Bitcoin and altcoin market analysis with a discussion of AI tools and macro economic indicators
Rob from Digital Asset News and Jerry from Costa Rica discuss the crypto market recovery, altcoin performance, macro indicators, and practical AI tools.
Summary
Rob and Jerry open by celebrating the crypto market's return above $2.9 trillion in total market cap, up roughly $1 trillion — or about 31% — in three months, with Bitcoin leading the charge. They walk through market cap gains across Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, XRP, BNB, and Tron, and discuss which altcoins are worth watching. The conversation then shifts to macro concerns, specifically the historical pattern of bond yield surges preceding major market bubbles, and whether a recession is imminent — with Jerry arguing that expanding sectors like AI, blockchain, and robotics make a systemic recession unlikely, though a "rolling recession" across specific industries is possible. The second half of the episode focuses on practical AI tools, with Jerry describing how he uses Claude to build personal agents for health tracking, language learning, and fantasy football analysis, and how his company Compute Portal offers self-hosted, privacy-preserving AI compute infrastructure. The episode closes with a live Q&A covering topics including MicroStrategy dividend products, AI-assisted sales, Bitcoin mining longevity, and building custom AI agents for real estate tasks.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Bitcoin price levels and moving averages
Rob: All right, everybody. Hello. Welcome to the Sunday live stream. We are joined as ever by Jerry from Costa Rica. Jerry, how's things today?
Jerry: Things are great. Has anybody noticed the increase in market cap lately in the old crypto industry? This kid has.
Rob: Yeah, it is nice. It is nice to be around here. And of course, like everybody who's watching this video, whether you're watching it live or you're watching it recorded, I think most of you, if not all of you, have done the same thing — which is you've gone through the bear market, you've purchased through the bear as the price goes down, you're throwing that sand in the ocean just to get to this point. And I've got to commend every single person out there because it's not easy to do these things, especially as people are going, "No, no, no, wait. There's going to be a bubble. No, no, no, wait. There's a new war on the horizon. No, no, wait. There's a Strait of Hormuz situation and we're going to lose everything as far as oil goes. There's going to be a massive crash and it's going to be awful." Out of all that, here we are. So let's get into it.
Jerry, let's start to talk about things. First of all, we're going to take a look at just where we're at right now. We're going to take a look at some of the macro effects. We're going to take a look at T-bills, treasuries, and the rates that are going up, and does this mean that a recession is inevitable. And then also, like Jerry talked about, we'll take a look at market cap and some altcoins.
So the first thing is, you know, things are a little bit different this time. If we take a look at just — I'm going to go through an example. Moving averages. When we go through this and we say, "When's a good time to buy?" — well, of course the best time to buy was years and years and years ago and then just hold all the way through. Unfortunately, some of us or all of us didn't do that. We have to take profits along the way. We get sidetracked by life and sell and so forth. But I have to tell you, if we're just taking a look at the best times to buy, it was like we talked about — below the 200-week moving average. We talked about this many a time, and we use the risk levels over on Ben's site, which I'm using right now. Links in the description if you want to sign up for it.
We can just see that below that 200-week moving average was really a good time to buy. And I don't know if Q4 is going to be like the next big dump. I know I'm like one of the few people who still thinks that Q4 could really suck. Everybody else is telling me, "No, no, Rob, you don't understand. It's going to go to 100K, then it's going to go to 150K, and then so on and so forth." But regardless of that, again, the 200-week moving average below that was a pretty good time. The lowest was $58,500, $59,000, $58K, $61K, $62K. These are not bad times. And we can see that a lot of people were waiting for the 250-week, which at today's level would have been roughly $58K, or the 300-week, or the nice 350-week which rarely happens — where you would have been buying Bitcoin at potentially $50,000. Now a lot of people were calling for $40K, and that just didn't happen. But I've got to tell you, where we are at now today — what is the date today, Jerry?
Jerry: It's September 27th.
Rob: Thank you. We are above the 150-week moving average. We are just about to cross over — if we can — potentially the 100-week, which is at $89K. I think today the price of Bitcoin is around $84,600, $85,000, somewhere around there. And of course we just had this nice little thing called the golden cross and everybody's super excited. But again, we are much farther ahead than where we were at just four years ago.
