Crypto in '26: Raoul's Vision or We Get Rekt? | REKT Vision (January 09, 2025)

0:15Hey, everyone. As you know, on this podcast, I bring the best guests in the world at that nexus of understanding of macro crypto in the exponential age of technology. If you're enjoying the show, a quick five-star rating goes a long way. It helps us grow and keep these conversations coming with the best guests in the world. Thanks a lot.

0:40Hello again. We are back for RexVision. The first one we have Raoul back and it's not an all-time high, it feels like. I know. What the fuck's going on? Maybe this is a good thing, because every time I come on, it just reverses again afterwards. I was hoping that we would have some sort of god candle into this show. I should just be long into it, no matter what, because I'm doing things very, very well. But we're going to have to speak to you with prices slightly suppressed. I think it's going to be a bit of a pep talk in certain places in the crypto space, but I guess you're kind of used to that at this stage.

1:15But yeah, it's great to have you back on. how was your how was your holiday break it was good actually i was in texas for christmas and then over here in little cayman for new year uh too many guests i had like 10 people and so it was just eating and drinking eating and drinking eating and drinking so threw them all out because that's quiet yeah i guess how about you where were you i was i was home as well i was in europe europe um i went back to london for a little bit but um yeah we we kind of stay we stayed in spain and in portugal so it was it was nice warm warm ish not probably not as warm as came in but it was it was decent good it was good but yeah markets they were kind of not feeling that great and then just before the new years we started to rally and then that rally kind of picked up pace it felt like and we went all the way up to like 94 95k on bitcoin and it felt like okay maybe we're gonna follow everything else higher again it's been a bit more of a chop it feels like and we still seem to be slightly i would say underperforming gold and stocks and all this sort of stuff but we're not doing terribly let me put it that way which makes a nice change right we should be happy exactly like there was a point in time where we were heading down to 80k for the third or fourth try at the back end of last year and it's starting to feel a little bit shaky now it feels as though you've got a little bit more of a footing how are you feeling kind of short term about the market here short term i think look we've got to get through um this tariff thing is like it's on it's off so we don't really know about that markets don't like this kind of stuff then we've also got the potential for shutdown again at the end of the month and i think we're going to cower inferior a little bit from that.

3:06So I don't think it's up only yet. But I do think that by sort of once we get clarity over that shutdown, I think we also get the Clarity Act through as well. That seems to be being pushed. So towards the end of Jan, I think that's it. Then the liquidity starts flowing in from the changes to the SLR and stuff like that, i.e. the banks can now print more money. And so, yeah, everything looking forwards is pretty positive. But we had a decent rally. stuff like sui was up 40 in you know a week and a half or so it probably needs a bit of digestion yeah it felt like it was mainly altcoin led like yeah actually just it's kind of hanging around the same sort of level there's altcoins that really printed mainly i think they were just kind of from being beaten up towards the back end of last year i think part of this always gets spoken about is is tax loss harvesting in in a number of different things and then you kind of have this bounce in the back of that but there were some macro things that that've been happening I guess the whole Venezuela move and then you have seemingly Iran also kind of going through a bit of a...

4:12All of these have a tendency to be positive, right, as they play out. Markets don't really like a lot of shit going on and people lose their minds over X. But if these things slowly resolve, these are net big positives to the general kind of structural backdrop. yeah i mean the back for most of the last two years whenever there was a conflict actually crypto seemed to take a bit of a nosedive but this time it wasn't like that at all when venezuela was kind of over in a weekend it felt like that was actually one of the main reasons people were pointing to to the rally just like cheaper energy more u.s control ai trade picking up again on the back of of that which seemed to be bullish and then even just the moves that we've kind of seeing in the rest of Central America now and maybe Greenland and Iran.

5:00Like, it seems like a bit more U.S. hegemony coming out, and markets don't necessarily dislike that. Dislike it. No, that's right. Because it leads – what seems to be happening at a bigger level is where kind of the U.S. is sort of walking away from the rules-based global order system, which is the United Nations and, you know, the WTO, all of these things, and it's going its own path. So we're seeing this multipolar world. it's only when there's a vacuum and there's a problem. But the US is filling the vacuum with its own kind of power ascertation. And that probably keeps markets comfortable because, you know, it's a relatively benign power.

5:38So you're not leaving these kind of big vacuums, I think. Yeah, I kind of agree with that. I think particularly because a lot of the wealth of the world increasingly is in the US, particularly in like the stock market or publicly traded markets, it's in the US. So if you can make that case stronger, like if you can make the USAI trade even stronger, then I feel as though that's going to provide the backdrop. And that was kind of, I think, the main backdrop for what people think about it. Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, you step back and say, OK, maybe they're going to be able to secure cheaper, more abundant energy via getting the resolution in Iran, which I think has been on the table for a long time with the Israelis and the Saudis kind of driving in the background.

