MARKET UPDATE: What Is MemeFi, WAR With Iran, & The Fed Not Backing Down — What You Need To Know

Shale is the single, greatest, deflationary force of our lifetimes, Abbi. If it weren't for discovering a technology whereby you can literally insert a tube, a mile down, and then pivot at 90 degrees sideways, and then slurp up a paper-thin ocean of oil spread across, you know, thousands of square miles, this horrible thing would have sent oil to a thousand dollars a barrel. Shale has saved the world. AI is no different. It's just going to create deflation. It's going to bail out the United States of America. Hello. Hey, Jonah. Today we have so much going on. It's actually ridiculous. The thousand x pod is back better than ever. September 2nd, it is Wednesday. I know we have Labor Day coming up, but we're back in the saddle now. Somewhere is over, Jonah, and Lord is the market. Do an interesting things. I mean, we want to talk today about a variety of different topics, including this ridiculousness that's happening in the world of Robinhood, these meme-fai assets that are tying their tokens to meme coins and pumping microcaps on the stock market on Nasdaq. We have the midterms inching ever closer. We're going to take a look at some interesting data that came out a month ago on polling and how that's going to impact your pocket. We're going to talk about the Fed and Worsh kind of hitting back at Treasury, basically saying, "Beson, I'm going to call your bluff," or maybe he's not calling anything. Maybe he's just around. More generally, we're going to talk about how Jonah is doing because I actually haven't talked to him in like a solid week. I don't know. Jonah, how are you doing? I'm doing all right, man. It's really hard to get you on the phone if we're not like in front of thousands of people on this pod. First of all, I called you. I called you. It's true. I was like, I did not answer that call. You know what? It's my fault. Sorry about that, dude. Let's talk about your fresh cut while we get a few people on the stream here. We can talk about the fresh cut. We'll watch the world just up and you were like, I want to look like one of those guys. Yeah, that was a little bit of the inspiration. Additionally, I've gotten really into the idea of rebranding this podcast as like a 1980s themed Gordon Gecko style. Agreed is good type podcast, but we're not going to talk about what was exciting in the 80s. We're going to talk about what's exciting right now. And I feel like the mustache might be a good look for that. I might have to keep it up. And I might be the only suit that's going to talk about Robinhood chain. And all of the other nonsense that happens in the world of crypto, like there's a new coin that I just bought on FOMO. That's not financial advice. I'm probably going to lose all my money on it. I kind of just messing around and trying to figure out what there is to do. I explain what you're doing on FOMO. Why would you do that to yourself? You're a sophisticated guy. What's happening there? You think I'm sophisticated. That's really, that's like actually the nicest thing I've ever heard anyone say. I used to be back when I was working at a real hedge fund managing a billion dollars. I was a lot more sophisticated than I am now. The meme coin punter that I have unfortunately turned into. And that is mainly because I feel the intense need to stay on top of what the kids are doing. As a newly minted 30 year old, I am what they refer to as "unk." And I want to shed that title. I want to get rid of it. And I want to prove to you that I can still hang, that I can still do what's needed to be done in order to make money in today's markets. And number one, that is getting on these crazy platforms like FOMO, which I wish they sponsored the pod. I wish they paid me. But unfortunately, they're not. And this is just purely coming from the heart. They're not paying me. If FOMO you're listening to this, maybe we'll get the founder on next week or the week after if it goes well, maybe the sponsor of the podcast. But for now, I'm on FOMO because I needed to figure out what was going on. And social trading platforms are totally taking off. I mean, FOMO revenue is going through the roof. We always knew that pump. And we've talked about pump on previous podcasts that the idea of gambling going away was never really going to be true. There was, there was always going to be an element of animal spirits that was going to come back into the markets. Now the question was always, do I buy meme coins in order to express that view? And the answer almost always is no because the meme coins that are not hot now are very unlikely to be hot in the future, right? It's always a new crop. It's always new things that are happening in the market that people actually want to put their money into. And I need to figure out, hey, what is interesting to people? What are people actually going to be gambling on? And prior to FOMO, it was quite difficult actually because you had to troll through ether skin. You had to go on soul skin. You had to track the big wallets yourself because people didn't necessarily, I mean, they did want to advertise their positions. But it was quite difficult to do so. And now you basically have a way to figure out who the taste makers are, which is very important in crypto. You have to figure out who's buying what and for what reason? This is what we call due diligence in the meme coin world, which is literally just who likes what instead of anything related to reality, like revenue or usefulness, actually usefulness probably comes last in terms of what you would be top three. Sorry, interrupt. I just got to ask who are the top three taste makers right now? The previous cyclos and some and a few others. Yeah. So that's kind of an interesting question. It's this guy named dumb crayon eater is 419,000 followers. He's up 8.6 million on FOMO. You have uni PCS 430,000 followers. He's up 5 is up 6,000, 6.7 million on FOMO. We've got Salem with 151,000 followers up about 6 million. You've got Nate Benish, which is I think the first guy to actually put his real name. His name is Natan. Sounds very Israeli to me. This guy Natan Benish. Maybe we got to get him on the pod. Talk about his ionized tricks and how he's using them. Dumb crayon eater sounds like he lives like an LA person. That's the type of that's just like the average person that lives in LA, right? Yeah. They're dumb crayon eaters, but they're normally quite good looking. So Jonah, I really don't know how you fit in there, but it's for those of you on audio. The joke of Jonah is a human. I'm I've got a face for radio as they say. If you're drunk, I guess that makes me gramp. I was you know, I'm pretty grandunk grandunk. Yeah, you know, I was pretty hot 15 years ago, but now it's all gone to shit. Anyway, the that's what happens when you have three kids in a beautiful life. Yeah, you kind of just so you're like, I've locked it down. She can't leave me now. The towel gets thrown in. Oh, and she can. So I have to keep I have to keep that, you know, divorce is the worst kind of break up you could have. So I have to keep my my act together sort of, but you have to really be the biggest the biggest piano killer. People, people, people think that it's holding assets too long. People think that it's gambling on mean points, but really the largest amount of capital has been destroyed, not through like Archagos. How much how much did they blow up? Like, I don't know, tens of billions. Yeah. How much did Bezos blow up in his divorce? Now that's the right like 50 to 60 something like that. But all I know is that the aggregate amount of capital destroyed by divorce is larger than the aggregate amount of capital destroyed by leverage. Great point. 100%. Actually, it's the worst you have to be careful. Be careful of the women that you let into your life, Jonah. That is the worst kind of liquidation. Imagine Jeff Bezos as PNL screen in the day after those docu signs haven't down 60 billion billion dollars. Yeah. So jokes aside, I got I got to look up the right number. How much did Bezos lose in divorce? Only 38.3 billion. Well, I mean, I'm sure he's looking at what that would have been worth now because it was Amazon stock, right? And and Archagos capital management lost roughly 20 billion. So actually, Bezos's divorce blew up 40 billion dollars twice as much capital as the largest blow up in the history of the financial markets. Wow. Well, actually, hold on. How much did situational and just like just like these hedge fund blowups divorce is zero sum, right? Bezos is losses. X Mr. Bezos is Mr. Mrs. Bezos is gain. So McKenzie Bezos. Okay, let's see. Okay. Leopold Ashenbender lost approximately 35 billion. So even even Leopold who just got married, by the way, it's possible that in the future, Leopold is a smart guy. It's possible that in the future he loses more money breaking up with his chief of staff wife at Anthropic than he did in this blow up. So just as a warning to all you young bucks out there, make sure you marry the right person. Big divorce blowups only happen to smart guys incidentally. One thing that's interesting to me, Abby, this whole concept of FOMO, like the previous cycle, it was pump.fun. This cycle, it's Mr. Dumb, crayon, eater guy, previous cycles, and some or Zion or whatever his actual name is. There's, you have to, it's not enough to just not be long the trailing edge of meme coins or not be long the trailing edge of meme coin platforms. You have to like be, you can't just investing in current meme coins isn't going to work probably. You have to invest in the current meme coin platform, like you have to be, you have to be FOMO, right? And even FOMO isn't going to last that long, because whenever the next meme coin explosion, gambling explosion bubbles up, it'll be on something else. This is what makes this space so tough for me. It's like even the bedrock kind of like it isn't stable, it shifts. I can get with the fact that there are different meme coins for every cycle. First it was Doge, then it was Shib, then it was Whiff, and now it's whatever the hell is on FOMO. But shouldn't the platform at least stay the same? No, like first it was like Binance, then it was, you know, Pub.Fun, and now it's this. I'm reminded of a scene, there's a pair, you know, a Scorsese