# AI Agents, Digital Scarcity, and Crypto Strategy

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-02-24

## Transcript

So I think as you go into 2026, you're gonna see more people understanding and being forced to understand and appreciate how much AI benefits digital assets.
What's up, everybody?
It's LG Du Set here, and welcome to the Milk World Show, the daily crypto show that hopes we don't get replaced by shitty AI YouTube versions of ourselves anytime soon.
Because come on, we're really cute, we're authentic.
John and I are the best hosts you could ever have.
Uh, we're gonna do a very special show today to talk about the AI panic, this Sitrini article that everyone's all upset about and all it's gonna change society by 2028, except if you get off Twitter and nobody knows what the hell you're talking about.
We're gonna talk about that and also how it relates to crypto, because we're a crypto show.
We wanna talk about crypto.
We want to talk about how you gotta relax about AI and just focus on the fundamentals in crypto because once it comes back, everyone's gonna just forgotten that we did any of this clawbot uh Citrini stuff, or those will be your overlords and uh we're just gonna be stuck with what we got and crypto will be completely dead.
Today's episode is brought to you by Warbucks, the easiest way to trade crypto and some turn crypto tax chaos into confidence.
Here he is, John Gillen.
Welcome back.
We're doing this a lot these days.
Uh, and I feel like this is a bottom of the timeline activity for us to hang out on the show.
I I feel like I'm always the first person who gets tapped when somebody cancels last minute and you don't have any other things to fill in with.
So I'm happy to improvise and find out what we're gonna talk about today.
You know what, man?
Like you're you're putting yourself in this position.
People love hearing from you.
People love when we do a show, just the two of us, uh, and they want to hear what what John has to say.
Uh and you know what?
Maybe on the macro side, if you have a last-minute cancellation, I'll fill in with my um uh very uneducated thoughts about macro.
I'll tell you about uh how the macro looks in a small town in Canada.
Yeah, well, that would be fun.
That'd be a good change of pace for macro.
But yeah, I think people like my episodes because I'm crazier than they are.
So um, yeah, it's if it works, it works, you know.
Let's talk about the main narrative this week, man.
And it's you know, I feel like it's such a um such a bear market thing that all of the crypto Twitter, crypto people, we just end up talking about just something else.
And in this case, it's AI.
Of course, it's gonna affect crypto, and I think we're gonna uh touch on that a little bit today, but the main topic this week, um, I guess across all of finance, let's call it, is this Citrini article titled The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis.
If you haven't read it, um, it's good, it's a good little bit of sci-fi is probably how I'd put it, and probably John would put it a little bit with some touch of realism, and it's basically writing from the future, writing from two and a half years in the future, June 2028, and how the economy has changed, how jobs have changed as Claude and all the other you know LLMs have evolved and and taken over and completely changed software and completely changed um, I guess how people live their lives, and there's a lot of details in here that are, I guess, our are doomerism fanfiction, and that's that's uh he says that that's not what this is, but I think it definitely feels that way.
It's all over Twitter.
All the crypto people are talking about it.
And in this article, to kind of save face in case you're getting scared or you think it's total bullshit.
He does say that crypto will do really well, that there will be a huge use for crypto in this agentic economy, and that that's basically you know what a lot of us have been saying, or a lot of a lot of what experts have been saying uh will happen if all these AI dreams, nightmares come to pass.
Yeah, I I I noticed that there wasn't a question in there, but I'll just start talking to fill the silence.
This is we're we're filling we're this is just this is a conversation this time.
This is I'm I'm done interviewing, man.
I want to say what I think.
I never get to say my own thoughts.
So I'm just gonna I'm gonna spew at you and you can react.
Yeah, well, I do think that you you touched on something that is funny is that the the second sentence of this is that this isn't bear porn or AI doomers and fanfiction, and that it is a little bit of what it actually is, right?
So I think that there was uh a lot of attention given to this a lot of speculation that this uh drove a lot of the the sell off and um some of the stocks that he listed in this in this report um but you know I think that there's a lot of criticisms a lot of things you can take from it I think it is helpful as a thought experiment there are some interesting ideas in it but you know I I mean I'm kind of shoulder shruggy about this overall I think that there's a lot of unknowns and a lot of things that are assumed in here and um so I yeah I just to me it's just kind of like like you said like a little bit of a science fiction kind of like a a thing that people are having fun being scared about um but you know we'll we'll have to see a lot how a lot of these things play out but it's not it's not clear at all right now do you think so you you mentioned this do you think that this type of article which is which is quite popular I don't it's it's reaching all over the place and it's a lot it's very similar to the Matt Schumer article from two weeks ago um also also a big Doomer thing where he's saying personally his job has been replaced by his Claude bot that can make apps instead of him and test them overnight while he's sleeping blah blah blah.
