Are We in an AI Bubble? | REKT Vision (December 05, 2025)

29:52It's supposedly meant to hit sometime between 2030 and 2035. So the point is that they're desperate, right? So where do they go to? Well, if they can find an outlet to bet on the things that they know, that they're inducing brain rot every day on TikTok or whatever, social memes, then they're going to funnel their money there. I understand this is a very tinfoil hat kind of view, but I do see that trend of hypergamification happening. And I think the likes of Polymarket and Calci will probably, right now at least be the facilitator of it yeah it does feel like polymarket is going to come out with a token at some point uh next year obviously um got to the app went live this week yeah yeah in the u.s it was it does feel like some of the stuff you said it is been a way to circumvent or pre-regulated let's say gambling it in certain in the u.s and some of the states are fighting back last week we got i think nevada came through and said look you can't do this here uh this is actually sports gambling and i i think you're going to see state-by-state battles because a lot of the states make a lot of money from from this sort of stuff so um i think it is to be made to be seen how what they can do but i agree with you that the it is if you look at the traditional sports book versus prediction market you you are ux it's often slightly more friendly it's like oh percentage of this happening versus this happening rather than you know you must have been to like a uk bookmaker like the very different uh way ways things are represented and you're not just betting on sports you can bet on right you know who's gonna be who's gonna be the most searched for person on google who's gonna is how many copies of taylor swiss the album is gonna sell like this is stuff that is engaging for just so many different pockets of people that I think is going to scale.

31:50I agree with you that the main thing there then becomes liquidity and ability to actually have a functioning market, so it probably gets compressed to a few very big winners. But I do see this as a strange time, because although you're saying nothing's really been built in crypto for a while, I think stuff has been built, stuff is happening, but it is generally just a bit boring for all of us right now. It's the scaling of stuff in TradFi or, I guess, prediction markets, but it's not the 10x coins where it feels as though, wow, they're going to hit product market fit. I haven't seen anything like that.

32:32It's interesting that the utility that everyone has been screaming about needed for crypto hasn't come from a single coin. Everyone had all these, like, oh, this is what we're going to do with crypto when it happens. Not one coin has rallied off the back of that, apart from maybe Zcash, which is kind of like a little bit going back to crypto's original roots of privacy. It's just been a strange time that I think, although the utility and use of crypto is going up, our assets are not. And I think you pointed to a very good debate this week, which was maybe that is the case for L1s. Maybe these sort of crazy high valuations where Solana is trading at 500 ,000 X revenue, and I don't know what EATS is, but it must be ginormous at this stage.

33:24Yeah, huge. Maybe they aren't justifiable. We're going to find that out. Okay, so I completely agree. And listen, that sounds kind of like, well, what are we even doing this for? Like, should I have just bought Bitcoin over the God knows how many years, right? It's not as simple as that. Regulations have held us back a lot. And let's be honest, so many people bought these tokens in the hope that it acts as a pseudo equity instrument, that it represents ownership and dividends in the form or in the same way that stocks and equities do. Now, the Clarity Act, I think, is going to be step one of many, many steps.

34:12As I say, it's going to take a bunch of time to eventually result in tokens acting as equity instruments. When that happens, when it becomes the number one instrument to IPO your company, whether you're a crypto native or whether you're an AI tech bro, that's when crypto tokens do really well and they're valued in a different way. It's as simple as that. And to quickly round up a point on the prediction market things, I think the reason why it's kicking off so much and getting so much attention in crypto mindshare is for a few reasons. One, it is mimetic. People can talk about any kind of topic and relate it back to prediction markets.

34:54Hey, did you see the game? Yeah, I bet on it using Polymarket. Oh my God, did you see what Trump said? Yeah, I bet on it on Calci, right? It's mimetic value, which is what Twitter and crypto Twitter specifically is known for. And then the other really cool thing, because you pointed out like, you know, Ejaz, you're kind of bearish on crypto products, but we have had some good ones. You're right. And one of the good characteristics on prediction markets specifically is the anonymity part, right? So a few weeks ago, Actually, when we, I think, filmed our last episode, Brian Armstrong went on his quarterly earnings call.

