TWiST News: Pardons, Enron, Crypto's Moment, and the Future of Chinese Venture | E2053

0:00I would say my best advice for startup founders in this new crypto era we went from like don't do anything you're going to get prosecuted play by the existing rules and you know you're going to have to just shake your head and say you know what we're not going to let non-accredited investors in america participate we will let accredited people participate by the rules top five ten percent of the country and then you know globally we have to play by those set of rules and we'll just do this offshore i don't think we're in the clear that you could rush in and just start doing whatever you want YOLO because this is going to create a whole nother wave of people losing their money.

0:41This Week in Startups is brought to you by Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code twist to save 10 % off your first purchase of a website or domain. LinkedIn Jobs. A business is only as strong as its people and every hire matters. Go to linkedin.com slash twist to post your first job for free. Terms and conditions apply. And Notion. Notion combines your notes, docs, and projects into one beautifully designed space with AI built right in. Try it for free today at notion.com slash twist. all right everybody welcome back to this week in startups i am your co-host jason calacanis with me alex wilhelm how are you doing alex i am fantastic i love a break and i love coming back there's been a lot going on the world did not pause for a couple days even though we all did here in the states so i'm freaking feeling good jason i'm hype how are you uh awesome i i had a nice trip to new york so my family so my mom and dad so my brought my two brothers jamie and josh saw all their kids saw producer nick saw his kid uh yeah just a great trip overall and got to spend a little time in manhattan with my daughters super fun to go to k-town go ice skating and brian park you know just all around a wonderful trip for a week and now i'm here in austin for a couple of days and then i gotta head to san francisco for the all-in holiday spectacular on saturday night uh which should be a lot of fun i get to uh you know um use my comedic chops hopefully and make people laugh a little bit at the show but that should be a fun party i think it's sold out now um and um you know i'm excited to get to work here we have a big docket today yes i guess everybody's talking about and you know i always want to talk to you and at the top of the show just whatever the the big discussion is whether it's in tech and business or outside of it i guess Hunter Biden got a pardon what's your take on that?

2:44so I was sitting here last night in my office shed in the backyard playing Factorio relaxing after a really rough bedtime routine with the children Jason like it was a hot mess for hours I was just like finally they're asleep my phone turns you know bright and I look over and there's a Wall Street Journal push notification saying Biden pardoned his son and I just went and I just turned it over I'm like I can't deal with this right now i mean that was my first that was my first read was oh gosh yes i mean it's understandable we are going to have four years of captain chaos you know trump is a live wire and he says a lot of bombastic stuff and people are really enthusiastic we got a real afterglow right now people are excited about the potential of doge and trump 2.0 he's going to evolve and there's going to be like this great renaissance and a golden age coming okay great uh but there's going to be a lot of bickering and fighting you know i looked at it and i thought to myself number one man so much grifting i hate grifting in politics these guys the biden's so much grifting they've done over the years uh and it's kind of dark and then this guy has all these personal problems that's also dark and i just thought you know it's like sort of two takes on it number one uh every parent would do the same thing if they had a troubled child in this kind of situation number two i'm exhausted from the lawfare or fair law you know in all these cases there's politicians going after each other and i think this is just an example of um because these two teams of rivals have been going after each other they were going to go after hunter biden obviously when the administration changed and so he's trying to protect his kid which anybody would do and it's not in the best interest of the american people right now to be wasting time on all of this no would not have been if he had been a civilian this wouldn't have been a case which is i would say the same thing for like maybe three out of the six cases against trump right now or the ones that were active i think like three of them wouldn't have happened if it hadn't been trump and hadn't been new york prosecutors you know trying to stop him so put it all together man i am ready to move on from all of this and not talk about it anymore and maybe we need to revisit the presidential pardons because i do think they serve a purpose in maybe two places one just massively unfair prosecutions of people maybe there should be a backstop but i would be more comfortable with the supreme court being that backstop and the other one i think i agree with because i was just thinking for first principles is the death penalty which i've always had a problem with i understand the death penalty when people do things that are just so heinous you know sandy hook school shooting you know school shooting something like that i i understand why people want that um but i also like uh think it's irreversible i mean we know it's irreversible and we've made many mistakes so given that you can't reverse it where you can reverse a life sentence yep i kind of feel like maybe the president that we all vote for should be given the ability to commute a death sentence i don't know where where's your head at on all this okay so a lot a lot of thoughts first of all i thought your tweet saying that any parent would do this for their kid is is pretty much accurate because we all have soft spots for our children by definition this is a human weakness or strength depending on how you look at it um but i'm i i would probably do the same thing the issue for democrats broadly is that biden said i won't i won't i won't i won't i won't i won't and then did uh though i really do think that in two weeks time this is going to be so far spilled milk under the bridge that no one will even be thinking about it the other thing that comes to mind here is that kash patel was put forward as the next um head of the fbi a famed trump loyalist and someone who says that he wants to go after all of trump's enemies perceived and real so to me that as a capstone for i didn't get to run to be president again.