This is a little bit more large scale.
Do you think, John, that this type of thing actually causes stock sell-offs?
Like that an article like this.
Uh, I think that it's it's one of those things, you know, Ben Cowan likes to say that narrative follows price.
So whenever there's a sell-off, there's always somebody to come in and say, well, this is the reason and and right now Citrini is getting blamed for that.
Um, yeah, I think that a lot of the stocks mentioned in this uh article sold off because a lot of stocks sold off, and so some of the ones that sold off happen to be also be the ones who are mentioned in this.
So yeah, you know I I I kind of take that with a grain of salt.
Like, I think you know, MasterCard uh sold off.
IBM had one of the largest uh single-day sell-offs uh in their history.
Um, and you know, Claude uh or uh anthropic rather just uh announced a whole new slew of plugins for for Claude around investment banking and design and and many other things.
There were 10 new plugins, so I'm sure there'll be a lot of shorting and and selling that's going on in response to that as well.
Um, yeah, but look, I think that what what this is all a symptom of the fact that the market is trying to figure out how AI coming into the marketplace impacts other companies, and if it has broken the moat, so to speak, of a lot of software-focused businesses and kind of now their their model doesn't make sense anymore.
We're still waiting to see if that's true, how that plays out.
But I think in the meantime, there's just a lot of uncertainty and fear in the markets, and so that's really what what's what's happening here.
I don't think it has anything to do with Citrini's piece, although it is a really good way of articulating a lot of fears that a lot of people are feeling.
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Yeah, definitely.
And I think it's funny.
I feel I'll give you a bit of my personal journey and how I feel like this affects and how it relates back to crypto is that I feel like when I was in crypto five years ago, it was like we were in our own little circle and we're like, well, we're decoupled from the rest of the stock market, and we're just doing our own thing.
And and news did move the needle in crypto, right?
An article like this about a protocol, good or bad, whoo, that price is going berserk one way or the other, right?
It implies volatility.
But uh through the last bear market and this recent bull market as well, it seems like crypto just got tied right into the macro, and that's probably institutions buying.
That's the bid.
That's you know, we've we've covered this many times on both both this show and the macro show.
Um, and now I feel like you have an even further um compression of narratives in economy.
Where now in the last couple of weeks, like or 2026 as a whole, an article comes out, an update comes out, and you have potential 10 to 20% moves as a reaction.
And even if you're what you're saying about the Ben Cowan thing is true, that it's well, narrative follows price action.
The narrative to me is quite is quite compressed and narrow now that it's like everybody is having the same, everybody who follows finance or stocks or anything, we're all tuned into basically the same thing every day right now, right?
It's like it's the same main story for all of us every day.
There's not there's not really all these different things, and and that's probably because crypto as well is in a bear market, and you know, so there's only the good news there is only so exciting, or you know, another uh institutional adoption headline is is we know by now, right?
It's not it's not that surprising anymore.
Um, but what do you think, John?
Is that is that am I on the right track there?
That it feels more kind of together than it ever has.
I don't think so at all.
I actually think the opposite's what's happening.
I think that there's uh a very um limited echo chamber of financial Twitter that that is very up on these things, but most of the world does not yet understand uh how to use AI, what it is or what the implications of it is.
They mostly think of it as an advanced search engine still, and that they aren't realizing that, oh, these things are going to be smarter than Einstein in every conceivable field and embodied in five years, and that that means like knowledge work and almost any kind of job you can think of is is going to be you know automated or are given to the robots, um, but just in different periods of time, right?
So, like coding is one of the the first things that is is feeling the most acute impacts of this because getting the AI to be really good at code is a way to make the AI better faster, and then it can propagate that that level of skill can propagate to the rest of these industries and different kinds of knowledge work.
Um, so I think that there's this sort of like a feeling of what you're saying, right?
Like that's the ostensible anecdotal experience if you are plugged in, but the rest of the broader world does not understand these technologies and even less understands the potential impacts and how it might impact their lives, their employment.
So that's one thing.
The other thing is I think that there's a complete bifurcation, especially in the United States, um, between the left and the right.
