The Trump Tariff Dump | 1000x

Hey everyone, Jason Yanowitz here. I am down bad right now with a 102 fever and no place to record an episode about, you know, Circle IPO, tariffs, Liberation Day. Should stablecoins have interest? I just didn't have it in me this week. So thanks for understanding. In its place, we've got a really good episode with Jonah and Avi from the 1000x Podcast, and then we'll be back at it next week. We've got a good episode going live on Monday with Gavin Wood, the Ethereum and Polkadot co-founder. And then Santi and I will be back for an in-person roundup next Friday. Thanks, folks.

I think you just have to remember that this market is the market that you take profit in very quickly. You got a little bit of pop and then you're out. You just, you just shove it out. And that's how I'm looking at trading this, trading this market right now. I mean, honestly, I think like getting short here still is like, you know, honestly, probably short at this point, get, get down to like $1,500.

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And we're live. Happy Liberation Day, Avi.

Happy Liberation Day. Are you, are you enjoying being liberated from your wealth.

Yeah, yeah. I'm, uh, I feel liberated from my hopes, my dreams, my money, my future. Uh, this is a pretty scary feeling for sure, but I guess the whole point of these tariffs isn't to help out, um, bros like us.

No, it's not. And it's not— I mean, I guess what I'm struggling to figure out is who exactly it's designed to help. But what's really interesting is that we're— we now collectively get to experience something that people haven't really experienced since World War II, which is a complete reimagination of America's place in the world and an upending of world economic order to a degree that, you know, was— I think basically would have been unheard of 4 years ago. At the, you know, even, even 2 years ago at this point, just because I don't think people took this, this tariff stuff that seriously from Trump. I mean, look, even, even the, even leading conservative voices are like, what, what the hell are you doing, Trump? Yeah. You know, he, he clearly, he clearly has a plan in his head. You know, hopefully the tariffs are not going to go into effect for another 4 days. I think April 6th and April 9th are the two major days that, uh, he, he put out in terms of implementation of tariffs. And so we have a little bit of wiggle room. Hope— I think what he's hoping for is that people are gonna come out and say, all right, we don't want to deal with this, um, you know, we'll take our tariffs off, you take your tariffs off, and then everyone returns to a free trade world. But, uh, you know, for now it's, it's hairy. It's, it's, it's definitely very hairy out there. I think You know, I've been fairly quiet. I don't think I've tweeted in like 2 weeks. That's because I haven't had really anything interesting to say. You know, I think this just goes back to the framework that I always discuss. Right now, the momentum is down, you know, but— and we're not clearly at value levels because, you know, you have the equity markets puking out. Below us you have, uh, you know, altcoins sort of, sort of bleeding. We're down, you know, we're down about 15% from the highs on NASDAQ, uh, maybe another 5 to 10% to go. I do think that BTC below $80,000 is a good buy midterm, but other than that, I mean, I just don't really have any strong convictions in the market. I don't know, I, I do think we're closer to the end just because it's like, well, what, what, what else is there to do at this point? Uh, but yeah, I mean, what do you think?

Yeah, I think that like this may be the flush that marks the bottom. I think this is what you buy. Um, you know, I've been— I, I didn't really see this sell-off coming. You're not always right as a trader, so definitely there's, when you say, all right, this is it, this is the time to buy. And you've said that a couple of times on the way down, there's sort of this risk that like, you know, your credibility's a bit damaged, but you know, I have been recommending Bitcoin. I haven't recommended other alts and Bitcoin's not really that deep in the can right now. It's, you know, we're trading where we were just like a few hours ago, realistically. Like we're on March 31st, the lows were $81, now we're $83. It's not really like that crazy to buy this. I think Bitcoin's showing relative strength right now, and I think that you're supposed to take heed of that. Another thing is like, you know, just having been a, you know, you'll probably res— this will probably resonate with you too, Avi. Like just having been a business person I think it's a little bit shortsighted to fault Trump for the immediate impact of these tariffs. I can sort of empathize with the idea of having a more nuanced multi-part strategy than just like everything I say and do has to make the stock market rally that minute or that hour. I can see maybe a long game being played here where the tariffs are hiked, there's some pain, uh, there's some contraction, other countries, you know, enter into negotiations, and then ultimately what ends up happening is, you know, the trade, the global trade picture looks a little bit fairer, tariffs come back down, and in the midst of the turmoil, uh, the Fed has a little bit more scope to cut rates. So, you know, I don't think I don't think we're going to enter like a crazy recession as a result of this. I think it's more just like the kind of situation that you look for when you're trying to, like, as a markets person, like the kind of situation that you try to have to understand the rationale for rather than like just feel annoyed about your static long portfolio. You know what I'm saying?