movie called Casino about, you know, Robert De Niro, one of the few movies I've seen and a phenomenal performance by everyone. Incredible. Just great, great movie. And then there's a parody of that movie that I think of often when I try to trade these meme assets called Mafia. It is one of the best parodies of all time. The opening scene of Mafia, you know, some gangster Italian sounding guy talks about the casino that they've set up, and then the big joke, the punch line, which is hilarious, is at the end, you know, the people stopped, just sent us the money and envelops and packages to avoid spending money on plane tickets to come to the casino because we were doing so well. And there's like a room full of guys raking money and opening envelopes full of money. And that's kind of how I feel about meme coin traders. They're literally just wiring money to whoever created FOMO or you to swap or arrow drum or whatever the hell. Like you kind of have to find out where the value accrues, and it's so evident that that value doesn't accrue to the average or even the top deciles speculator. And maybe accrues to the top percent of a percent speculator, Mr. Krayon, but it doesn't accrue to anybody else. So just stay the F away is kind of what I'm thinking. How do you look? I know that no matter what I say, no matter how loudly I say it, people are watching this and they're not going to stay away. They're going to log on and they're going to gamble. So the only thing that I can do is give you some frameworks for how you might actually approach this market. So when you look at what's happening on Robin Hood chain, it reminds me very much of what happened on base. There is a new platform that does not have a ton of baggage associated with it that does not have old assets siphoning up liquidity. It seems new. It seems exciting. People are shoving their capital into it because they feel like maybe this time can be different. Any platform that allows you to say that really can generate escape velocity for at least a short period of time. If you can say of a platform this time potentially is different. That is crack to your average gambler investor trader, whatever it is because what it does is it allows for hope and hope is the most powerful drug in trading. Robin Hood has a great story behind it. Robin Hood is a massive platform, Jonah. Robin Hood has hundreds of billions of dollars of assets on it. It has access to a huge swath of retail traders that have never gambled on chain. The leadership is pushing it. The people in crypto are genuinely early to a platform that may grow by 10X in the next five years. Does that mean the meme coins on Robin Hood are going to continue to perform well? I don't know, but I know that right now that's where the attention is and that's where capital is going. There's a specific set of meme coins that are doing very well, which tells you again, you have to go back to what I just said, which is this time is different. Well, what's different about these meme coins? Because of the way that Robin Hood chain is structured as a RWA platform, tokenized stocks are the hot thing. And so what these meme coins are doing is they are tying themselves to tokenized stocks. If you go by nude, you get issued, basically they buy Snapchat shares with the proceeds of the fees and it builds sort of a reserve of these Snapchat shares. If you buy, I think it's like Shiba AI or something like that, forget the exact name of it, you're funneling your money to Nvidia. If you buy a boner, you're funneling your money to hymns. There's actually a really great tweet that this guy, 0xSami, put out, which details the 20 or so different types of meme coins that are launched that are effectively just dats for DGN's as Conformist says. I have a question. I got to ask 100% so that's really what's happening. There's a new form of meme coin that's popping off. Will this last absolutely not? But today, something really interesting happens. This asset called Femi, which was about to be delisted from the New York Stock Exchange for trading under a dollar and doing zero volume, it's a $3 million market cap coin. A coin called Jin Kang, I'm sorry, I don't speak Chinese, but I forget. It's called Jin Kang launches. And ostensibly, this coin has the same framework. It is tied to this small cap asset. The small cap asset literally doubles, goes up 100%, Femi's up 100%, Jin Kang is running like crazy. There's actually no tie between the two. That's sort of the joke is there's actually no real mechanism for Jin Kang to buy Femi, but it just is stated that it might at some point. But what this tells you is that we've invented a new way to speculate. We're tying small cap assets to meme coins. And the idea is. But they're not tied. There's no tie. But hold on, but let me finish the rant. The idea is this. The idea is simple. If we can pump the meme coin, then if the stock is small enough, we might be able to pump the stock as well. And we get a virtuous cycle. And what you're doing is you're incentivizing the creation of real tokenized assets through meme coins. If these coins, if nudes, for example, or boner go up 5x and they're buying these tokenized, they're buying tokenized hymns and they're buying tokenized snap, then there might be a premium that gets associated with these tokenized stocks. You might see snap trading at a plus 10% to the underlying, which would incentivize market makers to come in. Basically, mint take their actual equity snap, take their actual equity hymns, mint a tokenized version on Robinhood, and then sell in order to capture the difference. And that actually does seem to be happening, which is kind of interesting. Now, I do think that we are probably in the late stages of this for the short term, because I signed up for Robinhood chain today. And I'm a pretty good indicator of when you're late to something given that I'm a suit and I barely pay attention. But I did want to play around with it so that I could talk to you guys intelligently about what's going on. Now, at some point, I do think that Rob, this obviously collapses potentially in the next week. But I do also think that this sets up for an even bigger one later. So I am paying attention to this space. I am buying a little bit of these coins just to just to play around. But it's just a reminder that patience is sort of everything. And prognosticating is about thinking about the future, not the present. Two months ago, people were looking at Robinhood chain and it was completely dead. There were memes, there were memes on it. Even two weeks ago, people were looking at Robinhood chain and there wasn't really much happening. But you have to understand that at some point, Robinhood's not going to launch a chain unless they're going to dedicate significant resources to pumping this thing. Vlad Tenev is talking about meme coins on Robinhood. You kind of know that at some point, this thing was going to this thing was going to pop off and you can sort of just allocate and wait. And so a lot of trading and investing is just thinking where is money going to flow, where, where will incentives eventually align and where should I put capital now that will pay me off in the future. So that's a little bit of why I think that even if we get a short-term collapse in Robinhood chain, right now it's just the crypto natives. It's just that the people that are extremely early that have gotten on to this. And what's going to happen is at some point, people, the normies are going to see this sort of ridiculous price action that's happening on Robinhood chain. And they're going to come over and they're probably going to end up buying as well, potentially on the dip, potentially accelerating this current move. All I know is that some of these meme coins are probably going to do very well in the future because, again, to reiterate, people can say that this time is different. That was my rant. No, it's a great rant. This time is not different. Of course, Vlad Tenev is talking about meme coins. Vlad Tenev is literally Robert De Niro in Casino, or his equivalent in the parody who's just receiving envelopes of people's money because they, you know, because they're just like, "I'm going to lose anyway. I don't want to take the flight. I'll just mail you my money." That's literally about as stupid as this sounds. So you have to ask yourself, not you, Avi, but just the listener, the royal you, we, whatever. We have to ask ourselves, where does the value accrue? Who's getting the money? It's not you. It's like, it's Vlad Tenev, maybe Robin Hood chain, if they launched it in such a way that the tokenomics mimic hyperliquid where there's like a 99% buyback unlikely. Robin Hood has external shareholders that would not be happy about that, right? Maybe then you can buy some sort of base layer, some sort of fat protocol thesis type asset that accrues value from all of this speculation and gambling. But this is the most common fallacy I see in junior traders. They watch a bunch of money getting made by some tiny subsector of the, you know, participant base. They assume that there's money to be made for them too. And that is the honey, the nectar that lures them into the trap, right? And I just don't, I view all of this as a trap. Like, there were times where I was, you know, I was in Bitcoin from fairly early, but I guess the rest of crypto was a bit of a mystery to me. I did make my dive into Ethereum at the right time, but it's a lot on it too, but then I did some some mistakes in 2021 and 22 or I bought stuff because I thought that a revolution was going on, whereas in reality, a lot of the more sober voices in my ramp community, the commodity straiters who are no coiners were actually right, you're like, no, it doesn't matter that near does sharding, you're on mute, sir, oh, you're on mute on purpose. Yeah, I know. I just was repeating the grant community, the people didn't need to hear that, it was just very fun to me. Yeah, I like it. Maybe we should make a Gramp Chat for all the people over the age of 35 in crypto. It's probably needed. Gramp, Gramp Chat, Gramp Talk, Gramp Stories, Gramp Confessions. Anyway, so yeah, basically my Gramp Confession here is nobody was like, Jonah, it doesn't matter that near is doing sharding. You shouldn't buy it at $20, even though that's sharding as two years