市场更新：Hunter Biden 收割我们，$INTC 猛涨，商品上链，Anthropic 的 Skynet 风险

Avi, AGI is here. This technology is too real. It may end up destroying us as a species, and I’m starting to get a little bit existentially worried about that. But between now and the point when Skynet decides to terminate us all, I don’t see how markets don’t melt up.

Hello, Jonah. Hello, chat. How are we doing? Jonah, I think you’re on mute. Jonah, you have the AV issues. What’s going on?

Yeah, it’s usually somebody else. This time it’s me. We’re doing, Avi. We’re doing good. Listen, I have a question for you. I was listening to that intro music that I made a while ago, and I was thinking, with the new retro-future ’80s-but-also-2020s thing we have going on, would you like me to compose a different intro—a variation on the theme—for the interview segments? If so, can you opine on what you would want to be different about it?

Yeah, I guess we’re doing business on the pod now.

Yeah.

Maybe we can get some people in the chat to let us know what they’re thinking. I mean, yeah, look, I think just channel your inner American Psycho. Go find the composer who did the music for American Psycho or Wall Street or even The Big Short, and try to come up with some inspiration and put it in there. Because while I do love the music, we need to inspire trust. That’s really the key. I need to—

But, like, American Psycho—

You can see when you’re listening to this music that we do know a little bit about this world of trading, which can be complicated and difficult. Maybe something interesting would be thematically a complicated intro and then a very simple outro.

I mean, the whole thing of—

It’s like, can we untangle the mysteries of the market through music for you? I don’t know. Let’s find out.

That’s basically Hans Zimmer’s masterclass on composing. This is the guy who made the music for Gladiator and a bunch of other awesome films, as well as a bunch of Christopher Nolan stuff. His big piece of advice for music composition was “question and answer”: raise a question with the music and then answer it with the remainder of the music.

I tried to do that with the composition that’s the intro to this. It’s intriguing piano music, and then, boom, an electronic version of the piano music with the same theme, harmonies, and melody—basically the same notes, just in a slightly different order. It’s question and answer. So I’ll do that. Basically, what you’re telling me is to add a piano intro with some complexity and then an electronic resolution, but the electronic resolution should probably be ’80s, Wall Street, American Psycho, a little bit of Huey Lewis and the News, but also inspiring trust.

I’m not really sure about the Huey Lewis and the News part, but I’m very much on board with the rest of it. I think that’s good. I know very little about music composition. For those of you who don’t know, Jonah is a phenomenal musician. Did you play Carnegie Hall when you were 7 or something like that?

No, but—

But something. You played somewhere when you were quite—

I went on tour in Italy when I was 18.

You went—yeah. That’s not bad.

Yeah, it was fun.

That’s pretty damn cool. I’m very excited to see what you come up with, and I think over the coming weeks—or maybe over the coming months. We’ll see how long it takes—we’re going to be rolling out a sort of brand update for 1000x.

Especially heading into the new year, because this is the start of the new business year, guys, and also the start of the new Jewish year, which coincidentally lines up—or maybe not so coincidentally, because who runs businesses? It’s going to be a fun couple of months. This is when people really lock in. This is when the market tends to come back alive, when new opportunities arise, and new opportunities have abounded.

1. The Market Comes Alive

Since the last time we talked, we’ve had a ton of moves in the market. Zcash is ripping through $1,000. We’ve got VVV going straight to $25, courtesy of this Navier-Stokes fiasco that we’ll dive into a little bit later. Also, look at Intel. This is something that I’ve been bullish on for quite some time, and basically everybody forgot about it when it was trading around $88. I said, “Don’t forget. Don’t forget that this is a phenomenal company. This is a phenomenal stock. It has great leadership. It’s extremely important to national security, and it’s going to have a comeback.”

Since then, I’m up about 20% on my position, which is good. I made about $300,000 on that, which I’m happy about. I want to start by talking about Hunter Biden and his $LAPTOP coin. Have you paid attention to what’s happening with Hunter Biden and his laptop coin?

2. Meme Coins Become Political Grifts

Yeah. Republicans seem better at meme-coining and crypto in general, and at having it benefit them, than Democrats do. What blew my mind about this $LAPTOP fiasco was that, during the Biden administration, Elizabeth Warren created her anti-crypto army and sued literally every American company trying to build in crypto, as well as some offshore ones, via her puppet, Gary Gensler. It cost them, right? Crypto being anti-crypto isn’t a popular issue. People have bags that got hurt as a result of that, and it contributed to Democratic losses.

I’m not going to say it was the sole contributor. It was a combination of things that hurt them during the last cycle, but being anti-crypto hurt them. Now you have Hunter Biden, kind of a Democratic talking head, coming out with a meme coin trying to do a Trump, and it doesn’t even pump. It just crashed straight into the terrain. I don’t know what the heck happened there, but to me it’s like they sold low and bought high, and now they’re selling low again.

