Financial Bubbles & The Crypto/AI Industry | Historical Signals That Will Repeat - Mere Mortals Conversations

Episode Transcript
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(00:07):
Welcome,
Mere Mortalites, to an episode of the mere mortals musings here
live on the
Indeed, it is Australia Day. Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi, Oi, Oi.
We have myself, Kyrin, here on this side of the microphone and
a blank space on the other side. Juan is not here. I am actually doing a solo episode. So me and mortals conversations,

(00:33):
it is a monologue
conversation this time.
Now the reason for this
is that I took a whole bunch of notes from a book review I did of Devil Take the Hindmost by Edward Chancellor, and I just couldn't fit them all into that book review. It would have been ridiculously
long.
And I was thinking like, okay, yeah, maybe I can have a conversation with 1 about

(00:55):
all of this notes and really talk about financial bubbles.
And the thing that with that was just because I took so many notes, and you're gonna see it on the on your screen shortly,
Whether you're watching this as a video or later as a podcast episode and you're in a decent app, which has podcasting chapters,
then you're gonna realize like, okay, he kind of would have probably just been talking this whole time.

(01:19):
Now I was meant to do the solo episode last week, because 1 was gonna be away anyway.
Plans changed, and we we did a a normal episode together. But,
yeah, it's it's occurred this week. So, we'll jump into it. Context, I guess, for this
was that,
as I mentioned, was related to the book.

(01:39):
And I've split this up in 4 main sections of the financial progression
of what is a financial bubble,
how do they occur,
the bubble like growing and strengthening the popping zone and then the aftermath
that you'll see.
And
then I'll also have a little bit of a section of scam signs. And then that'll be the first half of this. I'll go into the boostgram lounge. And then the second half is I I think there's going to be

(02:07):
a very big
financial bubble around the crypto slash AI industry in this next coming six to eighteen months.
So I wanted to go over all of that.
So let's let's just jump into this. So
we are.
Yeah.
Devil take the high most book. Lots and lots of notes. And in particular, it was around financial bubbles. So I'll try and list them all off the top of my head. We had the tulip mania

(02:36):
in in the Dutch land in
The Netherlands. So that was in the I think that was the 1500, sixteen hundred period.
We had railway mania
in The UK, which was the
probably
We had the Gilded Age
by of

(02:57):
Mark Twain's renowned. So that was in the
in America.
We had
a gold rush also in America that was probably more earlier before that.
We had the
Also in America,
we had the financial bubbles of the Japanese
Zai tech companies,

(03:18):
and that was in the
And there was a couple more, I think there was 8 or 9 all up. So I'm going to be referencing a lot of things that happen in these bubbles.
I won't get all of these exactly right, because unfortunately, I don't have the book on me at this moment. So I can't reference exactly. But
you get the picture. Okay, bubble beginnings. So it all begins with capital and liquidity, essentially, that seemed to be the big driver of all of these bubbles,

(03:48):
When people are moving money around that is and have kind of excess money to move around.
That's when they'll go into more speculative plays.
And
we we see right at the start of that book, it was talking about the differences between gambling, investing and speculating.
And boy, those boundaries
pretty, pretty loose that

(04:09):
they're pretty pretty similar.
So it tends to go in cycles ranging of multi year, if not decade length. Basically, basically, these bubbles would
usually go over like a ten year period.
And I'm not going to be talking about such as
the
two thousand and eight financial
bubble and crisis,

(04:29):
because the book was published well before that. Another 1 it talked about was the kind of leading up to the .com boom of the kind of
So that was another 1.
And
it's very intimately linked with governments and large business.
And in particular,
the I think we see the

(04:51):
rapidity
of like repeated nature of these
happening because governments are starting to interfere with business and have a large
portion of
influence with regards to what is actually happening
with businesses, with the economy in general.
And whether this be through the

(05:11):
printing of money, endorsing of certain industries
of
taxes,
of tariffs, of whatever it is,
the more the government gets involved, the more
liquidity
and things like that seem to derive from this and, you know, playing with interest rates, all these sorts of things. So that is pretty much the large overarching

(05:33):
theme of these. And
then we see, I think, the consequences
of of what
happens from this. Now it's not all of this. A large portion of this is also us humans
investing,
gambling, speculating
and letting our emotions go crazy ahead of us. And this is why we see these these bubbles starting to form. So

(05:55):
typically
at the bubble beginning, there's usually like a 1 off event or discovery. There's something that gets people excited. There is an actual breakthrough
of some sort of nature. So,
if we look, for example, in the
'18 or
here we had Captain Phipps,

(06:15):
and his diving expedited
expedition, which was essentially where,
this guy was a English, maybe he was American born and then came to England or,
in any case, he was on an English trawler or an English ship of some sort.
And he discovered a Spanish,
a sunken Spanish ship, I believe. And in this particular region, and he hold up a ridiculous amount of gold.

(06:41):
Ridiculous.
And just with the way that
the,
the contract was drawn up, I think 30% of it went to the the, you know, UK government
as a as a kind of tax. And then the rest he got to split between himself, his men and investors in the actual ship. And this is where people are like, holy shit. If I, you know, put in,

(07:05):
I don't know what the
£1 was probably a ridiculous amount of money back then. So, you know, they probably talk about shillings or pence or
or penny. I don't know what they were talking, what number they would be used. But, you know, I could put in this and I could get five years worth of wages
in this sort of thing. So

(07:25):
people would do that.
South American independence in the
where
countries like Argentina,
Brazil,
Paraguay, Peru
were
all gaining independence, and therefore,
you could then
what was
predominantly
being extracted by the governments of, you know, Portugal of Spain and places like that. We're now open to actual investors being able to reap those profits. Instead,

(07:56):
we had railways allowing men to reckon distance by hours and minutes instead of time instead of length. And this was, you know, just
the the productivity gains that be that can be unlocked by being able to move across physical space in
a rapid short period of time with way, way less energy expenditure.

(08:19):
So there's typically something like that happens.
We have these mini mini bumbles, which form within a larger economic framework. So
as I mentioned, is typically an actual game changer of efficiency
and innovation.
And this doesn't necessarily need to be of a
technological client. It can be of a,

(08:41):
a structural kind. So we can have, you know, the railroads, the automobiles, for example. But you can also have joint stock companies, so a way of capital formation, which was completely unheard of before,
of the way humans interact with each other being unlocked. Let's even look at social media
and how much value was
accrued to the social media companies,

(09:02):
which was essentially just allowing humans to to talk with each other more efficiently.
So
sometimes these are sparked by the innovation above, but not necessarily.
We then have usually
speculation unchecked by government regulation. So if the governments are not clamping down on this industry

(09:23):
and it's not heavily regulated,
we tend to see a
flourishing of activity
going there.
Now, typically this occurs because the innovation is new
and therefore there's no rules and things set up for it to
to for a government to say, hey, you can do this or you can't can't do this. So there's a lot of operating in,

(09:45):
gray, murky areas, which
are you don't know if they're illegal or illegal.
And this is sometimes actually fueled by an implicit promise that the government will protect the people
if things happen with this, such as the denationalization
of the Nikon telephone telephone and telegraph, to a pie private company, which occurred in the

(10:08):
I believe, which was part of the Japanese asset bubble that happened then.
So we also see these new and easy opportunities for retail to enter,
emerging
and whether this be the ease of use
of greater access or perhaps even more information.
So for example, we had daily newspapers providing info for the South Sea bubble, which was

(10:33):
a company in England in. Yeah, I'm going to say that
period, 1 of the first
companies, which I guess was
a joint stock company, wasn't the very first, but I think it was right up there
where you would actually get equal ownership of this

(10:55):
via shares. And
you could, you know, because because there was always private companies before this where
people agreed, okay, you get this portion, I get this portion, this sort of thing. But I think it's when it's starting to have those
larger structural frameworks of, okay, this is what a share is. I own a portion of this company if I hold this piece of paper, if I'm on this registry

(11:17):
and that unlocks a lot of,
you know, trust. For example,
if you can
automate away trust or if you can store trust in a piece of paper rather than in
complex
human interactions where I need to speak with someone for fifty hours before that I trust them, then that that opens up a lot of innovation as well.