6:20So I think that's happening. The Venezuela situation at the margin probably helps. So you get cheaper, more abundant energy. Greenland is clearly not only just geopolitical in where it is, but also for its rare earths, which is also part of this whole thing. So it feels like the US is kind of doing what China did a while ago, which is securing all of its needs for this tech revolution. Because, again, when you step back, this AI race is the biggest race in all of humanity. It's the single most important thing we've ever done. It's the most powerful technology man will ever invent and probably our last technology we'll ever invent.

6:57Yeah, I actually, I think the AI trade, it's gone in its, I think there was a period last year where I looked at what was happening in OpenAI and I started seeing the maybe contagion if that story didn't get better. It feels as though this year, the vibe coding phenomenon, on it seems to be ripping through at least ct and that's the most bizarre thing it's like people like frank the gods is now just talking all day about vibe coding i'm like what is happening in this world yeah it's it's now if you're not vibe coding you're you're missing out on generational wealth uh you have people spinning up apps within seconds with like if you're not aware claude which is the model from anthropic um they released their actually their opus model which is you can download as a terminal on your computer and it's an agent.

7:53I don't know if you've done this, Raoul, but I have not yet. It has like an interface kind of in between coding and your classic LLM interface, although you can make it a bit more LLM focused and you can ask it to do things. So you can say, look, for example, for my daily newsletter, I now ask it to go through all these various websites and get the biggest stories from them and put them together for a nice sheet for me people have been going through their credit card data and and uh and eliminating costs but there's there's various different things like if you're doing daily tasks uh i think this can be a bit revolutionary it basically takes control of all your logged in sessions so like it doesn't need your auth authentication for getting into like your your gmail or your or your um or anything anything you're already logged into it just it just opens up what you would normally have with google chrome or opens up mail and does it for you so it can actually be pretty seamless once it gets going and can just work in the background so i think for someone like you who clearly does a lot of that sort of daily analysis sort of stuff it can be quite useful i this is the first time i do think that if you think about these llms originally it's like yeah they've just become incredible encyclopedias and maybe even like they tell you how to do things perfectly this is now just like doing it for you it is just um you can give it about it does it for you it's really interesting to see the kind of mean coin crowd move towards this right because it's like chasing money and what happens is we end up creating infinite amounts of whatever it is because that's what everybody does infinite amounts of mean coins now there's going to be infinite amounts of apps and it where this plays out is as agents build apps and there is no moat around any software in the end and elon made a point which was interesting to me he said that most of the u.s stock market wealth is in software and software is going to go to zero.

9:45Now, that's not an instantaneous thing. It happens over time. I mean, to get rid of big systems out of companies and stuff is not straightforward. But the point being is the trend is in place that all of the value accrued within this stuff goes away because we're seeing people spinning up a Dex within like a day. And we're seeing Mert from Helios building apps over the weekend and launching them. And that just shows the plethora of stuff that's going to get built. Yeah. How does it get traction in that? But to be clear, these are people with no development skills. Like you can basically ask this claw model, hey, I'm not a developer.

10:26Speak to me like I'm not a developer. I'm just going to give you guidance. And it just does it. Like this is why I'm saying you should test it out because this is... Were you using clawed beforehand or were you using traction? I tried this out a year ago, honestly. like the whole agent thing came out um you know when when i was looking at these sort of models year to year and a half ago and i was like how good are they and i tried to make it do tasks and to be honest you had to be a bit more of a developer like it would the responses it would give you would be sometimes like python scripts or like and you'd just be like i can't do this or at least i've spent a long time learning how to code now it's not like that at all it's literally I had a good one with chat GPT.

