Unchained - Bits + Bips: How Wall Street Could Make a Killing off the Next Crypto Winter - Ep. 908

Episode Date: September 23, 2025

Markets had a flood of liquidations on Monday, and traders lost over $1.5 billion in positions. So, why are liquidations spiking? Is this a warning or a blip?  Also, could a flood of DAT issuance be setting the stage for not just a crypto winter, but a crypto “nuclear” winter? If so, hedge funds and market structure could accelerate the pain.  This week on Bits + Bips, Steven Ehrlich, Ram Ahluwalia, Austin Campbell, and Vinny Lingham talk about why mNAVs could compress and whether even MicroStrategy’s stack is more fragile than it looks.  They debate the bull case for gold (yes, even at these ATHs), how tokenized stocks and changing reporting cadences could open new insider edges, and what the U.S. macro picture looks like.  Thank you to our sponsors! Walrus: Scalable storage that lets you publish, deliver, and program any data, onchain. Xapo: Where Global Banking Meets Bitcoin Hosts: Ram Ahluwalia, CFA, CEO and Founder of Lumida Steven Ehrlich, Executive Editor at Unchained Guests: Austin Campbell, Founder and Managing Partner of Zero Knowledge Consulting Vinny Lingham, Co-founder of Praxos Capital Timestamps: 🎬 0:00 Intro 💥7:39 Why Monday’s liquidations spiked and what triggered $1.5B in losses 📊 11:18 How a shift away from quarterly reporting could change markets 🕵️ 14:16 How tokenized stocks might hand insiders a massive edge 🐻 22:05 Why Vinny is bearish right now and why Ram disagrees 🥇 24:25 Why gold might still have upside, even at record highs 📉 28:59 Whether the flood of DATs will end in brutal consolidation ⚡ 35:49 Could even MicroStrategy blow up under market stress? ✅ 48:17 What SEC clearing the path for ETFs really signals for crypto 📈 54:23 Ram’s stock picks in this environment ⚠️ 56:00 Why Austin sees a looming breakdown in the U.S. economy 😌 58:02 Why Vinny doesn’t feel the need to take big risks right now Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The next crypto winter will be a nuclear winter, because what will happen is these deaths will trade at discounts? I think it's quite phenomenal that we had the first debt, which is MSTR, and then we had a proliferation of deaths with the last three months combined with this fact craze. And now we're talking about MNAB compression and the collapse of these deaths. That was, that came quick, the left quick, welcome to crypto. That's what it is. The U.S. is running a twin deficit. The federal deficit is going to keep rising. I mean, we're going to be 2.X this year by the looks of things, getting close to the three by next year.

Tell me how we get out of this mess. I'll just hop in to say this is a long time debate between economists, but I'll just say none of this matters when Elon's automated robots kill us all. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Bits and Bips, the show that explores how crypto and macro collide one basis point at a time. I'm your host, Steve Erlich, High Scribe of the Unchained Kingdom, and I'm here, as always, with Ram Alalya, the Maister of Wealth, Leader of Lumida. Welcome.

And we're here with two very special guests. First, the returning guest, Austin Campbell, the High Scholar of Zero Knowledge Consulting. So welcome, Austin. Thanks for having, Nick. A lot of quest to have you back. And then, again, a very special guest, a true crypto-O-G, Vinnie Lingam, the Eternal Watcher of Praxis Holdings. So welcome, Vinnie. Hi, Steven.

Thanks, having me. One early bitcoiner sold 30,000 BTC too soon, missing out on over a billion dollars. Don't want to make the same mistake? With ZapoBank, eligible members can get instant cash without selling their Bitcoin. Check out Zappobank.com slash unchained for more. Built by the team behind Sway, Walrus is the global data layer for Web3. And with the launch of SEAL, developers now get permission to access controls built right into that data layer. Together, Walrus and Seal make WebFree Data private, programmable, and verifiable by default.

Learn more at walrus.xyz. A lot of our audience probably knows who are, Vinny, but just in case we have some people that aren't familiar with you. Can you just give us a minute or two backgrounds? Sure. Thanks, thanks, thanks, Senator. I'm just a long-term entrepreneur, I've been in crypto and Bitcoin. Since about 2013, I started Gift, the mobile gift card company. which was one of the first big sites to offer Bitcoin back in the days. And yeah, I sold that company to First Data and one of the earliest Bitcoin exits, so speak.

And then I'd just been building crypto companies. I was a GP at Multi-Coyne. I led the seed round for Solana, famously. And Multi-Peners, I received one of the biggest invest in Solana. And I was an advisor to Solana early days as well. I built Civic. I did one of the first big ICOs. Civic's still around. We have a big announcement and launched tomorrow. And so, yeah, I just been doing a whole bunch of things.

And I got into setting up a new hedge fund earlier this year. Actually, two years ago that we launched to the public, which is Praxas Capital in April. It's just a delta-neutral, it's a delta-neutral crypto hedge fund. And so we focus on taking the cream off the top and just delivering really good, healthy returns without taking on all the up and down risk of crypto. So I've just been an entrepreneur building in crypto and investing as the first investor in Falkoign, very early invested in Renda, and a whole bunch of. There's probably like, I mean, probably like 50 to 100 investments in crypto and crypto funds and whatnot.

So we're on the block for a while. I get a lot of hate for my sourcing takes on X sometimes. Sometimes right, sometimes wrong, as we all are. But I take it in stride, and I'm always happy to debate my point of view. But a lot of it stands from just being born in South Africa, living through apartheid, building companies along the way. And I'm just a big believer in utility over narratives. And I think there's just way too many narratives in Kirkland.

And so I always try and debunk them as much as possible. But not everybody likes a good debunking. I have to say when I first got involved in crypto, I would say 2013, 2014, actually digital identity and sort of data sovereignty was sort of my entry OIN. And I always had a soft spot for Citic. I think your SEO was what, like $30 million in three minutes? It was something crazy that you guys raised. Yeah, it was it wasn't that.

We actually extended it. we were one of those crypto companies that we didn't actually need to do an ICO. We had sold all the crypto privately to funds and high-knit with individuals. And I just felt that at the time, like we wanted more people to have ownership in the community. We wound up refunding about $11 million to funds and invest in high-knit-with individuals and making that $11 million available to the public in the ICO, which was very strange at a time. Most people would have just taken more money.

