MARKETS

“I'm not going to be thinking about the 87 crash or or Bitcoin. I'm going to be thinking about who I loved and who loved me. That's what I'm going to be thinking about and what kind of relationships we had and what kind of times we had. I think the professional aspects are these great tools that allow you to do more meaningful things and the things that count which is what have you done with your family? What have you done with your friends? How have you served others? What have you done to leave a legacy of uh happiness and betterment and goodness to the people that you've been privileged enough to come in contact with?”

“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.”

“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.”

“Today's number, ninety. That's how many seconds Russell Brand spent trying to find his favorite bible quote live on Piers Morgan before he finally gave up. The former comedian was on the show to discuss his new book, How to Become a Christian in Seven Days. Sources say step one is to be accused of sex crimes.”

“What if we learn that this world is wildly interdependent? More so than most of us appreciate. The moment you try and chop off an arm, all of a sudden you discover interdependencies and what there seems to be. At least those two stories tell us that that may be a fairly general thing.”

“In the old agreement, for example, Microsoft had to pay a percentage of their cloud revenue to OpenAI because of this exclusive OpenAI offering that they got to sell to their customers. Well now, they don't have to pay revenue share to OpenAI. And while it's no longer exclusive, they still get to sell OpenAI's products to all of their customers. In other words, Microsoft's cloud revenue just went up. At the same time, Microsoft still has significant control over OpenAI.”

“This transparency, having the real-time data, if the right amount is displayed, actually smooths volatility. It smooths the volatility over. So that's the opportunity for on-chain businesses. And then because all of that data is just live and it's up to date and real-time, I feel like Coinbase and any public company that does that should get some props, right? They should have to do less of the other bullshit that comes along with being a public company.”

“Most people are downloading these apps right now because of sports, but then there's all this other stuff, like mention markets where people bet on whether someone will or won't say something. We decided to bet on which words Trump would say in the speech, looking at probability odds for specific strikes.”

“What if we learn that this world is wildly interdependent? More so than most of us appreciate. The moment you try and chop off an arm, all of a sudden you discover interdependencies and what there seems to be. At least those two stories tell us that that may be a fairly general thing.”

“No. So I like, okay. Maybe this is, like, bad for me to admit or whatever, but, like, I don't think prediction markets are, like, a good thing socially. I think that there is, like, an actual, like, pretty real dark side to prediction markets. These markets are only profitable for people like me because there are people just throwing away money. I think that's probably pretty bad, to be honest.”

“It was such a great question because the kindest thing was also my very, very, very first childhood memory. I was probably two and a half or three. It was probably 1957, something like that. And I was with my mother at this place called the Curb Market. And uh I got separated from my mother. And boy, you can imagine being 2 and 1/2 years old and separated from your mother. You just it's it's you're terror stricken. And this elderly black gentleman came up and I was sitting there balling my eyes out cuz I thought my mother had left me and said, "What's the matter, little boy?" And I said, "I lost my mama." And he said, "Here, don't you worry. we're going to find her."”

“The Coinbase example is so interesting because Coinbase gets punished from volatility because the analysts consistently miss on the direction of just how cyclical crypto is. In bull markets, if you go back and look at the analyst's expectations versus especially the transaction based revenue, it's always off. So Coinbase benefits a huge amount. Their stock rips because they outperform the analyst. They get punished, though, on the way down. That transparency, having the real time data, if the right amount is displayed, actually smooths volatility.”

“The University of Michigan consumer sentiment index dropped to 49.8 in April. That is the lowest reading in the seventy plus years the university has been regularly pulling American consumers lower than during the February, lower than the COVID pandemic, lower than when inflation peaked after Russia invaded the Ukraine. And the decline, it hit every demographic, all ages, all incomes, all education levels, all political affiliations. So here's the paradox. The hard data says the economy is nowhere close to recession. Retail sales were solid in March even after adjusting for higher gas prices. Jobless claims are low at 207,000.”

“Well, it's a huge leap in technological developments, but it's basically As a computer programmer, I look at it basically as a new higher level language that is much much, much, much more powerful than anything that came before, but qualitatively is not different than the way we went from machine language to assembler language to fort Run and Cobol and eventually C and all the other languages. So this is a natural language. So AI is basically a higher level language, which is a natural language, and it also has to it available all the data that exists in the world, so that's why it is so immensely powerful.”

