Title: Fly on the Wall with Shrub & Cloudbear — Pacification, Claudification and MUM (Markets Under Manipulation) Show: Paulo Macro (Substack) — "Fly on the Wall" conversation series Author: Paulo aka "Cloudbear" (host publication) with Le Shrub (guest / co-host) Date: 2026-08-10 URL: https://paulomacro.substack.com/p/fly-on-the-wall-with-shrub-and-cloudbear-45b Length: written conversation post (paid) — no video, no timestamps Note: Written conversation post (PAID) — text captured via Stephen's logged-in subscriber session for personal study; no (mm:ss) cues exist. TWO SPEAKERS: Le Shrub and Paulo Macro ("Cloudbear"). The source capture has no speaker labels — the LE SHRUB: / PAULO: labels below are INFERRED from content (Le Shrub authored the "MUM / pacification / claudification" piece being walked through; Paulo brings the oil-vigilante, new-issue/credit and NVIDIA-whirlpool material). A few short back-channel interjections are ambiguous and may sit under the wrong label. Body text is otherwise VERBATIM — auto-transcription garbles are deliberately NOT corrected here (they are corrected on the analysis page): Besant/Besson = Bessent; "Ashton Brenner" = Leopold Aschenbrenner; "Kevin Mir" = Kevin Muir; "claudies" = Claude (Anthropic); "Takaiichi" = Takaichi; "Tamagotchi" (RRP passage) = Yellen by context; "yen cuts" = yen puts; "Hynex" = SK Hynix; "Masayoshi" = Masayoshi Son; "gripped" = grift; "clodification/cloudification/codification" = claudification (their coinage); "passivation" = pacification (their coinage). ================================================================ LE SHRUB: It's been a while, I have to go on. PAULO: It has, man. We haven't done one of these since like early May. LE SHRUB: Look, we haven't done one for ages, but I just felt, you know, after this weekend, when I introduced a new character in the Shrubverse called Mum, I just had to have a fly with you because I want to talk about all these regime shifts. It's just time. PAULO: It's time. LE SHRUB: So let's just, I'm just going to go quickly, give a quick overview of my latest piece and then we can just follow up for there if you don't mind. PAULO: Yes, please. LE SHRUB: So anyway, so we have this, so two years ago we were talking about the golden age of gripped, right? And if you remember, we met with all our friends like at the time and, you know, a few of them were like, oh man, that's just an exaggeration. It can't be, can't get that bad. And then in our Later meetings, everyone was like, dude, that golden age of grift, we thought you were exaggerating, but actually, we underestimated it big time. We think you were too conservative. Things just went way worse. And then the peak was Bloomberg just had a cover on the golden age of grift, which probably means that something bad is going to happen. Right. But that just got us thinking about other regime shifts that are happening. So I mentioned three of them. So pacification, plodification, and MUM, which stands for Markets Under Manipulation. So I'll just do them very quickly. So pacification is the easy one. So that's the passive investing, the shift to passive. And I think we're taking it a step further from how people understand it. Because how we traditionally understand passive investing is that there's a mechanical buying that once you get in the index, there's this mechanical buying that just keeps your share price propped up. And then if you leave the index, well, you're like in no man's land. But I think the addendum to that, to pacification, or the extra step actually, is all these mega IPOs that are happening. Because they're effectively gaming the system. So you basically want to get your company, you want to market up in the private market with a view that you're going to put in the index at a stupid valuation and the passive flows will maintain that stupid valuation. So that's passive investing, that's pacification. Now the new one is clodification, which is the shift to clodified investing, which is again a way to It again leads to a concentration in a handful of stocks and a handful of themes. And me more than you, I spend more time looking at, or let's just say Ponzi, let's just say more non-profitable companies or AI bottlenecks or stocks like that. And I'm not sure if you've experienced it, but basically you have a bunch of people on Twitter and they just... Clearly asked Claude for, you know, find me the bottleneck in photonics or the bottleneck in power or the bottleneck in memory or whatever. And they just come with a bunch of stocks and they just all throw the same stocks together, make new baskets and just buy the same crap. And, you know, I've been joking that Leopold getting... Bill Hwang was a result of Claudification in the sense, like, you can imagine Leopold going in and asking Claudies, like, just find me the winners, you know, the