TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #715: $1.5 Trillion in AI Promises With No Business Plan with Gary Brode
Episode Date: February 11, 2026Marty sits down with Gary Brode to discuss why the market's reaction to the Warsh Fed nomination was wrong, the real drivers of inflation, the unsustainable economics of the AI hyperscaler spending bo...om, and why Bitcoin's long-term value proposition remains strong despite short-term price volatility. Gary on X: https://x.com/Gary_Brode Deep Knowledge Investing (Code TFTC for 25% off): https://t.co/NWIf37SNL3 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/VJ2dABShBz Opportunity Cost Extension: https://www.opportunitycost.app/ Shoutout to our sponsors: Bitkey https://bit.ly/4pOv2L4 Promo Code: TFTC99 Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ SLNT https://slnt.com/tftc Lygos: https://bit.ly/4koiJmB 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/
Transcript
Discussion (0)
you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free
if you talk about a fed just gone nuts all all the central banks going nuts so it's all acting
like safe haven 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 i mean
And that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.
If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.
Mr. Broad, welcome back to the show.
Thanks, Marty. Great to be here.
What a week. What a week.
Thinking about, I've had a lot of time to prepare for this show today
because we thank you for last minute agreeing in this morning where you are,
night where I am.
We agreed to this recording early in the morning for me.
You have since gone to bed, woken up, gotten your day started, and here we go.
And I think.
To start off, this phrase has been in my mind for the last few days
because my partner at 1031, John Arnold, he writes our newsletter.
And on Saturday, the sort of line he ran with was the Warren Buffett line.
Price is what you pay, value is what you get.
And I think we're in a market environment where people really need to dig into that first principle and understand where the value is, despite where prices may be, especially as it pertains to Bitcoin.
And you had that incredible tweet you sent out, I believe, yesterday or the day before about Bitcoin.
You've had some commentary on Warsh.
And I think this is a good sort of framing to jump into.
Well, where are prices and where's the actual value in your mind out there?
Yeah, so I think that's that's a key question for any investor.
So many people say to me, you know, where do you think the market is going?
Or what do you think gold is going?
Where do you think Bitcoin is going?
And and when they ask it, they mean the next move.
And where's it going to be tomorrow?
Where's it going to be next week?
Where's it going to be next month?
And the answer is, I don't know. Nobody knows. Like, I never know whether the next 10 or 20 percent is up or down.
And people who claim they know, you know, it's sort of like that old broker's trick where they send, you know, half the people something saying buy the stock and the other half sell the stock.
And then, you know, the half that it works with, they send them something else, buy the stock, sell the stock and they do it.
And, you know, at some point they've given two or three good recommendations in a row to somebody.
But it's not really predictive.
And so, you know, the question that I ask them with things like gold and silver and
Bitcoin and these long term hard assets, I say to them, where do you think it's going
to be five or 10 years from now?
Because I'm prepared to hold for a really long time.
And that's that's how you make a ton of money.
That's how, you know, you start to make returns in the hundreds of percent rather than trying
to scalp the next five or 10 percent.
um and i think that's a key thing and in the case of you know bitcoin in particular it reacted
really badly to the warsh nomination i mean in fairness gold and silver did but they've recovered
um you know for the most part bitcoin hasn't yet and i i think the warsh nomination was really
interesting um first of all the president surprised people they were expecting an ultra
dove with good reason i was too based on his commentary that's what you would expect the
market generally doesn't like surprise marty i mean you know you've seen it when the market is
surprised even it's a good surprise and it's they don't like they don't like something they weren't
expecting right um and so there was this narrative which i disagree with but let's let's start with
the the narrative the narrative was warsh is a hawk he's going to raise rates and in doing so
you have a higher yielding dollar against zero yield hard assets gold silver bitcoin that don't
have a yield but have a lot more value long term because they're not debased on an annual basis
and so the thinking is well wait a minute if warsh is going to raise rates he's going to be a hawk
um then that's the place where fiat has an advantage over zero yield hard assets and it'll
extend that advantage and so you add people that were selling hard assets again gold silver bitcoin
and buying um dollars right that's effectively what they were doing and i disagree so that that
is what was happening and then you had rounds of deleveraging right so a lot of people had you know
derivatives products where they were very very leveraged there's a huge paper silver market
there is a paper gold market um a lot of the the people in bitcoin now are using financial
derivatives that effectively increases the tradable supply of bitcoin and allows them to
push the price around but they're on margin too and so when prices drop collateral is lower and
margin requirements get tightened and people have forced selling they have non-discretionary selling
And so when you're talking about price and value, you had people selling regardless of the value, regardless of the price.
It was you need to raise capital today.
And so they sell.
And then, you know, in what George Soros used to call reflexivity, that selling causes prices to drop.
And then people will in turn say, oh, no, I have another round of margin calls.
And so there's more forced selling.
And so the more forced selling and deleveraging there is, the lower the price will drop, the more forced selling there will be.
And that continues until there's either capitulation where new money comes in or you just like people are deleveraged enough that they don't have to keep selling on a regular basis.
And that's where you hit your bottoms.
Now, the reason I think the the Warsh take by the market was wrong.
First of all, Warsh is not a hawk.
He has come out publicly and said, hey, I favor lower rates. And as soon as he was nominated, I wrote a piece. I put it in our weekly five things. I put it on the DK blog. But I basically said, look, Warsh wouldn't have gotten the job if you wouldn't have promised President Trump lower rates because it wasn't going to happen.
And then it turns out last week the president spoke with NBC News and said, yeah, Warsh told me lower rates.
I wouldn't have given him the job otherwise. And so somebody might say, well, of course, of course, he said that to the president.
He wanted the job, but he doesn't really mean it. But Marty, what do you do in a situation where somebody's public comments match their private comments?
Like that's if their public comments match their private comments, you have a pretty good idea of where they stand.
So that's point number one. Point number two, Warsh may be sitting in the big chair, but he's not the whole Federal Reserve Open Market Committee.