And we just, we just capped it. They said, no, we don't want to take more money. And the other thing is, Civic's still around today. And I get a lot of hate. People think, Vinny made all these money out of Civic and ran away with $32 million. And it's like absolutely not true. I've made zero money under Civic. I worked like a basic salary for a few years.

People would be surprised. Like, I've never sold or traded Civic tokens. It's all held by the company. You know, we've had Engine Capital and board members and the whole lot. And the company is still around and functioning and building because we just kept a very low burn for a long period of things. time trying to find product market fit in crypto and quite frankly we lost four years during the Biden administration i mean the amount of hate that we got and the industry got for doing you know

kyc and verification and id verification was it was impossible to operate in those four years and i voted for biden so it was like it was a really crazy time uh for us and i think that you know now we're past that i think things are changing quickly as we were noticing in you know the regulatory front But, you know, I don't want to, you know, steal the civic team's thunder. But they've been building something really cool, which we're launching tomorrow. So it's been, you know, it's been great that people like you participated early on. And we haven't forgotten about the people who've been there supporting Civic and so cheerleading for us. But equally, the message really has been, it's been hard to be an operator in crypto over the past decade.

And to still be around and functioning as a company, as a team is actually, I think, pretty great for us. And hopefully we crack identity and we crack it in a way which is unexpected. Yeah. So let's get on with the show. We have a lot to talk about today. I mean, there's new, I guess there's a new chapter in the ETI versus that debate. The Fed lowered rates, 25 bibs last week. And the market did not seem to react very well.

So we'll probably get into that first. And, and gold is shooting its way towards four. thousand dollars in ounce which uh i know we have some strong takes about but before we do that just a very quick reminder nothing that we say on the show here is meant as investment or financial advice um for additional disclosures please check out unchain dot com backslash bits and bibs and with that rham why don't we come to you to just kind of get a sense of what's going on in the market today i mean bitcoin briefly touched i think 112 000 it's up a little bit since then all the alts are are down probably some or the major alt at least are down some of five to seven percent and from

what i can tell i mean there was some big long liquidations but that was all sort of prefaced by maybe just some bullish exhaustion slash maybe a little bit of selling the news when the fed didn't cut 50 instead of 25 what are you seeing right now yeah no you're right there's uh there's been a spike in liquidations, including in Ethereum. We haven't seen this level of liquidations in quite a long time. I'll share my screen here so you can take a look at what I'm looking at here. By the way, liquidations are usually viable. So keep that in mind.

Now, this is a prototype of a tool that we're building out here at Lumida. It's not financial device, entertainment only. But if I click here and go to Ethereum, you can see that we have a spike in this green bar here. that's a spike in liquidations. So, you know, this is one of the, you know, one of several other considerations, I would say, you know, this week in markets, you have the beginning of the worst two weeks of seasonality for the year. You're also in the week after options expiration. It's usually the second week after options expiration, which is not the best week. and you also don't have any substantial buybacks from corporates.

You're also on the other side of the Fed announcement. You're not an earning season. So it's hard to find catalysts. So, you know, those are all just considerations to see. Obviously, you can see here with Ethereum, for those that are watching the screen, there was a bearish engulfing candle here. So I think what you're seeing is just markets have been cooling off. you see that with the DATs also.

If you look at the like MSTR, for example, relative to Coinbase, it's, you know, that ratio chart shows that it's pulled back to the lows. I'm actually more constructive things like micro strategy here. I think it's, you know, could be no other lows and be poised for a year and run up. You just got to navigate probably the next one or two weeks or so and maybe even sooner in terms of, which asset class you're talking about in terms of getting long. Notably, we had three months of bad non-farm payrolls like we saw last year and also the year before. And then we saw a drop in initial claims.

So there was a fraudulent initial claims in Texas. So now we're no longer in recession. It's just it's like up only, right? But I've been saying for a while there's no recession, you know, you can see in the company earnings. company earnings are solid. So that's something to consider as well. This debate about are we in recession or not continues in the background,

even as the S&P hits all-time highs. So, you know, the best economist in the world is called Mr. Markets, the S&P 500. And it's the companies within that and how they report and what they're seeing. And what we're seeing is continued backlog growth, continued spending. And the video is buying, making an investment in Intel. there's still earnings growth and there's still productivity growth. So big picture, you should still be constructive. I actually have a question for Dr. Nothingberger or Mr.

Nothingberger, if you would allow. Sure, yeah, I should be my new title, Mr. Nothingberger. Yeah, yeah, he should. I'm curious that you mentioned corporate earnings. I mean, there's talk now about reducing the quarterly earnings to just, I guess, on a semi-annual basis. That's a really interesting question. Yeah, I'd love to just kind of hear what you think,

And maybe, I mean, Austin and Vinny, too, before we get into the other stuff, because, like, I guess the pros and cons for each approach. I mean, you don't want, you don't want directors just trying to goose the books to induce quarterly earnings. But at the same point, they provide really great transparency into health of a company. So what do you guys think about that? I'll be brief on this. I think there are a couple different stakeholders. There's management of the companies. There's shareholders.

probably the primary constituents, right? So if you're management running a publicly traded company, the burdens of being public and the reporting obligations are significant. And they do distract with the day-to-day operations of a company. That's the case for reporting semi-annually. From a shareholder perspective, you want as much transparency as possible. And as an investor,

I get more opportunities during quarterly reporting because you have a greater probability of overreactions to the upside and to the downside. So as a shareholder, I prefer that. I appreciate the point on having management more focused, though, with the less distraction of a quarterly process. Yeah, I'll hop into say, having been on both sides of this previously, that I also think there's some, call it interplay between various factors here. I agree with Rahm, the frequency of reporting definitely generates headaches. And to be totally honest, having the same frequency of reporting for all companies kind of feels crazy to me. And what I mean by that is if something like, let's try to pick a really boring company,

if like ConAgra, right, or like Archer Daniels Midland went from quarterly to semi-annually, does it really damage like the information granularity we're getting? Probably not really. On the other hand, should banks be moving from quarterly to semi-annually? Perhaps not, right? Where the balance sheet is of significantly more value to see frequently there. So one, query, what kind of company is it? Two, for some of these people, how informative or, like, their quarterly and, you know,

semi-annual reports to begin with? Like, I mean, obviously the worst of this prompt ever was probably like Enron and to a lesser extent WorldCom, right? It caused us to have Sarbanes-Oxley and a bunch of reforms in that space. but you could probably get to a much better place with less frequent reporting that also requires more accuracy and granularity from managements as opposed to what we currently have. I'm just waiting for somebody to somehow put like an ongoing quarterly report on a blockchain where it just runs autonomously every day we get updated P&L numbers and all sorts of stuff. Vinnie, want to come to you, any thoughts on the reporting issue, but also love to just go back to the markets. I mean, what are you seeing? I know you want to talk about gold and how it's doing.

