t think so. There may be a little financial engineering with OpenAI, but if we are in one, then cryptocurrencies based on proof-of-work will tear everything apart.

The point is that everything depends on mass funding for building these GPUs, which everyone needs to create these crazy AI models. The trickle-down effect is: I just don’t know how many companies are actually earning a lot of money from AI right now by running these GPUs.

Therefore, the most profitable way to use them is mining crypto ecosystems based on proof-of-work, assuming that the tokens are growing. But right now, there isn’t much to mine.

So you seem to be predicting an explosion of crypto-AI tokens—tokens that don’t yet exist and that didn’t really exist in 2024, right? We just traded those worthless agents back and forth.

What is the main bet? Who is the biggest beneficiary? Ambient, your brother's project, and the other one you were talking about—I can't remember. Is there anything else at this moment that captures these flows? Will there be a turning point that simply brings this piece to its full potential, or is it just, “We hope that this will happen. We'll see how everything turns out”?

Yes. I think there aren't that many AI crypto tokens that can be mined. So the beneficiaries right now are these publicly traded AI-mining projects, such as IREN, which is simply—you've already seen it.

What is this?

They do a combination. A lot of Bitcoin miners changed course. In fact, Tether started this. Tether started investing in data-processing centers for AI, and then all the Bitcoin miners that Tether had invested in said, “Hey, I see you investing in these AI centers. We should do that too. We should translate part of our infrastructure from Bitcoin mining to AI.”

Galaxy did the same, so it became a kind of plan of action for public companies like Hut 8. There are many examples. CoreWeave trades at a price that is 40 times revenue. If you look at IREN, it is somewhere between a Bitcoin miner, with a multiple of 5 or 6 times revenue, and CoreWeave, with a multiple of 40.

Of course, CoreWeave has four-year contracts with OpenAI, so that's a completely different business. But there is synergy between them, which is why the stock market loves them so much. This is the main manifestation of the bubble at the moment, and it really applies to all areas. We see that the main activity is focused on the stock market, not the altcoin market, but this is one specific example of that phenomenon.

I really think that, structurally, Bitcoin has not had competition as a proof-of-work-based asset for a long time. In 2017 and 2018, 10% of the capacity of TSMC's factories—Taiwan Semiconductor—accounted for ASIC miners for Bitcoin. Now it's about 2% or less, because although the price of Bitcoin has increased, production volumes for AI chips and the construction of data-processing centers have become enormous.

There's another really interesting catalyst associated with artificial intelligence that, in my opinion, people don't talk about enough. In general, over the last few months there have been headlines about CERN, where CERN transmuted lead into gold. That isn't so interesting, because it happens at the particle level. What's more interesting is that if fusion reactors work, they could potentially transmute or generate gold as a commodity product.

These works have not yet been peer-reviewed, but there is, for example, SpaceX, supported by the NSA and CIA, thermonuclear power plants, and players in San Francisco who could, in principle, generate gold as a byproduct of fusion power plants. You should check this too. I mean, you really must.

Yes. This is a whole rabbit hole, and such a volume could be significant, even if nothing comes of CERN.

CERN is cool because it represents real alchemy in real life. If you look at the history of money, alchemy was part of English history. There's a book, “The Case of the Loan” [?], about the refusal to use the gold standard in the 16th century because Spain had effectively “thrown it all away.” Spain had, in fact, declared default. They had a lot of gold because they took it out of South America, and then they defaulted 15 times.

The English were very fascinated by alchemy. They believed in it, although it wasn't real. They said, “Gold is finished.” These are old ideas. The history of fiat money is that these alchemists began to say, “Okay, in England there is a shortage of silver and gold. We need credit money.” They invented credit money and fiat money.

For that to work, they had to do all kinds of things. For example, they had to introduce debt prisons, because no one believed in fiat money. Everyone was saying, “I'm a fool to invest in fiat money. Will you return it to me when the debt comes due?” They responded, “Okay, we will literally kill people if they don't repay their debt.” Then people said, “Okay, maybe this is normal.”