6:58My party lost the election. We're heading off into the wilderness, and the guy who's taking over hates me, and particularly hates my son. I'm going to cover for him. It strikes me as very, very human. But we do expect our leaders at the top of the food chain to be a bit more than that. So, disappointing politically, understandably personally, and you know what, I'll take this. The death penalty, so long as it still kills even one innocent person, has to be abolished. And so I think your idea about commutations at the presidential level there, I'll take it. Love it. not a bad take you know it's because it's irreversible i have a really hard time with the death penalty um even though i understand it for terrorists for mass shooters and uh you know if i was ever in a situation where god forbid i had to deal with that with a loved one or something a friend yeah i mean i'm sure you know i might very much want to see the death penalty this week in startups is brought to you by our friends at squarespace the all-in-one platform for you to build a beautiful website and for you to grow your business.

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9:10Here's your call to action. Squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, go to Squarespace.com slash twist to get 10 % off your first website or domain purchase. That's squarespace.com slash twist. Make sure you go to that URL so they know you listen to the pod. All right, what do we have on the docket that's business? I think we got through our personal feelings on this one. Welcome back to This Week in Startups where Jason and Alex break down their views on the death penalty. I didn't know we were going to go there. Glad we didn't. The first thing that we're going to talk about, Jason, is a surprise.

9:39And this is a surprise so far from left field that I have to just play you the clip. This is all over X and social media today. if you are into business commentary you saw this court if you don't mind the enron video please the world is changing faster than ever can you feel it it's such a cliche transformation rebirth in the modern world you must accept change is the what is this wait for it oh my god Is this stock footage? Or has somebody shot this? It looks like stock footage or AI, right? Yeah. It's stock footage. It doesn't look like AI. There's a baby. A farmer in boots. Making weed. Archer Daniels mid...

10:29Oh my god, it's Enron. That's like PTSD. What does the farmer have to do with Enron and a ballerina on the beach and a bunch of diversity? I am Enron. I am Enron. We are Enron. We are criminals. We're Enron. Okay, wait, we're back. Enron is back. Can we talk? Enron.com. I mean, we're going to have to explain what Enron is to half the audience who did not live through Enron. There's a great documentary on it. Smartest Guys in the Room, I think, is the name of it. By Alex Gibney. Am I getting that correct? I don't recall the option. great documentary director uh great documentary i think a one sundance or a can or something um okay is it a joke because they have the enron handle on twitter and i they have the enron website i went there i read the release at an auction and then just started to troll us what's going on here well i at first i thought it was a joke right you know okay so someone's trying to bring up bring back this famously awful corporate name and to jason's point if you don't know enron was one of of a pair along with worldcom Jason of massive financial frauds of that era.

