James and Tim Solve the Student Loan Debt Crisis and Make a Billion Dollars

0:00Look, as a manager of people, as an employer, as an entrepreneur, and as an investor in startups, I can tell you the most important thing for your business is the quality of the quality of people. you hire. The best part is that great candidates are already on LinkedIn. Employees hired through LinkedIn are 30 % more likely to stick around for at least a year compared to those hired through the leading competitor. And I will tell you that the great thing about LinkedIn is that you're not just looking at random people. You're able to see the people who your friends and trusted peers and colleagues who they trust and who they've hired in the past and who they recommend.

0:42And hiring doesn't have to be complicated. Realistically, when you have a business to run, you don't want to spend hours on hiring. You want to hire the right person as quickly as possible. That's why LinkedIn Jobs AI Assistant suggests immediately 25 great big candidates daily so you can invite them to apply and keep things moving. Hire right the first time. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash altature. then promote it to use LinkedIn Jobs' new AI assistant, making it easier and faster to find the top candidates. That's linkedin.com slash Altachirk. Post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

1:26Okay, Tim Collins and I solved basically the main problems of the world on this episode with what I think is a great business idea. Solves all the problems of student loan debt. Solves really any kind of debt. Might solve inflation. I'd love to know what you think of it. And also, we have a call for participants in this episode. So here we go. The ultimate business idea that solves every problem in the world.

2:01This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher Show.

2:17Tim, let me ask you a question. With these runes, Ben was saying you could make a meme coin, like Dogecoin, I guess on the Bitcoin blockchain with these runes. Right now, I can make a meme coin in seconds using Solana, for instance. You could go to pump.fund and spin one up quickly and throw it out there and hope that you hit the bonding curve and you get funding and you hit the$70 ,000 market cap that you need to launch and go at it. Of course, it might take you 15 or 20 or 30 tries to make that happen. And chances are it's going to be liquidated as quickly as you make it. So yeah, you can. What do you mean liquidated?

3:00basically everybody that went in the bonding curve that gave you the money ends up selling their tokens as quickly as possible on any pump if you will or any push higher in value and look to get out I mean I follow that stuff every day and I just watch them in 15 minutes go up and down up and straight back down to zero so like an example is dogecoin is a meme coin so it's a coin that really has no value no fun no utility there's no use case for it you can buy a Tesla with it remember right well well that's just it like like because elon musk has sort of blessed dogecoin and ended up having value like did the founders of dogecoin make like a billion dollars each i have no idea how much they made but uh usually on founders you know you're keeping some back for the team you know you're you're gonna burn whatever you burn out of your you're gonna burn your lp or you're gonna vest it and most of the earlier guys they vested as opposed to burn which is a much better way to go because then you can sell in the future instead of just destroying.

4:01But with meme coins, I mean, meme coins, the same thing. All the value comes down to cultural values, you know, kind of social value, comedic value. Come on, you should understand that as a comedian. But with runes, the difference is like BRC20s aren't nearly as efficient and it becomes clunky. They take space. They're more expensive overall to be in existence. Runes is using the same UTXO. And again, this is a little bit above my technical knowledge, but it's using the same idea as what we saw in Ordinals, where there's this discovery of, hey, you can create tokens out of this. And not only can you create tokens in a single transaction, You can include multiple tokens and you can define how many tokens of the James coin I want on this and the Tim coin and the J coin and the Ben coin.

5:03And I can put these all on there together or I can have them individualized and I can send a portion of the coins or I can send a lot. There is going to be a learning curve on this, though, because if you do do something wrong at the beginning when you're setting it up, poof, it's just gone and there's no getting it back. whereas with other coins if when you're creating them if you make a mistake you you get a failed transaction in this case your failed transaction means it just goes away it's gone and it's like hey thanks thanks for trying but you know there's no coin now were you telling me i think it was you who was telling me about some investor that you had worked with on some project where it was basically a kid who had made 30 million dollars on some meme coin so yeah there was uh it was actually a venture capitalist and there was a teenager that that made almost 35 million dollars and that was back during a little bit more during the ico boom and into the mean coins i mean just recently i've seen people that i know that i've met once or twice in real life that have been they're really good about posting their trades online and um it was the emfer coin that came out and that had been linked to a prior NFT project.

