Crypto's Billion Dollar Opportunity Revealed ft. Dan Tapiero

31:53And now all of a sudden you have L2s, you have total Bitcoin L2 volume, that is up 10x this year. And so if I look out over the next two years, the thing that I think could really take off is US-based DeFi. So, you know, DeFi two years ago basically got pushed outside of the US. And so the first step for everybody is, you know, through a centralized exchange, they come on, they're Kraken or Gemini or whatever Coinbase, they buy their Bitcoin. But now, especially Coinbase, Kraken too, now they've made it easy to port over into DeFi. You know, not everyone is going to buy a Ledger and go in through Ledger Live or have MetaMask.

32:38But I do think that once these institutional guys, they're going to own their Bitcoin through the ETF or whatever, they're going to own their Ethereum. They're then going to start to understand as they watch it, as they focus on it, that it's really the decentralized financial world that has the ability to grow. I mean, TVL, total value locked in DeFi is, I think, around$100 billion, which is very small. The total value in the space today, if I add up all the cryptocurrency and all the equities, around$4 trillion. So of that$4 trillion sitting there, only really 2 % of it is actually active in DeFi.

33:19And I think that's going to change. You also were just seeing that tornado cash ruling last night. Yeah, I didn't get a chance to dig into that. So really, they tried to prosecute a person, a developer, for a piece of code, which was the DeFi decentralized finance protocol. And it got thrown out by the cause of appeal, saying you can't prosecute code. And so it's under freedom of speech, code is. And so it just makes DeFi much more doable now. Well, and also don't forget bloody Trump's son has got a DeFi protocol. I mean, if that's not a big enough signal, I don't know what is. Yeah, I know. I tend not to be so, you know, I don't know what the word is.

34:08I don't think everyone only acts for themselves all the time. I mean, it's sort of tedious if you're behaving that way all the time. I do think that there is a bigger vision here now in the U.S. that this is a technology that needs to be harnessed. And I think that, look, it's still a great opportunity. We talked about it for the first time five years ago. We said it was early, but we weren't sure that it was so early. You were hardcore into it in 2012, and I was sort of dabbling it in 13 and 14. but I think now there is this greater, just the beginning of this broader understanding that it really can permeate everything.

34:58And I think one of the first places it's going to start also is in the equity universe. Of course, I'm speaking my own book here a little bit. We have many private companies that we think in the next 18 months could become, you know, potentially public companies. And I'm hoping NASDAQ and the SEC and this whole new regime that come in want to encourage companies that are successful, that are buttoned up, that look like public companies from help and encourage them in a way by not attacking them, but hopefully moving. Yeah. I think there's only really Coinbase and maybe MicroStrategy, but to me that's more of a Bitcoin ARB specific play.

35:46It's not really an operating business. And Galaxy, which is smaller, and Galaxy is 8 billion market cap. Coinbase is 80. so I keep saying that I don't know many things with a 99 % degree of certainty but I know with a 99 % degree of certainty that Coinbase is not going to be the only large public blockchain crypto company in the next five years and you know I think Circle will see and potentially eToro and you know Kraken has been talking about it for a while maybe even Ledger at some point these are companies you know making a few hundred million dollars in revenue and the public has no ability really to get exposure so i think you know yes you own your bitcoin and e maybe you dabble in suey and say and you know a few of the others but for most people who want to have some equity exposure i just it's not possible right it's just not No, I'm sure.

36:48Look, I actually think Coinbase goes up to half a trillion dollars, 500 billion. Me too. I think that's eventually the right number. I mean, that's a great opportunity, but there's plenty more opportunities. The capital markets have been closed to this stuff. The other thing I think is coming is because nobody else has been able to be involved, M &A is coming, whether it's the Web2 companies or the financial industry, because you might as well buy as opposed to try and build from scratch. which that's still a big thing. Yeah, we're involved right now in several different transactions. I'm not going to talk about them, but my whole team is sort of activated in this way.