Yeah, I understand what you're talking about. I mean, sort of two, two points here that I want to make. One is I don't think— I think Trump could have played this as a long game a lot better. I think coming out and basically saying, I'm going to take on the entire world at the same time is a little, little silly. I think that was him trying to get things done too fast. If he had gone region, even just region by region, if not country by country, and tried to negotiate with them and used his stick to negotiate, it might have been a smoother ride. But I also understand that he, you know, he wants— he does want there to be pain. I think that that's like part of the calculus. But that with all that said, right, we know that he wants there to be pain, you know, but we know that he can't have too much pain because He's the stock market president. And no matter how much I think they jawbone about not looking at the market and looking at the yields, I think that they do care about the market at the end of the day. That's also a barometer for how presidents are measured. And we know this guy has a reasonably large ego. And so if the market's down 30% to start his presidency, I think that he's going to be looking at that and going, all right, maybe I got to fix this for my image. Because what you don't want is you don't want to get elected in and then immediately have the market nuke because of your policies. And then you kind of lose a mandate to govern because people lose faith in you. And he needs to avoid that situation. Yeah, that's really good. With all of that said, I mean, ETH is like basically all alts outside of maybe some RWA alts that are doing okay. Um, kind of just fucked across the board. They're just not going to be— there just won't be any buyers for these things at all until Bitcoin gets back above $90,000. Um, basically these things can have these, you know, can have bounces, but they're straight line lower until VIX is down and the market relaxes. I mean, this is just It's just a shit time to be, to be an alt.

But so are you saying that inverse alt season is still the new alt season?

Yeah, I'm saying, I'm saying the inverse alt season looks honestly, it looks pretty damn good. I mean, I've got my eye on a few things that I think could still do well, um, you know, if you just give them, give them a little bit of time. I've got my little RWA basket that I've been talking about, uh, you know, with the Pendles of the world, the know, Pendle, Ondo, Plume, Curve. I'm sort of waiting on good levels for them to start adding, and I'd be adding that against ETH because I do think these things over the next year are going to gain a lot of traction just because of the regulatory clarity that's coming. But other than that, I'm pretty much cashed up, you know, waiting for spots to deploy because that's a good place to be. What was crazy about today is like how badly the Wall Street Journal rugged the entire complex, including equities, because I think they're down more than Bitcoin.

Did you see this? Like, equity futures are down 3.2%, Bitcoin's down 2.6%.

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Yeah, I think some of that's like, yeah, what is it, GME buying?

Yeah.

Which was good, you know, keep keeping that up. But did you see, you see the Wall Street Journal? They came out with an article at 4 PM that said that the tariffs are going to be 10%, which was lower than estimates, and then everything just giga pumped.

Yeah.

And then immediately it came out that that was false.

Oh my gosh. Yeah, it's not crazy. The whole market was sort of like, the markets opened up today. I think everybody was expecting this to be like a, well, it was like a sell the rumor, buy the news kind of thing. And then Trump just came out swinging. I mean, what are the all-in tariffs on China now? Is it like 100%?

Obviously now it's something 50, it's, I think it's 54%. So it's 34% new in addition to the 20% that already is there.

I'm not just, hold on. Let me just quickly. Basically, one of my, one of my contacts is Ryan Peterson, who runs Flexport, and he was saying, remember, these duties that were announced are on top of existing duties. So for China, you have original duty of 7.5% to 25% duty from Section 301, 20% from earlier this year, 34% today. And then he said 25% for China's purchases of Venezuelan oil. So that's over 100%. So it's 54% higher to buy Chinese goods than it was at the, before Trump was elected. But there are still other duties floating around there. Like some of these, I'd like to see a list of all-in tariffs. Like these are, these are some savage numbers. And Avi, I want to get your take on this. Like my, my take is that my take is that it will not result in, I think, I think consumption will drop as a result of this. Like I think that Economics 101 will kick in. And higher prices will result in lower demand. And ultimately, I think that like, yes, everybody's profit margins will get squeezed, and yes, prices of certain goods will, will be higher, but like, I don't think that— I don't think that people are just going to pony up and spend this extra money. I think it's really going to crimp consumption, um, which will obviously trickle down into other recessionary type, type looking data. What do you think? You're on mute.