He's got one vote. So if if Warsh is a hawk and the other 11 members are pretty dovish and they are, he can't outvote them.
you can only try to persuade them. You can't move the whole room. He just gets to sit in the big
chair. But at the end of the day, when they vote, he only has one vote. And then the final thing,
I don't know that there's a whole lot the Federal Reserve can do to really move long term rates.
You know, this is one area where I do disagree with the president. President Trump is saying,
hey, I want the Federal Reserve to lower rates. But that that doesn't work. The Fed only controls
the overnight rate. The bond market controls the rest of the yield curve, everything from one week
to 30 years. And so, you know, for people who don't follow this on a daily basis, let's just
give the best, clearest, most recent example. The Federal Reserve started cutting in September of
2024. And over the last 16, 17 months, they've cut 175 basis points. That's just a fancy finance
way of saying 1.75 percent just under two percent of overnight rate cuts and yet the yield on the
10-year rose now granted it's come down a bit since then but over that time the yield on the
10-year treasury actually increased and so you know somebody might say well wait a minute why
is this happening the wall street journal even said somehow right somehow we're getting higher
rates it's not somehow the bond market is correctly pricing in higher long-term inflation that's
exactly what's happening so the president can put warsh in warsh can say i want to cut warsh can
cut the federal reserve can cut but the bond market is saying we don't believe you and we're
going to you know set the real borrowing rate where the five year is that's where corporates
get priced the 10 year that's where mortgages get priced right that that gets priced off of
future inflation um projections so there just isn't that level of control anymore now the one
place where i think the the bitcoin bears have made a valid point is they've said yeah but you
know warsh is in favor of qt okay fancy way of saying quantitative tightening which again that's
just a finance way of saying they're going to reduce the money supply so what happened was
the federal reserve had a balance sheet of about three trillion dollars they do need a certain
amount for liquidity two three trillion dollars is what you know people generally think would be
normal or reasonable let's just accept that number is true during covet that number ballooned to nine
trillion dollars including trillions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities which the federal
Reserve is not legally allowed to hold. Right. Anyone wants to know why housing prices are so
expensive? Look to the Federal Reserve. Right. It's not it's not your greedy broker. They're
not taking that much money. So. What happened then was Powell's Fed started to cut on a monthly
basis, and I was skeptical that they would cut very much, but to their credit, they took a good
two, three trillion dollars out of that total. And right now the Fed balance sheet is a little
over six trillion dollars okay that that was real progress now to the people who are saying
well wait a minute warsh is going to engage in quantitative tightening he's going to tighten
the money supply that's bad for bitcoin okay fair enough but over the last two years powell's fed
has cut almost three trillion dollars off the balance sheet we got record equity prices record
gold prices record silver prices and just last october which is only a few months ago record
Bitcoin prices. Clearly, it's not everything. And then the final point I would make about that
is let's say Warsh comes in and he cuts three trillion dollars off the Fed's balance sheet
on day one. Now, that's a ridiculous example, and I'm deliberately being extreme. But let's
let's say that happens. OK, that's one year of congressional overspending. Give it 12 months
and m2 will be right back where it was right so the most he can do is offset one year of
congressional overspending and look if you're trading bitcoin if you care where the next 10
or 20 which direction that's going to be that matters but if you're somebody with a long-term
time frame if you're looking out five ten years and you own bitcoin because it's a better option
then constantly debased fiat right or the dollar the yen right fiat is a government um currency
if that's why you own it then wait 12 months and for real bitcoiners that's that's nothing right
we've we've been through worse than that together that is a blip on the radar in the the yeah
on a large scale of things and i wanted to um touch back on the 10 year and the fact that you
have the bond market pricing in uh inflation elevated inflation and obviously with qt if
it's still on the table um many people are saying like why why why did why does the market think
that inflation is going to be high what do you think are the drivers of that inflation is it this
um this mad dash for ai infrastructure having an effect on electricity prices which is the
raw input is this re-industrialization tariff regime um a sort of implicit acknowledgement
that at some point there may be a liquidity crisis that forces the fed's hand and treasury's
hand to really turn on the monetary spigots um what do you think the market's seeing right now
in terms of inflation all right so so we've got the the proposed ideas let's take them all here
tariffs ai electricity um what were the other things you mentioned
um ai tariffs electricity reindustrialization um potential liquidity crisis that forces the
fed's hand what do you what do you think the market's trying to say all right so i have an
opinion on this but let's let's take these things one at a time right let's let's approve or debunk
each one of those um tariffs it's clearly not that right uh you remember liberation day last
april all the fiat economists went crazy oh no he's gonna crash the global economy that didn't
happen. Oh, no, he's going to crash the economy of the United States. That didn't happen. Oh,
no, we're going to have, you know, a huge resurgence of inflation. Now, listen, I think
inflation is too high. I think the CPI is understated. But when you look at the durable
goods numbers, inflation did not spike. None of this happened. And then, you know, to the credit
of the fiat economists, they came out over the summer. They said, well, there's supply chain
issues. It'll take some time. We really won't know until September or October. OK, you know what?
that was a fair prime, right? Like to say, it'll take a while for this to work its way through the
system. You'll start to see higher prices. Well, guess what? That still hasn't happened. And it's
been almost a year. And if these fiat economists had any integrity at all, they would simply say
I was wrong, but you know, they haven't done that. Right. Where's, where's Paul Krugman coming out
and saying i i got it wrong right they don't do that and you know listen marty i at deep knowledge
investing we don't get a lot of stock picks wrong but when i do you better believe i write to my
subscribers in very clear language i was wrong this is why i was wrong i apologize for the error
right we lost money i screwed up and and you have to own that mistake or you don't learn from it but
these keynesians these fiat economists like they haven't admitted they were wrong about tariffs and
And so, you know, we can talk about the reasons why tariffs haven't caused inflation.
And I have opinions on that.
I actually think Pompliano put out a great piece on it last year.
Like there's there are reasons to believe that it wasn't going to cause a problem.
That was my opinion.
And it didn't.
And people should admit it on the electricity thing.
I think that's a really big deal to families.