I know people would say, "Well, it's a different time. There's no coronavirus and so on and so forth." But look at where we were at before in 2022. These were great times to buy, and this is what people were talking about — $22,000, $23K, $24K. Where were we at? Yeah, $24K again. But look at these numbers. And this was September 25th. Look at that price, Jerry. $18,000. That is something to behold. But take a look at this — we were below the 250-week and we would have at some point gone below the 300-week moving average in that time frame. We're not even close to that here. So all the times that people are saying, "You just got to wait, you just got to wait" — I know dollar-cost averaging, especially with the dynamic portion of it, is something so many people say, "Well, I have to wait for this one particular thing." But I don't think you really had to. Now, something happens where we get a big huge dump in Q4 — I've got a little bit of cash on the sidelines — but I think we did as best as we could do. Jerry, what's your thoughts on this stuff?
Jerry: I agree. I think one of the really interesting elements of especially Bitcoin — not all crypto is the same. They don't all respond to scarcity elements. They don't all respond to the same macro indicators.
Rob: Yeah.
Jerry: And so we're starting to get to the point in the market where the market is maturing enough where there is differentiation between this asset or that asset. And I think that's really poignant. It's an important thing to know because maybe four years ago there was really no difference between Cosmos and Avalanche or Ethereum or whatever, because the fact that alts were all kind of rising post a Bitcoin uptick —
Rob: Price-wise.
Jerry: Yeah, you're talking from a price-wise perspective. Now, one of the things that's been really interesting lately in Bitcoin — and I think you're going to cover it more here in a minute — is the fact that the market cap accumulation for the crypto industry is now back up over three trillion.
This is a very important element to understand because it's not an exact one-to-one proxy for value, but it speaks to accumulation. If you understand how a market cap is derived, it's through the acquisition and price point of an asset in that market. So although at $84,000 most of us are not getting super excited about Bitcoin, when you look at the market cap of Bitcoin accumulating, it is a proxy for the actual asset itself being accumulated. And because Bitcoin is a fixed-supply asset, the scarcity mechanism kicks in. And at some point, if those fundamentals stay true or consistent, you are going to see a demand shock and a price acceleration. One of those "rip the face off," "melt your face off" moments — those terms that we use — those all happen when these other dynamics, these next steps in the process, start to unfold. And that has got me excited because we've been in kind of this doldrums for a while.
Rob: Yeah, it's been quite some time. And it's not easy to accumulate at $60K when it goes on forever. You're like, "This isn't exciting." I either want one of two things. I either want it to go to the moon, or I want a big crash. One of those two things I will accept, but I will not accept chopping sideways. It is the most boring thing. It's like trading forex — I'm not going to do that, I'm going to fall asleep.
Total crypto market cap and altcoin performance
So these are the things that, of course, these days are why we're excited about it, because we've seen nice price appreciation. But just as Jerry hinted, it's about market cap. We were talking about that — it was intriguing because right now we're at $2.98 trillion. Let me refresh this. Who knows? It could be up to three trillion or it could be down. Yeah.
Jerry: $2.9 trillion. We're okay.
Rob: I spoke too soon. It was at three earlier. Of course, that's usually how it goes. But this is a Sunday. Usually markets are closed. You know what's up 24/7, 365? Crypto. And people love to trade that.
But the question then was, if we're taking a look at just the price action — why don't we take a look at just the market cap itself? Did you know — I was kind of shocked by this — in the last three months, total market cap went from $2.1 trillion. As Jerry said, we were above three trillion. We added — let me do some quick math.
Jerry: 30, 31%.
Rob: 31%, something like that. That's huge. I was just going to go for one trillion because three minus two equals one. So roughly one trillion, almost — or $900 billion — was added to the market cap in three months. That is pretty amazing.
But the next question you have to ask yourself is, who are the big winners? It's not just about price appreciation because we have to take a look at tokenomics and the unlocks and things like that. But just take a look at this. Bitcoin went from $1.1 trillion and it peaked out at $1.7 trillion. So almost roughly $550 billion — half a trillion plus — in a short amount of time, three months. That's where most of it went, obviously. Bitcoin is the king still. Nothing's going to flip that anytime soon.
But what about some altcoins? I took a look at Ethereum, and of course Ethereum is still number two. The market cap was $188 billion and it peaked out at $336 billion. So I know people will say, "Well, Ethereum is not going to be chosen." I know Mr. Wonderful has talked about how Avalanche is the next big thing for him and he doesn't believe that Ethereum is going to happen. But as a reminder — who knows how much he got paid by Avalanche. Allegedly. Allegedly. Don't say anything in the comment section. He may have totally believed in it. But that's a big amount of push.
