Well, our year-end prediction that Great Grandpa Joe 'does not make it to the finish line' came true. Two Rap's back, we also speculated right before the Big Debate 'that the powers-at-be can see the electroencephalogram chart on the wall and will be waiting in the shadows, chronicling mental fumbles and freezes to help shove the Big Guy off the ticket.' The President was indeed unceremoniously sacked in what some are calling a 'coup,' but we see more as a mad scramble after the bad decision of running Biden for a second term.
A steep grade to win still sits in front of the Democrats. 97% of California voters did not support Ms.Kamala's first run for President, even though that is her home state, and the rest of the country will soon see why. They also face the challenge of reconciling their campaign messaging of 'Saving Democracy' while offering up a non-democratically chosen candidate as their Party's Presidential nominee.
Mr. Biden was certainly strong-armed and replaced with Ms. Kamala by a politically powerful few with a lot of pressure from a Donor Class threatening to cut off funds if things didn't go their way. This cloudy process feels more like a smoke-filled backroom meeting of the CCP's Politburo Standing Committee, where the Gang of 7 picks the next boss. In their last meet-up, they essentially anointed Xi for life. 😳
The seven members of China’s Politburo Standing Committee have everything under control.
We suppose most Democrats feel it's a big relief to get Great Granpa Joe off the stage after finally seeing/acknowledging that he was lacking mental agility and clearly can no longer function, never mind beat the Bogeyman. Unfortunately, Ms. Kamala got more bad news in a new YouGov/Times of London poll showing that a whopping 92 percent of respondents say that she was, in part, behind the coverup to hide Biden's failing health, further exposing the hypocrisy and incompetence of it all.
However, they keep trying to spin it; the irony bells are ringing so loud that this drama must become a South Park episode. Just as Meeghan and Prince Harold flew the world in a private jet chanting, 'We want our privacy!' (see South Park clip above), we can imagine posh scenes of gatherings, from Malibu to Martha's Vinyard, where members of the Donor Class hoist their glasses full of the finest varietals to cheer their horses in the race—Barack, Nancy, Chuck, Hakeem, and Ms. Kamala— while all are chanting 'We want Democracy! We want Democracy!'
This July 2nd Reuters/Ipsos poll showed that only former first lady Michelle Obama could definitively defeat Trump in the 2024 election.
The next scene shows Pelosi and Schumer playing good cop—bad cop, browbeating the Commander in Chief to give over the White House keys. Their leverage is Ms.Kamala has given them permission to invoke the 25th Amendment to get their way. Then, over to a shot at a beach club in Bali—on the other side of the planet—where Michelle Obama and her besties are cocktailing while she keeps sending Barack's calls to voicemail. 'Mich—You gotta do it! Don't worry, I promise to run the country—Please call me back!' (Most polls show that Michelle has the best chance to beat Trump and is reportedly most feared by the Trump campaign).
Dr. Jill would, of course, be ever-present, leading Joe around the Oval Office and talking to her husband like a three-year-old. ‘Ok, Joey, take a tinkle. Israel’s Prime Minister is here to see you, so we have to hurry up now.’
After watching a presidency meltdown in front of us—a candidate nearly assassinated with an honest spectator killed in the line of fire, the shadowy sacking and swapping-out of the Democratic Presidential candidate in a Politburo Standing Committee-style move—all within just 26 days—we are in desperate need of some good old South Park comic relief. Please, please. 🙏🏼
The Ethereum ETFs offered by BlackRock, Ark Invest/21Shares, VanEck, Grayscale, Fidelity, Bitwise, Franklin Templeton, iShares, and Invesco began trading on July 23, 2024, and brought in $1 billion on the first day. While the trading volume cooled to under $900 million by the third day, ETFs are projected to drive demand for Ethereum, absorb 1% of the Ether in circulation, and haul in $4 billion in new funds by the end of the year. This event was pivotal because it gave institutional investors easier access to Ether and further validated its role in the decentralized crypto economy. Ironically, these moves, plus AI, blockchain, and crypto innovation, will also accelerate the downsizing of Wall Street and create an exodus of a legion of disintermediated pinstriped middlemen.