I think, you know, when you own a home and all of a sudden your electric bill is up three hundred, five hundred, six hundred dollars a month, you know, over where it was a year ago.
And it's because, you know, Amazon and Google have bought up all the power in your area because they don't care how much they pay.
And they have you know, they have a bigger balance sheet than any of us do.
I think that's really hard.
i think that's brutal um but i also don't think that's been an inflation driver and and because
take a look at overall energy prices they have been rising and you know gas is insanely cheap
right now right so a lot of these prices have come down and so yeah it's unpleasant to have a high
electric bill but the gas bill it for you know your car to commute to work is down as well so
i don't know i i think long term what we're going to have is a gigantic increase in energy
production capacity i think we're entering a new golden age for nuclear power um the president
has done two things one is allocated a billion dollars for 10 gen 3 nuclear plants those are
the big ones we're also um recommissioning three decommissioned reactors in the midwest
um that's never been done before and then i own a ton of uranium and also you know an smr company
a small modular reactor company the ability to start to build small nuclear reactors very quickly
and roll them out and start to produce a lot of power is there.
Now, is that going to happen right away?
No, but long term, I think, you know, as long as we keep building power generation
and I'm hoping nuclear is the answer there, I think we'll be all right.
Industrialization, completely not worried about that.
And the reason is the economy that we've had over the last 40, 50 years
has involved outsourcing everything.
In the United States, we no longer make things.
we except for intel we don't have the ability to make um our own semiconductors we don't make our
own pharmaceuticals uh we can't build ships more and more cars are being built overseas even the
cars we are building in the united states we're getting whole components not just parts like
entire systems being shipped from overseas there's a lot we used to be able to make that we can't
make anymore i i think we need to reverse that i think having a country where you know we only
export dollars in financial services that's not going to work uh it's not going to work for most
of the country and it's certainly not going to work for the rest of our lives right that that's
not a long-term plan you need to be able to to produce things so listen even if that creates
inflation you do have a situation where people will have better wages because of it and the
quality of life won't drop. So the thing that I'm left with, I do think we're facing a lot of
inflation, but it's all related to congressional overspending. And unfortunately, that's not a
partisan issue. We can't vote our way out of it. Both parties overspend. You know, Democrats
overspend and Republicans run for office saying this is crazy. These Democrats are spending like
crazy. We're the you know, the adults in the room elect us will be fiscally responsible. And Marty,
Do they ever cut spending or do they take the crazy Democrat budgets and say, oh, that's our baseline.
We're going to spend more money from here.
The latter, even if even if it becomes apparent that a lot of the spending is overt fraud, which has happened over the last few months.
And and I think people understand that it's wrong.
But what I really like and what I'm trying to do is help people understand how that theft, that wasteful spending affects our quality of life.
And it's really easy to say, well, you know, we should have pensions and Social Security.
OK, yeah, fair. OK, good. Right.
But, you know, we also need to have free health care for everybody.
OK, and now, you know, we're going to pay for everyone's housing and everybody's food and, you know, welfare payments.
And it's really easy for people to say, well, you heartless monster, you horrible, heartless monster.
Why, you know, why are you against all of that?
And and you don't have to be for it or against it.
What you have to do is tie it so that people understand that that spending and the government waste and the fraud and the theft.
You if you're listening to this, you are paying for that and you're paying for it through inflation.
You're paying for it through higher prices.
You're paying for it through housing that's not affordable, which leads to a lower marriage rate, which leads to a lower birth rate.
Right. Our whole society is experiencing cataclysmic changes simply because of this.
And if you want to say, well, hey, I'm still in favor of it.
I still think we need all of these government programs and we need to spend six trillion dollars a year.
You know, I think it's five trillion on balance sheet, another three or four trillion off balance sheet.
Right. And we should take care of everybody and pay for everything.
And you're a heartless monster if you disagree. OK, cool.
But then own it and explain to every young person, just so you know, you're not going to be able to buy a house because we're paying for these programs.
That's why everything is so expensive.
And we're going to keep debasing the currency and make it impossible for people to save in dollars.
So now everybody needs, Marty, the same skill set that you and I have or in the absence of developing that skill set.
And in my case, you know, it came working 80, 90, 100 hours per hour weeks for years and years and years and working every weekend and studying and learning like that.
That financial education doesn't come cheap. Right.
And so, you know, what we have instead is all kinds of insane gambling behavior.
People said, why? Why are these people throwing money at, you know, at crypto, not Bitcoin, crypto, right? Why are they buying Dogecoin, which was set up as a joke? Why are they all on, you know, sports betting or prediction market betting? And the answer is because it's a casino, because people understand that the existing system doesn't work for them, that they're not able to build wealth in it.
They can't save in dollars. And so, you know, it's kind of like, you know, win big or die trying.
And it's turned everybody into a bunch of gamblers. And that's that's not what you want.
You don't want a bunch of young people who are gambling. You want people who are working and building and saving and investing.
When I talk about these things, these are not just financial changes. These are societal changes.
and again i you know i can see it in the comments already hey you're a heartless monster no
i'm not but own the consequences explain to people your lives have changed for the worse
because we think this is worth doing explain it like there are trade-offs because there are
these are all trade-offs you you can't have guns butter bread circuses and sound currency
can't exist people need tough love tough love is not a bad thing it is a form of love it's
abrasive to some people but uh it's all out of love you have to ask the hard questions and
had a good friend describe uh the economy you just articulated well the high velocity trash economy
that is what we've uh gotten to enabled by fiat where i'm sure you've seen the meme but everybody
and their mother particularly particularly if you're a younger millennial or gen z uh they're
all speed running to to escape the permanent underclass with the emergence of of ai taking over
um taking over the world right now you know what marty i you're completely right and and let me
like give you an example one of my friends he is a you know talented guy in his 30s he's smart
well educated has a really good technical skill set very disciplined you know he's a regular at
the gym he develops new skills he's charismatic you know socially adept um this is somebody you
know he's got a real job and he has the whole thing together um but it's so hard for him to
build wealth that he's busy buying zero data expiration options and i've spoken to him he
doesn't know anything about finance he took like a few thousand dollars i think like five thousand
dollars, ran it up to $160,000. I'm like, okay, wow. That that's, that's incredible. That's
impressive. And I said, well, then what happened? He said, oh yeah, I lost it all.