How about Tether? Now this is interesting because Tether still has money flowing in and out, and it's the only one in the ones we're going to talk about that has a negative flow. It's not much — it went from $186 billion, dropped down to $183 billion. So it lost $3 billion, but it is interesting that it stayed so static and actually lost ground moving forward.
BNB, not too bad — $73 billion knocked out at $105 billion. So you're looking at about $30 billion there. USDC took a little drop but then rallied again, so it actually as far as market cap beat out Tether. And Solana — I think probably one of the bigger ones — went from $42 billion and it's still going up to damn near $72 billion. Nearly doubled in that amount of time. So again, Bitcoin is the easiest one, probably — the king is the king — but there are gains to be had elsewhere and you just have to take a look at it.
And then lastly, before I get lambasted by the XRP army, XRP did pretty good too. They went from a market cap of $63 billion and really didn't do much for a while, then all of a sudden just crushed it from August 18th to August 22nd. Went from a market cap of $62 billion and just added about $43 billion. Congratulations, XRP holders. And then actually it's up again as well today.
So Jerry, taking a look at all those things — which one did we miss? Which one should we have added in? And which one are you more excited about?
Jerry: I don't know about excitement. I'll tell you what I try to keep in my radar — those layer-one protocols that are the underlying infrastructure for the payments world. Payments are the real-world use case for blockchain right now. It's the only industry where blockchain has got its hooks in and is gaining market share quarter over quarter over quarter. The adoption and the innovation that's happening in that particular segment of the world really speaks to market fit for blockchain. So the one you didn't show, and I would include, would be Tron.
Tron has a very strong Tether game going on right now. And even though Tether may not be the darling stablecoin like USDC, it's still a very viable payment platform.
Rob: That is true. It's very viable moving forward. But then just as you were talking about that, I did a quick look-up over on CoinGecko. They have their own subcategory called payment solutions.
Jerry: Oh, there you go.
Rob: And of course as you're looking at these, these are kind of down in the market cap area. And number one is Dash. I didn't —
Jerry: You forgot about good old Dash.
Rob: Of course I did. Actually, good old proof-of-work Dash.
Jerry: I used to make fun of it and call it a Dash assault because if you really want to gamble, a Dash assault is going to kill you. But Dash — I stand corrected. It's 30 days, 72% up. So I think it was dropped out of the top 100.
Rob: Oh my god. Remember AMP?
Jerry: I do.
Rob: 43%. I remember Kea being like the fastest thing out there, everybody so excited about it. It's been a quite a lag, up at 17%. And again, these are market caps of $500 million, $200 million, $300 million, $400 million. This gets really super risky and the trading margins — the volume — gets paper thin. So if you want to get into this stuff, it's a gamble for sure. And I think a lot of these will probably fall off as far as whether they're actually worthwhile. Can they actually do something? They can do it. But as far as adoption, it's an uphill battle in that section. But good luck to everybody on that one.
But yeah, Tron — let's see. Yeah, there it is. Tron's been very stable. It went from $29 billion on June 30th and it topped out at $33 billion. So pretty much sideways. It was actually one of the ones that helped me throughout the bear market because it's been doing so well. So I will say that altcoins can definitely outperform — you just have to find the right ones.
Macro indicators: bond yields, bubbles, and recession risk
And this will lead me to this one, because as we get into it, I think people get a little bit more cautious. Like, "Okay, well, this is kind of the time things should start going down if we're looking at the four-year cycles. But do I really want to invest, or do I want to wait for the big huge drop-off that is inevitably coming?" Because everybody's talking about a bubble, a bubble, a bubble. And they could be right. But I've been hearing about a bubble for — Jerry, how long have you been hearing about a bubble for AI?
Jerry: Well, I've been around to see the dot-com boom. I've been around to see the telecom boom. I've been around to see the initial Bitcoin surge — when I came in at the end of 2017. This AI sector is no different than the real estate that happened in 2008. We as people tend to place a tremendous amount of value on speculation and less sustained value on utility. And I think it's normal in every new market for there to be the exuberance of what can be —
Rob: What can be. Yeah.
Jerry: — while we go through price discovery of what really is.
Rob: That's it.