AI winners and find me the AI losers at four times leverage. And then wake me up once we reach AGI. But then everyone sees his track record, you know, that he's up 10 times and he's like, oh, I'm going to do the same strategy. So everyone just asks Claude, you know, get me the stocks of Leopold. And they just buy the same stocks at four times leverage and they all blow up together, which is what happened. PAULO: The important merger of these two is that the passive or mechanical autopilot player is all, they're all doing the same thing and herding into the same stuff. And the active, you know, slash retail monkey is doing the same thing because they're asking Claude the same questions and coming back with the same baskets and doing the same thing. So they're both herding. LE SHRUB: Correct. Yeah. So that leads to more concentration, but they think they're having alpha, but actually they're just doing momentum investing in a different word. PAULO: Right. LE SHRUB: So that's, that's codification. And, um, You know, the problem with cloudification is I think we're kind of like early innings in the sense like, you know, I'm sure you were discussing passive investing 10 years ago, five years ago, and we're like, well, this is dumb, but it actually got dumber. And now we have like peak passive where we're getting like trillion dollar companies added to the index on IPOs, right? Like SpaceX. So cloudification, unfortunately, it's kind of like early innings or maybe mid- Yeah. Middle, because you see interactive brokers is adding this function of using ChatGPT for your portfolio. And then I was shocked to see that, you know, Millennium is working with Anthropic. That was the Bloomberg headline on that part. And I'm sure other hedge funds will be doing the same. Man, that just adds. This is just like. Adds more concentration, adds the same models, you know, there's no free will out of all these guys. And then, you know, the guys that are doing spreadsheets and talking to management and all that stuff will be just pulling their hair as they go against these forces. So that's why, you know, you see me, one of my conclusions is, you know, you have to recognize these trends, otherwise you lose your mind. You know, if you're going to go against these trends, at least you have to recognize that they're there. So that's the second force. The third force is MUM. So MUM stands for Markets Under Manipulation. And this one is, it's basically, you know, I've been thinking about this for a few months now. So I'm just glad I got it out there because, and it's timely because now there's more events that confirm my view that basically, you know, markets were always manipulated, like always. But You know, Yellen took it a step further, as we well know and we discussed extensively. She took it a step further with the QRA and the bond market in October 2023 when she started actively managing the balance sheet as U.S. Treasury Secretary. So Besant comes in. You know, Besant is an experienced operator. You know, he understands all these things. He's been trading the yen all his life. So, you know, he can take it a step further because, you know, He's a smart dude. And he's like, well, if Yellen did it with the bond market, well, I can do it with anything else. I can do it with anything. So Mark is under manipulation. And, you know, someone like Besson is, you know, he's a smart dude to realize that traders, you know, the market is becoming more short-termist and traders just follow price and the price creates the narrative. So let's go to Hormuz and, you know, the energy crisis that never happened. So we basically went to the biggest energy crisis of our lives. 20% of the world's energy flows were disrupted. And the best we got was a two-month disruption and oil spiking to 110 or something, which is below the 2008 level. So that's all we got. And there were signs that there were suppression algos or Active engagement by forces and players to suppress the oil market. And, you know, on that, you can include a collaboration with, you know, social media reporters that shall not be named. And, you know, like it's a group effort. It's a team effort. Now, that sounds like an exaggeration, but then... You look at what they're doing with the yen, so we take it a step further. And now on the yen, they made it very explicit. They didn't try to hide it. They just literally said, we are coordinating with the Japanese treasury on the yen. So that's fine. So that's explicitly done. So that's why I mentioned markets under manipulation, mum. And the risk with MUM is, okay, so let's take it now. So MUM, so cloudification, pacification and MUM, they do one thing. They suppress volatility. So all three things do the same thing. They suppress volatility. And they can create trends. And they can calm down the markets. But they also create like an