TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Ten31 Timestamp: Going Vertical

Episode Date: May 11, 2026

China's teapot refiners are bleeding, Intel is going vertical on reshoring headlines, and AI benchmark scores are leaving the charts as Trump meets with Xi this week. Three vertical charts tell the st...ory of US leverage across energy, chips, and capital markets, why the AGI buildout is driving industrial policy, and what it means for a labor market already showing cracks. No matter which scenario plays out, the path keeps leading back to the asset with no supply response. 🔗 https://bitcoinproducts.com In this episode: Why Chinese teapot refiners are getting squeezed by Hormuz How the Trump-Xi meeting was shaped by Iran war timing Intel going vertical on Apple reshoring and chip policy US portfolio inflows and the weaponization of capital markets AI benchmarks breaking the charts on scaling laws The split economy: record AI investment and broke consumers Mass layoffs at Cloudflare, Upwork, and Coinbase Why every road leads back to Bitcoin's fixed supply TIMESTAMPS: 00:00:00 - Mother's Day and monitoring the meta war 00:01:06 - Chinese teapot refiner margins collapse 00:02:11 - Three vertical charts framing the week 00:04:18 - SPR drains, input costs, and export asymmetry 00:05:15 - Trump-Xi meeting timing and leverage 00:07:26 - Hormuz closure was anticipated by US strategy 00:09:44 - Intel stock goes vertical on Apple reshoring 00:11:06 - TSMC risk and the Apple-Intel chip deal 00:12:57 - US portfolio inflows and the capital markets card 00:13:58 - Asymmetric leverage: energy, chips, and capital 00:17:13 - The choice between US decline or industrial reboot 00:19:31 - AI benchmarks break the charts on scaling laws 00:23:38 - Data center buildout and the physical economy 00:25:44 - K-shaped economy: record earnings, cracked consumer 00:29:13 - Bitcoin as the only asset with no supply response SUBSCRIBE › Newsletter (free): https://tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ › YouTube: https://youtube.com/@TFTC?sub_confirmation=1 FOLLOW US › X: https://x.com/tftc21 › Nostr: https://primal.net/tftc FOLLOW MARTY › X: https://x.com/MartyBent › Timestamp: https://www.ten31timestamp.com/ › John Arnold: https://x.com/JohnArnoldTen31 › Ten31: https://ten31.xyz TFTC #MartyBent #JohnArnold #Bitcoin #AI #Intel #China #Geopolitics #Reshoring #AGI

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Good morning, Mr. Arnold. How are we? Doing well. Great Mother's Day. Bullish and all the moms out there. Feeling good. I know Mother's Day is gone. I know you have your one day, but you know what? We're going to throw it out to all the mothers out there who listen. I know there are tens of thousands of you listening as you take care of your families. Thank you. Thank you for being a mother. Most important job in the world. Second most important job is trying to read the tea leaves of what the hell is going on in the world as we barrel towards a digital economy built on agentic commerce, a multipolar geopolitical world that seems to be fraying at the seams,
Starting point is 00:00:36 an increasingly chaotic global financial system that is backed by fiat currency that is being, I don't want to say attacked, but it's being, there's a new competitor on the block, it's called Bitcoin. And we've been doing this podcast for, I think we're officially past the point where it becomes a habit. But I think we've done, I think 21 days makes a habit. Have we had 21 episodes?
Starting point is 00:01:00 I don't think. Probably not. That'd be good for the memes, but I don't think so yet. Not yet, but we're almost there. Point being, we've been making calls on this show, which is a recap of John Arnold's 1031 timestamp newsletter. So really, John's been making calls in the newsletter that we've been recapping. I've really been hitting pretty hard and coming to fruition.