It’s sort of pathetic to me. Come up with a coherent policy as a group and just run with it through thick and thin. Don’t attack crypto when it’s unpopular to do so, and then launch a meme coin and scam a bunch of people when it’s unpopular to do so. What’s going on there, Avi? Help me understand.

It’s totally nuts. I want to start by saying this: meme coins never have staying power. When you have somebody like Trump, Melania, or Biden, Hunter Biden, launch a meme coin, what they’re explicitly telling you is that they’re going to extract money from you.

If the President of the United States, with all the levers that he has to pull, cannot maintain a high valuation for their meme coin—I don’t know what it’s trading at, but it’s less than $10 billion, which is totally nuts, in my personal opinion, for a meme coin associated with the President of the United States—these things are extremely unlikely to have any sort of staying power.

Basically, the only tokens that have any sort of staying power are the ones that are going to be generating revenue. Attention is not enough. Even Ansem, whom every single person in crypto pays attention to, can’t support a meme coin. What that tells you is that this is just pure grift.

Maybe I’m willing to be wrong. If we can get Hunter Biden on the podcast to talk about this, that would be great. I’m happy to have that conversation. But the main problem here is that it casts a bad light on our entire industry when people realize that crypto can be a tool solely for extraction.

It’s fun, it’s gambling, it’s great—have a blast. If you were able to come up with some sort of strategy to trade this $LAPTOP launch, by all means. It was a place to make money if you were a sniper, if you were smart, if you were a quant. But for your average person, this is just going to put a bad taste in their mouth.

The reason I say it’s going to put a bad taste in their mouth is that when you have people like Trump and Hunter Biden launching meme coins, it’s very different from when Ansem launches a coin. When Ansem launches a coin, basically the only people who are going to hear about it are the people who are already in crypto. Most of these people already know the game. They understand what they’re getting into. They know it’s a gamble.

But it’s very possible that Hunter brought in new market participants, just as Kanye probably brought in new market participants when he launched his coin. When Trump launches his coin, it brings in new market participants. If their first experience with crypto is effectively getting farmed for liquidity, that puts a bad taste in everybody’s mouth, and it makes it harder for any of the cryptos to succeed.

Once you get burned on something, it’s very hard to come back and put your money back into the same thing. You feel like an idiot. This is just terrible for the industry in general. While I do think it’s quite funny that he called it $LAPTOP, I have to give it to him: he has a very funny Twitter. He seems like a funny guy, although we all know that the copy he’s posting about this coin—there’s no chance it’s from him.

It is at least entertaining, which I'll give it to him. At least he's an entertaining guy. But all in, this is something that you probably just stay away from.

If you take a look at the chart—if you look at Laptop, this thing's trading at a $630 million valuation. It came out at $1.5 billion, immediately crashed, and had a little bit of a bounce. I do think that if you hold these levels for some period of time, let's say 2 or 3 days, and we don't go below that $500 million mark, it's probably worth just a pure trade on technicals and flows. Looks like there could be a trade there, so set your alerts and make sure to check back in next Monday.

Basically, if it's still trading above $500 million and below $650 million, maybe I'll go take a punt on it and let you guys know what I'm doing, or I'll tweet about that. Other than that, I think the craziest part is, when you look at the liquidity, there's no liquidity on this thing, Jonah.

Why not just short it till it goes to zero?

Yeah, because it could pump in your face. I would much rather short it if it doubles. I'm not going to short it here, because it could go back to $1.5 billion. A very good trader once told me, "If you're bearish, you don't have to be short, and if you're bullish, you don't have to be long. You can wait for the trade to present itself."

While I am bearish on this coin, the best form of the trade would be to wait for this thing to have some sort of relief rally. You get above $1 billion, you short it. It's probably not going to $2 billion. It's probably not going to $3 billion. You can size it properly so that if it does, you just double down there.

My take on this is you sort of just have to wait for trades to present themselves, especially in the world of meme coins, just because they're so volatile. You have to get yourself on the right side.

I couldn't agree more. I tend to wait for long trades to present themselves. I'm not always first to a theme or an idea, but when there's a dip to buy, I like to be there, especially after it's already bottomed out and started to rally. That's sort of my sweet spot as an investor trying to jump in and ride waves.

I don't usually like catching falling knives. For the same reason, it's probably hard to set some limit offers out there on LAPTOP and wait to get lifted. It might spike 50% above your level before it comes back down. You probably want to wait for it to top out and then start tanking again.

No matter what Hunter Biden is saying, he's absolutely putting money into side wallets and selling like crazy. To me, launching a meme coin is kind of what you do when you've run out of other options. It's sort of the last thing that you do. If you launch a meme coin attached to yourself or to something in your orbit, like Hunter and his LAPTOP, and you're branding it around your own personal image or your livelihood, actively shilling it as some sort of community coin or SPX6900 community movement, you're washed up. It's over for you.