Okay. And, and, and he doesn't know why he doesn't know why he made money. He doesn't know why he
lost money. He just knows he was in the, the financial market casino. And he's not thinking
about how do I invest over the next 10, 20, or in his case, 50 years. He's thinking about how do I
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becoming more and more apparent and more and more confusing uh maybe the fact that this
environment exists isn't more confusing but the way out a clear way out is becoming more and more
confusing especially again once you layer on ai specifically in the potential job disruption that
can come if it is successful at replacing humans for white collar jobs and that's one thing you
wrote in your weekly letter this week was highlighting the the capex spend that's planned
for um these hyperscalers specifically and it's funny i was actually talking about it earlier
today um with john from our team and it's meta microsoft google or yeah google and uh amazon
um just to four of those based off their most recent earning calls um from earlier this month
600 plus billion in capex expenditure for this year alone insane numbers yeah yeah more than
half a trillion dollars and you know here's the really interesting thing i i think help me out of
this i think it was was harrison cupperman cuppy um who pointed this out i think he was the one
who called a bunch of people running these ai data centers and said what's your business model
How are you going to make money on this? And all of them said, we have no idea. This doesn't make
sense to us, but everybody's doing it. So we just figured somebody else had figured it out. And this
was the thing to do. And, you know, it reminds me, you know, it's weird that in general, the hedge
fund business tends to be guys who do a ton of work. They know their positions very well. But
every now and then I find something where, you know, I talked to a bunch of, you know, hedge fund
guys and they're all buying something and the thesis is just wrong it doesn't make sense basic
research would have uncovered it doesn't work um and it's not what they thought it was but they're
all counting on each other it's basically fund a is saying well i know we're good because fund b
bought it and they're really smart and they're saying well we bought it because fund c bought
it and they're really smart and fund c fund d is really smart and then fund d says well fund a
bought it and they're really smart. And it ends up being a circular thing where if you, if you
basically research your way down to the bottom of it, you find out that it was some like 23 year
old analyst at one of these funds who, you know, who's smart and hardworking, but misunderstood
something. They got one wrong piece of information out there and everybody is counting on everybody
else to do the work. And I find these situations on occasion, and then you want to take the other
side of it i think the same thing happened in the ai data center space where everybody's saying well
this doesn't make sense to me but everybody else is doing they must be right right the people that
met are saying well google's doing it google's saying microsoft is doing it right that microsoft
is saying well it's working in amazon but is it really working um you know the thing that i find
remarkable about this is these guys they're not only spending hundreds of billions of dollars
without a business plan to earn a return on that it's not just that marty it's that the spending
has to keep going it's you know back in the 90s there was this really interesting thesis
on the companies that build out built out the infrastructure for the internet or something
like the cable companies running fiber everywhere and the bulls were saying look this is incredibly
valuable they own these assets the bears are saying yeah but they have to keep paying to roll
it out but the answer was once you rolled out fiber to a neighborhood then you had that market
right you you owned the fiber to that neighborhood you didn't need to keep spending for it the issue
with ai is every six months it's a completely new product right things move two three months
at a time and so if you spend 500 billion dollars half a trillion dollars on ai you have to keep
spending or your model is irrelevant within six months right anthropic will just you know take
over and the thing that really worries me for the equity markets and this i think is is maybe the
biggest risk to the equity markets today we've all seen how much of the stock market return has
depended on you know six or seven companies over the past few years it's been our returns have been
incredibly concentrated so let's take a look at what's going on at open ai um first of all they
came out and said that they expected to lose i think it was 125 billion dollars over the next
you know four years ish okay well they don't have 120 billion dollars but that's not really the
problem because you know if somebody wants to say well come on they can do an equity raise they can
they can raise 125 billion dollars my answer to that is sure yeah i i believe that i believe they
can't but marty they have taken on 1.4 trillion dollars of of liabilities of promises to oracle
to nvidia to microsoft uh-oh right so they need 1.4 trillion dollars plus another 125 billion
dollars of losses they need one and a half trillion dollars of cash to do what they've
said they're going to do and if they don't deliver then you're going to have slowing growth rates
at places like nvidia which could literally take down the entire stock market or you know you have
situations oracle right now they're spending real cash to build up data centers for open ai well
if open ai doesn't have the money to pay oracle that's going to be a problem right because the
money is spent and so you know listen i i pay my 20 a month um for um for chat gpt but that's that's
not going to get them 125 billion dollars and it's certainly not going to get one and a half
trillion dollars so i don't know where these guys are going to earn a return on on any of this
it's like the numbers are insane just thinking back to uh like tarp and the bailout of 2008
like uh what was it 700 billion 800 billion bailout was unfathomable back then and then
you have these private companies that are 1.5 trillion in the hole it's like yeah we'll get
to it and to your point about work was okay obama was talking he was talking about bailing
the whole economy with a trillion dollars of shovel ready projects right that was yeah the
trillion dollar coin was a meme like that's all we need to do is print the trillion dollar coin
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unchained.com it's insane but to your point um about these these hyperscalers specifically in
oracle that's the the one because it's weird again it's like this like i said it's very unclear what
the other side looks like because i can squint and can see them maybe being able to thread the
needle like i was telling you before we hit record i've been using we've been using ai here at tftc
and it's helped our productivity immensely but as you said these models aren't perfect it can give
you uh a objectively wrong answer with confidence um and what i've come to find is if you like
what makes uh we use claude uh predominantly what makes it uh very uh efficient and product
productive for us specifically is knowing how to feed a context to pull from like when we're
doing things it's like okay i want you to pull from this source this source and this source
specifically don't deviate from these things and help us do the work focused on these things and
it's very productive there but i had a conversation with mel madison talking about what could um sort
of perturb this this ai wave and it's just people simply not knowing how to implement it and so i
think that's a big problem um that they have either not knowing how to implement it or just
not trying to because they understand that if they do it successfully it could replace their job