Starting point is 00:01:19 And we've seen a continuation of that, particularly with the Apple Intel news that dropped last week over the weekend. But before we get into that, I think just staying on the theme of the meta war that we've been talking about, the U.S. really trying to pull levers to get asymmetrical leverage in the geopolitical realm, particularly against China. And we have some data in from independent refiners imported oil refining margins out of China. It's not looking good for them, which would signal that the U.S. actions in the Middle East, if we believe this meta war is going on behind the scenes, are being very successful for U.S. leverage. Yeah, you know, we monitor the situation so all the moms out there can do the most important job in the world. And I think the situation monitoring has certainly, the patterns emerging from that, I think, are getting more and more clear. You know, my my usual caveats apply that nothing is ever set in stone and everything's path dependent and probabilistic and things can always go a bunch of different ways.
Starting point is 00:02:24 But, yeah, I definitely think the last six months have pointed pretty clearly in one direction on a variety of these data points. And we just keep kind of getting more and more. And, you know, I titled the the timestamp this week going vertical. And we're going to talk about, I think, three vertical charts that I saw this week, you know, in a world where we're just getting more and more of them every every day, seemingly. This is the first one, a fairly notable chart out of ZeroEdge highlighting the margins for independent oil refiners in China. These are commonly referred to as teapot refiners. They're like semi under the umbrella of government and kind of semi do the bidding of government, semi-independent. Historically, a very big buyer of Iranian oil, sanctioned Iranian oil.
Starting point is 00:03:08 And they are currently undergoing a fairly notable trend shift over the last 10 years of deeply negative margins as spiking input costs are not allowed to be passed on fully to Canadian users in China. Take all Chinese data with like a bit of a grain of salt as there's a lot of kind of uncertainty and manipulation and frankly, like, you know, manipulation both in the Chinese government, but also like from people who have an axe to grind, you know, in the West presenting the data. So it's all, you know, they grant us all in all of this. But this is a notable enough move that I thought it was definitely very meaningful and worth talking about, because, you know, if if it's directionally true, I think it points exactly to an outcome that I think you'd be naive to believe certain parties in the U.S. were not anticipating or trying to create by doing what the DOW has done in the last couple months in the Persian Gulf and throwing a major net oil importer into relative disarray. It's definitely the case that from what we can tell, China has significant petroleum reserves. I think they were probably more aggressive and more forward-looking in stocking up over the last five to 10 years relative to the US following the massive SPR drain of 2022. We did not even come
Starting point is 00:04:27 back close to the high watermark. And so we're not in a fantastic position there, but we do have the advantage of being a major net exporter of various crude products. So once again, just highlighting this kind of meaningful asymmetry, the two poles, to the extent that we want to entertain the analysis that those two poles are getting more and more opposed. Yeah. And I think now that we have the luxury of the ability to look back retrospectively on this war, and again, if we're running down this thesis and if we want to appease it, just thinking about the war in Iran starting at the end of February, many people saying, hey, why is the U.S. getting dragged into this war? seems like we're fighting on behalf of israel this is not what i want as an american citizen i was told no more middle east wars but if you look at the sort of scheduling of the the meeting that president president trump had in order with president xi of china it was originally scheduled
Starting point is 00:05:27 for late march early april and that got postponed to this week and so they're going to meet later this week and again running with this analysis maybe trump was looking at uh the the war with iran back in late february early march as a way to sort of send a message to president g before before these meetings and it looks like they're happening today as john said look at this chart it's not looking great for the refineries within china and as we can see their crude oil imports have fallen significantly and i would not be shocked if we if we come to find when the history books are written ultimately by the victors who knows that this was more calculated than people understand because you have the the meetings originally start the war postpone the meetings
Starting point is 00:06:14 let the ability for data to gather and come in and of course the week of this meeting with between president g and president trump it seems like trump's gonna have a ton of leverage yeah definitely uh probably more leverage than people expected you know six months ago And I think it's important to highlight once again, like not endorsing any of this, not actually happy about a lot of it, but just trying to objectively analyze it as clearly as possible. And I think, you know, I still see the narrative that the the CIA, Mossad, whatever nexus is kind of driving this, the deep state, as it were, and the deep state means different things, depending on, you know, whether your guy is in office or not. But in any case, the the people who think in, you know, 20, 50 year increments somehow didn't know that the first response to striking Iran would be that straightforward moves is closed, even though the the national security strategy document that was released late last year specifically listed keeping the straightforward moves open as a key priority for the for the U.S., despite the fact that it's never been closed. Like, so you're telling, you know, I think there are a lot of people out there who still want to believe that, like, the U.S. is just flabbergasted that this happened. And it's like, I mean, come on, guys. Come on. The pieces are, I think, aligning pretty well. Again, it may or may not work. There's going to be blowback and downstream issues.