out on Ethereum's roadmap. Nobody fricking cares, and we're in a bear market, right? We're already, the cycle for these meme coins is so short now, the oscillation is so compressed that it doesn't matter if you're, unless you're crazy early, whatever you're buying in two doesn't matter. You're already in a bear market. You can get bear market spikes, but like you have to behave as though the bottom is about to fall out from underneath you at any moment. This is the scariest, most ridiculous pyramid scheme style gambling adventure that I've ever seen occur at scale. I thought meme coins were dead. Now you're sitting here talking about dollar sign boner, a meme asset where some guys who created it with a couple clicks promised to buy hymns stock, which you could also just buy yourself, if boner market cap reaches a certain level, then there are probably arbitrageurs trading hymns versus boner on the probability that the boner guys actually go and buy hymns, and if they do, then there's some sort of systematic basis that they can trade. It's funny. Like when I was a DRW, we sat next to the Ergonia guys, Ergonia is like this on chain and systematic funds, like a mini winter mute. Basically, they were doing really well during the Salana meme coin frenzy before that. They were sort of like, you know, talking to, they were telling me stories about the people in the communities who were doing like sandwich trades and M.E.V. arbitrage. It's, you know, like, 17-year-old Dutch kids, those two of them with their laptops, like being $50 million a piece on M.E.V. and sandwich trading when that first became a thing, when Ethereum blew up in 2021. And then like one of them lost their laptop and the other one went bankrupt somehow or lost all his money. And then Ergonia was the next iteration of that. And now there's probably some new Dutch teenagers doing the same thing, like trading boner versus hymns. But honestly, to me, it's just, there's very little to grasp here, it's either you are an extremely technologically savvy person that can pile in and capitalize systematically on the feeding frenzy, the gambling frenzy that's going on by some sort of systematic on-chain or on-chain off-chain arbitrage, or you are Vlad Tenev, or you are, you know, the luckiest of the lucky, the winner of the lottery, Mr. Creon eater of stupid face, or you're just wiring money into the ether that you will never get back, and that money isn't just what it's worth today, it's what it would be worth in the future if you just set it and forget it in SPY earning 10-20% per year. Like I just, it's like, I cannot underline enough how ridiculous this is and how impossible it is to capture value that's seemingly so abundant. It's just not. It's all an illusion. I look, Jonah, I'm not going to disagree with a single thing that you said. I just want to go back to what I said at the beginning, which is that I know people are going to do it anyway. And so it's up to me to, if you're going to do it, let me lay out some rules for you. Number one, number one, understand what part of the cycle you're in. We are not early. You are not early. I am not early to this Robin Hood Ponzi scam. You are right now, the way that you have to think about it is that every dollar that you put into Robin Hood is probably a zero, but there could be some potential in the next week or so for some high multiples. So if you're going to try to go for those high multiples, you just put in number one, put in a small amount of capital. Do not put in any substantial amount of capital into Robin Hood chain. I put in like 10K. It's fine. It's whatever. If I lose it, if it goes to zero, that's okay. I'm treating it almost as a game, not necessarily as a real investment. Number two, make sure that you're actually paying attention very closely and you're trading. You're not investing in these meme coins. All of the hundred X's have actually probably already happened. I mean, you have pawns at 400 mil already, which is the launch pad for Robin Hood. You have the AI in video token at 250 million. You have tens of millions of dollars of volume going through these things. So the way that I would play is basically everything with a short leash. I'm not looking at 10X's. Right now, I'm looking at doubles. I'm looking at a 2X and then I'm getting out. And hopefully the rest of the people haven't necessarily caught on. And they're probably still going for the 10X's and they're going to get rugged. If you do want to gamble on meme coins, you have to think about the future, not the current state of things. That is the most important. Like the people that have all done very well, or the people that had a thesis on Robin Hood two months ago, allocated capital now, we're paying very close attention. If you're just starting to pay attention now, you're kind of treating this as like a casino as a, you know, pull and gamble. Now, is there a way to generate edge potentially? You know, if you see, if you're tracking these large wallets very closely, this entire thing, unfortunately, is very cabal run. If you go look at all of the top wallets on FOMO and all of the top coins that have run, the people that have made a ton of money somehow managed to buy these things at like a 100K market cap, but 200K market cap. That to me suggests that they were involved with the creation of the coin, which means that all of their profits are probably just a free roll. So it's very difficult, I think, to emulate. You might see somebody with an $8 million position. It's very difficult to emulate that because they were very likely. I'm not casting aspersions. I'm just saying it's more likely than not that they were involved with the actual creation of the coin itself. So you have to know the game that you're playing. Now, there are moments in time, which I do think this one is, where you can potentially get quick 50 to 100% returns because of all the liquidity that's flowing in. You just have to know that you're playing a game of hot potato. It reminds me a lot of the DeFi in 2020. When DeFi first started and all these coins on Ethereum were going totally nuts, that was a great trade. You knew that it was going to be all over, but you knew that there was a lot of capital still sitting on the sidelines that was willing to pour into these assets. I happened to be early at the time because I was literally full-time just staring at things on chain. I managed to pull out a decent amount of capital. Now, what happened in the age of DeFi is first to start on Ethereum, then it filtered to other chains. All these other chains, like Avalanche, near, they tried to engineer their own versions of DeFi Summer, and it actually ended hilariously with Binance chain. When Binance chain launched their EVM, when Binance chain launched their EVM compatible version and they started launching all these DeFi assets, that was basically the end. But you did, if you were the first day, first day, first money onto Binance chain, you walked away with a good amount of money. All I'm trying to say is that I do think, this is basically lasted for five days so far, maybe it lasts for another five, maybe it lasts for another 14, but you just have to know the game that you're playing, which is that it's massive hot potato. Because of the dynamic, you can probably make a lot of money with a little bit of money, and I wouldn't necessarily advocate putting more than 1% of your portfolio into this stuff. If you do believe in a long-term thesis here, the best thing to do is probably just to go by Robinhood itself, which I've been advocating for for a long time. I think Robinhood is one of the best expressions for the crypto trade. It has the downside protection of if equity markets come back, if the AI trade comes back, which I want to talk about in a, in a psych, if the AI trade comes back, Robinhood goes through the roof because of options value comes back. If crypto goes through the roof and equity stay flat, Robinhood goes up, Robinhood has a lot of different ways to win. I love stocks and investments where you have a lot of different ways to win. Some coins are basically the exact opposite. There's one way to win, and that's the front-run capital. Now, again, right now I do think I'm front-running capital, so that's why I took a little flyer on these assets, but that's why I like Robinhood. Arbitrum's also kind of a dark horse on this because I think they get 10% of the fees that Robinhood chain generates, and Robinhood chain in the last week has gone from 500 million of volume to 1.5 billion of volume. That is pretty crazy. You're going to see a lot of fees generated from that. Robinhood chain is going to end up making a decent amount of money, and in two years from now, I think Robinhood chain is probably larger than it is today. Now, interestingly, this is almost a bull case for Ethereum. Now, I hate Ethereum, you hate Ethereum, everybody hates Ethereum, but you are seeing most activity now happening on And on this new chain, which is based on Arbitrum, which does, at the end of the day, filter down to Ethereum. Now, on an actual revenue basis, Ethereum is not going to make any meaningful money from this. But on a narrative basis, it could, especially if Solana starts to lose flows because of this. Maybe what you see is an institutional narrative coalesce around Ethereum. If Bitcoin goes up, Ethereum could be the second fastest horse post. Now, I do want to talk about my general thoughts and your general thoughts on the market, because people are nervous. Bitcoin, you're, I think, you're muted. Before we get there, can I just do like a 30-second thing on what you just said? Sure. You want the most interesting price action to me is handsome coin. This meme-fight stuff has, tell me what. You were like last five to 10 days when the meme-fight bubble really occurred. That price action corresponds with handsome, just nuking right back to the local lows. I think the other sort of meme-y-type assets like bot going back down. And what that tells me is there's not a lot of capital on the sidelines here. It's sort of like squeezing one part of the balloon and then the other part blows up and then you squeeze that part and then the first part blows up. It feels like capital sloshing. It doesn't feel like this wave of inflows like what you saw between mid-2020 and November 