underlying instability. The only question is, Does this instability ever lead to a Minsky moment? So I'm going to argue that this is why I wanted to make it explicit that, you know, if you want to, because I want to make money out of this. I don't want to just be the, you know, I don't want this to be like an academic paper. I want to just see how I'm going to protect myself and protect my portfolio and ultimately make money out of it. So, you know, step one for me is just recognize that it's there. Step two, just recognize that you need to play along with that for most of the time. And that might be 90%, 95%, or 99%. So like passive, for example, you know, if you went against passive over the last 10 years, you got annihilated. That's step one. So two, claudification. Like if you went against claude over the last two years, well, you only made money after Leopold blew up. And then mum, now that's where it gets interesting. Because with MUM, whereas you can argue that pacification and codification are like structural trends, with MUM, we have a lot of precedents when central banks lose control. So that's more interesting. That's why I actually wanted to have this fly and discuss this, because that's where you have to be tracking if they lose control. And some simple things are this. The yen. So the yen was, you know, above 160. They smashed it down to 156. Well, you know, guess what? It's a 159 already. So they are kind of like not managing to convince people that they're effective. So that's number one. PAULO: Yeah. LE SHRUB: Number two, the US 10 year, that's kind of breaking out. So we had a crappy NFP on Friday and, you know, it was a messy print. So we know that. But still, like bonds didn't react to it. Like this, this never happened. Like you get a negative NFP and bonds are like flat from the... From the 19-year low or something. So they didn't, you know, they barely got like a short squeeze or anything. So that's a bad sign. So that's two. And then the third one is, you know, the oil price. Because if there was suppression in the oil price, well, it's going to be a bit like holding the ball underwater. So at some point, if there was suppression, if there is like a, you know, Pent-up demand or, you know, if someone needs to cover the short, well, you know, that ball is going to just explode upwards at some point. So, I'm going to just, you know, just stay on the mum theme and just say, like, that's why you should be watching these three things. The yen, the 10-year... And crude, because that's going to be telling us if they lose control or not. And you know me, like I'm, you know, I'm long the market, I'm long a bunch of stuff, you know, but all these things, I'm just seeing them converge. And that's why I was like, you know what, I actually want to reduce risk into September because, you know, I know that people are always scared of the summer, but for me, it's always like end of August, September that bad things happen. So, you know, it's been a good run, great run. I'm kind of chilled to a, Just take chips off the table, give thanks, and sit back a bit until we get some clarity on this. And we haven't even mentioned the Fed here because I just think it's best and best in control here on this thing. So anyway, that's my summary. That's where we are. It's a lot of food for thought. I think we have We're going to be discussing this for weeks and months. And I think it's just a neat framework to be considering. PAULO: For me, man, it's fascinating to see the synthesis because you look at each one of those factors in isolation and I think bringing it home, my first question to you actually while you were talking was going to be what do you look for To see that mum is losing control of the stroller. And I think you answered it. It's in news failure. It's in the market telling you... You know, you threw the BOJ alone over 50 just on the first 24 hours into the fire. And the meme I used were those pawn shop guys in Las Vegas who are like, you know, BOJ tosses 50 yards plus and Besson is in the mix. And the best I can do is Yen at 156. It's weak size. And they wipe positioning pretty hard. For me, and it's funny because I always assumed, and this is just kind of, I think, because of my commodity bias or tilt and general lean within Macro, that oil would be... I was saying back in 2022, oil traders are the new vigilantes. And I assume that this is the year where the oil traders make the plate-spinning, paper, fugazi, just kick the can, print some money guys have a religious experience and sort of dominate them and take over. And instead, it almost seems like oil is the last one. It was the first one to go and put pressure to make them mum. And now it's only in the last, I don't know, couple of days, maybe even the last day, started to show signs that Traders there are getting the joke too. It