3 Stories Of People Making Millions In Weird Ways

23:56And so how exciting is that? I feel like it's possible that somebody is going to make an ozempic for sleep. And it's going to allow us to, instead of needing eight hours, I can sleep for five and feel just as good as I would on eight. He says, this is like adding 10 more years to your life. An 80-year lifespan, eight hours a day of sleep, compared to 80 years with four hours of sleep. That's 10 years. This is amazing. And on top of that, by the way, there's people who suffer from insomnia and narcolepsy. There's all these actual sleep apnea. There's all these things that affect people's sleep.

24:30Maybe you could alleviate those along the way. If there's thousands of Americans who have those problems, could you also improve those? Okay. First of all, this is amazing. This is a great find. I'm reading his blog. His writing's really great. It doesn't write... That's why I was shocked that he's a researcher because he's... I think there's a quote where he goes, this is crazy. They don't normally say things like that. Yeah. They don't have personalities usually. This has profound implications. By the way, he's 22 years old. He's a PhD student at MIT. exploring brain simulations as an alternative path to beneficial AI.

25:06And in the past, he skipped out of high school in rural Austria to graduate early. In his gap year, he created a$1 million nonprofit and ran the most viral tech conference of the year that had Sam Altman and others come. He's a self-taught Mandarin last year and did his undergrad at Berkeley in two years. Guy's a winner. Doing well. And he owns Isaac.net. great domain name Isaac with a K this guy is great man well what I was going to say was is this I've never I've heard of you know that Gene a little bit that you're discussing but it's just funny that there's just some kid with a 22 year old with a personal blog and this is the first time that I've ever heard about this is this that's what I'm saying it's fascinating but if he if he's just talking about his blog is this like something that actually has, like why is there not more press or press releases on this topic?

26:10Is it actually legitimate? There is now. We just broke it, dude. This was the tipping point. You're going to see other people working on this. You're going to see people talking about this. There's going to be misinformation everywhere. It's going to be great. This story is awesome. Just because I like Isaac and also I would like to not sleep. Would you rather be skinny like Ozempic and eat less or be chubbier or whatever you... No, dude, if I could sleep only five hours instead of eight, I don't give a shit. I would be the fattest man on earth and do that. No, I'm just joking. But that is a way better superpower to need less sleep, to get back three hours of time every day.

26:48That's debatable. I think that people will always prefer to be skinny over less sleep. People are dumb. That's so dumb. If they prefer to be skinny over having extra three hours of life every day, If the average 25-year-old, if you're like, look hot or live to 90 versus 80, they're going to choose hot over sleep any day of the week. Well, this is why we don't ask 25-year-olds questions. The brain is not fully formed yet. This is a great find. His blog, according to SimilarWeb, just shot up to 125 ,000 visitors in October. What did he, like before it was nothing? He published this in November. So that's kind of cool.

27:26So Ben found this and he sent it to our friend. So our friend invested in a company that made a GLP-1 drug and sold for billions of dollars. And so he sent this to him because he's like, oh, you did that early Ozempic thing before Ozempic was a known thing. Seven years before, he invested in this company that was going to work on that. And it paid off in a big way. So he sent it to him. And that guy was like, I don't know how you found this. This is the best thing I've read all year. I'm so excited about what you just sent me. and it was such a great example of Ben being Ben where Ben has on one side a really curated feed where he'll find interesting things like this.

28:05He doesn't follow many people, but he'll be following a guy like this Isaac guy. And then he knows who to route the information to and he's like FedEx. He doesn't touch the package. When I get this, I immediately start doing research. I write notes. I go talk about it. I'm not passing it to somebody smarter. Ben's like he's like a FedEx guy. The package comes off the conveyor belt, he grabs the box, tosses in the truck, drives it to the address, drops it off, and doesn't ask any questions about what's inside. He just knows that's useful for you. I think this is useful for you. And he just does that all day.

28:39I had him add me to all these group chats. He was always texting people, but I said, yo, just add me. I just want to be a part of these. So now I'm in probably 60 group chats where it's me, Ben, and a mutual acquaintance or friend. And he's just doing this all day. He's just routing packets to different people about, I think you're into this kind of thing. That's ridiculous. How is he going to monetize it? Can he ever monetize this? Yeah. Dude, we monetize this phenomenally. This is the secret of Ben. He just tries to be useful. And then he'll be like, hey, yeah, remember that guy you met a year ago who you then didn't talk to ever again?