“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.”

“What the president calls a deal is not, I promise I will give up this and you will give up that. Promise means I'm going to follow through. What he has at the moment is press releases. What he's capable of delivering is, if you do this and I do this and it's in your best interests and it's in my best interests, we can get there. Which is basically a small set of possible outcomes.”

“Citadel Securities, one of the most powerful trading firms in the world with 65,000,000,000 with a b, assets under management. It is publicly exploring prediction markets. The president, Jim Esposito, said last week that event event contracts are interesting to us and that there's sound industrial logic for institutional clients to use these contracts to hedge against various risks. He said if the market ramps and scales, Citadel will certainly consider getting involved. This is a landmark signal. When a firm like Citadel starts talking about a market this way, it usually means the opportunity is real and it's not just hype.”

“IS is kinda one of those boring businesses. Right? It's a blue chip travel compounder. They have a dominant global global market share. They have massive massive free cash flow. It's supposed to be 10,000,000,000 this year. And they're trading about 20% off their peak heading into a pivotal Monday print. Now the data breach, the softening consumer data, those are all near term watch items, but there's a lot of events coming up pretty soon. FIFA World Cup, people starting to plan for the Los Angeles Olympics, and the shift to this new model away from the traditional, agent model they had, Very compelling at 15.7 times price to forward looking earnings?”

“These prediction market companies exist because they’ve convinced regulators that they’re also great for the rest of us. They're adding new knowledge to the world, making us more informed about the future by providing a clearer picture of what people actually expect to happen.”

“And if you look at how this has played out in the past, there's the initial dump, then there's actually an initial recovery faster than you think, that no one really believes, because it doesn't translate business sentiment and activity lags price by about six months.”

“We have an asset problem, and we have a trust problem. That's the core of what's happening right now, which is, you know, we'll get into some of the data that backs this up later. But I mean, the average token or the median net return of a token over the last five years is down 80%.”

“Lueck's concern is that when you deploy these black box models at scale managing billions of dollars and you can't explain why the model is taking a position, you've introduced a risk that is very difficult to manage. You still want researchers to be thinking.”

“Caden Booth bought a stopwatch and this device used for listening to bird sounds and hung out on the sidewalk outside of the stadium waiting for the rehearsal to start so he could time it. I thought I was gonna show up here, and there would be 500 people sitting outside; to me, I was like, this is just common sense.”

“For me, as an entrepreneur, I have two things I care most about. It's people and products. And I feel like if I can get the people right, which is just culture, and I get the products right, generally everything else will get easier. And I also think about the products are just really a souvenir of the people.”

“Citadel Securities is reportedly exploring prediction markets as trading scales up, a development that could fundamentally change how financial markets incorporate real-world event probabilities into prices. The price of this contract at any given moment essentially represents the crowd's real-time probability estimate.”

“I saw what some might call sinister interest in the real world recently. I was watching a mention market where people were betting on what words a Federal Reserve official was gonna say in a meeting about the crypto industry. It was on Zoom. And when the officials were taking questions from that Zoom, I saw KaoSci traders submitting questions as if they were just regular humans trying really hard to get the official to say something they were betting on. And they can get way more ick. Perhaps the most dark example, prediction market bettors threatened a journalist over his reporting on the Iran war saying that they would kill him if he didn't change what he'd written about a military strike.”

“One thing I think people find also surprising about me is I'm very bright-brained, left-brained. Like, so I call it creating cultures of artists and operators. So I want to build organizations that are incredibly innovative, that are creative, but also have operating rigor. Because if you operate the business well, it gives you more time for the fun stuff on the creativity.”

“And it it's the the valuation they're talking about, to be clear, they're talking about a 125 times sales. So that's not earnings, that's sales. And we don't even really know what the earnings are of SpaceX. There was, you know, the Reuters published that they had EBITDA of, $8,000,000,000. But EBITDA is not earnings. It's earnings before, essentially, the cost of building satellites and building rockets, you know, which for SpaceX, you have to imagine is a significant cost.”