Starting point is 00:07:32 But I think as an investor and analyst of the markets, as someone who's just trying to protect a portfolio, I think you do yourself a disservice by maintaining a narrative that the people who are really behind the levers of power are that stupid and lack foresight to that degree. particularly when they were very explicitly kind of signaling it, you know, six months ago. But in any case, you know, you're seeing this, the impact already on, you know, here on Chinese crude imports. You could say that's because of, you know, they're choosing to drain, you know, the SPR instead of importing, you know, much more costly oil. You could also say it's independent refiners, you know, responding to the fact that they can't actually pass on costs fully by, you know, lowering imports. But either way, China is definitely still, you know, maintaining this posture of strength. And certainly they have many, many cards to play. You saw it's not on here,
Starting point is 00:08:21 but you saw last week for the first time, China basically explicitly told refiners and various other companies to not worry about U.S. Treasury sanctions on Iranian oil. And so I think that's kind of a posturing that they're in a great position. Some of the actions that they also took, though, last week, I think point to maybe a little more hedging on that top headline, especially, you know, telling banks to deposit loans to sanction refiners. Right. So it's kind of talking out of both sides of their mouth there. And then to your point on the Trump-G meeting, you know, ahead of that, apparently, again, you take all these headlines with a grain of salt, but sources say, you know, for whatever that's worth, that China behind the scenes is, you know,
Starting point is 00:08:58 pressing Iran to wind this down, find a compromise and get Hormuz opened again, which would not suggest, you know, a desire to see this or an ability to kind of watch this go on forever, right? So, yeah, I think these are all kind of meaningful data points in that whole story. And again, I think it would behoove everyone, every investor, every kind of anyone looking at the markets to just think carefully about the constraints and incentives and goals of all the actors at play in like kind of an honest way. Completely agree. And I mean, we're just going to keep going down the list here because he's going vertical. And the next chart we have is the Intel stock chart, which you were sending screenshots of many different charts over the weekend. But this was one of them, and it's pretty astonishing how vertical this went.
Starting point is 00:09:49 But again, it confirms something that we've been talking about for some time on this show, particularly, which is you have this massive effort to re-industrialize the U.S. manufacturing base, bring the supply chains home. Obviously, the Trump administration took a stake in Intel last year, and people were wondering what they were going to do with it or how they were going to try to use that stake to influence what's going on in Intel and their chip production. And lo and behold, we had some news again, I think a week before this meeting between President Trump and President Xi very intentionally that the government is pressuring and it seems like Apple and Intel are on board saying that Apple should be using Intel chips in their products, which hasn't been the case for many decades. Apple famously uses TSMC, which is obviously a hotbed topic in the geopolitical realm because TSMC obviously is headquartered in Taiwan, which is becoming more contested as stakes continue to increase. And so just another, I think, massive chess move leading up to this negotiation with Xi by the Trump administration. And again, a confirmation of the fact that we are really not kidding, not kidding when we say we're going to reindustrialize or at least attempt to reindustrialize the U.S. economy.