11:07So I love these log regression channels on log charts, you know, like Bitcoin and stuff like that. And I wanted it on other crypto assets. And I usually get it off Bloomberg where it's set up, but I don't have all the crypto assets. So I said to chat GPT, you know, is there this function on trading view? He said, no, but I can build it for you. So I said, okay. So it's like, just, you know, what parameters you want i gave it and within a minute it had written the whole pine code and i just clicked copied it dropped it into trading view and it worked one shot i'm like oh okay this is quite clever because i have no i mean i don't even know what this pine code says this is a bunch of shit but it works yeah i mean the the extension to that what this would be would be someone that actually went on and did all that for you so it would put in the pine code probably think of even better charts to show you like that's the level that we're at um which is that you don't like i said it's not the encyclopedia anymore it's like it just does it so uh i've got to play around with it it's just always scary at first because the other thing is you've got to think what you actually want automated because if you're not careful you just start saying hey automate me all the news flow and blah blah blah and you just end up with overwhelming amounts of stuff that you don't actually need yeah so that is obviously we're entering a world of abundance so like once you start having a personal assistant that can do everything for you in the background like you can start asking it to do some dumb things but the uh we've had like for example i've seen people do it for and i'm sure you have a ton of calls each week with people that you've you've probably spoken to once or maybe spoken to before it like every day it sends you a summary of the calls you have and what you should prepare a little bit about the person who's probably done the call with you and about the company and so for example it can integrate into you to just get you more prepared and this is like smaller stuff you know uh yeah i mean because unfortunately i don't know why at real vision we've got bloody microsoft outlook and it's got no integration with this stuff and what i really want it to do is like go back in my diary because as you said there's so many meetings that we've had that you forget to follow up on or what that was about that something just smartly resurfaces and said hey have you spoken to joe recently because you know you were having a conversation about this kind of stuff i mean that gets super interesting that whole you know on your desktop everything everything from you know your zoom calls to your phone calls to your emails to your your you know your files to everything once that becomes your own personal assistant then it becomes a superpower because it can do everything for you yeah i think the first model of this was like to do it on the app level so it would be like oh your gmail has its own ai the clawed model is slightly different it just takes over your pc and if that's your main tool for doing things it's basically then can can manage it across everything so it's it's slightly different in that sort of sense and and they generally seem to have one of the stronger coding models but but like to be clear all the other people are now are now moving towards and this is the worst it's going to be which is what we've kept saying for the last two years every time we're shocked it's like well this is the worst it's ever going to be i mean it's literally we know chat gpt um 50 i think is coming out which is their multimodal model then we've got six to come out we've got you know gemini three and a half what does that end up it's stupid the speed of this stuff it's stupid you can't keep up with it well well to be fair i would actually i've been thinking kind of the more the opposite the back end of last year is that i hadn't really seen that much improvement in the llms it was like marginal and you were like oh okay they've brought out chat point chat tpt 4.8 and it's like it's slightly better this is the first step change i've really felt a lot of people have said this since chat tpt 4.0 which shocked everybody this is the first time people have gone okay this is like agi encoding because you can just get it to do things and and be clear people are making apps all i mean it's basic stuff right now so it's apps which people often have payment gateways to and people are you know just creating businesses out of nothing at the moment um seamlessly like and you i've seen people who've gone right i'm not even gonna say anything just imagine you are the best startup founder ever create one you know like just it's like you don't even it's just letting the ai go and see what happens have been some of the results here that's it's starting to move towards, you know, I've been using this kind of 2030 date for the economic singularity where it just kind of like, if AI becomes fully AGI at that point, and it can do things autonomously, then what role do we have in markets?

16:04What is a company any longer? You know, because companies births deaths in a digital world can be instant. We've seen in crypto, we've run that rail for a while, which is you can have a capture an opportunity in a business, it can last for a month and then go and it dies and moves on. Well, if you actually have companies, you have to hire the people and build the legal entities. This all goes. So I don't even know what system we're walking into, but it's very different than the one we know today. Yeah. Increasingly, it's almost like you want to take yourself out of the equation because you know the AI is going to be better than you.

16:37And like you just said, that becomes like, what purpose are we then in this sort of world? Like if I'm literally just creating a claw bottle and I don't even want to give it any input, just that you are the best startup founder ever to have lived, create a startup. Like I don't really know what role I am in society. Because the next step is it prompts itself to do that. And that's the end of you, right? I've spent a lot of time thinking about this and writing about it. And I just wrote my annual think piece in GMI. The reality is, is the one thing it can't do is be human. you know if you look at things like sports teams they just keep going up and to the right in value the reason being is they're human-centered things you know i've talked about this before it's like the computers have beaten humans at chess for the last 35 years we've never beaten them yet chess is the largest it's ever been as an industry so the signal within this which is human to human interaction has value it creates outcomes it is monetizable it is human attention is still valuable but we don't need to do all the other stuff yeah look i i kind of agree with that i i mean even the businesses that i run i've been thinking about this and being like the real thing that i still see value in is in the human human interaction like you can't replace customer service or a customer or like a personal relationship and people will be driven to that more it's a weird thing but like we've been hiring just like people who are very personable good the sort of person you want to have a conversation with is actually often going to be the sort of people that are going to you want to have at your kind of business like if you can the more personable and the better human you are like if you're the smartest guy anymore like if you're like a 100x dev like that skill weirdly is becoming not less value 100x devs obviously are very rare but if you are just a smart person that is being increasingly replaced yeah and i've like i see a lot of friends of mine whose kids are at university and they're like what do i do i'm like the best thing to do is actually go traveling for a year right go and meet go meet people of different cultures in different places and different complexities uh you'll come back able to communicate and understand people better and that is a key skill in the world we're going into because it's not fucking development it's not your intelligence because intelligence is being replaced so therefore it's your humanness yeah that's it and whatever that means possible i mean obviously base intelligence is part of that as well like you still want to have a smart conversation with a human but being a good communicator i would say is probably one of the top skills to actually have because also the the looks model that has been proliferating since Instagram basically is going to die a death because of AI, because the only fans, you know, porn sites, Instagram will all be AI.