(11:41):
So
we have also railways birthing stock exchanges,
the ticker tape during the Gilded Age where traders could instantly see
the the prices, things like this, radio programs during the
Internet birthing online brokers and Internet forums for communication.
All of these sorts of things tend to play into the bubble beginning and

(12:05):
which will reinforce what what happens a little bit later on,
which gets into the bubble growing and strengthening period. So
this is where I
categorize this as okay. We've we've had the initial beginnings and
I'm not really going to give time links or things into this. It's kind of be going to be a

(12:28):
little bit vague in terms of
numbers, statistics
and
hard concrete data because all of these were
were different in their nature.
Sorry. No. There were
very similar in their nature, different in the ways that they
played out and indicated.
And

(12:49):
I, you know, how how can you measure
the financial impact of the South Sea Bubble compared to Japanese asset prices?
Maybe there's some sort of way the book didn't cover this, so I'm not going to cover it.
What we see, okay, in this probable growing and strengthening period,
leverage and credit,
boy, oh, boy, do we see a bunch of that. So the South Sea was giving loans to people and and deferred payments

(13:15):
to buy more of their stock. So that was essentially like giving people money,
to go out and buy more of their stock.
Consumers in
so this is the
we're buying 40% of department store goods on credit. So
when you see that

(13:36):
credit,
I
the conditions for loaning out money to people with the
understanding that they are going to then pay you back
interest on that credit. So I loan out $100
and they will eventually give me that hundred dollars back plus 10 in the meantime of of interest.
We see a lot of that going on,

(13:58):
margins, loans galore in this era as well. And then leverage is essentially when someone can have a little bit of capital, say, a hundred dollars, but then they are able to
in such essentially invest a thousand dollars worth of or into something
with the understanding that if that thousand dollars dips by 10%,

(14:20):
their hundred dollars just gets taken from them. They get liquidated, all these sorts of things. So we really, really see in these periods
leverage and credit for
not only individuals, but
larger companies and businesses
and even governments
gets
notched up on the scale. People are certainly not in the worrying about

(14:44):
money sort of stage. It's more like I've got a bunch of money.
I want to make money from my money. What what can I do with this?
We see a lot of lingo and buzzwords starting to emerge.
And this is attaching the hot new thing,
to anything would kind of make it pop off. And we see this in a lot of these bubbles.

(15:05):
When it's a if it was a railway company
in England during the railway mania,
they overproduced
railways by so much that everyone was putting a railway anywhere that they could.
And if you said like, Oh, there's this new railway company, people were just coming and buying it instantly and buying stock in it instantly.

(15:28):
The lingo is closely related
where baby behavior
seen before is reworded. So
bull and bear
in the
really started to take off
jobber for stockbrokers,
things related to coffee shops as well. 1 of the things that I found really, really interesting in this book was this there was this IO IO mega company,

(15:52):
and I'd never heard of this before. And this was in the
And this company had something to do with Zip drive. So it was, you know, this was back in the days when megabytes were were big,
big numbers.
And
they I don't
know exactly what the company did, but
the

(16:12):
this was when Internet online forums were really starting to pick up
and becoming a thing. And people were meaning this company before meaning was even known to be a thing. And they would be talking about how Iomega was,
you know, going to pump how it was going to do this, going to do that. They had some clever wordplay of the I omega name.

(16:34):
And I just found that really fascinating, like, oh, wow. You know, you look nowadays and say,
what was that? I think it was GMC. The GameStop
became a meme
stock that that retail traders were doing.
Man, get get with the times,
GMC because I Omega was doing it, you know, two decades before. It was cool.

(16:58):
We have ridiculous claims starting to emerge during this period as well.
Here's a couple of my favorites.
Employee. We're going to
so this bit, employee capital profitably
without the slightest risk of loss. Wait, that's a that's a that sounds like a good thing. I wouldn't mind getting in on that. And this was a pawnbroker
talking about how they were going to undercut other you serious pawnbrokers. So

(17:21):
you're serious as in they're loaning things out on interest to people.
And
that was that was how that kind of tagline for why you should invest with their pawn breaking business. This their new 1, which was what's had
from what I could tell, no new technology during that period that was in the England in the I think it was in the

(17:44):
period where the joint stock companies were becoming a thing. So
'18
somewhere around then.
We're going to get profits exceeding the power of calculation.
And this was due to the amount of deaths that a mortuary business was was seeing and and to stop body snatches happening.
And they were gonna employ some some sort of new technology or something to to stop body snatches. And then this would allow the mortuary business to to get

(18:13):
a ridiculous,
uncalculable
profits
and straight up hype. So during the American independence,
people were saying that they were stumbling over leftover gold, that they just have the gold nuggets and
things that they were finding in these South American mines were so big that you could literally stumble over a gold nugget.

(18:35):
That's that the
worry that the market is about to be flooded with precious metals so that gold would and silver would just instantly go to 0 because of how much was getting they were getting from these South American mines.
We see a lot of these just ridiculous claims where,
you
know, okay, really? Well, that doesn't really make sense. But it's

(18:57):
it's said with such as enthusiasm zeal that it tends to go over and that other people get trapped up in this.
We also have ideas
coming out the wazoo
linked to ridiculous claims.
Here's some of the my favorites that I got from this was,
people were were talking about how they could create a really profitable business renting umbrellas

(19:20):
in England.
Makes sense. You know, England's
rainy all the time,
how they could pipe seawater to London,
how they could drain the Red Sea for Moses's jewels. I like that 1. That was pretty good. But probably my favorite was
that they were going to get cannonballs from the seabed near Trafalgar,

(19:40):
because the government has no claim on on them people. Like, it's just free money. It's free real estate,
you know, and they were gonna essentially get the lead from these cannonballs,
and sell them. And there was actually a thing called canon law,
which was related to,
because once they're fired, you you have no claim over them. So the the English government has before they're fired,

(20:05):
they're, you know, owned by the English government. After they've been fired, they are free game to anyone who goes to the battlefield afterwards and collects them.
And so they were going to dredge the sea near Trafalgar to to get all of this. So there's
a lot of ideas, and these aren't necessarily all bad. They are some that might be ahead of their time. There's some that might be

(20:29):
seem ridiculous,
but are actually visionary.
And
it's very, very hard to sort out in this period of bubble growing and strengthening
what what's real and what's
what's fantasy or what is going to become real but might take a decade.
So,
yeah, this is something to look out for. Hucksters.

