Toby Icewing

BREAKING: Donald Trump Jr's investment firm, 1789 Capital, has seen its assets under management surge by +1,650% over the last year, to $3.5 billion, per FT. Details include: 1. The firm is building an investment empire around "patriotic capitalism" and targets $10 billion in AUM 2. In recent pitches, the firm is being described as the "new Carlyle Group" 3. Over the past year, 1789 Capital has bought stakes in some of the most sought-after private companies including Ramp, Deel, Crusoe, Groq, and Reflection AI 4. Recent successful investments include investments in Cerebras, SpaceX, Anduril, and xAI under @DonaldJTrumpJr's guidance 1789 Capital is now one of America's fastest growing investment funds.

AI & INFLATION: Fun facts about AI: 1) The sell-side currently* estimates AI capex at ~$800bn in 2026 and $1.2tn in 2027. Emphasis on “currently” because these figures experience a jump condition higher in each successive earnings season. 2) $800bn is 2.5% of 2025 U.S. nominal GDP and $1.2tn is 3.8% of 2025 nominal GDP. 3) 2.5% is 46% of 2025 nominal GDP growth and 3.8% is 70% of 2025 nominal GDP growth. 4) Obviously, not all AI capex is spent domestically, with significant portions allocated to capital and commodity imports from places such as Taiwan, Korea, the Netherlands, Japan, Australia, Canada, etc. 5) A significant portion of AI capex is spent domestically, however, which is why each of the ~two dozen core and underlying inflation measures that we track are exhibiting positive impulses at levels that are radically inconsistent with the Fed’s 2% inflation target. We’ve all been gaslit by Silicon Valley, Wall Street, D.C., and Mar-a-Lago to support the rapid development and adoption of a technology that is all but guaranteed to replace tens of millions of jobs and consolidate wealth—and political power via campaign finance—to a degree not seen since the era of the ancient Egyptians. Now we’re being gaslit into assuming that a positive demand shock of this magnitude isn’t inflationary and isn’t contributing to the nationwide affordability crisis. There are 100+ million American families that have been struggling to make ends meet for roughly half a decade because of inflation, and many of them are about to be incrementally squeezed by perpetually soft demand for labor. This is bad. You’re drunk and high if you don’t think this historic display of greed and equally historic consolidation of power will have massive political consequences. Investors will look back on the advent of nationwide wealth taxes and trust-busting regulation with nostalgia by the time this Fourth Turning climax is over. Pray for every high-school-aged child in this country because every Fourth Turning since at least the 15th century has ended in total war. I love you and Jesus Christ loves you. —Skipper 💜