6:19And they actually did a really, really unique drop in that everybody that had been involved in the NFT projects received some of the token. Well, the token took off. It went from virtually starting at zero up to, I want to say,$18 or$20. And there were people that jumped in it when it first came out. And the market cap was virtually nothing. and the market cap, I think, peaked around$35 million at the time when it first came out. And they bought into it when the market cap was$50 ,000 or$20 ,000. You know, guys that turned$500 and$700 into hundreds of thousands of dollars in hours. And we've seen that happen.

7:03And I think you're going to see some of those opportunities again come up in ruins, especially that the fact that this is going to be so new one I'm telling you there's going to be mistakes you're you're going to see hundreds of thousands of dollars and at some point just lost because somebody codes it wrong I'm telling you it's going to happen whether it makes public knowledge I don't know but it will make its way around the community at some point and we actually saw that happen with an ethereum contract on an nft where um they coded it wrong and locked up tens of millions of dollars and it was locked in the contract it was in an infinite loop and nobody nobody's ever gotten that money it's gone um you know that's something like that's gonna happen again in in ruins but ruins are gonna make altcoins mean coins and yeah the terminology shit coins uh great again on the bitcoin blockchain i mean i mean that one that had 35 million in value was there any utility to it at all like was there any use for it uh no there hasn't been anything specifically stated it was um linked to a very very popular uh twitter founder who goes by Satoshi on Twitter.

8:23And that community was, you know, it's a top 10. Some people argue top five community in terms of projects wise, very, very vocal community, very supportive. The floor always stayed relatively stable. But yeah, you just, you had, it's that same notion right now. Meme coins run based on the wow factor, the me factor, marketing. I mean, it's all about – it's an attention economy. So what was it, two weeks ago? It was just cats. I keep thinking, though, that eventually there's going to be use cases that are unforeseen. So, for instance, every company could potentially have their own coin and like, you know, Crest toothpaste could have Crest coin.

9:17And the idea is, is as marketing, it's like frequent flyer miles. But the problem with frequent flyer miles, I can't trade American Airlines frequent flyer miles for Delta frequent flyer miles or a Starbucks cup of coffee. But like when, when, when all these things, when, when these kinds of marketing programs enter the crypto world, they're tradable and people are going to, once one company does it, every company in that industry is going to have to do it because those marketing miles or coins are going to be more valuable. It is closer than you think, because you know, I get pitched a lot of deals and I hear a lot of deals and I can tell you that I'm hearing deals that are getting really, really close to this, looking at the loyalty rewards program and ownership in it, transference in it, but it hasn't quite gotten across the line yet.

10:13And the reason being companies haven't bought into it. So while you have, and I'm talking about the big companies, they haven't bought into the idea. Delta doesn't want you trading their miles for American miles. Delta doesn't, but imagine, imagine Uber wants to make rewards points and they want, so they basically want people to buy Uber coin that they then use to, let's say buy rides at a discount and drivers are the miners of uber coin so they get paid uh the more people the more rides that they give uber would love this because they want to incentivize their drivers to drive because uber driver uber drivers are very unhappy people in general because of their pay and you know lyft will you know and if uber makes this tradable for things like bitcoin ethereum that makes them even that makes them it real money it makes it Like, you know, because then Bitcoin's tradable for Tether and the dollar.

11:11So it makes these things valuable in a way that frequent flyer miles never were. And then once Uber does it, of course, Lyft has to immediately do it to compete. And it creates, it actually is an interesting mechanism for lowering inflation. You have Uber Eats as well. And so all of a sudden, all the restaurants that participate in Uber Eats could take the Uber coin. And again, you get a small discount if you're using that. And you can create that kind of decentralized ecosystem if you do it that way. In a way, this would prevent or slow the inflation of the US dollar because you're creating new currencies.