And what does a delta neutral type approach look like in a market like this? Sure. A lot of questions. I mean, I'll just add to your point there. I think that I'd love, and I always thought about this, I'd love to get a point where you can trade real-time financial data from companies, figure out some way to smooth things out, whether it's just sales or whatever number, I'd love to see a public company that says, hey, we're going to give a live stream of maybe it's, maybe it's daily sales, maybe it's weekly sales, but, you know, more often than, you know, quarterly reporting.

And I think that'll be very healthy for Marcus, because right now you wouldn't have to, you know, the time lag between information creates asymmetry. And I actually think that it's going to become commonplace when we have tokenized trading of stocks because one of the issue of the tokenized trading of stocks, inside of trading now because I think the KYC systems that are going to be put in place to facilitate tokenized token trading is going to be very very lax and there'll be less SEC enforcement because part of the argument is that you can take a stock like Tesla you can tokenize it and now you're opening it up to global markets because somebody in Germany could buy it, someone in Russia could buy it or wherever and yeah yeah there'll be some there'll be some you know KYC or some sort of gating stuff.

system that prevents people from certain jurisdictions from owning their stock, but those are going to be very, very easy to get by and bypass. So you'll have people buying and trading stocks from the world of the world, and there'll be no enforcement for insider trading and protection. So if someone who works at a foreign subsidiary of Tesla has word of a big contract, or I'm using Tesla, but it could be any of the Mag 7 stocks or any stock really that's been traded. If someone has insider information, they can pass it on to a friend the way they do right now. They can. make these weird trades. The ACC picks up on these right now, at least some amount of them, right? Once you start tokenizing stock, you trade them globally, and now you have a problem

because you can't really have enforcement actions against people in foreign countries for insider trading. And so I think that's where people want to go to where you can have this sort of decentralized global financial system, but the cheaters are going to come out of nowhere. And so I think that's a big concern risk that I'm happy to point out in high. How would it work? I think it's interesting idea. You're saying, hey, look, get some or articles that validate data. You go from a month end close to a weekly close or to a daily close.

Some businesses can do that, maybe retailers, for example. But like, suppose you're in the video, it's a big deal if you have an announcement that there's a $100 billion spend announcement with the Open AI that's announced this morning, for example. That's the press release. Behind the press release, there's a commercial agreement. Behind the commercial agreement, there's a letter of intent. And by the way, behind the letter of intent, there's a sales pipeline that someone's running and attaching probabilities to deal by deal. Behind that, there's like salespeople just doing stuff.

It's like, what's the standard of transparency along that spectrum? Obviously, the further upstream you go, there's more noise, there's more volatility. On the other hand, in the video, would like to control the reception together with their customer open AI and have a shared press release with what they did today. day and it's a simultaneous disclosure to the public market. So you can anonymize the data. You could create a pipeline who doesn't disclose who the deal is happening with. And you could say we have a $500 billion pipeline over three years, and you can assign percentages to individual ones, you know, and, you know, it wouldn't be

publicly disclosed. But you could predict, you could predict without knowing who it is, and then as things come to fruition. I mean, Austin's shaking today, probably disappears. I don't know what the answer is. but and maybe it doesn't work for these big, big announcements. But the point is like even a simple point of sale system where, you know, if you're just an e-commerce business and you're publicly listed,

you know, being able to stream at least on a seven-day rolling basis or a 30-year-older basis with your daily sales as opposed to, you know, 90 days afterwards doing your release, is interesting. The only thing I'm pointing out, by the way, is that people with inside information are going to make a lot of money when stocks become tokenized. That's the statement I'm willing to make. All right. So I'll say a couple of things here.

One, please be careful about making forward-looking predictive statements as a public company officer. There's a lot of rules around those things. You should probably not be publishing that data, except an official, like official forums that have been vetted, because if anybody plays games with that, that's a go-to-jail party foul for everybody involved. It's really bad. Two, as an aside, I don't think this works in the current world.

And the reason I say that is there are a lot of like data lead, lag, like accuracy type issues that have nothing to do with putting stuff on chain. It just has to do with actually having accurate data. So there's a lot of industries where this is not doable. There's actually some where it's just like legally not doable if you look at things like health care because of HIPAA. Like a real time like feed for health care where I can start geolocating that against people's information and like triangulating health events and things like that is going to end a disaster. Right. Obviously, the whole defense complex can't disclose shit. So I think this is actually a very difficult thing to do.

The other thing I will say, I don't think tokenized stocks are going to be a thing in the way that people in crypto hope, e.g., we're not going to have permissionless trading of stocks. Like, yeah, the 33, the 34 Act, like these things, our securities legislation exists for a reason. And we have a lot of experience with things like insider trading. Honestly, the insider trading is the thing I'm less worried about. If people understand the history of like non-disclosed stock ownership and then self-dealing, that's even worse than insider trading because now I'm voting as a director to pay a company of myself outsized money at the expense of the other shareholders type problems. And so I don't think anybody is going to say share registries can have like essentially voting stock

that is tokenized. Now, could you have a small percentage of the float that is non-voting that gets tokenized that is intended for like rest of world investors? Probably yes. But then you may not have the same rights. And I'm not sure that insider trading works as well if you don't have rights. But my point is just in the current regime, like I know crypto people don't like this because they want everything to be permissionless.

But like there is a reason stocks are not permissionless. They come with control rights. I agree. I fully agree. Like we were, yeah, it was, you know, Ron brought out the point about the articles. I just, I can surmise how it could be done. I don't think it's going to happen. I think it's too much of a leaky bucket.

We should shift topics. But there's one concluding thought on this is you can pay for data like real-time retail spend on Visa MasterCard networks and hedge funds like 2 Sigma pay for that to get an early read on which retailers are going to perform or underperform. You think about what stable coins mean and being able to maybe tag that to different merchant IDs, things start to get pretty interesting in terms of democratizing access to that information compliantly. There's more so sort out there. Yeah. I was just going to say, before we move on, and I have to take a quick break for ads.