Very enjoyable watch. Lots of gold in here from one of the greats, both timeless advice and thoughts on where we are today. Here are some notes I took: Trading vs Investing • PTJ sees trading and investing as totally different games. A trader's job is just constant risk management and patience, waiting for the rare setups where you can take a really big swing • He compares trading to boxing. You're getting punched the whole time and the goal is just to stay standing until your real opportunity shows up (lesson from his mentor Eli Tullis) • Emphasizes having a plan before you even enter a trade and making sure that plan is self-executing so you don't freeze up when things get volatile. • Still wakes up in the middle of the night to watch global markets. Reckons passion and obsession are non-negotiable if you want to keep an edge over decades Liquidity is king • Never trust an asset you can't get out of quickly. Learned this early on seeing silver crash in the 80s. You're only worth what you can write a check for tomorrow. Riding the trend/big swings • The job isn't being right all the time. It's being massively positioned when conviction, technicals and macro all line up. • Most of his P&L comes from a handful of knockout trades. Everything else is just preservation. • He pointed to Bitcoin's 2020 surge as a textbook example of a rare knockout macro trade driven by a policy shift. Bitcoin as the best inflation hedge • Calls BTC unequivocally the best inflation hedge, better than gold, because the supply is finite while gold keeps expanding through new mining every year. • Inflation trades took off after central banks intervened in 2020 and he thinks the same setup repeats whenever you get heavy monetary or fiscal stimulus. • Did flag real long term risks for BTC: AI and quantum computing + cyber warfare. Equities are a bad setup • Buying the S&P at current valuations basically implies negative 10 year forward returns. He thinks it's going to be really hard to make money from here. • We're in a sovereign debt bubble and historically over-equitized. When the stock market cap to GDP ratio hits 250% (where it is now), history suggests 10-year returns could be negative. • A potential rolling top in the market could be triggered by a massive wave of new IPOs and subsequent unlock periods which will flood the market with equity supply while corporate buybacks are slowing down. The macro feedback loop risk • A proper equity correction could kick off a nasty self reinforcing problem. • Around 10% of US tax revenue is capital gains. In a crash, that goes to zero. • Then the deficit blows out, the bond market gets smoked, and the negative reflexivity feeds on itself. Bubble right now? • Stops short of calling this an outright bubble but reckons the structural conditions (valuations, leverage, supply pressure) rhyme pretty uncomfortably with prior tops. Yen bull case Talked through a long yen thesis. Thinks it is undervalued and the catalyst is the leadership change (new PM) that will drive the economy in a different way going forward (Japan first etc). AI Risk (Investment Lens) • Thinks AI is one of the biggest risks out there for markets and society • Reckons the industry has no proper risk management and is openly calling for regulation, not just as an ethics thing but as a structural market concern • He went to a conference with the top AI modelers, and the vibe was basically: "We probably won't do anything about safety until 50 or 100 million people die in an accident." On Kindness • Everyone should start their day with the goal of one simple act of kindness. It doesn't have to be a big deal or cost money. It’s about building the reps until being a kind person is just instinctive and organic. • His mom’s old advice was to kill them with kindness. He thinks that’s exactly what the country needs right now to fix the vitriolic, attack mode culture that’s taken over since the early 2000s. Highly recommend watching the whole thing. PTJ is a great role model for young people.

The highest-value human work in the AI era will be in domains with sparse reward signals. Internalize this, or watch your value erode over the next decade. Math, programming, rote memorization, data science, all fucked. The classic “smart nerd” jobs are exactly where AI is strongest, because the feedback loops are dense. You can check the answer. You can run the test. That means AI can improve quickly, and humans will rapidly fall behind. Your advantage as a human is in messy domains. Taste. Judgment. Negotiation. Risk-taking. Politics. Sales. Science at the frontier. Anything you can only really learn by doing. Cross-disciplinary stuff. The valuable domains will be the ones guarded by secrets, tacit knowledge, weak labels, long feedback cycles, and ambiguous outcomes. Places where the training data is scarce, the ground truth is disputed, and it's impossible to explain why something is good. AI will still enter these domains. But we will be slower to trust it unsupervised there, because it will be harder to tell when it is right, harder to prove when it is wrong, and difficult to construct secure sandboxes. The stakes will be too high to YOLO it. I find myself saying this over and over again to young people today: the future does not belong to people who are able to get good grades on tests. It belongs to people who can operate under uncertainty, in domains where correctness is hard to define. Those domains will become the thin waist of the economy: as productivity everywhere else accelerates, the humans who excel there will become our economic Strait of Hormuz. The best humans in these domains will demand an enormous cut of the growing economic pie. Your imperative going forward is to make sure you're one of these people. (Or become an electrician. That probably works too.)

Top 10 DeFi United Contributors 1. @Arbitrum – 30765 ETH (Pending) 2. @Mantle_Official – 30000 ETH (Pending) 3. @Aave – 25000 ETH (Pending) 4. @StaniKulechov – 5000 ETH 5. @Ether_fi – 5000 ETH (Pending) 6. @LidoFinance – 2500 ETH (Pending) 7. @KelpDAO – 2000 ETH 8. @GolemFoundation + @Golemproject – 1000 ETH 9. @The3D_ – 500 ETH 10. @bgdlabs + @eboadom – 350 ETH Will you be contributing to the relief fund?

