title #738: The Dollar Empire Is Just Beginning with Capital Flows

description Marty sits down with Jeremiah from Capital Flows to discuss how duration and credit risk price all assets, the implications of the dollar's reserve status on global trade, the current liquidity-driven equity melt-up, and emerging opportunities in decentralized finance and space technology.

Capital Flows: https://www.capitalflowsresearch.com/

STACK SATS hat: https://tftcmerch.io/

Our newsletter: https://www.tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/

TFTC Elite (Ad-free & Discord): https://www.tftc.io/#/portal/signup/

Discord: https://discord.gg/yHGkvYxdqT

Opportunity Cost Extension: https://www.opportunitycost.app/

Shoutout to our sponsors:

Bitkey

https://bitkey.world/

Bitcoin 2026 - Las Vegas

http://bit.ly/3NA9xQh

CrowdHealth

https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/tftc

Unchained

https://unchained.com/tftc/

Salt of the Earth:

https://drinksote.com/tftc

Join the TFTC Movement:

Main YT Channel

https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos

Clips YT Channel

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ

Website

https://tftc.io/

Newsletter

tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/

Twitter

https://twitter.com/tftc21

Instagram

https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/

Nostr

https://primal.net/tftc

Follow Marty Bent:

Twitter

https://twitter.com/martybent

Nostr

https://primal.net/martybent

Newsletter

https://tftc.io/martys-bent/

Podcast

https://www.tftc.io/tag/podcasts/

pubDate Wed, 22 Apr 2026 14:00:28 GMT

author Marty Bent

duration 4958000

transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:07] You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven.

Speaker 2:
[00:18] I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.

Speaker 1:
[00:29] I mean, that's part of the bold case for Bitcoin.

Speaker 2:
[00:31] If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.

Speaker 3:
[00:34] You probably should be.

Speaker 4:
[00:36] Jeremiah, welcome to the show.

Speaker 3:
[00:38] Hey, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Speaker 4:
[00:42] Well, I'm excited to have you. We've had a prep call. And like I told you on that, I've been a big fan of your newsletter and your commentary. For those of you who are unaware, Jeremiah runs Capital Flows Research, which is macro slash market substack, focuses on credit sub-cycles, cross-border capital flows, Fx positioning, equity factor analysis, among many other things, you're doing daily streams as well. And like I was saying right before we hit record, I think the last three newsletters that you've written have created a good framework for discussion. So just jumping into what you've been writing about in the recent week, I think you have this framework where every asset in existence is priced by exactly two risks, duration risk and credit risk. I want you to walk us through that because I think a lot of people look at M2 and the Fed's balance sheet and think that everything is driven by that. But I think understanding duration and credit risk is very important for people. And you've done an incredible job of covering that.

Speaker 3:
[01:46] Yeah, absolutely. Well, I appreciate it. I think I might ruffle a couple of feathers about conceptions people have about M2 or other things. So I think that my entire, you know, focus in markets has been on, you know, it's really my, you know, my journey has pushed me to focus on the macro regime and taking really large bets within that. Just because, you know, today with how information is distributed with latency, with every single factor that is structure of the financial market, like even the existence of Bitcoin itself and all these other assets we're seeing, they're all indicative of a system that is trying to distribute risk and not take risk. And I think a lot of people are trying to, you know, really focus on, you know, the risk takers in this business have really gone to the wayside and everyone has become an asset manager because the S&P has done, I mean, it's done very well over the last 20 years. But my entire focus has been that we have had massive melt ups and melt downs over the last six years. And that has really shifted how I believe I want to function in markets. And so a lot of the, you know, models that I've developed and strategies I've developed over the last really five and six years, especially, everything, I believe a lot of things changed post COVID. And I changed a lot of the things that I was doing and thinking about. A lot of those had shifted. And now it was really focusing on a lot of these credit and liquidity changes because we've had the can kind of kick down the road with 2008, with all of these other kind of things on where we're moving the Fed balance sheet, how we're functioning. And I believe that everything has moved to understanding interest rates and effects. Because when we look at where we're at in valuations of everything, and let me go to this chart that I have right here. The idea that I look at when I see this chart right here, which is just S&P valuations, S&P valuations at all time highs. You know, a lot of value investors and kind of this old traditional Graham and Dodd or even cycle framework that people used in the past, they would say, well, valuations go up because Mr. Market is wrong and we're just seeing euphoria. And it's not from a macro factor, it's just investors who don't know what they're doing and they're just bidding up stocks at highs. They have no clue, right? And you know, that kind of idea went on for a while. And then what happened is we had multiple melt ups where if you were not long during the melt up, you basically lost your business, right? Like there were so many people during 2021 and all these other, I mean, many, many even asset management firms, real estate firms and people in the hedge fund industry. If you weren't longer in 2021 or even over the last couple of years after the bear market in 2022, you basically got squeezed out because inflation rose. If your performance wasn't greater than that, you just got absolutely crushed. When I pull everything together and I say, okay, what is my goal in markets? I know that we are in a period of time where melt-ups and melt-downs are the new norm, because so many things are changing. I've structured all of the research and strategies that I run now, quantifying every macro piece of data, and then specifically connecting it to every asset and market. I basically run models that map all of those. And going back to the original question about credit risk and duration risk, the credit risk, when I think about that, it is about what is the probability of me receiving these nominal cash flows? What's the probability of me receiving the rents that I'm getting from my real estate property every month? What's the probability of me just getting those? The tenant doesn't default, I don't have to evict them, things like that. Then I have duration risk or this other risk that says, well, even if I get the payments every single month, what's happening to inflation or the amount of money in the financial system that is devaluing or revaluing, if you have disinflation, those cash flows that I'm getting? Everyone traditionally over the last 40 years just focused on, well, as long as I get my cash flows, I don't care. That was just the norm because everyone said, well, interest rates always go down over time, I don't need to worry about this stuff because I have all these other benefits, cap rates are high, kind of same thing for even equities and everything else. Then what began to take place is equity valuations start going up, and then interest rates start going up, and you start squeezing a lot more people and everyone who, I'm just using real estate as the example, but real estate especially, when you had all these people say, oh, I just want to keep locking in these rents, I want to keep locking in these rents at 10-year obligations or 20-year leases or something like that, and they only have 2% contractual lease obligation rent increases a year, then now so much of those cash flows, even though the investment-grade tenant will pay them every month, they have been nominally or in real terms devalued a ton. And so the consumer side, everyone who locked in a mortgage on the 2020 or 2021, they have the benefit of that, because they locked in a low mortgage rate, and now they have all this extra income that has benefited from inflation. But you have to realize there's someone on the other side of that trade, right? And so the entire system is shifting so much. And my conclusion is that these traditional views of kind of value investing or, well, if equities are at high valuations, it just means people are being stupid and bidding them. Doesn't really provide the type of navigation that you need for meltups and meltdowns that we have in today's world, because so many things are changing so fast. And so I've built my entire process around navigating literally this specific period of time with all this idiosyncratic factors. So that's been my focus and what I've been writing about over the past several weeks, especially, kind of connecting it to where we are today.

Speaker 4:
[08:30] Yeah, and I think the focus on real estate is interesting, too, because you think about how that's shifting and how those income streams can be impaired and have been impaired, particularly with the aftermath of the economic lockdowns, people realizing, well, actually, maybe we don't need an office, work from home, work well for us. And obviously, you have interest rates have been jacked up since 2022, and so that increases the carrying cost. But then even outside of that, the companies that were domiciled in that real estate, now their viability is coming into question with the emergence of AI and the disruption there. So you just have these tectonic forces moving rapidly below everybody's feet.

