Hedge Fund Manager Turned AI Founder Emad Mosaque: "Digital Assets Are The Future!"

Give me the hedge fund manager look at how do we win in this moment. >> Actually, you know, just you saying that last thing I had that thought. You said, "What's changed since 2008?" And I thought, "OnlyFans." You know, like how much of America is signed up or actually on OnlyFans. It's crazy statistics, right? >> Dude, it's wild. >> It's wild. >> women 18 to 24, something like 10% of them are OnlyFans models. That is insane. >> It's insane. But, um again, I think the oldest profession in the book, human connection, these kind of things. >> That is the nicest way to say sex I've ever heard in my life. >> Oh, you know. >> Thank you. >> I'm a I'm a gentleman. What can I say? The If we take a step back, what's the inevitability here? Is the government going to abandon all these middle-class people and voters? Actually, probably >> Definitely not the voters. >> Yeah, especially in the blue states, actually. Blue states will probably be impacted more than red states. Various reasons. If you look at the demographics. They're not going to, are they? So, what you have is you just need to do your classical analysis of what does that person do when they lose their job? And they've still got dollars, they've still got savings. People will be looking for retraining, they'll be looking for meaning. Religion is going to go crazy and boom. You know? These kind of things are things of almost inevitabilities because they'll still have purchasing power to a degree. On the other side, you have like two economies, right? You have your AI economy and your human economy. The AI is providing increasingly customized services and getting a lot of the cognitive surplus, etc. But, a lot of things you can't substitute for a human for at least another 10 years. And the reason for that is just we can't build enough robots, honestly. Like, I think robots in a few years will be able to do just about everything a human can do, apart from the very soft skills, although the Japanese are going very aggressively on that. But you just can't build enough of them. That's the issue. They're only thing holding it back because if you look at what Elon Musk says about Optimus, and you work out the math, an Optimus robot will be a buck 50 an hour. Jesus. You work out the math, it's $20,000. You have a depreciation schedule. And again, you look at Unitree and other ones, like they have fine finger manipulation now. They can make recipes. They can do all this. They'll have skin suits, etc. But again, human connection, retraining, attention is the thing that doesn't become scarce. This is the really interesting thing. Do you think video games are going to go down or up over the next few years? They're going to go up. Because again, there's only a finite amount of human attention, and as people get more free time, they will want to absorb that attention even more. So, the new media space is going to go crazy. Digital assets, I think the US has gone too far on legalizing them now in some ways when I look at the legislation that's coming out. >> Mhm. >> Like I said, AI would be the biggest bubble ever. The digital asset bubble's going to exceed that by far. You'll be able to buy any cryptocurrency ICO from your smartphone using Apple Pay on Stripe next year. So, what are they going to do? There will be some really interesting classical stuff, and I'll find coin that we're building is the better Bitcoin that helps kill cancer going to be probably at the top, he says. But there will be so many of these crazy Dogecoin, Fuckcoin type things, celebrity coins that never took off, NFTs, because they're scarce forms of capital, and again, people have a certain amount of attention, and they'll be looking for the casino. Like you look at Cal She and Polymarket, they've legalized those now. What are those? They're betting. >> Yeah. Straight gambling. So is the stock market, in my opinion, but >> The stock market yeah, but you know, at least they had the excuse whereas casino has straight betting. >> It is gambling with a better cover story, yes. >> But a year ago, that was completely illegal, and now it's legal. So I think if you look at it, there's the soft human aspect, there's the repurposing of all these people, and their attention is the key thing. How can you capture people's attention that they'll pay for cuz there'll be a lot more of it? Cuz they won't have jobs and other things. Kind of coming forward. And so we're going to see some booms like we've never seen before, and I think media is going to be ultra interesting in that aspect. Um plus, like I said, I I was really shocked by the US government on digital assets. Like I know they want to get money moving, but I can't see how next year the digital asset boom will completely outstrip everything. Actually, it's interesting to see this. If you look uh OpenAI and Tropic this year probably do $20 of revenue. The entire listed software sector in the US will do $40 billion in incremental revenue. >> Wow. >> Crypto has done $150 billion in net inflows. >> Jesus. >> And next year is that going to go down or up? What's going to go? >> Mhm. >> Absolutely ballistic. >> Okay, but so how are you treating that as an investor? By the way, do you still actively invest at least for yourself? >> No, I've gone all in on my new thing. So I mean, like we've got a Bitcoin competitor coming out, Foundation Coin, or complement, shall we say? It's 99% the same code, but every coin sale goes to supercomputers for cancer, education, etc., and giving people free AI. And then we're going to put computers in every country, computers for all the sectors, and you can direct the computer the network to organizing our knowledge so benefit. >> Mhm. >> We think that will do well because crypto is a $4 trillion industry with nothing blue chip in it. Like Bitcoin is blue chip cuz it's lasted a long time. Ethereum cuz it's a network. But what's the alternative to Bitcoin if you want a monetary asset? And we thought, what if you create a monetary asset where every coin sale goes to helping people? That builds trust. You use the free AI that builds trust. You organize knowledge and it helps people with cancer or something. >> there an interface where I'm saying I want this to go to that compute? I want this one allocated to cancer, this one allocated to autism. Can I allocate to anything I want or is there it's only from your six in the drop-down menu? Like how does that work? >> It'll be anything that can be benefited by compute. So we start with all the healthcare things and then we're going to expand it out. And you'll have a free version of chat GPT as your AI assistant to organize that. And you'll be able to buy it with your Apple Pay or whatever. And again, it's 99% the same code as Bitcoin but like a million times faster. So things like that, I think we'll do, he says, very well. That's why I've gone all in on that versus trading the market, etc. But in general, I think if you think about attention, actually, digital assets have