I, I think that, I think that you're right on that, on that point. I mean, you, as, as we've discussed before, tariffs don't, you know, it's not, it's not just a tax on foreign goods, it's a tax on domestic goods as well. It's just consumption in general. Uh, and without, without wages going up, I mean, What we're going to see is I think we're actually going to see like a reasonably deflationary effect overall from this. One of the main reasons I think that is because if you look at the levels of consumption, the people earning more than $250,000 a year make up a much larger percentage of consumption than they have in the last 40 years. And with the stock market going down, those are the people that hold assets. I mean, I know just like myself, like I'm like, I'm poorer today than I was yesterday. So I'm definitely going to be saving money a bit more, right? So it's like, it's like a natural thing, right? Yeah. It's like, you know, I'm looking, I'm looking at buying a house right now. It's like, okay, well, like how much money do I want to spend on the house? The answer is a little bit different today than it was. I mean, not actually, but you know, just as you feel a little bit. You, you feel, you feel, you know, you feel like, okay, well maybe I should be a little bit more frugal, you know, now that, now, now that I'm 15% poorer than I was 3 months ago.

You know, I think it's funny, like, I, I, I think that what got Joe Biden fired from his job wasn't the dementia, it wasn't the policies, it was just inflation that occurred during his term. And so I think that, you know, the Republicans are going to basically be subject to the same medicine if we have inflation. Going to have to take the same medicine. So I kind of agree with you. I think that while sticker prices on certain foreign goods will inflate, the overall impact of these tariffs on the economy will be a cooling effect. This won't heat things up. This won't cause consumption. This is like reverse stimulus. So basically it'll like, basically what I think is coming next is a tax cut package. I think that, you know, okay, they've basically just introduced a massive tax on consumption. Now they're going to have to cut taxes somewhere else. Otherwise they're just kind of like people that hike taxes, which is not what they were elected to do. And that's not really their branding. They're the tax cut party. They always have been. So I think we should expect bullish tight news for crypto from here. Like if Trump manages to cut taxes to zero for everybody who's earning under $150K, which is the plan, you know, Bessant's gone out and said that, Lutnick's gone out and said that. Like let's say they get close to that. That's pretty bullish for things that retail likes to YOLO, like crypto, you know. what gets worse from here before the, the stuff starts to get better? Like, it's hard to imagine anything happening that's worse than this, and Bitcoin's holding up pretty well. I don't know, to me the setup looks bullish.

Yeah, it's, it's a good, it's a good thought exercise, right? I mean, whenever you have, whenever you have a narrative in the market that's causing fear, you have to ask, well, how old is that narrative? And, you know, for, for a while, I think, which is why, which is why we got a bounce for a bit up until Trump announced this whole Liberation Day BS is that all of the bad news had been absorbed and there wasn't new bad news to come. And then Trump comes out and goes, well, there's, by the way, Liberation Day is coming soon. I'm going to be tariffing everybody. It was like, oh, market's like, okay, fuck, I guess that's new bad news. We can go back down. But now we're at a point where, okay, we're done again. You know, we've hit all the bad news. Um, and so then the questions are like, what are, you know, sort of what are, what are the knock-on effects? And then what are, what are the ways out? Uh, and then what's more likely? And what do I mean by that? Well, ways out mean how does this situation resolve itself? How does it, how does it get better? Uh, it gets, it gets better, uh, if Trump walks back the tariffs, or if there's negotiation room, um, or if just nothing changes and data remains constant, but both of us think that consumption's going to be hit. I think that basically the only way that they avoid a recession is if they actually do manage to pass a reasonable amount of tax cuts. Otherwise, I think by definition, it's very hard to see us not heading into a recession, which might be very possible. They pass big tax cuts and then the tariffs get removed and then we'd go up in a straight line forever and always until the end of the Trump presidency. But he has boxed us into a little bit of a tough position here. I mean, these tariffs are pretty extreme, Jonah. These are some pretty nasty tariffs.