37:29So there are several companies that we have. Some of them are ones that we own both sides. And there are also introductions that we've made in the whole 1RT, 10D universe. And, you know, we invested in 24 companies, you know, deployed over 1.2 billion. So we have board representation on 12 of these companies. So it's very easy for us in the middle to act as a go-between, you know, put companies together. I mean, I wouldn't say it's very easy. It's easy to make an introduction. It's not easy to necessarily facilitate it. But, you know, we're doing our best in that regard. You broadened out... um the types of businesses you invest in you know you've gone to very much more web3 businesses as well things like um you know in the nft ecosystem you know around the animoca stuff you've invested in you know the guys here in cayman leaden who are bitcoin lending which is super interesting yeah um and you've also yourself i think and as part of this whole dan industrial complex um have been involved in the new, what's it called?

38:45Zen Rock. So that's really interesting. The Dan Industrial Complex. This is what it is. That's funny. No, we just closed. We had a smaller secondaries fund that we raised for the last sort of nine months. We've been buying the secondary stock. I try to buy in the companies where I have board seats and I have good visibility. but is really in the ecosystem. We have a special sits component. We're raising our own SPAC now as well in this board fund, potentially the SPAC companies in our area. Very interesting. Is the SPAC market open yet? Well, apparently. Well, I don't know if it is in the way that it was in 21, like a gorge fest, but I think selectively it's a great way to bring companies public in a shorter period of time and, you know, et cetera.

39:43There are pluses and minuses versus an IPO. And then Zenrock is a company we transformed that we had invested in Credo. We bought it. It ran into some problems. We bought it out of administration, restructured it, refocused it. And the core tech is this multi-party computation tech, which is the next level of security after multi-sig. We have our own tech. We built it over four and a half years. And I had just always thought this would be the backbone to decentralized custody. So four or five years ago, I had this. I love this concept of not having your assets custody in a single place, like Fireblocks.

40:29They do a great job, but it's a single place. When you have your Bitcoin that's wrapped, that's moving around to DeFi, it's generally historically been just in BitGo. And so I thought, well, this company had come up with the idea of not having your Bitcoin in a single source, having it stored in the network. And to me, that was just like an incredible concept to be able to, you know, because I'd been in the gold, physical gold sales and storage business. and I always thought of some of the storage businesses in the digital space as like the vaults of cyberspace. And then I thought, well, what if you can actually hold your digital assets not in a single vault, but you can hold it in many vaults at the same time?

41:18And so this tech allows for that. And I just thought, well, what can we really, what can we do with that? What more can we do with that? And we came up with this idea of, and this is our first product, and it's going to be launched in a few weeks called Zen BTC, which will be the first decentralized yield bearing wrapped Bitcoin product. Where does the yield come from? Okay, so that's... It's always the question, right? It's always the question. And it'll come from the validators. It'll also come from MEV. It'll come from Eigenlayer. And this is where I traditionally hand off the specifics of where the deal comes from to Randy Little, who is partner of mine and CEO of business.

42:10It's not a huge amount of yield, but it will be a few percentage points. If we go back to our very first part of our conversation, we would talk about friends of ours who have billions and billions and billions of dollars of Bitcoin. They've never had yield. They've never been able to do anything with it. Well, they may have a lot of yields. They may not. Well, they don't need yields, yeah. I get it. But there's plenty of Bitcoin in the system that could do with a yield, and it's great collateral. It's the best collateral in the system. Yeah, and to have the Bitcoin stored not in a single place, it just always struck me as weird that the Bitcoin for WBTC is stored at BitGo.

42:54It's just one place. And so people who move around in DeFi, I wouldn't think they're the people who would want their Bitcoin in one place, single point of failure. And so it takes a little bit of sort of magic, I think. I kind of see it's like a little magical, the tech, to make this happen. But I think it's, look, DeFi is going to explode. Bitcoin is exploding. Bitcoin is collateral. if we can do something a little different and offer yield in a conservative way I think that's you know that's just a bonus but yeah we went to where we fully operate Zenrock and Zenrock Labs that is launching this product and we actually have a token launch that's I think it's Friday can you believe we have a business that we have actually and it's taken months and months and months This is very cool.