at the end of the day and so you have this uh sort of psychological and implementation problem
uh on on one side too that if those are solved could lead to the revenue that could get a return
not invest a capital for them but it seems like it has is a needle that needs to be thread threaded
very very thin hole too yeah the other day somebody asked me if i thought my job was going
to be replaced by ai and look at you know everybody made me one day but um you know first of all the
way i make money is by taking the same information everybody else has and seeing it differently that
that kind of vision as of today is unique to human being i mean could ai see patterns differently
eventually maybe you know but the key thing is it's all right to use it for analysis but you
need to know where to check and this issue of giving wrong answers with confidence is it's a
really big deal and you know i had a situation a few months ago um i was in spain i was in actually
Ibiza and I wanted it or Ibiza as they pronounce it. You know, and I was racing to get the ferry
to Mallorca and, you know, I was running a little bit late and the harbor is really large. You know,
it curves around. You have to find the right spot. And so I go to Chet GBT and I say, hey,
give me a Google map link. Which direction is it? Because that that harbor is really big
and it gives me a link and i'm following it and then like i take a look it's in the middle of the
ocean i'm like okay i i idiot i just told you i'm running late you like i don't care how you got it
wrong but if you give me a map link in the middle of the ocean that's clearly not the right place
to go right that's the boat is not loading passengers the port the harbor is not in the
middle of the ocean so you know you get stuff like that and then you also get like weird things
there's a whole agentic issue which hopefully will be solved one day but you know i'll say hey i'm
looking for a place to stay and i'm you know i'm going to go to this place for the weekend and
it'll say well here are the three or four places that i think are best okay that sounds good and
it'll say would you like me to email each of those places and see if they have availability and what
their rates are for the weekend yeah that would be great and then it'll end up saying okay well
you know or would you like me to call them yeah go ahead call them go do that and then it'll say
well i can't actually do that but if you want i can give you the phone number i can't actually
send an email but if you want i'll give you the email address i'm like that that's not it reminds
me of that really old seinfeld episode where um kramer's phone number ends up being very similar
to the number people called like movie phone right you know if if you want this movie press
one if you want this movie press two and then people would press the button and he would know
what it was and and he would end up saying why don't you tell me the name of the movie you want
to see like that's i feel like i'm in the middle of a 90s seinfeld episode when i'm talking to
chet gpt yeah i will say though the agentic stuff is getting better like i i spun up one of these
agents a few weeks ago i gave it its own email and it can successfully send emails on command or
i'll cc it on emails and it's able to basically um give me a synopsis i'll cc it on emails and
at the end of the day be like okay what do i need to respond to and it does a good job of highlighting
that so it is getting better into the point of spreading the needle and the capex spend like
that's the thing they need to spend more to your point because these models are progressing at such
rapid pace and i think that's the big question and everybody's buying like when do we get to a
point where the models are good enough to do everything and you can have confidence that
you can build out infrastructure and acquire a a sort of
gpus a number of gpus with a certain firmware hardware or certain caliber and have confidence
that you'll be able to plug that in and run it successfully and profitably into the long run and
i have no idea where we're going to reach that point but i think that's the big question that
needs to be answered but going back to your point on oracle that is the one chart i've seen floating
around that does give me pause and makes me think that the potential for dot com like blow up in
this um this part of the market is is um a serious possibility is the the cds value of uh oracle's
um debt so it looks like that spike in the yields on that debt spiking pretty high almost at dot com
levels as well which is would not be good so i i agree with you and i actually think the problem
is worse and here's why if oracle has problems because they spent money building out data
centers and open ai doesn't have the money to pay for those data centers um that means open ai
doesn't have the money to pay nvidia for the next x number of you know blackwell processors or you
know whichever one comes next um what happens to not only the valuation of nvidia but the entire
market index if the growth rate at NVIDIA slows and people have to start reducing estimates.
We're used to these guys coming out like, yeah, we beat revenue from last year by 100%. We beat
revenue by last year by 90%. And we're raising estimates. Your numbers are too low. We're
raising guidance. And that's why NVIDIA has such an incredible market cabin to their credit.
You know, they build incredible product and they've identified a segment of the market where there's a ton of growth and they are the unquestioned leader.
It's an amazing company.
But if all of a sudden they get on a conference call and they say, you know, our growth rate is slowing to 45 percent, which would still be incredible.
And we're lowering guidance.
You know, Marty, here's the question.
What happens to NVIDIA stock and then Microsoft and Google and Amazon?
and once that whole um pyramid collapses what happens like at that point everything gets sold
intel amd oracle um you know all of these companies and the tech sector once that implodes
you know everything but deep value is going to go down with it now permanently no but that's
going to be a really unpleasant two or three days is that how long you think would last and then
the fed would step in say hey we're gonna make sure that's the other weird thing about this
ai conversation too is that it um it seems to be existentially important to the current
administration um i think they've implicitly single signaled like we will we will not spare
any cost to make sure that we win this ai race um so like a bailout of that sector seems very much
on the table yeah so that's something that um alex mccrease has written about a lot and the two of
you share the same opinion i agree with both of you um the administration has said we've got one
bet right we don't we're getting killed on the industrialization side china makes a ton of things
we're not making a whole lot here except for dollars um there is that sense that the next
thing is going to be AI, we have to win. And, you know, in fairness, right now we have the best
companies in the world designing here in the United States. I think, you know, the U.S. companies are
by far the best in the world. But, you know, China has one gigantic advantage, which is they've built
out their power infrastructure and are doing so really quickly. And we're falling behind in that
And I think that's a place where the Trump administration is correctly throwing a lot of assets at, you know, wait a minute, you know, we not only need to win this AI war, but to do it, we're going to need real infrastructure, not just bits, right, but actual power plants, actual nuclear generators, things like that.
So, you know, I think that's going to be a huge part of it.
I also think your point on the Fed is really important.
I was having a conversation with a friend of mine the other day, really smart person, but not, you know, a finance person.