11:41Uh, and the con the company was at the forefront of like energy and new technology and was energy trading. Yeah. Energy trading. And it turned out to be an enormous financial house of cards. And a lot of people lost their life savings, their employment. And it was really an example of corporate malfeasance fraud and just being crap. I think Jason. Hmm. Um, so what's happening here is, is the company, so i thought the company still existed in some ways right who knows but what matters is they have detailed their pillars of their vision adaptation as strength leadership by example forgiveness and progress and then it all made sense to me with the next two things one permissionless innovation it's a crypto play someone has bought so you can decentralize technology is advancing and we will of course have a role to play in its future so i presume this is some sort of crypto grift but if you want to get attention genius here you go uh i mean everybody's getting back into coins now i saw joshua block the uh tiktoker has launched block coin and i'm just like this poor kid this is like deep into like meme territory that the kids are talking about there's a kid who is like a young adult now 20s early 20s okay he's got some challenges uh emotionally he might be on the spectrum etc um and he has three million followers it started very um benign him doing dances on tiktok years ago before he was 21 then he was 21 he started drinking alcohol and now his tiktok is him just getting plastered every night having the alcohol shakes is really dark um and it's like he's got these sycophants around him and he gives tours in new york of bars anyway it's really dark stuff but he's doing a crypto all these crypto coins are coming back and i guess we're now going to find out in this new trump administration which is going to be pro crypto what happens when gary gensler is not debanking people over regulating not giving a framework which i think was wrong i think it was to not have a framework here for crypto i think they should have worked in good faith to develop one they chose to say hey we're just going to apply the existing rules yeah existing rules play by them or don't that doesn't change our job um there needs to be crypto regulation obviously stuff is very different than what's come before it and i don't know if they're going to propose new regulation then tell people to do it but my gut tells me people think they can do whatever they want now okay so andrews and horowitz wrote about this on their site the the andrews and crypto team one of the most important pillars i would say of not only crypto investing but also crypto policy making um said hey things look like they're going to be very different including tokens but then they had a disclaimer like but do keep in mind our thoughts about tokens and so forth so i would say the smart money even is as optimistic as you are i would say my best advice for startup founders in this new crypto era we went from like don't do anything you're going to get prosecuted play by the existing rules and you know you're going to have to just shake your head and say you know what we're not going to let non-accredited investors in america participate we will let accredited people participate by the rules top five ten percent of the country and then you know globally we have to play by those set of rules and we'll just do this offshore i don't think we're in the clear that you could rush in and just start doing whatever you want yolo because this is going to create a whole nother wave of people losing their money remember everybody lost their money in icos oh yeah well there are local attorney generals they can still bring cases it does not matter what trump does we've talked about it here um it will take years to create a national framework there will have to be consensus on this from multiple you know parts of the government we don't have a god king even though it might feel like that to some people there is no concept of a god king or queen in the united states who can just magically come down and by edict say here's the rules there is a process here uh and it's different there are executive orders that can do certain things but i would say crypto regulation will change will take a year or two yeah at best yeah which means this raises a point though jason i'm curious because of that do you think that people have already priced in the upside that will come from a more accommodative regulatory environment in prices of bitcoin ethereum and other major tokens because to me it feels like yes we've already gotten the dessert we just haven't shown up to dinner yet it's a it's an interesting way of looking at it bitcoin because there is no central authority no ownership of it feels like it's out of the the woods and you know yolo anybody can buy it can do whatever they want in the united states um but something like xrp which i think still has an active case against it that is centralized you know that has gone parabolic it is nuts like if you look at xrp and i've covered that here man the case against them was really really granular and they won half of it and they lost the other or their the other half is still open now what happens to that lawsuit does trump just say let them do whatever they want it doesn't matter if they break securities law you know which is what they were alleged to have done this is nuts put it on five day for a second um we're looking at two percent in the last week i mean that makes no sense so i think xrp is the one to watch bitcoin okay whatever it's not centralized it's you know there's no corporate authority on it xrp is the one to watch this will be the canary in the coal mine and we'll watch it the guys there don't like me they're not happy about it because i looked at it in my assessment based on the facts i read was this is crazy if everybody could do what they did yeah in terms of giving away xrp having a central authority clearing their bags and all this stuff that was alleged in those lawsuits uh by gensler like i think we'd have chaos in the markets um and there would be no reason to go public there would be no reason to follow any sec laws you would just start selling tokens of every asset in the world and you know yolo so i think xrp is the one i'd like to put on our themes to watch watch the xrp lawsuits we'll explain them in detail and cover it the next time there's a news peg but um i want to talk about that more than just before you move on because here's the thing that people outside of the crypto world might forget which is that if you're not in it, you might just have Bitcoin next to XRP, next to Ethereum, next to Tom, whatever you want.