Speaker 3:
[09:15] Yeah, I think that there is a lot of things that have already shifted. And when I look at, especially in the real estate industry, it's very difficult, I think, for people to understand positioning on a structural basis. Right? The fact that there was a period of time where cap rates were lower than risk-free rates. I think it was 2023 or 2002 or something like that. And in some places, they are. Cap rates are below risk-free rates. And the reason why is because you have all these people in the market, whether it's boomers or whether it's financial institutions, that are able to get really cheap leverage. And there are so many other levers, not only on the tax basis, because you have an after-tax return in real estate that people account for, right? Like if you look at any real estate pitch deck, that's one of the things that they pitch. But then also, you know, it's just on a positioning basis. So many people will say, well, it doesn't even matter if I'm getting paid below that. I can't sell my property because I have to realize this massive gain. Even if I do a 1031, like I don't want to do that, man. Like it's just too much. Like, you know, it'll go up over time just like I don't care, right? And that positioning factor is such a large portion of markets. And people say, oh, well, that's just in real estate. But in reality, that occurs across every value chain and supply chain in the world, which is why AI connects to this. Because if you think about, you know, I have a lot of, I have a lot of friends that run, you know, businesses, small businesses that are producing any type of like durable goods, right? Like just physical products. And they import those from China, Vietnam, India, all these different places, right? And a lot of times what they'll do is they say, well, I don't know what's going to happen with these tariffs. I don't know what's going to happen with the supply chain. I don't know what's going to happen with this. I'll overorder or underorder. I don't want to shift supply chains because if I shift, then I might have to pay all this money up front and then I don't know what's going to happen on the back end. And all of these decisions take place over years, right? And that determines the flows of capital between each country, right? Because when you trade with a country, you are sending financial, you're sending the currency back and forth to be able to pay for that, right? And that is the flip side of the capital account in an economy. So in a balance of payments structure. And my view, this connects to the entire administration that we have with Trump and the entire kind of regime we've moved in with him. My view, and this is not shared by a lot of people, because a lot of people are just focused on, they've grown up kind of just trading US equities, and they don't have a ton of experience with rates. But my view is that this world that we're in with the dollars reserve currency status, if you understand the mechanisms of how a reserve currency works and how there's so many different ways liquidity can leak out of all of these dollars going around in global trade, then you can begin to understand why all these other financial assets pop up and why equity valuations are at all time highs. I mean, in my view, the reason why equity valuations are the highest they've ever been in history and also why you have, you know, kind of other things. I'll go through some other charts here. This is the Goldman Sachs High Yield Debt Sensitivity Index, which is all the equities with the most sensitivity to high yield debt. All the crappiest companies are rallying the most right now. Same thing for all of the companies with the highest short interest. We're back at 2021 highs. And then all of this is getting funneled into all these data centers and AI build out. And then as that's taking place, all of the low quality companies in the Russell 3000 is rallying as well. And so all of that is taking place as this carry trade index is making new highs. And when I see stuff like that, that means that any of these global changes and geopolitical changes that are taking place, they connect to a larger positioning shift that is going to determine the outcome of when are we going to have a top in markets? When are we going to have a bottom in these other markets? How did those rotations work? All of that is linked to cross border flows. And I think that the dollar reserve currency status and all of the dollar liquidity that has been created from global trade in the market today, that is likely the largest reason why equity valuations are the all time high in history. And why even, I think in many ways, Bitcoin has become so successful, right, across the years. I think that's one of the main things, which is why, you know, I've had an edge in mapping all of the drivers for them that are constantly changing, right? There's so many different drivers that have shifted. Even the drivers that drove Bitcoin price action in 2021 and 2022 have totally changed today. So, it's just very interesting to kind of see all of these factors that are playing out right now.

Speaker 4:
[14:36] Well, that begs the question, like, where are we in this, this rotation, because I think one of the sub-themes or sub-memes that I've been paying attention to is many people looking at what the administration has done since Trump 2 started last year, and they're basically asking many questions. One is, do we just have a mad king at the helm? Is this the end of the dollar? Looking at what's happening in Iran, in the Strait of the Meuse, and many people are becoming more convinced, wrongly saying, this is the end of the American Empire. What we may be witnessing is the end of the American Republic and the start of the true American Empire where we go from a republic to-

Speaker 3:
[15:21] I like that. I like that.

Speaker 4:
[15:23] An empirical state. I think one thing that would signal that to me is to go back to the national security strategy that was released last year, and the sort of honing in on the Western Hemisphere and locking down our relationships in Latin America, sort of defagging ourselves from the Middle East. And then you look at the industrial policy, the investment in Intel, the investment in precious metals, or excuse me, rare earth metals companies. There was a big deal announced this morning where we locked down 15 years of 100% of production for 15 years with the Cerro Verde. And that was back by the US government. So I think that is something I'm trying to wrap my head around and really understand what it means for markets specifically is the US leaving the Republic behind and this administration specifically looking like it wants to take us to a true American empire where you can have opinions whether or not it's good or bad. But I'm reading the tea leaves and looking at what's happening behind the scenes. It looks like that seems to be the goal.

