WATCH RARE EARTHS

“The thing that really first just, like, tipped tipped me off to it was last summer with the MP Materials deal for, you know, an equities massive equity stake in MP Materials and other rarest brews here in The US with offtake agreements as well and price floors, which is very industrial policy, very, you know, World War two preparation style, unfortunately, kind of central planning flavor in a policy. Well, you're seeing that here, as well with this deal. And so a major financing package for the deal from the Development Finance Corporation, which is, government Pentagon aligned, as well as a a long term fifteen year, 100% off take agreement with with price floors largely, it looks like, subsidized by and guaranteed by the government.”

“So to start on that point, of course, they could, right? There's been a PLA Navy Task Group operating in the Gulf of Aden or a series of task groups for 18 years now. They've shown the capability to operate naval assets wherever they want to. If they chose they wanted to join such a thing, they could. I don't believe that that would be the choice that will be made in Beijing. I don't believe that they want to shoulder that burden should that come along. Yes, Iran is an important partner to China, but so is UAE and so is Saudi Arabia. And they've been very careful to spread out their level of risk in different ways.”

“If if your view is Trump has the chicken out, this is he's he's sensitive about stock market. He's sensitive about treasury yields, all these different things. Well, maybe. That may be true. But if that's the case and that's his primary Achilles' heel and primary constraint, even after he sent 10 destroyers, 12 destroyers, whatever, into into the Persian Gulf to turn away dozens of ships and kinda imperially take control thus far of of that area and stocks are all time highs. So if your entire bed, if your entire philosophy, if your entire worldview is it's, you know, it's just a matter of time before The US has to pull back because Trump's so worried about the the stock market, well, you know, he's he's got a lot of leeway right now.”

“But I think that the projection thing is that what I detect in DC is a tendency to think that the Chinese must have the same concept of international power that the United States has. So if they are challenging the US in certain ways, what that must mean is that they are trying to replace the US system with their own system. And I just think that that's wrong. What they have is more narrowly defined objectives of freedom. And if you burden yourself with alliances, for example, or the cost of underwriting formal systems, that actually is a limitation on your sovereignty and freedom.”

“I'd say that what China wants in the world is sort of defined by a sort of a set of minimal objectives, sovereignty, security, and development. But what that means in the context of a shifting global order isn't exactly clear. They certainly want to feel safe and secure and prosperous in a world that the United States has long dominated. If anything, I think that Chinese leadership and experts that I've spoken with have a far greater sense of the domestic constraints that have in fact inhibited America's global leadership. And China's not eager to kind of repeat those mistakes of being an overextended global superpower while not attending to some of the more pressing challenges at home.”

“Just ask yourself, like, does de dollarization need need to happen? Does the Petro yuan need to happen? Do do we need to enter into thousand percent hyperinflation or, you know, massive, unprecedented big print? All of which is possible. But do we need that for Bitcoin to be an attractive investment, for Bitcoin to be an attractive technology to use for for payments at the sovereign level, the institutional level? And I, you know, I think I think the answer is definitively no.”

“One of the few things I've been following over the weekend because it's just so fascinating and validates something that we've been worrying or warning about in the space for for many years is the the draining of multiple DeFi protocols by hackers because the virtual machines that they're running on aren't as secure as as many people were led to believe and are not as decentralized as many people were led to believe either. So that, like, if you have a bunch of DeFi actors going aping in the stretch and they're doing it on insecure protocols or using insecure smart contracts, could could get interesting there as well.”

“Bitcoin screamed up to 78,000 on the seventeenth, so last Friday. And it's it's held up pretty well throughout all this. you had Bitcoin on the one month chart really diverging from the software stocks index from from Vanguard, I think. There was some sharp divergence. Bitcoin up 6%. Software stocks down about a percent, and they've been trading in tandem since the middle of last year.”

“In, you know, public company investing and Bitcoin's not public company, but public company investing, one of the key hallmarks of a CEO and a management team you wanna avoid is when they're overly focused on short term gyrations in stock price. Like, they just gotta get stock price up, and they're really freaked out when the stock price goes down one quarter, when the market misunderstands a quarter and sells sells the stock on earnings or something. And I see a lot of that in the conversation about Quantum, both from the institutional side, but also from some technical people as well. I would just encourage people to fade that type of thinking because that is a great way to optimize for decisions that will not help and will not drive value and will not drive stability and sustainability in the long term for any system.”