18:31And you might think of them all as cryptocurrencies. There's a divide inside of the crypto world in which there's Bitcoin for some people and then everything else. And recall, Trump went to a Bitcoin conference. He wants the government to own a lot of Bitcoin and sit on it. Now, all that's very positive for the Bitcoin heads out there. But a lot of them think that every other cryptocurrency is essentially a snake oil scam and so if trump comes out in favor of xrp he could actually annoy some of the pro crypto folks who are currently on his side so this is not as simple as you might think and there is a nuance inside of this uh and on the bitcoin part jason you wanted me to bring up one of your tweets to talk about this yeah and you've been taking some stick on social media i think it's fair to say um back in 2018 i'm gonna go through the tweets that everyone's talking about and then let you respond yeah back in 2018 jason you said that your 60 to 70 case was that bitcoin zero was still the likely case and uh here's that tweet from that back then and then in 2019 uh you thought that bitcoin's going to get replaced by a a better cryptocurrency essentially more like the world computer that ethereum is building which i thought was relatively reasonable uh and then here's your tweet from yesterday and i want you to tell me how this came to be my thoughts on bitcoin and it's a really good reminder to people that when a new technology comes out you got to figure out what's going on here i bought bitcoin and had bitcoin gifted to me at like low single dollars uh my wife and i also bought it at 100 to 200 but i think mostly like 100 so we've made a lot of money off bitcoin and we're going to hold forever is our decision so we believe in it but i told people like keep this to low single digits if you were to ask me my advice low single digits of your net worth that you can afford to lose which is what i tell people about angel investing if you're like a credited investor and i wrote this in my book you know not financial advice but if my brother or my mother asked me for financial advice knowing their lifestyle like let's say middle class they want to get some action they like it whatever they're passionate about it i could see putting one to five percent of your money into angel investing or uh private equity or a restaurant or crypto uh or specifically bitcoin or or you know any of those assets because you could get an asymmetrical return and which we did right you can get a hundred x a thousand x on one percent of your money you could double your net worth okay fine i get it people want to make long bets you know the thing that has shocked me about bitcoin is two things one it has never been hacked i mean at the end it's hacked but that's not bitcoin being hacked the protocol or the servers it's you know people's wallets or you know people's computers their phones like human factors hacks right it's not like somebody hacked the core technology or compromise it would be another way to say it like a 51 attack where china was looking like there was a big dialogue that china might be able to take over the systems by having more servers than everybody changing the rules etc so that's a the second one is i can't believe that the united states government and the west china other places finally acquiesced and said hey we're going to accept that people can own bitcoin and i'm not sure that state in china might still be technically illegal in china but like south korea remember flip-flop multiple times because the public was like we really want this and then third i also think it's not really a great technology for transacting you know it's slow it's expensive all this stuff so you the original concept of bitcoin 10 years ago was people were going to pay for their pizza with it and buy homes with it that's never happened it's kind of locked itself into this really store of value and speculation uh digital gold i guess or as seller would say it's manhattan real estate there's only so much of it buy it now well you can't it's going to only go up and so i thought it would be most likely that one of those three factors would stop it a better solution which is still on the table there still could be a better one that people go to and if there is a better one that appreciates faster or doesn't you know or has some better qualities or features to it like ethereum does or solana does maybe people will eventually move to it but so many people are vested in this now i think it's crossed over where it would take a lot to untangle this a lot and it hasn't been hacked so if it hasn't been hacked by now could it be hacked maybe with ai at some point somebody could figure out something or quantum computing people are speculating but it seems unlikely and then governments have allowed it so how do you put the genie back in the bottle so all three of those predictions i think or all three of those concerns have been largely resolved so i would flip my 60 70 percent hey this thing could go to zero or this could collapse to the opposite which is i think it's maybe 10 or 20 chance that it could get replaced collapsed hacked or banned in some way and that's still a possibility it there could be a situation where governments start to realize hey we're no longer in control of our currency and we're going to ban this and they don't have to ban it technically they could just ban it by arresting you or by taxing you or fining you and a tax is the easiest way to essentially ban this it's completely possible some administration some large countries could start to say you know what every time you come in and out of bitcoin there's a one percent transaction any individual or business has to pay a 10 tax on it per year a wealth tax kind of thing on it constitutional or not as we've seen the government can do a lot of things you know in the short term to um stop certain technologies etc in the long term probably very difficult to do so So I would flip it now.