Speaker 3:
[16:30] Yeah, what I would say, I kind of like, you know, I'd love to chat with you more about that and hear kind of how you define those and what you think because I think that's really interesting what you're saying. What I think, you know, to your point, what I love about this environment is that all the people, the majority of people in markets and kind of in all these places that are doing their things, they either absolutely love Trump or absolutely hate him. And I think, you know, he's a very polarizing figure, so it makes sense that that's taking place. But what I would say is when you look at the decisions he makes and then what he says, it's very interesting because the, I believe that Trump is probably the best president in US history at using social media and information and the news to be able to accomplish his international and geopolitical purposes. And I believe that when you look at the actions he's taking instead of what he's saying, and you look at the second and third order effects, you will notice that there is a very, in his last administration, you can read Jared Kushner's book about this. You can go through even other people who admitted it retrospectively, who didn't even like Trump. I think Jared Kushner's book is great. By the way, random prediction, I actually think that there's a higher probability of, I don't know if we want to say this on the podcast, but there's a higher probability of Jared Kushner running for president than there is for JD Vance. I think that it would be very interesting to me if Kushner got up there with a vice president of Rubio or something like that. That sounds more probable to me than JD Vance when we go through this next term. But the Trump administration this time around has done such an excellent job at recruiting literally the best talent in the world. And even the talent that they're selecting is indicative about their intentionality. And when you have a guy who is selected, Stephen Myron, who is put on the Fed Board Governors and who has been the dot plot to have the most dovish outcome in every single dot plot that has taken place since he's been put on there. The fact that he is one of the few people, public officials, who has written multiple papers about the dollars reserve currency status and the need to rebalance the negative impacts of global trade and the fact that the inequality and populism that exists is one of the main factors and primary factors that is doing that is the negative impact of the dollars reserve currency status. I think that it's amazing that we have US dominance and we have the dollars reserve currency status because that gives us so much power. But there are trade offs to that, which the American consumer face. And there's a reason, my view is that because of the cross border flows and amount of credit in the system, it is disproportionately benefited asset holders. Right. And that's why you have the entire side of the real estate market and other markets being so unaffordable for people with regular incomes in a way that it wasn't previously. Right. Which is why asset holders are getting paid so much right now. And so my view is that on the administration side, Trump has pulled in Scott Besson, who arguably is one of the best traders, risk managers, cross border flow experts in the world. And then you also have Kevin Warsh is coming in. And Kevin Warsh, I mean, they actually just did some. He has a very interesting background. And I actually think one of the best interviews on like Planet Earth is his interview with Alex Karp. And it's on the Palantir YouTube channel. So I know he has that little like the spinning thing and you're like, how is he doing that? And then you have this, you know, Kevin Warsh is almost like a establishment guy, but you like him because he's so honest. And he's like, actually is a risk taker who gets how the system works. But then he has like all this other background that he has. It's kind of interesting, right? So, you know, when I look at all that, when I hear Druckenmiller say, you know, Kevin Warsh worked for Druckenmiller and managed some of his money. And then also, you know, Druckenmiller said in an interview, you know, of all the people who understand international capital flows, Kevin Warsh is like the best in the world. So when, you know, the GOAT says that, and I see, you know, Kevin Warsh being brought in, hooked up with Scott Bessent, then you have these other, you know, Fed governors, these other people that are integrating in, you have actual risk takers. You know, I get that there's the, there's always going to be in the political system, you know, the president or whoever is in charge is going to be doing these plays, whether, you know, putting money, I mean, the Trump meme coin, all this other stuff, right? There's always stuff. I mean, there's just as much stuff that happened under the Biden administration for negative things where money was filtered to certain places. I mean, we're seeing it now, right, with all the fraud stuff that's getting uncovered. But my view is that Trump is just out here tweeting on true social. And because people don't understand the structure of the world that we're in, they just see him doing stuff, and they are just getting unhinged because they don't understand the larger structural significance of how China fits into Venezuela or Iran in terms of China being a net importer of energy and depending on different places, right, and how China has consistently not been able to cut deals and they're exporting via proxy through all these other countries, right? Like we put these people will look at China trade data and say, oh, well, we're not importing as much from China every single month. Well, it's like, yeah, but China is still exporting the same amount every month. So where is all that stuff going? And because we have some quote unquote tariffs on China that are higher than others, all China is doing is saying, oh, that's fine. We'll just go through Mexico. We're just going to send it to Mexico and we're going to go right in across the border and import it from Mexico or Vietnam or any of these other places. And we're, you know, maybe we'll take a 1% haircut, but we're still just pumping the entire global system with cheap goods in the same way that Amazon does in how they just come into the market, really squeeze out small businesses and they take prices and, you know, just take them to zero and squeeze everyone out. They take market share and then no one can compete with their efficiency. I mean, that's China as a country is basically doing as a monopoly what all the MAG7 names are doing right now. So that's the context for the place that we're in. And, you know, every single time, yeah, I'm not even saying you have to love or hate Trump, but every single time I hear someone love or hate Trump, doesn't seem like they really understand those factors of the system that we're in.

Speaker 4:
[23:43] Sup freaks? Guess what? Just booked my tickets to Vegas headed for Bitcoin 2026. It's that time of the year, April 27th to 29th in Las Vegas. I'm going to be there. A ton of people are going to be there. You better get your ass there. You know what? People are calling it bear market. You know, these are the best conferences. I've been going since 2019 when it was in a parking garage in San Francisco. If you want to get the best possible ticket prices, make sure you use our link and the code TFTC. You go to 2026.b.tc, use the code TFTC, you'll get 10% off. You can bundle with a hotel room to save big and make the most of your experience staying on site at the Venetian, that is where I will be. Ticket prices are increasing, so make sure you get yours today. Join Bitcoiners from all around the world. It's a global endeavor. It's a pilgrimage, if you will, for the ultimate networking experience. There's going to be a ton of people there. You can hear from the biggest names in the industry. Sailor's going to be there. Matt and I and the Pubkey boys and the Bugle boys, we're going to have live hot style takeover. That's going to be there too. All in the Venetian. Everybody's meeting up. That's going to be fun. Get there. 2026.b.tc, use the code TFTC and sign up. Sup freaks, this rip at TFTC was brought to you by our good friends at Bitkey. Bitkey makes Bitcoin easy to use and hard to lose. It is a hardware wallet that natively embeds into a two or three multi-sig. You have one key on the hardware wallet, one key on your mobile device and Block stores a key in the cloud for you. This is an incredible hardware device for your friends and family or maybe yourself who have Bitcoin on exchanges and have for a long time, but haven't taken a step to self custody because they're worried about the complications of setting up a private public key pair, securing that seed phrase, setting up a pin, setting up a passphrase. Again, Bitkey makes it easy to use, hard to lose. It's the easiest zero to one step, your first step to self custody. If you have friends and family on the exchanges who haven't moved it off, tell them to pick up a Bitkey. Go to bitkey.world, use the key TFTC 20 at checkout for 20% off your order. That's bitkey.world, code TFTC 20. It's funny, because I've been observing this for the last two years. What used to be an implicit acknowledgement, or not even an implicit acknowledgement, just an understanding that you never vocalize, which is the fact that the US dollar as the global reserve currency is this double edged sword where the demand for the dollar is so large that it gives you economic leverage, but then at home, it hurts the middle class because the dollar is so strong, exporting all of your manufacturing to countries like China. And that, I think, is one thing you've been writing about that I'd be interested to dive into. And I think it's become more explicit. I mean, I think the interview that Besson did at the Manhattan Institute in July of 24, I think that's very much talked about, but he explicitly like, hey, there's going to be a global monetary reordering. And I want to be sure that I'm there to help the president and all that's happening. And I think with the favorattling between Fed, excuse me, Trump and the Fed over the last two years has become more explicit, like, hey, you guys need to lower rates. And not only that, I think the Treasury should have more control over that. And I think with Warsh getting nominated, Meering getting placed and Besson more explicitly saying, we're going to work close with the Fed is the implicit is becoming explicit and the explicit is becoming a plan that seems to be a motion and I think Druckenmiller said it. But it's this recognition that the dollar as a global reserve currency is this double edged sword and trying to fix that while maintaining dominance seems to be the crazy needle that's trying to be threaded here.