I just want to tie a bell in this discussion because we were talking about markets. I mean, maybe for Rahman and Vinny just quickly, what do you think the next week looks like? this Bitcoin and market continue to go down? Are we're going to see a slight bump? What are you seeing? Especially given that this is a bit of a holiday week for. I've got a bunch of put positions in place, Bitcoin Ethereum in particular. I'm a bit bearish right now.

I mean, I was bearish basically going into the FOMC because I don't think they should have cut. And I think that cutting has signaled weakness. And I think it causes problems with, with Japan in particular. And we saw immediately what happened afterwards with the Niki. And I think, I mean, this is, again, the macro situation is a very complex one. So trying to discuss it in a short session like this doesn't make any sense.

But I think that we're going to see a lot of liquidity unwind from the system. And I think that even though we're seeing stocks go up right now, yeah, I have virtually zero stocks in my portfolio of public stocks. So I'm basically in treasury, short-term and some gold position. You're always in treasuries and gold, but come on. Sorry? You're always in treasuries and gold, right? No, no. You know, recently, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, I'm not a big fan of stocks. I think stocks are really over about it. I think the Buffett indicators, you know. No, I'll take the other side of that all day long. Yeah, I just want to point out, I recently invested in some gold, too, if people can't see, this is an Eagles championship Super Bowl ring. Nice. Just to be clear, it is not actually a real one made.

of gold, my wife would divorce me. But I think like on Bitcoin, I think if you ever gets to 107 the next week or two, you're supposed to be a buyer. If at 110, you get to be a buyer too, somewhere around those levels. Right now, it's kind of in a lukewarm position. You know, I go back to some of those negative seasonal issues we've talked about a few minutes ago. But I wouldn't be as bearish.

I think you should have a run-up through November. But you've got to be day to day on this. If you're timing the entry at that level, you've got to be day to day on it. You've got to sit on it. I can't tell you now what's going to happen Thursday, but if you tell them what happens on Wednesday, I'll give you a view. If that makes sense. Yeah. I would also hop in here and say, I think for people who are more concerned about real returns, which is probably where Vinny is, as opposed to purely nominal, or maybe you're not dollar denominated as well, I think one of the few assets in the current market that you could buy and just fire and forget for a while probably is goal.

Right, Rob, to your point of like, I don't think you need to tactically trade gold because that's one where if we continue spending this amount of money on a long enough time frame, that thing is definitely going up. I agree. Gold is, I'd say, a primary position for me right now. It's because I think it's all about protecting purchasing power. And I think that the U.S. is running a twin deficit. The federal deficit is going to keep rising. I mean, we're going to be 2.X this year by the looks of things, getting close to. three by next year.

Tell me how we get out of this mess. Like if someone can give me a coherent explanation as to how the U.S. gets out of the current mess and I'm not buying the tariff story. I'm just not buying the tariffs and I'm just not buying the tariffs and it plug the hole. I agree tariffs won't plug the hole and has its own cost, but

getting out of the debt trap is all about productivity. That's it. It's about productivity growth. AI, we're seeing it. I haven't seen this productivity growth since the late 90s. Human always succumbed in five years. By the way, the story I'm Gold is like the dat trade on China. Buying gold is what you're really doing is just front-running China

because China has shifted from buying U.S. treasuries. Yeah. To buying gold. They are the bid. India as well. India as well. So, and they're settling, they're going to start settling international trade in gold. What I take away from this is that I have to buy more of these since they're,

since they're made of gold. So, I think these things rotate. Like, you know, gold leads and then Bitcoin leads and then equities. I don't think so. I think this time might be different, Ron. I think this time gold actually just shoots up to like $1,000, $1,000, $1,000, whatever. I think gold just basically starts capturing purchasing power. Do you know, like one of my favorite gold sort of analogies or phrases would be that

the one ounce of gold today still buys what one ounce of gold bought 100 years ago, which is a finely tailored suit. So a hundred years ago, you go and buy a nice suit. It's going to cost you exactly the same as one else of gold today. Isn't that incredible? It is. And it's a great way to lead us into a brief commercial. You would have a better buy up stocks then, but let's go ahead.

Sorry? You would have better at buying real losses that compound and have earnings growth. Well, if you look at the SMP versus gold over the past, I think they show it, with 40, 50 years. Gold has outperformed it. I don't think that's right. Not if you include dividends. I'll find...

I'll let you guys try to figure this out while we take a brief break to hear from the sponsors to make the show possible. Selling your Bitcoin just to get cash? One early Bitcoiner did and missed out on over a billion dollars. With Zappo Bank, you can access up to $1 million instantly without selling a single set.

Eligible Zappo Bank members can borrow up to 40% of their Bitcoin's value. No stress. No selling. no buying back in. Use it for what matters most. Your dream home, your child's education, a getaway or that can't miss investment. With Bitcoin-backed loans, you're in control. Set your installments and repay in Bitcoin or US dollars, your choice. Enjoy competitive rates, zero fees, flexible terms, and no penalties for early repayment. And your Bitcoin stays safe, never re-hypotheated,

relent, or pooled. It's securely held until your loan is repaid. Check them out, at sapobank.com slash unchained. Meet Walrus, Web3's Data Layer, solving on-chain privacy with seal. Think of Walrus as the vault and seal as the key. Together, they give developers fast, composable access to data with encryption and permissions baked in. That means new possibilities like token-gated datasets, AI marketplaces with enforceable access rules, game logic that only reveals when it should. Even Dow governance flows where data stays private until the right most.

moment. From AI to Defi, Walrus and Seal make the data layer more powerful, practical, and secure. And yes, we use them too. Go to Walrus. Go to Walrus.com.com to learn why Web3's leading teams are building on Seal plus Walrus. Yeah, really good discussion. Let's move on. We have a couple more topics, not a lot of time to do it. So me, some dat news. I mean, I guess there was a bunch of dat news. A couple more, a couple new Salon of Dats. And then in particular, I think we had our first DAT M&A, strive buying Semler. I'm not if beleaguered is the right word, but it had been trading, the healthcare company had been trading below NAF for I think

a little while now. So I'd like to just kind of hear what you guys have to say about that. I mean, Solana, Solana Dats kind of interesting. They got out of the gate right away after the Bitcoin ones well before Ethereum, but I don't see as much excitement. I don't see as much

trading volume. So I'm curious to see what's going to happen with these couple of big boys that have really come out to play and and blown up the rest of the industry. And then, and then two, I mean, strive buying, buying similar. I don't think it's too big of a hazard to guess that we're going to see more of this. I mean, maybe, I think even Taylor was talking about how he might look to be arbitinistic in buying some, some Bitcoin treasury companies. So, Austin, why don't you lead us off?