These are big ones. I mean, put it this way, Avi. A guy in the chat says, why do you think there won't be a recession? Let me respond to that and respond to what you just said. I don't think there will be a recession because unlike every other flirtation with recession that I've experienced in my 20 years in markets, this is the first one that's intentional, like self-inflicted, intentional, like predictable. Like normally it's shit out of left field. It's COVID, it's, oh my God, like subprime mortgages. No one even thought about that until it was too late, you know, or, you know, flash crash or all these random things that happened over the years. This is the first time where like a bunch of politicians, policymakers, and technocrats have like gotten together and created a managed recession. And because this is like man-made, like, it feels like the timing is so kind of obvious when you look at it that way. It's, it's like, if you're going to take some painful medicine, keep using this medicine analogy, you do it right at the beginning when you're still on your honeymoon period and people are giving you a little bit of grace, your first 100 days. You don't just like let this malaise continue into the midterms and then get destroyed and then let it continue another 2 years and then get thrown out of office in disgrace, having not completed your agenda and having your legacy tarnished or destroyed. Like, no, you rip the Band-Aid off while you can, which is immediately, and then you start to rebuild the foundations that you, you were elected to rebuild. So this is not a partisan comment. Like, this is not something that it's like me trying to defend Trump. I'm just sort of like reverse engineering what's happening here. And the reason why I think that we won't end up in a recession is because since this was created in an entirely manufactured artificial fashion, it can be unwound just as easily. None of this, like, none of these tariffs can't be unwound. None of this is creating a beast that the Trump administration can't control. Foreign countries will always be happy to sell their goods to America, the world's largest consumer. At any price, tariffs or no tariffs. It's not like this is doing any permanent damage. So if we start to like get into real trouble territory for the S&P, I don't think Trump's just going to like stick it to the American economy. Like it's not, it's not just rich people who own assets. It's like businesses are assets. And if everybody's stock price is in the toilet, like hiring slows down, wages get cut, people get fired. Like it's, it's a, it's bad times. Like Trump's not an idiot. The people around him for the most part are aware of these basic economic realities. So just in sum, because this is manmade, it can be undone just as quickly as it was done, and it probably will be if things get too detrimental, which maybe they will, but I doubt that this spirals into something crazy.

Yeah, I think, I mean, what you hope for is that it just doesn't spiral out of control. Right. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's one thing. Uh, some, some things end up being sticky, right? For example, if there's a significant amount of job loss and that's what prompts everyone to be like, okay, fuck up now, you know, we're, we're, we're heading, we're heading into a recession. We should probably reverse these tariffs or do, or do something about it. Some of that stuff's sticky, right? Um, like some of those jobs just won't, won't, won't be, won't be coming back. Um, so there is, you know, there's, I think, a time limit on this sort of stuff. I do, I, I do tend to err on the side of yes, this is, this is a flush and this, and this will be over. A lot of people right now, like in this moment, are pointing out that BTC is holding. Basically every single time I see NASDAQ down a ton and BTC is holding, that just means that there's a delay because there's an idiosyncratic buyer in the market. And this time we actually know the idiosyncratic buyer, it's GME. So basically what I'm trying to say is like, don't, don't put too much weight on that. You know, I'm like, I'm not a buyer at $83. I'm a buyer at $78. You know, I know that's, you know, 5%, you know, 5% is not a huge difference. But if you're a trader, makes sense, right? Like, this is actually a phenomenal market if you want to trade. All you have to do is just trade at extremes. Like, if you get, if you get a billion dollars of liquidations, or you get, if you get a 10% down day from ETH, or, you know, an 8% down day from BTC, which is very possible, that's, that's a buy. That's like a, all right, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's wave it in and then sell some on the, sell some on the on the pop. I mean, and this market, I think you just have to remember that this market is the market that you take profit in very quickly. Like, basically you get, you get it, you get a little bit of pop and then you're out. You just, you just shove it out. Uh, and that's how I'm looking at trading this, trading this market right now. I mean, honestly, I think like getting short here still is like, you know, you can honestly probably short ETH at this point, get get down to like $1,500.

I feel like ETH is going to triple digits. Where does the Ethereum Foundation get liquidated again? I wonder. I haven't been following it. I don't know, but $1,200 or something was the rumor. We're trading $1,788 right now. That asset is just cursed.