Starting point is 00:11:16 Yeah, I think that's right. I remember, I don't think we're doing the show yet, but I remember writing about the newsletter. And I think we talked about it on Bitcoin Alpha, RIP, the predecessor of the show, when the initial Intel deal came out in September of the administration converting grants to equity stock popped, then you can barely even see that pop on the chart now. But I think we were talking about how this is a really kind of meaningful move and kind of opening salvo in what has now become very clearly and apparently U.S. industrial policy, right? Like it's not, you know, it was one thing like the MP materials deal in last summer or kind of these little onesie twosie things with very small companies that, you know, have strategic positions, but the people haven't really heard of like Intel is, you know, the, the, the ultimate probably like example or, you know, paragon of like American innovation in the last hundred years, you know, one of the most important tech companies and companies full stop of all time. So for the U.S. government to take the stake that they did, you know, I thought was incredibly like symbolic and meaningful. And, you know, certainly you've seen a continuation of the momentum kind of rot from that, you know, since then with that chart. And I think it's it's related to the first vertical chart insofar as it's like to the extent that you think that the U.S.
Starting point is 00:12:30 government is hyper focused on effectively like buying back or resting back hegemony and uncontested hegemony and control of its own destiny. on, you know, critical industries and supply chains, you know, the question you'd have to ask is like, well, what cards they have to play if China, you know, manufactures all of our, you know, has a chokehold over critical minerals, has a chokehold over, you know, critical defense industries and supply chains, what cards you have to play? Well, the first one is energy, right? We just talked about that. And the second one, I think, is capital markets, right? We have the deepest, most liquid, most desired capital markets in the world, you know, for now. And I think you have seen that we have, that the administration has the ability to, again, here's a great chart
Starting point is 00:13:10 indicating that, right? Despite COVID, despite money printing, despite Ukraine and freezing treasuries, despite Trump being elected again, right? Many people really, really being suspicious and perhaps rightly so of Trump and his capabilities. Another chart that has gone borderline vertical here is net portfolio inflows into the US and US markets over the last few years, right? And this is a clear, like, increase in a clear acceleration, right? The slope of that line is increasing meaningfully over the last few years. And, you know, this is another big element that I think the administration is clearly, you know, trying to weaponize. And, you know, if you flip back up one slide, I think there's this good point that Gavin Baker made, who's a really good
Starting point is 00:13:51 semis analyst, probably like the best one out there, just about relative population growth kind of needed to sustain the demand that DSM is seeing unless they want to resort to, you know, massive you know immigration into a relatively small and kind of homogenous country meanwhile you know the there's clear desire to have reshoring anyway there's clear desire to have you know what he calls american wafers regardless and we've got all this kind of latent capacity with this you know this this old man in intel who needs to you know get up off the mat and kind of you know uh do do one more fight to see if he has it in him all of those all those tailwinds like kind of point in a certain direction and to be very clear like none of this has materialized yet like
Starting point is 00:14:33 all of that chart above on intel that's multiple expansion like earnings haven't meaningfully inflected revenue's not there free cash flow hasn't really meaningfully changed it's not even totally clear like you know what chips intel will be producing for apple like is it probably not the leading edge because intel doesn't really have anything like tsm's capacity for it so you don't really know what the scope of it is how meaningful it'll be long term and there are a lot of questions that need to be answered there. But I think both of those, the verticality of both of those charts is telling you that like, there are two very critical levers that the U.S. has, and it is kind of aggressively, you know, aggressively using them, aggressively playing those two cards that it
Starting point is 00:15:10 has. And I think those charts are telling you about, we're seeing a phase shift, seeing a phase change, right? This is discontinuous, nonlinear changes that the market's trying to grapple with. And, you know, I think there's long-term reason to question whether there's mean reversion there, which we can talk about on both of those. But I think those two charts especially just like tell the story of the week and really even, you know, the last few months. Yeah. And say what you will about Trump, bull in a china shop, unorthodox, uncouth, maybe a little dealings with DJT and World Liberty Five, his family, like a little some people go as far as to say corrupt but i don't know as an american looking at all this it seems like we're giving it a college try to to actually strengthen the homeland and i know we've we've had this uh discussion about whether or not our ideological philosophical
Starting point is 00:16:05 economic belief systems align with the way in which she's going about it but how do you like i'm like i'm like we're proud to be an american the fact that we're bringing it all home you know it's like you're trying to at least again to your point nothing has manifested in terms of financial like the financial health of intel can apple and intel actually do something productive with each other can intel produce the chips that is yet to manifest but it seems like we're giving it a college try which which i'm happy to say i hear i hear toby keith getting fired up in the background i hear the song starting um no i mean i i hear you and i i I sympathize definitely to a degree. I think even more generally, like we've spent, you know, if you've, if you've looked at a lot of these dynamics over the last 10 to 20 years in the relative fragility of the United States position on a lot of key, key trends and key metrics, I think it was always just going to have to be this way, right?