35:29And at the end of it, he said a bunch of words that were unrelated to the call purely so that one of the prediction markets, which were betting on him saying these words, would resolve. Now, anyone would say that that was insider trading, right? And his kind of view, he went on an interview with Larry Fink yesterday, and he was asked, like, hey, do you think this is insider trading? And he goes, no. And this week, right, it was revealed that a Google employee, an insider, was making millions of dollars off of betting on prediction markets when Gemini would release and stuff. Now, the one side of it is like, this is insider trading.

36:06This is bad. The other side of this is, well, if you can get more accurate information and allow publicly anyone that can get access to prediction markets because it's all on chain to invest and bet and get that alpha ahead of just like the insiders of a company, is that good? Is that bad? Is that more morally ethical because now everyone gets access to the same types of information? Does it make markets way more efficient, especially if they're running 24-7? These are all precursors to a world where it's just so fluid. You can trade 24-7. I've been buying equities and stocks a lot over this year.

36:40It is just so archaic. It's so annoying where I'm like, oh, wow, I just read this amazing thing. Or I just made this amazing revelation about this thesis. Let me buy some Amazon stock. And then it's like, oh, it's freaking the middle of the day on Saturday. I can't do this. And it's super annoying. So eventually, we will end up in this space. And I think, you know, whether you're an L1, whether you're an app, it doesn't matter. We will eventually end up in this future. It'll just take a bunch of time. sorry for the rant you may no you made that the google one i thought was very interesting uh because i saw the same thing and and i agreed like calci i think it was or polymarket they basically said that we take a very you know bad line against insider trading but once you have this many markets open on this many things it's difficult to firstly regulate that but also like these aren't publicly traded stocks like when this comes with insider trading it's because you have material on public information about a publicly traded stock.

37:38This is not that. This is essentially a bet which you have insider information on. If somebody else wants to take the other side of that, I think most users of these sites also are very much aware of insiders, so to speak. I don't know if you've ever been on these apps or watched streams of people that are talking about them. They're constantly talking about who are the insider wallets to track them. it actually becomes part of the edge of the market to track who are perceived insiders for a range of different things. And I think that is, yeah, I just think it's probably, like you said, it gets us to a slightly easier point of truth quicker, even if somebody benefits from it.

38:27I think it's on the, in some ways, I think it's on the companies rather than polymarket to police that. Do you know what I mean? Like if I was at Google and I found out that somebody was doing that, I might be annoyed at them leaking our information early. But and that person might lose their job. But I don't know if that's Polymarket or Cauchy's issue necessarily. Maybe I agree. It's fluid about where that lies. Whether that's a hot take or not, I agree completely with you. That's the point I'm getting at. It's like, you know, you don't blame AWS because it facilitated a nefarious financial transaction.

39:03Right. You can't do that. It's not Andy Jassy's fault. The companies themselves need to police and regulate it. And again, I'm not condoning insider trading. I'm just saying that these are just more efficient tools towards getting to the truth. And I don't think it's entirely black or white in terms of whether that's right or wrong from Calci or a Polymarket's perspective. what do you think about the other trends so just finally before we get a question so get your questions in um if you want to ask any privacy which was very hot um it probably came and went by the time you had the last show but zcash went from 100 to 700 now it's back to around 400 there's a lot of talk about the different privacy protocols whether in a post ai world you know any of this is really will be private uh because we'll just have these bots that are able to kind of decipher a lot of this and there's a separate trend about people worrying about quantum threats to different chains at the moment you've been around crypto for a long time you must have been around kind of when zcash was popular uh last cycle and the cycle before that what do you think about this more recent trend back to privacy okay so um my train of thought around this is as follows.