29:15I'm like, yeah, I think so. I think I remember that guy. He was cool. He's like, yeah, so I've been texting him. We text daily. And he's got this new thing and it's taking off and he wants us to invest. He's not letting anyone else in. And then we invest in it. It's incredible how this karma just comes back tenfold for Ben. And he never asks for anything. He never asks. It's amazing. He texts me a fair bit, just like, solve this thing. You might like it. So I'm the recipient of some of these things. And I hate texting. I hate being at my computer and constantly having to go back and forth with 10 different people, which is how a lot of people's computers look right now where you're like, it's between Slack and messages.

29:55You're just like going back and forth with 15 or 20 people at all times. And you're like, what did I do all day today? I just like, I just shit chatted. And so I don't like doing it. Do you fall into that trap like throughout the day where you're like, dude, I just like texted people all day. Yeah, I like Slack because I like my projects that I'm working on, but I don't text much. I'm a very bad texter. And if anyone's out there who's texting me, I really apologize. I probably have not texted you back. So I'm prolifically bad at it. Ben is prolifically great at it. And that combination has really helped.

30:29The combination has really helped. And now people, they just bypass me altogether. They go to him. And it hurts my feelings sometimes. I'm like, wait, I thought I was friends with this person. But now I understand why. Because he's just a better person. He's a better texter. In fact, he was like, I need to make a shirt called I Reply. He goes, because that's my thing, dude. I Reply. And he's like, it's pretty easy. and I was like you should write like the modern day how to win friends and influence people because that's what he does he wins friends and influences people with the most basic the most basic of things and I was like you couldn't sell a like the thing you do creates like tons of value like tens of millions of dollars in value for us you couldn't even teach people this because you would say what you do out loud and they'd be like that was it I showed up for the seminar for that that's basic it's basic as hell and but that's what he does and it works That's insane.

31:19I think it's funny. By the way, Google Isaac Freeman. Very good-looking, young, stylish black dude. This guy's got it all. This guy's got it all. If he just becomes an astronaut, he's basically the modern-day James Bond. Oh, man. He's got cool glasses and a jawline? Fuck. Yeah. Game over. You said you had a bunch of exciting things. By the way, you know, we don't judge a book by its cover. So like, you know, looks, looks do matter. Let's be clear. We try not to judge people by their looks first. But once we take a look at what you do, we then go take a look at how you look. And it either is like a plus 100 or it's a minus 100.

32:03It's a huge multiplier on my opinion of you and how much I'm going to remember you afterwards. I will never forget this guy. Yeah, like if he were dorky looking, I'd be like, yeah, makes sense. Checks out. And then I see what he looks like and I'm like, aw. Huh?

32:22It's tough to be like looking at. By the way, most people when they have an avatar as their Twitter profile, it's because they're goofy looking and the avatar is better looking than that. He's making me question everything. There's a reason I have a cartoon profile picture. Look at me. If you're on YouTube, look at me. This is why I have a cartoon profile picture. That's the rule. It's like when someone quotes you revenue, they would have said profit if they had it. Right? If somebody talks about users, they would have quoted revenue if they had it. Normally, if somebody's got the looks, they're going to put their face as the profile picture.

32:55This guy defies all convention. I asked someone what the revenue was recently, and they were like, eight figures if you include the.00. And I was like, that's pretty funny. That was pretty good.

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34:19You want to do another thing? Yeah. All right. I got some cool stuff. Oh, you got to do this polymarket whale. Okay. Yeah. All right. So this is the Billy of the Week. Cue the music.

34:34A million dollars isn't cool. You know what's cool? A billion dollars. So you've heard the story, I think, but can I just explain a little bit of the detail here? Amazing. I read about it a little bit. Do we even know who this person is? Yeah. So the election was happening, what, 10 days ago or so. And the big news was sort of, I guess like there's a battle going on. There's Republicans versus Democrats. Great. There's Trump and Kamala, great. They were supposed to be a dead, but there was an undercard to the pay-per-view. And so who was the undercard? Okay, if Trump and Kamala are the main event, then I think the undercard, a lot of it was like mainstream media versus social media, right?

35:12You had like Twitter and blogs versus MSNBC and whatever. And they were giving you different narratives, right? And so Trump and Vance go on Joe Rogan. Kamala goes on Saturday Night Live and The View or 60 Minutes or these traditional media. So that was one battle that was going on. By the way, who would have thought you've seen Theo Vaughn being like a needle mover? Insane, right? I was saying this the other day. I think that going on Theo Vaughn needs to be part of the national standard for an election. I need to know if my president's going to be a good hang or not. And I think Theo is the one who could save us there.