Alchemy and gold actually have a very, very ancient history. Now we are returning to this 16th-century narrative, where thermonuclear stations and AI will become part of the story of supply. We are talking about acceleration technologies, whether asteroid mining or gold mining through thermonuclear synthesis.

We are here again, saying that gold is old money. There is new money; in this case, it isn't fiat money, but digital money. I think digital money is, in essence, a form of technological acceleration.

I don't think we want the AI market to explode as crypto investors.

Yes, we don't want that.

Okay, I'll change the topic. I want to ask you about stablecoins. So, you have a very interesting stablecoin thesis, and I'm not sure that I completely understand its scale. I think it's quite versatile, but one aspect is that the United States needs hyper-monetization through stablecoins. The way to achieve this is, in essence, to introduce speculation into every corner of the internet.

We need everyone speculating on everything in huge quantities and volumes, and there are many ways to present that as a bullish signal for what we do every day. Can you give me your opinion and explain, in general, the stablecoin thesis and how it will lead to wild speculation? Maybe give 3 examples of how this will return to crypto and what we do every day on Twitter, because I consider this one of your most interesting thoughts.

The problem begins with geopolitics. First, we have massive debt issuance obligations. Elon Musk couldn't reduce the deficit when he came into the Trump administration, and in the United States we have a deficit at the level of the Second World War. We don't have a baby boom, we are aging as a society, GDP isn't growing very quickly, and China, as we already said, is buying gold.

So the question arises: who will buy all this US debt? That's actually the most important question in a society where the government has already partially stopped working. If you can't finance the US debt, then you have serious problems. You can't run the government, food stamps don't work, and everything falls apart.

The answer, led by the Treasury Department, is that Tether creates huge demand for U.S. Treasuries. It's not only a beautiful demand curve, but also a tool for strengthening the US dollar in the world, because it serves as a basic payment network.

For example, in Argentina, people are now trying to get dollars. That's good, because it stimulates demand for the US dollar. This is actually quite paradoxical because we sell them, and the money then returns to stablecoins pegged to the US dollar, which is good for the United States.

Scott Bessent said, “We need to get to $3.7 trillion.” Citigroup and Goldman released reports saying, “Yes, I think we really can achieve this.” So this is a very real phenomenon related to stablecoin adoption.

The issue is that if you know the US government is doing this with stablecoins, you naturally don't want to hold them. You're thinking, “Why should I keep $1 in Tether without earning a return?” The GENIUS Act does not allow stablecoins that generate income to exist.

So this provision has to be used for something, but the only real use for stablecoins in the market now is speculation. If you talk to the guy from Ethena, he asks, “What is the yield?” Ethena's yield is essentially a proxy for the expected carrying cost of Tether, because you can place Tether on an exchange to provide collateral for a long Bitcoin position through a perpetual short swap, which is Ethena's strategy.

A 7% or 8% annual yield on Ethena is essentially the expected benefit from holding stablecoins. Now you can ask, “Are there other expected benefits?” For example, if I want to buy a new TGE, buy an NFT, or do something in the crypto economy, then having funds in stablecoins allows me to do that. That's the advantage of holding stablecoins.

When there is a lot happening in the cryptosphere, you want to have stables so you can quickly jump into it. If you don't have them, then the question is, “Why should I hold cash?” I could just invest in gold or stocks, but that doesn't make sense for the government.

This is the first level: the main use of cryptocurrency is stablecoins for speculation. That's why the administration refers so affectionately to speculation in every context. Even today, they pardoned CZ. It's as if they are sending a message: “We love speculation. We love you very much. Even if you have done strange things, we forgive you.”

That was the Biden administration, not us. We want you to speculate.

The amounts involved increased by about 600%. Prediction markets are growing upwards and to the right. Polymarket involves about $15 billion in investments. Trump’s in it; he was invested. It’s so obvious. How much is it, anyway? Maybe the government wants people to speculate.