“I think it's still arguably my best tactic for developing new ideas is to be in a foreign market, ideally with a creative or a couple of creatives with you, so you can sketch as you go. When you walk through a foreign retail store, you just look at everything a little differently, particularly if you can't read the language, so you have to rely a little bit more on like form and graphic design.”

“There's a company I can't think of their name now, but they they launched one NVIDIA chip into space in a little satellite, to run an AI program where I think it was meant to, you know, learn the works of Shakespeare or something like that. It constantly had to be shut down because it overheats, because it's very difficult. You know, everyone says, well, space is cold, but it's also a vacuum, and you need air blowing over something or water or whatever to cool it, via convection. If it has to cool radiatively, you need these massive, massive cooling fins on it. And so the next version of this tiny, you know, Shakespeare satellite is going to have the second largest cooling array in space behind the International Space Station.”

“But on the other hand, and in spite of that, I'm in favor of not having any rules against insider trading. I would like all the information out there as soon as it's available, because look, as a society, we're better off knowing as soon as possible anything that is noble, right, So why do we have to wait several First of all, when you face with a merger or acquisition situation where most of the insider trading is happening, right, the secretary is the lawyers. Everybody knows about it. They go home, they tell they buns day. So it eventually always filters out. So it's almost impossible to avoid. It's very very difficult and con versome. Why don't we just do away with it and let the information come out as soon as possible.”

“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.”

“Prediction markets have taken off in the past few years, using the same legal loopholes as the crypto market to essentially claim they are a 'swap,' or 'futures market,' similar to that of the totally legal grain and pork belly markets, and less like the state-regulated sports gambling market.”

“Iran showed that it has control over the Strait of Hormuz. That's actually very important and a major loss to the United States. When someone reveals a weakness that you had, that's as bad as them creating a weakness. And so if eight weeks ago, Iran didn't understand itself to have leverage, it had never had the opportunity to test it. Today it does.”

“The median net return of a token over the last five years is down 80%. That is that's the problem with the industry. And there's a lot of startup market structure reasons for that. But there's a broken structural piece that's unique to tokens, especially, I think, at the moment.”

“They think airfare has been an incredible deal over the last couple of years. It just hasn't gone up as quickly as inflation. They think prices deserve to be higher, basically, and would like them to be higher.”

“And I think actually, funnily enough, what's causing the sentiment drift here is that that ideological movement industry blob that is crypto won. And so now that it won, it moved from being a movement which is on the fringe, on the outside and countercultural, to one which is in the mainstream and it's struggling with an identity crisis.”

“When you say are we in a bubble, I don't know if we're necessarily in a bubble. We're clearly so leveraged in equities in this country. We're so dependent upon firm equity prices at this point in time. And when I say leveraged, we're 252% of stock market cap to GDP. So 1929 we were I think at the top we were 65%. And then in 87 we got to about 85 or 90%. Then 2000 we got to 170% and now we're at 252. 35% on 250% of GDP is 80 90% of GDP the reverse wealth effect oh my gosh 10% of our tax revenues or capital gains they go to zero so you can see the budget deficit blowing up.”

“One thing I think people find also surprising about me is I'm very bright-brained, left-brained. Like, so I call it creating cultures of artists and operators. So I want to build organizations that are incredibly innovative, that are creative, but also have operating rigor. Because if you operate the business well, it gives you more time for the fun stuff on the creativity.”

“Oh we were so long cotton one weekend and uh there was a great drought, spectacular drought and of course it rained all through the belt over the weekend. Walk in market was limit down. He'd gotten absolutely smashed. I thought, "Oh my god, it's over." That day for lunch, his wife brought in four of her friends. He had the most beautiful office I've ever seen in my life. And he came out and just, oh my god, he had a smile on his face. Oh, ladies and flirting with the wives. I mean, I was in sitting there going, "Are you kidding me? This guy's just broke and he's acting like uh he's Rock Hudson or something." When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”

“Like, the, you know, the the idea that so firstly, Nasdaq had to change all of their rules to allow this inclusion because normally a company needs to be you know, there's a list of rules as to how they weigh, you know, a low float company going into an index, how long it's been public, because the idea is it needs to be seasoned in the market and sort of find a valuation with real buyers and sellers. So normally, you would expect it to take about a year, at least, to even consider adding it. Fifteen days is unheard of, and then getting rid of the the caps for the the float on it. You know, Reuters reported that this is because Elon Musk negotiated with Nasdaq and said, you know, we we can list this thing on the NYSE, we can list it on the Nasdaq, we can list it wherever we want.”