35:50Yeah, that was insane. So under that, then you have the billionaire backers. You got Elon on one side, you got more Cuban on the other. And it's like, they're going around, they're promoting, they're using their money and their voice to do it. What was the other battles? One of the other battles was polls versus crypto prediction markets. So the polls were telling a story at the time, pre-election, the polls were saying, razor thin margin, toss up, these swing states too close to call, it's a 50-50 election right now. Like, we don't, it is too hard to tell who's going to win. And the prediction markets, which were people betting money, were saying something different.

36:26They were saying 65-35, Trump going to win. And they're different things, right? A poll is, you know, you go out and you ask people, who are you going to vote for? A prediction market is who's going to get the most votes. So they do tell different things, but the reality is still the same, which is that if the polls were accurate, that it was a 50-50 toss-up, it's going to be a razor thin margin, then the betting market shouldn't have such a big sprint. There shouldn't be a big favorite versus a big underdog. And what was the poly market spread? I think it was like 75, 25? No, a little less. It was about 63 Trump, but then it got to 65.

37:02And then as the election started, when the news was saying, you know, it's still too early, the odds were just jetting in Trump's direction. They knew earlier than the exit polls or the news was willing to report about how much of a landslide this was going to be for Trump, which it was. Okay, so before it happened, there was a question of like, is the prediction market actually predictive? And there was some legitimate skepticism. So the pro side was... The betting market versus the poll market. The betting, well, it's just like, even just alone. Should we care what polymarket says? And on one hand...

37:37Polymarket being the platform where you could take these bets. Exactly. And so you, the plus side would be to say, well, these are people betting their own money. So skin in the game. And so if you see a lot more action coming in on one side, that means the sort of the wisdom of the crowds and the actual free market believes the odds are this. And that might be better than just the polls where people say, they're just saying what they're going to vote for and it's a small sample, but who knows? Maybe they're lying. Maybe it's just too small of a sample to know. Maybe it's not indicative of, there's no skin in the game there.

38:09So on one hand, you said skin in the game. On the other hand, you would say poly market, never heard of it, banned in the US. So all the betting action was from international. So over$3 billion was bet on the election. None of this was Americans because you can't use Polymarket in America. Then it's also crypto holders, right? Because Polymarket is a crypto betting thing. So you're like, oh, maybe there's a bias. Crypto holders are more libertarian. Maybe they're going to go more right-leaning. And so it's what they want. And Trump's pro-crypto. So it's like maybe they're voting on what they wish for and not what it actually is.

38:43Okay, so there was some question marks. Then there was one more. then the news came out and said, you know, we can't trust Polymarket because it's manipulated. Manipulated how? Well, it's manipulated because a couple of whales are betting heavily on Trump and that's swinging the odds. So it's actually, this is not what the crowds think. It's really a couple of whales that are influencing this. And they saw that. And you can see on Polymarket the size, like, can I see like, oh, someone just put this million dollar bet in? I can go on Polymarket right now and look at the top 10 bettors and what they are bet on, how much volume they've bet this year.

39:17and how much their P &L is. Are they up or down? So Theo4, I think, is the biggest one on the platform, and he has made a profit of$22 million this year. Exactly. So that's one user. But you can go user by user, and you can see, oh, this guy's just betting on everything, or this guy's one huge bet, or whatever, right? So you can go look at anybody, any better's P &L on Polymarket. So what they found was they were like, hey, there's a couple of bets here that were in the tens of millions on Trump. and actually it all came from the same guy. And what they were thinking was that there's four big accounts that bet 28 million.

39:52And actually it turns out now after the fact, the guy came out and said it, he had 11 accounts and he bet 40 something million and he, 40 or 50 million and he had made about$80 million of profit actually. Sorry, I don't know the exact bed amounts, but I know he made$80 million of profit in the end. A French guy, I think. A French guy. So they were like, who is this French whale? And the story behind it's pretty interesting because this guy was a trader. He's taken finance. He lived in the US at one point. But basically, he's like, I'm trying to remain anonymous. By the way, how on earth would a journalist find this person?