took that NFP and this sort of almost failed yen intervention to wake those guys up and say, you know what, let's have a go at this market. Because here, I keep thinking of that clown meme where the guy's getting dressed up as a clown. First, it's You know, we will destroy your civilization and we, you know, we defeated them. We sank their whole Navy. Then it's, you know, we're going to do a deal and it's the best deal. Then it's, you know, it keeps going and it ends with, actually, we don't, you know, the Straits are open. And now it's like, we don't need the Straits anyway. Like Besant's out on TV. What is Besant doing commenting about how many pipelines they're going to build and workarounds? It's... LE SHRUB: Yeah, but that's the whole point of mum, right? Because you want to basically, you are breaking the, you know, anything that has to do with free markets. You just put your, you know, you want to babysit everything. That's what I'm trying to get to. PAULO: That's right. You want to babysit everything. You want to babysit everything. Like these guys had septuplets now, you know what I mean? Yeah. LE SHRUB: And soon to a theater next to you. That's the whole point. Like you got to be careful about everything they touch their, put their finger on. And by the way, the one thing that, I didn't mention... Oh, PAULO: and sorry to jump in, but the coda of all of this is if mum were going to work and they were going to put fingers in so many dykes, you would think of all periods on the calendar, it would work when markets are most illiquid and quiet because it takes the least amount of money. And here we are in the dog days of August, and the best you can do is yen at 159. LE SHRUB: Dude, with the bond market breaking out. PAULO: This is a problem. This is a problem. LE SHRUB: I know. I know. That's why I think it's a timely – I think this is a good time to be thinking about all these things because I'm getting so much complacency. And again, let's just make sure that we're saying this. We're long. It's not like we're perma bearish or anything. I've been – You know, as soon as Leopold blew up, I sent a piece saying that, you know, there's a Leopold, it's a situational awareness mean bottom. You got to buy the AI trade. So it's not like we're, you know, saying things are going to blow up or we're going to blow up. But this is a really bad setup when you see the yen bouncing so quickly and when you see bond yields breaking out. And let me just add one thing on this. This is a, you know, this is a, Productivity, not productivity. It's an AI CapEx-driven market, right? We agree on that. So the AI CapEx is debt-fueled. It's funded by debt. So you can't tell me that credit bond yields blowing up is bullish for the market. You know what I mean? It's not like a cyclical... So I reckon that's when you gotta be really scared because if this is a debt-fueled So if the market is driven by AI CapEx and AI CapEx is driven by debt and we're going to have a ton of issuance coming in in September and bond yields are breaking out in the meantime, dude, mom is not doing very well. PAULO: That's right. And it's interesting because that's a big point that changed over the last year and a half. I know it's August 26. It feels like this year has flown by and yet the days are incredibly long. But it was only like late last summer where you and I were jumping on the phone on the weekends being like, Yeah, it's been coming quiet. Yeah, it's been coming quiet. They tethered the credit market and the equity market key driver together, to your point. Yes, correct. And that's where the Minsky moment always goes, right? Correct. LE SHRUB: And I think to add to that, that's spot on. And to add to that point, because, you know, last year when we're looking through this, we were calling it like AIBS, so Artificial Intelligence Backed Securities or AIBS. Or bullshit. So AIBS. So like when they started doing the AIBS last year, don't forget the hyperscalers were funding everything with their own cash. And this is the year when they just went beyond their own cash flow. So I think this is a really key moment in the sense that, you know, last year they were, you know, they started borrowing and they were using their own cash flows, but they have some money left for buybacks and all that stuff. And now this year, oh, guess what? There's zero buybacks. They've used all their cash flows, and they're borrowing on top. So that's when it gets nasty. PAULO: And even sprinkling some equity in there alongside, like Google. And sprinkling some equity. Oh, yeah. They're moving down the capital stack because the market's just not cooperating. There was also a lot of interesting commentary recently from our buddy Kevin Mir and others who reminded us that for every $20 billion of credit that these investment grade and air quote guys bring, there