“Bobby found a guy posting about his alpha on a bet about how long it would take Charlie Puth to sing the national anthem at the Super Bowl. I saw that, Charlie Puth was in San Francisco, like, three days before. So I flew out there immediately, went outside the stadium. And I was like, oh, this guy's a perfect example of someone who's willing to literally go the extra mile to have an edge that people would think would would be unfathomable.”

“It's not just a revenue story. It's not just build great products, generate tons of revenue. We're actually doing that and the prices still aren't going up. So what it tells you is there's a trust problem. Investors have stopped. They never really understood what the difference was between a token and equity in the project. Token investors have been rugged so many times along the way in ways which would never in a million years happen to equity investors, like just buying out all of the IP and team behind a token. And the token holders get nothing.”

“Definitely, I'm absolutely convinced. So the stock market that gives us a venue to invest in the future, basically in the future of different companies, but you know, some of how those companies are actually going to end up faring in the future has a lot to do with the economic environment and social environment in the future, and basically we are left to our own devices to decipher what the future holds. So the prediction market gives them an opportunity to gather experts around who are not afraid to put their money on the line and express what they think, and to collect a consensus opinion so that we all know what we can possibly expect if it's probably a better guest than what we individually could come up with.”

“The biggest problem with AI is that if you think about the the way AI is being deployed, practiced and deployed right now is the it's the build break iterate model. Build it, break it, fix it and iterate. If you think about it, that's been the invention model since the beginning of man. Build, break, iterate. But we've never been in a situation where the tail event the break can do so much damage could could be hundreds of millions if not billions of lives. When I was able to ask them pointedly how do you think that AI safety gets resolved the pretty much the consensus answer is I think we'll finally do something about it when 50 or 100 million people die in an accident.”

“The CFTC, which was once a legal adversary of these markets, has done a complete about-face under the Trump administration. In January, the CFTC and SEC held a joint summit on modernizing the regulatory framework for these types of contracts.”

“I have long maintained that better than a business school degree. Journalism 101 should be mandatory subject in every college which is newspaper writing in particular. What newspaper writing does is it teach teaches you you have to write where the conclusion comes first. So unlike writing something and then at the end we get the story here the end comes first and you have to write it with this incredibly rigid discipline so that every succeeding thing that you write the most important part is in the first sentence of the first paragraph. There's that old saying, if you can't tell your story in 15 seconds or less, no one's going to listen.”

“My goal is everybody in the company understands the entire operating plan of the business and not just help shape it and mold it and things are delegated down. But truly, truly understand it. And going back to that, you know, trying to build a cross functional company. It's allowed our more junior team members to get better learning, but also just be more empowered because then they can spot opportunities.”

“The United States is actually, as a single country, is the world's largest producer of jet fuel by a long measure. So the United States, when it comes to energy, is in a good position here. The United States is the jet fuel superpower.”

“For me, as an entrepreneur, I have two things I care most about. It's people and products. And I feel like if I can get the people right, which is just culture, and I get the products right, generally everything else will get easier. And I also think about the products are just really a souvenir of the people.”

“My mother used to always say, uh, and I think this is what this country really needs right now. You've just got to kill them with kindness. So, you're going to wake up someday it's going to be terrible. You're going to be in a bad mood. There's going to be something on TV that's going to make you angry. And particularly in these times right now, my gosh, when everyone wants to demonize the opposition, I think we've got to realize it doesn't have to be that way. We can humbly uh devote ourselves to finding the kindness within ourselves and the goodness within ourselves and transmit that to somebody else during that day. I think that's I think that's the secret to happiness.”

“They use the playbook that the crypto industry, I think, started and perfected during the Biden administration, which is framing their disruption of industries as a technological disruption when I would characterize it more as just a legal disruption. They are willing to take more legal risk and break the laws and essentially take the approach of catch me if you can.”

“So fund ability is a great issue, and it is in the interest of the market participants to create as much french ability as possible. So accordingly, we are going to structure our contracts to be identical. Whenever it's possible. It is in the interest of the market participants to create as much french ability as possible. So accordingly, we are going to structure our contracts to be identical.”