That’s why this is part of public policy, because it is a kind of “Trump casino method” for financing the deficit. They say, “Instead of raising taxes, let’s transform everything into capital markets on a giant casino, and this is our way to cover the deficit,” because stablecoins should ultimately be backed by U.S. Treasury bonds, right? These bonds are what finance all fiscal costs.

But here is the problem, and the speech that I gave at TOKEN2049 was about this. They say, “What’s the problem?” We know that the vast majority of people who speculate on crypto lose money, right? If speculators are losing money, then those who earn from them, such as Citadel Securities or Jump, do not accumulate stablecoins. Jump Trading or Citadel Securities are not holding a bunch of USDT on Binance. They hold the absolute minimum that they can.

Therefore, for example, in a bear market, when it becomes really difficult and market makers are the only ones making money, you see historically that stablecoin growth simply collapses. If you express this in quantitative terms, we now have about $27 billion or $28 billion of stablecoin growth per quarter. We need to reach $83 billion per quarter to get onto the trajectory that Scott Bessent set.

We need to increase volumes. We need to increase these indicators significantly and support them at a stable level. So these $28 billion to $34 billion per quarter that we have now represent the highest rate in history. Therefore, it’s simply madness.

The only way to achieve this is through legislation, which I mentioned earlier in the interview. The only way to provide this level of stable speculation is to transfer all shares and bonds onto the blockchain. But we need to go one step further, because if retail investors lose all their money trading, then capital flows out of stablecoins, right?

I conducted a simulation. If we take data from the Taiwan Stock Exchange or all this global research on retail speculative activity, the average level of losses is 50% to 70% per year if you trade highly volatile assets such as cryptocurrencies. Therefore, if you compare this with losses going to zero, you can get a 3.5-times better result in terms of stablecoin growth. If retail losses came to zero, stablecoin growth would be 3.5 times faster.

Of course, that does not happen now. But essentially, that’s why I think financial markets need deregulation. The utility of stablecoins is where the game enters a new phase, because you think, “Okay, if I can trade Tesla shares privately on Solana, I can earn a lot of money because I don’t need to pay a salary to a compliance specialist. I don’t need to create a hedge fund.”

Suddenly, you start to engage in securities businesses that 4 years ago were not even considered possible. They are legal, right? So suddenly, useful possession of stablecoins, such as private stablecoins that can be converted into on-chain trading securities, becomes a huge bonus for speculators.

And this does not apply only to retail investors. Then you’re like, “Okay, what about this? It could still work.” You also need to weaken regulation regarding the listing of cryptocurrency ETFs.

So this is kind of my thesis on MicroStrategy. I think, “I understand. I don’t care what kind of closed-end company it is. Someone in the Trump administration will tell the S&P committee to add MicroStrategy to the S&P index.” That’s my thought, because the only way this pump might work is if retail investors earn money.

If we don’t earn money, stablecoins will not grow quickly enough. So how do retail investors start earning? What has to change? We need to extremely weaken regulation regarding social networks. We also need a merger between traditional markets and crypto markets through on-chain permissioning and privacy.

And it seems that this is probably not enough, because with WallStreetBets, for example, we see all this nonsense with Beyond Meat. You see that it immediately depreciates. People buy it at $7, and then it falls to $3, right?

But I think this is where my conversation was going: a new class will appear that I call AI collective intelligence. These are groups of people who work together to earn money in the markets. Right now, this is our Telegram. You and I probably earn money in crypto, and most people don’t.

The reason is that we’re connected to groups of people who see private deals and share them. We see startup presentations that contain a lot of information, so we know which teams are reliable and which ones are not. We know a lot of things, such as that Anom owns crazy insider information. Everyone wants him as an adviser. Therefore, he sees every deal and knows after the TGE whether it is a scam or not.

There is a whole layer of information inherent in people who are real internet natives. Now, general society is not involved in this trend. Most people have full-time jobs, so they could not be part of this trend even if they wanted to.

That is what I’m concentrating on: how do I create an information network for retail investors where people can really make money? How do we significantly increase the average person’s profitability?