Hunter Biden is an actual crackhead. He's not somebody that you should trust when he goes on tape and says, "Hey, I'm going to be a good steward of your money. I'm not going to rug you." This dude basically had relations with his recently deceased—or maybe still-alive—brother's wife. Everything on that laptop is Sodom and Gomorrah. He's definitely going to take your money without any qualms about it.

Whoever's buying this thing is crazy. They probably are realizing it if they haven't already, and any pump is to be sold with maximum velocity, in my opinion. This is the ultimate clown-world asset.

100%. Do you guys remember the Burisma scandal, where he was taking money from a Ukrainian energy company? It actually pales in comparison to whatever the hell the Trump family does. Now, that's a truly generational grift, so I can't really blame him that much. It's just what politicians do.

You have Nancy Pelosi making tens of millions of dollars off options trading, probably looking at insider information, and then you have the Trump family just extracting as much money as they possibly can, likely going back and forth, trading all sorts of things like oil and energy equities while they're dictating the markets. To me, this is such a blatant grift, and it's also executed quite poorly.

The price of LAPTOP is $600 right now. You know that there's a unit-price bias in crypto, right? The smaller the actual amount per coin, the better it does. He should've launched it so it would be half of a cent at a billion dollars, not $1,000. This guy's not only incompetent, he's corrupt.

All that aside, it is this kind of thing that makes crypto fun in some ways. It's the fact that it's the only industry that incentivizes people like Biden and Trump to get in and play around, because this is where it happens, man. This is why we stream. I'm cognizant that if we weren't able to do this in crypto, then what the hell even is crypto? It's the fact that it is the freest market in the world, Jonah.

3. Commodities Come On Chain

Yeah, I guess we can't really moan about meme coins when the whole reason why crypto exists is to allow everybody to access any type of exposure, right? The bad is that you have the world's most famous crackhead making crackhead coin. The good is that I'm optimistic.

The reason why I got into crypto is because I was hopeful that commodities would come on-chain. The illiquid, smoke-filled back room where deals get done controls the world's price of oil and dictates the price of everybody's energy. There's just this layer of extraction and margin and grift and fat getting gobbled by basically a few British guys who trade North Sea crude.

I'd like to see those diffs settle transparently on-chain and have everybody be able to trade them instead of just a handful of companies between 4:00 and 4:30 p.m. London time, often in collusion. So to me, that's what I was hoping for with commodities on-chain, and I think it'll eventually happen.

Well, by the way, it is happening. There's actually a great piece of data that went around recently. One of the things that people often look at to figure out whether the top of the market has arrived is whether open interest in altcoins exceeds open interest in Bitcoin, because that basically says to people, "Hey, there's a ton of speculation in this market." If people move over from trading the majors to pouring all their money into altcoins, maybe we're too far out on our skis on the risk curve.

There's this website called Coinalyze, which a lot of people were retweeting, saying, "Okay, now we've finally reached that point. We've reached the point where altcoin open interest is above Bitcoin open interest. Maybe it's time to be a little bit nervous." What they missed is that Coinalyze's "other" bucket—the chart that was going around, charting Bitcoin open interest versus others—actually contained equity perps as well.

What was happening, more so than people moving their assets into altcoins, was that people are actively trading equities on-chain now in a way that hasn't really happened before, courtesy of Lighter and Hyperliquid. You do need to really pay attention to this sector. This is why I'm so bullish on Lighter. This is why I'm so bullish on Hyperliquid.

These are the future of trading in many ways. This 24/7 market is how we get there, right? Nasdaq is going to be way too far behind. Traditional market participants are going to be too far behind, and I think a lot of volume is going to move over to Lighter and Hyperliquid.

Even though right now, which we'll get into, I'm not as constructive on Bitcoin, mainly due to its failure to break $80,000 and just the stalling that's happening here, I am still bullish on Hyperliquid and Lighter. I think that what you're saying is happening. Commodities aren't as traded right now because they're not as interesting to people.

But you bet your ass that if we start seeing gold rip again, if we see gold break $5,000, or if we see any sort of movement in the Iran war that has oil trading above $100 a barrel, you're probably going to see crypto people trading that—especially if crypto is a little bit boring, which it has been for the last 2 days, and that feels like an eternity in this market.

I'd like to see new commodities trading on-chain. I'd like to see some sort of consolidated price at the pump, or maybe by state: California gasoline, New Jersey gasoline. You should be able to trade all of that on Hyperliquid and Lighter, too.

