DEFI

“The fertility rate conversation is a great example of where people take their priors and explain the fertility rate based on what they already thought. Jennifer Schuber's basic conclusion is the thing that's causing the decline of fertility rate is a lack of gender equality, while conservatives will say it is feminism and the entry of women into the workplace. Truth is, no one knows. And so it's a really dangerous subject because it is one of those things that we don't know yet.”

“This is good because you have the infrastructure there, you have the knowledge there, people there, and now you have again another foreign car company that is willing to invest there and put this back to motion, back to track, so this is good. This is great. This is very welcome, but again, the levels in the details because the actual economic impact for the Spanish society is very different, whether you localize or not, for example, your value change, whether you employ or not local labor force, so this is significant.”

“Buying altcoins is a very high risk, high reward scenario, and you gotta make sure that you're looking at the right protocols that have good revenue and strong tokenomics so that you don't end up getting rugged. As we have seen in the past with crypto, even the giants can fall. What we're seeing right now is definitely shaky ground.”

“The fertility rate conversation is a great example of where people take their priors and explain the fertility rate based on what they already thought. Jennifer Schuber's basic conclusion is the thing that's causing the decline of fertility rate is a lack of gender equality, while conservatives will say it is feminism and the entry of women into the workplace. Truth is, no one knows. And so it's a really dangerous subject because it is one of those things that we don't know yet.”

“The interesting thing though is with AI, everything can be spoofed, everything can be faked. So everybody's looking at how do you prove that something is AI? And what's interesting is proof of work actually puts a value behind data. So there is a way of using SHA-256 and old miners to put value on content. And therefore, it's just not like one-off cheap. It's the equivalent of if it costs you a million dollars every time to send an email, then you're not going to get any spam.”

“Term 2.0 is trending imperial as the US flexes financial and military muscle across the globe, from the Strait of Hormuz to the Panama Canal. While ceasefire headlines whipsaw market sentiment, Bitcoin is quietly decoupling from tech stocks and showing resilience against a backdrop of great power competition with China.”

“It's by the way there's one company out there which does that perfectly people just don't know it or know it they know the company but like not the business model because they're not public which is Red Bull uh if you look at Red Bull yeah it's a consumer product um but they own various sport events. Um, it's not public, but my guess is uneducated guess is that at least some of them are really profitable or at least value a creative like the Red Bull Formula 1 team. Um, but the vast majority of the brand value of the Red Bull Formula 1 team is going to Red Bull. So, they make money or they build up value by owning it and they have this massive translation into their consumer product. And that's very simple or simplified said like what we are aspired to become.”

“Fatherhood is the last male institution. You don't have institutions anymore that are kind of just like male. It transforms us from the inside out. It's just existentially obvious to you that there are lives in the world that are just unambiguously more important than your own and for whom you would do anything. You would give your life for them. It changes men in this massively kind of positive way.”

“Dads should actually be able to take time off and should take time off with their kids, not because they can do what mums do, nor in support of gender equality, but because dads are awesome, and kids are awesome, and kids do really well with their dads around them. I don't want to be the deputy, the malfunctioning mom, the kind of, 'oh, if only you could be a mom.' I want a pro-dad argument rather than a gender equality argument for fathering.”

“For too long, the deficit framing around this issue of young men... classic example, of course, would be toxic masculinity. I'm just like, let's start with not making you toxic. There's just this way of talking about young men that really suggests that they're the problem, rather than looking at the kind of systems around them. I do think we have to set the table in a way that allows us to do the work, the cultural stuff both before and after.”

“We have to ask ourselves if we should start thinking more carefully about constraints. I think one thing that we conflate a lot in crypto is decentralization and permissionlessness, because they're not the same thing. Even just talking about permissionlessness, people usually assume you mean KYC, but a protocol can restrict what kinds of assets or collateral it will allow, or it can impose rate limits. If we even want to survive as an industry and a technology, we need to really seriously think about the trade-offs between crypto's core values and keeping users safe.”

“If you check out the monster of DeFi, Aave, things are headed downhill. So when this scenario started, it was about $25 billion total value locked, and it's sitting now at about $14 billion, right? So there is plenty of room to the downside on Aave.”

“Kelp Dow is a is a staking protocol. So you put in ETH, it gets staked, you get an LST or a liquid staking token back that earns you yield. But what happened over the weekend was that Kelp Dow's bridge was compromised. So there was an exploit there that enabled the hacker to mint, call it roughly an extra 20 percent of RS ETH.”

“Micro strategies, STRC or stretch instrument as they call it is the most traded, most liquid and largest preferred stock ever in history. Preferred stocks are kind of a somewhat niche area of the market. But interestingly, and many people don't know this, stretch's IPO was actually the largest IPO of 2025, full stop. Larger than circle, larger than any other asset IPO. It has really been catching on now.”