@Zodomo @33b345 Have a dedicated MacBook just for signing and factory reset it between ops. Separate system just for dev. Use iOS / iPad for any meetings

it hasn't sunk in for most people. we already live in a post-scarcity society. UBI is already here. basic package: disability, medicaid, food stamps etc bonus package: literally getting paid for staying at home and hanging out with your relatives extra bonus: if you are willing to commit fraud, pretend your kids are autistic and get paid for that. get paid for watching your neighbor's kid. pretend you are taking care of your grandma. fake hospice clinic. fake rehab clinic. fake therapy clinic. giga bonus: during a time of crisis take advantage of PPP or CARES and open a fake business and get paid for existing people are shocked when they learn that defense is the FIFTH largest line item in the budget. ahead of defense: social security ($1.6T), interest on debt ($1.1T) medicare ($1T), medicaid + ACA ($1T), AND THEN defense ($0.9T) complain about defense all you like, but healthcare fraud is a way bigger factor. hundreds of billions per year. this is only going to get worse, because the fraud is a structural part of the system – payouts to client groups in exchange for votes (normally D). in the US, only 47% of the population actually works (fully 14% of the population is working age and does not work). retirees are 18% and children 22%. the system I described above subsidizes 50m non-working people absolute minimum, but really it's far more because people that are paid to stay home and take care of their relatives are considered "workers" of that 47% of "actual workers" maybe one third does real work, the rest are shuffling papers around or doing fake email jobs. so you have, rough math, 50 million actual workers supporting 300 million dependents. that's the nature of the economy today. it will only accelerate. eventually you will have 10 million using AI tools to do all the work and 340 million dependents. the reason no one roots out the fraud is because it's the system that keeps our extremely fragile polity intact. the fraud is the UBI. the purpose of the system is what it does. of course, it's a deeply unfair system, because you are allowed to commit fraud if you are a politically protected client group of the democrats. DOGE was killed faster than any government program ever, because it attempted to root out the fraud. if you are honest and unwilling to commit fraud, you are a huge loser in this system. your neighbor will have their mortgage subsidized by some government program. they will get favorable SBA loans due to DEI. they will open a fake hospice or autism clinic. they will get paid for taking care of their neighbor's kid and vice versa. the primary skill in the labor market is learning how to extract money from state and federal government programs, not gaining skills or making yourself employable. if you are just trying to work an ordinary wagie job you are a huge sucker. you are paying 40-50% effective all in taxes to everyone else who is a net taker. the sad part is because AI is such a substantial productivity boost, it will actually keep this system going for a while longer, and maybe in perpetuity. AI boosts the 15% of the population that is actually productive so much that the remaining 85% can coast by. no one in charge will change this because they can't think of anything else. the political costs of a real UBI program are too great and we don't have the money for it anyway. so we will keep this covert fraud-based UBI program running indefinitely. unfortunately, if you are an honest wagie, you lose.

This is quite wild. It explains how AI will suddenly cure a lot of illness.

this is awesome, massive congrats to the teams involved here crypto is the API for planetary money, finance, and capitalism

Full list of countries with 0% crypto tax UAE – 0% Qatar – 0% Turkey – 0% Kuwait – 0% Georgia – 0% Monaco – 0% Armenia – 0% Thailand – 0% Singapore – 0% Hong Kong – 0% El Salvador – 0% Switzerland – 0% South Korea – 0% Saudi Arabia – 0% Liechtenstein – 0% Cayman Islands – 0% British Virgin Islands – 0% Portugal – 0% (held >1 year) Croatia – 0% (held >2 years) Germany – 0% (held >1 year) Luxemboueg – 0% (held >6 months) Czech Republic – 0% (held >3 years)

