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But, if you think about it today, what are the living tributes that, you know, capital builds and leaves behind for society? It's fewer and fewer. Mhm. I think I think that's a that's a very big opportunity for somebody to fill. It I think it's like especially for folks in tech, I think. If they can get themselves organized to do that, I think we we land in a good place.
If they cannot get themselves organized to do that and say everyone for themselves, I think it's going to be really complicated. Super messy. Hey guys, welcome to Everyday Finance. The abrupt reopening of the Strait of Hormuz during a temporary ceasefire caused a 10% drop in oil and a surge in Bitcoin towards $78,000, giving the current market a false appearance of bullish relief.
However, the highly suspicious timing of a massive $760 million oil short and aggressive Bitcoin accumulation occurring just minutes before the public announcement suggests the market is not naturally reacting to events, but rather is being purposefully positioned by insiders. In the end, this suspicious alignment of geopolitics and flawless, smart money front running confirms Chamath Palihapitiya's caution that beneath powerful headlines lies a controlled, artificial environment driven by highly concentrated players and hidden signals rather than organic cycle dynamics.
This suggests that retail investors are taking part in a game where the major moves are predetermined before the public ever learns of the news. And I think sometimes what is true and what people pay attention to are not the same thing. True. Yeah. And sometimes the thing that you should be paying attention to gets lost because the thing that you are paying attention to gets more attention because it's more interesting and useful.
That's sort of where we are right now. We're in this really weird phase, I think, where you actually like should be focused on this thing over here and instead we're all focused on all these things over here. I'll give you an example. Um here's like a very big one. I think like it's pretty fair to say since the last time you and I saw each other on the show the attitude towards technology I think has been pretty profoundly negative.
It's kind of tilted. It's relatively like anti-AI you know, anti-billionaires. It's anti all of this stuff. Um and it manifests in all of these interesting ways. There's protests, there's data centers, there's all of this stuff that's happening. Um people are worried about job loss. All of that stuff is real.
Do you want a cigar? No, I'm okay. I'm good. Um but what should they really be focused upon? And I think what they should be really focused upon is we're at the tail end of a cycle that doesn't work anymore which is all about like this tension between labor, people that do the work and capital, the people that fund it and then make all the returns.
And over the last 40 years, we've basically gone into this completely upside-down world where capital extracts all of the upside. And labor has extracted less and less and less and less. And all of this pushback it manifests in AI, it manifests in politics, it manifests in social issues, it manifests in you know, Israel.
Whatever you want to talk about. All of these issues, I think symptomologically come from this other issue which is we are out of balance. This total compact that we used to have a liberal democracy and a free market has totally collapsed. And there are simple ways to fix that, but that never gets the attention because it's not what you want to talk about.
The attention is here. Shh, you know, vote no to the data center, you know, um this model is going to take out all the jobs. Um you know, this social issue is really important. That war should not be fought. That war should be fought. All of these things, while important, distract us from what the core issue is.
And the core issue is that we as a society, I think, are out of balance. The The natural compact between all of us is broken. And there are some simple ways to fix that compact. Get people more invested. Get people more engaged in the upside. Have people have a positive sum view of what's happening.
And that isn't happening. Let's assume that you still lived in California, cuz I think it it tells this example in a more extreme way. Okay. Um let's say you make a million bucks a year, which is a lot of money, but it it makes the it makes the point more cleanly. Um you'd pay, I think, 30 percent federal tax.
And you'd pay another 15 or 16% in state tax and Medicare tax and all this tax. So, if you're a wage earner, 50% of all your upside goes to the government. If you're a capital earner, and you make that same million dollars via capital gains, you pay half that tax. Why did that happen? That happened because in the '40s and '50s, but really in the '60s and '70s and '80s, what we were trying to do, or what the American government and what Western societies were trying to do, was to convince people to invest their money.
Hey, Joe, go build that factory. Go hire those people. And we're going to incentivize you to do so. And by doing that, there was this idea that that all of those profits that you would get would then diffuse, right, trickle down into everybody else. The workers participated. Everybody participated. But technology allows you to do more with less and less.