2021. There's no sideline capital here. This is the same DGENs racing from one narrative to the next. And like you said, if you're listening to us, you are not early on dollar side boner. You kind of need to be a discord focused, you know, Celsius guzzling trench warrior to profit from those, to be early. But to your point about the cabal, Avi, I know I'm going past my 30 seconds, but I promise I'll finish soon. Look, we got a whole day here, John, I'll go ahead. The cabal thing that you mentioned is actually, you know, Mr. Crayon, Eater, potentially being one of the people involved with dollar sign, you know, dollar sign, ditto face or whatever the hell is going up, like honestly, that occurs at scale. That is Wall Street, right? Ditto face at scale, Jonah, you heard it here first. You heard it here first. Ditto face at scale. So basically, there's a huge business on Wall Street, like flood our boy posted something really awesome. He was like, you know, kind of talking about the difference between finance and prop trading. I was spent a lot of my career in finance in New York City and London and doing the things. And there are very few people that are just like pure, you know, Herculean battle versus the market, managing their own money, just like profiting in a vacuum. A lot of what goes on in finance writ large is recasting some sort of cabal information, scammery or attribution to a business that's already making money as like you being a genius or doing something forward thinking. And if you get enough buy-in, whether it's from the DGENZ on FOMO or from the senior leadership at Goldman Sachs or VTAL, you get enabled with more sort of like extremely high alpha opportunities that no one else has access to. It's to use your wording, Avi, if you can cast a free role as you having intellectually ideated some new form of profit, then the upside is colossal. And I will give you an example. So at Goldman, there was a group of guys. They traded refined products in New York. They had huge deals with refineries that were originated by the investment banking division. And the supply and off-take was to be handled and hedged by the, you know, the traders. Obviously the traders would rip their refineries eyes out on pricing and just generate infinity money. Basically, these guys were the, why were the refineries willing to be ripped off that way? I mean, you would assume in competition, those margins would collapse. As an off-shoot of a banking deal, when you're a refinery and you're desperate and you really need money, you do your debt origination with a company like Goldman. And then they insert like a jalapeno into the contract that says, oh, by the way, you have to trade with our trading desk when you need to do your hedging to ensure cash flows remain stable. And they're like, okay, okay, then don't really get it. And then when obviously they come in and they say, hey, you just sell like a gazillion barrels a day of some refinery margin swap. The desk is like, oh, really? And I know you can't compete with me. So I'm just going to show you a like offensive, but just inside of illegal price. And that goes on in the money. That's how the money is. If it was too wide, would it be illegal? What I don't understand. I don't know. Maybe there'd be a lawsuit or some sort of userious claim of breach of, I don't know. I'm not a lawyer. But the point is here, the same thing happened at VTOL, right? Like, basically, you give people money and they will do things. They will sign documents that contain unintended consequences. One of which is you trade with us, supply and off-take. So basically, take your pay, all kinds of little tricks. I could do a whole podcast on this. Anyway, the guys on those desks that get those deals, they use something called PNL Reserves, where they're like, oh, you know, this is a liquid. I couldn't sell it right now. So I'm going to stash some of this PNL reserve. And then they release it from the reserve on their own schedule. And it can kind of like craft a PNL trajectory that's not real, right? And then they talk about, all day on the desk, they talk about fundamentals and research and pretend to have this incredibly relevant knowledge. And basically, what they're doing in the eyes of management is creating this novel stream of money. And they're because they're so smart and they know so much about fundamentals. I've seen this time and time again. I've seen it in macro where somebody just has a connection in Washington. And turns it into profit and treats it like they're just the world's best trader. They have-- Right. So I mean, basically what the Trump administration is doing every single day when the oil looks around. I mean, yeah. No, it is very true. I mean, look, I'll just talk to you a little bit about-- Can I finish real quickly? It's almost done. I'm so sorry. I know I've been going on a long time. It's basically, all I wanted to say was, if you can make something that like a business or some free role look like you're actually generating the money from trading, people will throw money at you, throw promotions, throw titles, throw opportunities at you. And so many finance careers have been bootstrapped by just painting, painting like a stream of cash flow or some free role as a genuine, ideated profit, do not fall for it. Do not be one of those people that throws money into these situations. Well, that is literally exactly what is happening in crypto, right? It's you have all of these people that-- I mean, that's why I think FOMO does so well as because there's always an appreciation for people that seem to have it, quote unquote, all figured out. And there's not a lot of digging that goes into how they have it all figured out. And I think what you see a lot in crypto is a combination of two things. One, it's that meme-- you've seen that meme that's survivorship bias meme with the plain where all of the bullet holes on the plane, it's like all those red dots and you see the plane. And basically where that comes from is in World War II, when planes would come back, the army would look at the planes and they would see, okay, where are planes most likely to get shot, all the planes that would come back? And they would say, okay, they're most likely shot on the wings and most likely shot on the nose. And so then they would put armor on those parts. But what they weren't realizing is that all of the planes that were actually shot down were shot somewhere critical where they weren't putting armor. That's the issue of survivorship bias. It's the same issue that we run into crypto. A lot of your favorite KOLs, a lot of the people that have ended up making a ton of money are the people that genuinely got lucky. This happens in the world of finance, too. If you have 100,000 people all gambling, one of those people is going to hit 30 trades in a row and end up extremely wealthy, even if they have no skill. And they're going to be paraded as somebody that does have that skill. And it's your job as somebody that looks at these markets, especially that looks at all of these KOLs and crypto sort of figure out who actually has a thoughtful approach to the markets that you can learn from and who is an example of survivorship bias. Somebody that actually genuinely just got lucky, but somehow ended up with a lot of P&L. The best disinfectant for survivorship bias is length of time, right? Is how long have you been successful, the longer that you're successful, the less likely it is that you got lucky and that's what I would look for. That's why I take Umbridge with all of these new people that came in in 2023, calling the people from 2016, 2017, Unks, and washed up. Well, we actually managed to last about twice, maybe three times, four times as long as some people. And whatever your P&L is right now, the key is not making money. Making money in a bull market is the easiest thing in the world. You throw a dart, price goes up, you make money, you parade around your P&L, you seem like a God. The hard part is keeping the money through the bear. And most of these people have not managed to do that at all. Most of the people that I like to talk about, your Ansem's talk about me, talk about the Jonas of the world, talk about all of the KOLs like Gamzee and Donald and all these people that have been around for multiple cycles. These are guys, especially like Donald shout out to him, he's a friend and I think a phenomenal trader. Like these are the types of people that you should be looking up to, not the new age guys that come in and proclaim themselves God's immediately. Those are the people that you should really avoid because they're going to lead you down a bad path of probably speculating on crazy meme coins and not ending up actually making any real money, losing it when the next bear market hits. So generally, my view on YouTube. on trading and investing is they're very few people worth listening to directionally for actual trade ideas. The people that are the best to listen to, the people that the content that is the best to consume are the people that give you frameworks for navigating and you, it's on you, your skill, your ability, your courage to actually go out and make the money and then you're savvy to keep the money. And it's all about people that can help you build those frameworks, not about people that spoon feed you and tell you buy this ticker, buy this ticker. That's why it's funny. I often encounter people and by often, I mean, every like 18 years encounter people that listen to the podcast and they tell me, oh, the one thing that you should do is show more tickers. And I shy away from that because if I show something, or if I talk to you about something like talk about Robin Hood, you know, that is something that I have long-term view that I've spent time building that conviction. And it's not something that, you know, I'm trying to lead you to the slaughter. It's something that I genuinely believe in from a long-term perspective, I've done work on. You know, so moving on from that, I do think that right now we are in a consolidation phase for crypto. I am pretty confident that we are going to resolve higher. I mean, we've been bullish, well, at least I got up with a good friend of ours, Jonah, who apparently you got lunch or dinner with in Los Angeles. And he told me that he had to convince you out