“I think broadly, there's a pretty consistent desire for, under the sovereignty rubric, freedom of action and freedom from coercion. So they invest a lot in doing things that prevent them from being coerced basically by the United States, and they've got increasingly effective at that. What they want to be able to do is act freely in their own interests wherever they need to. That is very different, I think, as both Jessica and Dan suggested, from an ambition to create a whole new structure that they then have to bear the costs of supervising.”

“You know, I think it's it's worth asking, you know, if we map ourselves to to Rome as many people often do, are we entering the decline of the republic stage or the decline of the empire stage? Because those are very different phases of the history of that great power and have a lot of great powers that follow similar cycles. And, you know, a lot of people are ready to to stick a fork in in The US, but they maybe should be sticking a fork in The US Republic, not The US Empire.”

“Mark Carney's comments, I guess, in in reaction to to Trump's posturing towards Canada specifically. And if you're thinking, like, deep state actors placing Mark Carney in the prime minister role of Canada seems to be very strategic for for the incumbent power structure. If you know the history of Mark Carney at the Bank of England and HSBC and his involvement in the the cartel the cartel money laundering case with the HSBC where they're putting, duffel or, excuse me, briefcases full of cash through teller windows. They designed the teller window. He's he's had his fingers in everything. Many would consider him a a Davos class economic actor.”

“My thought is here because President Trump is so distracted. He has so many things to take care of. And I think his instinct, sometimes he has some instinct thoughts about certain things in our bilateral relations, which is very good. But he does not have people to implement. So just like President Nixon has Dr. Kissinger. But I haven't seen here who is the Dr. Kissinger for President Trump. So if you need to have some grand bargain, you have to have people on the table to discuss.”

“I mean, I think the latent interest is there, but I think in terms of numbers, we are certainly down, and I don't think it helps that sort of the kind of funding for the study of Chinese language at traditional centers of excellence throughout the United States has been way cut. And to add it to that is the concern that if you go to China, what kinds of positions in the United States government could you get in the future? And apparently, I hear it so bad that even in the embassy in Beijing, they don't have enough kind of qualified Americans with the language expertise to staff this kind of a visit. So we're in dire straits here, right?”

“There are definitely some requirements for domestic companies to buy domestic chips in order to keep the domestic industry going. And there is an active gray or black market in these chips, which evade the export controls and the Chinese import controls all together. And this is kind of tacitly agreed to by pretty much all of the parties in the transaction. So it's kind of a messy compromise, and I think that's going to characterize a lot of the technology debate in China in the years ahead.”

“Look. It you know, your instinct is right. I think everyone should be off the screens, frankly, as much as they can. It's increasingly low low return on time and increasingly a a a dos attack on, your attention to really follow the headlines closely. So, it's it's Michael Scott, snap, snap, snap, snap basically every day of the week. And so I think this is just a great illustration of how little the average market participant knows or can really rely on anything that they're seeing come across their their Bloomberg or or CNBC on any given day.”

“This sort of this is leaning on the authority of NIST or the perceived authority of NIST. Everybody is pointing at NIST and saying, well, NIST is saying that, and NIST is doing this, and we need to do what NIST is saying. I think it's, again, tone deaf and naive because Bitcoin Satoshi picked LibSec p two two fifty six k one, that cryptographic library, because he looked at a lot of the NIST approved and recommended cryptographic signature schemes and found that a lot of them had embedded constants, which ultimately led to backdoors.”

“If I can just ask you on freedom from coercion, I mean, last year when China said to the US, you're putting all these tariffs on us, we are going to introduce a fairly draconian export control regime for rare earths. As someone told me recently, Deng Xiaoping first talked about rare earths in 1964, which I thought was stunning. I think they felt that they had sufficient, not only physical control over the rare earth supply chain, but also legal control through the export control regime that they had developed to put that on the table. And my assessment is that in Beijing, they now think that they have gotten to a point of you could call a strategic stalemate with the United States.”

“Well, there will be some nice pictures, you know, and some handshakes. I think that the pomp and the circumstance is like at a minimum, I think, for both these leaders. Reportedly, there's less preparation for some of these kinds of kind of substantive details. I certainly think I agree that on the Chinese side, there's actually a pretty dim assessment of just how much can be done with an administration that is so mercurial and that might not be, you know, might not stick to its own positions from a given week to the next.”