Speaker 3:
[27:23] A hundred percent. And I think the residual, if you understand that, right? That the dollar reserve currency status, the positive and negative sides of it, the benefits and the downsides of it, and you understand how it connects to positioning across all these countries that want it. The residual between that is where US equity valuations, Bitcoin, the dollar, like all of these different assets function right now. Because when we're at these high of equity valuations, the thing that matters is not like animal spirits. What matters is what's going to constrain cross-border flows or other large institutions to begin to have to sell their positions. That's going to be the differentiating factor for everything. And I think, to your point, a couple of the things I laid out recently on the on the sub stack, by the way, capitalflowsresearch.com, if you're trying to understand any of these things, there's an entire educational primer section right here. It's all free, I wrote, I don't even know how many primers now. Every single aspect of macro markets. But in the, you know, I'm doing live streams every single day, you can go to here, whatever, you can go through all the talking points. But I've laid out all the credit cycle playbooks for how this, you know, most recent inflationary shock connects to this global trade rebalancing. So you can kind of go through these and say like, what really happened with the kind of system that we're in? And what I would say is, I'm going to actually switch over to the dashboard that I have and see if I can share this chart. Yeah, here we go. So in, when we look at, wait a second. When we look at real interest rates, and this is a very well-known kind of documented effect in financial markets, if you're in the interest rate space. One year real interest rates were negative in 2021. And that is why we had the dollars going to zero. These lows right here in real interest rates were actually the highest in Bitcoin. And there was some positioning variance in there and some other changes. But overall, the highs in Bitcoin in 2021 were set by the lows in real interest rates. And then real interest rates rose as the Fed hiked rates. And then now we have kind of been consolidating during this period of time right here. Over the last year to date, real interest rates have fallen. And then we had this shock with crude. And basically same story for two-year real interest rates. We had this shock with crude. And the key thing with crude is that crude injected more money into the system, even from the supply side. You know, it's now more money that people have to spend every month. What you need in commensurate with that, technically, to not allow liquidity flow into the financial markets is interest rates to kind of come up and be more restrictive. And for a moment there, I'll go to, you know, the Z6 contract. For a moment there, let me zoom this in. We had, you know, this is just a chart of how many hikes or cuts we're getting in interest rates this year, for 2026. And, you know, we were chopping along at 25, 50 bips of cuts. And then this is when we had the oil rally and the supply chain shock. And we went from pricing 50 bips of cuts to zero, and then also 25 bips of hikes. This is really the range that we're in now, because if we were pricing 25 bips of hikes for this year, and saying the Fed is going to hike by 25 bips this year, that would add, that would, you know, begin to contract marginally some, some liquidity in markets. But the entire point right now is that the Fed is very unlikely to cut this year. And they're probably going to pause into this inflation that's happening. And the entire question is, or the entire point is, their pause into this rise in inflation is allowing residual liquidity to flow into the system, which is why, you know, this rally in equities, especially in ES, has been so aggressive right here over the last month. All right, I think it's two weeks now. I mean, this is just such, I mean, look at it. I just think about it as, you know, it's very similar to this period of time now. But, you know, we were chopping in a range for a while right here. And we didn't have a large liquidity impulse that injected money into the system. Now, when we came down here, the fact that you had some shifts in cross border flows, you had some other things, you actually accelerated the entire credit cycle. And now we have even more money into the system than we did previously. And that's why you're seeing capital move out the risk curve. You know, equities melt up so much. But then the other thing, you know, going back to this slide deck that I have, we were going over in the live stream before this, all the short names in the Russell. But what we're seeing is the Goldman Sachs most shorted index rallying, right? Which happened during 2021 when all that liquidity was in the system. Hedge funds are just getting blown out of positions right now. And then you also have, let me pull up this other, I'm going to pull up, oh, it's actually at the beginning. Let me pull back here. Yeah, I covered this briefly, the Goldman Sachs high yield index. When that is rallying, that was chopping in a range when liquidity was neutral in 2023, and capital wasn't moving out the risk curve, and you want it to be long mega caps. But now, when you have such an aggressive meltup, it's an indication about how much liquidity exists in the system. And so my entire goal is to say, on the sub-sac, everything else I'm doing, and chatting with you, and getting other guys' thoughts is mapping all of these points. I think that real rates were 55 bips from turning negative right now. And so my largest bets right now are betting on further upside in equities. But it's also kind of these two trades with Oracle and Per, which are the two most asymmetric outcomes, in my view, for where we're going with this entire AI side, and then also financial disruption side. And so those have kind of been the biggest bets that I'm taking within the credit cycle. And I think that, you know, I was covering in the live stream earlier today, this idea of where we're at with Bitcoin. You know, we had capitulation at these lows here, and that capitulation, when it happened, we actually had the volatility blow out in iBit, right? So if you look at vol in iBit right here, you know, this high in implied vol right here blew out at the lows when we had iBit. Which is why, when we were at those lows, when we had that blow out, the reason why we haven't made a new low is because so much positioning unwound right here at this like level. And now every single move that we've had in Bitcoin that has from the geopolitical shock or equities pulling back or whatever it might be, none of them have made a new low, which is a massive signal, massive signal about where positioning is in Bitcoin. I think it's still pretty net short. And that's why my entire view is long hyperliquid, long per some other names, but long hyperliquid because I think Bitcoin is in the process of making a bottom here. And I just think this entire disruption of perps and tokenization in the financial system is, I mean, when Larry Fink is talking about tokenization in the financial system, you know it's time for a regulatory change.

Speaker 4:
[35:31] Sup freaks, this rip was brought to you by our good friends at Salt of the Earth. It's so delicious. This is my pink lemonade, electrolyte mix. It's pink Himalayan salt. There's no sugar. It's way better than LMNT liquid IV. I went through a big electrolyte kick testing them all out and I landed on this, settled on this, been drinking it pretty consistently every day for two years now. It is my favorite. This is the pink lemonade. They have orange here. As you can see, this one's ripped. I had this on the train ride back from New York last night. I'm always stocked up with these things. They also have creatine packets. Very convenient, particularly if you're traveling and you like to work out. You can get those brain juices flowing. They have these creatine packets as well. They're about to launch a bunch more flavors, lemon, lime, watermelon, and a few others as well. So go check it out. Go to drinksote, drinksote.com. Use the code TFTC for 15% off. Seriously, game changer in our house. My wife drinks it, I drink it, our boys drink it, stay hydrated. It's a beautiful thing. So freaks, when you take Bitcoin seriously, you start with custody. You want to control your keys, avoid single points of failure, and make sure your savings cannot disappear because you or someone else screwed up. That is what Unchained has been focused on since 2016. Unchained is the leader in collaborative multi-sig custody of Bitcoin financial services that keep you in control. They secure over $12 billion in Bitcoin for more than 12,000 clients. That means about one out of every 200 Bitcoin sits inside an Unchained vault. Their model is simple. You hold two keys, they hold one key. It always takes two keys to move Bitcoin, meaning their single key can't access your Bitcoin on its own. Just resilient, shared custody that gives you institutional-grade security while keeping you sovereign. Unchained also lets you trade straight from your vault, access Bitcoin-backed commercial loans, open a Bitcoin IRA where you hold your own keys, and set up personal, business, trust, or retirement vaults. They even offer inheritance solutions built for long-term hodlers. Or opt for the highest-level private client service with Unchained Signature, and get a dedicated account manager, discounted trading fees, exclusive access to events and features, and much, much more. If you want a partner that helps you secure and grow your Bitcoin without giving up control, go to unchained.com and use the code TFTC10 at checkout to get 10% off your new Bitcoin Multisig Vault. That's TFTC10 at unchained.com. Let's talk about hyperliquid. It's a hot topic that just had the sort of biopic or not biopic, but expose of the founder, I believe, in Axios, sir. One of those publications was, and to be honest, somebody told me about hyperliquid like two years ago. They were saying, buy the HITE token. I was like, I'm Bitcoin only. But I think getting a better understanding, particularly with the Iran shock, I think that's highlighted the sort of use case for hyperliquid as this 24-7 market place that lets you trade futures on the weekend and during the Iran oil shock that proved to be rather valuable.