Yeah, so a couple of things here. one, like the eternal problem of the debt is that they don't have an internal call it price stabilization mechanism like the ETFs have with the create destroy mechanism for shares. So if I'm like, think about your average like canonical debt, which is basically I'm a public equity vehicle. I'm going to go buy some assets. What I'm going to do with those assets is like throw them in the room behind ROM with the books and just leave them there. And what that means is that the resting price of that thing should be the assets inside of that less the future cash flows that they're going to be paying out to like management, custodians, expenses, et cetera, e.g., they should

trade it a discount. And your view of how big the scalping is going to be and how well they're going to do accumulating those assets should influence what that is, the problem that creates is that a lot of people who can do those things themselves are then in a position where they can make money by consuming these things in M&A, right, which is why you're going to start seeing this happen. Because if I'm not trading at a discount and I'm another debt and I can buy one that's trading at a discount, I'm essentially just monetizing that gap. That I think is the benign version. The less benign version is that I am somebody like Coinbase with my own institutional

custodian or I am like a hedge fund and I look at that thing with a large gap. and go, ah, I could just take that thing, wipe it out, sell the assets, and make the money. And so what's going to happen? It's going to happen. It's going to happen. In a downturn, the MNAV multiple is going to compress for a lot of them, and you're going to have one, maybe two big players in each space, each. Cabion on that. Like, I wrote one of my newsletters on this a while ago.

I think there's two types of dads that will survive. One is there are a few places in the world where DATs are a form of regulatory or tax arbitrage. That's not the United States, but it can be elsewhere. Totally get it there. Like tax optimization is a very real thing. You should probably do it generically speaking. One example, that's MetaPlan in January in Japan. Correct.

For our listeners. And so number two is DATs, I think that this is kind of where Vinnie's going, that have an operating model in cash flow and can consume other things, be it DATs or other cash flowing businesses. those are likely to be the one big one that remains. So if any of these stats survive, I will jokingly say over time, they start looking more like an accumulation company, right? The most familiar of which is Berkshire Hathaway, but there are others that exist in the world, like, you know, that do M&A serially to bring things that it and create value or quite frankly just have an ETF. Yeah, look, I think it's quite phenomenal that we had the first debt, which is MSTR, and then we had a proliferation of data. that's with the last three months combined with this pack craze. And now we're talking about MNAV compression and the collapse of these deaths.

I mean, that came quick, the left quick, welcome to crypto. That's what it is. Yeah, look, I agree with your observations. You know, you don't need that many debts. I think a lot of this is liquidity seeking. You know, you have insiders that can wrap these and put them into public markets. And I think the liquidity that's offered by U.S. public markets, which is significant. Now, that's not all of them.

I don't think the intentions are nefarious. I think there are a handful of very high-quality debts with great opera. Like Andrew Keyes, I think it's like a very high-quality, high-integrity individual. He's thinking about staking yield. How do you maximize that? And he's invested alongside that with his personal reputation. But I think in other cases, you really have to question like, what are the motivations? What are people really trying to do?

Is there a back-end transaction somewhere where there's liquidity? You have to keep your wits about you. I got to say the best business to be in our now is, I guess, investment banking, because you can make money, I'm selling all the placements and then you can make money. Well, the flip side to that. Speed dating and putting these companies together. You're right. The flip side to that, though, is the quote, be careful of Wall Street sells.

That's what you're saying. You know, like Wall Street says on the ducks are quacking, feed the ducks, right? That's so a lot of ducks are quacking. They're getting fed. And, you know, we've talked about before that. When you see a proliferation of new issuance, that is a contra signal. So you have to make sure that you don't top-tick the market on a stupid deal. That's what happens around this time of this is the kind of stuff that happens, right?

Vinnie, are you guys invested in that? Is that part of or even just individually? Well, so we, yeah, it's a practice capital. We, you know, we don't invest in deaths. Not yet. We're Delta Neutral Orb fund. I think that's offers some interesting arbitrage opportunities, but it's hard to unwind them, right? So you can bet one way on the multiple and you can say the compression will happen,

but it doesn't mean it unwinds and you can get hold of the, like you could, you could short a debt that's sitting at 1.3 times multiple, and he could start training a discount eventually. which is fine. You'll make, you'll make money on the spread. But, you know, it's, it's, it's, you have to, you know, I guess it's just, you guys get it. Like, unless that there's distributions, unless you can actually redeem the shares for the underlying, it's very hard to just orb to ob to ob bet as a, as a, as a fund. Yeah. You have to buy spot. You know they're going to buy spot. Just measure who's got to buy what spot. Look at it by out. Yeah, but there's, there's, there's some, I've got some liquidity concerns with what I'm seeing in the debt space. And I, I think, and I. think that what Saylor is doing is over-leveraging micro-strategy by bringing out all these additional instruments on top of MSDR, right? And so everyone, like, while there's liquidity in the market, everyone's kind of going

along with it. But, like, no one who's actually sane, and maybe there are people speaking out about it, but, like, everyone's just running with it right now, and everyone's kind of, you know, like MSDR is trading, I think I lost, so, 1.6 maybe, 1.5, 1.6 times assets, which is kind of crazy, and he stacked up all these debt instruments on top of that. If Bitcoin, like, this is like this is, this is the spicy take, which nobody wants to talk about. You know, Ram's saying like, hey, you know, Bitcoin 10's a buy, one $10 a buy, whatever.

What happens if Bitcoin drops to 50 or 60? Oh, that'll never happen. Okay. I've been around the block a long time. If Bitcoin goes down to 50 or 60, you know, micro strategy starts to look extremely vulnerable and I think at some point it could blow up. But like, yes, it's depended on Bitcoin. If Bitcoin breaks like 99, you're supposed to sell.

You're supposed to get out. No one's saying buy it 107 that'll hold on until 60. No, but no, no, but that's not how it gets communicated. That's not for a narrative in the market, you know. Everyone is like cost average into Bitcoin, buy Bitcoin no matter what. No, I was going to say, Rob, you don't say that. but a lot of people do say buy Bitcoin at any price and literally ever say. With that said, there are plenty of people who will be unwinding debts.