19:38And so that's not an edge so much anymore. Yes, it might be in human life, but humans don't even meet in bars anymore. They meet on apps. So it's like, it's kind of a weird world, but yeah, I I think you're right, that human thing. And I had this realization a few years ago, which is why we've been rebuilding the whole Real Vision experience around community. It's the single most important thing. It's all we have. And yes, our communities will have AI within them. But the physical thing, so I'm going to give the plug to the crypto gathering because it's a perfect spot. We get the Real Vision community together down in Miami.

20:14I think it's on the 22nd to 25th of Jan. and you get a couple of hundred people, two or three hundred people down there and you get to talk to each other and meet each other and share a drink and share some food. And that is the realness of the experience. And, you know, because if not, we just exist too much online. So just a plug for anybody who's not signed up, we've got the special social pass tickets, which I think they're 300 bucks and you can buy one, get one free. I bring a mate for that. That's the social pass. So it doesn't get you into all of the events. You can add on to those if you want to or just come for the party and the fun and meeting people because meeting people is the most important thing.

20:52And it's better to do it in the sun than a fucking miserable, wet end of January everywhere else in the world. So realvision.com forward slash crypto gathering. But aside that plug, it's... I'll be there. Good. But it's the human side of stuff, right? To get together. I see you, give you a hug. I haven't seen you in a while. Have a chat, have a beer. you know that that creates true connections and understandings and stuff like that is valuable yeah like i said it's the only bit of the business that a business that we i can i can't see being replaced with ai like the need for human uh you need fewer top level people for the intelligence bits but the real thing is like uh where people still desire personal uh touch or relationships then that will not be replaced and the other thing that won't be replaced is nature right you know i'm here on little cayman right now it's just it's it's just complete nature and you realize how valuable that is humans have a connection with nature nature's this kind of integrated ecosystem so i think nature becomes a premium in this world because we spend so long like this which you know over a zoom call or over your email or on x or whatever you're doing and in the end you actually want to get back to some sort of reality so i think there's a it's a it's a barbell strategy is you lean into everything with the ai you possibly can to replace yourself and then be as human as you can yeah on that same sort of vein like i'm also i've said this on a couple of shows before but increasingly it's my view is that intricately made human items that are probably going to die off in the next 100 years you know like how many people are going to be still making watches by hand how many people are still going to be making doing certain human skills by hand in a world of ai as it scales to humanoid robots and various other forms of of manufacturing as well as service like artisan stuff right like this is the other point about art like this is why i've been buying all the nfts this is the exact trade yeah what's going art and collectibles physical collectibles particularly human element sort of stuff i think it's going to be worth a lot like uh because people will desire them and like it i'm not saying you won't have the skills to do these sort of things in like the ai could probably teach you but it's just there's gonna be fewer people doing it at the same sort of scale and i think there's gonna be a lot of training doing it so stuff like that but you know it's obvious that vintage cars keep going and you know um homes obviously keep going you know the kind of fancy stuff that that gets built but also art digital art i think is is so obvious because we've got this massive cohort of young people who've grown up digitally native and here's the art of the culture of the internet when this all happened so you know that's been my big thesis i mean i've just done nothing but keep buying art all the time art as a field i just think is is there's something and yeah like these more collectibles physical collectibles i think it's actually going to be big too bring it bring it back to crypto though slightly like this has got me more bullish again on the ai trade i felt like it was maybe a bit of a mini top with open ai and that that may take down a few of the the medium-sized players now i feel like this is if ai agents are having going to have their moment this year and i don't know if they will but it does feel like everyone will now launch their claw bottle it looks like anthropic's about to raise at 350 billion dollars uh just on the back of this actually side note does seem like the ftx stake you know ftx i know 80 of this that diluted down from something like 15 or 20 like uh he he would have had 30 billion dollars uh in in anthropic there and something like close to 100 if he'd kept if they hadn't diluted him down with all the other stakes so crazy um that was that was sold during the bankruptcy but hey ho uh anthropo is gonna and it does feel as though we're gonna we'll definitely see one of these sort of models from from google and from i'm sure all the other major players uh when it comes to the models yeah because deep mind said was it deep mind or deep seek i can't remember i think it was deep seek was saying they their new models out in february something like that x have been to xai have been talking about their new thing coming out as well so we're just going to see what you're now seeing as the step change will now become the norm as everybody catches up and then there'll be another step change again i don't know where we are by the end of the year i mean i it started to become almost impossible to predict where we are but it's just more more ability faster easier there was always this question about like how much will you be willing to give up seed power to this the the the ai like no we'll never give it we'll we'll put checks and balances in it now we're just like just take over my pc you do whatever like you can see all of my private information just go for it uh it's kind of just to see that yeah when it actually comes down to the individual choice about this and it's like there's a money-making element to it it's just like yeah just go it's like it's like it always makes me laugh the people who fight over um privacy from government i'm like you've given every single thing that you do to google every porn site you've ever visited everything you've ever said everything they know literally where you are because you move around with your phone and if you put your phone down the nest device tells you what time you're going to sleep and you're worried about the government knowing it yeah yeah for sure we lost this a long time ago So just so we could post pictures of cats on the internet, we gave up all of our privacy.