Speaker 3:
[38:28] Yeah. So I always try to explain hyperliquid and start by saying, it's nice that it's 24-7 markets, but if that's the only value proposition, it's going away, right? Because you just need to have some other bigger exchange say, oh, we'll do 24-7, fine guys, we'll take your fees. So my, I think that's a huge one. I think it's very important, but I think the entire value proposition of hyperliquid right now is that over the last, I mean, you know this better than I do. Over the last five, six, seven years now, all of the narratives around Bitcoin have fundamentally changed, right? First, it was all the purists, and then it was everyone that says, well, let's just get it into the financial system and have them pump our bags. And now, you know, the amount of people who hold Bitcoin or are involved in crypto, they're not thinking about it from a, you know, kind of the libertarian perspective that Bitcoin started with, right? And I think it's, and I think it's totally fine, right? I think, you know, whatever the views are, that's fine. But I think what's happened in the industry is a lot of people have shifted their perspective, instead of trying to say, how do we create value? It's shifted into how can we just get our coin onto an exchange or into an ETF so it can pump the coin. And when I saw Hyperliquid, you know, I over the last, you know, I was, I was pretty involved in crypto in 2021 or, you know, trading it. I was involved in like a company, but trading it and managed some money there. But after 2022, I, there was nothing super interesting to me in crypto. And I had, I, you know, I didn't really have a ton of capital focus there just cause I didn't see, I didn't see anything that was world changing enough that I wanted to bet on, you know, I think that's why alts are lagging so much is because you always want to bet on the things that are changing the world the most. And right now that's AI and all the AI infrastructure. And that's why those are melting up that and kind of some other kind of things connected to that. And crypto is changing the world less right now, which is why I think it's lagging. So then, you know, then I kind of come into last year and I, you know, start being introduced to hyperliquid. To be clear, you know, it's not currently legal to trade on hyperliquid. So, you know, I'm not saying that I trade on hyperliquid or there's any connection there or anything like that. But which is actually interesting, connected to the trade that I have on right now. But hyperliquid, in my view, is not about crypto. It's what they did is they said, how can we provide so much value that instead of trying to get our coin onto an exchange or onto an ETF, how can we pull capital to us because what we're doing is so valuable? And on net, I think they've made, what, $100 million in revenue from a team of 11 or 12 people or something like that. One of the most successful quote unquote, 11 person startups or whatever you want to call it. I view, I know hyperliquid is decentralized and it's a blockchain. I view it really as a company that's producing cash flow and the main value proposition behind it is perpetuals. And the reason why I think perpetuals are such a game changer is because traditional futures, if you want leverage in the financial system, you get futures, like bottom line. Those give you way more margin than any margin in a brokerage account or anything like that, or like stock margin. So futures are this great product, but the problem with futures is the funding mechanism for that leverage is the role. So you have these futures role every single month or quarter to be able to pay for this leverage, and also you have all these futures that expire depending on when they're at, so that you can take physical delivery of all these things, right? And futures markets will really, I mean, I think there's a lot of reasons they're created, but one of the main things is that commercial hedgers are in there, providing, they're taking or providing to the delivery of those actual products, right? So that's great for them, but if we're structuring contract roles or stuff like that, around them taking physical delivery from these contracts, but like that's not something that's benefiting me. So why don't we create a financial product that actually optimizes for me, instead of having to roll a contract every single quarter or month? And perpetuals are the mechanism to do that because it gives you that futures, and even more a lot of times, I think is the level leverage without having to sell the contract or have some type of cash settlement in the sense of a contract expires. And also, we haven't even talked about this whole capital gains thing where if I get a trade on sides and own the S&P or something like that, I have to sell that in a future, and I have to get taxed on that. So you could have this entire thing for perpetuals happen, where it's almost similar to a stock brokerage account when all of us buy or sell or try to leverage against things. If you have a large position and you own it on leverage, you try to in some ways not sell it, but then you usually hit leverage constraints at some point, if you want to put up more exposure somewhere else. So perpetuals, the positive for them is that, one, they never expire, so you have this entire tax advantage. Two, the leverage for them is provided by the market and by people coming in and there's the funding rate mechanism that allows people to provide liquidity in the market. I think that's one of the major value propositions for it, because this is a financial product that is optimized for speculators in the market, or for people providing liquidity as a speculator, as opposed to trying to match your liquidity or create a financial product around a commercial hedger. And here's the thing, there's so many different reasons and why and everything for like why futures were created and how roles work and all this stuff. I'm not going to say the only reason was because of commercial hedgers, but the fact of the matter is that these roles are inherent to futures and futures have the most leverage and these roles in themselves have downsides that need to be problems that need to be solved for. And perpetuals are the product that provides the solution to that. And so hyperliquid is the one stop shop for that. And I think that people will begin to realize, if you've ever had products get launched on the CME, right? If you ever watch products get launched on the CME, you know, the CME wants, I'm not going to say they have or haven't done this, but the CME wants people like me on Twitter or wherever else it is to trade and share things about their products, especially new ones, because it provides liquidity and liquidity is self-reinforcing, right? It's a self-reinforcing prophecy in a sense for a lot of liquidity as a proposition and once it gets there, it usually doesn't leave. And that's why the CME, Eurex, ICE, that's why all those six changes are around. So the fact that hyperliquid already has liquidity and we're waiting for it to get added to the United States is, you know, in my view, one of the best value propositions that we have in the world. And now we're having, I'll go up to this other dashboard. This is public. I mean, anyone can go to this, the dashboard for hyperliquid and it goes over all the data for it. But the reason why I got so aggressively long is because you have HIP3 volume, which is basically volume for any financial product that's not crypto. So the S&P, a perp for NASDAQ, a perp for oil, a perp for crude. One of the things that I actually said before all of this took place was saying, once HIP3 gets added on, it's going to get fees from traditional products and not from crypto and Bitcoin, which means it's going to diverge in its correlation from Bitcoin. And I had a lot of people that were like, that never happens. We've heard that so many times. That's such a, everyone says it's going to diverge from Bitcoin, it never does. But there's actually a constraint and mechanism for uncoordinated returns. And if you look in the chart here, open interest. So basically HIP3 is all the regular traditional financial products that are not crypto. HIP3 open interest versus the total has moved up to, we're at the high at 30%. And then in terms of volume, we had highs at almost 50%. So all of these things are just going to happen more and more. And my view is that HIP3 is, and then we're going to have HIP4, which is all the betting contracts like on Polymarket, are just going to take over the market. And the fact that we don't have hyperliquid added to the United States right now, is in my view one of the greatest opportunities because they don't have any VC backing or institutional capital. And no one in the institutional space can technically touch this stuff, which is why my biggest bet is PUR, which is basically the only way for a US financial institution that is regulated, has all the compliance things to get exposure. So if you think about any company like, if you think about a market making firm like Jane Street or some other firm like Citadel, whoever it is, and they say we want to make markets on hyperliquid, right now they can't, which is wild because it's very rare for this type of situation to take place. So if they want to hedge their risk and say, well, I'm going to need to get exposure and lock in some of these prices so that I can make markets on hyperliquid once it gets added, I mean, the play is per. And that's why it's my largest position in my portfolio right now. And I've been buying it since sub 350. And I think it's going to go over 10 bucks. So I think it'll go over 10 bucks this year. That's my view. Yeah, it's well my money, not all of it. But it's largest position that I have. You know, it would be if it doesn't go there, I mean, I'll definitely feel the pain, right? In terms of like, you know, if we went back below my cost basis because it's a large position. But my view is that it's going to move much higher into this entire play for hyperliquid getting added to the United States. And I just think these tokenization things that Larry Fink keeps talking about, I mean, anytime that guy starts talking about something, you just know regulation is coming.