11:54So you're crowding out old currencies. You're creating new currencies for specific use cases. Like, and you can create, I mean, imagine this is an idea I had back when I wrote my article about New York City. But one thing that New York City could have done a couple of years ago is create New York City coin to encourage tourism to come back to New York City. Like, you can basically mine New York City coin as either a store owner or a store customer in Times Square, say. and and they're all it's tradable on exchanges but it's all redeemable to one new york city coin for one dollar in five years it's all redeemable so you can make almost like a a stable coin but with a uh it's not redeemable for five years so uh people have five years to mine it and and the increase in taxes you know what could be fun with the tourist thing is then hey you have the coin now if you go visit the statue of liberty and you scan this qr code it'll allow you to stake at the statue of liberty for so long and now you know you have anything that charges money now all of a sudden if i stake there i can get a little a little reward for every time somebody goes there and uses the token and spends money there and you create a revenue share i mean you could get really creative with this i think what scares people away right now is regulation is is still in the wild wild west and so without any rules behind this like you see all these shit coins launching and if the sec i was i was actually talking to a mutual fund about a mutual friend about all these shit coins and and he was asking me how is this legal and i said well if the sec ever actually looks at this it won't be because this is just hey i'm gonna raise capital and you know i'm not giving you anything and it might go to zero it might not and right there would have to be some difference between like a a meme coin like a shit coin that has no value and like a marketing coin right you need to because you're still you are issuing a security that could buy something it really is kind of a security correct but really it's a commodity as opposed to a security um and therefore because like look if i have oil oil a barrel of oil it's considered a commodity right but i can exchange that i can sell that for money it's it's one of those things as i would look at it more of more like gold more like oil as opposed to more like a shares of microsoft you're right so it doesn't represent ownership right so i think it falls more into cftc you know commodities future trading commission as opposed to the sec which gives a lot more flexibility.

14:37I guess if I was tokenizing, like, let's say, oh, I'm going to, I'm going to sell off 10 % of my next 20 years of future income. And then I issue a million coins, a million James coins that can, that every year, if you own a James coin, you get literally airdropped 10 % of my pro rata, 10 % of my income, depending on how much. Actually, you would, you would put that, You would put that 10 % of your income into a liquidity pool. That way people can either sell or not. And what happens is when they sell, you would burn the coin and then that would reduce the number of coins going forward. And if you made more money the next year, not only does the value increase for those people, but there's less tokens.

15:20So it increases even more. And you create a gamification now of somebody making a judgment of, is James going to make more or less next year? Did he cap out this year? Should I cash in or should I hold? And if I know half the people are going to cash in this year, well, now if he makes more next year, I proportionately make more. You know, it becomes algorithmic more. See, I think that right there, what you said, this solves the student loan debt problem. It absolutely does. I've been arguing this for like two years now that this is how students should face it coming out and selling future income and gamifying it.

16:00It could be a it would be a fucking blast. Yeah. Overall, it creates a whole insurance industry around just ensuring what happens if something happens to this person, if they become disabled, if God forbid they pass away. If they move out of the country and you can no longer collect income from them, you have this whole little insurance pool that you could create. But you gamify it with a five-year, 10-year, 20-year coin, almost like bonds, and then a redemption process of whenever they sell, you burn, but somebody can hold. And it's a totally great new asset class, and you can figure out ways to hedge bear markets.

16:37For instance, I could invest in students who studied accounting on IRS issues. And that's a good way to hedge against bear markets because those accountants' incomes go up in bear markets. Or bankruptcy attorneys. I was going to say the bankruptcy attorneys, the life insurance agents, the crypto lawyers. That's who's going to be popular. But you think about it, that could be a phenomenal business opportunity. And then you can also link up with universities and schools and they could, you know, create some kind of partial scholarship that goes into your liquidity pool after you graduate it to give you some support.