The answer consists of the main principles. People are essentially monitoring valuable securities in combination with social-dynamics data exchange, reinforced with artificial intelligence. It’s as if you are doing the job of a hedge fund manager, with the help of AI.

That’s what I mean by “collective intelligence.” You think, “Okay, what if WallStreetBets were a technologically perfect movement that used all resources and interacted?”

Interesting. I don’t want to distract you or knock you off course, but I keep hearing about this crisis. I’ve heard about it since first grade, and it’s only getting worse. Will it ever get paid? Or will it default? Can we just put it off forever? Is it possible to just announce a default?

I think so. People have always said this. As long as I can remember, they just say, “No one will ever touch this.” Like, damn it. I don’t want to interrupt you, but what’s the joke?

The first debt crisis almost got out of control in 2018. Then, in September 2019, the overnight repo market almost collapsed, which made the Federal Reserve restart balance-sheet expansion. There was an overnight risk, and banks did not want to take on overnight risk, especially if the Fed came and sold securities every night. That is why JPMorgan was losing money every night.

They were like, “What the hell is this? I’m not even going to show up at the overnight repo market.” All the banks left the overnight repo market. There were all these securities that fell by 9% or 12% in one second. Everything simply collapsed, and then the Fed said, “Oh, oh, oh, we’ll restart overnight repo operations.”

Japan is at a very, very late stage, right? The government owns somewhere around half of the stock market there. They have actually taken it to the end. We started this process, and then COVID was like real steroids for it. Now we are restarting the process that I described, the one we went through in 2019, which, by the way, increases overnight risk.

The thing is that 2022 was the first case because people had always talked about the so-called bond vigilantes. It was a meme for years. People would say, “Dude, the bond vigilantes are leaving.” You hear this forever, man.

But in 2022, Liz Truss in Great Britain was dismissed from office because of what happened—essentially, a failure in the British bond market. When you look at what happened over the last 5 years, if you invested in gold, you would have, you know, $1.50. If you invested in long-term U.S. Treasury obligations, you would have $0.60. So, essentially, owners of Treasury bonds were seriously deceived in real terms by owning that debt.

The probability of a crisis in the bond market is high. From 2018 to 2025, we had a number of markets that completely went out of control. In 2022, there was a serious problem in the corporate debt market, which partly led to the fact that the Twitter deal barely did not break as the corporate bond market exploded.

In Japan, on the long end of the curve, the central bank is forced to constantly intervene. For context, there is an idea in foreign exchange called purchasing-power parity. The Swiss franc has no debt problems, while the Japanese yen has a debt problem.

They are both historically considered safe-haven assets. But if you want to buy a Big Mac in Switzerland, it costs $10. If you want to buy a Big Mac in Tokyo, it costs $4, right? That could already be a 50% difference in the purchasing power of currencies through these debt dynamics.

We are already in the area where debt begins to have value. If there is a failure in the debt market, many assumptions we have about markets can become invalid. For example, you could see gold become illegal to trade, trading in securities stop, stock markets close, full-scale government intervention in the bond market, or simply an insane amount of quantitative easing.

So it’s not that the markets disappear. In Nazi Germany, they stopped the stock market. In the end, they launched the market again, right? But it fell hard when they reopened it, right? So it can stop and restart, but when this happens, it’s about a 50–75% change in purchasing-power capabilities.

So, yes, it’s also a meme—and it’s not like a meme. But I would say that now, when gold has gone parabolic and the bond market has collapsed, we’ve reached the moment when this is very, very important, and this is not a meme anymore, right? People are losing real purchasing-power capacity already this year.

It feels like this is hyper-accelerating, dude. It seems like it’s hyper-accelerating, even when you listen to Peter Schiff’s apocalyptic thesis about the collapse of the “everything bubble.” I know what he’s talking about. He’s been saying it for 10 years already, but you still feel it somehow.

That’s why some things about AI scare me a little, because it feels like we will only grow as long as they are able to provide this support. I don’t want to call it a crime in the field of AI, because real events are taking place—tangible innovations—and this is, of course, extremely valuable. But, returning to your question, in my opinion, they can actually receive profits from nothing for a certain time. But when does it become impossible? You look down and think, “Wow, there’s a long way to fall.”