“The Bogeyman wants more Bitcoin” Artist: A.I.
Donald Trump gave a Bitcoin 2024 keynote speech in Nashville that was a shocking and even semi-sophisticated reversal from his 'Bitcoin is a scam!' attitude during the last election cycle.
Trump Bitcoin 2024 keynote excerpts
"For too long, our government has violated the cardinal rule that every bitcoiner knows by heart: Never sell your bitcoin. My administration policy is for the US to keep 100 percent of all the Bitcoin we currently hold or acquire into the future as the core of a strategic national Bitcoin stockpile."
"On day one, I will fire Gary Gensler and appoint a new SEC Chairman. The rules will be written by people who love your industry, not hate your industry.”
"Upon taking office, I will immediately appoint a Bitcoin and crypto Presidential Advisory Council... Their task will be to design transparent regulatory guidance for the benefit of the entire industry."
"We will immediately shut down Operation Choke Point 2.0." [The crypto industry's term for anti-crypto regulatory policy, such as SAB 121, issued by the US Securities and Exchange Commission in March of 2022.]
"Bitcoin and crypto will skyrocket like never before, even beyond your expectations. And you are the people that are doing it."
"Bitcoin stands for freedom, sovereignty, and independence from government coercion and control. If elected, we will transform the US into the crypto capital of the planet and the world's superpower of Bitcoin. If we don't embrace crypto and Bitcoin technology, China will, other countries will, and they will dominate."
Trump’s new Bitcoin stockpile would have a great start. The US has seized an estimated 210,000 bitcoins since 2020, worth $15 billion today, making it one of the world's biggest holders. Trump was also pleased to remind the audience that he is the first presidential candidate to take cryptocurrency donations. Since the Trump campaign opened its crypto wallet in May, it has raised over $4 million in crypto contributions and accepts a variety of cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Ether, Dogecoin, Shiba Inu coin, XRP, and USDC.
BTC CEO David Bailey, who produced Bitcoin 2024, pledged in June to raise $100 million and turn out over 5 million voters for Trump's re-election, just one more indicator of the crypto industry's shift to Trump.
Keep on keepin’ on
We remain highly long-term bullish on BTC, ETH, other quality coins, the many great ones to come, and the tokenization of all tradable assets. This transformation will not only create $200 trillion in new wealth but also dramatically downsize inefficient institutions, return power back to the people, and create a more private and safe world.
Cryptonite Weekly Rap’s paid members gain access to company and investor lists and analytics and enjoy invitations to private events and global summits. 💪🏼😎
Jordan Peterson’s conversation with Elon Musk part 1
Famous Canadian psychologist, author, and educator Jordon Peterson caught up with Elon Musk last week at the Tesla Gigafactory in Austin, Texas, for a deeply insightful chat made slightly chaotic by JP’s hyperactive behavior. (JP is great, but he is better off being interviewed rather than being the interviewer—sometimes can’t STFU🤬)
We have published excerpts of our favorite interchanges and a smattering of commentary below. Enjoy!
Elon had just flown in from pulling an all-nighter at his company X.ai in Memphis, where they are building the most powerful AI on the planet.
The AI arms race
JP: I use Grok and ChatGPT a lot as research assistants. ChatGPT lies a lot, so you have to watch out for them, as they can deviate quite a bit. Why did you call your AI app Grok, and how does it perform compared to (Google's) Gemini and ChatGPT?
Elon: To Grok something is to understand it at a very deep level. X.ai's stated goal is to understand the nature of the Universe and, even more, to understand what questions to ask about it. So I think that is a good goal.
I do want to emphasize that X.ai is a relatively new company—it has only been around for a year—so we have a lot of catching up to do. But we are moving fast—our velocity of improvement is higher than any company out there. We were able to bring online a massive new training center in Memphis in only 19 days—from getting hardware installed to beginning training—that's the fastest set-up ever by any AI company by far.