Starting point is 00:16:59 Like if it was either going to just, you know, it was going to be the fall of Rome, which it may still be, right? But it was going to be just complete, you know, downtrend, like controlled demolition. Basically, the U.S. becomes like, sorry to say this to our European friends, but basically the U.S. becomes Europe over the course of the next 20 years, right? And fully seeds its industrial capacity and its, you know, relative influence and standing in the world, its relative wealth in the world to, you know, up and coming players like China. or it was going to have to be something like very aggressive like this, right? There was never going to be like a, you know, a multilateral set of, you know, carefully considered agreements and white papers that led to, you know, a careful reintegration of industry in the U.S., you know,
Starting point is 00:17:42 distributed evenly between the U.S. and Europe and different stakeholders, quote unquote, making sure we check all the ESG boxes along the way. Like that was just never going to happen. There are too many interests at play on the other side of the world. for anything like that to just to actually make it through right it was always going to be if we tried that i think it was always going to be slow played it was always going to be you know wait until trump's out of office and another guy comes in if he's still trying to do the same thing you know backpedal uh delay do as much as you can to make it difficult like if you if you wanted if
Starting point is 00:18:13 you wanted anything like this to happen ever like this is how it was going to happen tbd whether it will ultimately be net good i think for the us tbd whether it'll actually work but you know i think for a lot of analysts that have sat around saying well the u.s can't you know fight a war without china well like okay we're trying like this is this is how it would look if we were going to try right yeah it's uh fascinating and interesting to observe and uh monitor the situation it's a fun situation to monitor at the very least fun's one word for it it's uh it's interesting you know the old chinese proverb is may you live in interesting times and i we certainly do we certainly do and we're talking about hey intel apple what are you going to do now with the
Starting point is 00:18:56 emergence of of ai maybe they should just make an andy grove agent maybe they should just take everything andy grove did in his life while i didn't make no mistakes load it into an lm make no mistakes bring andy andy grove back from the dead in in robot form i mean who knows the next vertical chart is the uh the progression of these large language models particularly how they are performing on these benchmark tests by a meter and it looks like claude metha is the preview that these guys got in march at least is a is another step function order of magnitude improvement um in terms of what these loms can do yeah i mean scaling laws are holding right like i think that's what that's what this is telling you uh and this is a this is like the third chart the third big
Starting point is 00:19:46 chart of the week that was you know kind of going vertical and i think it's the most interesting because the other two like as i wrote about in the newsletter like are subject to like the ultimate you know laws of gravity of the supply response like the forces of supply and demand just like hate vertical charts like they the market wants to like force vertical charts to mean revert like when people see you know intel like new supply comes online both in terms of like actual capacity to respond to the potential for you know well above market profits new supply comes online in terms of equity issuance right like you could imagine like intel could absolutely be very economically issuing a lot of new equity against prices like this uh you know insiders
Starting point is 00:20:25 can very easily make the case for you know taking some off the table at prices like that and you know the flip side too with china like there are various market forces that you know will will tend to kind of push that that downward vertical line back to back to kind of the mean and i wrote about some of that in the piece or in the newsletter this week but this is this is a vertical chart that like you know it's one of the only vertical charts in the world that doesn't really have like an obvious market constraint to to bring it back down right there's this this looks like a one-way function kind of a one-way vertical takeoff and i think it's you know it's it's telling that the meter chart on the left right is the mythos performance
Starting point is 00:21:01 you know it's it's early but it's literally off the charts like they don't even show it because it's like so high as to be like maybe unreliable or not sure about it i'm in the chart on the right you can see kind of a less cropped version from an anthropic researcher but i think this is like you know this is really the chart that is in some way like driving the other two because this is kind of like if this continues right this is the next great game like geopolitically the thing that you have to do if you're in if you're in the seat in you know the white house the dow if you're in the seat in beijing is you have to try to be the one that owns this line and moreover like you're thinking that the other guy is also thinking that he needs to own the line