“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.”

“We are the connective tissue that powers these on chain capital markets with a layer of standardized disclosures, standardized data, and we connect investors who wanna deploy capital with on chain businesses that require that capital. The days of tokens just being able to launch this liquid instrument, not really define what it is, provide no disclosures about ownership, sales, those days are ending. And by the way, they should end. This does not work. There's actually a layer of disclosures that is the bedrock — what does the ownership structure look like? What are the emissions schedule look like? Who are the insiders? When are they selling?”

“And I used to just sit there and rail on Warren Buffett year after year after year. And I would self-congratulate myself for trashing because goes, you know, he just happened to be in the right place at the right time and caught this bull market. And I was just thinking, "Oh my god, why couldn't I be Warren Buffett? Just believe in America." What I realize now is what an idiot I was. That guy is a flipping genius cuz he understood the power of compound interest which I somehow managed brilliantly to avoid my entire career. He understood it at nine. But anyway, if Warren, if you happen to hear this, I'm deeply apologetic. You are the OG of compound interest and I wish I was onetenth as as smart as you are.”

“I think it's still arguably my best tactic for developing new ideas is to be in a foreign market, ideally with a creative or a couple of creatives with you, so you can sketch as you go. When you walk through a foreign retail store, you just look at everything a little differently, particularly if you can't read the language, so you have to rely a little bit more on like form and graphic design.”

“I try to steal from as far away from what we're working on as possible. So it could be stealing an idea in a museum that you could apply to a brand. And if you look at my body of work as an entrepreneur, you'll see that through line in everything I do. So with Method, I really stole from personal care and I stole from housewares.”

“Hi, Mary. It's Daleep Singh, currently vice chair at PGIM, former deputy national security adviser for international economics under the Biden administration, former head of the markets group at the Fed, blah blah blah. Well, I'm calling because I heard you're leaving Planet Money. Too bad because I was just about to cave to that interview you've been chasing me on.”

“Our view is that The Straits are still very much closed. Oil Brent oil is close to a $110 per barrel. And if you look at the refined products of gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, they're closer to $200 per barrel. And you're already seeing an economic slowdown across most Asian countries, and that our view is that the next leg will be in Europe. So so we're actually think the markets are being very complacent about the risk of an oil shock or a higher for longer oil environment.”

“I don't think it's going to be this huge surge in everything winning again. I do think there'll be some knee-jerk surge where capital moves back into the space, and maybe the dino coins pump a little bit. But that dispersion trend and the winners winning and compounding, I think will happen, and it'll give faith to everyone again.”

“The app is very brightly colored and super engaging. There's charts all over the place, and you kinda can't stop looking at the thing. You can literally see trades just flowing all over the screen in real time, and it feels like being in an arcade.”

“They have been slowly transitioning away from this agency model to more of a higher margin merchant payments model via its connected trip strategy. The growth strategy is certainly bearing itself out with merchant model revenue growing about 27.4% year over year.”

“The administration has proposed a $1.5 trillion defense budget for 2027, which makes me think, okay, this is all noise, this is all nonsense. Gas prices are continued to be elevated. I think there are more than 30 percent since the war began. It seems as though this is only going to continue. At least that's my sense, but maybe I'm being pessimistic.”

“I try to steal from as far away from what we're working on as possible. So it could be stealing an idea in a museum that you could apply to a brand. And if you look at my body of work as an entrepreneur, you'll see that through line in everything I do. So with Method, I really stole from personal care and I stole from housewares.”

“I didn't tell them like, hey, tell me if you like it, because nobody's gonna ever step on anyone else's dream. They're always gonna be like, yeah, it's great, good luck. So I gave them the assignment, come back with three reasons why you think it's gonna fail. So that way I empowered them to beat up my workplace.”

“The days of tokens, just being able to launch this liquid instrument, not really define what it is, provide no disclosures about ownership, sales, those days are ending. And by the way, they should end. This does not work. Refer back to the data that we just showed. It's broken. It doesn't work. So there's actually a layer of disclosures that is the bedrock, which is just super table stakes, basic stuff.”