40:29That seems really hard. That's a great scoop. So on Polymarket, you can see the bets. So you can go see, wow, this is a huge bet. Then you go look at the account. You try to figure out whose wallet is this. And because crypto is, there's a public ledger, you can actually trace back and try to find it. And there's a company called Chainalysis. Do you know Chainalysis? I've heard of it just like as a headline. They're basically, the government goes to Chainalysis and says, we need to know who owns this wallet. And they can go and do the forensic analysis of every transaction that wallet's done and tries to figure out the root wallet and who owns that wallet.

41:00And so that's, and this is like a$10 billion company, Chainalysis. We have to do a breakdown of this company. This sounds fun. Yeah, they're a fascinating company. And so they came out and they did this analysis and there's like this web of the accounts and like, so take a look at this. This is like all the best stuff. Like crime and crypto stories are the best stories. And so like working at this company would be super exciting. Oh, I know, but you know what I mean. Totally. So they come out and they say, all right, well, dude, how did you know? Why did you make such a massive bet on Trump? And this is where the story gets really interesting.

41:32He says, he's like, I didn't trust the polls, but I trust polling. What do you mean? He goes, I commissioned my own polls. There's a French guy who commissioned polls in America. to inform his own bet. And what he did was he paid a polling company and he said, I want you to go and I want you to ask them, but don't ask them who they vote, who they're going to vote for. Because that's what polls often ask. What do traditional polls ask? Are you likely to vote? If you're going to vote, who are you likely to vote for? Are you certain of that? You know, whatever. Is there anything that's going to change your mind?

42:03Well, and I think they also ask, who do you, I think they ask it in a weird way as well. I think they also ask, who do you think your friend is going to vote for? That's what this guy did. Oh, got it. So what this guy did was called the neighbor method. And what he says is he says, don't ask them who they're going to vote for. I don't want to, people are indirect, people don't want to reveal their own preferences. But if you ask them a specific question, which is who do you expect your neighbor to vote for? They will indirectly reveal their own preferences and what they believe is going to happen.

42:34And he believed that the neighbor method is a more predictive method. And when he did this, he commissioned this poll, he paid a major US pollster to go do these polls for him. just like the DNC and the RNC, they'll pay pollsters to go run their independent polls that they're not reporting to the public. And he wanted them to measure this neighbor effect. And what he found was that the results were, quote, mind-blowing to the favor of Trump. It showed a Trump landslide. And so he thought, now this is mispriced. The media is telling you that this is 50-50 razor thin, but actually my polling is showing that actually this is going to be a major landslide for Trump.

43:14It's overwhelmingly in favor of Trump. So now the bet is mispriced. So he places this huge bet on Trump. And it turns out he's correct. And his final quote was, public opinion would have been better prepared if the latest polls had measured using the neighbor effect. And he specifically didn't just bet on the overall victory. He bet on specific swing states where he thought people think this state is closer than it's actually going to be. It's going to be more in favor of Trump using this neighbor method, which is just insane. And now, of course, the French government is trying to ban the Polly market.

43:44This guy nailed it. Two words. Bonjour, my friend. Fucking A. First of all, what I respect about this is... Everything? I don't respect everything about it. I don't love gambling like this, but people who have conviction on something, like they do their own analysis and they're like, no, this is the answer. Even though all the quote smart people or everyone's, the establishment is saying this, but I did my own research and then he did the big part, which is he bet$30 million or whatever of his own money. I think that is like, those types of people fascinate me because that takes so much conviction.

44:27Yeah, exactly. This is, I mean, the guts that it, the brains and the guts, right? And that's kind of, I think, the theme of the year is like, you see someone like Elon who basically swings the election, who catches a rocket with some chopsticks, is working on self-driving cars, helped co-found OpenAI, which is changing the world. The guy's just firing on all cylinders. And it's like, why? What is different about this guy? And it's the combination of the brain and the balls. There are other people as smart as Elon Musk. There are other people who have the risk-taking guts as Elon Musk. but the combination is rare.

45:08And then you add on top of that, the willingness to, you know, absolutely work to the bone as well, right? And then you add on top of that. Like sacrifice your own life. Yeah, so he's, you know, top 0.1 % in like five things. And then it's like, oh, if you just multiply 0.1 % times, you know, five times over and over again, you end up with like one in 10 billion, which is like, oh, that's actually the ratio. We do have one Elon out of the entire human population. Dude, I thought it was impressive. I was like, Justin Timberlake, you can sing, dance, and act, and you're funny?