However, the foundation model of Grok is still weaker than GPT in order of magnitude. Our newest Grok release is sort of our 1.5 version. Grok 2 just finished training with 15,000 H100 GPUs (AI chips), and we are hoping to release it in a month, which will put Grok on par with a GPT 4. The training we are doing in Memphis is for Grok 3 and should be done in about three or four months. After bug fixing and fine-tuning, we are hoping for a December launch, at which point Grok 3 should be the most powerful AI in the world.
Editor's Take: The speed of X.ai's time to market shows how AI can and will exponentially increase the production and transaction velocity of all companies in the future. As we move into the second half of the year, AI commercialization is starting to scale. Every category: developer tools and infrastructure, search, the collaboration and productivity suite, games and entertainment, the creative suite, and biology—to name just a few—will be transformed over the next decade by AI innovation. It will do the same for the individual who stays current with the AI tools impacting the industries they are passionate about. The three-work week is on the horizon for those who master the AI tools of their trade.
JP: So what the hell do you think you're building with these AI systems? (waving arms)
Elon: All AI companies are building digital superintelligence that is far smarter than any human—and ultimately, superintelligence that is far smarter than all humans combined. Now, one can ask, 'Is this a wise thing to do? Is this dangerous?' Unfortunately, whether we think so or not, it is still being done. So, from my standpoint and that of the X.ai team, it's better we are participants rather than spectators.
JP: That's life, man...
Elon: Yes. As participants, we have a better chance of steering AI in a beneficial direction for humanity.
JP: Why do you trust yourself on the front?
Elon: Well, I don't trust myself entirely.
JP: Good! Fair enough. But you are still confronting an ethical conundrum.
Elon: Maybe we have a chance of doing it better than others from a moral standpoint and trying to avoid their pitfalls. From what I've seen, the others are not striving for truth. I mean, these systems are trained to give an answer, but they are also trained to be politically correct—the woke mind virus is woven throughout. I'm sure you have recognized that.
JP: I sure have.
Elon: Perhaps I should go back to the foundation of my philosophy because that will help explain my actions. When I was about 11 or 12 years old, I had somewhat of an existential crisis—there just didn't seem to be any meaning in the world or to life. I was a voracious reader as a kid, so I actually tried to read all the religious texts—the Bible, the Koran, the Torah, Hindu scriptures. At 12, I didn't understand these things super well.
JP: Well, you understood enough to have an existential crisis at 12, and that's a start.
Elon: Then I dug into the philosophy books and read quite a bit of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche—which was quite depressing to read as a kid—not so much so as an adult. And nothing really gave me the answers that resonated with me. Then I read Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which is really philosophy disguised as humor. The point Adams was trying to make is that we do not know all the answers obviously—in fact, we don't even know the right questions to ask. So the book is about this giant computer that was built to answer the question, 'What is the meaning of life? And it comes up with the answer 42. (laughs) So what does that mean? It was then that I understood it would take a computer far more powerful than us just to know the right questions to ask. So, that was my fundamental turning point.
"He who fights with monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you."
JP: Ok, so it seems to me that you are intimating that your discovery through Adams that 'the question is the thing' was the key to the resolution of your existential crisis, and that's part of the reason you are motivated to build Grok 3 and look deeper.
Elon: That's correct. So we can understand the Universe.
JP: How old were you by then, and what did that discovery make you do?
Elon: Maybe I was 15, and I was a lot happier after that because I decided to accept that we are ignorant about a great many things, and anything we can do to deepen our understanding of the Universe, learn the right questions to ask about the Universe, and become less ignorant is good. And I think that was Adam's central point.
JP: And that was good enough to soothe your craving?