40:23When crypto was founded, it was based on the premise of transparency, decentralization, and distribution. And privacy was heavily baked into this originally. It was like, own your own cash. You don't need to reveal what your name is on your bank account. Just use a Bitcoin address or whatever. So this was one of the founding cypherpunk principles. And at some point since then till recently, it kind of got lost or put to the side. The main reason being regulators and major economic authorities didn't appreciate it. They didn't want privacy because it would enable under their own story, corruption, it would enable kind of crimes and stuff like that.

41:07But I think since then, it has also become avidly transparent that privacy is extremely important to have, especially when it comes to your finances, especially when you kind of like enable a financial system 2.0, right? Okay. So then what's the reality of this becoming, sorry, what's the practicality of this becoming a reality in our future? So I just spent about five minutes on this episode explaining why it's just, it's taken us so long to go from tokens are absolute scams to, Hey, maybe we'll consider this as some kind of equity through the Clarity Act, right? Privacy comes right at the end.

41:46Privacy is like the privilege that we get the cherry on top of the cake that we get right to the end, because that's the last thing authorities want to give up. Why? Because they want to have some sort of control and surveillance. We've seen it with like Signal and the Telegram debacle, right? Where you've got the founder being put in jail, or being forced to add a loophole so that the FBI, CAO, whatever intelligence authorities can get access to these different kinds of things, right? So it'll come right at the end. Now, the only bullish narrative that I can see accelerating that timeline to bring privacy into crypto and in finance in general earlier is if we can get ZK Compute to improve massively and scale to a point where it's super cheap and easy to integrate into anything.

42:32Because in that way, we could have privacy whilst also not exposing people's stuff. We can still validate that they are a US citizen without revealing who their name is or what their age is. We can reveal what their dietary preferences are and their medical data without revealing their names and giving off personal information. If that happens through ZK stuff, then I can see privacy becoming more of a narrative. But otherwise, I don't see this happening until post-tokenized equities and stuff like that. I think that's a fair take. I agree that it feels like the cherry on the cake. um i i do think that and we've even seen some of the l1s say you know we're going to roll out privacy features once the chain is almost complete or like as one of the final things we're going to do for eth or solana i do think there's a need for privacy um i don't think zcash is going to be the only option to get there but uh i i can see why privacy as a theme you know i'm based in the EU, UK, both of them have come through with pretty heavy-handed rules around, well, potential rules around ownership of crypto and that you'll have to basically do KYC if you own, I think it's 10 ,000 pounds of stable coins or 20 ,000 in the EU, I forget the exact numbers.

44:01But in a year's time, that's only going to be even stronger, that we're going to have to have some element of privacy i think in crypto um i don't i just see that in many different parts of of crypto at the moment as we become more like trad fi or get more trap people trap by people involved privacy becomes a stronger narrative but maybe that is a case for uh this time next year for now zcash did drop it has having a slightly better week this week but it hasn't been a great week for, well, I guess we had a rebound. ETH has been back above 3K. Solana's kind of still above 130. All hope is not lost just yet, but it does still feel like crypto's the whipping boy for global markets at the moment.

44:47You know, if you've ever wished you could ask me a question, any question, 24-7, well, now you can. The RALPAL bot is my AI assistant, trained on all of my insights macro research macro views even wine and travel knowledge the row bot is available for everybody who subscribes to either connect alpha or pro it can really change your life you get me as your mentor 24 7 the links in the description i think you're gonna love it uh let's maybe go to questions i just want to um say real vision is hosting a scripted gathering in january uh it is between January 22nd to 25th in Miami Beach. I will be there.