“I don't think it matters at all, to be honest. And as for him getting it, I've seen other investment portfolios similar very much as spray and pray. You don't necessarily get it. But listen, one of these will work out. So I'll just invest in, you know, the top 30 or whatever names happen to take my fancy. It's that's a risk portfolio, and that's often how they work.”

“This is exactly what I'm looking for to know when it's time to back up the truck on altcoins. And if I'm comparing these two cycles to each other in a way that rhymes, this actually looks like it could play out some time around August or September of 2026. Even though there's turbulence within DeFi and altcoins, I don't think that DeFi is dead.”

“What's happening to young men is masculinity vertigo, in which on Monday, what you're being told is, the problem is that you're not masculine enough. You need to work out more, be more dominant, man up. The next day, what you're being told is, you're too masculine. You need to cry more and eat more salad, and go to therapy more, and find your feminine side. Then on Wednesday, you're back to the other one. It's just become this very contested and difficult thing right now.”

“For too long, the deficit framing around this issue of young men... classic example, of course, would be toxic masculinity. I'm just like, let's start with not making you toxic. There's just this way of talking about young men that really suggests that they're the problem, rather than looking at the kind of systems around them. I do think we have to set the table in a way that allows us to do the work, the cultural stuff both before and after.”

“I think there's a lot of leverage in the market, but also there's foreign money coming in, perhaps not so much into the treasury market. Oh yeah, there is as well. Not on the private side, certainly because the rest of the world is kind of messed up as well. But there's a lot of leverage.”

“Activists are always psychologically reluctant to succeed because there's something about your identity and your purpose that is tied up to your own failure. If you succeed, you have to start saying, great, we've done it. Now I have to find some new identity. If you've actually wrapped up your identity in the sense that the whole of society is stacked against men, and then suddenly people do start caring about men, you've either got to say, oh, that's not true anymore, or say, no, no, that can't be true.”

“If I've deposited a bunch of collateral and borrowed, let's say I deposit $200 million worth of collateral and borrow $100 million, my net exposure for the protocol is $100 million. But if I put $200 million on and borrow $190, now my net exposure is only $10 million. So what a lot of people did was to risk mitigate, they go and borrow any asset they can.”

“The message I think most young men need is 'we need you.' Society still needs you, the tribe still needs you, your family still needs you, your kids, for the love of God, definitely still need you. We want you because you're a man, not despite being a man. We see you being a man as a feature, not a bug. I just don't think enough men have heard that. Not as a volunteer, but as a man.”

“I think I have to be honest that I felt like banging my head against the brick wall with Democrats until November 2024... And then there was an election, and then my inbox started filling up with Democrats. Because they saw how much they'd fallen behind with men, especially young men. I mean, they can read a poll. And there's no question that one of the things that happened in the 24 election was that Democrats lost men, and especially young men, in a very, very big way.”

“Bilateral goods trade exceeded 55 billion last year, up nearly 10 percent, and yet the trade deficit keeps widening. China now accounts for a staggering 74 percent of Spain's total trade gap. So what is Sánchez actually up to? Is this a sophisticated bid for strategic autonomy, a bid for a Spanish brand of leverage between Washington and Beijing? Or is it, as one analyst put it, an increasingly one-sided and unbalanced pilgrimage?”

“It's not even about smart contract exploits anymore; you can have a million audits and that wasn't the cause of any of these recent attacks. Now it's about all the dependencies around oracles and bridges and collateral and multi-sig configurations or operational security practices. It sort of feels like you're just playing whack-a-mole. North Korea and other illicit actors are just going to keep coming up with new ways, probably greatly aided by AI, to exploit vulnerabilities in the systems surrounding the core code.”

“Taking this open European vocal, European stance against Trump, I think the Sánchez government hopes that it could mobilize domestic support for this government, and this could mobilize support for the incoming election. We are still having local elections, regional elections in Andalusia next month, which is the most populated region in Spain. We are having general election next year. Also, the fact that Trump is creating this domestic opportunity for Sánchez, and he is also taking advantage of that.”

“China has excess capacity in solar panels and also makes pretty good batteries that are fairly cheap. Maybe we can think about creatively what China could bring to the table in terms of solving some of those issues and what the governance strategies would be for extracting some kind of learning out of that investment if it were to come.”

“I think we always wanted to get here to have something like quality assets that people can simply hold on chain, self-custody, or, you know, borrow land loop, which is like kind of like a simple way of tranching it, you know, getting the senior trash or the junior trash by lending or by looping it.”