It's down 6%. Yeah, totally, totally cursed. I mean, like, I can easily see $1,500 shortly in that thing, even if BTC holds— like, if BTC holds the low but it sells off to, uh, 77. I mean, I think Ether's at $1,500 in that case. I would say lower than that, which is very possible. I mean, some puts, puts are probably, you know, if you're worried about your portfolio, puts are phenomenal here because this is, it's this type of situation where you just have to be humble with your own skills and you got to say, I don't know. What's going to happen. This is a once in an 80-year event, and you should probably not take massive swings or do anything too crazy with your portfolio unless something like truly nuts is happening in the market. And -3% from BTC today is not truly nuts. Yeah, that's, that, that, that's my take.

This episode is brought to you by SKALE, the next evolution in Layer 1 blockchains. With a gas-free, invisible user experience, instant finality, and robust security, SKALE allows for limitless scalability and has already saved its 50 million users over $11 billion in gas fees. SKALE's high throughput, zero transaction costs, and powerful Web3 infrastructure make it the ideal platform for gaming, AI, and other high-throughput apps. To explore the gas-free ecosystem, visit scale.space/ecosystem and follow their journey on X @skale_network. That's Skale spelled with a K. Thanks to Skale for making today's episode possible. I wanted to take a moment to tell you about Marinade, the platform connecting Solana holders with the best staking rates on Solana. Marinade unlocks a high-performance, staking delegation platform that brings billions in liquidity and security to the Solana market with solutions for both individual traders and global institutions from both DeFi and traditional finance. Use Marinade to earn rewards on your Solana treasuries and holdings. Optimize your Solana staking with Marinade's best-in-market features, including user downside protection through protected staking rewards. And optimize delegation via Marinade's automated auction marketplace. To learn more about Marinade, visit marinade.finance or click the link in the show notes.

Equally, as a response to that take, if we get a flush, that's the flush that like, like let's say that, let's say that Bitcoin really flushes. Let's say it goes down to $75K. I would think it'd be crazy not to buy that. What, what news is going to come out next?

With what money, Jonah?

You said you're all in cash, Avi. I mean, I, I forgot.

Yeah, but you've been buying, you've been buying the dips.

I mean, I, I, I haven't blown my entire wad, let's put it that way. Like, I, I, I really, I'm careful about not blowing my entire wad. I, I have made some money on shorts. I've traded in and out of—

if you need a place to stay, let me know, Jonah.

Avi, it's over. Let's throw in the towel. No, I mean, honestly, like I, I'm fine because I follow the advice that we give again and again on this podcast, which is don't use leverage, uh, don't, don't bet more than you can afford to lose. We're still doing— we're still above like Trump's election levels. I was happy then, slightly happier now, just disappointed that we're not like immediately mooning into his first 100 days. Now I, I just like let's— I can see why the world is pissed off. The world, the markets participant world is pissed at Trump right now. Let's just sit here and war room this situation. How, like, what could, what's something that could happen that could make this worse? Like, for example, I, let me just think of something crazy. Let's say that China is like, all right, we're just hiking our tariffs another 50%. And then Trump responds by hiking tariffs on China by another 50%. And now suddenly, like, you know, your cheap Chinese crap on Amazon is, you know, more than twice as expensive as it used to be. Right. I guess that's the big risk. That's, that's what you're afraid of. If you're, if you're— yeah, you can short altcoins with confidence. A lot of them are just going to zero, but Bitcoin or stocks, if you short that here, what are you hoping for? What do you— you're hoping for that, right?

I mean, what you're really hoping for— Bitcoin's just going to follow equities at this point. So really what you're asking is, you know, what stops equities from going lower? And equities right now are just pricing in a reasonable contraction in GDP because of lower trade and lower consumption. At least I think that's what's happening. And that is very plausible. I mean, here's, here's the reality of the situation. We don't know what the fuck is going to happen with these tariffs. Like, we don't— we can guess. But when's the last time that we had tariffs this extensive put on goods? I mean, there are arguments to be made that it doesn't matter. That, you know, a lot of people are reasonably priced, you know, a lot of this consumption is reasonably price insensitive. Uh, and you know what, what it actually eats into is it eats into the savings of Americans. I don't know, that's a stupid argument in my personal opinion. Uh, but it is an argument that you can make because who the fuck knows, uh, when it, when it comes, when it comes to this, you can maybe, uh, it produces American innovation. And suddenly, like, there are American companies that figure out in the next 6 months how to produce the same Chinese slop at lower cost because they're forced to, right? Because they're putting R&D into it.