I think it'll be there one day. Polymarket's cool, but the fact that there's a settlement is kind of bad to me. I think these commodities really lend themselves well to perps, as well as calendar futures if you want the hedgers to get on there and trade their actual exposure, swaps, et cetera. So with a little bit of regulatory clarity, I think it'd be super cool to have actual commodities—jet fuel. You can hedge your airline flights or lock in airline ticket pricing ahead of time. I think it'd be super cool to do that on-chain.

I think maybe entirely new categories of commodities arise, like rice or certain crops—ags. But I guess we're just not there yet. We will be soon. You need delivery mechanisms, and you need exchanges that are entrepreneurial.

I think ICE and NYMEX, which are the 2 big commodities exchanges in America, are so bad at launching new products. They're still just riding the coattails of these benchmarks that were established decades ago, like wheat, corn, WTI, Brent, and Henry Hub natural gas. Those commodities that I just alluded to aren't the only commodities out there. There's tremendous demand for new commodities, but market structure doesn't lend itself very well to a couple of old-school guys in a super-bureaucratic, layered organization in Atlanta—that's ICE—or CME in Chicago, which owns NYMEX, which used to be in New York. Those sorts of bureaucracies don't innovate quickly.

Ironically enough, the most interesting attempt at commodities trading platforms that I've seen recently was FTX. Before Sam took the whole thing down via the backroom dealing at Alameda that was going on, FTX was actually innovating really quickly on the tradables front and listing a bunch of stuff. I remember there was active lumber trading during that crisis.

So basically, my point here is that it's not just a retail thing. It's not just, “Oh, let's create a way for degens to gamble on commodities.” I think there's a lot of institutional demand too to lay off risk and speculate at scale on a lot of commodities that are just being very poorly served by the major commodities exchanges.

And furthermore, types of crude oil—I think dated Brent benefits the few at the expense of basically the many, everybody else on Earth other than the shareholders of a couple of big trading companies. Why should it be that the world's benchmarks, WTI and Brent, cumulatively represent like 20 basis points of global physical oil consumption? There should be a Nigerian differential. There should be an Indonesian Petronas, or Malaysian Petronas differential.

There should be Saudi diffs if they want them listed. It should all be live and tradable on-chain. I think that'd be super interesting. But I guess I'm kind of just pontificating and philosophizing here.

Well, that's what we do. It's kind of fun. I will say that I really do miss FTX. For all of their faults, they were an extremely innovative exchange, and they were just the number 1 in terms of pushing out new products when other exchanges find it quite difficult to do so. And that takes skill; it takes a tremendous amount of Adderall and stimulants, apparently. But most importantly, it takes vision. So I do give Sam his props despite scamming a ton of people, and that was great.

Now, I do want to mention a few other things there in what you said, because I don't know if I agree with everything. Number 1 is, when it comes to new products, it definitely is valuable to launch new products, but you have to generate interest and liquidity for them, right? And so the question is, if you're just going to have institutional interest in these types of products, then why isn't ICE launching them? Why are they not launched? And I think it's because a lot of these products don't exist because there isn't institutional interest in them, because people don't actually want to go trade them.

And so, obviously, in the world of crypto, there are a ton of people that are willing to speculate on a ton of different types of products. But I think it's going to be hard to get them to speculate on the very niche stuff that you've mentioned. Because the reason that people speculate in crypto is often because there is no edge, right? You go punt a meme coin, you go punt Zcash, you go punt all these things because you think that you can generate just as much edge as anyone else by reading public information and really not thinking too hard about it.

When it comes to all these other types of products, like a Nigerian differential, you're going to look at that and say, “There's no chance I'm touching this. There's somebody much smarter out there who's going to be able to figure that out, and I actually have literally no way to generate edge. Therefore, I'm probably not going to speculate on it.”

Whereas for the big products like oil, like Brent—Brent specifically—you can kind of say, “Well, Brent is basically tied to my view on what's happening in Iran, and I think I can generate a view on Iran that's different from the market, and therefore I can bet on it,” because it's not as complicated, right? That is the main driver right now. And so that's why people are willing to speculate on it.

So I don't necessarily think that crypto is going to be a place for super-niche products in a way that the traditional markets aren't. But I do think it is going to bring a ton of liquidity to the big commodities in a way that doesn't happen right now.

The only other thing that I'll say on this topic is that dated futures are the product for physical manufacturers, right? A perpetual doesn't have that dynamic. If you know that your harvest for wheat is in August, you're going to sell August futures on your wheat product to lock in whatever price is trading at the moment, and you know that it expires when you collect your physical so that you can close out that trade. And perpetuals obviously don't have that dynamic. You actually don't know your cost a priori because it can change pretty radically heading into that date. And so there's no way to lock in the price in the same way that you can on a dated future.

Absolutely.

And so I do think that it's less important for these institutional guys to be trading on perpetuals. It's really, at the end of the day, onboarding a new class of speculators, and liquidity is really important. If we can get every single sports bettor in the world to go trade commodities contracts or equity contracts and increase liquidity in the market, that's actually better, in my personal opinion. That's better for the world than having liquidity for whether the Jets are going to win, which should be zero, by the way.