“So, so I started my career in biotech. Um I was like uh 20 didn't know a lot of life but sometimes you need to be at the right place at the right time and need to be bolded. So I uh I talked two of my professors into starting a biotech company with me uh which became very big. I didn't check the market cap meaning I sold years ago but it's called Alnum. We pioneered RNI technology. It's roundabout like people can look it up alny as a ticket but again I'm sold years ago but like I think it's a $50 billion company now like it became wildly successful it's a very iconic biotech company where I have actually and actually that is maybe as an anecdote so I'm doing biotech which makes me very old like since 27 years again I started early and since I'm in biotech I was quizzing all of the people I met and because of the success of a lot of cool people early and I was like why the hell are we only focusing on nichy diseases which originally was the mantra of biotech for 20 years.”

“Unless the Department of Justice plans are going after all the crooks in Congress currently inside of trading, this is simply skewed justice. There is no justice when guys like this get the book thrown at them, yet members are illegally profiting every day.”

“Fatherhood is the last male institution. You don't have institutions anymore that are kind of just like male. It transforms us from the inside out. It's just existentially obvious to you that there are lives in the world that are just unambiguously more important than your own and for whom you would do anything. You would give your life for them. It changes men in this massively kind of positive way.”

“You do have some issuers testing public tokens on public blockchains, but most of it is going on permission blockchains. And that's, to be honest, where it's going to be. Not because I think it should be. I don't think it should be. I think public blockchains are a better marketplace. But because it's what institutions will be comfortable with, it's because it's what their lawyers will let them do and their compliance compartments will sign off on.”

“The Bitcoin move is curious and does have many of us, myself included, scratching our heads with a little bit of tentative optimism. It starts to feel like there's spot accumulation. It's tentative. This is not the frothy risk asset narrative that we're accustomed to seeing in Bitcoin, and it could have to do with the hedge against crazy from those that actually take time to understand Bitcoin. For those that do so tend to buy the hedge against crazy narrative, I count myself in that particular bucket, which is why it tends to outperform when things are crazy.”

“What I did last bear market was wait for the flush out. And obviously I was interested in buying Bitcoin through this entire range... but the key here is that I was only interested in buying Bitcoin's spot during that initial phase of the bear market. When to buy altcoins is a very delicate situation. And what I did is wait for a bullish divergence to happen on the momentum waves.”

“I think the mythos risk is very overlooked. Going back to what you were saying, I totally agree with you that this is going to hurt the DeFi story. It's not going to hurt the tokenization story at all, because to be honest, that's not really on DeFi. You do have some issuers testing public tokens on public blockchains, but most of it is going on permission blockchains.”

“Dads should actually be able to take time off and should take time off with their kids, not because they can do what mums do, nor in support of gender equality, but because dads are awesome, and kids are awesome, and kids do really well with their dads around them. I don't want to be the deputy, the malfunctioning mom, the kind of, 'oh, if only you could be a mom.' I want a pro-dad argument rather than a gender equality argument for fathering.”

“Think about it like Formula 1. When the engineers of the Formula 1 team designed the Formula 1 car, that's at the forefront of scientific innovation and technology, that Formula 1 car is never going to get mass-produced. But what the engineers learn in developing that form car in some form of a derivative is going to trickle down into the world car production a few years down the line. So the anti-blockage system that you have in almost every car today actually comes from motor racing. very similarly for us would help Christian Golam, a Greek swimmer that broke the first record last year as an enhanced athlete. What helps him break a world record is way too complicated for an average Joe like myself. But the work that we do with Christian and all of the other athletes is constantly improving our product offering and our prescription guidelines for the people at home.”

“Rare earth industrial policy: The Sierra Verde acquisition and Indonesia partnership. US-China leverage game: Who blinks first on gas prices and supply chain disruption.”

“Activists are always psychologically reluctant to succeed because there's something about your identity and your purpose that is tied up to your own failure. If you succeed, you have to start saying, great, we've done it. Now I have to find some new identity. If you've actually wrapped up your identity in the sense that the whole of society is stacked against men, and then suddenly people do start caring about men, you've either got to say, oh, that's not true anymore, or say, no, no, that can't be true.”

“Activists are always psychologically reluctant to succeed because there's something about your identity and your purpose that is tied up to your own failure. If you succeed, you have to start saying, great, we've done it. Now I have to find some new identity. If you've actually wrapped up your identity in the sense that the whole of society is stacked against men, and then suddenly people do start caring about men, you've either got to say, oh, that's not true anymore, or say, no, no, that can't be true.”