(20:51):
This is people who talk a charming game, but when analyzed, don't make much sense.
If you've read, I think it's I can't remember if it's the Black Swan or 1 of other
Nicholas Nassim Taleb's books where he he talks about the intellectual yet idiot. So these people who are smart, but they're almost too smart for their own good. And so they they miss, like, the base,

(21:13):
the base core reality of of of how things actually are.
And so
they can't explain their thesis in a simple manner manner. So they might be a mathematician,
have an intellectual background.
George Hudson,
the railway king during The UK railway mania,
was this kind of like pushy, underhanded dude who could talk a slick game.

(21:35):
Anyone associated with long term capital management,
falls into this camp, which was a
a company in The US
who
were
essentially made up of from
these Ivory League intellectual
tower people
who said like, Yep, we've Myron Scholes,

(21:56):
we've got this equation. We won the Nobel Prize. We're going to do this arbitrage and company.
It's going to work perfectly. It's going to be amazing.
And they ended up just busting
hard because
they weren't as smart as they thought they were. So
hucksters definitely.
Yeah. Hucks is it's hard to know because once again, there's some who are flashy

(22:20):
and really
in your face and you're like, give you creepy vibes. And then there's others who are like the more intellectual.
They seem smart, but how smart are they actually? Once again, these things aren't easy to tell. They do take a little bit of time to
to to try and mingle out
influencers.

(22:40):
You think influencers are recent innovation? Wrong influencers have been around for the
for
millennium, probably.
So these are people of note who attach their reputation to projects. So we really saw this with politicians, with kings, with riders,
in the earlier bubbles.
We're gonna see some interesting 1 coming up, but we'll talk about that later.

(23:03):
Japanese recruit cosmos scandal
is is something worth checking out, which was they were paying off top ministers
to delay unfavorable legislation against their company. This was a Japanese company. And so they would essentially give them stock to be able to
to say like, hey, here's some stock. Just just, you know, delay delay this legislation that's going to actually really hurt our core business.

(23:29):
That was common, common, common, common.
Most notable, I think, was the
English ones of the the kind of South Sea company where
the, you know, kings
the king at the time was was getting stock in this. The
the prime minister,
the
top
people in the UK government and parliament, we're all getting stock in this company.

(23:52):
And it's it's so gross when you see it. But, you know, that's it's it's underhanded. That's that's what happens a lot. And it's like, oh, free money? Sure. I'll take it. That will this cause a conflict of interest? Nah. Surely not. Surely not.
Okay.
Overvaluing the future, undervaluing
the present value. So
typically using math with with inaccurate assumptions

(24:15):
to produce a veneer of professionality
and plausibility.
And this can be predicting
future growth, adoption, etcetera, etcetera.
A good example of this was John Law. So he was the establisher of France's First national bank and proponent of the fresh fractional reserve banking used.
And,
he he used his

(24:37):
he he wasn't the inventor of fractional reserve banking. That's probably been going on since, you know, Egyptian times or even before that,
But certainly of using a national bank to do national fractional reserve was he was right up there with 1 of the first, and he used his ideas and power to create the Mississippi
Mississippi Company and later the Mississippi Bubble, another bubble I haven't talked about, but this was when France owned

(25:03):
the New Orleans
area.
I'd I'd my American history, it's not the greatest with regards to,
what happened with with France and and there. But
essentially,
he tied,
France's national economy to a Mississippi
company. And boy, oh, boy, did that go bad.

(25:24):
And for example, he guaranteed
and maintained a 4% dividend for the company
despite shares rising from 500 to 10,000
livres,
whatever that is,
whatever currency that was. And,
you know, it's like, okay, sure, you could you could maintain 4% at at a $500

(25:45):
share, but when it gets up to ridiculous levels,
okay, well, where's where's all this extra money coming from? And
there's always
a a circular thing. We'll we'll talk about that shortly as well.
We see new entrants start participating when the the bubble is growing and strengthening.
Average people on the street in English bubbles due to coffee shop brokers. So these were just

(26:08):
places where you could go get coffee and you could also do a little bit share trading on the side. Women in the roaring
are due to emancipation,
so they could then have access to their own bank accounts. It was culturally acceptable for them to
go and buy stocks and things like this.
We also see

(26:28):
the Japanese housewives during the Babaru Kaiki.
Babaru being bubble, Kaiki, I believe, is their term for economy.
And, the Plaza Accord and crazy tax laws just essentially meant that Japanese people needed to invest. Otherwise, they were screwed.
And we we see notable characters coming up. Hetty Green, the Witch of Wall Street was and and she wasn't, you know, she was actually a really good investor,

(26:54):
But she was just a,
just a woman,
who
during the
made a boatload of money and was really good at at what she did.
Another 1, Nui Onui
on Onue. That's a Japanese name. Gonna
definitely not pronouncing that right.
And,
well, she
was good at what she did until she wasn't. And essentially, she was a influencer slash restauranteur who

(27:22):
got all of these crazy wealthy Japanese people,
whether they be the
yakuza or
prime ministers or
top company executives,
come into our restaurant
where she would get shares,
advice from them, and said, essentially insider trading. And I believe she also did some really illegal shit by getting them to

(27:46):
print off fake,
fake
notices or letters
showing that she had assets, which she actually didn't have.
Not in naughty.
And, yeah, she eventually got caught.
Complex financial
shenanigans
by large corporations to,
and sorry. What Juan says here, the concept

(28:07):
of fractional reserve banking evolved over time and doesn't have a single inventor. It emerged as an unintended result of practices used by early goldsmith and bankers during the mid ages. There we go. So, yep, that has been around for a while. Thank you, Juan, for the clarification in the chat there. We
see with these complex financial shenanigans,
they artificially show better numbers.

(28:29):
Sometimes this is outright forward. Sometimes it's gray murky areas.
There's a whole new suite of derivatives
of derivatives on derivatives
for derivatives to derivatives.
You could derive away your
your life essentially. And a derivative is where
it's something that tracks an underlying asset, but not perfectly. And it'll give you more upside, but more downside.

(28:54):
So
just trying to think an example off the top of my head,
I could buy
a,
you know, I could invest directly into a,
let's say I think there's gonna be a copper boom
or something like that. I could invest directly into copper
or I could be into a company which heavily uses copper

(29:17):
or sells copper probably and and short maybe a company that is heavily into copper
and,
and needs it for their business because Their profit their profits are going to dwindle because they have to spend more money to buy copper because it's getting more expensive. And then I could instead of shorting that company, I could
1 of their suppliers, I could, you know, you know, all these sorts of things where it's like this is going to impact this, which will impact this even higher and go over here.

(29:44):
Banking, financial services, the you know, it's you don't need much infrastructure to just lend out money to people,
but you need a whole lot of infrastructure and people to do all the derivative
trading
and arbitraging and all that sort of stuff. So we see a lot of that happening
is sometimes linked to relaxed government rules.

(30:05):
Great example of this. This is one's wild.
Japanese companies in 1980 were allowed to value investments at book price or
market value. So
if they bought something
on their financial services sheet, on their, you know,
listing of annual reports and stuff,
say they bought some of a subsidiary company or

(30:29):
some just some company elsewhere
and they
they bought it and it's and it goes up in price. Awesome. They could show in their financial reports, hey, we own this much of this thing and it's at this current market value. Perfect. But if it went down, they could just show it at the price that they bought it at and say, hey, we're still neutral even though they could be 80% in the red.

(30:52):
That that seems to me to defy logic, but out of why you would want that.
Nevertheless, that happened
related to complex financial shenanigans.
This 1 I I wasn't really expecting, which was that in real life, meetups explode. So
parties
particularly, you know, if people are making money, if things are going good, you start to see more parties.