45:30I think OSF is going to be there too. You can get your tickets at realvision.com forward slash crypto gathering. It's always a great event. So hopefully see you guys there. Okay, we'll go to a few questions. Yeah, just write them on Real Vision or YouTube or in the Twitter comments. So Sig Sassino 80 on YouTube says, do you think we're going to have another leg up in crypto before the end of the year? My view on this has been slightly evolving. I did think we were going to have a Santa Claus rally. I thought we'd hold the 50-week moving average, and we kind of didn't. Now, I'm just not sure. like i i thought we would regain the correlation to gold m2 which has been broken now since kind of the middle of the year uh and i i'm not banking on that uh at least for now like i'd like to see some bitcoin get above let's say 100k again uh to really kind of want to aggressively get back into the market i think for now i'm just waiting i'm actually more looking for like bottom signals rather than we're just going to rally through uh to a new all-time high like i'd like to see us test kind of that 80k level again to see if it would be a very strong bottom um and then if not there then i think i'd be looking like i said for kind of the march level or april level which is around in the mid 70s and then who knows after that but those are like my levels i'm more looking to buy dips at this stage because that's what i think the market's going to do rather than aggressively rally i don't know if you have a strong view about like the direction of the market these things are really difficult to judge uh no no uh no comment i agree with a lot of what you just said okay um oh this is an interesting one trader five two two three eight six two great name on x says what's an effective way to get portfolio exposure to robots for the next five to ten years right question this is a very interesting question it feels like i mean i'll let you answer it actually you must have looked at this a lot um no i'll be quick uh so i've been thinking about this a lot because um i think we are well underway in the uh ai trade you know everyone's buying Nvidia or Google or whatever that might be.

48:04But then my thought kind of jumps to what's the next kind of early AI trade that you might be able to access. And I've settled on the answer that it is robotics. It is the physical manifestation of AI, which I think will come in humanoids for the consumer side of things and replacing factory workers, etc. And then just general robots, which, you know, the likes of automated cars like Waymo and Tesla can fall under and other things that don't just look like, you know, a Terminator robot, right? There are a few companies that kind of either directly or indirectly address this. And some of them are probably going to IPO over the next couple of years.

48:45But like the current publicly accessible ones are Tesla. Tesla is the obvious one. And then you have Amazon. And then you have Google, right? And so you're just like, well, Ijaz, you just listed three of the Mac 7 companies. You've got to think about how big this market's going to be and how much these companies can claim that market share over the next decade. It is going to be nothing short of massively overwhelming, right? People haven't quite factored in having the level of a PhD scientist in a humanoid robot and what that person can do being practically mobile and everything. Tesla is really ahead of the curve on this.

49:29They have so much data coming from manufacturing operations at Tesla and through their robo-taxi service, which they're rolling out right now, that they can just kind of weave into any kind of humanoid robot. And they're well on track to producing their Optimus humanoid robot sometime at the end of next year, right? So prototypes are already out. On the Google and And Amazon side, it's less obvious because people are like, well, Google's never created any robots. Well, they have the Waymo service, remember? Then they have an entire robotics AI department, which they've been focused on different types of robots.

50:02But most importantly, robot AI models. Think of like GPT, ChatGPT, but the model equivalent being run in robots. They are like one of the leaders. than Amazon specifically. And this is like the most boring, unsexy answer, which usually ends up being the most profitable side of things in my trading history, at least, is these guys are warehouse fulfillment experts. They are the single company that has moved the most amount of atoms in the world. That's something my co-host Josh loves to say a lot on the Limitless podcast, right? They have all this data from people that are wearing kind of like automated glasses that kind of pull in all this data from their employees and through their own robots, which they've been running for the last decade in their warehouses that sort and package different things.

50:51So I think they're going to be a major player in the robot space as well. Sorry, that was a very long answer, but those are my stakes. I didn't really realize Amazon were in that market as much until you've just said it. Obviously, I knew publicly that Tesla was and Google was, but yes, it does make sense that Amazon would be, particularly for like functional or workplace robots, they would be up there. And then in private markets, are you involved in any of those deals? Any things we would, like you said, are you expecting some things to IPO soon? Yeah, I'm involved in the figure startup. I don't know if any folks have heard about that, but it is led by this guy called Brett Adcock.