of selling your BTC, but you stuck to it. You held your BTC. He talked me out of it. He talked to you out of it, which is good. I mean, I think at that time, I was very bullish on gold. Gold has retraced a good amount now. I think now is another good entry for gold because I do not think this debatement trade is over. As evidenced by what I view as Kevin Worsh's jawboneing, like toothless jawboneing at Jackson Hole, I don't know if you saw what happened there, but basically he came out as reasonably hawkish and the market thought there are things that we might be gearing up for a fight between the Fed and the Treasury, I don't think so. Kevin Worsh doesn't have a spine. What he's trying to do is talk the markets down. He's trying to stop the markets from getting out of control, but I think what we'll see is in September, we're not going to get a right hike. You heard it, you heard it here first. If we do get a right hike, I'll come on the pod and eat my words and tell you guys that I was wrong, but I think it's very unlikely we get a right hike. And I think we're setting up for the next leg in both Bitcoin and gold. And if we don't get that right hike, I actually think that we could get a bull market across all three assets. We could get an equity's gold and bull market. The equity's gold and Bitcoin bull market. So I'm pretty constructive on the next month here, Jonah, heading into the high holidays. - Shonatova. - Yeah, Shonatova. - You bring up so much interesting stuff there and I'm glad we pivoted away from crypto for a second. It's, if we get a bull market in gold, Bitcoin and stocks, it's really just a bear market in the dollar, right? Every time I just remind myself of how much money that's been printed, I look at M1, which is like clown world, I look at M2, which is still almost clown world, maybe clown world. I look at the United States national debt, our national debt to GDP. That's also clown world. How is debatement not gonna happen? We're on an inexorable mega trend. May as well just hop on board with things that are sort of not that perform as the currency gets debased. That's stocks, that's gold, that's Bitcoin. I don't know what to make of worse, generally speaking, whenever you're a few months into a new chairman's chairmanship, you end up with a lot of, you know, a lot of head scratching and deep introspection over every word of what's being said. You know, generally speaking after the guy's been around for a little while or gal in the case of Yellen, you kind of know from what they're saying, what's gonna happen, I agree with you. I don't think we're gonna get a hike. I don't think this guy is just gonna start taking the heat out of the economy. Zooming way, way out though. AI is the most, it's exactly like shale. At first it created inflation, right? Tott of spending, ton of investment, hundreds of billions of dollars just getting thrown into various places like the pocket in the North Dakota and you know, Eagle Ferd, Texas and all these other random Permian basin places that most people have never heard of before. The same things happening to AI, right? Mega, mega, mega CapEx, you know, everybody's heard of NVIDIA of course, but like you know, billions, tens, hundreds of billions of getting showered at companies that you've never heard of, like core weave, vast, you know, nebias, all these Neo clouds. You know, at first it creates inflation and then I think what will happen with AI is exactly what already happened with shale. Shale is the single greatest deflationary force of our lifetimes, Abby. If it weren't for discovering a technology whereby you can literally insert a tube, a mile down and then pivot at 90 degrees sideways and then slurp up like a paper thin ocean of oils spread across, you know, thousands of square miles and thereby achieve energy independence. We would literally, this horrible thing would have sent oil to a thousand dollars a barrel. There would have been lines around the block for gas stations. The price of a Tesla would have been 300 Gs. Like honestly, Abby, shale has saved the world and it's been the most deflationary thing ever and this AI is no different. Literally all of this fear and uncertainty and doubt and loathing and Las Vegas over the, you know, AI spend and is it gonna be worth it or not? Honestly, it's just gonna create deflation. It's gonna bail out the United States of America. I'm an optimist, everything's gonna be fine. We don't need to hike rates and cool off the economy. The inflation will cool itself off as people realize that they could just do work without paying 150 grand a year for a secretary. You realize that's indirect, that's actually directly contradictory to the idea of the debatement trade. Debatement, you were talking about a, like a one to six month time frame though, weren't you? Right, yes, yes. So I do wanna make that clear. As we always try to do here, we'll tell you our thought process behind why we're taking a trade, why we're thinking about it and also what would falsify it. So with the debatement trade specifically, the reason that AI moons so hard and Bitcoin and crypto didn't do so well and gold retraced a lot is because what we were experiencing was real economic growth from investment into data centers from $600 billion plowed into American infrastructure from the rebuilding of the energy grid. This is all real growth, AI was contributing to real growth. And then what ended up happening is that growth got priced in. The AI trade sold off and we were back to sort of steady state of we're not really sure where the next piece of economic growth is gonna come from. We have to really see if these frontier models really take off, we need something more from these AI companies like OpenAI and Thropic to show us that they're radically gonna change the economy because where we stand today, that has already been priced in. What they're going to be able to change today has already been priced in and it wasn't before. And so then what ended up happening is that Bessent comes out, announces that he could use up to a trillion dollars of treasuries to control the yield curve and inflation started to feel like a real issue. If we're not going to see meaningful movement and meaningful development in the world of AI that will increase productivity, that will engineer GDP growth, then that means that we're not gonna be able to deflate our way out of this issue and yields start going up and then the treasury is gonna have to start printing in order to stop yields from going too high and tanking the whole economy. So we entered into a period that seemed like it would be good for the debasement trade. Now what could change that? What could change that our frontier models coming out and actually new frontier models coming out and proving that we haven't reached the limit that we are going to see new productivity games that we're going to see Microsoft integrate AI and suddenly they're twice as productive as they were before. The new products are coming out. Software companies start to go down as CFOs at large companies replace them with AI and cut down and cut down costs a ton. Then we start to see real deflation. Maybe we start to see things like Adams and Prometheus actively work to make manufacturing cheaper in the United States and suddenly your chairs, your tables, your headsets, everything starts to go down in price and we're seeing real wage growth, we're seeing real productivity. That would obviously hurt the debasement trade. I don't think that's going to happen for at least six months. Now great, if we do see that happening, you have to realize, oh my god, our thesis of the debasement trade is no longer real. I'm not your dad, right? That's what we're not your parents. I don't stream every day. If that happens on a Thursday and I don't stream until the next Wednesday and the market goes down, please don't yell at me because remember this, like remember that I said this and that you need to take that into account yourself. You need to make those decisions yourself that if you see evidence of frontier models radically improving productivity, that is bad for Bitcoin. That is bad for gold. Take action to protect your portfolio. I might not be live. Although hopefully I will be because I do want to start streaming more. Although I say that every week and then I never stream because I'm a lazy piece of shit, sorry. - I'm getting pretty regular with these Wednesday streams. - Yeah, the Wednesday streams are great. The Fridays, I think I did one. I'm gonna, I'll do them eventually. guys. It's hard to mind. I need you guys in the comments to be engaging because that's where I get my real dopamine. If you guys are not sending comments to me, it's very hard for me to stream because I actually get super board monologuing. I need an audience. Yeah. Respect to Megan Kelly, Ben Shapiro, all those monologers who sit there and talk for two hours. It's hard, man. Yes. They don't do it off the cuff, though. That's what I've learned is that they really prep for these things and they're, they're almost, they're not reading, totally reading a script, but and they do go off at some points and that's a lot easier, which is something I might start doing is just picking a topic, going deep into it and talking to you guys about it. I did before we wrap this stream. There's, I mean, Jonah, there's so much that I wanted to talk about here. I don't have a hard stop today if you want to keep going for a bit. Yeah. I got to hit the restroom, man. But, but basically, I'm just, where were we can keep going? Just piss yourself. Seriously. Yeah. So this is right now. I already spilled coffee. I spilled coffee on my hair. If you need to go take a leak, I can try to monologue for a second. I spilled, I spilled coffee on my cuff here. I don't know if you can see it. I'm totally, I'm totally a mess right now. But at least my piano is up. I wanted to talk briefly about the Nvidia trade last week because it worked and it didn't work at the same time. And I wanted to give you guys a download. So last week, I had the idea and I spent two minutes talking about it that post Nvidia earnings. We were going to see Nvidia actually do well for the first time. For the last seven out of eight earnings, Nvidia has gone down post earnings. I turned out to be right. I ended up making a little