(31:15):
But
you'll see this becoming talked about in dinner,
in golf parties, on the street.
Investment clubs were created in many of these bubbles for people to pool funds to get in on the action. And so when you start seeing this
confluence of, okay, it's a financial bubble, but it actually leaking out into in in real life behavior of people actually physically go into spaces to talk about this thing or

(31:43):
it being a dominant conversation in
their normal
areas,
that's when you start to see, okay, like this thing's really starting to grow and strengthen because word-of-mouth people influence other people.
And then we have circularity.
So this is perhaps what's leads it to the bubble metaphor, which is
it needs a rather self reinforcing

(32:06):
tight mechanism,
because everything is ultimately circular. You know, I
buy an apple, which affects my grocer,
which,
you know,
affects the daughter who goes to private school in this area, which raises the wage of this teacher who
taught this singer, who influenced this person to get into media, who then watches the mere mortals and and, sends in a

(32:33):
donation support.
Okay. Well, you know, that is very much circular.
What we're talking about is this really tight 1. So the South Sea scheme
of high share price leading to profits for
all
of
where and they had some sort of mechanism there where it was just really tightly reinforcing,

(32:55):
Jarett, Japanese warrant bond prices drove share price, which drove warrant bond price.
When you see this really tight feedback mechanism,
which once again, not is not necessarily illegal, it's not necessarily a bad thing,
but which
can lead to really rapid,

(33:15):
proliferation of things.
You know, I just did a book review on the Emperor of All Maladies.
Cells are meant to replicate. There's nothing wrong with replicating cells. You want that. It's when they have this unbridled
growth
where it just keeps going and going going. That's when you have cancer. And that is certainly is is not a good thing because it's unsustainable and will kill you in the end. Not good.

(33:40):
Finally, the popping zone, the popping zone of the bubble.
And this is where people,
are leaving their jobs. We will see to to pursue profitable
business elsewhere.
Many examples of common laborers becoming traders across time.
A good 1. Benjamin Disraeli, who would become on go on to become the future prime minister

(34:01):
of The UK, I think twice,
left his law job to lose bigly
gambling on Latin American mining companies during their independence period. So
and he then had to subsequently turn to writing, which is he was a very good writer journalist, which then got him into the upper echelons of power.
You have this interconnectedness,

(34:23):
contributing to linked failures. So once you see 1 failure of bank run, you better believe that the rehypothecation of
leverage of this derivative being linked to this thing
is going to spread.
The panic of eighteen ninety three during the Gilded Age, for example, is where you see
Argentine
coupes
or coups

(34:45):
and
European panic selling of USA stocks really influencing The US.
What you know why and which would then lead to panic selling in The US.
Why would Europeans have anything to do with,
what happens in American stocks, you know, it or a crisis in Europe affecting something in in America?

(35:07):
You know, it it doesn't really matter. These things are linked. And even though perhaps they shouldn't be, they are. And so this we see these resulting failures, or
wild price swings,
typically downwards.
When the vast bulk of people subconsciously
and I put this
and put the subconsciously because I think

(35:30):
they might not know exactly what they're doing.
But
I think everyone
just through living life, you know, let's just say 18, you become an adult,
you know,
that just things just don't happen. You can't just get your way that things just don't materialize out of
thin air. You get a you get a feeling of this. And there's probably because you play some games. And in school,

(35:54):
I remember playing pogs and stuff like that, trading them as a kid and then those Pokemon cards.
And you I think you subconsciously know, like, you can't just have infinite growth. Like, it just doesn't happen like that.
Yet
When they're gambling, they don't care about the long term outlook. They just don't want to be the sucker.
Hence the
the title of the name Devil Take the Hindmost. It's like, as long as I'm not the 1 holding the bag at the end, that's okay.

(36:19):
And what you see is there's no numbers or rational historical arguments will convince them out of this,
which 1 then subsequently leads to extreme numbers,
a lot illogical behavior.
And we saw this when price to earnings of Japanese shares were actually actually rising when additional dilutive shares were being sold or

(36:40):
added.
And it was it was the actual news that, hey, we're releasing more shares to the public.
This
is everyone's getting diluted. Everyone who already has shares getting diluted,
yet
the price to earnings
would go. It's just like, how does this stuff make sense? It doesn't make sense.

(37:00):
But when people are irrational, exuberant,
they throw more money in and hate everything does make sense.
Dodgy arbitrage happens when people are arming
between structurally iffy side projects.
So we sold this with railway stags and this is selling unofficial scripts, seeing some lingo in here as well,
at a hoped for premium. And this was,

(37:23):
yeah,
once again, kind of complicated stuff of of people just
doing some arbitrage. But it was
the arbitrage was very much linked to
the
the price
being continually be high,
for for the buyers of these things.

(37:44):
And so it's like, yeah, technically you do an arbitrage, but man, that thing can just go away in a second. And if you're holding holding the shares, then boy, you screwed.
And there was some really crazy stuff where
to buy into a company, you would have to pay them interest.
I can't remember why that was happening, but there was essentially a whole bunch of people who were buying,

(38:07):
you know, stock of this companies
hoping it would go up to then be able to sell on later.
But to hold that stock, they had to pay interest
to to the company,
which is just wild. Like, boy, is that risky behavior?
Typically, in the popping zones, some negative trigger links to the actual underlying asset will happen. So there'll be a tulip fungus

(38:33):
or just general life interest rate rise, revolution or war. It's gonna be very tenuous. This this trigger,
it doesn't
it can come out of nowhere. There can be bigger things which you'd think
were worse off, and the market will just steamroll over it. And then, you know, right near the top, there's usually something which is like, oh, that's bad, but it's not necessarily that bad a thing. And then everything will tank.

(38:57):
And then finally, this time, it's different. The belief that the things that were risky or didn't work in the past have changed. We've entered a new era of limitless prosperity.
So we could have, superior
commercial knowledge in 1825,
which was the,
underlying reason that people were saying that the the stuff's just gonna keep going on. There's, you know, the gains, the productivity gains of, this commercial knowledge is just gonna keep going.

(39:23):
New economics of the Federal Reserve System in the
that's what's gonna keep the fed, the
going on.
That that's, that's why we're not gonna have a, a crash or anything.
Wrong, incorrect.
And, yeah, we really, we really see,
the popping popping happening with a lot of these things.

(39:44):
Yeah. There's the kind of downplaying of risk of this is usually done by comparison of a risky asset to something safer.
Can't remember which period, but stocks as safe as bonds was a a mantra that was coming out.
Long Term Capital Management with a highly 200
x levered arbitrage. And it's like, no, this stuff's safe as bro. This is all good.

(40:08):
We see excessive flexing and consumption,
galas, diamonds, and dresses during the gilded age, golf club memberships, art, and iconic property in the Japanese bubble years. Japanese people were buying,
you know,
was it Sears Tower or something like that? You know, they were buying
famous golf courses because they just had so much money.

(40:30):
And we're like, we we need to put it into something. And
it wasn't and they were putting they were buying these things at crazy inflated prices. It's not like we've got so much money.
I'm scared this is all gonna go away. Like let's buy it in something that will hold value over the long term. No, they would they'll buying at ridiculous prices for for flexing.

(40:50):
The top of the bull market can,
actually be,
predicted shortly after the completion of the world's new tallest building, which was the erection index.
I'd never heard of this before.
Now the Burj, Bingatti,
Jacob and Co residences will be
in 2026.
This will only be the sixth biggest.