Um, there's a lot of people on the left who feel like you know, inflation expectations are huge, the economy's gonna crash, Trump is gonna drive us all into a wall and set everything on fire, and it's gonna be terrible.
And then, you know, I think there's some optimism on the other side of that spectrum that, you know, they think that uh tariff policies are going to be very constructive, the investment incentives to bring capital back into the United States are gonna be effective.
The big beautiful bill is gonna be effective and lead to this economic reaccelation and sort of this new American century.
So, you know, look, I think that there's a lot of bifurcation of these things.
If you are plugged into any of these um circles, though, it does feel um very much like you're there's groupthink and that everybody's seeing the same information and very much up to date with what's going on.
However, I don't really think that that's the case.
And I think that you see that in the markets, right?
Like there's a lot of people right now, just that look at this Mag 7 sell-off, right?
There's people like when one guy comes to mind is Jordy Visser, who thinks that AI has broken the moat of a lot of these major businesses and the market is starting to realize that capital is reallocating.
Then you have people like Kathy Wood and many others who've said the opposite, or like like Real Paul and um some of the guys at Real Vision think think that some of this selling on the NASDAQ and Mag 7 is is overdone and you're gonna see a recovery in in IGV and in US tech and software.
So I think that that's usually what happens, right?
And this is why when you see a market of any kind roll over into a bear market, there's usually some kind of dead cat bounce.
There's some kind of bull trap because half the market, or maybe not exactly half, but a good portion of the market thinks that the bears are all wrong.
And you have to figure that out.
Markets figured that out.
Markets are how we figured that out.
Um, and that's that's something we're we're seeing play out right now.
Personally, though, I think that you know, you can bring this back to crypto because this is a crypto show.
I do think that the thesis from everybody that I've heard talk about these things in some way validates the thesis and the need for digital assets and digital assets as a technology, because these new agents are gonna be doing economic activity that is going to settle in either digital assets or in stable coins.
That's gonna settle down to digital asset rails.
They're gonna need a system of um identity, of reputation.
Um, you know, so ERC 8004 is one of the ways to do that.
The current head of the or the former head of the Ethereum Foundation recently left.
There's speculation that he's leaving to try to work on a project around bringing the agentic economy into Ethereum.
Right now, NIRCON is going on in San Francisco, um, where Near Protocol is releasing a lot of tools and apps um centered around the intersection of digital assets and uh artificial intelligence.
So there's a lot of work being done at this intersection.
There's a lot of really bullish momentum happening, and I think that digital assets as a as an investment thesis uh in the agentic economy in an AI-driven world are going to be uh even more robust because you know, digital scarcity on Bitcoin is going to benefit a lot from this, but then Ethereum as a capital asset, as a collateral asset and as a global decentralized financial infrastructure is going to get more and more adoption, not from humans or from institutions, which is primarily where it is right now, um, but more from agentic operations, agentic economic activity.
There's going to be a a lot of competition for that market share, but it is an enormous section of there's an enormous market to be addressed, and we're still at the early phases of that.
Right now, the market is telling us that it sees Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other digital assets uh, you know, assets and the the infrastructure as sort of tied up in this software trade.
And so the capital that's been allocated is reallocating rapidly, but the the investment thesis and the way the market is treated and thought of Bitcoin and Ethereum and other digital assets has evolved rapidly over several years.
It will continue to evolve, and that's what's going to play out here.
So I think as you go into 2026, you're going to see more people understanding and being forced to understand and appreciate how much AI benefits digital assets, the understanding of the investment thesis evolve, and that will bring with it uh, you know, we're gonna see continued volatility, continued volatility across all markets and speculation.
Um, but capital is going to move fast and it's gonna be chasing uh a way to stay safe as all this changes really rapidly.
But there's there's a lot of uncertainty, there's a lot of confusion, and there's a lot of fear about what the future looks like under these circumstances.
But I think if you have a longer term view, like we what we say on Milk Road, you can look through this and see how much this benefits the digital asset industry and the assets themselves.
Uh, so I'm very bullish, but I think you just have to be patient while the entire market goes through this learning curve of figuring this out.
One final thing I'll say about this Jordy Visser has made this point.
I'm gonna interview him on the macro channel um in in March.
But um, he made this point that while institutions and investors are able to get great returns in other places that they view as quote unquote tech related or speculation related, they're not going to need uh a Bitcoin or an Ethereum.