are a lot of guys who will hedge... Yeah. Hedge fund managers who flip deals, if you bring too much paper at once, they have to start making room sooner rather than letting these IPOs and blocks run for 30 days, 90 days. They have to flip them out to buy the next one. So you watch the performance of new issues very carefully. And if a big pop and run starts turning into a pop and fade, starts turning into a weak pop, starts turning into just break deal price on day one, You know that these guys have run out of room. On the DCM side, there's something similar in the sense that you've got paper that guys now need to make room for, so you're seeing tales in the auction. A buddy of mine who's very good in credit was even showing me how... Not just the concessions, but there is a tracker that the credit guys use. And credit is literally the last in line for me in terms of expertise. So I don't even know enough to be dangerous. But guys track performance of new issues versus secondary very closely, exactly for this phenomenon. And ever since June, July, when momentum started to go down the stairs and give back the whole year, You would see existing bonds trade actually very poorly ahead of so much of this issuance. And that's the sign, like in ECM IPO world, that guys are starting to choke on the issuance. And if you're right, and there really is this much debt on the come, requiring hedging in Treasury to back out the duration, it creates kind of a feedback loop or reflexive loop where Things could get kind of nasty, but to your point, if we've now tethered equities and credit together because it's the same handful of names that are now levered, and it's not just the market and the names that people care about, but also the key driver for the economy, right? Like how often do you hear half of economic growth is just data center construction and AI-related spend, right? So if the two are together, this kind of touches everything from one little nexus, which Yeah. Why didn't the carry trade blow up? This was that classic moment where you intervene and you get a whoopsie and it touches off something else. But it's only been 10 days. LE SHRUB: Can I just insert another meme there then? The Simpsons meme. It's like you're Bart saying, why didn't the carry trade blow up? And then Homer Simpson comes over and says, why didn't the carry trade blow up so far? Exactly. PAULO: Exactly. Exactly. This goes back to early this year, right, where first gold and silver got caned. And literally within a week, the long short factor pairs all blew up on the same day and like momentum and growth. They all had like their worst day in forever, I think since COVID. And then a few weeks later, the fixed income guys started to blow up. And so kind of call it rolling crack ups in honor of our friend Kevin Muir for his rolling bubbles. We haven't seen it yet. But if mum is losing control, the yen sits at the heart of so much, man. And the yen really concerns me also because most of the smart money guys I know, the FX Vol dedicated guys, and that's their corner, they've been looking for the intervention is going to come, this can't continue, and they will send it back down to 150 or under because the yen is so cheap. And I sit here and I think, A, the market's not confirming that prior and there's a P&L loss that's underway already for these guys who have been trying to pick their spots and what have you. But then on Saturday, a little headline dropped that nobody saw that showed that the Katayama is potentially going to be replaced next month by a guy that not a lot of people know, but who's very much a reflationist. I don't want to say it would be like a signing Kevin Hassett, but not that far away. This guy is firmly Takaiichi, make Japan great again, versus Katayama, who's there. And if something like that were to happen, where you get clear Takaiichi is in charge, like she's Japan's Trump, and everybody's looking downfield the same way towards expansionary fiscal and an accommodative BOJ and line of sight to that for the next couple of years, dude... The amount of volatility we're going to see in the yen and the Japanese bond market, we've seen nothing yet. And FX of all is still near the lows despite this intervention. And when I say like this could be rock and roll, I mean like imagine having a dovish Fed with an executive and legislature that wants to go do 5% plus deficits as far as the eye can see. Man, you're talking about, again, depreciation big time and a rate blowout in Japan that only a few alarmists have been warning about. While most guys are trying to lean into Japan is too cheap and the money is going to come home because they're going to repatriate and sell America, I just feel like I can't believe they're going to do this. But if they do this, man, I can see a lot of people having a holy shit kind of