“For the average person in Guatemala, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, they're not really thinking about who's going to freeze my tether, right? They're thinking about, I don't want my government to have access to my bank account, and I don't understand these other assets that are not dollars. They're way too volatile. And other people have gotten scammed. So this USDT thing seems pretty safe. Everybody uses it. And I think the excitement in the Western world is because they are seeing stable coins as a way of basically vampire attacking the Euro dollar market.”

“The 30-day correlation here between the dollar and Bitcoin is now negative .9. It's the most negative reading since September 2022. A below zero reading indicates inverse relationship. So that means when the dollar weakens, Bitcoin gains and vice versa.”

“On Monday at Tsinghua University, he delivered a speech defending multilateralism, calling the EU trade deficit unsustainable and to the astonishment of some, describing Spain as a country that recognizes China is rebuilding its greatness and is destined to play a vital role in the future. He called on Beijing to do more to push the adherents to international law and to end conflicts in Lebanon, Iran, Gaza, and Ukraine, especially now that the United States has decided to withdraw from many of these fronts, he said.”

“We've now been in this range for 78 days, trapped in this hellscape of, I don't want to say boring price action, because there is a decent amount of difference here. I mean, you're looking at a $12,000 swing. If you're on 47X leverage, this range is very, very exciting.”

“Our view at LeDin was always that if we wanted to get the cheapest cost of capital to disperse to clients in Bitcoin-backed loans, we had to go the regulated route. The regulated entities like pension funds, insurance companies, banks, etc., they are the ones that historically have the cheapest cost of capital, which makes the most sense for you to borrow from and lend to other people. So an example of that is our ABS bond, which is the first Bitcoin ABS bond rated by S&P.”

“One is there's been a 40% increase since 2024 in the extent to which the American public has friendly, a sort of friendly disposition towards China. It's now at around 53%. I mean, this is an extraordinary figure.”

“You want to do it well, you want to inform people about the token, what does it do, what are the risks, what is the yield coming from, be as transparent as possible, try to curate as much as possible. Because that's how you build a user base that appreciates those things, that invites other people, trusts you, etc.”

“Bitcoin thrives in chaos. If you take a look, it outperforms in almost every instance of global uncertainty. But at the moment, we also have a bit of a crisis in DeFi and on the crypto side, leading many to believe that maybe Bitcoin is just the safer option at the moment.”

“Nobody is more confused than America's allies about what the United States wants. And this is especially the case when it comes to China. I've sat in a lot of meetings recently where Europeans have said, what does the United States expect of us in our relationship with China?”

“when you look at the research that's been done on an anonymized basis, it roughly half of Olympian athletes admit to using banned substances and only 1% gets caught. So you ask yourself why is that the case? The reason for that is because athletes when they choose to cheat, they take newly developed drugs that are not well researched. They take additional drugs on top of that to hide what they're taking in the first place. That's how they're able to circumvent the testing. And that is completely unnecessary. Because it puts their health massively at risk. And why is that unnecessary? Because all of the substances that would make you perform better, recover quicker, and protect yourself better from injuries are actually substances that are FDA regulated and can be prescribed and are being prescribed by doctors to other patients every single day. And so we're saying, let's not be naive, pretend that the cheating is not happening. Let's take it out of the shadows.”

“Where is the term medicine coming from? Where's the term doctor coming from? It comes from a report which was commissioned in the 1920s by the US government. Uh which was great back then because before there was no definition. Everybody could sell this whole thing and like yeah. So that report said hey if you want to call yourself a doctor you need to have a minimum of a dedication. if uh they call the disease a negative deviation from the norm uh and then a medication which has a minim minimum efficacy yeah and where you know kind of what are the side effects in order to bring back the negative deviation of the norm to the norm by the way back then I don't want to criticize it groundbreaking because it improved the medical system it's actually what the western medical system is built on but like the tricky thing was that negative deviation from the norm it's very obvious for cancer.”

“The two problems with private credit are illiquidity and lack of transparency. Stretch is liquid and transparent. And so I think you're going to see people typically look at preferred stocks and they're like, well, it's this tiny bit of the market and like the TAM is not really going to grow. But I think it's going to grow massively because you're going to see this huge wave of capital moving out of private credit.”

“I was talking to everyone at BrainPoint that this is going to be really good and big in Solana. Because we always wanted this and we finally have it. And I think although we live in this permissionless 24-7 world, it's still fine and some people still lose money and things break.”

“I think I have to be honest that I felt like banging my head against the brick wall with Democrats until November 2024... And then there was an election, and then my inbox started filling up with Democrats. Because they saw how much they'd fallen behind with men, especially young men. I mean, they can read a poll. And there's no question that one of the things that happened in the 24 election was that Democrats lost men, and especially young men, in a very, very big way.”