43:54Who'd have thought you'd be doing this, right? Oh, no. I know the ROC token. I mean, the ROC token, we're having our TGE token generation event. It's going to be key to our sort of ecosystem. And look, I think if we can get just a little bit of TVL in ZemBTC, it really becomes something that will become a big focus for us. So, you know, part of the reason I shifted a little bit into that was that, you know, growth equity, which is sort of first 24 investments that we made, companies generally investing more than 50 with over 50 million in revenue. You know, for the last 18 months, there really hasn't been a single proper large growth deal.

44:39I mean, zero. And my specific areas are not venture like BC and later these more developed companies really got hurt by the SPF FTX debacle because he plugged a lot of the growth investors into stock and they got killed. And these are people who were successful in the old world, massive firms, you know, Tomo Bravo. And I don't know, you know, Silver Lake, Tiger, Kotu, Tomasik, all of these very large. They didn't get hurt just in FTX, but they invested at very high multiples, 50 to 80 times revenue in some cases, in these crypto blockchain businesses that, you know, promised the world and didn't deliver.

45:29and I think they really soured on the space. So the capital has not come back into the growth equity space just yet. I think it's coming. I think we'll start to see some deals. As you mentioned, M &A, we have companies that we think are ready to be brought public. But the venture side, the venture space has come back. I mean, it's, you know, the most risky things in our space are exploded. I mean, it's and the VCs doing seed and pre-seed things that's been ongoing. But the larger companies still are suffering from the fallout, you know, the reputational fallout. The space, you know, the space's reputation was damaged for those external, you know, larger$50 billion funds, 100 billion U.S.

46:22pension funds or larger institutional entities that were sort of duped into some of the fraudulent names. Look, there still is a little bit of a Wild West component to the space. I do feel like we are pioneers. I've said this to you before. It's like 1840 and we're heading west and we're pioneers. And there are all sorts of dastrally dudes. And, you know, all sorts of people are out to get you. And, you know, it's like you're going out to dig for gold and you find a little gold. And then, you know, all of a sudden someone tries to rob you. And so, I mean, it's it's it's there's a little bit of that.

46:57I think we're moving away from that. But you get things like FTX and they're the poster child. So anyway, this next bull phase, I think we're going to see, I'm thinking at least 160, 180 ,000 Bitcoin, you know, eight, nine, 10 ,000 Ethereum. I mean, I'm being conservative. Solana probably could double from here. I've always thought that even a year or two years ago, sort of 150 to 180 was my target based on the way things have moved in previous bears to bulls the last three cycles. I don't know if you have any. Our companies, by the way, are all kicking butt. I didn't get into that. But I mean, almost all of them are near record revenue or will be in the next few months.

47:50My general view is I hate the conservative numbers, and I think it's always good to anchor yourselves on those, particularly when you're building a business. um i think for me the base case the the the base case is kind of 250 so 150 low side 250 normal 450 blow off 2017 site by the end of 25 yeah so you know don't forget i was 2017 2017 yeah i sold out at 2000 in just before that the usual tax season where it falls in like march april may june right i sold out 2000 it went up 10x in four months at the end of the year 10x those are smaller numbers we can't go up 10x no but that's why i'm saying that's why i'm saying saying listen it's possible to go up 3x in in the last part of the cycle if we get a very strong cycle that's all i'm saying is i think that tail is is because people have so much ptsd i think it's underpriced i'm not saying it's my base case but you know how much value will be added to the digital i think your number of 10 trillion is yeah i think it's i think 10 trillion is underestimating for this cycle i think it's close to 12 12 13 something like that this cycle um i think your you know your whole 10t idea is going to sound hilariously outdated very soon it brings me right back to the beginning the first uh thing i we we discussed you can tell where somebody entered the space because 10t will be a joke it wasn't when it was 300 billion in 2019, 30x people were like, they're nuts, there's no way.