Once they're not able to get those kinds of outsized returns from the Mag 7 from other places, then the value proposition of Bitcoin that changes the thesis there, and you're gonna see reallocation.
I think that there's some truth to that, but basically it kind of comes back to this idea that the way the market is treating digital assets is going to evolve and is evolving.
And we're not gonna have the same problem of adoption with AI agents as we have with humans.
It's gonna be a much uh quicker learning curve and adoption curve there.
And I think a huge explosion of economic activity is gonna come.
You know, Jordy Bister, he also focuses uh focuses a lot of his thesis right now on scarcity assets, right?
That's his whole thing.
So when all these stocks are moving, the way his like main through line for how to decide if it's something that he's willing to invest in or not is there limited supply?
Is there a cap on what it is?
Right.
And something like stocks, like, yes, of course, there's a limit of the stocks, but the assets that they represent that they're producing those companies, it's a little, it's not the same as like a scarce asset like Bitcoin or gold or precious metals or whatever.
And that's kind of his that's his main main thesis.
And I like that.
I like that.
I don't know if it's necessarily what I believe or what I follow, but I like having this kind of really simple black and white line for your own belief system going into this really uncertain time.
I think that that having something like that is something good for for him to develop and for him to share it for us to have and for anybody to have, I think going into really volatile, volatile times.
It's also something I'm looking for personally, um, from a thesis standpoint right now, of like what do I what do I actually think?
And here's another here's another good tweet just while we're we're wrapping up that AI crypto chat.
This is um obviously a lot of chatter about Citrini and that article, but this is probably the tweet that stood out to me the most from somebody I've never heard of.
Um, but it says the reaction to the Citruni article tells you that no one has a clue what's going on.
You're telling me that hedge funds, hedge fund P uh PMs uh was that with PM project manager?
What's a PM for hedge fund?
I don't know.
Portfolio managers portfolio manager of course you're the finance guy I'm just the I'm the the film leader.
Um you're telling me hedge fund portfolio managers read it panicked and then billions of dollars shorted off the back of this no one has any real takes right now because the world is changing so rapidly everyone is in short term trades.
The only constant will be volatility uh and I feel like that's that's most true and I think it's it's important for people to find kind of their own thesis in all this um and one thing too John that you said that stood out to me is that you know you have this kind of sell-off right now on fear of what may come to pass and I feel like that is a little bit like COVID.
Um and COVID is probably the only recent event that people have to compare in terms of like some kind of stock uh apocalypse major change of the economy we're all gonna live so differently in a year from now kind of idea um but even with COVID you had a day you had one day a couple weeks but one particular day that was like God everything just almost went to zero and then that was it and it was up only right and that was obviously that had a lot of other bells and whistles attached to it you had inflation, printing and money.
So many other things happened to save the economy then uh that are not necessarily happening at this moment, but maybe they are then maybe they will soon.
Um, but that was an example where it was like the world's fucked, everything's going to zero, the stock market reacted, and then that was it, you know, and then and then it recovered from there.
Um, so not exactly the same thing on the same timeline now, but it does if these if these narratives do follow or these little sell-offs happen or whatever, and I know we're gonna finish the Citrini AI stock talk after this.
Um it does feel like mini COVIDs.
That's like, oh, a new release of a software that nobody that some people use but no one's ever heard of, the end of the world for the rest of the stocks, you know.
It's like big, and then, but then you know, that doesn't that doesn't just overhaul those companies overnight, right?
So um, and it takes a while, and and those companies are definitely going to defend themselves and find ways to not get eradicated by Claude and all the other stuff.
So they're not just gonna go quietly into the night.
Right.
Yeah, and I don't think that Claude is going to put all of these businesses out of business.
Um, and I but I don't quite think this is the same as COVID either, because COVID was, like you said, a temporary economic shock that was papered over through printing.
I don't think that's what's gonna happen here.
I think this is a fundamental change in.
I mean, the biggest, like, you know, the biggest sign of a bubble top is saying that we're in a new paradigm.
But I really do think that artificial intelligence does fundamentally change the economic realities and the employment outlooks.
Um, and you know, look, there is some some there's some truth to the Citrini article in the sense that we are seeing and could continue to see this explosion in uh GDP, but a decline in employment, and that is kind of the big fear, right?
Is that this K-shaped economy becomes an I-shaped economy, becomes uh an economy where like there's a few people who have everything, and then there's this permanent underclass.
Um, there's all these kinds of things going around on on crypto Twitter about what this might look like.