24:23I'd say I'm 80, 90 % that this technology is here to stay. And here to stay, I would put it at like, it's going to be around the next 10 years. It's possible in 10 years, a better technology could emerge and people would prefer to own that. Or the pump dump cycle could move to another token. That's more, it has more upside in it. Right. Do you remember before the election when that silly squirrel thing, peanut was a big deal for like a hot minute? I missed the entire way. it turns out that there was a peanut coin that was made and and now there's a new one which i'm not going to mention by name because i'm getting tagged in all the tweets but i'll just say that there's another small animal out there that is being um promoted as a crypto coin and i just want to tell people stop you're making you're making the the serious people in the world of crypto who do believe in a decentralized permissionless money system like bitcoin shout outs cool technologies jason says all the clowns are making you guys look like clowns so you're hurting the team very frustrating to me um i agree with you though a bitcoin's gonna stay and uh that's why my family now purchases a small amount of uh the fidelity bitcoin etf every month as part of our taxable buys jason so uh really so you just keep buying into it yeah a little bit every month yeah we have retirement accounts that are auto we have taxable accounts that are auto set up and we have 539 accounts that are auto investing you're so good financially i love it well thank you and so we just added one for the um fidelity bitcoin investment trust or whatever and it's going to just sit there and invest money for us and if it goes to zero to your point about net worth we don't care and if it goes up 100x um yeah i mean if you don't mind me asking what percent of your portfolio do you target it to be at net worth i should say so including your home including all your assets what percent do you feel comfortable it being so that's different than the number that it is uh no don't have a target i would say probably one to two percent uh my spouse is very financially conservative um which honestly matches a lot of how i invest our money in low-cost index funds um but yeah i think i think a couple of points wouldn't scare me that's not money that i'm going to worry about you wouldn't go 10 you're not like i gotta get as many chips into this as possible no because it doesn't have any sort of yield and i like assets that generate yield i mean okay yeah all right tell me if this sounds familiar you hire somebody they're not the right fit productivity drops the team's momentum slows it's uncomfortable and suddenly you're spending more time fixing problems than growing your business.