49:42But yeah, I think 10 will be too small by far, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think by within 10 years, if I just follow the log regression channel of market cap, or use a Bitcoin version and impute something out of it, I get to 100 trillion by 2034. Now, that makes sense because all other assets are 100, 200, 300 trillion. A lot of assets are going on to this. It's going to be a lot of activity. I don't think that's wildly wrong. That kind of suggests we're only 3 % there because it's 3 trillion today. It's like - What was that first call you had? Did you call for Bitcoin? What was that very first one in that article?

50:27So I said, I think it's worth a million. It's worth 700 ounces of gold at the time. What year was that? That was 2013. And I said, I'm going to discount myself by 90 % because this sounds stupid to call for a million dollar Bitcoin when it's 200. So I'm going to say 100 grand. So we hit my original target from 11 years ago. And I still think we'll hit the other target, which is now 700 ounces of gold is now two and a bit million dollars. so i do think somewhere and that was a bad math calculation random numbers based on stock to flow but it kind of feels about right you know i think yeah that sounds about right you know yeah i i i wonder you know it's interesting because we're talking about these big numbers and of course you've got michael sailor out there who's you know taken a cycle out of uh air out of the room um And rightfully so.

51:24I think he's, you know, he's been incredible for this space. But I haven't sort of sensed as much enthusiasm yet as in previous cycles. Right? Like, I don't feel somehow, I don't know, maybe it's because some of these altcoins, et cetera, are still down 90%. If you look at some of them, you know, not Ripple, which has now exploded, but, you know, some of these. Yeah, we haven't had, we just started to sit in the last two weeks where things are doing 50 % in a day. You know, that's what brings in retail. And I know from my WhatsApp messages that people are coming back, but these were, I'm only getting back last cycle people and not new cycle people yet.

52:13So we're not above where we were in 21 in terms of emotion and this and that. I mean, it's very, it's very, I mean, if you're new to this space, you might think, oh, it's crazy. It's this, it's that. It feels very tempered. People feel like, I feel like ho-hum. Someone told me, we have some companies where the founders have been in the companies they founded seven, eight, nine years ago, and they are really tired. Yeah. It's a tough market to be in, right? As I always say, it trades five times as long as the S &P per year, right? Because it's 24-7, 365. The S &P is only eight hours a day or whatever it is.

53:01and so every one year in the old world is like five years in our world and if you started a business nine years ago and you lived through you know three bulls and three bears uh that's you know that's like 40 years in the old world and so we have you know founders that are interested to sell their businesses even though you know you'd look at them and you'd say well why are you Why are you interested? This is the greatest business ever. You're kicking butt. You're making a huge amount of money. And they just say, you know, like they started it from zero and now maybe they have a billion dollars in it or whatever the number is.

53:43So I feel like the volatility in this space is really, really chews people up. It does. Particularly, Dan, you know this because you see it. Building a business in a very volatile asset means that your cost base has to become flexible. That's the hardest part, right? The hardest part is the cyclicality of your revenues versus your cost base, which means every time you have a down cycle, you spend 18 months of firing people. So that is really hard. Or you never hire them on the up move, which is kind of, you know, you try to game it a little bit. right? You do, but it's hard. I mean, I was with one of the blockchain, one of the centralized exchange guys at Barry Silvert's thing.

54:32They're just, they're like, we're done. We just can't do, you know. You mean tired? Tired. That's like in their mid-30s who are just wiped from 10 years. We fired 77 % of our staff and now we're having to rebuild again. And now we're desperately trying to hire staff and it's like you know this is just too hard it's difficult i agree i wonder you know look i think the volatility sort of going forward next 10 years can't possibly be what it's been the last 10 years but you know the way markets work everyone always gives up at the exact wrong time always always like you i mean it's it's almost it's so good and it's like bitcoin eth right now right that cross you've been pointing it out it was like i'm not watching the cross i just watch the price okay well i'm watching the cross and just hearing people just capitulate like it's a piece of shit it's never going anywhere they've screwed it up vitalics a moron i'm like we've seen this all before right and at 2500 it was really low 2700 a few weeks ago i started looking at it and i just thought this is way too cheap with Bitcoin at 80 ,000.