Starting point is 00:21:41 right and so that starts to make certain calculations a lot more tractable it starts to make certain decision paths like a lot more inevitable and you know the i think it's an open question but if you listen to a lot of um heavily agi pilled people who are sitting in the bay area right now, like there's a lot of view that this is a winner take all game or at the very least a winner take most game. And, you know, a six month lead is equivalent to like, you know, a 10 year lead in any other like conventional industry. And, you know, I think it'll be interesting to see if like open source and, you know, distilled models out of China can, can really kind of keep up with this, especially as, um, you know, the, the weights and the, the key data here, like
Starting point is 00:22:21 become more and more like, you know, nuclear launch codes. And, uh, you know, we're seeing more and more kind of encroachment from the government, the Department of War onto these companies and these tools. So all that is to say, like, this is, I think this really is, it tells the story of the prior two charts and why they're happening kind of the way that they are and why they're happening now. And the one, you know, constraint that you could argue that is on kind of the growth of these charts is just the physical reality of like what's needed to make more and more
Starting point is 00:22:50 gains that are kind of parabolic and vertical like this. but i think if you flip flip to the next chart or the next page like you'll see i think a few data points highlighting like what what the solution to that is going to be or like what the attempted solution to that is is going to be yeah sorry i was um reading up on fermi's paradox in the great filter because as you're explaining that it's like are we just speed running towards the great filter and do we make it through um but here's the next chart it is insane when it comes down to it like you said these charts are beginning or not only beginning but are materially affecting the the physical economy and i think will continue to for decades
Starting point is 00:23:27 as we race through or towards the great filter but uh this is isa manufacturing pmi today ai data center investment is hitting 20 billion every two weeks capital outlay estimates in the multi trillion dollars i think approaching 10 trillion dollars over the next decade uh latest i heard yeah and so i think this is this is the thing right like if you're going to say well the the constraint on that, that last vertical chart is physical reality. You know, the, how are you going, how are you going to possibly, you know, physically scale to sustain gains like that? How are you going to pay for it? And I think it's, it's very clear that whether they succeed or not, like they're going to try, right. And, you know, there's a, a, a clear push on both the private
Starting point is 00:24:09 and public side to aggressively re-industrialize and to, and to use that as an engine for what you're seeing here, you know, earnings growth to, to further support the market and to further support GDP to kind of make this all tractable. And so I think it's, to me, that's why it all ties together, right? The need to decouple from China in the administration's view, the need to support local industry champions like Intel, that's all directly related to kind of winning this race. And this would be the only shot that the US really has to kind of growing its way out of the debt, right? And reestablishing some level of legitimate industrial dominance that will be necessary to sustain you know the next hundred years of say the dollar system and the u.s military
Starting point is 00:24:50 so it's all kind of like one trade it's all kind of one chart and you know thus far like again this is tbd but um for some pretty crazy earnings growth out of q1 thus far it's insane yeah 27.7 actual growth rate for the quarter will mark the highest earnings growth rate reported by the index since q4 2021 obviously that's a bit of an anomaly because we're coming out of the economic lockdowns coming from a significantly smaller base baseline and so this is i think it's hard to judge it to q4 2021 i think there's any signal there i think uh but it makes it more impressive right because it's like q4 21 is kind of this artificially inflated number and we're like you know getting right up there despite the fact that the base was was not nearly as low right on the prior year
Starting point is 00:25:34 this time around yeah yeah fascinating stuff but then to your point like we're gonna have this insane i mean to extend your point we're gonna have this insane growth earnings gdp but then And it's going to be very discombobulating for people because you're going to see these headline numbers out of PMI, GDP growth, revenue growth. And it's going to be like, oh, everything's incredible. But at the same time, we're going to see mass layoffs, it looks like. So we have a bunch of headlines here from over the weekend and last week. Kraft Hein, CEO, pushes value. Consumers are literally running out of money.