We don't know yet, but I think that that's like uh it has a lot of assumptions in it, and it assumes primarily that things will continue as they have been, and there won't be any other innovations that people find to do economic activity or find meaningful work, meaningful work or purpose.
But that's never been the case, right?
Like the invention of the cotton gin was intended to make it so you didn't need human beings to process cotton anymore because it was so much easier to do it with the cotton gin.
But the opposite happened, which was that now that we had a cotton gin, it became economically viable.
So they hired way more people to pick cotton and make more cotton.
Um, same thing happened with Uber as an example.
Uber exploded the amount of people using uh cabs or or or you know, uh calling car services because it was so much more cheaper cheap and accessible and and and global.
Um, and so I think it's one of those things where we're gonna see uh a proliferation of economic activity, not a shutdown of it.
But we just don't know exactly what that's gonna look like yet.
Now, just because we don't know what it's gonna look like doesn't mean it's not gonna happen.
Um, and so I think you know, in economics, economic analysis, whenever I was doing this in in school, we always had to write setters parabus on every question that we answered in economics, and I say this all the time, but um setters parabus means all things being equal.
In other words, you have to hold everything constant.
Well, nothing is ever held constant in an open dynamic system, and so neither will be the economy that we're in right now.
So there's all these analogues to history of the GFC and COVID.
Everything is different this time.
All these economic indicators are gonna vary differently and behave differently.
Um, but I think we're seeing an economic reacceleration, at least in some ways, um, driven by AI and the investment in AI, the capex in AI.
I think that employment and labor is softening in certain areas, strengthening others.
We'll have to see all this plays out, but it's not going to go in a straight line, setters parabus like everybody thinks it is.
Um, but that's that's why we have to pay attention.
This is why I always say stay safe, stay educated, stay bullish, because there's always a bull run somewhere.
You have to keep up with what's going on, and then you also have to protect yourself because there's this is going to be volatile.
And uh, yeah, you don't want to get cute in markets like this.
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I like that.
Yeah.
It's true.
It's true.
And it's very tempting.
Uh, the more narratives you miss, the more you're like, okay, well, I'll catch the next one, and maybe I'll sell some of my long-term stack to go get there because my long-term stack sucks right now.
Your crypto stack, and you're like, okay, you know what?
I'm not gonna wait.
I'm not gonna wait.
If it's gonna get if we're at Bitcoin's still gonna bottom some more, then I'm not gonna wait.
I'll just go whatever the next thing.
Okay, I'll short IBM tomorrow some more.
You know, the next article, I'll go short something.
I'll go try shorting.
I've never done that.
I'll go try it once and then you get nuked.
Uh right.
Well, because it's dangerous to short because a lot of people could go long and you could get a bounce, a quick reversal, and you get so like, yeah, just I don't use leverage.
Leverage liquor and ladies are the three easiest ways to go broke in this environment or in any environment.
Um, so just be careful out there, you know?
Don't put yourself in a bad thing.
Is that a black rock line?
Is that what you guys used to say?
Uh closing down BlackRock, you know, like Friday Friday afternoon parties, and you'd be like, All right, listen, before you go out there and party.
It's just a line that's been around for a long time.
I don't know where it came from.
Um, I do want to actually go back to one thing you mentioned, though.
Uh, this idea that Jordy Visser has been hammering so hard about abundance versus scarcity.
In this artificial intelligence aids, abundance is going to go to zero.
So things that are abundant uh are are going to get replaced and and become you know devalued rapidly.
Scarcity is what's going to be valued.
That's what drives his thesis on Bitcoin.
I also think that that drives the thesis on Ethereum and the global decentralized financial infrastructure that's being built in Ethereum and in other ecosystems.
But digital assets overall have a moat in the sense that they provide a system that uh provides an economic foundation upon which you can build the agentic economy that the legacy system doesn't have an alternative to that's workable or viable, and that is robust and much more difficult to recreate in some other way, right?
So I think that uh there's there's a lot of value there that is scarce and in demand.
Uh, and it's not just limited to Bitcoin's limited supply.
You know, like Jordy likes to say that um religion has a moat in an AI world because that religious faith around something is is you know can't be penetrated, and that's kind of what Bitcoin's value proposition rests on.
Um, but Ethereum also has a different kind of a moat, a different kind of a value proposition.
I do think that that's undervalued as well.