I think the greater risk, honestly speaking, is political. If you look at the American system and ask what happened in 1971, then this is really the beginning of the rise of the Chinese middle class. It started the globalist movement, the average American saw a decline in their standard of living and in their desire to have children, and people are upset.

I really think that Trump is somehow an absolute mutant of a person because he’s capable of successfully uniting all these strange constituencies of people who usually don’t get together. There are Latin Americans, far-right Christians, and all these different groups. There was significant growth in support among African Americans in the last elections.

There are all these different groups that gather around Trump because he has such a unique personality and skillfully knows how to fan the hype. He appears in a stadium, he seems like a weirdo, and you think, “Okay, if you didn’t have Trump...” Then your base-case scenario is a transition to a certain kind of populism, do you understand? You move to left-wing populism, like AOC, Bernie, and the like.

Forget about AI, right? Because there is a political situation that may arise if enough people feel very deceived. When Trump loses power, the leftists come, and from the point of view of asset prices, this is the end. This is also the end of our opportunity to make money in cryptocurrency. This is very bad, truly.

Therefore, I think the most important question in our society is: How can we make young men’s lives better? How do we fix this? It’s actually the most important problem, because if it isn’t resolved, the alternative will inevitably be far-left populism, right?

Or if everyone loses all their money—if we wake up in 4 years and it turns out that everyone invested in these stablecoins, that we reached $2.5 trillion in stablecoins, and then, you know what, they lost all their money—they’re all bankrupt. They all live with their parents. Well, you know what? AOC will win by a huge margin.

Immigration will rise, taxes will go up to 70%, and the United States will just give up Taiwan without even thinking. We will lose the conflict between great powers and enter the century of humiliation. This will be so damn bad, do you understand? It’s simply incredibly bad.

And this has nothing to do with AI. This is due to what happens with countries with high debt loads that move toward ultra-left populism. And this is exactly what happened to everyone in Latin America. Argentina, for example, was once an extremely prosperous place.

People say, “Oh, the United States is similar to Japan.” And I say, “Dude, the United States is not at all similar to Japan.” In Japan, first of all, there’s a completely different culture. There are a lot of elderly people who hold Japanese debt because they’re patriotic; they’re simply forced to hold this debt.

You won’t see such pensioners here. We have old people like Peter Schiff who say, “To hell with the United States. Buy gold, dude.” Our boomers grew up in Woodstock. They aren’t like Japanese pensioners. They’ll just invest in gold, whatever.

So we’re closer to Latin America. Everyone knows that we’re closer to Latin America. And we definitely know what will happen if we go in an ultra-left direction—we’re all finished.

And so I really think the most important point is that you filmed a video yesterday. You’re essentially saying that your audience and what you’re working on are actually extremely important. I think the cryptocurrency movement is 93% men. It’s a pile of young guys who are trying to achieve success in a society that is configured against them.

There is this whole “woke” nonsense. It’s hard to find a job. The entire crypto system—it’s a game where everyone is against each other. Everyone. It’s really hard to achieve something in our current system.

The regulators are on our side. Trump knows that he needs to help us, right? Republicans know that if they don’t solve this problem, then it’s the end for us all. So we’re all in one boat, do you understand? Maybe we don’t like each other, but we’re in one boat.

Me too. I think that’s exactly the state I’m in now. I don’t think it’s about AI. Actually, I don’t think it’s about gold. I think it’s closer to what Murad is talking about: this is fundamentally a sociocultural phenomenon. It’s not about technology. That’s why Bitcoin has grown so much.

Yes, it’s not about technology, dude. This is a matter of policy. This is a matter of life. And it’s simple: China built its own middle class. They’re communists, right? And if the American left comes to power, they will unite with Marxists, right? That’s what you think it all comes down to.

I think investors in stocks and elsewhere face this problem: even if your thesis is correct, you can’t afford to be right, do you understand? It’s almost as if, if it happens, it will be so bad that you’re almost forced to dedicate yourself to trying to do something about it.