“And so, yes, having an allocation to gold, which frankly, I think having a 10% or more allocation to gold is really important in times such such as this with dollar debasement, with the lack of, demand for US dollar denominated assets and what that's done for dollar assets. Having an allocation, albeit small, to cryptocurrency, having an allocation to traditional alternative investments. The benefits of that are not just about returns, but our overall risk level as well.”

“I'm confused because we have one extra layer that we don't normally have, which is we have no idea what the truth is. I'm not being funny. There was a time when someone said the following is a red line, you would understand it to be a red line. There was a time when someone said these are the conditions, you understood it to be the conditions. There was a time when someone said we've reached an agreement, you would understand that they'd reached an agreement. None of those things are true right now.”

“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.”

“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 had not even every token, because it's not gonna be every token. 10 to 15 tokens. If 10 to 15 tokens started to compound in return, I think it would solve every problem. I actually do think that's how we get out of this bear market, is that a few tokens say, we're gonna maybe kill our equity. We're gonna drive all the returns back to the token, and we're gonna have one simple structure. We're gonna generate revenue, and those tokens will get rewarded in the market. And then other founders will see those tokens get rewarded, and the flywheel will start to happen.”

“I didn't tell them like, hey, tell me if you like it, because nobody's gonna ever step on anyone else's dream. They're always gonna be like, yeah, it's great, good luck. So I gave them the assignment, come back with three reasons why you think it's gonna fail. So that way I empowered them to beat up my workplace.”

“We're starting to see airlines cut back capacity because they're just no longer going to fly unprofitable routes. A route that wasn't making money at $2 a gallon jet fuel is certainly not going to be making money at $4 a gallon.”

“Bitcoin is unequivocally the best inflation hedge that there is more than gold because Bitcoin is finite. There's only so much Bitcoin that can be mined. The problem with it is inflation hedge is if you got into kinetic exchange, there's clearly going to be cyber warfare and anything that you have to deal with electronically is going down, including Bitcoin. So, strike one. And then secondly, quantum computing. Who knows if and when with AI advancing as fast as it is that we may actually have quantum computing. Now quantum computing, someone can come in and can hack any bank and hack anything they want to.”

“She gives me a GP. The GP, a general practitioner. So she makes me go in. I see the guy and uh this guy's 83 years old. And I say to him, "You're living here in the land of the walking dead. Everyone here is basically fossilized. Um, what is the secret to longevity?" And he goes, "It's real simple. You retire, you die." And that had a really profound impact on me because I realized as I get older, and maybe when you get older, you will too. Boy, you better. If you don't use it, you're going to lose it.”

“So. We are coming out at the end of May with a consolidated feed where contracts that exist on cellular platforms we will have consolidated so that when somebody comes to us interactive brokers to look at the market. We will give them the consolidated feed just like we do on stocks there. Yeah, trade on I don't know, Tony or so markets and we always have the best feed on offer and we always provide best executions based on all the possible venues that stop trades, and we will do the same thing on prediction markets.”

“AI agents, the fear that these large language model companies could displace both tax prep and small business bookkeeping simultaneously has led to a lot of fear. This is a sell-off driven by convergence of regulatory and AI disruption fears, not really deteriorating fundamentals.”

“Iran showed that it has control over the Strait of Hormuz. That's actually very important and a major loss to the United States. When someone reveals a weakness that you had, that's as bad as them creating a weakness. And so if eight weeks ago, Iran didn't understand itself to have leverage, it had never had the opportunity to test it. Today it does.”

“My goal is everybody in the company understands the entire operating plan of the business and not just help shape it and mold it and things are delegated down. But truly, truly understand it. And going back to that, you know, trying to build a cross functional company. It's allowed our more junior team members to get better learning, but also just be more empowered because then they can spot opportunities.”

“Bunker Hunt was squeezing silver at the time and he bought about 200 million ounces at an average price of about three 12 bucks. And between 1976 and 1980, we had crazy monetary policy. Inflation started ripping and silver went literally through the roof. So at 50 bucks now, he's worth about 11 billion and he's got a multiple of five or six on the next closest guy. So anyway, they made liquidation only. Silver collapsed. It went from 50 bucks to under 10 bucks in the space of about eight weeks. And that had a searing impact on me to see him go from the richest guy to virtually bankrupt in the short space of six or seven weeks.”