26:42Yeah, if there's an element of social or money behind it, yeah, people would be willing to give up quite a lot on a personal basis. They'll complain about it on a public basis. But if it's like, yeah, I'll get the AI, just make money for me. Yeah, you can do whatever. That's where I think a lot of this is going is there was a brilliant article by Mickey Malker from Ribbit Capital about tokenization of data. So not tokens in the crypto sense, but creating machine-readable packets of all data because the AI needs to be fed. It's a beast. It needs as much data as possible. And we're going to financialize that because with crypto rails, we're going to have giant marketplaces for data in real time where agents just go and pull data, that kind of stuff.

27:23And we're going to end up selling our personal data. And, you know, all of the privacy thing goes out the window again because money is being waived in front of us. Yeah, of course. And these models need to be fed. I mean, they need to be fed. So we need to give them all of the data. And that's where I think a lot of the money we generate, which was kind of the Web3 ethos in the beginning, right, which was the read, write, own. That own element, I think, will come, you know, in the next five years, it'll become very apparent that owning our data was one of the things that gave us income. Yeah, I think that's true too.

27:59It's very clear that the data here is very valuable. I can't imagine how much data Anthropoc has been getting from everyone just giving up their PCs. But just bringing it back to crypto slightly, I actually haven't seen that many people add this core model to crypto yet, but it is coming. I don't know which blockchain or which apps are. If I am in crypto, that's what I would be doing right now. Basically making it as easy as possible for Claude to come in and either build trading models on my platform or integrate into a trading view or do that. And I haven't yet seen it on a blockchain level or in an app level, but it is coming.

28:40And that will be the next step change again. I even think in crypto. Yeah, and I think also there's the X402 payments system and I think Siri got a version, A402. There's some really interesting things comes out of those, plus agents. So I think there's a lot of that integrations that we'll start to see happening.

29:05Also, I try not to overcomplicate it. And I've been thinking, I was speaking to Julian about this over the weekend, writing GMI. it's like barry silver is going to be right tau is going to go up a bit tenser it's really annoying because i've known barry forever and he always gets these things right um you know he got the z cash one as well um and i just think bit tense if i look at the weekly chart it's like it's a killer chart i don't own any in fact let me show you the chart uh let me see if i can find i've been in out of tau several times um they had their halving uh in that's right if i look at down but it always has this nice bottom to it around this little level i mean it's just uh so tau is like a rewards mechanism for these ai so like if you're talking about what we just spoke about with the how to train these models better that is essentially what they're trying to do here yeah i mean i mean that's a very clean kind of big flag pattern and if it's going to happen there's a big price move to come so yeah i've been following this one with interest and then trying to keep open to the ai trade i think a lot of them is going to be just who is able to process at the speed the agents require and that feels like that's a solana sui world more than an eth world but maybe the layer twos can i don't know but i think that game is going to be one of the key narratives as you said yeah look i was a big believer just over a year ago that ai agents would this was going to be last year was going to be a year of ai agent i i would be really surprised if this year is not now at least in terms of so and then because you can imagine now like we just said coinbase has a complete air agent payment framework like they could easily integrate this even into coinbase and be like look have your clawed agent do this have your google agent do this have your and trade it on a dex or a sex and i i don't and then then it kind of comes down to like what you just said which chains are they going to use i imagine part of it will use base part of it will use solana part of it will use um sui i have to say i've been i've been more uh bullish on the apps than i have been on on the l1s just because i've just seen the price action just has not been aggressive enough let's say even with this even with the whole dat trade and i kind of feel like the valuation metric just isn't quite being picked up by travi whereas in the app layer like if if for example hyper liquid was to do that and you can imagine the massive increases in revenue you could see from from this you could integrate into pump fun right like just have the agent make a meme for you all day and it's not it's not going to be if it's going to be obviously it's going to happen at scale I mean, it's just, it's a simple of when.