(41:11):
And the other bigger 1, which is also in Dubai,
that's not planned until, I think, like, the
So
perhaps we're perhaps that is an indication that, the coming
full run is not gonna actually be as big as, or maybe it'll go longer. Who knows? We'll see.
We have loose guns who are eccentric

(41:33):
pulling off crazy numbers. They're genius, obvious by their weirdness and not simply
moral gray areas such as tapping into high risk capital.
There was this guy, Campeo Campeo, I think it was a Canadian.
He was wearing these pork Bipolar
hats. And
he this was in the era
of American

(41:53):
takeover,
where people could just
get some capital somehow
and take over companies way larger than they were to then be able to
essentially like sell this on or
increase the stock price.
Just crazy shit. Even Boesky and he was 1 of the influencers for the greed is good. Gordon Gekko will for, was that Wolf of Wall Street or just Wall Street? Gordon Gekko Wolf.

(42:17):
Was that Wolf of Wall Street or just Wall Street?
Character
who was did this address to university and was talking all about this
And you're most credulous when you're happy. So
outrageous statements become believable within the realm of possibility when people are just happy men when they're having fun, possible future scenarios feel like right now, and you convince your friends to join in. And that's the word-of-mouth.

(42:43):
His quote,
I was made acquainted and this was a letter from Alexander Pope to lady
Mary Watley Montagu.
I was made acquainted late last night that I might depend upon it as a certain gain to buy a South Sea stock at the present price, which will certainly rise in some weeks or less. I can be as sure of this as the nature of any such thing will allow from the first and best hands and therefore have dispatched the bearer with all speed to you. And he sent this to her

(43:12):
right near the top of the South Sea Bubble. Alexander
Pope, bad man, bad bad investment advice to your friend there.
Okay. We're gonna we're gonna leave the aftermath, the,
things like that to afterwards. This episode's already getting pretty long, so I'm gonna try and speed run a lot of these things.

(43:32):
This is the boostgram lounge. This is where we think thank the people who have helped contribute to the mere mortals to support us
financially
in this section. And we actually, after a couple of weeks of sad puppies, we've got some boostograms coming in, which is absolutely amazing to see. So I have to thank 2 people this week, which, 1 being

(43:54):
mister Lyceum.
And this is our friend,
Martin Lindeskog
from
the Secular Foxhole, and I think he's got a couple other podcasts.
And he was, sending a couple of things in. So he said, Wanna Curran, best premises with your new podcast. I hope your puppy will be happy. A very happy puppy right now, man.
I have now streamed 10 satoshis per minute, so you should receive around 600 sets. And then he sent, this boostgram of 2222,

(44:21):
a row of ducks. There's a super comment with payment on your episode on truefans.fm,
Martin Lindescode, and then Lyceum at Truefence dot f m. And he did indeed send in a 2222,
BoostiGram as a super comment. So thank you very much, Martin. Very, very much appreciated.
It's good to see that, someone's still using Truefence and and testing that out. I will get back onto that someday.

(44:43):
I'm just busy, man. I just got other stuff going on.
We also have Peter who comes in. He says, when the Hoskie maker said okay to listing his tokens on an exchange and provided the exchange with additional Hoskies,
It also graduated to full fledged scam. Please correct me if I misremembered that interview.
I need to go back and, relisten to those.

(45:05):
I don't know for sure if in the interviews that I had with them if they had done that,
but
they
certainly have done that as of now. So if that is what qualifies as a scam,
then Husky is a scam.
I don't know if that is what qualifies.
I always thought

(45:27):
as long as they're not marketing and advertising themselves as anything other than what they are, then that's fine. And if you're buying into that, then,
you know, that's that's what you're
you're getting into.
You know what? The I had this whole section on scam signs,
but this this episode is getting pretty long. So maybe I'll save that section and I can talk about 1 with this,

(45:50):
because there is a point where I could see what you're saying
as a scam. Maybe there's something I'll ask Hoskie himself because I I am planning on, chatting with him again and grill him a bit on that. So that,
yeah, in any case, message received.
I won't won't talk about Hoskies.
If you wanna own a shirt as well, there's just a reminder. If you send in a hundred thousand satoshis across, I said, any of the 3 shows, I gotta bump that up to, like, 5 shows now.

(46:19):
We'll send you a mere mortals t shirt your way. So,
yeah.
Peter has already got his.
Martin is now 02/22
closer to getting towards that shirt.
So, yeah, in the,
in that case, we very much appreciate everyone sending that in. If you want more details on how to do this, meremortalspodcast.com/support.

(46:41):
Very much. Thank you. And that was, sent using fountain. So fountain, true fans, very, very solid, podcasting apps where you can also get the chapter art and all these things that I'm talking about on here.
Okay. We're forty five minutes in, and I wanna try and keep this to, like, an hour and fifteen max. So let's go through these next sections about the crypto and AI bubble that I think is coming up.

(47:02):
I do indeed have my Banana
Zone t shirt on. And,
you know, I'll even put on my Banana Zone
hat at the same time here.
Not sure how long that'll stay on. It's pretty hot in this room.
So I think there's gonna be a crypto AI bubble coming this year.
And here's my reasons why. I'm actually I'm taking the hat off way too hot.

(47:26):
Capital liquidity.
I'd look looks like we're heading into a period where liquidity injections are needed. US dollar is super high. Countries around the world are suffering
to,
that they're feeling the pinch
because of this high US dollar.
Add on to this interest rates,
probably needing to be cut for an extra boost. I hate that I have to learn this. I hate that I have to become a macro

(47:52):
economist
to know,
what's going to happen in the future.
And look,
you don't have to, but it's it's
it's wise to get into this. I remember if you told me this stuff ten years ago,
I would have hated it. Then I still dislike that.
This is,

(48:12):
that I need to do this for my own personal finances.
This is why we need a separate state from money.
Every year. I've heard plenty of people talking about this and that. Oh, we just need if only the Federal Reserve or if only the Australian government,
why should the Australian government have any interest in interest rates? And it's like, why do we have people fucking with interest rates? What are interest rates? Why do we do this?

(48:39):
It makes me annoyed. Anyway,
looks like there's gonna be capital and liquidity,
unlocks coming soon.
Event and discovery. Well,
Bitcoin was a game changer,
perhaps slightly less so than the Internet, but still a massive, massive game changer.
And,
why I think there's gonna be 1 happening now is, chat g p t. It was exploding right at the start of 2023

(49:05):
and we're starting to see these 2. So this is the first time we're going to have,
crypto and AI merging together and we're starting to see this with
memes and AI crypto coins exploding in value, which are essentially just cheap tea wrappers from what I gather at this stage.
But they are going to integrate and there are going to be

(49:28):
agents
which are capable
of more complex behavior than what bots can do. So I certainly think that is the start of this this bubble beginnings,
the economic tools. And so if you
don't realize here, everything that I talked about previously,
I'm now just
transferring that into what I think I'm seeing now and what I think we'll likely keep seeing.

(49:53):
Oh, I I address these live comments just quickly as well, which was why I'm saying the skyscraper
index has some statistical relevance in the sense that historical correlations exist
between the completion of record breaking skyscrapers and economic downturns. I think he's just chucking this in the GPT, man.
It says thanks for everyone who who supported him, which is very much appreciated.