“As you can tell from the shirt that I'm wearing, we're partying right now, but that doesn't leave a potential for one more nasty flushout, just like that final flushout that we experienced when FTX went under in the depths of the bear market. This candle, when FTX kicked off, measures about 25% from its local high to low on that weekly timeframe.”

“I think I have to be honest that I felt like banging my head against the brick wall with Democrats until November 2024... And then there was an election, and then my inbox started filling up with Democrats. Because they saw how much they'd fallen behind with men, especially young men. I mean, they can read a poll. And there's no question that one of the things that happened in the 24 election was that Democrats lost men, and especially young men, in a very, very big way.”

“JPMorgan Research has pointed out that yield-bearing stables are growing significantly faster than traditional stables. I would call it 15X faster right now, though. Noting for everybody, coming off a small denominator is much easier than coming off a large denominator. 15X size from current non-yield-bearing stable coins would be a giant amount of money.”

“If I've deposited a bunch of collateral and borrowed, let's say I deposit $200 million worth of collateral and borrow $100 million, my net exposure for the protocol is $100 million. But if I put $200 million on and borrow $190, now my net exposure is only $10 million. So what a lot of people did was to risk mitigate, they go and borrow any asset they can.”

“There's currently two proposals up. So one would be that there's a uniform haircut of RSI across all, effectively all instances of Aave. And this is something like 20% haircut on the asset, if you apply it evenly. And then the other one is that because the reasoning is that because the exploit was caused by a bridge, you would only haircut the L2.”

“It comes at a moment when Spain has emerged almost improbably as the most outspoken voice in all of Europe, challenging the direction of American foreign policy. Just weeks before this trip, Spain took the extraordinary step of closing its airspace to US military aircraft involved in the war in Iran and denied Washington the use of the Rota and Morón military bases in southern Spain. Trump threatened to cut off trade with Madrid. Secretary of State Rubio accused Spanish leaders of bragging about it.”

“What's happening to young men is masculinity vertigo, in which on Monday, what you're being told is, the problem is that you're not masculine enough. You need to work out more, be more dominant, man up. The next day, what you're being told is, you're too masculine. You need to cry more and eat more salad, and go to therapy more, and find your feminine side. Then on Wednesday, you're back to the other one. It's just become this very contested and difficult thing right now.”

“Kelp Dow is a is a staking protocol. So you put in ETH, it gets staked, you get an LST or a liquid staking token back that earns you yield. But what happened over the weekend was that Kelp Dow's bridge was compromised. So there was an exploit there that enabled the hacker to mint, call it roughly an extra 20 percent of RS ETH.”

“There was a statement that we were going to be disinvesting in this region and reinvesting more in this region. But essentially, there was very little in terms of specifics about where and how we were actually going to disinvest in order to focus on the regions that really matter to us.”

“When we identified a user trading on classified government info, we referred the matter to the DOJ and cooperated with their investigation. PolyMarket snitched on him. They have a data partnership with the Dow Jones, also kind of connected to the Wall Street Journal.”

“It is true that Spain has some comparative advantages when it comes for promoting cooperation with Latin America, because the Spanish diplomatic service, Spanish companies, Spanish academia, we all have very intense networks there. We have a lot of knowledge of what's going on on the ground there. And so it's just natural that, for example, Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs has a dialogue. They have concluencies on Latin America regularly. They talk about these things because they have a common interest there.”

“I think we can characterize this strategy mainly by two things. One is pragmatism. He's been very, very pragmatic in his approach to China. He avoids this kind of idealistic or wishful thinking narratives about China, the global order. He thinks that China is a highly successful and powerful authoritarian system with a model of state capitalism. This creates clear challenges, of course, the US was talking about that, but it also generates significant opportunities. Not only in socioeconomic terms, but also when we talk about addressing the main challenges for the international community. It's like climate change, governance and proliferations.”

“DeFi giant Aave is bleeding TVL right now. When the DeFiasko with KelpDao kicked off, Aave's TVL was sitting right at around $26 billion. As of the time of this recording, we're at $14 billion, a major, major pullback for TVL in Crypto's biggest lending protocol. So yeah... that doesn't leave a potential for one more nasty flushout.”

“NVIDIA on a tear... It is up 6% in a very short amount of time there. We bounced off the 200, bounced off this trend line from 2024, and now that thing is moving up, but coming up into a previous all-time high.”

“If we prioritize the Indo-Pacific and deterrence in the Indo-Pacific, even if we're going to come at it as the NDS uses the language of not wanting to humiliate China, not wanting to dominate China, but instead back up our position and our interests in the regions with a credible deterrence, that's going to take a hefty amount of resourcing and that's going to mean that we're going to need our allies and other theaters in particular to take on more of the burden.”