31:57It's just what I get to again is what the fucking role do we have in markets when it's AI agents trading versus AI agents? It's like, you know, that's, don't forget, it's been that world in high frequency trading for a decade and a half, two decades now, where humans have no edge. You know, you know, from the investment bank, you know, from the sales and trading floor. the traders had to move out time horizons because everybody else got replaced by the machines and the banks couldn't compete with with jump and all of those guys because and virtue and all of those because they were just too powerful and too fast so i just don't know whether we're going to have an opportunity in markets and i think it's kind of naive to think that you or i could spin up our agent and it's going to be this master thing in markets when agents are going to be spinning up their own agents to create money for themselves to do economic tasks.

32:49I'm like, I don't know where this is going, but what you're excited about today is the death of you tomorrow. It's not bad. I'm not negative, but I'm just, I'm a realist. So a quick break in your regular programming. If you're serious about your future, grab my free report called Prepare for 2030. I think you've got five years to make as much money as possible. And this guide will help you navigate what's coming. The link is in the description download it now i know what you mean i now was a trader obviously yeah i could not post your time but like in a time where electronic trading was coming in and replacing a lot of people what the the theme was on those trading floors was that if you moved more and more into illiquid markets that the ai or the machines would be less likely to replace you and that kind of ties back into what i was saying before i actually think like illiquid markets collectibles these sort of things might have a bit more of a human element to them um they may not but i can imagine that the trading of those is going to be more difficult than some of the easy to chart easy to do technical analysis on majors let's say then then like it makes sense it's like the the sneaker market yeah exactly you know it makes sense because they're physical goods you want to touch them own them etc so they don't just trade on screens because there's an ownership thing right it's a it's a display and ownership thing so that makes sense and there's a bunch of kids i mean a friend of mine's son and his way through college just trading sneakers yeah we had we had a bit more of a collectible show actually i think it was like three months ago we had on spencer who who has has moved into this before and that bit of the the market continues to kind of go crazy like i the other no-brainer in all of this is and i've noticed this trend is every generation has a set of cars that they kind of worshipped so in my day it was the lamborghini countash and i had the picture on a wall with a sort of semi-naked girl on it and i wanted that car and those cars once once people get in their 40s and 50s end up buying all of this stuff for to look back on their nostalgic youth i remember looking at the lamborghini when i was still living in spain so maybe 15 years ago and they were like 30 grand and then the next printed 350 grand and i'm like and i didn't i didn't do it um but we're going to see the end of petrol cars and particularly a lot of this kind of stuff so that's another thing you can do is just go and find what are the iconic cars for people of today that still exist and they don't have to be sports cars they could just they just need to be iconic and you just stick them away like the Land Rover Defenders um because they stopped making the old ones those now have they're now I mean I redid mine here because it had rusted apart because this little salty island kills everything um and just people said you're not allowed to trash it i mean it was completely done and so i had it rebuilt and i had it rebuilt it cost me i'm like 100 grand to rebuild but if i send it to the us they're trading at 150 grand redone land rovers yeah i guess this comes back to the theme that we've kind of already seen with crypto is like you were drawn into crypto because you felt like you had a bit more of an edge and um and even with like the internet culture thing like i i came in because i felt like oh yeah you know this is around the time of meme stocks they feel like i have an edge this is the stuff again that the ai will not have an edge in like they're not going to be at the edge in like that cultural element i don't think at least not like they would have an edge in trading yeah but they they would choose the portfolio for you if you were to chat gpt hey here's my thesis on classic cars what's going to be a classic of the future right from the kids today i'll scrape the internet figure it all out and give you a list of here's the five cars to buy under 10 grand so so we're still going to be useless not useless but like they're still going to be a use for the the ai but i still think the only human edge is going to be in those little bits and i think people will be drawn to trading those even more like even even just at the base level ownership of things right you know that it comes down to that it's like can you have that car in your garage why that status signaling to yourself it's nostalgia it's a it's a memetic carriage of all the things that you've learned on route that's what i think it ends up coming down to it's like the weird things humans hold on to dearly that nobody else does um they're valuable and it's the ownership of human things that's that's what my point is i also think that like a car is going to be increasingly easy to create right like think about a world where there's just humanoid robots making them out in china and they already have to be tariffed like 200 before they come to europe and the us right now like that's just because we're not we haven't got good enough robots essentially or good enough tech like all of this sort of tech has become much cheaper so it's the human built things that people see real value in like that human connection thing that we just spoke about i think those things are going to be worth a lot and if you saw that you've seen this in japan so japan with the aging population young people didn't want to live the salaryman lifestyle and all of that and they saw what it did to their parents and so japan has got like more artisan shops than anywhere else you know there's some crazy people who use a specific denim from a specific cotton to make specific jeans handmade that cost fortunes and they love it because it's very artisan it's human it doesn't make sense because you can get it made in a factory in china for nothing but that artisan element has something to do with it it's a human thing that's the thing that you would go and buy right you if you knew it was made by a 3d printer but it was incredibly made like it's the idea of these like these new diamonds as well like these 3d yeah it's kind of cool but like you also think the the actual real ones is like the it's going to be worth more like they feel like they have more value to them because they're actually real and i think if you can keep that edge i think it's gonna be important i want like obviously you've just spent the last few weeks building doing this whole um you know outlook for the year we've obviously touched on a few things is there anything else like that you really feel is big themes for for this year yeah so if i break it down there's the there's the mega theme this whole exponential age um economic singularity that we're hurtling into the AI trade.