Yeah. No, I have a couple of takes on what you just said. I think this is a really important conversation to have because it's kind of the future of crypto, right? So basically, the reason why ICE and NYMEX are so bad at launching new products is not because—I think it's not exactly why you said it was. You were saying—

That there's no demand for it.

No, that's not true. So basically, take something like gasoline, right? If I'm a refinery and there's this—gasoline futures are pretty popular, so maybe that's a bad example. Let's take jet fuel. If there's this raging bonfire of trading going on in jet fuel—like some jet fuel perp on Hyperliquid, where retail degens are just going crazy trading this thing—hedgers will come in and hedge, and speculators will come in and speculate.

Basically, the thing is, whenever jet fuel swaps are tradable, they're kind of exchange-listed. People will do OTC block trades with each other, but the institutional community of interest in that isn't big enough for it to generate a really big, flourishing, active market. But I do think that if you had a perp with retail interest or a series of dated futures with retail interest, that would add extra liquidity, bring in more institutional interest, and make it a more interesting product than if you only gated it so that it's institutions and nobody else, which is kind of how these big exchanges work.

Like, if you or me want to onboard our PA to ICE to trade a jet fuel swap, and the minimum size is a gazillion dollars and there's a mountain of paperwork and margin and all this other stuff, it just doesn't work. Meanwhile, crypto has this seamless onboarding process that allows people to just start gambling right away. So I'm saying you kind of have to merge the 2 worlds to create an interesting market.

And then for markets like the Nigerian crude oil differential that I mentioned, you're absolutely right. You're not going to have a raging retail degen gambling community punting that around. Or maybe you would in Nigeria, but let's assume that you probably don't. An AMM is a way better settlement mechanism for a differential to a liquid benchmark than what's currently, like, a phone call and fax machine and Teletron, Telex.

I don't even know how they do the North Sea window or the Nigerian window, but it's basically a few guys haggling with each other on some sort of 1970s technology, right? That's not inclusive. There are many more people who need to hedge those differentials, and many more refineries that are interested, than the window allows to participate. So I do think an AMM would be a better settlement mechanism for that.

A perp would be a better gambling mechanism for jet fuel. Then, in terms of, if you're a commodity producer or consumer, there are many financially settled things that best match your cash flows, like a swap that's not physically settled. Oil comes out of the ground every day, so a producer will hedge with a swap because a swap settles daily. It literally prices out each day at a daily settlement time over the course of the month.

For physically delivered stuff, that's actually becoming less and less relevant as the hubs become less and less relevant and the commodities community becomes more and more global. For WTI, if it was just a sort of PADD 3—meaning a sort of South and Midwest-type market—then, yeah, Cushing, a storage hub in Cushing, Oklahoma, with a bunch of storage tanks, is a very useful physical transshipment location into which you deliver product and out of which you draw it. But that's not that relevant anymore. These are global benchmarks.

So I actually think that perps and swaps on perps are probably better than physically settled futures at this point, even though you probably need physically settled futures to avoid market manipulation. But the point that I'm trying to make, just to sum it up, is that crypto is the best place in the world to spin up a new market and attract interest. If you light the fire with the huge logs, which is what ICE and Globex try to do, the fire never starts. If you try to light the fire with kindling and gasoline, which is kind of what crypto is, that's a great way to get something started.

Then you need to throw the logs on, which hasn't really happened yet in crypto, but I hope it does. I hope institutions—the logs—pile onto the fires that we're seeing ignited in these nascent venues like Hyperliquid and Lighter. Very cool stuff they're building there.

4. Everyone Needs Market Exposure

Yeah. There's one thing that stood out to me that I haven't really thought about before: if you do have access to trade markets, you can get a wholly new set of participants in. For example, with the Nigerian differential, if you have people working in that world in Nigeria, right now it's quite difficult for them to express whatever view they have. In the future, you might see people who work in specific worlds and specific areas now able, because of crypto and access to markets, to express their views and put money where their mouth is in a way that you've never really had before.

I was actually just talking to a guy recently who worked at Lockheed Skunk Works, and I'm sure he's not able to speculate on the stuff he's specifically doing. But he was a procurer, so he would go out there and buy specific things from companies for the new planes or the new assets that Lockheed was generating. So there's a world in which somebody like that, if there's a market for some sort of laser tool that uses a ton of components and he knows they're going to need to massively increase the amount purchased, is able to buy up maybe a niche commodity that's used in that manufacturing process. There are no insider-trading laws for that, and he might be able to express that view, and that might draw people in.