bit of money on it, but I didn't execute the trade perfectly. And I want to talk to you about my learnings. So I wrote down first, what do I want to happen? I actually wanted Nvidia to beat earnings because I have, I have other assets that are correlated with it. My portfolio anchored me to wanting Nvidia to beat earnings. And so that's what you first have to recognize is, do I have a bias going into this? I did have a bias. But could I make a real strong argument for Nvidia beating earnings and then going up? What was I looking at? It looked like the world was short. So Nvidia, like I said, seven out of the last eight earnings, it went down post earnings. But what happened prior to those earnings is Nvidia went up an average of eight to ten percent heading into the week of those earnings. For the first time, Nvidia was actually down. It was down seven eight percent heading into those earnings. And so we have an indication that maybe something is different this time, something has changed. The entire AI complex had gone down into Nvidia earnings. And it was very unlikely for Nvidia not to beat because analysts tend to be extremely conservative with these things. They don't like to estimate too high because then they look like bulltards and then they get run out of the street. And so I thought Nvidia was going to beat. But I know that that wasn't enough to send it higher. So I had to look at where people short and it turned out that people were actively short it in higher quantities than they were an all last of the eight earnings. Nvidia had gone down into those earnings and also generally structurally, the entire AI market was out. The discretionary pods seem to have exited from the AI trade in a meaningful fashion. And so I thought that set up for a good bounce from Nvidia. Now, what actually happened on the earnings beat? Nvidia initially traded down. And why in hindsight did Nvidia initially trade down? What I did, which I didn't execute perfectly, is I sold half of my Nvidia post earnings. I ended up keeping half for after and ended up making a small profit on the trade. But I sold initially on the on the earnings beat because I think I got caught by the algos. What I didn't realize is that my thesis was predicated on discretionary pods and your average investors going into Nvidia and shorts covering, right? Initially, I think what ended up happening is that algos or quant funds ran the same pattern that they ran every single time in video beats earnings. Nvidia did not have a massive blow out. And so post the actual numbers coming out. The algos came in and they shorted or they sold Nvidia. And then once the earnings call happened, once Jensen came out and said that they're guiding to 70% revenue growth, those people covered. And that allowed the discretionary guys to come in. And then obviously it opened up seven, eight percent the next day. And so what I failed to take into account was that it was very likely that when a pattern happens over and over and over and over, the first instinct, even if you think that pattern is going to break, is often for that pattern to hold. The first very short time frame is for that pattern to hold because of the way that people trade, because of these quant funds that are trading off of these patterns that occur regularly. And so my mistake was letting them take me out of the trade and not waiting for my actual thesis to take hold, which is a discretionary traders coming in. And so I do want to just talk about that Nvidia trade. I'm going to be gutter on executing for next time and you guys can hold me accountable for that. It was a great call though. I think one of your best like ultra short term calls. I loved it. And just to be clear, it was a short term call. I'm no longer holding in video. Should we briefly touch on Iran before we break here or do you got to go now? Yeah. Yeah. Let's talk on Iran. What do you got for me, Jonah? Yeah. I mean, not the finest king. Yeah. I think this war is a good idea. I think, but that aside, you do in terms of you have you have you have ethnic loyalties, my friend. I have the type of face that somebody who thinks this war is a good idea would have, right? The type of just physiognomy in general. Anyway, um, there was a stalemate. There was some attempts at negotiation. They all failed. Shooting restarted. Brands back up to $95 a barrel this morning. It's, you know, it's all kicking off again. Basically, what I want to underline here is Iran is trying as hard as it possibly can to shut the straight of Hormuz. And oil is still getting out. Not the full 20 a day or whatever, 21 a day that was coming out beforehand. But, you know, Saudis, East West pipeline is now doing seven. I think, you know, transit, Hormuz transits are 11 MBD, according to, um, you know, most back channel sources Kepler, the vessel tracking firm that everybody in the industry uses recently, like backfilled their erroneous data, which is way too low with, you know, the dark fleet that's getting through. They, they dredged that Omanian route to get more vessels out. Like, if you had told me 10 years ago when I was in the thick of oil trading that the straight of Hormuz was going to be like that Iran was just going to draw a red line and shut it as, and tries hard as they could to shut it for, you know, many, many, many months on end. I would tell you that the global economy would be in the toilet that everybody would be poor and that the world was basically in the process of coming to an end. The fact that that they are trying to do that by day, I mean, Iran, and things are still pretty much fine tells you that their leverage over the straight of Hormuz degrades by the day. It doesn't matter. Like the oils get a get out. It's getting out and only more is going to get out rather than less. They're like necessity is the mother of invention that they are building the pipelines. They're dredging the, the random little creeks and rivers and whatever the hell else is there. Like it's, if it, if things are fine now, they're going to be more fine in, in basically, you know, in a couple of weeks, they're going to be even more fine a month later. This is, this is the type of situation where Iran is going to get stopped out of this trade. And I know there's a lot of job owning in the media, a lot of, oh, this is so expensive. The American people are against it. Like, you know, let's, let's just investigate the facts. We were supposed to stock out of oil if the straight of Hormuz remained closed this long. We are not stocking out commercial tanks are, you know, not, cush, like, not at tank bottoms. They're well above. They're definitely not at tank tops either. Definitely not in between in the middle. There's, you know, sort of, let's, let's call it like 25 to 30 percent, you know, come on, come up above tank bottoms, commercial storage globally. To me, this is the type of thing where that will only continue to build back up rather than drain down as time goes on. The leverage is gone. Iran has gotten slapped if they full, you know, siege of Jerusalem style military blockade. They cannot import anything. Their currency is spiraling into the greatest inflationary abyss since Zimbabwe. Like, this is, this is literally, they are going to get stopped out. Mochetaba, Kameni, the supposed supreme leader of Iran, you know, rumored to be brain dead, had like half of his face and jaw blown off and, you know, a bunch of shrapnel in his, in his brain from some explosion in his bunker. The IRGC is sort of puppeting him around. The only two times he's been seen were just AI deep fake videos, which are like, you know, they're not like the latest and greatest Hollywood deep fakes. These are, this is like a bunch of guys in Iran with like limited access to internet doing something on mid journey. So basically, he's out, right? I think Pajekian is opposed to continuing the war. There are hardliners in the IRGC who want to continue it. There's an internal battle within Iran between the hardliners and the president. I don't know how to pronounce his name, apologies to any Persian friends out there. Basically, where we're at with this is the president who's kind of a moderate becomes the leader. the clerics can't nominate a Mojitaba successor once it becomes evident that he's dead, which he basically is rumored to be at this point or a vegetable. That charade can't last much longer. So basically the question is, can the IRGC bribe enough members of the clerical sort of religious, I don't know, the Muslim equivalent in Iran of the cardinals? Can the IRGC bribe enough of those clerics to basically appoint a new IRGC aligned hardliner as the supreme leader of Iran? That's TBD, but in the meantime, the population is heavily shifting against the hardliners because they brought this upon themselves by racing towards a nuclear weapon. So if you believe, as I do, that Iran was on the verge of achieving nuclear weapons capability, then all of this makes sense. If you think that that was just a scam, a conspiracy theory, you're probably a little more pissed off about it, but you shouldn't be because even if you don't believe that, the price of oil is contained in the most extreme possible scenario that any person in the history of the oil market has ever imagined possible. And that leverage is decreasing again by the day. So to me, I think, give it a, you know, I did not expect the war to resume this quickly. I did not expect Iran to have as much control as it did over the Strait of Hormuz, but that control has degraded to such an extent that it no longer is relevant. In my opinion, you know, they're literally autonomous U.S. Navy speedboat drones. You know, again, necessity being the mother of invention here, U.S. Navy speedboat drones speeding around the strait, blowing up Iranian mines and fishing boats pretending to be fishing boats, but actually laying mines like that thing is going to be locked down like I thought it would be imminently if it hasn't already been locked down. And to me, like this is all just heading back towards a Venezuela situation. Okay, fine, they didn't use sonic weapons and kidnap Maduro in the middle, kidnap Iranian leadership in the middle of the night and transition the country in a heartbeat the way that they did in Venezuela. But it's pretty damn close. Like this will be done