39:23What is this all about? So we spent a lot of time talking about that. What's the future of humans? How we do that? Julian spent a lot of time looking at the macro outlook. And the simple macro outlook is business cycle go up, commodities go up, that kind of stuff. The crypto world, this is actually a good chart. Let me show you this because this sums up all of last year. So this chart is our, this is the everything code thing with the GMI daily liquidity composite and NASDAQ. It kind of worked absolutely perfectly. So the everything code has been working perfectly. And then you look at the same chart in crypto.

40:01It did that. It was the only thing that decoupled. And it was based really on just what happened in 1010, that government shut down, liquidity, the furthest forest out in the longest term assets does this. I think the alligator's jaw's shut. You've got these beautiful charts. I mean, that's like everything excluding Bitcoin and stables. I mean, these charts are nice. Liquidity just keeps going higher, and we've still got to refinance all of these debts. So we wrote a lot about that, that just for crypto looks good, technology continues to look good because liquidity is still coming into the system.

40:41They've got all the debt to refinance. We've got the fiscal stimulus coming forwards. We've got all of the right things happening. So I just think this year is a good year. And then we've got the structural change to what's happening with technology. So that's that. And then people who are in the more traditional world, it's like the commodity world. It's where the Aussie dollar goes up and the Canadian dollar goes up. And that typical cyclical trade that ends up with overtime inflation crawling higher again, which not yet, but overtime. What's your view on the metals? the metal trade in in general because it's taken some of the i wouldn't say the shine off from the crypto trade but it feels as though there's been people coming back into it i'm going to show you a killer chart just need to find it sorry this this this publication that we write every uh every year this this one was 39 000 words oh wow and 130 pages um where is the bloody gold chart So we put overlaid financial conditions, gold, and also the interest payments.

41:41And it's super interesting because it's basically gold is following current financial conditions. So I'm just whizzing through trying to look for the chart. Gold follows current financial conditions, and it leads liquidity. So, yeah, I'm going to show you these two charts. These are really cool charts. Again, the moment we show any of this stuff, it gets copied by everybody. So this is our total liquidity in gold. So gold leads it by about 12 months. It basically lives in financial conditions world. But more importantly, here's that interest payments chart. And what's happening is gold is ahead because this is where we are in financial conditions, but we need to ease financial conditions all the way to pay for this stuff.

42:34And then liquidity, you can't see it very clearly here, is in blue, just follows the whole thing. And Bitcoin follows liquidity, although we had that slight change. So the metals trade, I don't think it's done yet because of this. We're not there yet. So it feels like the metals trade can go till the end of the year, which means financial conditions, the whole thing just goes forward. So I still think it's longer than people imagine, but we will get some sort of rate of change and understanding later. We need to see where the ISM is as well. Has the ISM ripped high? And if it's near 60, you want to be a little more cautious because Bitcoin sniffs out that peak in the ISM very quickly, along with a peak in financial conditions rate of change.

43:12But I don't think it's there yet. Any view between them? Are you like a silver guy, gold guy in any of these? No, I just think crypto pays catch up because the multiplier effect. Look, I showed you the chart. It was a dislocation in one asset only, and it's to do with what happened in October. So what do you think happened there? Here's my thesis is the markets broke, fine. We've seen that before, flash crashes and stuff, but the market makers couldn't access the APIs. So who bought the stuff that was being liquidated? And my guess is the exchanges had to step in, finance, OKX, and whoever had all of that forced deleveraging.

43:59And they had to step in because there was no market at all and everything was automatically being liquidated. Can you imagine that happening? You're sitting in front of your screen. The market makers are shut out from making prices, yet everybody's being liquidated in a cascade. What do you do? Well, if you're Binance or whoever, you're going to have to put your balance sheet on the line. Yeah. And my guess is that's what happened. So they bought a whole bunch of stuff. and then they've been acting somebody's been acting like a program trading desk unwinding a big trade we've kind of seen it every day they sell something you know they sell a bunch they sell a bunch and that's what that's what it looked like to me so somebody took on an absurd amount of risk because they had to and they've been having to work out of it in an illiquid market over time i mean what i would say is that the volatility has really come out of of of crypto So it does feel as though it may be that sort of narrow band of dip buyers are getting immediately smacked back down, but the market's not being let to go down too much lower.