Maybe a bunch of companies build factories here.

Yeah, exactly. Like, genuinely, like, who the fuck knows? But that's kind of the issue, right? Like, the issue is that nobody knows. Um, and with that in mind, like the most likely outcome is that you do end up in a recession because you do have a massive hit to consumption, at least in the short run. And so I think that's what the market is responding to. Like that's what everyone is so nervous about it. You know, and you kind of need, like you need the ship turned around by stimulus in some way, right? Yeah.

And maybe that stimulus is coming. I mean, I don't think it's hopium to say that. I think it would be weird if the, like, they've pretty, they've been pretty open, the administration, about how they're not just going to hike taxes and then walk away without doing anything else. Like, this is all part of an extremely well-telegraphed agenda, most of which is relatively stimulatory. No taxes on tips, no taxes on any income under $150K. Like, we're going to lower income taxes across the board. We're going to give you bigger state and local income tax deductions. Like, we're going to pump domestic manufacturing. We're going to move unproductive people in the government into productive parts of the, you know, private economy. So I, again, like, you know, if you're short right now, what are you hoping for? I, all, with all of the information that's been priced in today, you know, lower earnings are priced in, lower consumption is priced in. We, we have perfect information on what happened in the past. What, what you're hoping for if you set a fresh short on Bitcoin and SPX at current levels, and those two are trading with Very high correlation, right?

Yeah, I mean, what you're hoping for on BTC, I think, is like, okay, so I wish I could share a chart here because—

All right, let me just finish the sentence. You're hoping that the government loses control of this. You're hoping that this spirals out of control, and even if stocks are down 10%, the government brings the tariffs back down to zero, that some beast has been let out of its cage that cannot be controlled. That's what you're hoping for if you set a fresh short.

Well, you know, hoping, I mean, betting on.

Betting on.

I think, I think it's a better, better phrasing. Hopefully you're not hoping for anything when you trade. Um, but like on, on Bitcoin, if you go to the 3-day chart, it's actually just such a clear short setup. Um, from a, from a technical perspective, you get, you, you basically, you get to stop out above $88,000 and you get to target the previous highs of $73,000. So you have a you know, 7% move to the top side, uh, 10% move to the downside seems reasonable. Like that, you know, that seemed— and, and you have the momentum on your side, which makes the risk-reward better. That just seems like a reasonable trade that a reasonable trader could, could take. Um, with, you know, with, with SPX, I think what you're, what you're betting for is you're, you're betting on a, like, a one-touch of 5,000, uh, and and you can get out. And I don't, you know, the way that this is gonna play out is all of the fears are gonna be front-loaded. Like this is gonna end by Monday of next week, my personal opinion. Like whatever price action is gonna happen is gonna get priced in by Monday of next week. We're gonna get some move over the weekend which is likely going to be negative if there's no change in the news. Uh, and then you get the flush on Monday and then you're going up straight. Um, that's my, that, that's, that's my take because you need, again, you need more bad news to come out. It can't just be the same thing over and over and over and over.

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That's what I'm saying. I couldn't agree more. I think like, I agree with Yuan Liu in the chat. SPX touching 5,000 would be a gift. Like, You, what matters is the second derivative of the news, not the news that just came out, right? Like, is the news going to get worse from here or better? Hard to imagine it gets worse. I don't know. I, I, I, I, you know, I tend to have a bullish bent because over the course of my career, like I started in '07, there was the immediate global financial crisis. And then the stock market basically rallied in a straight line from 666 all the way up to 6, 0.000, right? That's like, you know, nearly a 10xer. So I, I've built my career over a period of time where if I had been a permabear or even a permarrange trader on risk assets, I wouldn't have been able to sustain my 20-year career. I would've gotten blown out. So I tend to have a bullish bent, but there's method behind the madness. Like, it's not just that, oh, I grew up over a bull run, so I'm a bull. No, it's like something very important happened in '08, something game-changing, like as important, I would say, as the US going off the gold standard in the 1970s. What happened in 2008 was that the United States of America, uh, and governments around the world in parallel decided to underwrite risk in the economy. That was sort of like a first, and I don't think that that genie can be put out, put back in the bottle without stocks going straight back down to 666. So I think that if things really get bad, which this isn't, like having seen actual recessions and actual crazy sell-offs, this move in stocks from 6,000 to 5,500 doesn't seem that crazy to me. Like this, this feels totally tolerable. And in Bitcoin going from $108,000 for one unit of our magic internet money to $83,000 for one unit of our magic internet money. Like that, those, that's not crazy, right? If things get actually crazy, I think we're backstopped. And this just isn't that crazy, frankly. I think Trump was, was right to rip off this bandaid. Sorry, not right in the sense that like I agree with what he's doing because I don't necessarily, but like his calculation that he could get away with it now will probably be proven correct.