So thinking about the world in terms of abundance versus scarcity as an investor right now can help give you some patience um and help focus your your thinking and your outlook on on your investments and and just yeah, what what you're what you're doing to navigate this environment.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Um let's let's let's jump to talk more.
Let's let's spend the second half of the show or the last little bit here talking actually more crypto stuff.
Um, I'm literally, as you're saying that, I was looking at the Ethereum chart, and it's a sad chart, John.
It's a sad, it's a sad ass chart.
And uh for any long-term holders like you and like me, uh, it is it's a sad chart.
Um, I mean, uh this is a redundant question, so you don't have to answer it.
But I think at this point, anytime we do these kinds of shows, and you're doing the shows too, um, people just I I think the general question is always like, okay, are we gonna bottle some more?
When are we gonna bounce?
What's the deal?
We've had a lot of guests come on lately being saying that, hey, we got to bottom a little bit more before you really see the bottom and you form the bottom and you bounce back.
Um I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.
I don't know at all, and I know you're not a big TA guy.
Um, and I know that you think about this and discuss it every single day, and it feels redundant to talk about it some more.
Um, but there's a lot of macro stuff coming up, you know, tariffs meeting, and we you can probably save that for your show.
Uh, but Trump has the the tariff meeting with China in April, there's State of the Union tonight.
There are still a lot of other, you know, macro-ish things happening.
You were saying before, we're just discussing there's a huge demand for capital, and um, you know, people can't really find the they can't find anybody to buy the bonds and all this different stuff happening in the economy, but crypto can't seem to really find a bottom in all this, despite it being something that usually precedes a lot of other market moves.
I'm kind of giving you just like a broad stroke picture of talking about whatever you want, just so long as it kind of relates back to to your dear old friend Ethereum.
Uh okay.
Well, uh, as it relates to Ethereum, uh, most of the president's personal net worth and his family's activities and business are in Bitcoin, specifically Ethereum, or I was gonna say crypto and specifically Ethereum, um, Bitcoin as well, of course.
But um, you know, so that he's personally invested in this as well, so that's not bearish.
Um, yeah, and look, I would say that the the thing you said about crypto and and Bitcoin front running some of these things, it seems like that might be the case, right?
You saw the slowdown in Bitcoin, you saw the slowdown in software.
That's you know, now turning into a slowdown in the Mag 7 and in the Nasdaq, and then maybe in the SP 500.
So maybe that's the direction this is going to go.
I think that overall you're seeing a huge demand for liquidity.
There's an enormous amount of CapEx happening.
There's an enormous amount of spending going into the economy.
That's not going into financial asset markets.
The bond market needs to be funded amply uh in order for the Treasury to finance the refinancing of $9 trillion of debt that's coming up.
Um, so I think look, no matter what how you slice this, there's a huge demand for capital.
There's there's you know, just three IPOs plan for this year: anthropic, open AI, and SpaceX, which combined for an estimated uh IPO valuation for just under, I think $3 trillion.
That's gonna pull a lot of capital out of the markets.
Um, the the Treasury uh has, I think, around $900 billion in their Treasury General account.
Uh if they are forced to repay some of the tariffs, that's $150 billion.
But I don't think that'll happen for 15 months.
It's basically status quo um for 15 months after this tariffs ruling.
And and Trump has already said, and Scott Bissent has already said that they will use other policy tools to accomplish the same effective outcome on tariffs.
So look, I think that no matter how you slice it, we need more liquidity, we're gonna get more liquidity because the Trump administration, and rightly so, I think, views it as a matter of national security that we do not have an economic recession or a market crash at this point in our our nation's history, because they view winning the AI arms race as a matter of national security.
So they're not gonna let these companies, you know, uh suck three trillion dollars out of the public capital markets and tank the whole rest of the economy.
They're not gonna let the CapEx spending um starve the rest of the economy.
They're not going to let the bond market starve and have to refinance it at huge huge rates.
So they're going to do some degree of yield curve control and whatever methodology that looks like.
They're going to renegotiate the relationship between the Federal Reserve and the Treasury, and I think move more of the balance sheet management from the Fed back to the Treasury to allow Scott Bissent to have more control over that and uh you know buying back his own bonds, so to speak, but you know, it'll work.
Um, it might change market dynamics a lot, but it'll it'll get what they need done in the short term.
Um, and so I think that you're gonna see a lot of things come out of this administration to sort of re-engineer the economic and market realities that we're in.
I don't think they're gonna give up.