45:44You know what I mean? It's super bad. Eli just really stepped it up. That's a great call. Is Polymarket going to sustain after this? Of course not, right? Okay, so I've been a big Polymarket fan. I was using Polymarket before they banned it way back in the day. You're also a little bit of a degen. Yeah, but I think a lot of people are. How much money have you... First, by the way, you called this gambling. I don't believe that this is gambling. I mean, just by definition. Well, for example, you own stock. Do you believe that you're gambling when you buy a stock? I guess... What are you doing when you buy a stock?

46:27Yeah, you are. I guess you'd have to say that it's not as binary, but there's levels. or like it's a scale. So, but yeah, you are. Just like if you buy car shirts. Like you and I, it exists on a spectrum. Yes. So like, you know, with a stock, the old-fashioned way of looking at it is I'm not dabbling. I'm buying a piece of ownership in a company that produces goods and for account. It's like, yeah, all right, cool. Nobody really in practice treats it like that. Meaning you're not sitting there like, you're not sitting there waiting for dividends. You're not trying to own this piece of this company because you think it's going to exit at a later date when it's a public stock already.

47:11You're basically saying, I believe that the future earnings of this company are going to be X, and that's why owning this is good because the share price is going to go up because their earnings are going to go up and they're maybe going to go up at a faster rate than the current price of the stock indicates. That's what you're supposed to buy. You're supposed to buy a stock that you think is going to, appreciate over time. I think that polymarket has the ability to do that in a bunch of interesting ways. So first, there are the other speculation slash betting gambling type of use cases. So speculating on prices of things, speculating on sports outcomes of games, right?

47:53Like sports betting is obviously a huge deal. So there's those use cases. There is an interesting thing. So So I'm guessing you didn't read Vitalik's blog recently about this? That's an accurate guess. Vitalik, who's the creator of Ethereum, wrote a great blog post. Vitalik's one of my favorite entrepreneurs and thinkers on the planet. So the blog post is called, I guess, From Prediction Markets Into Finance? Info Finance. So he's like, you know, I have written a lot and I've supported Polymarket. And many of you who know me might be surprised by this because Vitalik is sort of notoriously like not into the like crypto casino side of life.

48:34Like he's not price based. He's not trying to get rich as like his primary motivation. It's kind of like a prude. He's a purist. And so like, it'd be like, why do you care so much about these like prediction markets as people gambling? Who cares? And he's like, because I don't see it as that. I actually think that there's another category here that's overlooked and it's called info finance, information finance. And he gives some examples. So he's like, polymarket was two things at once. He goes, on one hand, it's a betting site for the few people that want to bet and gamble. But for the rest of us, we could look at how the gamblers are betting.

49:07And that would, for them, it served as a news site. It was like, oh, wow, Trump is doing better. Trump is improving. In the same way that the polls are supposed to be part of the news, the prediction markets were actually better news information. So it was information finance. He's like, that's the first level, which was, even if you're not participating in the betting, trying to make a buck, it is very useful that other people are doing that because it's another source of information. He's like, it should not be the only source of information, but it should be another one. He talks about the elections in Venezuela, how basically he was watching how people were protesting, how it was getting manipulated and blah, blah, blah, how Polymarker was actually a very useful source of information for him in understanding what was going on in Venezuela from an informational point of view.

49:50All right, so that was one. Then he's like, okay, what's the other use case? He's like, so imagine a company. So like, you know, I don't know if you saw like Chipotle or Starbucks. Like Starbucks just hired the Chipotle CEO. Did you see that? Yeah. And he's, the headline is that he's working from home, even though he's making everyone else go back to work, right? Yeah. And he's like private jetting in and out. But like this guy's kind of famous for like, he trims the menu, he cuts costs and he like, he basically improves margins. That's what this guy's known for. And so the amazing thing is that guy, he's that, he's that guy.

50:23And so he's him when it comes to public markets. Because when he switched teams, they paid him a bunch of money. And I was like, wow, what a huge stock package for CEOs, like$100 million or whatever the number was. But the stock jumped like$20 billion or something. I'm making up numbers here because I didn't plan to talk about this. But the stock jumped in a disproportionate way based on just the news that this guy was coming over. And so it was a great trade for them to overpay this guy, this talent, because it immediately improved the overall value of the company, just the news of him joining.