55:46This is ridiculous. And I started putting out some tweets. I tweeted something last night, like ETH not dead. They kept saying ETH. And there's such like rivalry or, you know, tribal behavior. Tribal behavior is always wrong. It's just like buying at an emotional extreme when you feel great is always wrong. You know, selling when you are feeling bad is always So it just felt like, you know, the ETH community, I guess at the moment, doesn't really have a sailor. You know, it doesn't have a guy out there, you know, with an enormous amount of energy. I mean, you know, Vitalik's a programmer. He's, you know, he's thinking about stuff, you know, the nuts and bolts, as are some of the other core people.

56:35And I think it will be the financial system. I think suddenly they'll be going, oh, so-and-so's building on this layer too, and so-and-so's doing this. And then people go, oh, I get it now. My thesis was that they just overbuilt block space for where we were, but that was forward planning for a future because we're going to need a lot of block space. And Ethereum is very secure. It's interoperable across a whole bunch of EVM stuff, and nobody gets fired for building on it. And so it'll be fine. It'll be just fine. You know, the question really is, you know, over the next year or two, during this next bull phase, is there anything that we see growing?

57:21You're the exponential guy. Exponentially that we're not really focused on right now. Like is there, do you have one of those outlier ideas, maybe something that's starting to creep? I think, listen, the one that I think is probably the biggest of all in terms of numbers, outside of like gaming and stuff we all know about, it's ID. It's digital ID and proof of AI, proof of humanity. It's this idea that you're saying of the security truth layer of blockchain is going to become, it's very, very important. um now i know world coin are doing it i met another group recently doing it but ledger is working on something also that's right ledger's got this is their one of their big ideas i i think that's wildly underpriced because how are we going to monetize that i mean how it's just we're markets guys right like i it's so much easier for me to you know figure out how a business can work to I would just say it's just on-chain activity, just owning the token of the chain.

58:35The business, look, I don't know. They'll figure something out, but that's less interesting to me than bringing 385 million Americans and forcing them into using zero-knowledge proof of who you are for all of the U.S. government infrastructure. I mean, that creates a lot of activity. driving licenses all of that kind of stuff you know so i think that's something that's an area is it investable for you maybe maybe not don't know um i think you're right that defy is still wildly underpriced um i think big pools of capital like apollo blackstone you know these huge pools will lend into these markets now because it's just lending markets they know how to do this but they've not been able to.

59:27So we can see a massive amount of liquidity coming into these. Yeah, I love the lending, borrowing lending business because no one wants to sell their Bitcoin. So it's obvious, it makes sense. The other one that... Yeah, I was just saying every cycle we get hit with something that we never anticipated. You were involved in the art and the NFT stuff. Does that come back? Yeah, I mean, it's already happening. the high end of the art market is ripping and there's very little available already. Okay. Because it's a recycling of wealth, right? You know the art market well. As soon as people make money, they buy art.

1:00:06And that whole thesis plays out here. And if I'm right, it goes from$3 trillion to$100 trillion in value. Even if I'm wrong by 50%, that's a lot of wealth, a huge, preposterous amount of wealth. And art will benefit, as it always does. So that one's a decent idea. The other thing that we do need to, let me know if you've seen this yet, is an exchange essentially wrapping equities and other assets. FTX did a bit of it, but that's going to generate a lot. I think Figure is thinking about it. You know, Mike Cagney's firm. Yeah. I think. Or Nasdaq do it instead. Kraken has talked about it. Yeah, they were looking at buying a brokerage at one point, a traditional brokerage.