(50:15):
He's jumping off because he needs to go on Aussie day barbecue, which is what I'm hosting,
in a also why I need to keep this
slightly shorter. I align with Peter slightly like an open in the scam.
And, yeah, and the only way Karen is getting 9 figures that were soon as if he learns macro. Well, that's not happening. I don't want 9 figures. That's not that's too much.

(50:38):
In any case, economic tools.
I think AI and crypto will bring huge changes.
I regularly use the Lightning Network
with BTC.
Every time I travel, I feel way more secure knowing that I have
access to my net worth
wherever I go in the world.

(50:59):
I also do this in a way where if you stop me on the street, you're not being able to get that because I can't get it. But there are ways I can,
of actually being able to save money. So just putting it in a certain place and letting it sit and not having to learn all this economic bullshit,
having actual hard money.

(51:20):
1 is seeing huge savings of time and money in a side business related to the actual
A. I. He hasn't hired a lot of people that he would have needed to hire with his side business.
So there are certain
undeniable
productivity
gains from all of these things.
And so I think that is the the underpinning of of what this bubble is going to be lighter regulation.

(51:46):
You can see this with the recent election of pro crypto.
I was going to say BTC politicians, but
man, does it turn on a dime? People, if you if you think your politician is going to stick to the word or or do what you would like, you're absolutely insane.
But the tide certainly is turning and they they are saying nicer things now. So they're

(52:09):
less likely to do
negative, impactful things
until they do just you wait. If you're if you're on the AI train,
boy, oh, boy, is that turn, that tide is going to turn so quick
at some point. Well, at what point? I don't know. But they are going to clamp down on that a hardcore. So just keep that in mind.

(52:33):
And,
you know, talking about things like a strategic Bitcoin reserve.
Once again, is that going to happen? I don't know. I don't care.
On ramps and off ramps are easing access. So Binance, for example, now accepts
Australian deposits again. They didn't allow that for for a time period.
And there were certain Australian banks where they would not let you send

(52:58):
Australian fiat to a crypto company.
From what I gather,
those are mostly, if not all,
been wiped away because people want access to it. So
the regulation is is getting lighter.
Retail access,
man, this has never been easier with places like Revolut. You can just go on your on your phone, see if I can bring this up quickly.

(53:19):
But 1 of the main screens on Revolut, which is just like a neobank,
if you're a traveler, you've probably used this or heard of this before.
And essentially all you have to do is,
go into the app, upload some money, and then I'm just trying to see if I can
get this,
iris thing going. Here we are. Not good financial or, security practices to do what I'm about to do, but I'm gonna do it anyway because I've only got $72

(53:47):
in here. But you see on your little screen here, and then what's this tab right down the bottom? Crypto.
Just go onto there
and bam, you can you can buy something
super quick, easy.
This I mean, the
it's crazy how how easy it is now compared to even just four years ago.

(54:08):
And,
a recent exchange I used sent me an email
email detailing why the problem I had would take a little while due to a huge influx of onboarding
wallets becoming more intuitive
and all in 1 places like the Phantom Wallet
ETFs for the institutional side of things and like media wise, independent voices have never been bigger. YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Telegram, WhatsApp,

(54:33):
if people want to shill, they can shill. And that's definitely going to happen,
and it's going to spread
really, really, really, really quickly.
So, yeah,
watch out for that. Look out for that.
We also have
jumping on to the next slide here,
the bubble growing and strengthening.

(54:53):
So
leverage and credit. Well, defy you can do shit like at 50 x leverage on hyper liquid.
The Coinbase was saying how they're now going to start allowing you to do loans on BTC collateral,
which will definitely unlock a whole lot of
Bitcoiners who
perhaps aren't pure maxes, but who want loans on their their Bitcoin

(55:16):
without having to sell. They're going to do that
Lingo and buzzwords. I mean,
I'll try and do this quick. Aping, degen, rug pull, wrecked, mooning, diamond hands, max, flipping, hard fork, soft fork, k o l, key opinion leader, FUD, fear of uncertainty doubt, d o y r, do your own research. ICO, initial coin offering. DeFi, decentralized finance. DEX or SEX, decentralized or centralized exchange. DApp, decentralized app. HODL.

(55:43):
This
holding on for dear life or that I think that's a backronym of just hold,
WAGMI or NIGMI, which is we are gonna make it or not gonna make it.
POS, POW, proof of stake, proof of work. And I'm not even in the trenches to know the more ridiculous recent stuff, but you can bet your ass there's more lingo coming, particularly on the AI side of things, I reckon.

(56:04):
Start to see some ridiculous claims. And where are we right now in the cycle? I think we're strength
bang straight in the middle of the bubble growing and strengthening area.
1 I heard recently was that there was an AI crypto agent running an Ethereum node. This is just so, so stupid
because
whatever
autonomy you think this thing has of running it

(56:27):
is is nothing.
To,
illustrate this, I know a pretty smart dude here in Brisbane. Met him a couple of times. Frank. Shout out to Frank.
And,
he's got he's got a node. He runs a node. And,
you know, he's the type of person who likes to automate things. He if if a problem can be solved through automation, he'll do it. And I was chatting with him recently, and

(56:51):
he's got all of these systems set up to notify him when his node is doing something unexpected, some behavior is happening.
Man, his thing is just pinging off like crazy.
There's no way that
an agent is being able to fix all of this stuff if a dude like him is still having to manually
fix a lot of problems that are coming out with this is so dumb. So claims like that,

(57:15):
definitely getting some like those.
And I believe we're gonna start hearing signs,
that they are solving capital allocation, this being the AI agents. Agents are going to be the number 1 users of blockchains, not humans, ejaz. Once again, this is like
it's kind of ridiculous right now.
In the future, maybe. But to say that right now,

(57:36):
you know, and he says are going to be. So I guess the preface with that,
my favorite 1, the Uranus in Taurus sextile Saturn in Pisces transit is poised to revolutionize the financial landscape.
There's this dude called Crypto Astro. He does,
astrology,
zodiac signs, things like that,
to predict crypto prices.

(57:57):
I I think that is look. Astrology, in my opinion, is is total horseshit.
Mixing that with being able to predict crypto is hilarious, though, and I love the dude for doing it. So good on you. Crypto Astro.
May sat in in Pisces
give me financial gains,
ideas out the wazoo.

(58:19):
Mean coins will sell solve x y z problem. My brother just got a rewards card for Qantas.
Nope. That'll be solved with Qantas coin.
I've got a Woolworths card
that gives me points for shopping at the certain app.
Points a card
on chain, baby. It's going to be on chain. Every login and password becoming a public private keeper.

(58:41):
No, not all of this is necessarily stupid and infeasible.
It's just
a lot of them are.
And I think we're starting to really see some of these now. The hucksters,
Look, you're going to get continued grifting of people like Justin Sun. That dude is the slippery of snakes.
How he just keeps

(59:03):
flying under the radar or over the radar or through the radar. I don't know. But, man, that dude, good on him.
Russell Khan, if you remember her, she was part of the,
2 scammers who,
not scammers.
They they hacked into 1 of the
big
is it bit for next?

(59:24):
I can't remember which 1 exactly. Anyway, they took a lot of money,
and she's about to go to prison, and she's still dropping singles for a rapping career. So you definitely have people like her.
Definitely a new breed is gonna pop up.
If I have to name names,
I'm gonna say something like mega ETH project. I just got bad juju vibes from that.