17:15And I mean, colleges have to get more creative than charging$90 ,000 a year for tuition. And I think a college that makes a move for this first all of a sudden becomes more attractive to students. And OK, I'm willing to pay a little bit more if I've got$10 ,000 that gets donated into my liquidity pool when I graduate because now all of a sudden I can sell tokens and I don't have student loan debt and it's based on my income. Now, if you look at things now, if I take a loan now and I take an income-based proportion payback, it's like I'm paying the government back and they're getting the interest as opposed to I could be paying somebody else back and they could get interest in the upside instead of the government getting the interest in the upside.

17:56Exactly. And there's motivation. You wake up trying to increase the value of your Tim token, James token, J token, whatever. Why isn't anybody doing this as a business? It's a great idea. Let's do this. Look, I would be, I would, actually, as we're talking about it, I'm excited about it going, okay, this has some potential. You'd have to basically set up a corporate, there's a legal issue. You have to set up a corporation and kind of sign a contract that all of your income, or maybe you just say all of your income as a lawyer. Let's say you go to law school, you graduate, you set up a corporation and you say, you have to agree that all of your income as a lawyer is going to go through this corporation.

18:34Then 10 % of that corporation is essentially distributed to the holders of James coin or whatever. Some legal structure has to be set up with dumb contracts, unfortunately. So, but here's the thing is if you're dealing with blockchain i mean you can you could theoretically if you get paid in cryptocurrency you have a contract that would automatically split the money for you and 90 comes in is usdc into you and in 10 goes directly into the liquidity pool for the token holders yeah i mean you could have it where the contract and that's not a complicated contract that comes in and it auto splits it for you it's It's like withholding social security tax.

19:18I don't get to say it's not going to be taken out before it's taken out. I mean, unless I'm self-employed. But if I'm a W-2 employee, think about it. Your Medicare, your Medicaid, your social security, it all automatically comes out before the rest of the money goes into your bank account. It's no different than that except this becomes visible and anybody can verify exactly what you made on chain and they can see it. And again, it's an asset class like any other. There's going to be bad investments and good investments. And the bad, the good investments are also people, you know, you have a reason to trust these people and, and so on.

19:52And they haven't said, you would start getting a ranking based on schools of, you know, who's what majors are making the most amount of money. I mean, you create a whole new market of what majors are making the most amount of money. You know, is the Northeast, the Northwest, the Southeast sports for careers. That's exactly what I, that's exactly what's going through my mind is all of a sudden you're creating, you know, this token is going to be worth more if this person's graduating from, you know, uh, university of Michigan. And they were in this degree that has a higher likelihood of success.

20:22I'm willing to pay a little bit more for that, for that. I mean, it's almost kind of like what prosper kind of did, but you're, you're really taking it to a decentralized level and you're taking away a reliance on government loans. Yes. Again, like, let's say, let's say I invest in tim coin and for whatever reason i'm tired of it or i want to now invest in j coin instead uh because i know jay and most other people don't know jay and i think he has more upside than tim he does i could it's fungible i could sell on on any defi exchange yes so i mean the big thing would be that's the difference with prosper yeah you can't once you're in the loan if it looks like it's going bad you can't cut your losses or if you know all of a sudden jay gets a big promotion you got a bunch of jay coin you may say i'm gonna go ahead and roll out now and you know i also know that jay's been hitting the bottle so yeah i'm gonna roll right but no if he gets a big promotion and all of a sudden his income's going up it's gonna start trading at a premium and you're gonna go ahead and say all right well maybe i don't want to wait for all the upside i'll go ahead and get out now and take a part of the upside and somebody else is going to look at it and say, well, I can buy Jay Coy from James a little bit cheaper than anywhere else in the market.

21:39I'm going to go ahead and jump in there because I think his path is even better. Or I know it's a slightly below market value. No, there's a whole, and imagine the data that you would pull from that. I mean, the data that you would pull from that would be incredibly valuable as well if you're a company in that space. Well, entire industries will spawn out of this to just managing the data. Like you said, which colleges get the best returns, which professions, and so on. I mean, if I'm an employer, I'm going to be looking at that too. Where's the most value? Because that person clearly has value, that type of person.