50:56And so Vitalik actually was like, just like today we're looking at these as prediction markets, you could actually use this as a decision market, meaning a company or a group of people could basically, in the way that that guy, Theo, paid for a private poll to get information, you could actually set up a prediction market, a decision market and say, should we hire this CEO? Or what will the... Not should we. What will the share price be in six months if we hire Brian Nichols? And if the share price expectation is really high, it tells you in advance without having to hire him yet, what the market reaction is going to be to making this decision.

51:37Does that make sense? And so you can actually create decision markets and it would be worth basically paying participants to go pick a side and make a bet in order to gather information that will help you make a better decision about what you're going to do. And so he's like, you can actually improve judgment if you were to make this decision. And so I thought that was pretty interesting. And he talks about, he goes through how InfoFinance might affect all these other things. So for example, scientific peer review. So right now in science, you submit a paper and there's something called the replication crisis, which is that famous results that end up going to books and in the news or whatever.

52:19Then they can't be reproduced. that study can't be reproduced. It's like, is it even, like the definition of good science is that it's a reproducible experiment. But that's not happening. And in fact, there's not really a big incentive to go reproduce these because the incentive is come out with a new finding, you get published, you get the glory, you get the funding for your lab. Spending your resources to reproduce somebody else's science, somebody else's big news, it's not really a good use of time. And he talks about how prediction markets could actually create incentives for people to go and try to reproduce these studies.

52:52Because you could have people betting on if this is reproducible or not. And so you'd be able to profit off of knowing that this is going to be reproduced or not. So it's pretty interesting to see how that might be applied in all these other ways. I haven't read this other than what you just told me and skimming it here. First of all, this is like an amazing blog post. I need to go read this. Second, if you go to his blog, if you go to like his other posts, he publishes like an in-depth post like every three days. How amazing is this? That we have access to a genius like this who just shares his thoughts.

53:25And by the way, if you read just the headlines and then click the articles, they are not just half-assed blog. These are in-depth things that he's publishing a shit ton. How special of an era do we have where we can go and just read his thoughts? That you get access to this, yeah. And the beautiful thing about his stuff, which is, I think, hard to... Because I was thinking about this with podcasts. it's amazing now that there's podcasts with you know like when we started this I felt like there was a slight differentiator in the business podcast space because we were not just journalists nor were we like never has been we had like done it we had started many companies or we're in the process and we sold companies we had done real things and so that was kind of like a interesting oh what if you actually had a podcast from from entrepreneurs who are actually like more successful than the average podcast I think you're looking for the term for us, by us.

54:19We foobooed it. Yeah. But now you have all in. You have, now you get to see billionaires, you know, doing this. Reid Hoffman has a podcast. You know, Zuck is going on podcasts. Like, who doesn't have a podcast at this point, right? And I think that's really cool. And the same thing is happening in sports. Athlete, current athletes, past athletes now have sports podcasts. Whereas before, the only sports podcast you get was like, you know, hardcore fan in his mom's basement. ranting about his team or a journalist. And now you have this third thing. And the third thing is somebody who's actually been there and done that, who gives their perspective.

54:55Not to say it's always better, but it's interesting that that's now accessible to us. But the problem with something like, let's say, All In or other podcasts like that, is you have to always parse the agenda. So it's like, wow, this guy's really bearish on nuclear and really pro-solar. Then you go look into Shema's profile and it's like, oh, wow, he's made enormous bets on solar. and he's talking his book in a way. And it's okay. It's okay to talk your book, but you have to constantly do that underwriting yourself as a listener to be like, what's the bias here? The beautiful thing about Vitalik is that the guy is such an uber nerd that you can actually take him at face value.

55:34And it's so nice to have somebody you could take at face value. And other people might disagree. I don't care. I take him at face value and I followed this guy for eight years straight now. And this guy's done nothing to make me think he's just trying to pump his bags. In fact, he actively does things against his bags. Not pumping Ethereum or talking about where it lacks or what's slow about it and under-promising what it's going to be. And I think that that's great that we have access to this guy who is not trying to take something from us in the process. That's a very good speech on this guy.

56:07I don't even think you could subscribe to his blog. There's not even an email form. Dude, his blog... So he publishes on... All right, so listen. October 29th, October 26th, October 23rd, October 20th. He's been writing these posts a lot. And those posts that I just said, I just put them into a word counter. One of them was 6 ,000 words. Now, I don't know how Bitcoin works. The dramatic look you just gave me when you said that. I was supposed to audibly gasp. dude that's so much work I've written a lot of blog posts a 6 ,000 word blog post would take me 40 hours probably right it's so much work when you are this guy and you create Ethereum is it one of the things where like you've created it and you can now walk away or is it like a house and you gotta like maintain it no he's actively working on it I mean it's bigger than just him obviously, but yeah, he's actively dedicated his life to this.