So, that’s a cool opinion. A little scary, but I think it’s generally based on rational thinking. It’s like Peter Schiff after Alexander [?], and everyone is like, “Damn. What do I need to do next?”

I would like to give you the last word and the opportunity to speak out. I have to say that it was worth planning 2 hours for you. It seems we’re already at almost 90 minutes. Time flies.

You seem to have already answered this in various ways, but I would like to allow you to finish on the optimistic scenarios for cryptocurrency and tell me why it’s worth supporting and playing a role in crypto’s victory. Why should crypto win outright? Why do you need to believe in its victory? Why must you pray that this happens?

I’m looking at someone like you, and I’m inspired by how obsessed you are with crypto, because you’re fascinating. You’re brilliant. You could earn money anywhere, and it’s obvious that you could probably raise funds for some AI startup that has nothing to do with crypto or blockchain and earn a lot of money.

You could be fully provided for. Your family would be provided for. But you’re here. You’re in crypto. You talk about crypto all day. You could be cynical, like many people could be cynical, but the reality is that you exist here every day.

I think that gives people like me optimism that smart people really believe in it, even despite the fact that they’ve been beaten and censored at every step, and it still continues to exist. So, yes, I want to give you the possibility to speak out about it and complete this conversation.

Yes. I mean, listen, I was thinking about the world like this: Does fiat currency make sense? No. Obviously, the government cannot be trusted with the money supply and the fiscal situation. We live in that kind of world now.

So, okay, what is the alternative? The alternative is Marxism, right? It’s a repressive, cruel, godless world where your rights are suppressed. And as an American, I don’t want to be part of that world.

You can’t escape from what I’m describing. You can’t simply move to Argentina. I know all these guys in crypto who have 6 passports. I say, “Dude, if the United States loses the conflict between great powers, these passports will be worth nothing. You will be stopped at the airport with the best facial-recognition technology in the world.”

And I’m like, “Okay, then what would they actually have as money?” What would they actually have as money?

I think there’s an interesting idea that cryptocurrency itself is a permissionless thing that allows individuals to unite in a community. If you read Alexis de Tocqueville, he wrote a book called Democracy in America, and its main thesis was that capitalism is complete chaos. It oppresses people, it’s exploitative, and it’s a game where everyone is against each other.

This is a pile of greedy people who do bad things, and you need systems that respect human rights. Historically, it was the church; historically, it was Christianity. But it started to decline because of the scandals in the Catholic Church, Bill Nye the Science Guy, who said that dinosaurs were real, which contradicts the Bible—and this whole story about homosexuality.

This caused a lot of problems, and you think, “Okay, Christianity is in a state of secular decline.” And suddenly you say, “Okay, now we’re in a society where we believe in freedom, but we clearly cannot believe in the government’s ability to print endless money.”

For me, cryptocurrency is a pseudo-religious movement with significant support among young men in the United States, which is the main demographic group capable of resisting Marxist enthusiasm in the United States. Therefore, this is the only reliable belief system that has at least some chance to resist what I think is great evil.

I think that the flight to gold is an illusion. I think that your ETFs will be outlawed, and I don’t want to live in a world where we get rid of human freedom in the name of wealth redistribution, surveillance states, or some other devil. So for me, it really is an ideological question.

I wasn’t like this before. Over time, I realized that this is all very bad. I met with people on the internet, and yes, I think I have changed. I think I was first here only to make money and study the dynamics of attention, but over time I started to investigate these dynamics more deeply.

I asked myself, “Why do people pay so much attention to this?” I always tried to quantify why people were watching this shit, but I never asked myself, “Why are people actually so involved in it?” I’m like, “Dude, people are caught up in this shit because they are, damn it, in complete despair.”

And this is like—well, the system must grow so that we have at least some ideological basis for resistance to evil on a countrywide scale. So, well, I think that’s what we’re talking about, and that’s the point for me.

There are—and that’s why I dragged my own brother into it. Do you understand? We were just like, “Yo, dude, what happened during COVID with the Biden administration?” Both of us were completely disappointed.