So now what happens is the capital owners can accrue infinite, almost it seems like, value. And the workers get less and less. But now if you get less and less and you're taxed more and more as a percentage of what you own, you're going to feel really out of sorts. You're going to be like, "Why am I paying 50 cents of every dollar and I see these other ways where folks are paying 25 cents on their dollars, but their dollars are compounding way faster and they have, you know, hundreds of billions more of those dollars than I have of my dollars?" If you take that example and you expand it across society, I think people understand that now.
There's enough information and there's enough people talking about it where it's pretty clear that that's happened. So the question is how do you fix it? I think like if you think about AI and if you believe that we're going to get into this world of abundance and we're not working, what does it mean for governments to tax our labor?
There is no labor. You're not working anymore. I'm not working. We're doing things out of leisure. Why should I pay 50 cents of every dollar? Why aren't the companies that are going to be making trillions of dollars, why don't they pay more? Why isn't there, you know, an expectation that they then help our lived society do better and thrive as a result of all of that winning?
That's the real conversation that I think is bubbling and I think that we're probably another 12 to 18 months where all of these other issues are going to be important, but they're going to be viewed for for what they are. Um they're going to get demoted, I think, in importance. And it's this core structural issue.
It's what is the economic relationship that we have together as a society? What is the relationship between Joe, Chamath, Jamie, and all these companies? And how do we feel about a few and an ever-shrinking few making more and more and more. And then how do we feel about their ability to share that with a small amount of people?
And then what do you What is the expectation for everybody else? I think that's mostly at the core of what's happening. And so back to like, you know, all of this attention that we give to these other issues distracts from that one. Because I think you can get organized to fix this issue. You can't get consensus on any of these issues.
Mhm. You know, you bring up Israel, it's like this. You bring up social issues, it's like this. You bring up, you know, whatever you want to bring up, people just kind of take a side, nothing happens. This is actually where people are universally actually much more aligned than you think. Because there's reasonable ways.
One simple way was is you'd say, "Well, let's flip the taxation model." Corporate taxes should exceed personal taxes. They've never. We should have an expectation that then corporate actors can buy down their taxes if they want, but if they do social good for society. I'll give you an example. At the Industrial Revolution, there's a table like this and the leading lights of that era, Andrew Carnegie, Nelson Rockefeller, Jay Gould, J.P.
Morgan, they sat together and they said, "Guys, this is going to benefit us, this Industrial Revolution. It may not benefit everybody. What is our responsibility? What is our collective responsibility?" And they allocated tasks. Carnegie went and built libraries all throughout the country. Rockefeller built universities.
Hospitals were built. And I think what happened is society was like, "Wow, these are living testaments to us doing well." And so then they were okay with this transition. But if you think about it today, what are the living tributes that, you know, capital builds and leaves behind for society? It's fewer and fewer.
Mhm. I think I think that's a that's a very big opportunity for somebody to fill. It I think it's like especially for folks in tech, I think. If they can get themselves organized to do that, I think we we land in a good place. If they cannot get themselves organized to do that and say everyone for themselves, I think it's going to be really complicated.
Super messy. Rather than being an isolated incident, the highly suspicious $760 million oil short placed just minutes before the ceasefire announcement is part of a larger, extremely concerning pattern of impeccable market timing. This is the third significant transaction in recent weeks after a $500 trade before a postponed Iranian strike and a $950 million trade ahead of another ceasefire headline, totaling over $2.2 billion in perfectly positioned capital.
And it has officially sparked a CFTC Commodity Futures Trading Commission investigation into possible insider trading and access to confidential information. This aggressive, coordinated shorting of oil stands in stark contrast to the opposite behavior seen in Bitcoin, which has seen significant accumulation during times of peak market anxiety.
This has led astute traders to wonder if the world's markets are naturally responding to geopolitical news or if influential insiders are purposefully front-run and positioned around it. In the end, this discrepancy indicates that macro liquidity, an underlying force that will probably determine the market's long-term destiny far more than any one news event going forward, remains the true and final driver of asset prices beneath the chaotic noise of international headlines.
I think we have to figure out how first of all, kids need to learn and I think this is where like we have to do a better job as parents. Kids need to learn how to be resilient thinkers. I don't even know what that term meant before, but I know what it means now, which is like you take this AI slop and you just kind of like pass it off.
And if like the teachers in the school system aren't trained, they're just like, "Wow, this looks good." They have to be able to push back. Parents need to be able to look at this [ __ ] But then all of this stuff I'm just like so frustrated cuz it's like one more thing that I have to do as a parent.