moment. It's not a base case for me, but I'm just saying like this is very – like the cruiser of mum and passivation and clodification sits in front of like an aircraft carrier of policy that these guys are like – their mummification of the market only works if the primary trend is going their way and they can turn the boat. Correct. You know what I'm saying? Correct. That's why your note landed so well for me because it all comes back to respecting the market's message first. And it's clear to us the market has other ideas about what is going on here. And you're right to say, just be aware what you're fighting because these guys, they're playing for keeps and they don't care. LE SHRUB: And the thing is, you remember how we had the bond vigilantes? You know, they were going against, you know, irresponsible fiscal policy or responsible monetary policy. Now you're going to have a different form of vigilantes, I guess. I don't know how you could call them. Like teenagers? I don't know what the word is. They go against mom. Because I can literally just think of a trade where, you know, you want to go against mom, you buy oil calls, yen cuts, as in like yen getting weaker. Yeah. And you want to get like, I don't know, bond puts or NASDAQ puts or gold calls. And that's your mom trade. Yeah. That's your mom trade. PAULO: And it's interesting because gold sold off when oil ripped. I wrote about this as well. And then gold hadn't bounced. It was kind of chopping around 4,000 while oil fell down the stairs. And now just suddenly in the last week, gold woke up and so has oil. Yeah. It's interesting that the two are trading together. LE SHRUB: Super interesting. And I think there's a, I can see a scenario where, you know, you can have like, if mom loses control, I can see a scenario where commodities initially sell off or don't even sell off, but then they rip because people are going to be like, oh shit, what can I buy? I'm not going to buy the S&P. I'm not going to buy NASDAQ. I'm not going to buy, you know, yen. Why would you buy yen? They're just going to buy hard assets because what else can they buy? PAULO: Yeah. LE SHRUB: I don't know. It's just something to think about. I think it's more important to just be aware of it first and then think about it and have a plan. Because, you know, look, they might just patch things together as they've been doing for a while. So, you know, again, going back to 2023, that's when Yellen just was very masterful because she managed to patch things up in the October QRA. Whereas I think Besant's mistake is that he's just... I can't even call it his mistake because the war is not his mistake. I'm just saying that he's got his finger on too many pies, so he needs to deal with the oil and the 10-year and the yen at the same time. PAULO: Yeah, they're riding on credibility of the powers that be always are in control. But that's another point. When you mentioned Tamagotchi, it took a while for people to figure out exactly what she was doing in terms of the draining of the RRP. It was several months before you started to really see more widespread commentary that this is how they were doing all the issuance without messing with the markets. It reminds me of the usual suspects where it's like the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn't exist. The greatest thing that the plunge protection team ever did was convincing the people who see footprints in the market that they're crazy and there's no such thing. But that's the joke that these guys in charge right now don't get. If you are going to screw around, you do not come out with a to-do list that says one thing on it and sell 5 to 10 billion Japanese yen parenthesis JPY just to make sure that the guy from the New York Post knows the ticker. I mean, you and I found ourselves thinking like, man, they're not even trying to hide anything. I don't know if that makes sense. Wizard of Oz, dude. Yeah, it's the Wizard of Oz. LE SHRUB: It's the Wizard of Oz. PAULO: Yeah, that's it. LE SHRUB: That's it. PAULO: One last thing. I know we're running a little long, but I want to bring this back to you and I were joking right before we hit record about Elon and NVIDIA. And what was bugging me is, you know, the euphoria has come out of the market, even with the, you know, Ashton Brenner is almost like a Cathie Wood character. Like she gets smoked first, right? But we haven't gotten the last buy-in in my sense. And the thing that bugs me is the poster child for AI since ChatGPT 2223 was NVIDIA. And I remember two years ago, you came up with that beautiful graphic of the whirlpool and it's NVIDIA sucking all the world's liquidity into one name. And I found myself thinking about that this weekend because no true, you know, So I found myself thinking, what if we take passive, which the joke is out on for years now, and we turn that up