(59:45):
And of course, I expect shilling from
none other,
than the DJT himself, Donald J. Trump,
who's already starting to do this.
So you got crazy, crazy stuff just coming,
with the hucksters
influencers.
Well, Trump and crow just essentially gave the green light for anybody with an audience to do this with the Trump meme coin.

(01:00:09):
Good lord. That's gonna unleash some crazy shit.
This will vary culturally and predominantly,
be in The US, I think,
due to their
brazen shamelessness and getting attention.
Both a good thing and bad thing. The US dominates media.
There's no doubt about that.
Yet
the the way they do it,

(01:00:31):
I don't like a lot of it.
Nevertheless,
that's that's that's what happens.
A good 1
to look at is Ron's basement and unicorn fart dust.
This was a dude who was a gold and silver bug, and he would do live streams of talking about gold and silver,
created a meme coin for a laugh, you know? Sure. Why not?

(01:00:53):
It got popular, and now he just shows it constantly. And that was like
a month ago. And he's he's ditched his old audience and is just all in on this
meme.
That's that's the type of influences we're gonna see and is starting to happen. So,
yeah, that's
a bubble growing and strengthening. We're right in the thick of it.

(01:01:15):
Future present value,
mix up. We're definitely gonna have the inevitable
APR, unsustainable
yield farming again,
with a twist. I think that this time it'll be based on restaking of ETH and SOL. That wasn't possible last time.
And perhaps even things like using the BTC annual growth as gospel as you

(01:01:36):
can't have infinite growth. And so if you say, you know, BTC grows annually at 60% a year,
that's true.
You can it keep doing that?
No, it can't because
that that will consume everything. So
if you use that number to say
this is what's likely gonna happen in the future,

(01:01:56):
I think that's disingenuous.
And
you probably should say it's probably gonna be less. It'll still probably be pretty high, but just not as much.
We have the new entrants coming. This is gonna be anyone and everyone. I was looking up some some numbers in terms of saturation levels of social media.
TikTok has 3 times the number of users compared to 2021,

(01:02:18):
for example.
I think it's going to be hard to avoid,
seeing shilling and
just general
financial AI
crypto stuff.
If you if you're a user of social media, I think it's just going to be everywhere and
more people than ever now have a smartphone. So yeah, I keep seeing hearing and seeing financial apathy videos as well, both intentionally and not of people saying like, I can't get ahead.

(01:02:51):
The system's rigged against me. I think those when they're hopeless, they're going to willing to invest, speculate and gamble.
My dude, my brother recently, my dude, I came across a dude in the gym trading whilst working out.
Oh, yeah. There's new entrants. There's new entrants coming in
complex financial shenanigans.
Now it's hard to hide on chain data.

(01:03:13):
So it will be the sexes and the like, centralized exchanges that will offer ever increasing products to attract capital. A % that's gonna happen.
Crypto companies starting to IPO, and I think they're gonna likely start engaging in weird financial practices
that may or may not sting them. I don't I don't know, for sure about that, but

(01:03:35):
it's certainly gonna get more
financially complex really quickly.
And I think this will be boosted
by relaxing regulations, allowing people like RAV to to promise more with his NFTs
as
the definition of securities become hazier
or complex is not always bad. It's just a bit like, you know, it. Yeah. This once again, this is gray, murky areas. What is

(01:04:03):
complex things
like launching a rocket to space is good.
Yet
when it comes to the financial sector, I'm
I'm not so sure.
I'm just not so sure on that. Anyway, in real life meetups, I mean, what better place than Las Vegas for the twenty twenty five Bitcoin conference?
I saw enough opulence at the twenty twenty four Nashville to already irk me, and I'm I'm talking about you, Cybertruck, with the

(01:04:31):
Taproot wizards and Thorchain shit on the side of it.
There's something about the flashiness and the in real life meetups that yeah, once again grosses me out, but people can do what they want to.
Local meetups, I expect these to get bigger and spend more. There'll be more parties.
I met a girl at the gym the other day who has some bags of random stuff. And when I see her in the gym now,

(01:04:55):
she'll talk to me about crypto. Usually she'll bring it up. I I haven't been bringing it up.
I try and keep it on the down low.
And
I think that's that's just gonna keep happening. Just just more in real life meetups for sure.
What'll happen with the circularity?
I think we're seeing a good example of this with the master. So this being micro strategy,

(01:05:17):
its premium goes up because BTC does, and it can borrow money against the the master shares,
slash its BCC to buy more PTC, which helps it go up in price.
Other companies are gonna start doing this for sure. Will they do it as good as him? Will they be able to survive the inevitable bear market that comes?

(01:05:38):
I predict not.
Will it? I don't know. You know, I'd but when when things go up so rapidly, so crazily,
there's there's usually
warning signs to to be looking out for there as well.
And then we get in into the popping zone. So that was the bubble strengthening strengthening and growing.

(01:05:59):
Job changes.
So last cycle, I knew a lawyer friend who gave up law and got wrecked by FTX.
I already met a girl this cycle who hasn't worked for three months due to profits.
I expect more of this to start happening with the twist that some of this is going to be linked to

(01:06:20):
not job losses due to AI, but just shortages.
1, for account his company, for example,
he
him and his
partner, business partner, or I'm not sure exactly what
their relation business partner,
they have not hired people. They haven't fired people because it was a new company, but they haven't hired people. And so I think things like that, we're gonna see people actually

(01:06:44):
just not having jobs because there's there's less coming out.
And
yeah,
they'll turn to something that will bring them some money. And
if they're making a little bit from crypto,
I know another dude at the gym, man, the gym is full of degenerates.
And he,

(01:07:04):
he was showing some interest in getting back into it and he's just got a job. But who knows? He's certainly the type who if he was making some money from it trading,
I think he'd ditch that job and go trading. So we'll see.
But it's it's not there yet, but,
I'm starting to see the the little the little inklings of that.

(01:07:26):
The links failures,
this is mostly just likely due to price declining quickly
and people getting forced to sell, not wanting to sell. And you saw this with, like,
FTX. It happened after the peak of the bubble. So
was that the bubble popping on the way down? Had it already been popped and was this was just a rapid deflation if we're gonna talk about a instead of a bubble, it being a balloon, perhaps.

(01:07:53):
I think some
big centralized Spain exchange will get exposed or hacked. As usual, it'll be individual s investors who get hurt, some unjustly, some rightly so. I don't think there's anything new here. The linked failures, that's that's pretty common.
Illogical behavior.
Once again,
a lot of suspension of normal doubt as people just trust AI and its hallucinations,

(01:08:16):
price predictions.
I see a lot of people saying, like, BTC will be 200 to 300, somewhere around that range or $1.50 to 200.
I I I feel like it's gonna blow past those, and then they're just gonna up their numbers to, like, a million or something like that.
A meme coin probably crossing 12 figures,

(01:08:37):
so that'll get into the hundreds of billions, token launches from centralized companies.
This is actually probably a big 1. Token launches from centralized companies with no purpose behind the token. It's only nice for financial reports that
similar companies buying BTC just to get a stock price pump
that we talked about with the the Microsoft strategy.