Jerry: We're in that sector with AI. For instance, I would never put a dollar into OpenAI or Anthropic. I'll subscribe and use their product for $20 a month, but I would never invest in them as companies because they don't produce value. They don't own the computers — they have to rent those. So if I was going to buy a company in that stack, it would be the server farm that rents the server to Claude or rents the server to OpenAI. You know what I'm saying? And so we're in this thing with AI where there is a tremendous amount of money chasing promise. And we all know that we tend to overpromise and underdeliver in any of these types of things. So there will be a reckoning. Just like in the dot-com boom, there will be pets.com that gets shaken out, and the Amazons of the world will rise to the top. But those have not been decided yet. The winners have not been decided. So stay tuned as this extremely exuberant speculative market shakes out into real-world utility and therefore real value based off of cash flows and revenues and expected returns and things of that nature.
Rob: That is just it. And as we go through this whole process, you're going to start to see stuff like this. This is from Coin Bureau. Just to piggyback on what Jerry talked about — here is the big shakeout. And the big shakeout, I think, is going to — at some point we have to get a recession. I just don't know when it's going to be. You just can't keep going up and to the right forever. At some point you have to get pulled back. The question is, does that recession happen next year, six months from now, three years from now? How long is it going to take?
And this was a nice segue into this by Coin Bureau. They state that three of history's biggest stock market bubbles all ended the same way. Today the 10 biggest AI stocks make up 41% of the US stock market —
Jerry: From a market cap perspective.
Rob: Right, market cap — not just buying, but market cap per se. Each of those past bubbles ended with a surge in bond yields, and that has been the big topic for everybody, especially in macroeconomics. It's been a big talking point — actually on a live stream we talked about it. Ben calls them the bond vigilantes. They pretty much just say, "No, we're not going to buy anything. We're going to sell off and we're going to wait for you to raise the rates, the yields, because we don't think it is enough for us to gamble on treasuries." And this is what's happening.
Each of the past bubbles was ended by a surge in bond yields. They took a look at three particular examples. The Nifty 50 — the top 50 companies in the US back in the early 70s — US yields jumped two percentage points. Japan in 1989, Japanese yields jumped 2.3 points. That's a lot. And then the MSCI ACWI, which essentially was investing into markets that were already established in developed and undeveloped countries. And then of course the big one, which Jerry alluded to — in 2000, US yields jumped 2.6 points. The end came once yields had risen by two points or more.
10-year yields are already up 1.27 points since February. So it's another indicator of an upcoming recession and the pop of a bubble. But I want to focus in on this. The end came once yields had risen by two points or more. I want to show you something. These are the 10-year Treasury yields. In these little grayed-out sections, this is a recession. You had a recession in 2008–2009. You had one during the coronavirus. You had the dot-com bubble in 2000–2001. You had one in the 90s. Then you had the big one over here in the Volcker era, 1979–1981.
And what they said is when those 10-year Treasury yields go up by two points, that's the endgame — not all the time, and I think we're in a little different situation. But take a look at this. In 1993, Treasury yields were 5.37%. And then in one year it went up from 5.37% to 8%. There you go — there's your two points. Did everything collapse? No, it didn't. And we actually went down again, then up, then down again.
Jerry: It did absolutely affect certain markets.
Rob: Of course, it definitely did.
Jerry: I was a loan officer back in those days and I can distinctly remember what it did to mortgage rates.
Rob: I'm sure it shot them through the roof.
Jerry: It impacted the market of buyers, that's for sure.
Rob: That is for sure. And then once the housing market slows down, what happens to the rest of everything? It always kind of goes in tandem. So we see it here, and then I think we see it over 2003 — 3.34% up to 5% — and we had to wait just another couple of years or a year and a half, then we got a recession. So is a recession coming? I think a recession is coming. It has to at some point, just like Jerry talked about. But the question is when is it going to happen? I just don't know if it's six months away or two years or three years.
Jerry: I have a different take on that. And the take that I have is based off of this model — that a recession is a systemic retraction. And I don't see a systemic retraction happening at all. There are too many appreciative sectors — AI, blockchain, robotics. Too many new sectors where value is accruing and creating more value. Therefore, there will be retractions in — for instance, are there companies that I think will retract and have recessionary-type elements? Like Ford? Absolutely. Buick? Absolutely. There are a bunch of sectors of our economy that I think will have recessionary-type macro factors to them. But there will be others that are so expansive and so much capital is being deployed and so much value will be created that it will be impossible to have a systemic recession. And so the key is to be in that updraft, not in that stagnant downdraft.
Rob: Makes sense. No, it makes sense.
Jerry: And I could be wrong.