1:00:52We talked about it. I think the two worlds come together. So I don't think the old world just disappears. Maybe people with an old world mentality disappear. But I think that it can't. There's too much. It's hundreds and hundreds of trillions. Robinhood are probably in a unique situation to do that. Robinhood could be doing it. They've got 24-7 equity trading. So there's no reason why that can't go on chain. And then you've got this storage of equities. and all of gets rid of all of those bloody middlemen you know what it is it's just the digitization of ownership right it's allowing people to own all different kinds of things right you know just what's up sorry a lot because go back about seven years seven or eight years ago and we're you're over here in the cayman looking at buying gold vaults and yeah i was and now you You own crypto storage companies, custody companies.

1:01:50I know. And it's so different than that physical. Remember, you and I went to that bank. We look at their vault, measuring it up. Can we get gold in? How the world has changed, right? Physical ownership is so different. Yeah. Yeah, but who's going to warrant a little kerfuffle there? Well, it was just so old compared to today. I know. It is funny. maybe we'll be doing this on Mars 10 years from now, right? I really think, you know, I can't think of any single person that's been able to, I know we're jumping around a lot today to different topics, but if you just think about, you know, we always, our job really is to think about the future, what's happening, assess the risk and reward of it.

1:02:41But it's incredible how one person has been able to shape so much. I mean, he bought Twitter that was just like yesterday, essentially. And that was a real vehicle that was tweeting every 10 seconds. And they're interesting, good tweets. And then he's running these companies. And he basically, his goal in life is to make us a multi-planetary species. And he's starting with Mars. So I don't know the science behind it. but I you know I'm thinking like that maybe really is a thing I I have a lot of wilder theses about this but the guy's not human you know even in the in the humor in the humorous way of not human how do you run Tesla SpaceX the largest private satellite communication business a robotics company a car company a boring company a um a neuro company then run Twitter and be one of the largest tweeters and now the US government.

1:03:47What about that video game thing? He's apparently the number one video game guy on that video game. Oh yeah. This is not normal, Dan. I'm sorry. I know what you're saying. You're saying it's abnormal. I know it's abnormal. This is unparalleled. I even asked chat GPT, I said, has anybody ever done anything like this before across so many industries and dominated them? and every single major bet he's ever taken. He's like, he said, nothing is, there's nobody compared. Across the broad range of technologies and industries, there's no comparable person in history. And I know people might not like him or not.

1:04:23I don't care. This guy has made more, everything on the line bets and won every single time than any person I've ever seen. Well, he's, you know, in our generation, he's clearly the sort of most productive, top thinking active uh guy see there's hope for us people in our 50s yeah he's the same age as us he's a bit younger than me he's probably about the same as you yeah there's there's lots of uh it's interesting how different he is also from the boomer uh you know it's yeah there is a there is a a transition there and he's and he's out there pumping doge and i mean it's just the funniest thing that we have this doge department which started as a joke on twitter it's like we're living in the twilight zone right like elon you should do doge and department of what there's one guy who came up with the idea that's right it's like your banana thing is now on his rocket ships i mean on his spaceship yeah look his rockets have a picture of your banana it's the craziest this thing like what what world are we in i know it's i know and you know he is you know and i know he is going to integrate dogecoin into the whole payments platform of x of course he will yeah yeah into x i thought you were going to say the u.s government i don't know about no not the u.s government but into x yeah for fun first the hell of it the guy's got a sense of humor about the whole thing and that's what you know i think people are really drawn to that too it's kind of it's elon's world and we live in it somebody said that it's like we live in a massive game and he's the main he's the only character in the game we're just non-player characters in the game but it's kind of true he's like oh i think it's funny if we if we create doge to be the world's biggest currency call it the government department over it stick bananas on a rocket i mean he doesn't care He just doesn't care.

1:06:22You know that one where people, the bigger sponsors were leaving Twitter and he basically said, F you, you can F off or F you. He said it like 10 times in a row. You saw that on. Yeah, that was the Bob Iger from Disney. Fuck you, Bob. It was like, wow. Right, because he was right and he has conviction and he continues to sort of shape our world more than certainly anybody else I know. I don't know why we've digressed onto this, but it is supposed to be some psychological, sociological, historical shift that's happening now that feels very different than any other time in my life. It's not just Carter to Reagan, which felt like a massive shift.