to be the biggest thing. If you think about so many forms of capital being completely flooded out, like again, your taxi medallions, your factories, even other things being replaced by this, your workplaces, offices, digital assets will come to the fore. It's just there's going to be such a deluge of them that you have to be intelligent about that. Because what's more fun, watching Netflix or trading crypto? Probably trading crypto for a lot of people. >> For a certain personality type, yeah. >> Hey, NFTs NFTs might make a comeback. You never know. >> Well, the interesting thing, like if people understood the underlying technology, NFTs haven't gone anywhere. They're just not part of the gambling mechanism right now, which honestly, I think is better, but uh nonetheless, it does the the whole crypto ecosystem in this economic moment is bound to attract gamblers. And I think that we're going to see a lot a lot of lot of that. First of all, people just like to gamble, the dopamine rush of it all. But, um they also, in a time where nobody can afford a house, you're like, "Well, if I am smarter than the next guy, and I can out-bet them on when to get out, uh then I really can." And so, yeah, you're going to see a lot of that, which is the get-rich-quick impulse. This all started from me asking you through the lens of a hedge fund manager, where should we where should people be allocating their capital? Uh digital assets is the thing that you have the most conviction in. Obviously, you're not backing anything, you're not giving anybody specific advice, but I do want to drill in more. Um So, attention is part of what makes that interesting. Um With the stock market, the nice thing is, at least until, call it 2008, you can really understand what stocks to move on based on fundamentals. I think that's largely gone out the window as it's become more and more of a gambling mechanism. Uh but, what do if somebody were surveilling the digital asset landscape, is there a type of fundamental that you look for? >> So, you said the fundamentals are out the window for the stock markets cuz it's so much of things are narrative-driven that it's crazy now, right? >> Mhm. >> And again, what's your marginal narrative for various companies against each other, various things? Like, in the digital asset space, you have something like hyperliquid, which basically is doing almost direct buybacks of its um shares or pump fund or something like that, of its tokens with cash being valued less than things that have absolutely no cash and no fundamentals whatsoever. Like, Dogecoin is still worth $20 billion. You know, something like that. Why is this the case? Everything's about marginal narrative and so what you're looking at is as the world evolves in the next few years, what's going to capture the marginal narrative? You see Elon setting this up with Tesla or X or whatever by saying they're going to be AI companies and robotics companies. Because that's the next narrative and Elon is a master narration, right? Like Oracle just got to 900 billion dollars yesterday. I think it was up 46%. Right? Why? Because suddenly it's an AI company versus a legal company with a database attached, right? Because they kept suing all the people. Like people are looking for the narratives being in the stock market or crypto markets. You have to think what does it look like and then what are the narratives that are going to incrementally improve and attract more and more people? Because it's dangerous now to deploy your capital. Are you going to give your capital to bonds in the government or are you going to start deploying it everywhere else? What does growth look like? Growth is probably going to come down. Rates are going to come down. But what's going to happen then? So, I think that what I look for primarily is marginal narrative creation. And then understanding where the capital flows go. So, when I created foundation coin, you know, I was like, I'd like to have a Bitcoin but backed by GPUs where the GPUs are doing good. I want as much of that new compute capacity going towards helping organize cancer knowledge in the world, helping give that knowledge to people because that's a good thing. 100% of your purchases go towards that. That's a good thing. That's something you can tell your grandma about. And we don't have a blue chip like that in the digital asset sector. So, that's how I kind of looked at it but at the same time you see areas where communities build around certain things, right? And that's what crypto has done classically well but it's also why you have rapid Tesla owners, right? Or you have people that love Palantir and other things and they suddenly go from 10 times earnings or 20 times earnings to 200 times earnings. >> Wow. Yeah. I mean, Palantir I think is like 200 times earnings now or something like that. $400 as a company. >> Geez. >> Cuz people like that's the structural growth. So, you look at your inevitability, you look at the narrative that will get you there, and you look at what steps these entities are taking against that structural growth. And that's kind of come in instead of profits and these other things. And that's the nature of how companies go. They go from their assets to a story about future earnings to a story about market capture with structural elements. And so, here on your podcast, you've given your audience a bunch of stories of the future. Any company that does like defense technology with AI is going to do well now. Full stop. Why? Because of the increasing unrest. Surveillance companies will do well. Companies that do attention better or attention capture than others will do well. You know, digital assets, you can Honestly, I just buy an index of these things cuz indexes are usually good things. But you know, all the endowments of the world and others are just going to buy craploads of digital assets. That's why you have these digital asset treasury companies raising billions of dollars. Completely crazy. Because people want exposure. >> What do you think about Michael Saylor's all-in strategy on Bitcoin? >> I mean, it came at just exactly the right time. And it's kind of similar to classical It's it's it's a leverage play on crypto assets at exactly the right time. So, if Bitcoin went down 50%, then he'd be in a bit of trouble, right? Because then the market demand for him selling his shares to buy more Bitcoin would evaporate. But right now, he's going to do well. Why? Because is there going to be less money in digital assets next year than this year? >> Mhm. >> No. Is there anything decent apart from Bitcoin? Get a bit of Ethereum, bit of Solana, but there's nothing that institutions will buy. Can institutions buy Bitcoin directly? Probably in a year or two it'll be available on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange as a commodity. Right now they can't. So, what do they do? They buy MicroStrategy. >> Mhm. >> So, again, you're talking about a trade versus a company. For a trade, always look where the puck's going to go and where the capital's going to flow.