Rob: No, no, Jerry — we're 100% right on this channel every single time. But you know what, I think there's a term I've heard before. They call it a rolling recession. So you have this sector that slumps off massively, but then there's another part of it that actually does pretty well and it kind of rolls to the next one. So you have something that's in development and fabrication and construction — things are working pretty well. Then healthcare gets hit and that kind of goes down the line, because there is a supply and demand dynamic and things are getting hurt. So I can see what you said — something that's not working out in one sector and one that is just booming and going crazy in another.
AI, government technology, and the America.gov initiative
And like when you talked about — I mean, you're big into AI and your company Compute Portal — I think that AI is going to do some pretty big things. And take a look at this one. This one's interesting. Before everybody starts booing because I bring up the Trump administration — I just found this right before we started and I thought it was something worth talking about. The Trump administration is set to launch America.gov, an AI-powered tool designed to be a one-stop shop for Americans navigating the federal government, replacing what officials describe as a maze of scattered agency websites.
I would have tuned out because I'm like, "Oh, it's the government trying to get into AI, it's going to suck." But I thought it was a pretty big thing in terms of who's backing this and who's a part of this initiative. This is going to be rolled out on Tuesday, featuring Elon Musk, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp, Mark Rubio, Dr. Oz, and will also include panels on AI, energy, health, space, and agriculture. So they are really making that push into the next sector.
The only downfall is the tool was built by the National Design Studio led by Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia. If you ever use Airbnb like I do, it's an awfully painful app to use if you're a host. If you're looking for a house, super simple, but as a host they treat us like third-class citizens. But anyhow — Jerry, what's your thoughts on this as far as America getting its own AI-powered website for government?
Jerry: My overall view of AI is that it's going to penetrate every industry and every element of life. To what form, what degree, what dominance it does will be dependent on the value that it provides for that thing. I think you are going to hopefully — hopefully — AI as an industry will be, like Elon says, truth-seeking. And as long as that's the case, as long as AI is always pointing us to truth and reality, I think it's going to be incredible. But again, we're at this point where those are more questions than answers. We don't have the answers yet. So will this thing that they're going to do truly benefit Americans and the government? In theory, it should. Will it? I don't know.
Rob: I don't know either. I think the next couple of years are going to shake out a lot of those questions and we'll have a lot more very concrete answers. And by that time there'll probably be three or four distinctly decided winners in that industry. If I had to bet today what those will be, I'm thinking SpaceX with xAI will be one of those. And I think the next AI company that masters engineering and is able to bring artificial engineering intelligence to the marketplace is going to take a huge market share.
So this is going to get really interesting over the next couple of years. And the rate of change — Rob, we didn't know ChatGPT from our aunt Elsa two or three years ago. None of us were talking about personal AI assistants on any kind of commercial level or any kind of level where we actually had actual experience with it. It was more science fiction than it was science fact. And today, all of us have access to some form of this intelligence that's adding value to our lives. Whether we're writing reports at school or doing PowerPoint presentations for our YouTube channel or creating TikTok videos or whatever — everybody's using these tools. And it's only getting exponentially more and more valuable because more and more adoption and more and more industries are taking place, and people are using it better. It's like using the first computer you ever got. Remember your first computer?
Rob: The thing was a tank. It literally weighed like 80 pounds. It was a monster.
Jerry: Yeah. I remember one of the first ones I had was Microsoft Windows, one of the very first ones. And it had on there — it was like a game. It was like a space pinball game. I used to play it all the time. I'm like, "This is the peak of technology. This is so awesome." And now of course we use our computers for everything.
Jerry's personal AI use and Compute Portal
Hey, so everybody — that'll conclude that part of the show for what's going on in crypto and the news. But I want to get in with Jerry because he was talking about AI. When we talked about the government AI website that's coming out, Jerry, you're in Compute Portal. What are you using AI for in your everyday life? Like what have you used it to actually make things easier, faster, and to do your heavy lifting?
Jerry: My preferred frontier model is Claude. And I use Claude Code to build agents to do things for me. Not differently than the way — remember when you went out and got your Mac Mini and did the whole open Claude thing?
Rob: Yeah. It was awesome.
Jerry: That was like your dive into creating agents to perform functions. So I have agents that perform functions for me as an executive with Compute Portal. But then I also have projects in my Claude that are personal. Like I have a health journey agent that I feed my ketone levels, my blood glucose levels, my blood pressure levels. Every 90 days I go get a blood panel done and I feed the results of the blood panel into my agent. It has a very large context window and it remembers everything.
I just recently built an agent where I'm reading Spanish, speaking it into the microphone. The agent is listening for my pronunciation and giving me insights to improve my Spanish. So I'm using AI in my personal life, my professional life — my fantasy life. I built an agent just to help me analyze fantasy football players for the draft I had two weeks ago.