THEY DID IT. The SEC and CFTC just dropped a landmark document that officially classifies crypto assets. They're actually telling us which crypto assets are securities and which ones aren't - by name! THIS IS SOMETHING GENSLER REFUSED TO DO (he focused on prosecuting crypto out of existence) This rule doc gives crypto many of the benefits of the clarity bill - it lifts us out of the gray market - it gives every asset a path. It's almost like the Clarity act just passed by way of regulator. (of course, the actual clarity act will harden all this into legislation and make it irreversible in the event we get another Gensler, we still want it) This rule says there's 5 categories for crypto assets: 1) Digital Commodities - assets tied to a functional, decentralized crypto system (e.g., BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP, ADA, DOGE). Not securities. (yes, they name them on page 14) 2) Digital Collectibles - NFTs, meme coins, artwork tokens, in-game items. Not securities (fractionalized collectibles may be an exception). 3) Digital Tools - membership tokens, credentials, domain names (e.g., ENS). Not securities. 4) Stablecoins - payment stablecoins under the GENIUS Act are not securities. Other stablecoins, it depends. 5) Digital Securities - tokenized versions of traditional securities. Like tokenized stocks. Always securities. Amazing! This makes so much sense I can't believe it's coming from a regulator. No more enforcement threats to Ethereum developers and crypto exchanges. How about the Howey test? More common sense! If an issuer makes specific promises of managerial efforts from which buyers expect profits, the offering is a security until those promises are fulfilled. Then it's a commodity. The asset itself was never the security, the deal around it was. (E.g. XRP was a security pre launch, became a commodity after). How about stuff like staking and mining? Mining? Not a securities transaction. Staking? Also not a securities transaction, that includes custodial and liquid staking even with LSTs! How about wrapping BTC? Not a securities transaction. Airdrops? NOT SECURITIES. NO MORE GEO BANS PROTECTING AMERICANS from free airdrops. Remember this is a joint doc from the SEC and CFTC, They're actually cooperating on this, no internal strife, this is binding to both. SEC regulates $80-100 trillion assets CFTC regulates $5-10 trillion assets Both of the world's largest capital markets are showing us that crypto assets are here to stay and they're welcome alongside traditional assets. Every country will follow. This is the biggest move toward legitimacy I've seen in all my time in crypto. Maybe bigger than the genius act since is covers all crypto assets. Well done @MichaelSelig and @SECPaulSAtkins. And especially well done to the indefatigable @HesterPeirce. Her fingerprints are all over this, couldn't have happened without her eight years of principles-based curiosity.

The Bitcoin Value Zone - The macro outlook, Bitcoin plumbing, and the key risks and opps from here. Live webinar with Joe and @SamuelPMacD from @CCI_Crypto. Recorded today. We cover: • Where Bitcoin sits today • ETF & institutional flows shaping the next move • Macro liquidity & gold regimes • The real quantum computing risk to BTC ... and much more, check it out: youtube.com/watch?v=tdfRcQ…

What happens when you embrace life as a trader, living on your own PnL 1) you treat the general volatility of life with equanimity, sh*t happens everyday in the portfolio and its a reflection of life. Most people want to suppress vol (salary, stability etc)

Who were the buyers of those Solana ETFs? The top of the list is a who's who of market makers and crypto investment firms.

Solana is down 57% since the spot ETFs launched in July (that is about as unlucky timing as you'll ever see in ETFs) yet they managed to not only accumulate $1.5b in flows but not really give any of it up. Further, 50% of the assets are from 13F filers = serious inv base. Both really good signs for future IMO. Great note out today on it from @JSeyff

Today we announced a strategic relationship with Intercontinental Exchange (ICE). • ICE has made a direct investment in OKX and joining our Board of Directors • ICE will license OKX spot crypto prices to launch U.S.-regulated futures • OKX plans to provide access to ICE U.S. futures and NYSE tokenized equities markets to our 120M users Together, we’re advancing the infrastructure connecting digital assets and global capital markets. Details from our Founder & CEO @Star_okx: okx.com/en-us/learn/ok…