Starting point is 00:26:07 So you have this juxtaposition of everything going on in the world of AI and the real economy seems to be suffering. I think that's the big question in the way in which the AI economy is affecting the physical world. Can it produce enough blue-collar jobs, I guess you can say, to save the American consumer? I don't know. Will the deflationary effects, the productivity gains of the technology be a tsunami that no amount of blue-collar jobs can overcome? We shall see. But we have Heinz and McDonald's basically saying consumers are hurting. At the same time, we have Cloudflare, Upwork, Bill cutting anywhere between 20% and 30% of jobs.
Starting point is 00:26:50 And you don't have to hear, but in the industry last week, Coinbase cut, I believe, 15% of their workforce. Yeah. And I think it's, you know, it's, it's a, it's an open question whether some of these are, you know, using kind of AI as air cover for just, you know, cutting blood work structures. And, you know, none of, none of the companies on here are like durably profitable and they're all, they all have decelerating growth anyway. So it's like, you know, maybe that explains a decent amount of it, but either way, like, I think you probably are seeing the early signs of it. Either way, there's this clear K shaped economy. That's, you know, only going to increase as all AGI pill people will, will tell you over the next, you know, 10 years. if they're right. And so just collectively, like, and this is before, by the way, you even get to, you know, robotics, like the physical AI, physically instantiated AI over, you know, 10 years from now, right? Like what that does to right now, the re-industrialization of America is maybe an offset to some of this. What happens when, you know, the robots take our jobs, the physical jobs that are still available, like that's an open question. And so I think it's just like all these headlines together make me just think like, this is how I concluded the timestamp
Starting point is 00:27:49 was just like, you know, okay, what if they're right? What if, what if the AGI thesis, the government's thesis of, you know, just run it hot into building out American AI dominance. Well, that's totally right. Well, what is that going to mean for the labor market, both white collar and blue collar eventually, right? What is that going to imply for the need for, as Elon Musk calls it, universal high income, right? Or universal basic income or whatever to deal with that reality. And, you know, the flip side is like, okay, what if they're wrong? You mentioned like $10 trillion of expected, you know, infrastructure outlays being financed kind of in probably increasingly creative ways, you know, what does it mean if, you know, the demand isn't
Starting point is 00:28:26 ultimately there, if the products can't be integrated in the way that it, you know, would be needed for the ROI to really make sense? What does it mean if you have, you know, too big to fail AI companies, data infrastructure companies, data center companies, not able to pay their bills, et cetera, like, okay, well, that's going to create a massive hole in the national balance sheet as well, it needs to be papered over. So kind of in either side, either direction, like you get into the the the end game conclusion that number will always go up number of dollars will always go up right and there will always be a supply response of dollars right when it's required to solve one problem or another as things get too socially volatile too geopolitically volatile
Starting point is 00:29:05 and that increasing supply of dollars either way is going to be necessary to get us to you know any version of the future that the administration wants to see and so it just kind of leaves me with like, it always comes back to Bitcoin. And that's not just like, you know, a contrivance. That's like, that's truly what we believe. It's why we believe this is in any environment over time, like the most interesting thing to be focusing on. The one asset in the world that has no conceivable supply response. And I just highly recommend people go study why that's the case and build an intuition for why that's the case. This is a screenshot from Parker Lewis and Drew Bonsall talk from last year. If you, I forget exactly what it's called. I think it's in search
Starting point is 00:29:42 of a finite monetary policy if you look that up a great 30 minute video to explain the intuition behind that but ultimately like i think this it's all just leading all roads will converge on and lead to exactly this kind of regardless of you know who in the administration is right or who in beijing is you know is right or wrong yeah never boring john we'll do this again next week of course it's a habit now enjoy your haircut enjoy your haircut sir see you guys we'll be back Thank you.

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