And I'm using AI in so many different ways that it's becoming a ubiquitous element of my life. It's very subtle, piece by piece by piece. And I can't code — I am a Luddite, you know what I mean? And so if I'm doing these things and getting these benefits, then I can only imagine what somebody with drive, ambition, discipline, and a little bit of intelligence is actually doing with these tools. It's probably remarkable.
Rob: Yeah, it's pretty amazing. I take a look at SaaS — software as a service — and go, "How long is that going to be around?" Because we can build pretty much everything these days.
Jerry: I think it's morphing. The old model of somebody with an idea for software gets 10 engineers, gets a million dollars, and 16 months later releases a product — that's gone. Somebody with an idea and a $200 subscription to an LLM like ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexity or whatever can sit down and vibe-code their idea into a coded reality, back-test it with agents, and then host it in a cloud format somewhere — whether it be computportal.io or Amazon or whoever — and immediately go to market within a week or two. That whole SaaS thing, although not gone, has morphed and changed.
Rob: Oh, it's huge. The thing that I worry about — and I remember seeing somebody, I think it was four or five months ago, they said the LLM that everybody's going to be talking about is going to be the one that's self-hosted. And they said, "You don't realize what you're giving away when you're talking to AI — all your ideas, all your company's ideas. You don't own that anymore. That goes to them." So when you just said that, it makes me worried about the ideas that I have. What stops Anthropic? What stops OpenAI?
Jerry: Nothing. If you're concerned about data sovereignty, then you want to adopt — do you see that black device behind me? That's hosting a 120-billion-parameter open-source model. GPTO OS 120B. And so the model sits there on my computer. The harness — which is my user interface with that model — Compute Portal built. Other people will be building it using Claude Code or ChatGPT code or whatever. That is what most likely will be in everybody's home in five or six years. They'll own a piece of hardware, they'll have their open-source model on it, they'll have a uniquely built-for-them harness that harnesses that open model, and all the apps and stuff that they want to use on it they'll get from app stores like computportal.io or what have you.
Rob: Do you think the open models will take over the closed ones — the Anthropics, the OpenAIs?
Jerry: I think there is room for both. When you think about it, there's using AI and there's training AI. That is currently the two differentiators. I can take a model and use it, or I can feed data into one to have it become more intelligent. When we get to the point — and we're not that far away from recursive self-improvement — that open-source model on my computer will get smarter with my data. And we'll have ways and means to interact with the world outside of itself to gather other data — in other words, going into the open web and getting data and bringing it back. That's the big key. But we're not at the point where everybody can have recursive self-improvement. We're not there yet. But we're not that far either. In the big scope of things, it's not that far down the road.
Tesla robo-taxis, freight, and infrastructure investment
Rob: Hey, and then there's one more thing to bring this all together. You talked about infrastructure and we're talking about AI kind of going in a sideways action. But I was taking a look at — you know, these robo-taxis are coming out with Tesla and it's a big thing. So I immediately think, I need to buy some of those so I can have some various cash flow coming in. And I took a look — there's a site over on tesla.com for the robo-taxi. You can fill out a form for interest. And one of the things I found interesting was when you filled it out, it asked, "Do you want to get a Cybercab purchase? Do you want to buy one of those cars? Or do you want to get into the picks and shovels — mobility hubs and infrastructure?" And I was like, that's not a bad idea. Because if the new paradigm is going to be these types of cars, electrical services to actually make them run — not gas stations — wouldn't that be the big thing? Picks and shovels instead of going, "I need a Cybercab."
Jerry: You could service a hundred Cybercab companies with one infrastructure hub.
Rob: That's it. Now, to add a little caveat to this — take it to the next level. Yes, there'll be a lot of people buying robo-taxis in the hopes of commercializing them, monetizing them. Do you hear anybody talking about the same thing for freight?
Jerry: Freight — like —
Rob: Yeah. How about the Tesla truck? And I don't mean the Cybertruck. I mean the semi.
Jerry: Yeah, I've seen it. I actually sent it to my brother who was a truck driver. I'm like, "Hey, it's time to retire." And he said, "No, no."
Rob: Or do more with less.
Jerry: Yeah, exactly. The one driver in that truck — the very same driver in that truck — can do 30 to 40% more because of things like autonomous driving.
Rob: And then the profitability. You can do more and you can be more profitable because the cost is like 35 cents a mile versus a dollar a mile for diesel. That to me — because freight isn't going away.