Elon: It was for me, at least. Is this a 'religion'? I don't know, maybe it is. But I think it's a good one. I call it the Religion of Curiosity. It's the religion of enlightenment. And what falls out of that is the expansion of consciousness in scale and scope. So, not only is there more consciousness but also varied consciousness, so people don’t all end up thinking the same. I think it is probably good to have multiple religions that provide different perspectives on things. From there, we need to take a set of actions that increase the probability that the future will be good for humanity.
Sam Harris's identification as a cultural Christian highlights a growing trend among secular thought leaders who value the cultural and ethical dimensions of Christianity without adhering to its religious beliefs.
JP: Did you see where Sam Harris (best known as one of the ‘Four Horsemenof New Atheism’, alongside Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett) now describes himself as a cultural Christian?
Elon: Yes. I do believe Jesus' teachings are good and wise, and there is tremendous wisdom in turning the other cheek. For a while, I thought it was a weak thing to do. But the notion of forgiveness is important and essential. If you do not forgive—as someone said— ‘An eye for an eye makes everyone blind’—you have this endless cycle of vengeance. So, I am actually a big believer in the principles of Christianity—I think they are very good. So, I am probably a cultural Christian. I was baptized and brought an Anglican, and simultaneously went to a Jewish nursery school (laughs). I am in favor of the principles that will result in the greatest happiness and contentment for humanity, not just for today but also for future humans.
Editor's Take: We defer to Nietzsch’s words above for our take on this section. Watch out for those eyeballs looking back at you from the abyss, and take heart that Elon has proven one can go to hell and back and still go on to do great things.
'Don't worry, my dear Faust, you will soon be uploaded to our computers and will never be conscious of life's pain and misery again—Muahahahahahaha', comforts Mephistopheles, agent of the Beast😈
Confronting the Beast
JP: So you were involved with the project now called OpenAI, which Sam Altman runs?
Elon: Yes, the company was my idea. I was one of the primary founders and named it. The reason OpenAI exists at all is because I used to be really close friends with (Google cofounder) Larry Page. I used to stay at his house in Palo Alto all the time because I was splitting my time between living in LA running Space X and Silicon Valley running Tesla, and I didn’t own a home in the Bay Area for over a decade.
We would have these long conversations into the middle of the night about AI safety, and I became increasingly concerned that Larry was not sufficiently worried about AI safety. If you have some radical new technology, you want to set standards that maximize the probability it will do good and minimize the likelihood it will do bad things. You can't just barrel forward and hope for the best. And at one point, he called me a speciesist. (eyes raise). There were witnesses there.
JP: Yes! You are one!
Elon: Yes. I am correctly labeled because I favor humans relative to digital intelligence. Larry just seemed more focused on achieving digital superintelligence—essentially a Digital God as soon as possible. Larry's view (chuckling), if I am not misspeaking, is that we will all ultimately upload our minds to the computer, and everyone will be robots, and there will be no need for humans. And I said that we needed to ensure that humanity thrives and grows—that’s when he called me a speciesist. I told him I guess I was pro-human and asked, 'What are you?' (chuckles)
Elon’s former BMF Larry Page, cofounder of Google.
JP: Right. That's the question! He's describing the death of humanity. It's like Mephistopheles—who represented the devil—pitching to Faust that consciousness is nothing but consciousness of pain and misery, and life is short, brutal, and pointless; therefore, it would be best for consciousness to be eliminated.
Elon: Exactly. If you are not going to be pro-human, who will? That was my final straw. We needed a counterbalance to Google and Larry Page, whom I had concluded has a misanthropic view of humankind. It was especially imminent because, at the time, Google had almost all of the AI researchers and resources. So we were worried about what would happen to humans.
JP: Yes, that's a problem when people that powerful are not concerned with humans.
Elon: Yes, and they had all the AI power. That troubled me, so that was the basis for founding OpenAI. We would create something that was the polar opposite of Google. A non-profit, open source, decentralized—not a black box. The 'open' in OpenAI actually refers to open source. I recruited a lot of key people, including Ilya Sutskever (former Chief Scientist at OpenAI); without him, OpenAI would not be where it is today. He was also one of the people at OpenAI who, I think, had the strongest moral compass. It was troubling to see Ilya leave OpenAI. He had been part of the temporary coup to exit Sam Altman, the CEO.