“The belief that transactions are, call it optimistically correct, has to be discarded in this environment. You're clearly getting enough hacks that all large transactions should probably be viewed with some degree of skepticism. And I don't know if that means delays with drawing for protocols, choke points on bridges, needing significantly larger shares of votes to move assets.”

“Morgan Stanley is effectively creating something called the stablecoin reserves portfolio, where they're offering to custody, manage treasury, redemptions and issuance of stablecoins for companies. So think of it as if USDC or USDT gives up all of the back end of doing it, or more specifically, probably if someone wants to launch a new stablecoin, you now have Morgan Stanley behind you handling everything.”

“The Admiral, who went on the floor of Congress and said that Bitcoin is a national security tool, that the United States military is running a Bitcoin node, monitoring the situation, so to speak, and that it's not a matter of holding the asset or investing in the asset, but that they're looking at it for a way to secure networks and use proof of work. I thought that was just an astounding, astounding clip.”

“Strategy's STRK preferred stock and the risks building in DeFi derivatives. Market positioning and the taco trade. US vs China leverage thresholds.”

“I think the level that a lot of people are looking at from a technical perspective and especially some of the smartest technical investors I follow, they are looking for a weekly close over 75, which we have not yet had in, I believe since the February 6th down or drop. It does look like we're going to get that this weekend, at least as of right now. So I think that is the breakout signal that he was looking for in particular.”

“Institutional pressure for quantum resistance by 2029 echoing the 2016 block size wars. NIST criticism and 2016 parallels. Quantum computing institutional panel.”

“If we're saying it's nation state actors with their tremendous resources against individual protocols, the protocols will lose with certainty. However, you can still flip that security framework on its head if we make it a chain of things that have to fail with a redundant response across the ecosystem. Because the Lazarus Group, breaking a single protocol is relatively easy, but breaking eight protocols simultaneously, all of which work differently, becomes so complex.”

“The message I think most young men need is 'we need you.' Society still needs you, the tribe still needs you, your family still needs you, your kids, for the love of God, definitely still need you. We want you because you're a man, not despite being a man. We see you being a man as a feature, not a bug. I just don't think enough men have heard that. Not as a volunteer, but as a man.”

“Van Dyke profited 400K by trading various outcomes related to Venezuela after learning of the operation because of his role as a US. Army soldier. The FBI will continue to investigate threats to our nation's security, especially from those entrusted to safeguard sensitive classified information and military operations.”

“Dads should actually be able to take time off and should take time off with their kids, not because they can do what mums do, nor in support of gender equality, but because dads are awesome, and kids are awesome, and kids do really well with their dads around them. I don't want to be the deputy, the malfunctioning mom, the kind of, 'oh, if only you could be a mom.' I want a pro-dad argument rather than a gender equality argument for fathering.”

“There's currently two proposals up. So one would be that there's a uniform haircut of RSI across all, effectively all instances of Aave. And this is something like 20% haircut on the asset, if you apply it evenly. And then the other one is that because the reasoning is that because the exploit was caused by a bridge, you would only haircut the L2.”

“The challenge, and I think what investors realized during this exploit, is that DeFi has no bankruptcy rails. There's no court. There's no recovery. Everybody that got out of Aave first took the full money out. Everybody that's still at Aave is waiting to see how much of the losses are going to get pinned to them. And so if you're an institutional investor and you can estimate the potential of a loss, but you cannot estimate how those losses are going to be attributed, you cannot determine your exposure.”

“For too long, the deficit framing around this issue of young men... classic example, of course, would be toxic masculinity. I'm just like, let's start with not making you toxic. There's just this way of talking about young men that really suggests that they're the problem, rather than looking at the kind of systems around them. I do think we have to set the table in a way that allows us to do the work, the cultural stuff both before and after.”

“I think accountability is really important and we can't have that unless we're allowed to ask questions. And so we shouldn't be silencing each other every time something like this happens. What about the victims, right? They deserve to know what happened and why and what these teams are going to do about it, what the industry is going to do about it to make sure that it doesn't happen again. We can't just give thoughts and prayers; we need to improve things and ensure accountability for those who lose funds.”

“To get to the question, what the United States wants, the United States does not know what it wants. We're in a moment right now where to state the obvious, the old consensus has come apart. I think that memo first landed with Trump's election in 2016.”