Jerry: Freight is not going away.
Rob: Freight is not going away. Well, that was a nice little segue out of crypto as we get into AI. But everybody, let's do this. If you've got questions for Jerry right now or myself, go ahead and ask them and we'll do a little Q&A.
Live Q&A
Jerry: Can I answer AI Rising?
Rob: What did Jerry say — that you can use AI open source but still private?
Jerry: When you host an open-source model on a computer in your home, yes, it's an open-source model, but the data that you interact with it is not going out into the world. It's very much private. Think of it like this — instead of using AI on the internet, which is open to everybody, you have it on an internet that is closed only to you. I hope that answers your question, AI Rising.
Rob: There's a bunch of different open AI models. I think you can get a bunch of them at Hugging Face, and there's a couple of them there actually.
Jerry: There are several very good open-source models. GPTO OS 120B is wonderful — easy to run. Kimi 2.0 I believe is absolutely free and easy, although you have to pay for the higher tiers like 2.5 or 3.0. Hugging Face has a bunch of those. It's an open-source repository for those kinds of things. And if anybody needs help with that stuff, reach out to me. That's one of the things Compute Portal does — we consult and help people in all elements of their AI compute journey.
Rob: Two things, Jerry. This is your website, right?
Jerry: Yes. computportal.io. We service both humans and AI agents.
Rob: Also, everybody, if you're looking for that link, there's a link in the description. It's just called computportal.io. So let me see — I'm a human. Get started. That was a good idea. Choose your compute and then just go through the steps.
Jerry: Yeah, you just find what kind of compute you need and you'll see menus of stuff with pricings and comparisons to other companies like AWS and Microsoft, et cetera.
Rob: Can you get — and you can make this essentially a walled-off system instead of reporting everything to OpenAI?
Jerry: Yes, you can host your own AI model on a device in your home and only you have access to the data that you generate. It's called data sovereignty.
Rob: Darth Mike says, "You can run your own AI models on a Raspberry Pi."
Jerry: I'm sure there are some very lightweight models that can run on a Raspberry Pi, but again, what do you want to do with it? What is the purpose and function of you having a model? Is it to monitor your blood pressure? Well, you could probably do a simple little AI on your Raspberry Pi. But if it's to run a complex medical team, then most likely not.
Rob: Gotcha. How about this one — what are you guys buying? What are you selling?
Jerry: I'm stacking cash right now. I'm not buying anything. I've been in a cash accumulation mode for a while because I believe there are going to be some really good buys coming up.
Rob: That sounds good. I am currently buying every Monday on the Cash App — Bitcoin — and then I'm also buying Solana and a little Ondo, a little Cantos, and some — I was buying some Tron, but I laid off it because it's just been kind of going flat. But I probably should be buying now. This is probably the time to actually buy. But I'm just taking a look at the risk levels — they're not really that retracted. So I'm still doing okay.
I think in the next two years — like, imagine going back to 2022. Remember those prices in like November? All I remember is like — that was like —
Jerry: I do remember. It was very painful.
Rob: Right. And then of course we go all the way up. So I think right now, like these price levels — people would say, "Oh, they've already run. Why are you showing cryptos or digital assets such as Solana which is already up 50%?" I'm like, well, back in 2022 when Solana was like $9 or $10 and then it went to $15, people were like, "Well, that's it." That's not how it works. Not every single one will really win, but I think the ones that Jerry was alluding to as far as winners — I think they'll do pretty well.
Rob: Dale Myers 6184 says, "Jerry, I want to build something to scrub tax deeds and tax liens."
Jerry: Dale, get yourself a Claude subscription — maybe $200 a month. Try it out for a couple of months and build a badass agent that lives on your computer that performs those tasks for you. The skill you will have to pick up, Dale, and get good at is what we call prompting. You will have to learn how to prompt your app-making tool called Claude Code to create the kind of app for you that seamlessly does the things that you would normally have to spend your time and energy doing. And if that doesn't work and you want help — Compute Portal, jerry@computportal.io — we're here to serve and help to bring all of you into the AI future.
Rob: That's the way to do it. And you know, people say, "Well, what prompt should I use?" The prompt I use a lot — let me show you. So like I'll do stuff like this. When Jerry was talking about skills and Claude Code, he's talking about this stuff, which is where you just tell it, "Hey, I want to do this one thing." Let's try like this — "Claude, I want to create something where I can scrub for tax liens on various county websites. How do I set that up?" And then what I'll say is I'll put in "95" — and that just elongates the ask. I say, "Ask questions until you're 95% sure of what I want, and give me pushback if you have better ideas." And then it'll just go for it. It'll kind of tell you, "Well, you've got to do this and this and this."