Speaker 4:
[49:57] Yeah. Thank you for that, Walter, hyperliquid. The value prop, I mean, is pretty clear to me, but now the whole purpose angle makes a ton of sense. The fact that you can just create markets on it if you're not in the US.

Speaker 3:
[50:12] Totally. I think that the thing that helped me the most is like, don't think about it as like a crypto coin because I think perps are going to be added to the US financial system across everything, and they're going to have nothing to do with crypto. But crypto is just the rails for hyperliquid. If we didn't have crypto, hyperliquid would be getting built on something else, some other private blockchain or some other thing. So I think that will definitely, that's why we have perps on like Coinbase and some other things right now, or they're trying to launch more. That's why I think people are trying to get ahead on this. But what's going to happen is all these exchanges, because there's still a lot of limiting factors for leverage and stuff like that, you're going to have market makers trade between them. And so I already know peop- What else do I say broadly? I already know that people are in the works of setting up ARBs between hyperliquid and these other exchanges once their perps come online. They're already in the process of like setting all of this up. And once this entire thing gets added to the United States, I mean, I- the thing is like it's impossible to price this thing right now, right? Because the largest financial market in the entire world hasn't added this thing. And I think that you'll basically have a move that's like XRP, where it's like just out of nowhere, it's just boom, right? And you just go straight up. And it'll just go there for like weeks or a month at a time until we get overblown, because there is literally a regulatory constraint. Regulatory changes are the greatest inflection points that happen in markets for inflection points.

Speaker 4:
[52:05] Yeah. Well, bring this back to the melt up scenario and what could kill it for like landing the plane here of where we are in this transitional state for the global economy and the jobs market, really. What could kill the melt up in your mind?

Speaker 3:
[52:26] Well, there are two major things that I think about right now. My view is that we have a credit injection taking place right now that's pushing equities higher. And there are three different things that could stop this melt up that I'm watching really carefully. And I mean, here's the thing, those three factors are the things that are pushing it up and that will eventually pull it down. So I don't think this credit, these types of melt ups never last forever. Like they'll last for sometimes 12, maybe a couple of years max. They could last for like six months, right? Maybe a little bit short, it's just unclear because it's path dependent. But what I will say is that on the, there are several ways that this entire thing could go south. Number one is if the inflation combined with AI carve out begins to weigh on the labor market and deteriorate the labor market. We are not seeing that right now though. I don't believe, when we look at the data, and we also look at all these alternative data metrics to account for some of these shifts in how employment is functioning in like this gig economy and other stuff like that. We are not seeing significant deterioration in the labor market right now. So that's number one. And on top of that, we have government spending that's still getting pumped into the system right now that no one's talking about. We still have pretty significant, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars, pretty significant outlays every single month by the US government paying. And not only that, but also for interest payments. And they're still issuing a lot of bills, which is adding liquidity to markets. But on we have that that side of like, okay, if we have a recession, yes, that's probably going to create some issues. But the problem is, CapEx on the, CapEx from all these major companies is actually decreasing the probability of a recession, which is why the Russell is rallying right now. Right? So the fact that the Russell is outperforming right now, even on the day and over the last couple of weeks, it's because all this CapEx spending from the Mag 7 companies are going into the companies of the Russell. Like they are the companies that are like, oh, sure, we'll build this out for you. We got all these, you know, value guys that are, you know, skilled labor that are going to do all this stuff. So that's, that's on the gross side. I don't think that's going to happen. I don't think that's going to be the source of it. On the other side, there are two things that could set a top in financial markets from liquidity. So when you have these types of meltups in liquidity and these types of, you know, expansions that are so aggressive, and when you have, you know, equity valuations that are this high, right? Where we're at this all time high in price to sales, and we're so much even farther above 2021 levels. Not just the levels, but like the valuations of 2021. There are two things. Number one is if inflation actually transmits into core CPI and gets into the entire economy, we'll have a rerun of 2022, and that'll set a top in markets. So number one is inflation risk and long end rates blowing out and pulling down the market. That's basically what happened in 2021. Or 2022, excuse me. So I'm watching basically on CPI, and the dashboard that I run is basically all of these. Here's core CPI right now. The last print that we had, basically it was flat. So the projections and inflation swaps are showing a little bit more of a rise, but then basically a fall back down. Headline is basically showing a mass. If we have a persistence in these oil prices, headline in the next two prints could move up even further and pretty significantly. Yeah, I don't think that's going to happen, but basically the entire idea is how much will headline transmit into core. So here's the projections just based on the speed of headline CPI. And then in orange right here is these orange dots are inflation swaps pricing CPI. So right now the market believes that inflation will pop up a little bit, but then move back down. And if it doesn't transmit into core CPI, which is all of the most sticky parts of CPI, then we'll probably be fine. Right? So that's on one side. The second side is with this entire cross border flows mechanism. And this is actually the biggest tail risk in markets in my view. So I'll explain what that is. But basically, you'll remember that in 2025, what took place was the S&P 500 sold off. But then, you know, due to the tariff tantrum. But then also, it was very strange for people who don't understand kind of this entire structure that Trump has created. The dollar sold off as well. And that was confusing for people because everyone thinks, well, if equity sell off, the dollar has to rally. Right? I mean, sometimes the dollar can rally and equities rally at the same time. If equity sell off, usually the dollar rallies. And equities sold off and the dollar sold off. And the question is why? And people haven't even in retrospect said why did that happen? They just said, well, it happened and we hope it doesn't happen again. And the reason why is because the source of the selling pressure for this move in 2025 was 100 percent the tariffs. If tariffs change, if tariffs increase or decrease, that then changes your and mine ability to buy things from other countries. Right. It changes, oh, can I import a bunch of these goods and like fabs or, you know, durable goods or cars or whatever it might be to sell them. Now, I either I have to import less or get a better deal with that country. Either way, it negatively impacts that country. And so that country then has to say, OK, it's like a hedge fund unwinding a trade. They're long one part and short another part. These countries have to say, OK, if we have tariffs that come in, we now need more dollars in our bank account so we can hedge our risk and be able to offset the lack of dollars we're getting from foreigners or from the United States. So what a foreign country would do, or everyone in a foreign country, I mean, like just regular guys like you and me in another country, if we're exporting, if we're running a manufacturing business, we're doing this. Like immediately, basically what we do is we say, okay, I need to short my balance sheet because the US might buy less stuff for me. And so that means I need more dollars to offset some of that. And I need to convert, or I need more of my own currency to offset some of that. And so what they would do is they would say, okay, let me sell the US equities that I have and get out of dollars as well. So I would sell my US equities, convert them into dollars, and then take those dollars and convert them into my local currency. And they would take those and shore up their balance sheet a little bit in the same way a hedge fund has to unwind two sides of their equity long short trade. And basically hedge, because they don't know where all this tariff stuff is gonna go. And they have to unwind some of their dollar positioning, because over the last, again, 40 years, every foreigner, once they get dollars from a country, or I'm sorry, from the United States, they take those, and the surplus of them, they put them in financial assets, US financial assets. So foreigners hold so much US financial assets, that when you have this shock to the system, it causes them to unwind, which is why the dollar moved down, and equities moved down at the same time. So my view is that on the one side, this top in markets could occur, and I don't think it's right now, I think we're still skewed to the upside. So to be very clear, I'm long, I'm bullish, all that stuff, right? If long end rates blow out because of inflation, that will pull equities down likely. If we start having some changes in trade, or the dollar starts hitting lows that are even, that begin to drag on the real equity returns that foreigners have, that could begin to pull on equities as well. So it'll, I actually believe the ultimate, you know, kind of move that we have in markets will be that the dollar moves down so much and so low, you know, probably, you know, I think it'll be, you know, down to these, you know, 92, 94 levels. It'll get down so low that it will actually, because Trump is trying to rebalance, and they're gonna try to cut rates, and they're gonna try to rebalance into all this global trade stuff, that it will then force foreigners to unwind some of their equity positions because it's putting so much pressure on their local currency to rebalance some of this trade stuff. Will that take place? I think it's a very probable scenario. Either one could take place that sets the top in equities, but right now neither of them have enough strength, and we're still seeing so much more force in the credit cycle and liquidity and things like that. So that's how I view the outcome and how I view the scenarios for the risks around it.