And he said, you know, I can't figure out if we're going to have, you know, when there's a problem, if we're going to have inflation or we're going to have basically so much debt wiped out of the system in a depression, not a recession, a depression that you end up with deflation.
Right. Kind of like the 1929, you know, you can buy this, you know, brand new expensive car for
one hundred dollars. Right. We've all seen that picture. All right. One hundred dollars. We'll
buy this car. And I think, you know, the government, the Federal Reserve, they've given us
the answer long before we get to that point. They will go to, you know, they'll all become
helicopter band and start just spraying stimulus into the economy um we will end up with nominal
growth but real negative growth and in a situation like that marty what do you want to own
right let's start with bitcoin and then gold and then silver and then you know maybe a little bit
of oil although you know energy prices will be down in that scenario but you know in a situation
like that you want to own hard assets yeah and that's um i think this is a good addition to the
wash commentary too because that's another thing i think um sort of flew under the radar of his
nomination specifically is that obviously besent's been talking about um being in this position
of secretary treasury because he wants to be sort of behind the wheel if we're going through a
monetary reordering. And then in parallel, you have Trump saber rattling the Federal Reserve
saying, I want more control over it. I want the Treasury specifically to work in tandem
with the federal or vice versa with the Federal Reserve to basically go along with
what the Treasury says it wants to do. And then you have Warsh, who is an acolyte of
Stan Druckenmiller, as is Scott Besant. And there's this sort of theme emerging that
people are getting put in positions that have worked together in the past or are very similar
or share very similar worldviews on the economy um and where it needs to go um so that they will
have that sort of uh conducive cooperation between the fed and the treasury as well and so i think
warsh is uh basically being put there because it's like okay you and scott basically came up
through the ranks via um via the same route working with the same people with the same
perspective of market and so you're going to get in here and you guys are going to go to work
together yeah and i think that's right and the thing that's really interesting to me all these
people saying, oh, no, you know, the White House is meddling at the Fed. The Fed has lost its
independence. You know, we've lost faith in the financial markets. OK, let's let's take that
apart. First of all, why anyone had faith in the financial markets a year ago is beyond me. Why
why would anyone have faith in the U.S. government or the dollar? The dollar is being debased into
oblivion as all fiat has been through history no fiat has ever survived right 775 of them in
history they all go to zero this is the nature of nature of the world you know why anybody looked at
a u.s government with now 38 trillion dollars in on balance sheet debt and another 200 trillion
dollars of off balance sheet let's do the math on that we're talking about almost a quarter of a
quadrillion dollars of liabilities right and people were saying now we've lost faith in the system
where were you last week right why why did you have faith in this last week nobody's paying a
quarter of a quadrillion dollars zimbabwe wasn't paying a quarter of a quadrillion whatever they
you know um this is insane the whole thing is is completely insane beyond that right people are
saying oh no president trump he was acting outside of democratic norms we've never seen meddling like
this before you know we've lost faith in the fed this is going to kill the markets what are you
kidding me this has been going on since the creation of the federal reserve president trump
has done only one thing different which is he's had these arguments in public he does it in a way
that we can all see right that old expression you know never look at how the sausage is made
right especially in regard to legislation the only difference is he's doing what had always
been done behind closed doors in public that's it that's the only difference and people were
saying, oh, no, you know, the White House wants control of the Fed. What do they think FDR had?
Right. He literally insisted that his treasury secretary also be chairman of the Federal Reserve.
And the whole country went along with that for decades. You know, you had Lyndon Johnson
slamming Arthur Burns into a wall, literally picking him up, slamming into a wall. And they're
saying, oh, no, you know, President Trump said mean things about Jerome Powell on social media.
how will the republic survive well how did it survive the fed chairman literally being
strong-armed and shoved into a wall by the president saying i want lower rates president
nixon you know same thing he strong-armed his you know again it tried to put pressure on the
federal reserve for lower rates that didn't work out well for the rest of the 1970s right janet
yellen shortened the duration of of treasury securities the reason we've had such large
treasury security auctions this year is because yellen was stacking the deck for her team
right saying we're going to take the lower short-term rates and not do as much long-term
financing even though rates were relatively low right that was to help the democratic party try
to win the 2024 election okay you know i get that the point is like do and i again i can see in the
comments. Somebody says, oh, he's OK with this meddling. No, I'm not OK with it. It's never been
OK, but it is going to continue until we get rid of the Federal Reserve. And if somebody wants to
point out that's never going to happen. OK, great. Got it. Then you should also expect that the
meddling will never stop either. This is the Federal Reserve was created for this exact
purpose. So, you know, if somebody wants to say, well, you know, the the Fed will never be
eliminated. Stop whining about it. OK, then the White House will never stop meddling with the
Federal Reserve. Stop whining about it. It's like they're they were always tied together.
The only difference is we're now getting the show on social media instead of being reported a decade
later by, you know, some staffer who happened to be in the room at the time and they write their
memoirs. And I think the FDR example is the best because it just highlights the hypocrisy is
vaunted as this hero of people that like social welfare programs. And he was, I think, before
Trump, probably the most egregious of with this meddling specifically. He came in, said, here's
what we're doing. You know, you're right. I also think it's really interesting that, you know,
Democrats spent the last two years of the Biden administration screaming, we need lower rates.