1:07:15this is you know yes the end of sort of wokeness i feel like he's going that that whole trend is over there's some sort of new but it's like a new zeitgeist that's being put forward yeah the technologists have taken over the white house that's what it is that's what it is the accelerationist and technologists yeah i don't know if you've you probably haven't had time yet mark andresen was on joe rogan last night for three hours i missed that okay watch it yeah he is grinning like a kid yeah he's like this is the greatest fucking time because they were all involved all of the crypto packs were involved elon was involved jd vance's a xvc vivek the whole it is all an accelerationist government so this is why we have never had a government of this type um ever i don't think anywhere in the world yeah for sure yeah so this whole exponential age idea this is that we finally have accelerationists exponentialists running the government the government has always been terrible uh you know i always say trump he's the first president we ever had that actually you were the S &P 500 closed every day.

1:08:35And, you know, that to me was valuable. He had a sense for the market. And now we are super. So what you're picking up. At guys, and it feels, everything feels completely different. And everything that felt bad in the last four years feels gone. It literally feels gone. It feels. This was what Mark Andresen was exactly saying. He's like. it just it's all it just overnight i i don't know what the so we've had a rev we've had a revolution or a mutiny or whatever you want to call it right an overthrow of government by technologists to say this is the one way forward right this is the elon thing is like we must move we must move forward that's i think we're picking up is it is a the biggest wholesale change it's not at the margin change.

1:09:26This is a complete redirection. It's been developing. I mean, you know, many people, and I sort of feel myself in this group too, but many people, the last few years were really dissatisfied. And, you know, that woke mind virus thing that Elon talks about, it was really real if you lived in America. And, you know, I, you know, you really felt it. I'm on, you know, I've been on the board of my school for 16 years now, and you really felt that it it it was changing things the ivy league schools have become terrible i mean disastrous like i my school brown i don't even know what happened to it it turned into this extremist left-wing kind of thing it was bad before but it just became absurd and now it just seems like that's just the tip of the iceberg of the change it's a philosophical goal you know it's not about left or right well a left or right thing it's a complete restructuring of world view and how we the next election will be voted on technology it's not a left or right thing you're right look at the administration there are many and that that one tweet that he has uh that i think is phenomenal that's what was it we were once all democrats and it's a picture of Trump, Kennedy, Elon.

1:10:46I forgot who the fourth person was. Gabbard. Oh, was it? Okay, so it was the four of them. And that's true. I mean, I was never a Democrat. So I'm just saying, it's incredible that... Yeah, Andreessen was a Democrat. Ben Holwich was a Democrat. They were all Democrats. They were all of them. And now they've come together under the Republican Party because the concept, I think, really of freedom, I think that's what this is. There's a little bit of a libertarian streak to this because, you know, with Kennedy, et cetera, I think people were just sick and tired of being told what to do. You know, the regulation that came into, you know, post-08 in the financial system, people were being told how to think, what bathrooms they could go into all this kind of thing it just got too much and the technology guys are all about freedom freedom of information movement right not being stuck in any one area right a lot of the digital nomad concept um so i think that's that's really so if we think about that in the future.

1:12:02How does that play out? Well, my view on this is the next election is fought over. Don't forget, AI is going to be AGI by then. The world is very different. And there's going to be one group that are like, slow down. We don't want this. And another group say, let's keep going to Mars. Wait a second. Hold on a second. Did we just get rid of the slowdown rule. Was this election not right or left, but not slowdown? No, I think we perceived it, or those who were more futurist-minded saw that. Elon forced it through, but the other party were fighting a different election. They were fighting the left-wing ideology versus the right-wing ideology.