“As Adam and I started formulating the product, we realized like, wow, like cleaning is a dirty business. You pollute when you clean, use poison to make your home healthier. So we realized there was a second culture shift, which was really sustainability and wellness. And so I guess I'm going to take credit for it of really combining high design and deep sustainability.”

“The idea here is mixing these different asset classes that have different correlations to each other, and it lowers your overall risk profile of your portfolio. Because nobody knows what the future is gonna look like, and you can never be certain.”

“During the Iran crisis, poly market ceasefire probability contracts moved before and alongside traditional markets. These markets aggregate real-time information with participants who have skin in the game which often produces more accurate forecast than polls or even option implied probabilities.”

“But really, what is happening here is that capital markets are getting rebuilt and they're getting rebuilt on chain. That is the big opportunity mega trend of the next five to 10 years. And so when you think about capital markets, what powers capital markets is trust and infrastructure that connects investors and people with capital, the people that want to use that capital businesses, on-chain businesses.”

“And they have, at the moment, around 10,000,000 paying customers, I believe. You know, there's some analysts out there, and they said that that, that they would reach 1,200,000,000 customers. Now, that's quite an amazing number when you look at the population of the planet who are like, there's 1,000,000,000 people on the planet who earn $35 a day, which comes to a bit under $12,000 a year. They will not be paying for, you know, $150 a month Internet access.”

“And as Bobby gets deeper into this giant fight with the states over whether Kalshi is gambling or not, he realizes the whole existence of these prediction apps depends on the courts agreeing with Kalshi that these yes or no questions about the future are like derivatives, like swaps, a regular degular financial instrument in which two parties with opposite views on the direction of some price or level agree to bet against each other.”

“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.”

“Everyone overcomplicated it, and something like the four year cycle is clearly in effect here. There's the initial dump, then there's kind of actually an initial recovery faster than you think that no one really believes because business sentiment and activity lags price by about six months. Look at 2019. Bitcoin doubled that year, and I remember it as one of the most depressing years of the time that we've been in crypto. So that's what I think this year will be. And then I think you'll start to see a resurgence, and people will think, oh, everything is back, and then the winners pull ahead.”

“As Adam and I started formulating the product, we realized like, wow, like cleaning is a dirty business. You pollute when you clean, use poison to make your home healthier. So we realized there was a second culture shift, which was really sustainability and wellness. And so I guess I'm going to take credit for it of really combining high design and deep sustainability.”

“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.”

“One thing to note, they actually have earnings coming up pretty soon. And anytime you have earnings within the next two weeks, it is just a bad idea to enter a position in a company. Why? You're paying a volatility premium that kinda drifts away from the fundamentals of the company.”

“As we were watching, the odds of every word were jumping all around, and we just really locked in. Like, the world stopped. We felt like we were looking at this through a soda straw. Did he say our word? Will he? It becomes all your brain can think about. So when Trump starts talking about the economy, Mary's basically trying to goad him into saying the word tariff.”

“Since the Strait of Hormuz has been closed due to the conflict, about 20% of the world's jet fuel has not been able to get to global markets and pass through the Strait of Hormuz. And that has been a big problem for the jet fuel supply for airlines.”

“So the big drivers of the emerging markets for the last better part of last two, three years now have been the submission of your place, specifically in Taiwan, TSMC being the big one, and South Korea, the memory companies, SK Hynix and and Samsung. And in one stat that's pretty mind blowing is that if you look at it on a year to date basis, those three semiconductor companies, TSMC, Samsung, SK Hynix, are driving almost 70% of the entire index's earnings growth. So this has basically become a one way bet on the CapEx build out that you're seeing.”

“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.”

“Lueck's concern is that when you deploy these black box models at scale, managing billions of dollars of client capital and you can't explain why the model is taking a position, you've introduced a risk that is very difficult to manage. In a drawdown, you don't know whether the model is wrong because the market has changed or right because the market is temporarily irrational. The distinction is everything. It determines whether you should add to a position or cut it. The danger isn't using AI in investing. It's outsourcing the thinking to AI.”

“China still represents 30% of the revenue. So any additional export controls or Chinese retaliation, restricting tool service access, that could remove revenue to the tune of $2,000,000,000. It is a best in class franchise, but you are paying full price.”