44:59That's kind of what the market looks like right now. That's right. It's not bearish. It's just that there's still the supply. Now, if you think of where the supply really comes from, it's the alts, because that was the stuff that ended up going down 80 % on that tick price wick. So you've got to work out of a big alts position that's illiquid that everybody cascade sold into. Just takes time to digest. So I think those alligator jaws close. I think that is the feature for the year. And that's why I think, you know, we've also in the global macro investor, we looked at the undervaluation of Bitcoin versus where it should be.

45:39It should be somewhere around 140 ,000 to 160 ,000 had that not have happened. if it had just followed the nasdaq chart and the everything code chart so we've got this discount that's happened and then we back checked it against like six other different variables to see does that discount stand true and it does so it's like okay so we've got this discount that was created by a temporary factor not a permanent factor um you just need to give once liquidity comes back fully into the market i think it closes so i'm not involved in a trade at all the worry i have about this is just in a world where as you just said you know they're talking about 150 bps of of fed cuts they're talking about you know liquidity going back to the system if it doesn't pick back up and ai goes and gold goes and metals go and all these other assets go it becomes a trade which i think it's it doesn't it's not that the underperformance can kind of be extended just because people are i can i already see it but i just think you've got a recency bias there it's like we didn't have nice things and everybody else did it's and so it's the recency biases well why don't we're stuck like this forever it's like if you were to come in from mars and say look at all the evidence is it likely that blockchain technology which has this most powerful network effects of any investment asset class in history suddenly just dies to death while every single bank is about to build on it, the government's about to pass the Clarity Act, we've got financial liquidity.

47:11No, it makes no fucking sense. Zero sense. That's what I get to. Sorry? It's definitely not dying. The use case of crypto is going parabolic. We spent the whole time talking about agents and payments and all of this stuff. It's going parabolic. So therefore, you just have to say it's got to be temporary until you end up with liquidity being drawn from the system because it's the end of the cycle. then you can say, yeah, sure, okay, that might change. So I just look at it, look at all the evidence and say, it's just a temporary phenomena. Well, I have quite publicly on my show actually still reduced my crypto exposure in this period.

47:49I did rotate slightly back into some of these sort of things. I thought we would keep above 80 before the end of last year, and we did. And now we've had a little bit of a nice rally. I do think there is a very good chance now that we will rally back up to 100K. over the next month. I think if you look at, it just feels like there's room for it to bounce, even if you think it's a reversal of the trend and not. So I do think there's a good chance now that it does that. And that is a decent move. It will probably be a very big move in alls if Bitcoin moves 10 % here. As we just saw, like when Bitcoin went up 5%, so we went up like 40, it went up 70.

48:29We've also forgotten about what volatility means in crypto. It means upside more than downside. So when we talk about 10 % move in Bitcoin, I mean, when I go back and look at the monthly percentage change, you know, it's not uncommon to have a 40%, 50 % month in Bitcoin. Yeah. Two of them back to back. And yet we've kind of forgotten because we've been in this bloody low vol environment the whole of last year. But when it happens, I mean, we've seen them. I mean, alts do 5x in a month when Bitcoin does 40%. I agree. It's been a while. Probably not since the Trump election has it felt like, oh, God, crypto's got upside volatility here aggressively.

49:14And then it went on for about, what, three or four months then? Then correct. Then we had a shoot into the end of the year. Yeah. And then, yeah, we had a couple of months of it last year. I agree. If you miss the up weeks in crypto, you kind of just miss the whole year. Because when it goes up, it can go up completely violently. And you're playing catch up with certain trades, which is kind of the worst thing about it. Because you often then start investing at the highs and some old-clones stuff. Which is why I just don't do anything. I don't trade out of it. I just don't do anything. I just sit with it and say, it'll be the gift that keeps on giving over time.

49:57So I just sit with it. and then i don't drive myself insane like oh my god i missed gold what do i do what's the next one should i go to silver so i just don't do any of it i just sit and are you still mainly bitcoin and sui mainly sui um and you know i have a bit of majors um and a lot of eth because of nfts because that's that's been my biggest bet really is i bought a shit ton of digital art and that's all been on ETH. And I think the ETH case is very strong going forwards over time. In the same time horizon, I'm looking at digital art, which is next 10 years. And I think digital art will become ultra valuable artifacts.

50:41If we're going from$3 trillion to$100 trillion in value in crypto, there's$97 trillion of wealth. Upstream of all wealth is always art. And so that's my thesis. And the thesis that we talked about in an AI-driven age, these digital artifacts become extremely valuable to us humans because they're human things. Yeah, I can see that. I actually can see that trade as almost being a hedge against everything as well. It feels like a slightly different trade to the rest of crypto, but it's a very interesting one. Yeah, and it's not a quick get-rich-quick. It's no flipping. It's not the same NFT markets of old.