22:17So all of a sudden, I can look at things. I mean, it becomes a recruitment tool as well. If I'm a company, I'm going to look at Jcoin going way up in value and going, He actually works in the industry that I run a company. I need to give this guy a call and see what the hell is going on because his token value keeps going up. I hate to say that you could push Indeed.com out of, you know, or the ladders or anything out of business. But you theoretically could because now I just have to go to this marketplace and see whose value is going up to say I want to solicit them to see if they want to come work for me.

22:54Now, yeah, you've got to watch for manipulation, obviously, but if it's a large enough coin, it's going to be very hard to do and you're going to learn very quickly who's manipulating and who's not.

23:29Look, as a manager of people, as an employer, as an entrepreneur, and as even an investor in startups, I can tell you the most important thing for your business is the quality of the people you hire. The best part is that great candidates are already on LinkedIn. Employees hired through LinkedIn are 30 % more likely to stick around for at least a year compared to those hired through the leading competitor. And I will tell you that the great thing about LinkedIn is that you're not just looking at random people. You're able to see the people who your friends and trusted peers and colleagues, who they trust and who they've hired in the past and who they recommend.

24:12And hiring doesn't have to be complicated. Realistically, when you have a business to run, you don't want to spend hours on hiring. You want to hire the right person as quickly as possible. That's why LinkedIn Jobs AI Assistant suggests immediately 25 great fit candidates daily so you can invite them to apply and keep things moving. Hire right the first time. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash altature, then promote it to use LinkedIn Jobs new AI Assistant, making it easier and faster to find the top candidates. That's linkedin.com slash altature. post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

25:18What can 160 years of experience teach you about the future? When it comes to protecting what matters, Pacific Life provides life insurance, retirement income, and employee benefits for people and businesses, building a more confident tomorrow. Strategies rooted in strength and backed by experience. Ask a financial professional how Pacific Life can help you today. Pacific Life Insurance Company, Omaha, Nebraska, and in New York. Pacific Life and Annuity, Phoenix, Arizona. So I kind of think we have to do this business. So here's the way I would do this business. I would find one person or two people who want to tokenize 10 % of their income.

26:02You need to find eight. Eight is the lucky number. All right, we'll find eight people to tokenize some parts of their future income. Like, like, let's take a lawyer who wants to tokenize 10 % of his future income as a lawyer over the next 10 years. And we've got to just do it and then create the coins and just have somebody buy them and just do it. So this way we grease the wheels. We know how the whole process works. So anybody listening to this podcast, sending, sending your pitch as to why you should be one of the first eight to go under this pilot project. Tweet us out. I'm Jay Altucher on Twitter.

26:38tim what's your i am at retro wallst it's short for retro wall street r-e-t-r-o-w-a-l-l-s-t ah right you're retro wall street that's how we met right is because i was doing every day uh the blogs of the day that you had the blog post of the day blog watch i called it we met because i worked at the street and you worked at the street no no but i was there i think i linked to your blog. You had a blog, right? Yes, yeah. And that's how I knew you. Yeah, and then also through Bob, our trustee. Yeah, then I got to really know you. Yeah, that's where we really got to know each other. This would, actually, I think this would be, I mean, it's a unique use case for it.

27:24It's extremely interesting. Yes. And look, we know the student loan system was broken. We know the student loan system is broken. But like this would motivate people to get jobs that would, pay for their student loans and then they could rate they could borrow from the future income of those jobs to to pay down the student loans instantly and because you know not have to be burdened by that and then they're in the game i mean it's it's there there's some fine tuning here but there i think there's a lot of potential in in doing this and then you can kind of pick the chain where do you want to be do you want to be on you know a bitcoin room do you want to be on solana do you want to be on avax i mean you can kind of go through and and look at the different chains now the nice thing with bitcoin with runes coming up is that is on chain and if you know it's not going away not that i think solana is going to fail but obviously you get network congestion on salon of the last week there there were a ton of failed transactions because of all these coins have been launching and it got you know uh the system volume is not going to be that no you're You're not worried about the volume of these individual things.