to 11? And it becomes a narrowing into one name as, you know, you go from Mag 7 to there can be only one. NVIDIA has kind of lost its cache because, you know, it's part of the semi-crowd, you know, hardware and chips, which are not working well. NVIDIA is kind of hanging there. It missed out on the big whoosh of Korea and Samsung and Hynex and Micron. People have kind of forgotten about it. It's 8% of the S&P. It's the largest name again after Apple and Microsoft tried to grab the title briefly. And I found myself thinking, like, that's the name that has to sort of capture imagination even for a few months and do something bananas because it would be a pain trait for everybody from value guys to investors. Growth guys who can't overweight a name that's already 8% of bench to long, short tech pod monkeys who are doing great in long, semi-short software for a while. If it's one name that's attracting all the action, whether it's from passive, just shooting it higher in inelastic fashion to whatever. And plus, Jensen's got the leather jacket. And what if he comes out with quantum on a chip or something insane, robotics plus this or Right at a moment where the markets are getting shaky. So this is kind of trade after the trade, like later in the fall maybe. And then you said, what if it was Elon? Sorry, I don't want to steal your thunder. You got to bring it home because it would be amazing. LE SHRUB: Yeah, so I have this, and I'm going to tell you why I've been thinking about this. So I think Elon is going to do a deal with Jensen soon. And the reason is, He is basically, I've been noticing there's a lot of bromance on Twitter between the two. So Elon was sending some videos of like, look, we went to 10 years ago, we got the first GPU and I called Jensen and he said he had this amazing GPU and he wanted to show it to us. And he said, And I told him, I have this nonprofit called OpenAI and it can work there. And then Jensen also said the thing is like, 10 years ago, no one wanted my GPUs. And then Elon called me and he said, oh, that could work for us. And then I was like, I got my first customer. So anyway, point is, there was this back and forth bromance. And then I was thinking, in his latest results, he said that he's going to go exclusive with NVIDIA for GPUs. PAULO: Yeah. LE SHRUB: And I was like, dude, this guy, all these bromance, you know what this is setting up for? The biggest circular deal of all times. PAULO: Yes. LE SHRUB: So I reckon we're going to see that in the next few months. PAULO: Imagine those two guys on stage in leather jackets at the same time with some giant reveal. And it's not going to be LE SHRUB: $250 billion. It has to be like a trillion. Yeah. Yeah. PAULO: When you mentioned it, it clicked for me because the NVIDIA chart's been bugging me. The narrative of it's forgotten has bugged me. And then I remembered back in 2020 and 21, I told guys, and this was when NFTs were all the rage and pet rocks on Ethereum. And I said, this doesn't end until we get that line in the book. That says Elon Musk is the world's richest man, even for a day. And he wasn't. He had been vying for the title. Warren Buffett and Bill Gates were up there. He was closing in. And I said, it's like Masayoshi in 1999. It's got to be even for a day. But we got to see that headline. Then last year, I told buddies, This doesn't end until we see the first trillion there. Elon Musk brings SpaceX, XAI, Twitter, all back public. And we see that headline on paper that he's the world's first trillion there. And then I was thinking, man, NVIDIA is number one again, $5 trillion-ish market cap. I kind of think this doesn't end until we see that headline of the world's first $10 trillion company. And you and I know that in blow-offs, Crazier things have happened and it seems like it would take a lot of flow to get it there. But when you think of how little volume in relation to the market cap actually goes through these big names anymore because they're becoming so inelastic due to passive ownership, man, we could see like that kind of last 50% move in a month, you know, and then it's over. But you need the imagination to be captured. That's the thing. And so when you said, imagine Elon and Jensen do a deal, all I could see is them signing boobs at a convention afterwards together. You know what I mean? Like two years ago when we had like the Jensen signing and both of them in their little leather jackets. LE SHRUB: Leather jackets, bro hug, signing, fans. PAULO: I think we have to do this, man. That's how it's going to be. This is it, dude. We have the timeline. [CLOSE — sign-off, speakers interleaved] Oh, man. All right. Let's leave it here. Let's leave it there. All right, bro. Well, safe travels. Thanks. And great doing this. All right. I'll talk to you from Spain. Cheers, buddy. All right. Take care. Bye-bye.