So there might be an argument there that crypto increases access, right? It makes it easier for you to speculate on these things. You can sign up with 3 clicks of a button. It reaches people that it wouldn't necessarily reach before and convinces them to come into the market, and therefore we get new information expressed in the market that we wouldn't necessarily get otherwise. That leads us to the conclusion that we might be able to launch new products because that new information has somewhere to go, right? And so that, I think, maybe is a steelman argument for you.

But regardless of any of this—the niche ways that this might play out—I think we both agree that this type of investment and this type of trading is the future, and it's the future for a variety of different reasons. Not only because of technological advancement, but because the deep desire that individuals now have to speculate and gamble is never going away. And it's never going away because of fears about AI, fears about the economy, and, in people's minds, the stagnation of their wage growth, which isn't actually happening—that's a crucial point—but people do fear it now.

And so there's this tremendous desire to escape the quote-unquote “permanent underclass,” and that's only going to grow. And it's only going to grow for one big reason, Jonah: the markets are going to continue to do so extremely well. If you project out 3 to 5 years into the future, it's very possible the Nasdaq doubles, the S&P doubles, and the rich continue to get richer and leave behind, from a net-worth perspective, the people who aren't invested in the market.

I tweeted out recently that it's a national-security issue to get people to invest in the market, and that's why meme coins might be good, and that's why crypto might be good, because it provides an incentive mechanism to put their capital to work. Now, this sounds crazy, but it might genuinely be that somebody's first investment…

I was talking to Seon or Sei of FOMO[?] last Friday, and he was saying that sometimes, for the people buying meme coins, it is quite literally their first financial investment. And while they might lose money on it, it opens the door to actually investing responsibly. If you buy a meme coin and it goes to 0, I'm not going to pretend to get in the head of people who do that, but I'm going to try to say that it's likely you're probably not going to swear off investing in totality. You might say, “Wow, that was really stupid of me to put my money to work in meme coins. Maybe I should invest in something safe,” as opposed to not investing at all.

That's really what we're trying to get people to do: in order to escape the permanent underclass, you have to be invested in the market now. Because we are on the cusp of a technological revolution, because the world is about to change, you have to put your capital to work because companies are going to be more profitable than ever. And if you are not invested in those companies, you are not participating in the upside of the American dream anymore.

That's the whole reason why Trump launches the Trump Accounts, putting $1,000 in every baby's basket. You're now invested in the S&P. That's your savings account. That's the way that you escape. You need to have a piece of the pie.

Before, what would happen is that wages would be the way that companies distributed their profits. That sustained the American public for a long time. If companies made more money, you would make more money. The actual problem is that companies are making so much money that they can't increase your wage because you're actually not even providing that much to—you’re not providing nearly that much value to the company, so they can't increase your wages. But how do you get around that? You buy in.

I actually worked at Capital One when I graduated from university, and one of the things that was really interesting about Capital One was that I worked there for 2 months before this thing called IOTA 10Xed. I was a really big IOTA fan because I was a total idiot back then. I thought it was going to change the world. Silly me—it did change my portfolio: it 10Xed, and I suddenly had a few hundred grand in my bank. I was like, “Look, it's time for me to quit and do this crypto thing full time.”

And I actually quit literally a week before Bitcoin topped, so just know that whenever I decide to step away or quit something, that is almost always the top. It's happened a lot in the past.

Now, to bring it back to Capital One—I'm doing the weave, doing a little Trump weave—they actually, as part of their employee compensation program, allowed you to buy their stock at a 15% discount to the current trading price. It was literally free money. Obviously, you couldn't sell it for a year; it vested. But every 2 weeks, you could put your paycheck toward buying the stock at a 15% discount.

One of the reasons they articulated to us for doing this was that they wanted people to be, 1, aligned with the company, and 2, not feel bad if the company did extremely well and they didn't participate in the upside, right? Very few public companies do this. I think a lot more public companies should. That would be a great way to get people aligned with them: this type of stock-purchase program.

I do think there are obviously a lot of companies that do it, but basically every company in America should be doing this. Every public company in America should be doing this. They were early to that sort of idea: you need the people invested in the economy because it's very possible that we have a breakaway in the next 10 to 15 years, and if you're not invested, you're totally…

Yeah.

I agree with you. I think that's what's been so painful politically for so many people on both the right and the left: the goalposts have moved, right? We've gone from a world where it's like, “A penny saved is a penny earned. You should go to college, try to get a pension.” Earning is the path to wealth, to escape velocity, to, like, “LOL, your college degree doesn't matter.” You cannot earn your way out of the income bracket that you're in unless you get really lucky or get a really amazing job that's super hard to get.

For most people, the median job is not gonna do what it did for the Boomer generation, which is buy a house in the hills, have the real estate 10X, and retire, right? That's just so not a possibility for anybody from younger Gen X on down, and everybody's super pissed off. It was a seminal moment when Trump did the—what's it called again, with $1,000 in the equity market? The Trump Accounts.

