The Frontier

James Check sees Bitcoin in a reaccumulation zone: he wants $72,000 to hold, with the 200-week average near $68,000. If support fails, he expects a mid-$60,000s retest, not a fall to $45,000; a monthly higher low could set up a move toward $100,000.

James Check reads the $58,000 to $62,000 base and rally to $87,000 as seller exhaustion followed by a short squeeze. During the preceding selloff, Bitcoin ETFs shed $8.5 billion in eight weeks and Michael Saylor sold about 6,000 coins; Check compares the base-building to 2019 and 2023.

James Check says AI-driven attacks are exposing weaknesses across the internet, from programming languages and servers to credentials, and expects a difficult security transition. He contrasts that exposure with Bitcoin Core's resilience, calling its human-written code exceptionally battle-tested.

James Check argues AI could erode business moats, raise security costs, and make today’s concentrated stock-market gains fragile. Marty Bent cites seven stocks driving 60% of S&P 500 returns and says 95% of index companies underperformed; Check rejects Jason Calacanis’s Bitcoin-death-for-AI-trade pitch.

James Check sees no political will for austerity and expects deficit spending to continue as governments protect the existing financial system. He argues fiat debt can be prolonged through creative interventions, while Bitcoin’s case strengthens as the currency system accumulates cracks.

James Check says stablecoins are spreading dollar access among people in Turkey, Venezuela, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, but their reach beyond developing markets remains unclear. He notes recent redemptions as U.S. officials advance stablecoin rules and seek to integrate the tokens into finance.

James Check says Bitcoin mining’s strongest models are small entrepreneurial operations using stranded power or miners embedded in grids for load balancing. Public miners moving into AI makes business sense, he argues, while hash rate recovery shows mining equipment can move to operators with better costs.

James Check says AI agents will use the payment method users specify, so Bitcoin use by bots is no automatic catalyst and medium-of-exchange adoption remains decades away. He sees Zcash and Monero privacy technology as valuable but says Bitcoin’s UTXO history and network effects cannot be copied by a fork.

James Check says 75% to 80% of Bitcoin wealth is held by long-term holders, while recent buyers who chased $87,000 have been the main sellers. He estimates their selling at $420 million a day, far below capitulation lows, and says holders below $58,000 moved less than 1.5% of recent coin volume.

James Check recommends answering Bitcoin questions rather than lecturing, and argues that self-custodied money can help people flee hostile countries or escape financial abuse. Marty Bent links Bitcoin to affordability politics; James Check says Australia’s tougher capital-gains treatment of shares, ETFs, and Bitcoin alienated young investors.

James Check says Bitcoin matched a semiconductor ETF’s return from January 1, 2023, through the episode despite Bitcoin’s later downturn, countering claims that AI stocks simply took its gains. He also sees Michael Saylor’s preferred shares as a possible new corporate-finance tool that other companies may copy.

James Gleick traces the telephone to the telegraph era, when electrical communication was already transforming business. Philip Reis built a working voice-transmission device about 20 years before Bell, but Bell recognized conversation as the telephone’s central use.

Gleick argues Bell’s telephone patent was unjustifiably broad: Bell had not built the device when he received it, and Faraday and Maxwell understood the underlying science better. Gleick says bribery helped secure the patent, which lawyers extended to cover other telephones.

Bell grasped that a telephone became valuable when many people could reach one another, an early network effect. Gleick says users ultimately defined the technology’s uses, from farm families wiring phones through existing barbed wire to isolated women sharing conversation and knowledge.

Gleick says telephone service did not need Bell’s patent monopoly to spread: independent companies and grassroots networks worked, though they needed ways to interconnect. J.P. Morgan consolidated the Bell system; government regulation kept prices in check while guaranteeing a profit.

AT&T resisted devices that let customers modify its closed network, from a telephone “cone of silence” to wireless handsets and cheaper microwave long-distance links. Gleick points to the company’s opposition to these innovations as monopolist behavior that helped undo the Bell System.

Mobile phones let countries with little wired infrastructure leapfrog fixed-line networks. Gleick highlights Africa, where mobile adoption moved quickly, and agrees that China and India also built mobile-first economies without first developing extensive telephone wiring.

The analog telephone network had to converge with digital computing before computers could communicate over phone lines. Gleick says the FCC’s first Computer Inquiry, one of three, distinguished data transmission from data processing; analog phone service could even keep working through a city power blackout.

Bell Labs became a heavily funded corporate research center where scientists could follow ideas beyond immediate profit goals, producing work including the transistor and integrated circuits. Sonal Choksi compares it with Xerox PARC and argues that funding, close collaboration, and a practical mission helped sustain invention.

Claude Shannon developed information theory and named the bit while working at Bell Labs. Gleick connects Shannon’s work on digitizing analog speech to a World War II problem: encrypting a telephone conversation between Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill.

Gleick describes the first industrial revolution as machine-driven, the second as electricity-driven, and the third as the information age. He rejects treating AI as a fourth revolution, calling it a continuation of decades of digital progress, while acknowledging impersonation risks and uneven performance.

Gleick contrasts European physicists, who developed electrical theory, with American tinkerers who built practical devices; slow, ship-carried correspondence delayed the spread of scientific ideas. He sees the late 19th-century United States as fertile ground for invention because builders could experiment without knowing a device’s eventual use.

Robert Hackett connects Gleick’s account of technological change to the emergence of unexpected outcomes from simple events, the theme of Gleick’s book Chaos. The hosts also discuss Nikola Tesla’s 1926 prediction of pocket-sized communication devices and H.G. Wells’s idea of a “world brain.”

Wilde reads Angela in The Invite as someone whose sense of duty gradually eroded her artistic ambitions; she thinks Booksmart’s Molly and Amy would be horrified by that slow self-sacrifice.

Wilde began directing at 35 despite lacking film-school training, and says the career pivot required her to question whether she had permission; Nora Ephron’s advice that people can change their minds helped her take the leap.

Wilde says directing freed her from pressure to play an idealized, likable woman; she now chooses acting roles more playfully, including tightly wound characters with sharply different relationships to sex and desire.

Wilde says the experience left her less concerned with being adored or understood and more willing to show vulnerability in her work; therapy, reading, and travel helped her grow from the rupture.

After fearing she might never act again, Wilde returned for a brief role in The Studio and enjoyed it enough to invite Seth Rogen into The Invite; she credits him with helping her reconnect with acting.

Wilde tells young actresses who cannot get the roles they want to make their own films and cast themselves; she waited years to follow advice from casting director Mally Finn to create a role that showed her abilities.

Wilde describes directing as collective work: a director hires strong artists, creates conditions for their best work, and shapes the film’s tone, rather than needing technical expertise in every department.