before the end of next year and will basically be in control of a country with oil reserves that can control that basically produce at their peak five million barrels a day of pristine, like top quality crew. You talked on something that's really important, Jonah, which is, and people don't talk about this enough, is actually part of this war that's been good is the preparation that the U.S. military has now and the ability of the U.S. military has actually increased fivefold probably from before this war because we again had to win when we have to win. And so we're working with defense contractors in a way that we haven't basically since the Gulf War, since the since the war war in Iraq, the first and even really the war in Iraq never really established a challenge for us. There wasn't any necessity for invention. There wasn't necessity for deploying new military technologies in the way that there is with this war in Iran, right? In order to control this straight, we have to employ all of these new analytics tools. We have to deploy new drone technology. We're working more closely with Ukraine on that as well. And this is actually preparing us better for a dangerous world. And so while this war might not have gone the way that either you and I hoped or expected in the beginning, it is making sure that any future wars that we get ourselves into will be done faster. And we are going to have, I think probably over the next few years, this is another mega trend, an absolute explosion in contracts for defense contractors and our military is going to level up tremendously from both the lessons and the technology that we develop because of this war. And I do think this is something that people didn't really expect in many ways because we don't necessarily see it on a day-to-day basis. And we definitely didn't see it in any of the other wars that we thought we generally have been so overwhelmingly powerful that we haven't needed to deploy any new technology in order to reach our objectives. And now that we obviously need that tech, it's going to be developed. And we're going to see just an explosion probably from Palantir from Anderl in the ability to wage war, which I'm very excited to see. It's more than just Palantir and Anderl. You're absolutely right. Like every day I go on the LinkedIn at least once, unfortunately. And what it does, it suggests things for me. Every day it seems a new, you know, El Segundo-based startup is raising a billion dollars from A16Z or Sequoia or whoever to build like really cool military technology. I've started listening to their podcasts. All this hardware is like, it's awesome. Anderl is just the tip of the spear. There's a lot of 100%. I mean, you're seeing basically anyone with anything with a defense attached to it is raising money very easily from Silicon Valley, which is good. We're finally going back to hardware. I know this has been talked about for the last two years, but we're finally seeing it come to fruition now, which basically this is the coolest part of everything. The coolest part of everything is a dredging that you mentioned. People didn't, like, we're doing it. We're doing, as somebody said, on Twitter, what the Romans would have done, which is literally just dig a new straight, take away all of the leverage from Iran. And that is what's the straight of remooses never going to be important again. Now, unfortunately, I took a look at some statistics this morning from a poll run by Pew Research about a month ago on what Americans care about heading into the midterms. And unfortunately, gas prices, I think it jumped from 30% to 55% of Americans think that gas prices are out of control. And that obviously means that we need to get a handle on this quickly, because the midterms are really around the corner, and we need to see some sort of win before people go to the polls. Otherwise, we're going to see very likely a Democrat majority, and at least the House, if not all to the Senate, although the Senate obviously would be a lot harder. And that would be very good for the debatement trade. It would be very bad for your AI stocks, I think. It would be neutral to positive for BTC. It would be when I say debatement trade it, that means it would be very good for gold likely. But neutral to positive for BTC, and very negative for all of your favorite crypto assets that actually produce revenue, because you're going to see legislation, you're not going to see any good legislation come through for pro crypto purposes, unfortunately. And so that's something that we do have to pay attention to, is the closing out of this war is still important to your pocket. Regardless of how it's going, we think it's going well right now. We do need to see a conclusion on this. I'm going to shell the war again, just quickly. This, sometimes you take the lesser of two evils. Sometimes there's no golden path or path of total turd material. I won't use the S word on the path, but sometimes it's not as easy as black and white. And I think that if you, again, if you believe as I do that they were pretty close to nuclear capability, maybe energy prices would be a bit lower right now if Iran was, if the previous I told it was still in charge and they had a nuclear weapon and they started testing it and parading it around and making scary noises. Maybe things would be fine for a little while, but I think it's naive to assume that if Iran just sort of like hands off a nuclear bomb to one of their proxies who then goes and uses it, that the price of gas would just be totally under control. And America first, America, isolationist policy would be like insulated against that. Oh, who cares if there's a nuclear war in the Middle East? That's pretty naive to me. So I think the administration here for all the criticism they're taking had no choice. They front ran a serious problem with a medium-sized problem. Yeah, I don't disagree with you on the take, right? I'm obviously, I'm pro-war. I'm pro-bombing the Middle East generally, but joking, joking, joking, joking, kind of. But I do think that you have to take into account how the average American sees it and unfortunately the messaging isn't working. Like he can't hit the average American over the head and say, this is good, long term, this is good, long term. People care about here and now. It's very, that's why people don't, people, most, that's why most people are not good traders, by the way, because everyone thinks about the present. Nobody thinks about the future. And very, very few people can think about five years down the line, let alone five minutes down the line, right? And so you have to ask I have of Trump. I'm very happy to do more effectively. And Trump, Trump normally, sorry to cut you off, but Trump normally is a master of messaging. And I think heading, maybe he's older, maybe he just has a less, has a weaker handle on what the population responds to. I mean, you know what he used to do is he used to get up on stage and he literally would just say whatever the crowd liked the most. And he would just test what gets me the most claps. And whatever got him the most claps, the most chairs, he would just double down on. And it seems like he's sticking to his guns in a way that we haven't really seen him do before with this war because he really views, he really views it as genuinely important to the future of the US. And more importantly than that, he views it as his legacy. And he doesn't want to let go of his legacy regardless of how the current people view it, which makes him instead of a boon to candidates that are running, it's the opposite, right? He's a detriment to the candidates that are running because right now in this moment, people are quite upset with him as evidenced by the polls. I mean, he still has his 70% approval rating amongst Republicans. But I do think that that's gonna wane if he doesn't get inflation and gas under control heading into the midterms. And that, as you've always said, is the biggest danger to your pocket? - I'm absolutely charged. - I'm surprised. - I'm surprised to the upside by, my biggest concern about Trump when he first started arriving on the scene in 2014 and '15 was, what's gonna happen with a guy who just does whatever gets them as claps, right? If you pulled, if you just issued a referendum to everyday Americans and ask them, yes or no, on some sort of scary ethical questions, like you might end up with the wrong answer, right? You're supposed to have a leader who doesn't just pull the audience and see what gets the most claps and do that thing. So here, he was faced with an unpopular decision and actually made the right choice, which I'm kind of stunned by. I wasn't really expecting that out of him, but it was really great. Props to Donald Trump for doing the right thing. - But like after doing the right thing, instead of posting an AI video of you blowing up one of those random islands in the Strait of Hormuz, like do an FDR, sit down or do a fireside chat, be like, hey, so this is why we had to make this hard choice. Right, like I'm not doing this for claps, this was just legit, the lesser of two evils. Like, what are those, come on, where is it? - You know, I think he has. - Because he went on 60 minutes, he does interviews. It's actually just that people don't pay attention. Jonah, everyone is in their own echo bubble. That's the part that freaks me out, is when you talk to Republicans, they get the messaging. A lot of Republicans do understand the messaging, a lot of the people that like Trump understand and are with him. It's just this huge political issue now. A great, like one of the funniest things that I came across in this entire research, poll by Pew, is Americans view on the economy and how it's changed over time. Quite literally, 45% of Democrats thought the economy was in good or excellent condition in October of 2024. By January of 2024, that number had dropped to 10%. Post-Trump election, 30% drop off, in whether you think the economy's heading the right way, he literally hadn't even taken power yet. There's nothing that he could have possibly done to tank the economy. It's just entirely political. So again, the big issue is that people just really, really are against this war. And I do think not to get into the whole Israel of it all. A lot of it is due to that. A lot of it is that