JP: So, why the hell did that happen?
Elon: I am not sure. I provided almost all the money to get it going—close to $50 million—with no stock or control. How do you go from there to a company that is essentially worth over 100 billion, is maximizing profit, and is no longer open source? Can it be possibly more different? It's like funding a non-profit to save the Amazon rainforest, but instead, that company becomes a lumber company, chops down the forest, and sells it for a profit.
JP: Are you shocked by all this? Are you addressing this by creating Grok?
Elon: Yeah, sure, but I am still concerned about it and have expressed those concerns over the years. I am still considering taking legal action to at least have the courts explain to me how an organization I founded for one purpose does the diametrically opposite thing for a profit. Please show me the trail of breadcrumbs that allowed that to happen legally because I am confused. Am I missing something here?
JP: Well, at least what happened should be understood, especially given what is at stake!
Elon: Yes, OpenAI is the leader in AI, and I am also worried they have ingested the woke mind virus in their training results. You see that with Google Gemini as well, to extreme degrees (both laugh). It's funny at this stage, but the more powerful AI becomes, the more it could start forcing politically correct outcomes onto society. I don't think either of us would survive under that scenario (both laugh).
Editor's Take: In 2013, the year Elon cofounded OpenAI, Google and DeepMind [a British AI research lab acquired by Google in 2014] had about three-quarters of all the AI talent in the world, billions in disposable cash, and more computers than anyone else. We were living in a unipolar world then where Google had a monopoly on AI and scaled computing, largely owned and controlled by a man who, if we believe Elon, wants to upload humanity onto presumably Google computers. 😳😳😳
Since 2020, over 5,000 AI companies have received over $350 billion in venture capital, and the AI space has become much more diversified. Several new LLM platform companies, such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity.ai, and X.ai, are gaining on Google, along with incumbents, notably Apple and Microsoft, who are also joining in on the AI market share feast.
Finally, we have never been a fan of OpenAI, given its structural history and the fact that the CEO has his hands in a lot of outside businesses that have relationships with OpenAI. We think Elon's concerns expressed above constitute another major contingent liability to the company. The Information reports that OpenAI could lose as much as $5 billion in 2024 after generating $3.5 billion to $4.5 billion in revenue, putting the ChatGPT maker at risk of running out of cash within 12 months. According to the report, OpenAI is on track to spend $7 billion on AI training alone and $1.5 billion on staffing.
Another OpenAI competitor, Anthropic, is projected to burn more than $2.7 billion in 2024 on $800 million in annualized revenue. Valued at $18 billion in a March financing, the company's burn rate suggests it is operating much less efficiently than OpenAI. The AI business ain’t cheap. It’s all in the training and high salaries.
“Within the vast cultural panorama of each nation, artists have their unique place. Obedient to their inspiration in creating works both worthwhile and beautiful, they not only enrich the cultural heritage of each nation and of all humanity, but they also render an exceptional social service in favor of the common good.
Those who perceive in themselves this kind of divine spark which is the artistic vocation — as poet, writer, sculptor, architect, musician, actor [entrepreneur] and so on —feel at the same time the obligation not to waste this talent but to develop it, in order to put it at the service of their neighbor and of humanity as a whole.”
The good Doctor Frank Lipman, MD, emphasizes the importance of sleep to our health, longevity, and disease prevention. In addition to the usual suggestions, including turning off screens, sticking to a schedule, and not eating too close to bedtime, Dr. Lipman shares with us a list of night rituals to help us separate from our day, reflect, and wind down, whether we have 5 minutes or an hour.
Listen to your favorite song
Burn incense or put your favorite essential oil in the diffuser
In your head or on paper, list three positive things from the day - even the smallest ones count
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Great issue. Multiple interesting pieces. Thanks!