1:12:53This was not that bad. We're fighting up. Exactly. And so the next battle will be whoever defines, you know, how much can age, how much can, what rights do AI have? Yeah, but who is going to be reactionary on this? Like who, what group is going to be? Oh, Christ. Look at that. There's an accident. There has to be something that if things accelerate, there's an accident. Of course there wouldn't be, Dan. All of those people who say, oh, look, the accident, you know what it's like? it's like the people in 1915 who said oh we can't all have cars because a car killed somebody on the road and therefore we should stay with our horses and that that is the thing that we're going to have some sort of accident and then you have all those people hand-wringing who don't want to you know push ahead right that's right and it will be to do with ai changing jobs structures as well correct could be people start losing jobs it's like well well we don't want them to take over us it's like pro the the ai and against the ai and the robots coming people don't realize amazon i think now employs more robots than humans and it keeps accelerating so that they are coming so that societal shift is going to be very problematic people don't realize it yet but it's going to be very problematic it's the the risk takers against the risk aversion people yes and also the people who are optimistic and say it will we will figure it out of course we'll make mistakes and there'll be some big messes but over time progress makes humanity better and another group will say it's going too fast we can't keep up we don't want it look this is this is definitely right now feels to me the most optimistic best most like yeah most optimistic about the future time i want to say almost ever i mean that i recall in the u.s since the 1970s i mean there were moments where things were you know good or you had a positive outlook but this is this is crazy i i honestly i have never then I can feel it and you can see it and the and just people's reactions and the energy that's pent up that's being let out and so I yeah what probably happens is we just go to an extreme so you know the 20s were a great period the 1920s maybe it's the 2020s and we have a rip roaring period into 2029 and then we have a market that crashes 60 percent and then all the hand come out and they say, oh, you see all this innovation and it just led to a crash.

1:15:39And they forget that, of course. You know, my view is that the underlying structure of the economy changes belong to 2030 in ways we don't understand. And so I think if there's a probability of a blow-off bubble cycle, it's between now and 2029. This is it. I think this is it. You're all in max long everything the most you know future focused stuff and we're going to leave a lot of people behind a lot um and it's going to feel bad but you know the people we're leaving behind now we need them they're going to be the buyers in 28 and 29 they will panic i'm for it's human nature you know after at the top someone always has to do that yeah um but honestly i i i'm gonna watch the andresen thing because uh you know i you know it's right up your street you like it yeah but i look i i i feel it i sense it it's why i moved into this area i think all the exciting growth this year and i always say this anybody under 30 should be you know who's interested in financial matters you know or value or economic issues um should be in the space but then it's across the board it's interesting because i get lots of as you will lots of friends kids like can you speak to little johnny about what he wants to do he's at university studying whatever and he wants to go and work for goldman or yeah work for hedge fund so i get them and say look do not work in an industry that is in a secular decline yeah yeah that's got this amazing industry that's growing at 100 % a year at a minimum.

1:17:17It's all about finance and trading, but it's the future. Just please go and do this instead. Yeah, I have one of those once a week as well. Listen, Dan, fantastic conversation as ever. And yeah, good to touch base. We just seem to do these every six months or so just to check in. I can't remember what last six months was, but it could not have been anything like this six months. No, don't forget. It's very sideways. We had a lot of sideways. Six months from now, I think it could really be gangbusters. Yeah, I think so. This is 2025 is going to be an interesting year. So I think your numbers are too conservative, and I think there's a higher probability of the right tail, a slightly blow-off-y cycle, not the big blow-off cycle, not the 29 cycle.

1:18:08That's what's in my head, but you never know. We have to see what liquidity does as well. All right, my friends, good to see you and we'll chat soon. So hopefully you enjoyed the conversation with Dan. It's always a wide ranging conversation. There's definitely a shift in the landscape. Many of the roadblocks for crypto have been cleared. Institutions now don't have a reason not to do it. Yes, the regulation is not set yet, But a lot of the hurdles are all gone. And the world will start shifting faster and faster to this new technology and these new rails. And it's there for us as an opportunity to unfuck all of our futures.

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