Like Right. Every time technology gets better, it's one more thing, you know? Right. We're going to make the world, you know, super connected and social and all that that stuff. It sounds great to me until I have to be the one that has to tell my kid I can't they can't get Instagram. Ha. And then they're up my ass every day.
Right. You know? And it's just like I don't want to have to deal with this stuff. Right. I want this to be handled in a way that just allows me to do what I want to do. I don't want to say no to my kid. I don't want to police his school work and make sure he's not cheating or not learning and just like, you know, passing off this AI slop.
What am I Where are my tax dollars going? Where is everybody else in all of this? It gets very frustrating. And again, it goes back to like this feeling of like, well, is this all getting better for me or is this kind of like not You know, people start to be nostalgic for what it used to be cuz it was just simpler, but I think that's a different way of saying easier.
Well, what Is the CEO of Verizon, Dan Schulman, he put out this very public forecast. You know, very smart guy, well-regarded in business. And I think he said something like 30% of all white-collar jobs will be gone by 2030. I don't know, Jamie, maybe you can get the exact thing, but it's something like that.
That's probably optimistic. And I thought at first my initial reaction was like, this is totally not credible. But then I'm like, hold on a second, that's my bias cuz I want to believe that that's not possible. Honestly. Right, right. And as I've gotten older I've I've I'm a little bit better now. I'm like, okay, hold on a second.
Let's weigh the probabilities. And then I was like, man, if I'm I'm to be fair, maybe there's a 10, 20% chance of that. There's a bunch of other outcomes that are much better than that, but that's part of the set of outcomes that you have to consider. And then I was like, well, what's my antidote to that?
My And And the only thing that I can say is, don't worry, it's going to be better. I don't think that that's a good answer. No. So, there has to be Like, all of this kind of goes back to Look, my wife and I have this conversation where like, if it were up to us, who's Who can you trust to have some superintelligence?
Now, we're biased cuz we're friends with him, but the only person that we can trust is Elon. Cuz he seems to be like he has a bigger Like, it's kind of like he's like over there. He's like, I need to get to Mars. Right. You know, and I'm going to first terraform the moon, but then I'm going to Mars.
And I'm going to build like a [ __ ] magnetic catapult. I'm going to do all this [ __ ] And so, I just need this thing. I feel like he's the least corruptible. He's the most independent thinking. And I think he's the one that has an actual empathy for people. Then there are folks where there's just a in insane profit motive.
Right. They're less in control of the businesses that they run. Those businesses are really out over their ski tips in the amount of money they've gotten from Wall Street and other folks who expect a return who'll put a ton of pressure on these folks. And if they get there first, I don't know where the chips fall.
We don't really know. We can kind of guess. And then you see in the press just enough snippets of their reactions in certain moments where you're like, hey, hold on a second, question mark here, you know? You see OpenAI react one way, you see Anthropic react another way, and you're like, where is this going to end up?
And the honest answer is nobody really knows. So, it comes back to like, we need a few people that can organize. Those guys need to self-organize and actually present a really positive face. And they need to show why those 20% of outcomes that uh Dan Schulman paints The truth is, it's possible, but here's why it's not probable.
The fundamental structural reality of the contemporary financial system depends on an unavoidable cycle of continuous liquidity expansion, spiraling global debt, skyrocketing interest rates, and systemic borrowing needs that eventually require printing more money into circulation. circulation. This goes beyond simple geopolitical theater or the mechanics of insider timing.
In the past, this newly created capital steers clear of stagnant bank reserves and naturally shifts toward high-performing risk assets like Bitcoin whenever macroeconomic conditions coincide. However, the ultimate realization of this capital shift currently depends on legislative clarity, particularly through initiatives like the Clarity Act, which has the potential to unlock massive institutional inflows, but is threatened by political friction and bureaucratic delays that could stall widespread for years.
Investors are ultimately faced with a crucial divergence as a result of this structural tension. Figuring out whether the recent price action of Bitcoin has fully absorbed this impending liquidity wave or if the real macroeconomic breakout is still on the horizon. This raises the fundamental question of whether formal regulation will serve as the true catalyst for the next major bull run or if it is only a secondary diversion from the raw, unstoppable force of global liquidity expansion itself.
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