I don't know if it'll work exactly, but they're not just gonna be like, oh, shucks, look at that, we're going into a recession and everything's collapsing.
Um, we're seeing that economic reacceleration happening.
They that's because the CapEx has been allowed and because of the big beautiful bill and the effects of that, but the in order to fund that without having a market crash, they also need to make sure there's ample liquidity to support all of these things.
That's going to come.
I'm not saying when or how, but I know that that's gonna come.
The the relaxation of the ESLR requirements, which is a a it's a basically a change in policy that allows banking institutions in this country, large enough banking institutions in this country to hold an enormous amount of treasury bills or treasury bonds notes, bills on their balance sheet without changing their risk rating or risk profile.
So it like de-risks that.
So they're gonna stuff an extra two to three trillion dollars, something like that onto bank's balance sheets in the form of US Treasury bonds.
So there's going to be a lot of things done to kind of pull every lever possible to keep the economy going strong and keep that funding going there, as well as keep the markets up.
I think that in this environment, you're going to see, and this has always been the long-term bet for me, but like the Federal Reserve knows they need more liquidity.
They started these reserve management purchases to try to like slowly start doing this without having to resort to QE, even though they know they need to add more liquidity.
They're trying to act like they're not scared, even though they're terrified.
Like it's all gonna, it's all gonna come out.
The only direction this goes is more liquidity, more dollars, more debasement.
That benefits Bitcoin, that benefits risk assets, that benefits Ethereum.
It validates the use case for this alternative financial infrastructure, it validates the need for hard monetary assets, a way to protect capital, but then also the growth of the agentic economy means there's gonna be more utilization of these things.
And you know, I think that there's been a big misconnect, uh, disconnect between myself and Kyle.
He calls a lot of the digital assets um in this space and the infrastructure that's been built useless.
I completely disagree.
I think it's like an enormous aircraft carrier, enormous, elegantly built airports without any airplanes yet.
The airplanes are coming, those are AI agents, and there are gonna be way more of them doing way more things, way faster and hiring each other to do things too, which is what they're currently building on ETH.
Um, so I think that it's it's not a question of useless, it's a question of um uh building the infrastructure necessary to support a new economy that hasn't come yet.
Uh, and I think that we will see adoption by institutions, by individuals, and by AI agents that's gonna make everything we've seen in crypto so far look like a preamble because it has been.
I think the Clarity Act, one final thing on this the Clarity Act will come through in April ish.
Um, and once that does, because this it's required, like it's again a matter of national security.
The Secretary of the Treasury cannot necessarily fund his government uh through the strategy he has chosen unless he gets this bill through.
There will be some sort of compromise achieved.
Um, and and that will be very bullish and constructive for the asset class and bring in a lot more investment and adoption.
Another thing I'll say about this too institutional activity and adoption has not slowed or even bulked at all at the price action changes we've seen.
It's only continued, it's only expanded.
Every asset manager in the business is tokenizing things.
The explosion of real world assets on tokenized rails and the competition for that market share is gotten better, stronger.
It just validates the thesis.
Every time somebody launches a new competitor, like the Canton network, for example, it just validates the thesis.
It validates the need for Ethereum for digital decentralized public um uh financial infrastructure, as I've said several times.
So all these things are extremely bullish.
The market sentiments in the toilet, the fundamentals are skyrocketing.
That to me means that price resolves higher.
And I think that that's what you're gonna see in the short term.
I think I'm expecting as it is to go into March, a relief rally in Bitcoin and digital assets.
I don't know if it'll have legs.
I'm you know, it could be another dead cat bounce and we go lower eventually.
But I think 60K is the floor I'm looking at right now.
If we go down there and touch it, I wouldn't be surprised.
If we drop into the 50s, I don't think we'll stay there long.
But bounce here, because we haven't really had one, and I think we're due for a relief in software that should benefit Bitcoin.
Um and so we'll see how these things play out.
But those are just some general thoughts on everything that you laid out there.
Uh to bring it back to ETH, as your part of your question, the the investment thesis on Ethereum keeps getting stronger.
The value of the network keeps getting stronger, and I think that that will eventually matriculate into price once sentiment turns around.
Because sentiment is a very fickle thing, it can stay depressed for a long time, but all it takes is a couple of quick quick narrative flips.
Some capital comes in, we break some price levels, and all of a sudden we're back into a bullish territory.
So yeah, I that's that's kind of my outlook of where we are right now.
Thank you for sharing.
That's that's I feel like that's one of the best things you've said on the show.