“the 50year-old teacher in Iowa who just wants to do more with his grandchildren or whatever. He's not on Twitter. He's not going to go on a out of his own impetus. And most likely he's also not going to get reached with the marketing the classical the platforms are doing at the moment but he's going to most likely watch one of the biggest sports events of the year and when he's then learning about it he's like oh wow there is real science behind and that's why our clinical study we're doing in Abu Dhabi beyond that it's like gold standard for the uh for the athletes what they're getting in terms of uh medical service I think it's very important that be very scientific and everything we're going to do in the future and everything we're going to recommend uh is going to be backed up by science and with that sort of combination approach of like this massive global sports event which going to reach again hopefully millions and millions of people.”

“The fertility rate conversation is a great example of where people take their priors and explain the fertility rate based on what they already thought. Jennifer Schuber's basic conclusion is the thing that's causing the decline of fertility rate is a lack of gender equality, while conservatives will say it is feminism and the entry of women into the workplace. Truth is, no one knows. And so it's a really dangerous subject because it is one of those things that we don't know yet.”

“I do agree that the default setup that's out of the box for people to use is probably not great, and I think it's something like 40 percent of people do tend to use that setup. So they're saying it's mainly the fault of KelpDow for not modifying that and going further. But I think there's some truth in that. Obviously, there's 60 percent of people, including Euler and all these other projects, that decided to use more DVNs.”

“What's happening to young men is masculinity vertigo, in which on Monday, what you're being told is, the problem is that you're not masculine enough. You need to work out more, be more dominant, man up. The next day, what you're being told is, you're too masculine. You need to cry more and eat more salad, and go to therapy more, and find your feminine side. Then on Wednesday, you're back to the other one. It's just become this very contested and difficult thing right now.”

“It's almost a commercial that people that are ETF centric can somewhat point to and say, listen, you can play around with all this stuff, you know, or you can do this ETF and this ETF. You've got exposure, right, to the industry and to the asset class, but you don't have to worry about some strange hacking thing and going into pools, and then it's the meme and it's gone.”

“So, in the US, for example, if you win gold, you make 37 a half thousand. Compare that to the 250,000 that we're paying if you win an event. Massive difference. In Germany, where I'm from on Cru, where we're both from, uh the prize money for for gold that Germany pays you is €20,000. So, it's really nothing. And so we had one female swimmer, she won gold at the Paris Olympics in 2024 and she was saying like, "Hey, I've now represented my country on the highest level, won the highest award there is in my sport after having dedicated my lifetime to the craft and I make 20,000 euros, but if I go to Love Island, I'm going to make at least three times as much from just rocking up there. So how is that possible?"”

“Fatherhood is the last male institution. You don't have institutions anymore that are kind of just like male. It transforms us from the inside out. It's just existentially obvious to you that there are lives in the world that are just unambiguously more important than your own and for whom you would do anything. You would give your life for them. It changes men in this massively kind of positive way.”

“AI is a great tool, but it's an arms race, right? It can be used by the good guys and the bad guys. I do think teams need to be using it much more than they could auditing end-to-end, absolutely everything, using AI, and getting their hands on the best possible tools. I think you see a lot of security firms are working to bring these tools out now, and increasingly teams are using this, but it's also in the hands of the bad guys, and they're very, very effective operators.”

“The international order is crumbling into disarray, she said, adding that both China and Spain are nations of principle and integrity, and should cooperate closely to resist any regression toward the law of the jungle. Later, Sánchez met with NPC Standing Committee Chairman Zhao Leji and Premier Li Qiang, and a set of 13, I've also heard 15 bilateral agreements were signed on education, technology, sports, and cultural exchange.”

“Bitcoin has had a hell of a ride to the downside. It has fallen by right around 50%, 51% to be precise, from that local peak at 125K. Now, this situation is a tale of two cities. There are many people that, rightfully so, are highlighting the current structure of Bitcoin as a potential bear flag, looking at targets down in the 40K region.”

“The Bitcoin dominance index is this morning reached its highest point since I think November of last year. So what we're seeing is in part new money coming into the market, and Bitcoin is the obvious on ramp, it's tentative still. But I think we're also seeing some rotation out of other crypto assets into the safety of Bitcoin.”

“If you have a large portion of the ecosystem, in this case, all of Layer 0's users, if you have something like 47% of them going with this one-of-one verifier setup, it starts to look less like an individualized choice, and more like actually standard architecture, or even the industry norm. I think what courts will eventually have to wrestle with is, when is it not enough to say, oh, we just provided the options, or we provided the tools? Defaults matter, and the options you give actually shape user behavior.”

“The Ninth Circuit heard this, and the other interesting thing is all three judges on this three-judge panel were actually appointed by Trump, but they sounded openly skeptical of the CFTC's federal preemption argument. If we have the Ninth Circuit rule against the prediction markets, and another circuit rule for them, that makes it way more likely that the Supreme Court is going to take on this issue. We’re likely looking at a 2027 or 2028 timeline before we have a final answer on whether these are considered gambling or legal contracts.”