We were like, “Okay, they are literally causing myocarditis in young people. Hundreds of thousands of people died. They stopped reporting about vaccines.” And I’m like, “Dude, I don’t believe that the system in its current form, under the Biden administration, can be trusted anymore.” Everything has already been ruined.

And, you know, I don’t even really like Trump’s personality. I think he has done many doubtful things, but I’m like this: at least everyone here is in one boat and rowing in one direction, saying, “Hey, we really appreciate financial sovereignty. We appreciate individual rights.”

Crypto is a permissionless network where people can be part of systems that can really expand their financial opportunities. And this is a capitalist system on which a certain moral superstructure is built. For me, this means, “Okay, that’s the only thing I want to work on.”

I like that you’re on the air, Alexander. That was simply incredible. It was one of your best speeches. I think you’ll play a huge role in this, dude. I’m inspired by your speech yesterday.

Thank you. I think there is a convincing feeling in the younger generation. There is a small degree of separation, because crypto gravitates toward the old school. Crypto is older—I think 30 or 40 years old—kind of cypherpunk. That’s an older audience.

And there is such a convincing feeling of hopelessness among Gen Z, which, in my opinion, people cannot fully formulate. Crypto natives feel it too, but they are closer to it and can talk about what is happening.

There is something like mass migration to the only way out, which, in my opinion, is really approaching for consumers. They all say “hyper-risk” and “hyper-trading,” but it’s actually an escape—a way out of the system in which you’re stuck. It’s probably your only way out.

And so I think that, as paradoxical as it may seem, what we do here—creating content, conducting interviews, providing a platform, talking about it, streaming, and trying to find an approach to these people—will actually be very important.

Because I think that for many people, this will be “find your way out” of the system through crypto or nothing. Or nothing. It’s that binary if you think about it and look into the very essence.

I have so many friends. I’m 23, so most of my friends are now finishing university. I have many smart and talented friends who cannot find work. They can’t get a salary. The smartest of them can’t find work. They can’t earn money. They can’t afford to live on their own.

And it turns out that they’re stuck living with their parents, essentially forever if nothing changes. But changing the situation in the other direction is impossible, so many of them ask themselves, “What do I need to do?”

The answer to what to do isn’t very clear, but there is a chance that there is some corner of the internet where, if everything works out right, it’s like your bet. You seem to have to take this ticket, place a bet, and just go ahead in crypto and everything that’s happening in this internet economy.

And that’s radicalizing people. If you studied in high school and had a 4.0 GPA and excellent grades, you were an athlete, you played on the football team, you were a girl, you entered college, joined a fraternity, and were sociable, charismatic, and had good grades, then graduated and settled for some shitty job in sales where you can’t earn money, this really radicalizes people.

And I think that this is taking place in real time. In many ways, I think the idea of cryptocurrencies as salvation, as a way out, is actually very important. So I’m always grateful when you talk about these things and when you come on the stream and give me the opportunity to talk to you directly, because I think I’ve learned a lot from you, dude. So, yeah, man, I appreciate it.

I think many of the things you’re saying are important.

Yes, thank you for that. I think that this time, you know, we don’t seem to be running away, are we?

I don’t think so. It’s not about escape. I think Peter Schiff’s position is about escape, and gold is about escape. But cryptocurrency, at this stage, is already part of the system.

What distinguishes this case is that this is the way in which the system can actually survive. It’s not about fraud and fleeing to Argentina or some random countries with a lot of bitcoins. It’s literally about political activism and about how everyone tries to resist unfair social dynamics, which suffocate us all.

And so I think that what you do, and all these things, have the potential to become much more of a movement than people imagine. I think that’s what I have. I mean, when I say that what is fundamental is not technology, it’s actually about young people, money, and society—and about how to be a part of it and how we change the definition of money so that we can finally fix all the chaos that is happening now.

Perfect.

Good Alexander, it was nice, dude. Thank you.

You’re welcome, friend. Yes. All the best, bro. Peace.