you have very strong emotions on both sides about why we're in this war and Israel is a key component. It is true that Israel probably did advocate, I mean, not probably, Israel advocated for this war. Full stop, that is true. But people take that advocacy as Israel is the reason that we're in this war. And it's very hard to parse that out, right? Because for 40 years, Nathaniel, who's been talking about going to war with Iran, Trump finally decided now is in the best interest of the United States to go to war. And but people still blame it on Israel, right? And so this became a very political issue, which is why my take in order for the Republicans to do well in the midterms is we need this war to end soon so that the collective zeitgeist can move past it. There's actually no messaging. There's nothing that you can say. There's nothing that you can do to convince people that the actions taken were the proper actions to take. It is simply that you need people to forget about it. And that is the game of politics. Is wait for people to forget about the actions that they don't like and have a period of calm or period of good so that people can't say, "Hey, he's messing things up." That's what I want to see in order for the Republicans to hold both houses. And in lieu of that, I do think that it's basically just gonna be a referendum on this war, which right now is looking quite dicey. Now, what would be obviously really cool is if we literally did announce that we've dug a new, that we've dug a new straight, yeah. And he tweeted today. What did he do today? He said, "We have full control over the straight-up "for Moos, we're gonna name it the straight-up America." In the same way that we just renamed Lake Ontario. Was it Lake Ontario? We renamed to Lake America. It's now updated on Google Maps. Everybody go check it out. Go give it five out of five ratings. Say, wow, it's way more beautiful today than it was before. Be as partisan as the other side. Unless you're a Democrat, listen to this. In which case, we love you still. You guys are great. We love everybody from all aspects of the spectrum, except for people part of the DSA, we don't like you. - Yeah, we don't like you. You're bad for our bags. How long before they renamed the Atlantic in Pacific Ocean's American Ocean one and two? - I give it, where is there a polymarket on this? Can we make one? - I think, yeah. - By the way, Polymarket is getting dominated by Cal State. Have you seen that destroyed, destroyed Jonah? I mean, it's embarrassing. Do something. Sponsor this podcast. - I know. - Well, you get back on track. - You pay us $5 million a year. I guarantee you, Polymarket is gonna add at least 15 users if you sponsor this podcast. I mean, it's gonna be, it's gonna be really great for everybody involved. But seriously, I think Cal State is just, this has always been the case, Jonah. Unfortunately, for the people in crypto, there are very few good operators in crypto. It has proven to be an issue time and time again. Like, Jeff Yann is kind of like, oh, once in a generational talent, taking hyper-liquid to the heights that it's going to. But for the vast majority of people working in crypto, you're kind of not getting your best. You're getting good people, but Cal State, Cal State is just executed on a different level, you know? You have to get people who are already rich because it's like, remember I told you about the land glide test where I should have checked out the property value of this guy who I was thinking of working for his house before I went to work for him, 'cause then had I, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He'd talked like he was worth $500 million, but he lived in like a $1.25 million row house in North Chicago and I was like, man, this guy's actually just a loser with a big title. I should have taken that into account because losers with big titles tend to be little weenuses who are kind of greedy and bad partners to work with. Meanwhile, Jeff Yann was already loaded, so he was probably less like, all right, I need to just hit the bid whenever this token hits a certain valuation. He's more like, no, I'm already good. Let's build something lasting here. Like he passes the land glide test, Avi. - Yeah, actually one of the biggest things that I look at is was your wife hot and is she no longer hot? Because if you stuck with a woman that has totally lost her attractiveness, I know that you're gonna stick through eating glass building a company. So I really look for people that married hot and now their wife put on like 50 pounds, it's such a good indicator. I actually have never thought about that before. I just said that out loud right now, but I'm gonna start looking for it. - I'm gonna start looking for it, John. - Okay, now we know Avi's marriage criteria. So pivoting back. - No, no, no, no, they have to start, 'cause if they start ugly, that just means that you're terrible salesman. Because ugly dudes should be able to get hot women just by virtue of talking well. It's amazing, like Riz matters way more than looks. I'm actually five six and somehow I've managed to end up with some very beautiful women in my day. And so like, and like look at me, I'm not, I'm not a particularly good looking guy. So like, I'm just telling you right now, it's all about your ability to yap. Those listening. Anybody who's curious about what it takes to meet a really incredible exceptional outlier partner should look at Billy Joel and Christy Brinkley. Holy moly, that guy. - Can we pull that up on stream? - Yeah, hold on, Brad. And you throw up a Brady Joel, Christy Brinkley side by side. - By the way, I wanna give a shout out to Brad, our silent partner in this. - Going back to how short people's attention spans are, you were saying it's like scary and dangerous. Here in LA, it's actually physically dangerous. Like I'm driving around, a light will turn green. None of the cars will move, right? Like literally everyone will still be on their phones texting. And normally what happens when the guy in front of the green light at the-- - Oh yeah, here we go. - Wow, what a, what a mismatch. - Yeah, man. - This just goes to show-- - What a mismatch. - What a, like, Christy Brinkley was like the-- - She's gorgeous. - The girl in Monroe of the 80s, right? And Billy Joel, let's face it, right? Nice Jewish boy, not the most good looking human. - Billy Joel is Jewish. - Yeah, I think so. - Anyway, my point here is like, usually what happens when what used to happen, this is how society ideocracy is progressing. A year ago in LA, if the first person in line was texting and the green lights there for three seconds, the person behind him or her would honk and then the light would progress. Now you'll literally be the fifth car in row and the first four in front of you are all texting for like five seconds while the green light is going. And I'm just like, people cannot keep it together. Even when their life is on the line or your life is on the line, they cannot stop Instagramming. And so-- - Yeah, I do have to go now in a few minutes, like it. It's, to me, the fact that the attention spans have become so short is terrifying both physically on the road and financially with respect to like my portfolio. - I'll leave you with this and then we can all get out of here, but I read a, there was a recent research piece that just came out detailing how short form content actively degrades your attention span, but not only that, it fries your dopamine receptors. So you end up getting, every time you scroll on TikTok or Instagram or you use reels or even X. Unfortunately, all you guys on X are victim to this too. You get short bursts of dopamine and you get addicted to this and it actually stops you from enjoying things because what it does is it sets your baseline of dopamine so high that when you do normal things like eat a meal or hang out with your loved one or go for a walk or look at a pretty sunset, those dopamine receptors are totally fried and you get zero enjoyment from the things that you still literally fill us with awe. I mean, think about this, 200 years ago, if you went out at night and you looked at the stars, you were filled with awe. It was an incredible thing to see because you didn't often get simulation like that, right? If you saw an incredible sunset that's like once in a hundred days sunset, you got this amazing feeling and you just, nobody gets that anymore and they're just addicted to the short form dopamine and I really do think that it would behoove every single person in here to remove those apps from your phone to not expose yourself to short-term dopamine and to really every now and then take a full break. By the way, this is why Shabbat is so important. - Shabbat is the answer, I was gonna say that. - This is why keeping Shabbat for all of you Jews and all of you non-Jews, non-Jews, you can keep Shabbat too. It's not a religious thing. Don't use electricity on Saturday. - Watch as your brain starts to heal itself. It's a really an incredible thing. It's a Wednesday, I'll probably see you on Friday, but just in case I don't, Shabbat Shalom. Shabbat Shalom for all those that celebrate and I think it's on the 12th, 11th? - First Shalom. - Anyway, Jonah, this was awesome. We hit three point two live viewers and just remember whenever you listen to this podcast, you're listening to two Jews and Jews around the world. So pay attention. - Yeah, we fixed the weather in LA. We did good there. Why is nobody saying thank you for controlling the weather here? - I don't know, it's really, we need to be thanked more for all of the content we do. - All the weather, all the media, the banks, and the pornography. - If you don't forget pornography. - Oh, yeah, yeah, that too. Yeah, you're welcome for that. If you've ever watched pornography. - Yeah, that was us. - Great to see you, Avi. Love you, buddy. All right, thanks for making time. - Take care, as always. (upbeat music) - Nothing said on the 1000X podcast is a recommendation to buy or sell any investments or products. This podcast is for informational purposes only and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely their opinions, not financial advice or necessarily the views of 1KX media. Our hosts, guests, and the 1KX team may hold positions in the company's funds or projects discussed.