Elizabeth Warren. Right. She's she was constantly saying we need lower rates. The Federal Reserve
has to lower rates. OK, well, now we have a president who's trying to strong arm the Fed
into lowering rates, which, by the way, I disagree with the strong army and I disagree that, you know,
that the Fed should lower rates. But the whole point is Warren is now getting what she said she
wanted, but she doesn't seem happy. Why does she never seem happy, Marty? Yeah, because she's a
miserable old woman what are the people in massachusetts doing that's what i want to know
it's my question with elizabeth warren how uh how can you keep voting her back in but i don't think
we're going to solve that in this discussion i don't know right but the point of all this is
this was never about policy it was about partisan politics you know and and that's like that's fine
but then admit you know you're cheering for team red or team blue and you know you're you're
cheering for your team's colors and that's fine. But, you know, if we're going to go to real
policy, the Federal Reserve has never been independent. It shouldn't exist. It's never
going to be independent. I don't like that, but that's the way it is. But nothing has really
changed now. And the same people who two years ago were screaming for lower rates. Now that you
have a president who's at, you know, who's agitating for lower rates, again, something I
disagree with. They're not happy with it. Right. So I can only draw the conclusion that this is
nothing to do with policy these are not people who understand finance and are trying to make a
good decision they just want to score points for their team and and again they're entitled to do
that but i'm also not going to take them seriously yeah uh another policy that i'm interested to get
your your thoughts on very shifting gears a bit but um i was thinking about it earlier today
uh the the trump children uh equities accounts or the investment accounts what are your thoughts on
this this is like a is this like a sly like semi bailout of equity markets or is this like a good
um good product for american citizens that that we should be happy about so you're you're talking
about the um the idea that every newborn is going to get a um basically a stock market account paid
for but you know he makes it seem like paid for by president trump but but it's not it's paid for
by the american taxpayers through inflation right that's that's yeah so look i have mixed feelings
about this um big picture i am against it everybody at first of all he shouldn't act like
the trump account or like you know obamacare like these guys act like they're paying for it you have
your your you know 401k account or your kids trust fund account or your health care it's because of
the guy right it's it's the same thing i'm in thailand right now the first time i came here
somebody was telling me how much they love this is this is more than 20 years ago they were telling
me how much they love the king because he built them this wonderful highway okay okay you know
um but but at any rate they act like i i personally have bequeathed to you
this wonderful largesse now it is being paid for by the rest of the country through inflation
in general i'm against these things now i know i said mixed feelings and here's why i have mixed
feelings almost all of our spending now is for consumption and that is a terrible thing you know
rudy havenstein the the pseudonym for um one of my favorite x or twitter accounts um constantly
will write where's our hoover damn and what he means by that is the government is spending you
know five trillion dollars a year but where's the infrastructure for that where's the investment and
the answer is we're not building infrastructure we're not building investments we're spending it
on consumption and pretending that's an investment and so the one thing the only thing i like about
this stuff is at least this spending is actually for long time duration investments and i think
listen our government spends too much and acting like you per you marty you're getting something
because i the president and bequeath it to you whether it's a you know a democratic president
or republican president i don't think that matters so much you know i don't think that's the right
way to go um but at a minimum at least this spending is for investment instead of for
consumption so it's better than anything else they're doing with our money yeah that's a good
point as somebody with three young children i mean if they're going to offer it i'm going to
take it i'm going to sign them up fill out that that form um you might as well you're going to
pay for it yeah exactly might as well get get some benefit from it at least for my kids and
speaking of that oh god i i you know i just one other thought too we were talking earlier about
how our constantly debased, untrustworthy currency is leading young people to treat
their financial lives like casinos.
And, you know, I want to be clear on something.
I don't blame them for it.
I think it's a bad decision, but they're facing pressures that don't make sense and they don't
see a system that's working for them.
If these basically trust fund accounts lead to less of that behavior 20 years from now, and people say, OK, I own stocks, I see the value of long-term investing, then maybe we get less casino behavior from our young people because they'll see it through the course of their lives.
And maybe 20 years from now, we end up with people making better financial decisions.
You know, on a personal note, do I have time to tell you a personal story on why this matters?
Yeah.
So years ago, I was starting a hedge fund called the Key to Capital with a partner.
And we agreed we wouldn't have any outside positions.
And I had, you know, Atlantic Richfield stock that my dad had bought me when I was six months old.
and um i went and i took a look and um you know i contacted atlantic richfield i said hey i need
like the history of this account and my dad had bought me 19 shares right this was you know six
months after i was born i looked at that that's really weird and i'm just staring at the screen
what hey what really happened i would have understood 20 because it's a round number
you know people think in terms of 10 i would have understood 18 because i'm jewish and 18
corresponds to the letter hi which means life it's gifts are frequently multiples of 18 right like
here's like something to celebrate life but 18 it was weird staring at it and then i saw it
it was 248 dollars and all of a sudden i saw my dad is 27 year old young man with the weight of
world on his shoulders and a house and a young wife and a baby at home and he had 250 he didn't
have enough money for that 20th share i called my dad and i said dad this is what i saw and he's
like oh yeah that's exactly what it was he said i still remember where on the credenza behind my
desk that paperwork was sitting he's like i i didn't have more than i didn't have enough money
to buy that 20th share but over time that 248 investment when i sold it grew to 15 000
holy crap right okay and by the way this was atlantic richfield you know it wasn't like my
dad randomly fell into you know apple stock or you know amazon at the beginning where you like
it was just a normal energy stock right it was just an oil and gas company and so look i am
generally against government largesse it doesn't go well but let's you know let's actually put on
our compassionate hats for a minute and think about the potential impact on young people who
have thousand dollar accounts instead of 248 dollar accounts when they're two months old
and then two or three decades later they take a look and they see oh wow this is fifty thousand
dollars you know and like maybe that's a down payment on a house or maybe that's the ability to
pay rent um or at a minimum maybe it's just a really big reminder right we're not talking
at generational wealth, and it's not like nobody's going to work because they've got
$50,000, but it certainly would be a generational reminder, wait a minute, if I invest and I'm
patient, I can grow real wealth.
If I think across decades, I don't have to treat my financial life like a casino.
And so there's a non-crazy universe where it actually leads to better decisions being
made by young people because it forces them to see the value of patience.
I love that.
And you can see it paying off soon.
Maybe they could start a business, you know, with the proceeds.
Hey, the guys at Hewlett Packard started with less.
Yeah.
I'm going to sign my kids up tomorrow.
I'm going to do it.
I know we've got to wrap up, but you said when we were talking about this,
you said long-duration investments.
It reminded me of something we missed during the ad conversation.