Speaker 4:
[61:44] Yeah, very eloquently put. Thank you for walking through that. Another thing that I have, just thinking about disruption and markets having to react to it, like what are your thoughts on midterms and what happens if they go one way or another? Because if you're looking at the last year and a half of economic policy, really the last year since the tariff tantrum, and there's been this massive attempt to re-architect what we're doing as a nation if the Trump administration, the Republicans lose the House and the Senate, and you no longer have the House and the Senate playing ball. Not that they have been great up to date, but we get the 2028. Let's say it shifts again, point being like volatility in economic policy because of volatility between switching, it's back and forth between the aisles moving forward. How do you price that in?

Speaker 3:
[62:40] So I think about midterms a little bit differently this year, because I'm going to say on one side, I think that any edge into midterms is very difficult for me to know in terms of the actual midterm outcome because I talk to people all the time, and they're in each district and they're mapping, like they have relationships, like inside relationships with all of the people that are either going to get into the, just into Congress, right, into either branch, I'm sorry, not branch, House or Senate. I don't have an edge into, because I know the guys that do, right, and I see like what they're doing in the insider information. There's no legal insider information, but the insider knowledge that they have. And I do not know the outcome. I mean, besides what all of us know and read of like, oh, well, probability markets this, we're kind of leaning this way in either one, whatever, right? I think overall, we're probably just going to be fine. I don't think it's going to be like a massive deal either way. But what I will say is, I think the unique view that I do have is that the fact that Trump has decided to have two major geopolitical events and a market crash, in market crash, pullback, whatever you want to call it, into midterms, I think, shows his view of it. I think that he already knows what the outcome is or thinks it's just so narrow anyway that he doesn't really care. Because so often, what does everyone do? They're like, well, we need to mark it up into midterms. We need, like, don't do anything crazy, like play it safe, like all this stuff. And he just did the opposite, which tells me that he probably has something up his sleeve for after midterms in how he's going to play stuff. Because if this is what he's doing before midterms, what do you think he's gonna do after midterms? And so I think that's one side. And then I also just think that, I think that there are so many deregulation things that are happening right now on, so many deregulation things happening in just relationships that are just unseen and not quantified. And then also you have, I think Trump just continuing to put pressure on the Democrats with this government shut down thing. And I think that he is focused on like all these other levers that he's playing with. And it just seems to me that he doesn't care. I think he wants the midterms to come out for his favor. But like the fact that he's doing all this stuff into midterms, which is the opposite of what you would expect, just tells me he's probably like, all right, well, we have a narrow outcome, so let's just send it anyway. And I'm not trying to impress people because I'm not going to become the president again. And then I'll also say this, I think the other unique view that I have is that I've shifted my kind of, or there's this idea in history, in like, if you read any book on historical fallacies and stuff like that, that like the victors write history, right? It's like, you know, you have two countries that fight against each other, and now we have the history books of those, but those history books were written by whoever won. So it doesn't matter if that guy was like a genocidal maniac or something like that. It's like all war, right? A couple thousand years ago. But, you know, the it what matters is, you know, who won, and they're just going to write the history books as they were the good guys, right? My belief is that maybe this little fringe, but my belief is that the clipping economy and how everything in social media has shifted to clips. And now that the White House is Oramaxing its clips every single day is going to be how everyone remembers the events that take place. And I think that the fact that you have like, like I'll go on to like the Department of Agriculture's Twitter page. Like you just go on there. They're posting insane videos. I'm just like, these are cool, man. I want to go like, can I work for the Department of Agriculture? You know, like it's, you know, like they're doing such a good job. You can love Trump or hate him, whatever, man. You know, go cope somewhere else. They are Oramaxing these clips to the like insane degree. And I think that if you are a young person, that is your language. And so like, I think that is how they're reframing a lot of this stuff that's taking place. And I think that that will set the stage for whoever becomes, you know, whoever Trump pitches to become the next president that's in there. But yeah, I think in midterms and markets and stuff like that, I don't know. I don't have like an edge on the outcome. But that's kind of those would be my two kind of unique takes on the political kind of midterms and everything else connected to it.

Speaker 4:
[67:52] History will be written by the victors of meme warfare.

Speaker 3:
[67:55] It's funny. Exactly.

Speaker 4:
[67:57] You see it on both sides. You have the admin or a maxing, and then I think a big reason why Mondami is mayor of New York is because he ran a pretty flawless social media campaign.

Speaker 3:
[68:08] Well, and you just look at the videos that Iran is making right now. They're not videos that are in some dark room with these weird guys that are like, listen, we will not accept you. It's like they pulled together a Lego video. It's like what do you guys expect? Everyone is playing informational warfare and may the best clipper win, may the best memer win. So much of all of this reputational stuff is connected to, well, how do people feel about it? I think in the same way, like I think people don't get that like, you know, like the fact that Trump won by a landslide in the last election is because there's so many, I just think, you know, middle of the road people, they got pushed too far in the last election, right? But there's so many people that are just in that cohort, especially in like just the Midwest and everywhere else, like all these other like just regular states that are not like overrun, like, you know, San Fran or LA or whatever it is. But I think there is this entire cohort of people that are going to like start forming that are all the young people who grew up on social media. And this will be their life. Like they don't watch Fox News. They don't go in there and like seeing the other guy that's just like, oh, well, like they are Clippers, right? Like that is their language. And so I just think that's going to be one of the most important things moving forward.

Speaker 4:
[69:39] Agreed. They completely agree. It's such a strange world, too. The state of discourse in geopolitics. You may not like it, but this is what it is.

Speaker 3:
[69:52] What an exciting time to be alive, man. I mean, it is what it is, man. And you just get to have some fun, man. Like go and trade markets. There's all these cool things happening with AI. I just think this is the greatest time to be alive. I mean, I know everyone's just like, oh, it's never been worse. I'm just like, whatever, man. Like it is just so good that you have everything at your fingertips and it all just comes down to like, do you really want to take agency or do you want to come up with another excuse?

Speaker 4:
[70:24] Never do. Develop some agency. And that, I mean, that gets to the last topic that I wanted to talk about. As we talked about this on, on our prep call last month. And I just thought it was fascinating because I think it's something that you highlighted that I've heard other people talk about, but everybody's focused on AI. But and not that the trade is going to blow up immediately or it's going to blow up at all, but it's certainly where a ton of the capital is right now. When everybody's zigging towards AI, I think the idea of zagging towards something like space investment is what a lot of the smarter people, including yourself, that I've talked to over the last few months are doing.