51:35and he think of him as like the pioneer in American made robots, aside from like the obvious Elon Musk's of the world. He's created this really cool slick humanoid robot, which it goes beyond just like the fad and clickbaity titles. It is actually functional. We will see they are starting to roll out next year. And so I'm excited to see what that actually functions. What this will look like is literally a humanoid robot in your apartment or in your house that can clean the dishes, pack your groceries away, stuff like that. I think, you know, it's going to be one of those things where it's like a luxury kind of item.

52:13And then it'll start scaling into becoming a normalized things as costs are driven down. But then someone might say, respond to that and be like, well, you know, whatever. They actually have humanoid robots in factories, specifically BMW right now, that have been working 24-7 for the last four months. There's actually a live stream of this, which they occasionally make public of their robots literally just doing a bunch of operational controls in BMW. And that is happening right now as we speak. So I'm bullish on that company. There are a few others that are coming out, which are kind of like more early in their iterations, but that's probably the one that I'm most excited.

52:49Nice. Okay. So, Bob Basson on RV on Real Vision says, what if you are still holding a heavy alt bag with losses at the moment, how would you approach this? Well, obviously, that's a pretty painful position. So, I apologize for what's probably been a pretty horrific last month. I would say that luckily there is a silver lining in that Bitcoin dominance has kind of stayed around the same sort of level, even during the sell off. So you're not for once, you're not really holding a bag where, oh, God, like Bitcoin has barely moved and my altcoins have moved a lot. Bitcoin's moved a decent amount to here.

53:37So I actually think the perfect thing would be to be moved back into Bitcoin. that's that's what my gut would say with altcoins during a bear market or let's say a downward trending market i don't think we're buying a bear just yet um it's very difficult to have any sort of rational price target about where anything would bottom compared to like bitcoin normally has quite quite clear levels right well this could be a uh a formation of a bottom with altcoins means it's much more difficult to do. So if anything, I would say that it's a... Just be thankful that Bitcoin is at every level so you can move back into Bitcoin and still feel you have a decent upside in whatever trade there is still to happen.

54:20If you are going to hold altcoins, I do think this is the sort of market where certain specific things could break out. Like we've seen, and we see this often during weaker periods that like one altcoin or two altcoins will have monumental runs very much like fomo style runs that we saw with zcash so i think it's also good to keep powder dry for those rather than rather than holding something hoping that it would uh rebound um i my gut tells me that if bitcoin

54:57goes even lower from here, let's say it goes to mid-70s, that Bitcoin dominance would go higher in this next leg. I think the first leg of this was the DAT trade being questioned. And Michael Strachey, although I don't think it's incredible at this stage, the fact that they have two-year runway for cash kind of puts them in an okay spot. I would say that a lot of the other DATs for altcoins they're going to be tested here if we start to head lower and MNAVs go below 1 and I don't think they necessarily have the ability to raise cash to pay dividends some of them won't have that sort of need for cash for interest or dividends, some of them will but if they start to trade significantly below MNAV I think there'll be questions about why are we even doing this let's just shut this thing down and that can get messy for things like ETH maybe Solana, some of the other dads.

55:57What do you think, EJ? Yeah, I mean, listen, I have been in that position countless times in my investing career. So I can empathize with where you're at. I largely agree that I think now is probably the best time to kind of be more defensive than offensive. I think if you still want to be in the market and be cautious about it, just buy Bitcoin, it's never easy. Selling the top is just an illusion and a myth. No one actually ever ends up doing it. So it becomes more of like a psychological game. Can you control your emotions and can you cut losses when it needs to be and realign yourself from your investment thesis and figure out what you want to invest in long term?