Yeah, the Trump Accounts. That was a seminal moment, not because he did it, but because of what it telegraphed. The layer of the onion below the top layer was like, “Hey, cash is trash.” In case it wasn't already obvious to you, your new mechanism for just keeping your purchasing power somewhat the same is the S&P, which is pretty wild because the S&P appreciates 10-plus percent per year. That's kind of what you'd need to do just to preserve purchasing power.

That CPI number is not real. If you think that investing in T-bills is gonna protect your purchasing power, you are mistaken, especially at the higher ends of the purchasing spectrum. Maybe In-N-Out Burger costs 3% more this year than it did last year, but it feels like everything else—

Is there inflation at In-N-Out as well?

A little bit. Not much. It's pretty cheap still.

Yeah.

Good.

If you want the Double-Double Animal Style, which I don't do anymore because it's not kosher, it's probably inflating a little faster than your average burger. Needless to say, you do need to have your money in the markets. It is a national security issue. People will go freaking insane if their wealth keeps getting debased at the rate that it's been getting debased.

I honestly think that, from the perspective of new markets and new gambling opportunities, meme coins are—obviously, we've expressed our opinions—the wrong vehicle. I do think that these crypto exchanges, like Hyperliquid and Lighter, are important tokens, though. I don't know Lighter's tokenomics, but with Hyperliquid, you gotta own some of that because what Hyperliquid is doing is basically throwing spaghetti at the wall, or maybe curating spaghetti and then throwing the curated noodles at the wall.

Unlike ICE and NYMEX, which have to do a whole song and dance to launch a new product that almost inevitably will fail because these companies are just milking decades-old benchmarks that are never going away, Hyperliquid has to be a little more ambitious and hungry. Kalshi, Hyperliquid—these companies just throw stuff up there, and if something doesn't stick, that's fine. But a lot of stuff is sticking, Avi, and that's what's so important.

5. AI Democratizes Quant Trading

You have to find some sort of investable asset class. It's never been easier to use AI to backtest a strategy or to identify some class of things where, if you just apply a basic set of rules and get long them, you generate decorrelated returns in excess of the S&P 500. I do not think that throwing darts with a blindfold on is gonna work. You have to have a process, which is what we emphasize on this podcast.

But what's an example? I'm not gonna give you my process, but what's an example? You could basically identify an anomaly whereby, anytime any sports team on Kalshi trades at an X discount to Vegas odds, you just buy it and do that at scale in a diversified way. You can write yourself a bot in Fable or Astra that does it for you. ClickBot, GropBot can do it for you. If you just do it consistently, you'll perform according to your backtest.

So if you identify a backtest that looks profitable or smooth, you can probably just deploy capital consistently and earn money that way. Unfortunately, it's not as easy as just doing what you did with IOTA and being like, “Oh, wow.”

Right, just like writing it up. It is actually, by the way, something that everyone should be looking at and that I'm starting to do a lot more of: It's so much easier to be a quant than it's ever been before. You can literally just hook up Astra now to your accounts and basically use our 1000x Terminal to figure out where strategies might lie, because it does a lot of quantitative analysis for you.

But then once you've done that analysis, you can automate it using Astra or a scaffolding like a Hermes agent or OpenRouter, and it's easier than ever to be a quant and try to figure out these strategies. Set up something even as simple as, like, buy—find a meme coin that trades, download its price history, figure out what hours of the day seem to have a bid and what hours of the day it seems to have a lot of supply, and then set up a simple strategy to go buy and sell during those strong hours and short during the weak hours.

Put in $20, see how it goes for a month, and then re-up the strategy if it's working. This kind of stuff is now literally easier than ever. Another great place to do it would be to hook up to Pair Protocol, because you can do all these really easy rebalancing pair trades. I've been using that, and I love it. But it is now sort of a golden age of being a trader in many ways.

6. Bitcoin Looks Vulnerable

I did also promise a Bitcoin update to our loyal followers, and unfortunately for you, my Bitcoin update is that it's looking kind of sketchy out there. I was always nervous about the AI trade coming back and siphoning flows from BTC. Intel is up 20% over the last 10 days. SanDisk is up the same. You're starting to see flows come back into the AI trade.

Bitcoin's at the highs of $80,000, and I'm like, I probably need to reduce crypto exposure. I bought Intel, like I told you guys on the stream a while ago, but I might need to re-up, buy some DRAM, and sell out of my HOOD, which has done extremely well. So reallocate a little bit more now to the AI trade, especially as people aren't really thinking about it.

Now that Astra is out, I'm just doubling down on the idea that not enough people are thinking about the AI trade, and you should probably trim down your crypto exposure and move back a little to Intel, SanDisk, and maybe Nvidia if you're interested in being a loser and making 3% when everyone makes 40%, because they're long the memory stocks. Just kidding. But I am a little bit more nervous short-term about it.