“No, I think Christian uh you're making a good point that I think the underlying thesis is right, how can we showcase the efficacy and effectiveness of enhancements when they are administered under the right clinical and medical supervision. And so there is, as Christian alluded to, right, there's athletes that can break world records, but that's extremely unrelatable, right? There's very very few people, one right, that can hold a world record. And so we have a second category of athletes like Megan who's 35 coming to beat her personal best. But then still how can you make it even more relatable? And so everything on the sporting side then if you take a step back and look at as an overall organization everything that we do on the sporting side is the showcasing of the efficacy and effectiveness of those enhancements to go out there and inspire people to think about their own health differently and consider what can enhancements do for me.”

“Amex answered the three hardest questions in agentic commerce: identity, mandate, and accountability. When the agent screws up, who pays? This is the one that matters most, and crypto has obviously not figured it out. Amex says we will pay if you use our rails and the agent screws up. That is what is going to unlock adoption for agentic commerce—the liability and the accountability—especially because the laws in this space are so uncertain and current laws are built for humans swiping cards rather than AI agents.”

“Part of the challenge has been that Americans have become so, I think, understandably cynical about the ability of government and politics to produce real change that they see it now just as an area for culture war. That has been a problem specifically in foreign policy as well.”

“What we observed with Prime is when you have something that is sustainable and that scale, it takes a bit of time, but people start trusting it and then they realize they can do useful things. People with that want to earn yield, they can rely on it. So this was always the promise of defy composable money, but there were no pieces to compose with.”

“I mean, changing the binaries, managing to carry out a DDoS at just the right time and being able to then trick the RPC nodes into essentially providing a view of the world. It's all quite sophisticated and clearly, I think it looks like a nation state level, so I think the Lazarus attribution is probably correct.”

“What history repeats itself or at least rhymes should look like is we'll have some juice to the upside on the money flow and then have that final move down on momentum and then start to come back up... I think a DeFi cascade could be the linchpin that causes that final capitulation candle.”

“One of those core national interests is re-establishing deterrence by denial on the first island chain in the Indo-Pacific, in order for us to have, you know, basically hopefully a credible conversation with China that's backed up by the appropriate, you know, use of force if we need to use it, you know, to basically make the Taiwan scenario for the Chinese so unpalatable that they won't want to go.”

“The bond market has generally been labeled the intelligent market because it just trades on macro data and big fiscal data. It doesn't get involved in AI narratives and things like that. And so generally the bond market has the reputation of being the intelligent market. And so it's where the macro traders tend to focus. And that has been signaling squeeze coming up. I mean, yields for the 10-year are up at 4.23%, 4.3%.”

“But there's this weird dynamic on chain, which is I can just issue a utility token to fund my project. And so like what role does debt actually play? And I guess my view would be it largely has been supply and demand for leverage. And so credit cycles on chain, they don't necessarily follow sort of credit cycles in the TradFi world.”

“Middle East ceasefire chaos and why oil prices aren't reflecting the full strategic picture. US-China leverage game: Who blinks first on gas prices and supply chain disruption.”

“Even to get to the point where the Kelp DAO was even used, that was used largely by recursive looping and yield strategies. These weren't necessarily people taking out loans to do real things in the world. They were just trying to juice their yield. And that is another problem in DeFi. There's so much on-chain rehypothecation, you don't really know what's real. And I expect as the Aave liquidations and losses get attributed and more capital is allowed to exit, you're going to continue to see knock-on effects.”

“The message I think most young men need is 'we need you.' Society still needs you, the tribe still needs you, your family still needs you, your kids, for the love of God, definitely still need you. We want you because you're a man, not despite being a man. We see you being a man as a feature, not a bug. I just don't think enough men have heard that. Not as a volunteer, but as a man.”

“It's almost a commercial that people that are ETF centric can somewhat point to and say, listen, you can play around with all this stuff, you know, or you can do this ETF and this ETF. You've got exposure, right, to the industry and to the asset class, but you don't have to worry about some strange hacking thing and going into pools, and then it's the meme and it's gone.”

“Bitcoin diverging from software stocks after months of tight correlation. While ceasefire headlines whipsaw market sentiment, Bitcoin is quietly decoupling from tech stocks and showing resilience against a backdrop of great power competition with China.”

“Bitcoin thrives in chaos. If you take a look, it outperforms in almost every instance of global uncertainty. But at the moment, we also have a bit of a crisis in DeFi and on the crypto side, leading many to believe that maybe Bitcoin is just the safer option at the moment.”