That last damn that last that last segment.
That's perfect.
He nailed it.
He nailed it, folks.
That's the only thing you need to know uh going into this market for the next the next couple of months.
Um, John, I think we can wrap there, man.
I think it's been a great and a fun episode.
Uh, and always always leave it with some hope at the end, especially when we talk to you.
So I feel like it's a lot of that's a lot of good stuff.
And and really the main thing I'm taking away from this is just zoom out and relax, man.
Let this stuff happens in crypto, it happens in the economy.
A lot of weird stuff is happening.
A lot of people are are are trying to doom you into selling all your shit and freaking out and buying some assets you've never looked at ever in your life.
Uh no, really, or trying to clown you into quitting your job and just becoming a vibe coder using Claud Bot or whatever thing is gonna come out tomorrow or the day after, which is also not a bad idea.
That's that's a lot of fun.
It's always good to stay current in technology and new things, new trends.
Um, but that crypto is gonna be fine one way or another.
Even if all this AI stuff comes to pass, it's gonna use crypto.
Even if it doesn't, the fundamentals are there for crypto, despite uh what you said, sentiment price action being in the toilet.
So I appreciate that.
I think we all do.
Don't forget, you are your most important investment.
Take care of yourself, your health, your wealth.
Um, stay safe, stay educated, stay bullish, and yeah, keep learning, keep learning every day all you can because there's a lot going on in the market, and there's a lot of opportunity in in all this uh new information.
Uh so you are your most important investment.
And uh stay with Milk Road.
We're uh no, because honestly, look, I think literally you because like I think we're doing a great job of staying ahead of this stuff and like trying to bring more content on AI and the interviews.
Like your your AI podcast has been fantastic for me uh to keep up with some of these things, and I think that we're we're staying on the cutting edge a lot of these conversations.
I really enjoy that.
That's fun for me.
Um, and I love our community.
There's so much enthusiasm uh in the chat and Discord.
Um, so yeah, it's just it's a really exciting time to be here, and um I'm I'm glad to be part of the team.
Thank you.
I'm glad you're enjoying it.
The AI the AI show has been fun.
I've kind of moved into more like a full-time host job there, although it's just I'm just hosting one interview a week uh with different guests, and then also hosting Kyle and sometimes e Jazz for like a roll-up on Wednesdays.
But the Monday interviews have been really good.
If you guys haven't checked it out, I'll just take a second to plug it.
Um, we've had a few people from the Moonshots uh podcast, which is the biggest podcast in AI, probably gonna be one of the biggest podcasts in tech soon that they have uh they they do a daily show, they do really well.
But we've had Salem from there and also Dr.
Uh Alex Wisner Gross, who's like a super genius, did three degrees from MIT at the same time, and then they banned it after he did it.
And they were all and he finished the top of his class in all three of them, and they were all the most complicated topics possible, like mechanical engineering and physics and stuff and math.
He did all three of them at the same time.
That was 20 years ago, but uh his his podcast and one of the most more one of the most viewed podcasts ever at Milk Road.
Um, and people really love that, and he really gave us a really big zoomed-out view of like what's gonna happen a really elegant way.
Um, and I feel like that I feel like that guy actually needs a lot more publicity than these kind of like random fear articles from different different uh Twitter people.
I feel like that's the guy that that people need to focus on.
So, anyways, we're interviewing those types of people over at the AI show.
And and naturally the conversation trends to crypto when we talk to them.
They always crypto always comes up no matter what, a lot in the same way you're saying, and in other ways we don't expect.
Um, so it's very hard to separate them these days, but always worth a listen.
Those those interviews come out on Mondays.
Uh, and then I do the roll-up with Kyle uh on Wednesdays as well.
So um, yeah, thanks, John, for listening to those.
And um, listen, you're gonna be a victim of your own success, man.
People are gonna say they love this episode, they love hearing John, they love hearing LG say a bunch of dumb shit and John correcting correcting him.
So they're gonna they're gonna want this again.
The people are gonna want this again.
Well, I'm here, so uh happy to do it anytime.
It's always a lot of fun.
Uh, and you're right, my favorite part is the intro where you go, what's up, everybody?
LG J said here.
Um, so yeah, I'm always happy to come on.
That's my signature line.
Been at it for over five years.
All right.
Thanks, John, and thanks everybody for listening.
Have a good uh have a good state of the union tonight.
And uh, we'll be back tomorrow for more milk road.
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