It's not trivial, but the thing to understand is they will not be retail investors, and it may not be good for the retail investors when they get involved with unwinding these things. Like, yeah, I guess I would put it to people this way, unless you yourself or one of them, you might not want to be in a trade with an activist hedge fund to try to unwind at that, because they've probably done a lot of stuff behind the scenes, like, oh, I don't know, shortened all the tokens already when they bought the thing to lock in a discount. And then they're going to go wage more on that company.

Like, people think I'm joking, but I used to work at 100% And I've seen, like, I'm going to remind people that they will do stuff like, we're just going to sue you until your insurance company drops your D&O insurance and then go after your board members personally just to exhaust everybody to force you out. Or you have maniacs who have done things like, and this is not an exaggeration, stolen military vessels from sovereign nations to collect on debts coming after these things. Like, they will get it done. The next crypto winter will be a nuclear winter because what will happen is these debts will trade at discounts. And I'm not saying all debts are bad, but there'll be a lot of debts that would acquire a lot of coins for a certain project.

they will trade at a massive discount. Now, the hedge funds come in, they go, okay, we can just go raise $2, $3, $4, $5 billion, whatever it is. We'll buy up the company, but we're going to short before we buy it up, and then we're going to dump it on the market and get extra leverage.

We're going to shank the price down 90%. Interesting point. So I had a chat with a person who's perhaps the most active in debt. So the way you make money in the debt strategy is by making decisions out to participate in the pipe or not. No, no, no, no.

You're talking about pasta. I want to just, that was a quick start. Here's the, here's an alternative in you. So suppose you're trading at a discount to MNAV discount. So this person is a prolific investor in debt. And I actually made the point you guys are making.

This is what he said. He said, I disagree with his response. Because I know you guys are probably going to be on my side as well. Share his thought process. He said, look, if you're training at a discount to NAV, then what you do is you sell the spot asset

that you've been accumulating and buy back your shares. because that's a value-creating mechanism. But Saylor specifically said he won't do that, by the way. Sailor won't, but the argument is that these other data... So here's the problem. When you've got a couple of percentage points of the float, the moment you start selling and people are watching those wallets, the market front runs itself.

That's why I disagree with the response. You're right. Because look, if you're... That's accumulating... Let me give me the mechanism here, okay? And I haven't announced the details yet, but I'm working on a couple of decks. So these are things that I'm thinking about very, very carefully. It's just you and me, Vinnie, and maybe like 10 or 20,000 other friends.

Yeah, it's between us, 5,000 people. No, no, no, no. I get it. Like, I mean, it'll come out very soon. But like, I wouldn't say which ones or what I'm doing exactly. But here's an example of a risk factor in a debt. I come to you, Rom, you're running your whatever X, Y, Z debt. And you're trading at a discount because.

the market's really weak right now. I get you to sign an LOI by the debt because you're trading a discount and you can't offload. At the same time, I'm busy basically selling the coin. I'm sharing the coin. So I have more negotiating leverage with you because your MNF multiple is now negative

and getting bigger and bigger. So you then like, you know what? The price you offered me yesterday, it's actually good because it's 20% or 10% more than what it is today. I'll take it. You sell it. Meanwhile, so that happens. Now I've acquired those coins, but I've actually, but now I'm going to unwind the deck and sell them into the market more and layer on my short deeper. And by the way, the way they do this is they use a combination of puts and spot shorting, right?

So with deep out the money puts, you basically need a delta hedge it down. So you don't need all those coins. You say, okay, go to an OTC desk, sell me a 30% out the money put and then negotiate the contract with you and then those puts basically go deep in the money once you start offloading the debt. These guys are going to make a killing unwining these debts. Who are these guys? H funds. H funds. Wall Street. Wall Street is going to make so much money on the way down. Are you talking about it? The next crypto meltdown will be a nuclear crypto. The streets of the world speak specific here. Like what I'm not going to say I'm not going to point out specific hedge funds, but there are guys out there who will basically short the shit out of the

crypto market the moment the the damn burst 99k whatever number you want to use it's going to cascade i don't i don't disagree with that by the way i there's look so my response to individual who's not on the show we to get them back but is that these these are pro cyclical markets so there's reflexivity on the way up and reflexivity on the way down so the person's argument's like look if you're trying to discount navv then you sell spot buy back your shares you close the gap but the point is if You can't. You can't. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Then the spot market comes undone and then your dad starts to go to zero two. It's like trying to bail water on a boat and the boat's taking out more water. It's just not going to. So I agree. That's the risk. And I think you could get, you know, things like the next GVTC, the next ETHA. It's going to happen. My prediction is there'll be one max two debt winners per. per major token and then that's it you're going to have a very few i would say like the long tail of dats with limited sponsorship and limited adoption most of those won't even have a

great doubt behind them i think the majors will like four solana bitcoin ethereum hyperliquid that's about it oh that right good luck you know although i am interested in the long tail now i mean especially since some of the bigger ones are getting saturated and i mean it's it's almost like At that point, you almost like bet on all the horses, where like at some point you just try to launch as many of these little dows as possible corner, a decent part of the market cap. And if you get the next hype, you get the next something, you're going to make a killing. And hopefully it'll offset them. But there is some, there is, there are some unique. And again, I'm looking at some of these.

There are some unique opportunities for certain tokens. So thinking about what is a debt, it's a regular. It's an arbitrage. It's a bridge between capital markets that exists in 401K. funds in, you know, the money is not sitting in crypto. It's sitting in sort of the financial markets and getting into a crypto that's only listed on crypto exchanges. And so if you can find one where it's, you know, very undervalued, widely distributed, maybe it's at all time lows. That's probably a better one than something that's an all-time highs and everyone has already

got it, right, has access to it. So there are these arbitrage opportunities. But, but Micro Strategy and Bitcoin is the bellwether for our industry. And so until the bow breaks, everything's fine. Like, I think we're going to go. One thing I'm just in defense to micro strategy. Look, they're using non-recourse debt and they've been selling bonds with converts at a 0% interest rate. So I don't think that debt capital stack is.

No, no corporate. Okay. Okay. How does micro strategy pay the interest on the debt? Look at the interest rate on the bonds. And they have 0% converts out there. No, no, not all of them. I think he's talking about the 11%.

They've got some 11%, 12% as well now. Yeah. There's some more common shares to do that. Well, that's not great. We should, you know, bring on someone that's looked at the entire MSTR debt stack and take a list. No, the argument is it's in five years from now or three years from now. So it doesn't matter right now. I'm like, no, I don't think so.