Speaker 3:
[71:08] Yeah, so I have been spending a lot more time reading books and going over, you know, with some AI, you know, just educating myself with AI stuff, or on AI, with a lot of this, these changes in how space is getting retooled and developed around all of this stuff. I think there's a reason why the largest IPO in history is going to be SpaceX. And I think that there is this entire world in the universe above us, in the space above us, that people are not even comprehending about how we can have robots, zero-gravity manufacturing. We already need a base on the moon, just for strategic purposes against China. All of these things, I mean, I think just retooling things with all of the phones that we have, I mean, it's still insane to me that I'm driving down a road, and my phone call cuts out. What is this, man? What's going on? What? I need to pay another 10 bucks a month? Fine. I literally have the best service in the United States, and my phone call still gets cut off, right? That's not even counting Wi-Fi or data, right? We're not even talking about that. So the faster all of that happens, I think that you can get all that retooled. I think you have the whole arms race around space that is going to be a differentiating factor. But I truly believe that so much of the world order is that set up today has been based on geography, right? It's like the United States has all these natural resources. It has surrounded by bodies of water. We have agriculture, we have oil, we have a military to defend these borders. We have enough land for all these different types of people. And I think that freshwater, all this other stuff, transportation, right? United States is the best geographic, strategic geographic place in the world. And a lot of geographic, or a lot of world order has like shaped around that. What happens when you begin to have and inject this additional element where the asymmetrical linchpin of rare earth metals or manufacturing or any type of, you know, again, the zero gravity manufacturing or asteroid mining or any of the kind of just boots on the ground, things that are created all gets transitioned to space. Every single one of those robots or spaceships or whatever it is, what does it need? It needs GPUs. It needs more energy and it needs the ability to be self-sufficient up there. And I think that that is the entire rush for the space industry right now is that it's not just about innovation. It's about kind of the entire structure of the world that we know it. And I think, you know, over the last 20 years, you had different countries industrialize. You know, we industrialized, you know, China industrialized in, you know, in the 90s and 2000s. We industrialized before that. But China has kind of taken all this market share and limited other countries from industrializing because they're still producing everything themselves and not allowing some of the lower quality stuff to go to other countries. But if you shift how manufacturing works and the cost structure and everything, and it all goes to space, and then you just keep, you know, you manufacture something in space, zero-gravity manufacturing with robots. And again, I think it's less than a decade away. I know that sell seems like a long way, but all the capital is pointing that direction. You know, countries recognize that, and you can't restructure a country in a year. You have to restructure a country over a decade. And I just think that what happens when me having AI robots or a manufacturing plant, either here in the United States because we have AI robots, or in space that creates something without the constraints of gravity, and then just gets it and then shoots it down onto earth every 24 hours to a location that I want, and lands it right there, and it ends up being cheaper than the shipping costs I would pay from a boat that comes from China. Like what, again, what happens when all that takes place? And people are like, well, there's just seems like mal investment, all this stuff is like going here and there. I'm just like, people don't get it. It's that will produce more GDP than the entire world, right? Especially if you do this asteroid mining thing, where you have, if the entire... I mean, I just imagine like what happens to carbon and quality of life and everything, if all the mining that we do goes from the United States, or sorry, land, not the United States, like where we are now to space, right? Like what happens if all the mining goes there and we get all this pollution out and we shift to EV cars and all this other stuff, and we throw more trash out in space instead of landfills? Like it just, it changes the entire distribution of outcomes, which is why SpaceX is like the first step for that. And I think there are so many other companies setting the stage for that. And all of them are, I mean, I mentioned this before, but all of them are in private markets. There's not a ton of space companies. It's very similar to OpenAI and Anthropic. Like all these major companies are in private markets because these private equity guys get access to all the deals. And I just think all of that stuff is shifting so much faster than people even realize.

Speaker 4:
[77:24] Last question, is there like a, what would be akin to a GPT moment for space that you would look out for, or people should?

Speaker 3:
[77:33] Man, that's good. I think that, I don't, I think this will connect to space, but what I believe, the next GPT moment, by the way, I think there was a GPT moment four months ago at the beginning of the year when the cloud code update came out and no one gets it still. I think that was a GPT moment. But I think the next GPT moment, and this will connect with space is, when hardware merges with software. Right now, we have all these software things like Anthropic, OpenAI, they're doing the things running GPUs. But then you have all of these hardware things that are manually run by all of us. Even if you think about some of the sophisticated ones like CNC machines or different robotics that are involved. They're still not completely merge with software. You still have to give them very specific tasks. And those hardware do not have iterative learning feedback loops that are the same that we have integrated into AI right now with memory. So my view is that once you have hardware merge with software, software is already there. I think it's pretty close. I mean, I think it's always going to improve. And I think we're going to have another crazy moment this year, because I think Anthropic and OpenAI are going to release a massive amount of models into their IPOs, and they're going to take the entire market into euphoria. And everyone's going to be like, I have to buy this IPO. And they're going to pump it. Maybe that'll be a market top, maybe not. But I think once software merges with hardware, you have a totally different dynamic taking place. And that is what will likely allow. So like you and me right now, right? We can just go onto Twitter and just post something. That's free for us, right? Just free. What happens when we can create an entire product line or innovation or something like that, and it almost feels free? That's what happens when software merges with hardware. And I think once that happens, that will set the entire stage for the space side of things, because people will send stuff up there, make stuff up there, send it back down. They'll stream it in real time and everyone, and then they'll raise capital while it's in space. Or they'll do something like wild like that, especially if you have tokenization laws change in the interim. And you can have, you can do, I mean, people are doing live selling on TikTok and Instagram and all these other places right now. If tokenization laws change, people do live streaming capital raises for, oh, I'm releasing this new shirt and I'm going to sell it to everyone. Here's the income statement and pitch deck for it. It's a, you know, if we sell all of them, it's a 10 percent return. And then if we get anything above this, it's a 20 percent return. You can buy the token here if you want to buy one of the shirts here. The goal is around this period of time. And if they see you and me executing on our visions well, they're just like, oh, live stream capital raise. Oh, I can also buy this shirt and know what up. Done, done, done. And everyone's going to do that if they if they merge all those things together.

Speaker 4:
[80:56] Brave new world.

Speaker 3:
[80:59] Wild time.

Speaker 4:
[81:00] Very loud. Well, again, this is a lot of fun. I was very much looking forward to this. And like I said, I think waiting until today to do it was perfect considering all the content you've put out over the last week. So I think we covered a lot of bases today. I appreciate you taking taking some time to do so.

Speaker 3:
[81:19] Totally, man. I enjoyed it, man. I appreciate you. I appreciate everything that you're doing. And looking forward to chatting again.

Speaker 4:
[81:27] All right. We'll we'll link to the sub stack and the show notes. Make sure you check it out, freaks, and we'll do it again in the future.

Speaker 3:
[81:33] Awesome. Thanks, brother. Peace.

Speaker 4:
[81:35] Peace and love. Thank you for listening to this episode of TFTC. If you made it this far, I imagine you got some value out of the episode. If so, please share it far and wide with your friends and family. We're looking to get the word out there. Also, wherever you're listening, whether that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify, make sure you like and subscribe to the show. And if you can leave a rating on the podcasting platforms, that goes a long way. Last but not least, if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad free, make sure you download the Fountain Podcasting App. You can go to fountain.fm to find that. $5 a month gets you every episode a day early, ad free. Helps the show, gives you incredible value. So please consider subscribing via Fountain as well. Thank you for your time, and until next time.