Yeah, I mean, I think basically what you're— basically what you're trying to say is this is, this is a— this will be a short-lived crash. Like, this, this is, this is not the destruction of an economic system that's going to take, you know, you know, there's, there's— in, in your words, it's not going to be one failure, then another failure, then another failure, then another failure. There's not going to be a Lehman and an AIG. There's just going to be— this is going to happen. There's going to be a cascade and then we're done. Yeah, I tend to agree with that. I think the only thing is figuring out where, like, where we're done and that that's what we've been trying to debate is like when, when does, when does the bad news end?

Maybe what you're supposed to do is stay on the sidelines and then start buying good news when it comes out, like when the administration starts doing things that are supportive of markets. Then you can start buying. I don't know, but then they might come out and do another one of these.

You know what's done really well?

Gold. Yeah, 3,200.

Like gold is insane.

Remember when the target for Bitcoin was a gold market cap of $10 trillion? Now gold is a $22 trillion asset.

It's pretty— it's— hold on, let's see. Gold is— gold is 30. That's— it's just so insane, man.

One-way train.

Like just straight one way. Like over the last year, just straight up. I'm glad I own a ton of gold. You do? Yeah.

Why? I don't understand that one. I've never been a very good gold trader.

I don't own gold in like my investment portfolio. I own a bunch of physical gold. And by a bunch, I mean, I own like a substantial amount of money in physical gold, but not like a huge percentage of my personal portfolio is in this physical gold.

My wife owns the gold in this family.

I just think it's, you know, it's good. You know, you never know when you're going to need it.

Do you have like gold bars, or are you just talking about like earrings and wearables and stuff?

Um, so I have a bunch of like stuff that I bought from India, like earrings, uh, bangles, uh, necklaces, all that sort of fun stuff.

I can see you, you and some of the other crypto nouveau riche guys, like in, in their late 20s, early 30s, like you guys act like NBA players in their rookie season, you know, like Um, I'm not going to name any names or dox anybody, but you're like, oh yeah, I love the gemstones, like the gold.

Uh-huh.

You're literally like, uh, Kevin Durant in Uncut Gems, you know.

I'm—

where—

look, I'm on top of the game. What can I say? I like to treat myself.

It's true. It's better to have gold, gold, um, gold earrings than Artcoin right now.

Anyway, for sure, long story, long story short for the listeners, Bid Bitcoin when it's collapsing in on itself, preferably between $73K and $78K, and just wait. Short Ethereum to zero, buy some puts, and then, you know, throw darts at your watchlist and pick any alt to short, and you should be happy, except for the RWA ones.

Yeah, I think some of these shorts, like, look at my, my favorite bellwether for shorts, the thing that's down the most on my entire board today. Can you guess what token it is, Avi?

Fartcoin? WIF?

WIF. Yeah, I was looking at WIF. WIF is down 12%. This thing is just the smoothest death spiral I've ever seen. I don't have—

I'm honestly, it's like it pisses me off that I closed my short at $1. I shorted it at $1.20. It went to a dollar. I was like, 20%, that's great. Fuck.

I reset my WIF short. I closed it for a while, then I reset it because without a WIF short, I felt naked. You know, you know, sometimes when you have one of those, one of those positions that you take off and you just feel like, you feel like, yeah, feeling naked is one way to describe it. Another way is like just something feels missing in your life. Without that position, you know, like you— I don't know, I kind of, I kind of feel that way about the WIV short.

Yeah, that's fair. All right, dude.

All right, you ready to call it?

I'm ready to call it. I gotta— let's, let's do another one, uh, later this week.

Yeah, let's record on Sunday like we usually do.

Yeah, we'll record on Sunday.

We had to do something. It's an emergency stream for this crazy, crazy thing that happened. All right.

All right. Adiós.

Adiós. Thank you, everybody. Bye.