We go through a financial crisis. The general idea is correct. Like, there's this concept called a Minsky hypothesis. developed by Hymaninsky. It's an extraordinary framework. I see heads nodding, awesome of any there, but I'll lay it out briefly. So the concept is that at the beginning

of a market run, you underwrite assets to free cash flow. The unlevered free cash flow is enough to motivate a purchase. Maybe that's 8%, 12%, 14%. Then as the market gets going, that assets priced higher,

yield is lower, to get to your target return, use some leverage. Okay, so now you say, oh, I can get to my 8% boge, 12 or 14%, but I've added leverage to the system. And obviously we've seen a levering of assets, including micro strategy. And then what happens in phase three, it's comparable-based analysis. That means you say, oh, you should buy it because the public comp is 60 times earnings, therefore it's a bargain because this is at 42 earnings.

So that's actually a form of greater fool theory. You're betting that there's some marginal buyer who's a sucker that's going to to buy. And so Vinnie's point is that some of these assets are transitioning from phase two to phase three because they're kicking out the can to the future. And there's going to be some buyer in the future. The problem is that it's all reflexive. There is a buyer in the future if it keeps going up. But if it doesn't keep going up, then there's no buyer in the future. You can't presume that. Well, I was going to say you've kind of hit on the problem with Dats trading in an MNAV premium. Right. Like this is the sort of tale of the Minsky theory. Is it like if you live without

being overly mean here. If you listen to most people, like trying to explain why their DAT should trade it an MNAV premium, it's a version of the old joke in mathematics of part one, a miracle happens part two, right? It's like, guys, you know, it's like explain to me how using leverage causes your underlying asset to become more valuable over time, right? Like, you could buy more of it. I get that. That's how leverage works. Cool. Totally good. But like, say more and they just can't. So to me, part of, part of why I've been skeptical of most of the dots. And again, there are some set like, there are a handful of dats with things like operating cash flow. Okay, maybe you're going to work. But for anybody who's in the asset part that's

trading at a premium, you're in the final phase of Minsky already. And we all know how it's. I agree. It reminds me of the old joke about the economist on an island with a can of soup. And someone asked the economists, how you can get off the island. Well, assume a can opener. That's what you're saying. Assume 10x. If we get the 10x, we're going to 20x. And aren't we going to 10x? We'll look at MSTR here.

I like it. I just want to ask because I know we're going to get some questions. The new listing standards from the SEC to sort of standardize cut down the timeline from, I think, down to as little as 75 days to list new spot ETFs. How does that impact the calculus for all of this, especially. especially for some of the longer-tail assets that that maybe don't have uh, dats. And,

and I know in some cases, dats were formed strictly because of that regulatory arbitrage that I think Austin, you were talking about before. So, Austin, maybe just come to you. What are your thoughts?

Well, my thoughts are that I'm on mute. Um, you're, you're causing me pain. Is I, should I go to, Rambh,

yeah, go to ROM. I want to think about how I'm going to, I haven't talked about. I, I stumped Austin. That doesn't happen very often. I try not to be rude.

I have no views on this. All right. That's topic. Fast forward. Okay. Well, Austin seems like she has something that he wants to say. So, I mean, just for me, I mean, I think it just, like, just to buy us in a little bit of time, it kind of closes off the window to some of these.

I mean, I've seen some debts. Like, I think one was for Fed, the artificial intelligence company, like a company called Interactive Strength through a hell mirroring and try to convert them. themselves into one of those. And I don't see any interest in like real liquidity for any of those types of tokens. And I don't see much hope of any of these tokens reemerging from the dead, which is what I think a lot of those are doing. So unless you catch one of these shooting stars right on the way up at the perfect time, being an ETF or debt, I don't see a lot of hope. But Austin. But let me actually go one step like further to explain why I paused there. The debt thing fundamentally

is like a funding complex trade in general, right? Because the whole. idea is like I'm going to start with some initial amount of money, either in a shell company, through a SPAC, something like that. I'm going to layer on additional money, usually in the form of a pipe or something like that. And a lot of that is sometimes in-kind contributions from people who are doing it for tax reasons and then to be able to borrow against stuff for these. So is there an ability to get certain things rolling purely on a tax arm basis that will inevitably decay back down to zero? Like, yeah, that can totally keep happening. Like, I think you can kind of endlessly throw like ice cubes into the boiling water on increasingly dumb and weird stuff.

In that regard, the separate question is, do you have any staying power with any of these? I will jokingly give the answer that I was contemplating how to wrap my head around, which is actually the thing we should be launching is a dat that unwinds other dads. Well, no, I actually think, I think what actually wants them happening is the dat's with the highest MN of multiple will be able to gobble up the smaller ones, right? So it's basically Pac-Man for debts. And so, but, but that only happens with the debts that are highly, very capital efficient.

You know, for example, it's like Salon, right? If you're running a Salon debt and you can manage the amount of capital, you have cash on hand, amount of soul that you have, you stake the sole appropriately, you use the soul in the way that, within defy that makes sense, and you can generate an above market return on that. And then you have a sole debt that has no idea what they're doing. And they're just, maybe they're just staking bluntly and they're highly leveraged and they're borrowed, sold, instead of whatever else. And the market shanks, all of a sudden, that one's heavily undervalied and the one that's responsibly managed isn't.

And because they're more efficient with the capital, they can gobble up the smaller one. So I don't think, I mean, I think if we look at the capital markets within crypto for the highly liquid stuff, the Solana, is Ethereum, Bitcoin, et cetera. as long as the capital is managed correctly, I think you do get this arbitrage opportunity. However, however, I will say that the stuff is still priced in dollars, right? Everything trades to the dollar. And so any down draft in the prices will create pressure on these assets. I feel like that's still the MNSki problem, though, right? Like, assume a dat that trades at an MNAV premium.

And I'm just like, again, I remain skeptical than in the long run any of the dats traded at MNNN. have a premium. You should only be trading at a premium to your assets if you have cash flow generation above and beyond, right, what would be expected. And I will also remind everybody, in fact, I'm working on a paper about this, that with the ETF listing standards, we're going to have staking inside of the ETFs now. So this whole problem of, oh, my ETF is a melting ice cube and the data is not is also about to go away. And in fact, I think you're going to start seeing things like liquid staking tokens inside ETFs to get the best of both worlds. And it, suddenly becomes very hard for me to figure out how if a dad's not going to be buying

real cash flowing businesses, what the hell it's doing existing. It's a great question. So also, I would say this. I would disagree here. I would say I think you can have that's that are higher beta to the underlying spot. And if you're in a bull market, then they'll have an MNAV ratio greater than one. If you're in a bear market, would be less than one because to Vinny's point, they've got some debt outstanding. I don't think there's anything saying that they can't have a premium in a V yet. If you've got cheap debt, I agree with Austin. I think that some of these debts will have to buy operating companies.