Short-term, you're nervous about what specifically? Bitcoin?

Yeah. Look, maybe you just run the Jew trade, which is sell Rosh Hashanah, buy back after Yom Kippur, because everyone's gonna be taking the—every market participant's gonna be taking the next week off. But I do think that the probability of trading back down below $70,000 is quite high right now.

We saw a lot of froth in the market, right? The Hunter Biden laptop coin, Robinhood Chain totally popping off and now coming down. I do think that it's probably smart to reduce your crypto exposure now instead of waiting for later, when we've already sold off. I'm gonna be rebuying sub-$70,000, but until then, I'm gonna be reducing, reducing, reducing, buying Intel, buying SanDisk, buying DRAM.

And also reallocating to my biotech. Guys, Intel went up 20%. That's pretty good. That's pretty good.

These people in the chat—they are brutal. “This pod used to be called 1000x. Come on, guys. Recommending Intel for 5% gains, LOL.” It's like, if you can compound 5% here or there over the course of a year, you can 1–2X your money, or—sorry—2–3X your money, 100% to 200% returns. Give me a break. So to me—

Dude, people really underestimate the effects of compounding. Look, there was a tweet that I saw the other day—I forget who it was referencing. Maybe he was referencing Base16Z. It was like, “This guy sits in cash for 7 months and then doubles his portfolio in a month and then goes back to sitting in cash.”

You can do that. You can try to do that, or you can just consistently look for small wins, and those really stack up over time. And if you're calling 20% a small win these days, I don't know, your brain is totally fried.

You have to have respect for the dollar, Jonah. You have to appreciate it. One way to really win and outperform your peers is to have patience. You don't always have to hit the 2x in a week. You don't always have to hit the 1,000x.

You have to consistently win over time, actually crystallize those wins, and then move on to the next trade. I think the easy crypto trade is in peril right now. If you haven't taken profits, if you haven't trimmed a little bit, or if you were one of those lucky people who managed to buy the lows, now is a great time to trim a bit. That's just my 2 cents.

Yeah, no, I think it's great. So I guess, as we ponder, it's funny: We started the podcast talking about what it takes to make music, and I'm going to bring this all the way back in with the weave here. It used to take me 24 to 48 hours to throw together a great track of concentrated music-making in Ableton. Astra can coordinate the work in Ableton, the actual digital audio workstation, and you could probably craft a track.

You can obviously make a track with a prompt in 3 seconds. But I'm talking about if you actually want to build a track and have control over the knobs: You can probably squelch what, for me, would take 48 hours—or maybe what would take deadmau5 2 hours—down to 1 hour for even an amateur, right? With actual control over the levers.

7. AI Productivity Drives Markets

That, scaled across every possible discipline within the endeavor of human work, to me, feels like it translates back into the markets in the form of a crazy parabolic acceleration. I think we're going to see tremendous price increases across the board—not in everything, but in a lot of things. I don't think we're going to 1,000x the way scammy meme coins did in 2017, again in 2021, and maybe for 10 seconds in 2023, where SLERF and Popcat are getting a few people rich.

Don't forget Boden, Jonah. That was your big win.

That was my big one.

Never gonna forget.

That was my trench warrior moment. I think we're going to see it in the AI trade, SanDisk, and the physical-memory stocks. Now, to be fair, with physical memory, the market is actually cooling off a little bit right now. Some consumers are like, “This is literally just too expensive. I can't pass it on to the consumer or stomach it anymore. I'm going to take a breather and wait for some supply to come online.”

Memory is not one of those things that can just go to infinity, but there are other bottlenecks—they call them bottleneck bros on X. There are other bottlenecks as a result of this AI trade that probably will 1,000x your money. It won't just be a set-it-and-forget-it thing. You'll have to keep rotating from one trade to the next.

But, Avi, AGI is here. This technology is too real. It may end up destroying us as a species, but I'm starting to get a little bit existentially worried about that. Between now and the point when Skynet decides to terminate us all, I don't see how markets don't melt up.

This is the most bullish technology, the most bullish productivity, bullish output, bullish GDP—an extraordinary phenomenon I've ever seen in my lifetime. If I can, bedroom-producer style, make tracks in 1/48th the time it used to take me, do work faster, self-lawyer, and do all the other stuff, I just don't see how a group of 8 billion agents called humanity that have been communicating with each other at dial-up modem speeds—and then suddenly unlock the T1 line of interconnection across everybody on Earth—doesn't just accelerate price action across every endeavor that passes value back to stakeholders.

That would be Hyperliquid doing Coke and buybacks, equities—literally anything except bonds.

100%. You heard it here first: Skynet's coming for us all. All right, Jonah, unfortunately, I gotta wrap it up here.

Nice.

All right.

Good talking to you, Avi. Have a good one.

Take care.