“Ticket prices are already up like 20% right now, and they seem pretty confident that by the end of the year, they'll be covering almost the whole run up in fuel prices, if not all of it, through higher fares.”

“One of the other big problems that I think has existed with tokens so far, which is the founders and the team treated the shareholders and the customers as the same person. And that was kind of actually the vision, which was a fun vision for a little bit. It's like Uber bootstrapping the network and the people, the early Uber customers end up owning the Uber tokens. But in reality, what's happened is that your shareholders are very different than your customers. So this idea of governance tokens maybe was kind of the wrong vision.”

“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.”

“The one thing that I think should be part of this next election the simplest most important thing that we can do is we can demand that all AI is watermarked. That's the single most transformative thing that we could possibly do for the country, for the world. Make it a felony if someone knowingly violates that three times and put them in jail. I want to know what's authentically human and what's not. And when that happens, talk about restoring trust in the country, which I think is one of the biggest problems.”

“Since the conflict began, the price of jet fuel has more than doubled to a record high of over $200 a barrel. That's a huge issue for airline companies because jet fuel makes up about 25% of their expenses.”

“64% of respondents think unemployment will be higher a year from now, up from 61% in March. Never before has that share been this high without the economy experiencing recession. People aren't just complaining about prices anymore; they are scared about their jobs.”

“What the president calls a deal is not, I promise I will give up this and you will give up that. Promise means I'm going to follow through. What he has at the moment is press releases. What he's capable of delivering is, if you do this and I do this and it's in your best interests and it's in my best interests, we can get there. Which is basically a small set of possible outcomes.”

“I think that in the long term, people are underestimating the benefits of TurboTax, for example. Right? The benefit is not that they're preparing your taxes. That's easy. The benefit is audit defense. The benefit is the lines of expertise in case you get audited. That is not something that is automated away. And so in the long run, I think a lot of these software companies that are beaten down have been beaten down to an extent that is unjustified.”

“The first real domino to fall is Spirit, which was in bankruptcy for the second time in less than a year, like a really vulnerable airline to start with. It had an agreement with its creditors to come out of bankruptcy, and that agreement has just been sort of totally upended by fuel prices.”

“Crypto in many senses was an industry and a technology, but it's also kind of a political movement in a sense. And there's an ideology that underlies that political movement. And I think, actually, funnily enough, what's causing the sentiment drift here is that that ideological movement industry blob that is crypto won. And so now that it won, it moved from being a movement which is on the fringe, on the outside, and countercultural to one which is in the mainstream and it's struggling with an identity crisis.”

“I'm confused because we have one extra layer that we don't normally have, which is we have no idea what the truth is. I'm not being funny. There was a time when someone said the following is a red line, you would understand it to be a red line. There was a time when someone said these are the conditions, you understood it to be the conditions. There was a time when someone said we've reached an agreement, you would understand that they'd reached an agreement. None of those things are true right now.”

“So we are choosing contracts that, in our minds have questions, the answers to which have serious economic consequences. So, for example, global warming, I think it's a huge question, maybe not this year, but ten twenty years from night certainly will be, or the rate of adoption of AI or I mean, you know, really significant questions that basically will determine how we live our lives ten to twenty years from now, and therefore it's important for us to have questions to those answers so that people that enter schools today, or decide to buy a house somewhere, or decide what profession they are going to study and develop into these sorts of questions deserved to have serious answers.”

“In 2023, Tarek proposed Kalshi's first election market, a market for betting on what party would take control of Congress. Regulators blocked it as expected. They said election betting is gaming. It's not allowed. And that it would open up elections to interference among other things. But this time, Tariq sued. His lawyers argued there's no rule specifically against betting on elections, and this market would do what futures do best, you know, hedge against harmful outcomes and provide more predictive data.”

“I think these are the most compelling NVIDIA alternative in AI accelerators. They have record data center revenue, they have that 41% server CPU share, and they have a credible roadmap towards GPU growth by these committed hyperscaler orders.”

“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.”

“The administration has proposed a $1.5 trillion defense budget for 2027, which makes me think, okay, this is all noise, this is all nonsense. Gas prices are continued to be elevated. I think there are more than 30 percent since the war began. It seems as though this is only going to continue. At least that's my sense, but maybe I'm being pessimistic.”