Like, you know, if you're doing a Solana debt, you want to maybe buy a, you know, a validate or set one up or, you know, that sort of thing. So there's businesses that these debts can own to help juice the returns. It just depends on how vibrant and how stable the ecosystem is for that. for that particular crypto. So that's why I'm pretty bearish on the long tail of cryptos out there because most of them are very illiquid, very small market cap, don't have established sort of economies that are functioning there. But it's very clear Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana has it.

Yeah, specific quality. I agree with that. Yeah. So we have about a little less than five minutes. Ram, as you know, and Austin, vending used to you. I like to end by just asking everyone to share just one kind of contrarian thought or just something from this discussion that was left on the cutting board. So final thoughts. Rob, why don't we go to you first?

Yeah. So like the total return on the SMP crushes gold. That's one. So I fact check that with GROC. If you do equal weight, it's different. But why are you doing equal weight? You got to do market cap weight. All right.

Equal weight is this to settle before. Equal weight is, you know. Equal weight is not a market basket, right? But you know, you're adding to winners, trimming losers and market weight. Two is, by the way, my last call on the show, I think it was last week. And I also had reiterated six weeks ago as better mortgage. That's up 57% today, up 300% of the last few months. But that's been phenomenal.

Not financial advice, entertainment only. I think Norwegian cruise lines is quite interesting here. It's got strong EPS growth. The return on equity is 90% plus. They've got debt, but the bulk of that is. customer advances. Those are customers saying, here's my money. That's called a negative cash conversion cycle. I like, here's my money so I can pay, can I use your cruise in the future? That's what you want. So I like, I like that concept, betting on boomers, betting on travel

and leisure, betting on consumer discretionary. Boomers want to stretch more and more retiring past peak employment. And it comes favorably to their peer group in terms of valuation, like Royal Caribbean and Carnival Cruise Line. So that's my Norwegian cruise. Nice. I'll hop in here because mine actually piles on in a different direction from what Rahma is saying, which is I would tell you if we are going to have a breakdown in the economy, I don't think it's going to be driven in the traditional way that people in the United States are used to. What I mean by that is the U.S. experience, if you look at financial data in this country over the past, I don't know, 50 years more, what we've had is a growing young population relative to the elderly population or at least stable with a growing working age. population is more and more people piled into the workforce. And we are now on the reversal of the trend of that. So if we're going to start seeing sort of unwinds of these sorts of things, it's going to look more like the experience in Asia of the past few decades, not as extreme, but go look at somewhere like Japan, because as your economy essentially becomes older and older

and older over time, you start to have a total reallocation of where efforts go. And one, you would expect things like cruise lines, nursing homes, like funeral homes to outpour. perform because essentially you're going to be delivering more services to a greater population share. But two, you start to have in a place like the U.S. intergenerational warfare. And to me, if we're going to have a breakdown, my point to people is it's not going to look the way you think. So also, please, please, please stop overfitting with past models from the United States. Intergenerational warfare. I mean, that's more metaphorical than literal. People are still taking care of grandma and grandpa and the nursing home. And so do you guys? Do you guys?

see the TikTok video, the guy who's like waiting for their grandparents to pass away. That's not warfare. It is past aggressive holidays. But it's not warfare anyway. I like your thesis. The overall demographic thesis, I think is a good one. Vin, how about you? Yeah, I'll just share the, you know, Luke Roman published this one, the S&P total,

total return over the past, you know, 25 years. And gold is clearly 839% versus 547%. So there it is. You know, there you go wrong. We'll schedule a separate debate for you and Rahm to go in. No, it's fine. I mean, look, someone made a comment on X to me last week or this, yeah, last week. And I actually thought, you know, you're right.

And he was like, Vinnie, you're rich enough that you want to protect your wealth, not, you don't care about making it as much. And that's probably true. You know, I spent a long time, you know, creating wealth for myself. And now I look at purchasing power. I look at protecting assets. I look at protecting wealth. And I realize that I don't need to take the risks that other people are taking to create the wealth because I already took those risks earlier in my career and in my sort of life arc.

And so now I look at things like gold, silver, precious metals. And I think to myself that is probably a better place for me to take to at least hedge against the uncertainty I think we have in the next couple of years with massive federal budgets, overspending by the governments. And I know there's this big productivity miracle hope that's happening with AI. I think it could backfire in ways which we may not have thought about right now. And you look at the unemployment that's about to happen. You look at all these driver's cars. Like, what are these people going to do?

How are people going to make money? How are they going to survive? And by the way, with all this productivity growth that we're forecasting and seeing, there is zero will for the government to cut spending. So they're spending more and more money As productive as we get, we can't get the productivity cycle up so high that we don't have to worry about not increasing spending

and they're doing it. So if someone can explain to me how this magicity comes together and we don't have a sovereign debt crisis in the next couple of years. We have time to go back and forth, Stephen, or not? No, unfortunately, we don't. My thought is that as much as we can over index some productivity, I think for some people, myself being one of those, I think protecting the sort of purchasing power of our wealth is the most important.

Let me brief. Federal deficits correspond to corporate earnings. Federal cost cutting? No, no, no, no. Federal depend to the stock market as well. So if the stock market collapses, there's less taxes to pay because people aren't recognizing their gains. So we're one stock market collapse away from a much bigger way. Why are we going to collapse? Why are we in? Federal deficits are bullish? I mean, I don't like them. I'd rather have a more moderate, constrained, restrained federal government spending that's sustainable. I would prefer that.

But if you're going to goose it, you know, Mark would keep going up until the second derivative on spending turns. I'll just hop in to say this is a long time debate between economists and we're not going to settle in the next 30 seconds. So we'll spare Steve and I'll just say

none of this matters when Elon's automated robots kill us all anyway. Thank you for that often. And Vinny, thanks. for joining. Ram, as always, Benny We'll have you back. That's great. Thank everybody for watching and listening, and we'll be back next week with another episode of Bits and Bepps.

See you guys.