28:35You're worried about the volume on the entire network. So the Solana network got a little overwrought. Right, because 50 million students do this then. But just other things that happen on the network. So unless you're building your own network for this specifically, you're going to be running on an L2 or something like Bitcoin that already exists. There are other things that happen on that network. And so that network can get congested from those other things. What happened with Solana was it got congested from all the shit coins that were being launched. I mean, I would be watching and there would be times where there were 20 new coins launched in one minute.

29:11I mean, when OJ passed away, there were a dozen new coins launched within minutes of the announcement of his passing. OJ Simpson died? This morning, yes. I had no idea. That's incredible. Yes, OJ Simpson passed away. I think he was 76 years old. The family said it was from cancer. Wow. So what was funny was - That story is over. Yeah, that's - Well, what I want to know is, is the truth going to come out now? Yeah. You know, is somebody that knows something going to come out? But what was funny was, and not funny, but when you look at how people frame things, there were some people when they announced his passing, the picture that went up was him in a buffalo bills uniform whereas other ones it was at his trial and it was kind of you know you look at how the media frame thing frames it do you want to put a picture of him on trial or do you want to put a picture of him playing football like what is he actually known for more and i think that depends on your age a little bit as to did you know him as a football player is Do you know him as a...

30:19It's also, what do you want to honor him for? Like, I know him as a Buffalo Bills record-breaking running back, but I also know him as a murderer. Accused murderer. Accused murderer. I honestly don't know. I mean, the court said he was innocent, so who am I to say? So I shouldn't say that. Yeah, I'm not an expert, so I don't want to say guilty or innocent because I don't know. I mean, not that I was young at the time, but I had... No, I followed that trial. It was 1994. I followed it. You're the same age as me. You followed it. I was in college at that time. I was drinking. I was a young kid. I was busy being a kid.

31:00Yeah, you followed it, but I followed it from a distance. And she's 94, so we were tooling around on AOL on the internet. It was paying$9.99 an hour once you went over your limit or whatever it was. You had to have a modem. Yeah, yeah. The robots die. every time you went online with that sound. Yeah. Anyways, back to the conversation at hand. A lot of the things that we see coming down have potential. Yeah, so literally anybody who wants to be part of this, the first eight people who are part of this will give a small piece of the company if we decide that they should be the first trial. I don't know what you call them, not subjects, but people who tokenize their future income.

31:48and yeah we need to come up with a catchy catchy name for that uh yeah i gotta put my marketing hat on for that one all right tim but but thank you so much for coming on this podcast it's such short notice i really got obsessed with learning more about inscriptions and ordinals and now runes is added to this and now of course we just as a side effect we solved the whole student loan debt crisis and we probably solved inflation along with it we we call it the human the human token fund take a take a page from seinfeld make a donation to the human fund you know maybe human coin it's basically buying and selling humans i hate to use that kind of terminology no no we had to come up with a better name than that you only you could only sell 10 of your income there has to be a max of course then there's a little competition that companies will say you can say oh here's a company you could sell 100 but there's there's probably some right number there but yeah if you get to 100 that puts yourself way too at uh put yourself way too at risk there because then you need to make enough money to live off of it's like right it reminds me of the the laffer curve where uh what is it zero percent unemployment is no good and 100 unemployment is no good i forgot what the laffer curve is something like that there's pro there's probably almost a point of diminishing returns here where there's yeah there's that curve where it's optimal in terms of what you sell and what you keep versus if you go too far, it becomes a diminishing return.

33:20And if you don't do enough, it's not helpful. We could just let the market decide. Investors will be smarter than us. People who are investing in these for a living in this asset class will know more than us what the right mix is per person. That's true. Over time, you'll get demand to move up to eight or down, you know, or move down to eight or move up to 18 or 12 or, you know. Yeah. Like if there's a lot of frauds at 30, it'll move down to 15 or whatever. All right, Tim. Well, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Always happy to talk and learn. I always learn from you. Next time, come on and talk about Star Trek.