56:47There are different types of traders as well. there are short-term traders and long-term traders. I don't know which one you are specifically. I'm more of a long-term one. So I kind of like find investments that I can buy and hold for years and not even look at the charts unless my thesis gets kind of invalidated. But yeah, I would say be more cautious. I agree with you, Rekt, that we're nearing somewhere where it's kind of peak depression. And so that usually implies we're getting somewhere near a bottom. but I think there might be more pain to go purely because we haven't got that kind of major narrative around crypto aside from like some of the deeper financial stuff.

57:27Yeah, I agree with that. Okay, let me just see if there's any more questions. While I head on YouTube, final question. Do you think tokens as equity is the next crypto problem we have to solve as an industry? I don't know if that's necessarily a problem or an asset um tokens as equity for me feels like i mean like maturing of the industry i think the other side to that is that the ones that are not built on revenue or are built on revenue but the multiples are very very high slightly get exposed you know like we we just spoke about this debate that happened this week which is kind of a question about uh whether l1 can really be valued at these sort of exponential valuations.

58:19No one was asking that about hyperliquid because hyperliquid doesn't trade at some unbelievable multiple. It trades at, you know, I think it's less than 10 on current market cap and not much higher than that on diluted, probably like 30 or 40 versus hundreds to thousands. I think that that question needs to happen in crypto, if I'm honest, because like if people are buying a are you buying it because of the fee multiple or are you buying it because you actually think it's a store of value those two things are very different and i think sometimes l1s have conflated the two um something like eth for example with the burn uh has has tried to do that in in certain moments so you could say well eth is really a store of value, but also should it be a fee multiple, but the ones that don't have that, and let's say there's a lot of L1 tokens out there and a lot of other, which just have high inflation and some loose fee mechanic.

59:23I don't know if a lot of that can be justified at the high multiple. So I think this move to tokens as equity is going to be very good for some tokens and expose some others, basically. That's my take on that. Well said. Yeah, I spoke about this earlier on the episode, so I won't belabor the point, but I am very bullish tokenized equities. I think it is crypto fulfilling one of its, maybe not official, but more unofficial promises, which everyone's been buying tokens for years, saying that this should be representative of equity. We're finally getting there. It's going to take a bit more time.

1:00:01Ultimately, a good thing. Good. We have a bright spot at the end. Okay, guys. Well, that was Rekvision. Before we go, we've got a question for you. Are you bullish on crypto or more bullish on crypto or AI in 2026? Let us know in the comments. Obviously, follow us on X. I'm at Rekmando. I think EJ's your, is it Punk? Crypto Punk. Crypto Punk. Crypto Punk. 7213. Next week, we're going to have drinks with OSF and myself. Thanks again, EJs, for coming on. It's always a pleasure having you. join us on next week Friday at 10.30 a.m. Eastern 4.30 p.m. GMT have a great weekend guys thanks for tuning in thanks guys

1:01:07you obviously enjoyed the episode because you're here with me at the end but listen don't forget to go to realvision.com forward slash join and grab a free membership it's an incredible community packed with alpha great investment ideas and the research that you need to help you unfuck your future so get started now go to realvision.com forward slash join Have you ever wanted to trade Bitcoin but haven't dared try? With Plus500 Futures, you can trade crypto without the hassle of opening a wallet. With just a few clicks, you can register and start practicing with their free and unlimited demo. See a trading opportunity?

1:01:44You'll be able to trade it in just two clicks. Feel ready? You can move to real money with as little as$100 once your account is approved. And the great thing is that in addition to crypto, Plus500 gives you access to a wide range of instruments. S &P 500, NASDAQ, gas, and much more. Explore equity indices, energy, metals, forex, and beyond. With a simple and intuitive platform, you could trade anytime, anywhere. Experience the fast, accessible futures trading you've been waiting for with Plus500. With over 20 years of experience, Plus500 is your gateway to the markets. Visit us.plus500.com to learn more.

1:02:19Trading in futures involves the risk of loss and is not suitable for everyone. Not all applicants will qualify. Plus500. It's trading with a plus. Thank you.