(01:08:59):
I think
there'll be lots of behavior, which is
immediate
good news
looking things
which will pump something and but will have no
actual underlying
efficiency, productivity
benefits.
That I yeah. I think there's gonna be a lot of that going on. Dodgy arbitrage,

(01:09:22):
I suspect we'll see some people trying to do this with AI agents. So not just bots that will go a a wall and lose a bunch of money. That's my 1 of my predictions.
Negative trigger.
I wouldn't be surprised if a major cane chain has an extended outage looking at U Solana, but maybe a newer 1 like SUI, which is gaining popularity,

(01:09:42):
probably in the works for the biggest bridge hack yet as well.
Always the possibility of natural wars,
sorry, natural wars. Wars, natural disasters, and assassinations.
I think an AI agent's gonna rug pull a coin. I think that's gonna happen this cycle. I'm gonna I'm gonna put that out there,
and that 1 will be funny as fuck when it happens. If it happens, when it happens, man, that would be funny.

(01:10:08):
This time, it's different.
This time, the super cycle is real because institutions and governments are involved,
bro.
Another similar reason to this would be how AI is going to make everything super productive. GDP growth will outpace debt repayment, so you don't need to worry.
Yeah. I think I think a lot of that's going to happen.

(01:10:30):
Risk downplaying. We're gonna have blue chip meme coins. People always I've seen some of that already. Blue chip AI coins.
I haven't seen that yet. That'll probably happen.
Definitely a lot more
of like ABC person owns x y z, and they are smart slash rich. So it's safe.
Forgetting the principles of not your keys, not your coins.

(01:10:52):
That's that's certainly gonna happen and is what will be in the the popping zone. I think
the,
yeah, well, flaunting
Lambo sales rising.
I probably suspect an NFT sale higher than
packs and people's previous of high figures of I think it was like 96,000,000

(01:11:16):
US and 58 or something like that.
Probably deep into the 9 figures this time.
Crypto borrowers, buying buying yachts, penthouses, airplanes, just the general
general wealth flaunting shit that happens.
Yeah. That that's probably going to happen. And
yeah, we're talking of Hoskie. If if Hoskie actually does make me any money,

(01:11:41):
I would maybe buy a Hoskie number plate as a laugh.
So if I do that, Jesus Christ, watch out people.
Eccentric billionaires,
I think after SBF,
people are gonna be on the watch for this. So perhaps it's
less tolerant of it. Nevertheless, you see Elon Musk and his fake gaming is is pretty cringe,

(01:12:02):
and he's likely to pump Doge. So something along those lines of, you know, it's Elon Musk. He's doing this. This person is doing that,
that that'll be in the in the popping zone area.
But maybe we'll get a new billionaire cohort to come through and,
and do weird shit. And people think like they're a genius. Oh, my God.

(01:12:25):
Word-of-mouth
as well in the in the popping zone. I think this is the best metric was just simply over here in conversation where people are talking about it.
Now there's all sorts of on chain measures you can use, you know, percent of people in profit, new wallet creation,
X amount of holders,
all sorts of graphs and things you can check out for that

(01:12:46):
as well as social indicators, crypto app downloads, Google search trends, the fear and greed index
staying in the high nineties,
all of that sort of stuff.
I don't, you know,
know too much about it. I don't
am I gonna follow that? And maybe I don't know. But that that sort of stuff, I think, is
if you're if you're serious about the the bubble popping zone, looking out for those sorts of things, are probably,

(01:13:11):
in that same area as well. Scam signs. I'm going to skip this section here
because we'll talk about that with 1 later
and we'll finish this podcast off value for value. Thank you, everyone, for joining in on this episode of the the mere mortal solo sort of of Karen's
financial
learnings from a,

(01:13:32):
a book on financial bubbles.
That was that was a really I'd highly recommend that book. Devil Take the Hindmost by Edward Chancellor. I've done a book review of it if you don't want to read the book.
All of those everything, all those notes in the first section are what I took from that and then
applying those exact same

(01:13:52):
metrics,
criteria, perhaps is a better word, to
to where I think we are now and what's likely to happen with a big crypto AI thing.
I would love to know your thoughts.
Is am I am I off the deep end? Is this actually not gonna happen? Is is there not gonna be any crypto AI bubble?
Or is it gonna be a super cycle and it'll just keep going?

(01:14:16):
I'd love to know all of these things.
I'm I'm putting like a general timeline of that of six to eighteen months, but
I, you know, like, that's that's so vague as well that this is probably not too helpful to you if if you're listening in.
Time, talent and treasure is how you can help support the the mere mortals because we're not going to have any ads nor sponsorships. Mirmodels conversations

(01:14:39):
is is what we're going to rebrand this to.
So no no ads, no sponsorships, none of that sort of stuff on here. So we just ask ask that you, help contribute to the show.
You could do this by word-of-mouth.
If you if you found this useful, sending this on to someone who might also get some benefit from this
or sharing it via social media,

(01:15:01):
talent. What do you what do you reckon? Are any of these points
illogical that I made? Do you think that's there? Yeah. I'd love to know your thoughts on all of these things.
So you can do that by reaching out by any of our social media areas on this video itself on anywhere.
And then finally, treasure.
There's PayPal link down below if you want to send in some schmeckles to help support the mere mortals.

(01:15:26):
Peter in the chat here says, I've started to believe in the super cycle in the last cycle.
Well, that didn't happen.
And
every, you know, the super cycle is a weird 1 because it's,
I think you could justify like
a lower
volatility. Like, things won't dump as much as they used to.

(01:15:49):
But there's there's certainly,
I still think there's going to be a rapid rise up, exuberance, people going crazy, and then a really rapid fall as well.
That that's what I expect,
but,
we'll see. We'll see.
And yeah. Yeah. Me and Me and Me and Me and Me and Me and Me and Me and Me and Me and Me and Me and Me and Me and Me and Me and Me and Me and Me and Me and Me and Me and Me and Me and Me and Me and Me and Me and Me and Me and Me and Me and Me and

(01:16:13):
the description of how you could, support us with a boostgram. Like, Peter did, just before,
and he's all the way into,
in Canada. Seems so plausible at the time. Doesn't it always I don't know. What is you think, like, this stuff's gonna, I mean, look, and
and you, if I came across high and mighty in any of this, I want you to know

(01:16:36):
I have made poor financial investments
through tons of periods of my life.
You know, this I wasn't really talking about actually investing in any of this stuff of
this is kind of just what I kind of predict is going to happen.
But I've certainly
made,

(01:16:56):
you know, money where your mouth is sort of thing.
When I first found about boostograms,
I thought this shit was revolutionary
technology that's going to change the world instantly. And I was wrong in that.
I was talking with Juan on this podcast, I don't know, a couple of years ago, and I was like, value for value. That's what's going to that's what's going to drive the 2025 bull market.

(01:17:18):
No one cares about value for value. It's a it's a philosophy, not a technology. It's not it's something that's very hard. I think it's something that will eventually
change the world for a better place
and
is undoubtedly a good thing. But it takes time. You know, you can't you can't just have stuff going
going parabolic and

(01:17:39):
and affecting the world instantly. And he says, but I was totally wrong. I was totally wrong on many things, my friend as well.
It's getting hot here, man. I gotta go and
prepare these last little bits for the Australia Day barbecue. So Australia Day, Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, oy oy oy oy, all of those good things. So I'm gonna

(01:18:00):
lend end it off here.
Thank you very much, Juan and Peter, for joining in. Thank you much, Peter. And Lyceum
Martin for
for contributing into the show. It's very much appreciated.
9AM Australian Eastern Time on a Sunday is when 1 and I do these. We will be back at it next week.
And
as usual, I hope you're having a fantastic day wherever you are in the world. Ciao for now. Carrying out. Bye.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Financial Bubbles & The Crypto/AI Industry | Historical Signals That Will Repeat