57:14You got to re-roof it every once in a while. I don't know how these things work. Like Ethereum, I don't know. Ethereum was like a 10-year roadmap. And so he's just, it's not even re-roofing it. It's like building a hotel one floor at a time and people are staying in the hotel. But you told them from the beginning, this is a 50-story hotel and I haven't even built all those other things that we're going to need in order for this to work. There's no elevators yet. I know. we're going to make elevators. For now, we take stairs. That's like the transaction fees and all that. The reason I'm asking is how on earth is he writing this much stuff while doing a full-time job?

57:47Because Ethereum doesn't work like that. It's not like he's sitting there coding all day or managing people. It's not a company. It's like a non-profit foundation, open source project, of which he's a steward and a champion, but he's not like he doesn't have 25 direct reports. Does he have a girlfriend or wife yet? I'm not sure. I've seen a bunch of pictures, but it's so hard with him to tell what's a meme and what's reality because he's so memeable that when Ethereum price goes down and then they post pictures of him, they're like, God damn it. It's because he has a girlfriend. By the way, is his girlfriend just going to be like, which way is it going to go?

58:23It's November 13th. We're recording this. Exactly one month ago, I came on this podcast and I said, Tim, can I give you my one minute case for Bitcoin? And you literally rolled your eyes and audibly groaned at me and said, haven't you already done that? Are you talking about why you like Bitcoin again? I just want to say, the price is up 47 % since I did that rant. All right. Well, are you like that French dude? Are you the French guy? Were you smart and ballsy? Go back and listen to it. It's in the episode called Did the Creator of Bitcoin Get Unmasked at the 30-minute mark? No, I'm not debating if you said that.

59:04I'm saying, did you make your own? I'm saying, go listen to the case and say, did I get lucky or was I smart? Did I have a reason? No, that's not what I'm asking. What I'm asking is, did you make the bet? Well, of course. What do you mean? Well, what I'm saying is, did you just say it was going to be good or did you actually invest your own money into it? Oh, dude, I'm Polymarket, bro. I was skinning the game. Does gambling on Polymarket mean you have Bitcoin? Well, it's like Polymarket versus a poll. A poll is just saying what you're going to do. Polymarket is putting your money up saying what you think is going to actually happen.

59:35I put my money up and said what I thought was going to happen. Yeah, I mean, it's had a hell of a run. Almost as good as Palantir. Everything's fucking crazy right now, though. Everything's too crazy.

59:48I don't know anything about anything, but it seems like it'd be a good time to make the opposite prediction. So yeah, you were right. It's just like, how long are you going to be right for right now? Everything is just insane. Yeah, yeah. And of course, these are like, you know, one month fluctuations or nothing. But I guess the thing I, the reason I thought it was bullish was because it was the same reason that the thing is pumping right now. Because there was a whole bunch of like big things, like for example, that the government was going to be pro Bitcoin, which was always the biggest risk of Bitcoin was like, oh, even if it's, even if you're right about the technology being better, the government will never allow this.

1:00:27And I was like, the guy who's going to become president is saying not only will he allow it, he's bought and sold by the crypto donors now. And both sides are. And I don't know if you saw the Congress and the whatever House of Representatives, Senate, all that shit. There's like 140 pro-crypto people now in active government, which is like, that number was zero seven years ago. And I just felt like these things were not priced in properly. Now they're talking about a Bitcoin strategic reserve for the country itself. These things, once you go in, it's almost impossible to unwind these things. And I just thought that when a top two or three risk gets de-risked, that should change your underwriting on the price.

1:01:07And I thought that that wasn't happening. For some reason, the price was flat and people weren't paying attention to that one fact. What a world. So in summary, I was right. Thank you. You were right. You absolutely were right. Everything is insane at the moment. I hope your prediction will be true for many, many, many more months and many more years. But it's definitely making me nervous at the moment. Everything is insane. Is that where we end? That's where we end. It's been a fantastic podcast. To Martha Stewart, to Bitcoin, to the Polymarket Whale. That's called Thank You For Your Service.

1:01:36Hot, hot heat. The hot, hot heat was served. You're welcome. All right, that's it. That's the pod.

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