While Claude is thinking about that, I will show you that for me the best things that I do with Claude is make it do all the website heavy lifting. Like you can create your own website — all you really need is hosting, which can be kind of expensive, but you can run that cheap at computportal.io.
Jerry: Yeah, there you go. We're about 30 to 35% lower than AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and the big hyperscalers.
Rob: 35% less. Definitely got to go for that. So yeah, not too bad. And then — I like about this is Claude will say, "What's the end goal? Acquire properties, monitor nearby content, business idea?" What's a good one, Jerry?
Jerry: Acquire properties.
Rob: Well, again, if you know what you want, that's the best thing — just tell it what you want.
Jerry: Just tell it what you want. And it's not like prompt once, get a completed beautiful response, everything's done exactly perfect. No, there's a back and forth. So ask for what you want, review what it gives you, say, "Please revise — fix this, change that, tweak this" — then go test it, back-test it. It's a process. But think of it like this — think of it like you're working with a development team of coders. No differently than if you were to take $100,000 and say, "I'm going to go to a freelance group of developers and build this app." You're working with them, they do some coding, they give you a result, you check it out. "Hey, that's not exactly the way I envisioned it. I want you to change it." You just do exactly that thing with your Claude Code or your ChatGPT code or Codex or Gemini Code or whatever.
Rob: Who is this Claude dude?
Jerry: He's a Frenchman. He makes the best croissants.
Rob: Here's one from PJ. "Hey, Rob and Jerry, what do you think of MicroStrategy as an alternative to altcoins and memecoins to outperform Bitcoin?"
Jerry: I can tell you as somebody in my demographic — I turned 60 last year — I'm getting closer to the stage of my life where I would like solid income. A consistent income. And MicroStrategy are building some really good dividend products. Some of these preferred share products are paying a much better than bond rate return, in an asset underlying Bitcoin that I believe in. Do you really believe in the US government making good on the debt they have? I don't know. I have more faith in Bitcoin holding value than the promise of the United States government, and the return is better. So I can get 11% from MicroStrategy. I can't get 11% from the US government.
Rob: How about this one, Jerry? "I'm a phone sales guy in finance. Do you think an AI agent can store my conversations and actually learn and implement my human phone skills?"
Jerry: 100%. Now, can it do it over an open phone line right this minute? I don't know. Can it do it over a WhatsApp channel? I'm fairly certain the answer today is yes.
Rob: Yeah, we did —
Jerry: How do you conduct your sales?
Rob: Yeah.
Jerry: Do you do Zoom calls with people? Zoom calls — 100% you can capture every pixel, every word, every letter, everything. So it depends on your means of communication. But S. Walker, I believe that is doable in some shape or form today. And will it get better in the future? Absolutely.
Rob: Right. And Bogdan — "Do you think miners will migrate from Bitcoin to Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash once there's no incentive to mine Bitcoin or run nodes?"
Jerry: Boy, that is so far away. The last Bitcoin will be mined many, many years into the future. Is it 2050 or 2150? I always forget.
Rob: I don't believe I'll be alive, so I know it's not within my lifetime. That's a really interesting question and I wonder why it's being asked. Unless this person is 18 or 16 or 15 years old, most likely they won't be here either. So what's the point of having an answer to a question that's beyond your life?
Jerry: It's a good question because people are worried — "If there's no miners around, no node operators, what secures the blockchain?" They're very concerned about that.
Rob: We talked about that. There's a video we did a couple of days ago — it's from the Blockrunner podcast — and we took a look at just how painful it's going to be to actually secure the Bitcoin network. The idea was, "Well, maybe we could make Bitcoin infinite — forget the 21 million." I said, "That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard of in my life." But that's not what these guys said. They were saying, "No, what we could do is we could actually charge a subsidy — a second subsidy — and use that to secure the network." It was an interesting thing about how they're doing it. Just look for "Bitcoin security problem" and you'll find it on the channel. That was the guys from the Blockrunner podcast.
The thing is with Bitcoin — let's just say at this point, in like 10 years, it's a million dollars per Bitcoin. I'm pretty sure the community that owns that Bitcoin is going to some way, shape, or form find a way to secure that network, because they're not going to lose all those funds. I think if it's a problem that was created by man, it can be solved by man. That's about it.