I'm not sure if you saw it today, but Google putting out there
that they're thinking about issuing a 100-year bond,
which is just another signal that uh all may not be as well as uh is being reported on the
financial side for the ai hyperscalers specifically so in other words the um google cfo department
has figured out one um inflation is going to be higher than people think it is and two they may
not get the return on all of that you know half trillion dollars or 200 billion dollars this year
of ai spending and if their credit rating drops it'll be more expensive to issue that
the following year or five years from now right like if you were a google cfo and the market
would buy a hundred year paper wouldn't you wouldn't you vomit that out yeah it's not a
great sign though the dell position and we're thinking long term this is uh this is a humanity
scale project a technology that will shift the the tide of humanity if we need to make this
long-term investment i want to be clear like i'm very bullish on ai whether or not um the spending
in the the capital alley that we've seen over the last few years is sustainable i think is the
biggest question out there yeah i it's they're gonna need to earn a return at some point um
you know one thing one thing where i did disagree with people a couple years ago and i'm not sure
i was right i'm not sure they were wrong people were overlaying the nvidia chart over the 1990s
2000 cisco chart and saying boy these look similar and i said you know i'm not buying that comparison
because, you know, Cisco was selling to Pets.com
and, you know, other internet companies
that had negative free cashflow
where NVIDIA is selling to, you know,
Google and Amazon and Microsoft.
And, you know, listen,
if these companies waste a trillion dollars,
then they're not going out of business.
And so I said, this is completely different.
And then, you know, we get to this last year
and you start to see these, you know,
1990s style circular deals
where you know nvidia says okay well we're going to invest in um open ai and open ai says we're
going to take nvidia's investment and buy nvidia gpus and i'm thinking okay so you're buying gpus
with your own money and marking that as revenue and that does look really similar so somebody's
going to have to figure out an actual business model at some point you know and and maybe it'll
help when the market shifts more from training to inference that is cheaper but you know we're not
there yet yeah i think that i mean i feel blessed being able to uh basically run these models ragged
on the inference side for as cheap as they're offering them it's like i mean it's it's very
manageable i would pay more for it and that's i think that's the big question out there is like
you're going to have to charge for the compute the cost of the compute at least that's actually
the people are actually using because it's highly subsidized right now so marty you're right and and
can i just insert one additional thing that people should be concerned about on that so
the place where this stuff is going to the ai is really going to have an impact on people isn't
just like the vibe coding that you're talking about which i do think matters i think the ability
of non-technical people to design their own apps their own websites um is huge where people are
really going to use it is agentic ai like you talked earlier about can it send emails for you
right i talked earlier about can it you know make a hotel reservation for me or you know contact
somebody or do something and the issue with that is that is going to be the thing that will cause
people to say, yeah, I'll pay $20 a month for this or $50 a month for this, or, you know,
order my groceries for me. But you're also going to run into huge issues with potential bad
behavior. And, you know, you could have bad actors using those agents to run up credit card bills on
other people to buy things to send malicious code or send, you know, malicious photos or, you know,
things like that and so um what we're going to need to make all of that work is some sort of
security that will authenticate those ai agents and when we talk about security like right now
you know everybody's thinking okay username password the better uh actors are starting to
use biometric security right think about like face id but working at a much higher level much
much more accurate instead of one in a hundred thousand error rate one in a billion error rate
um which is what you need for that but now they're also going to have to authenticate
these ai agents because if they have access to your email your contacts your photos your text
messages your credit card oh boy you know like somebody takes control of that something bad
really can happen yeah it's almost like they need uh they need a digital identity built on an open
protocol uh that runs on private public key cryptography uh to authenticate now it's crazy
uh and i think bitcoin plays into it here bringing it back wrapping up with um a call back to the
beginning of the episode where's the value for bitcoin specifically i thought it was extremely
poetic that um the price was dumping as hard as it was last week as i was exploring how far i could
push my agent that i spun up a few weeks ago and i was literally in in the process of seeing if it
could spin up its own bitcoin wallets and then to your point about authentication um the there's a
protocol on bitcoin's lightning network called ln url off so it's basically like a sign in with
google or sign in with apple sign up with github but you sign in with the private key attached to
your to your lightning node so i was successfully able to get my agent to figure out how to spin up
a bitcoin node uh attach it to the lightning network or uh understand that it has a private
key and then sign into a website using the private key in its lightning server um and then i
topped up a balance with a little bit of bitcoin and so there's a bitcoin trading website called
ellen markets that lets you authenticate with ellen url off i was like all right send bitcoin
to this and put in a trade let me see if you can do this and it did it successfully um it worked
it worked yeah i'll i'll show you uh when we're done recording i'll show you what this thing's
doing but uh all right marty that's amazing but i gotta ask you right were you able to use it to
buy coffee because as everybody knows that is the trick of test of any currency it's not a currency
unless you can buy coffee with it i bought i bought i bought a beer with it last week in new
york at pubq but uh did you really yeah all right that counts it does so bitcoin is a currency it
is it is it's money it's money but uh the point being is like price is crashing price is what you
pay where's the value and it's like oh uh the agentic economy is emerging like bitcoin is a
good currency for that and not only is it a good currency for it but the private uh the nature of
the private public key pairs actually does set it up for interesting authentication credentials
in this agentic world interesting yeah that's great it's phenomenal you were able to do that
um and now like think about the expertise and the different ways you had to cobble that together
you know somebody who's like the the more technically advanced version of us is going
to find a way to wrap that up like in one api one you know one package where somebody says okay
here's my sign in here's my wallet and it it it does that for them right it you built it piece
by piece somebody's going to piece it together where it'll just be a download this app and it'll
work kind of thing yeah yeah it's brave new world gary thank you for your time it's been uh a
pleasure as always sir thank you i i appreciate it i was like uh filming these with you the
conversation is always entertaining for me well well like we said before we hit record we'll have
to do them more often so we'll check in uh in a couple months happy to and and by the way you
You know, for your for your viewers who are interested in deep knowledge investing, we've got a coupon for your people.
TFTC will get them 25 percent off of a deep knowledge investing subscription.
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And your analysis is very, very much appreciated by me personally, because I think it is not like contrarian for contrarian sake.
But when you see the market like Warsh, particularly misreading something, you're not afraid to call it out.
Thank you.
All right.
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