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28:10That's right. F-R-E-E. If you use the following URL, LinkedIn.com slash twist to post your first job for free. Terms and conditions do apply. Oh, by the way, I invited Michael Saylor on the pod. he's begging to be on all in constantly uh i don't know he's got to get three out of the four all-in guys to agree so is that the threshold three quarters yeah we it's kind of a democracy over there we kind of all agree on it if we want to have somebody on um but you know i don't know that people have strong feelings about it either way and when i hear him on podcasts yeah he's really pumping really marketing and that makes me a little concerned so moving on to michael sailor and uh mr mstr micro strategies i think the kids call it mr is that where you were going to go on the docket is move to mr yeah i was just going to bring up the latest um i went ahead and pulled the latest ak so last week we talked about micro strategy their bitcoin strategy bitcoin yield jason everyone's favorite made-up statistic and since we were talking um michael sayler is still at it uh as of uh i think the filing came out today between november 25th and december 1st the company sold 3.7 uh million shares for about 1.5 billion dollars and they purchased uh another 15 400 bitcoins they did a secondary basically they they did an offering of shares not debt the other five billion dollars or something was debt so the company's got something like seven billions in debt but they also issue shares to buy more bitcoin so now they're at what 400 000 bitcoin is it that 402 100 and i mean to michael sales credit 23.4 billion dollars in cost so their average price is 58 000 per bitcoin now at 95 they are in the black shout out to them uh i still do not know why they're trading for two or three x their net asset value um but people can do what i think this is these will be the questions people will ask and so let's just go through basic math and by the way i was using the genie um uh sergey and the team over at uh google built genie this really cool like chat gpt app for ios oh and i talked to about him like i can't find genie can you just make a genie app so it's really easy so on my phone i can just tell siri to open up genie and i can just use it and um he was uh like yeah that's a really good idea which i guess means they were working on it and uh i've been using it it's fantastic it's really good at searching the web i would say it's better than chat gbt with live data so i was asking it hey what's the market cap of micro strategies i think it's 85 90 billion right now as we speak um and then what's the value of the bitcoin well it's 400 000 times you know it's it's just under 40 billion right we're at 95 k bitcoin or something they have 7 billion in debt yep i think i'm correct ballpark uh market cap 71 billion just checked that and now i'm gonna run a no that's the market cap i don't think so according to by the way you were asking before it's a central bank digital currency cbdc i was trying to say uh bitcoin reserve ah got it okay so bitcoin reserve slightly different than a digital currency uh by the way 89 billion 89 billion yahoo finance google finance 71 billion not sure why google finance is giving me the wrong number yes so my apologies there you are correct google is a liar fix your search google why is google have the wrong market cap i'm looking at that as well 71 billion from them it might be share count and how they count diluted shares versus existing shares huh all right so let's just say so what does yahoo say 89 89 okay so we'll round up to 90 billion we have 7 billion in debt is my understanding have 7 billion in corporate debt so if you take 90 billion minus 7 billion you're at 83 billion and then if the coin was 100 000 right now it would be 40 billion so 39.3 billion 39.3 billion so 39 from the 83 gives you 44 billion dollars in additional value between their holdings and their market cap minus the debt ballpark correct i think ballpark correct yeah so we have to account for 40 billion dollars in market cap between the value they have 400 million in revenue for their legacy business let's give that a 5x multiple 2 billion so you're right around 40 billion 35 to 40 billion in unknown value of the market cap in other words double the value of their coins so this is the issue if you were to buy if you wanted exposure to bitcoin you could pay 200 000 a coin in micro strategies essentially or you could buy two coins and get it for half price 95 000 right or in this model 100 000 a coin just rounding up so that's the concern i have about this and then at what point somebody should build a model if the that three billion in debt is due if it was trading if their bitcoin holdings if bitcoin went down to 25 000 their bitcoin holdings would go from 40 billion to 10 they would have to liquidate 30 of their bitcoins i think in this math to service that three billion in debt and then they want to put more debt on this so somewhere between 25 000 and 50 000 it would become really concerning for micro strategy to have to liquidate bitcoin in other words under their average price so this leads me to believe that you know if you were going to short a stock this would be one to look at i don't short stocks because i you know with meme stocks and having watched what happened to you know any number of people who tried to get in front of momentum it's just so dangerous like whether it's djt coin djt's you know truth social stock or you know tesla with the shorts getting their faces ripped off game stop all of this stuff you know and tesla's obviously a real company the other ones i'm mentioning are not real concerns they're manipulated meme stocks i think yeah um anyway this just feels really dangerous and that's why i asked a series of questions uh hopefully microsoft uh microsoft's ceo michael seller will come on tuesday wednesday or friday uh this week but he said he wanted to come on and then i sent him and i asked him for his email and he hasn't gotten back to me well well i want to make one last point before we move on so uh i just ran out of time before we jumped on but i was digging into their latest sec filings and the bitcoin yielding which we joke about but i did find a very interesting um warning factor uh and that i think summarizes what we've been trying to say i'm just going to quote here to explain to people that we're not being shrill about the possibility of them needing to sell assets to cover things.

35:05So conversely, if any of the company's convertible senior notes mature or are redeemed without being converted into common stock, the company may be required to sell shares in quantities greater than the shares such as are convertible into or generate cash proceeds from the sale of Bitcoin. So essentially, beware. Yeah, I mean, if you were to buy, if you had$100 ,000 to invest,$95 ,000 to invest, Should you buy a Bitcoin or should you buy 95 ,000 in micro strategies is the question. That's such a silly question because Bitcoin people have been telling me for so long, Jason, not your keys, not your coins.

35:41So by that logic, every single person who really believes in Bitcoin should be annoyed with micro strategy because one, they're trying to centralize ownership of a decentralized asset and two, they're going against the ethos of owning your own coins. So to me, it just seems a bit ridiculous. now the other thing i'd like to add to this i'm sure gonna is that i think i'm using it correctly which is the a ritual complaint session right uh no i think it's like crazy stupid you know behavior is other folks are moving the treasury so there was a tweet if you pull up michael sailor's tweets he is pumping pumping pumping all day long uh this stuff and by pumping i mean sharing memes or telling other people what they should do so pull up michael saylor's tweets and if you look at his replies if you scroll down in his replies specifically you'll see him saying other people should move their treasuries oh into bitcoin and rumbles ceo um said they're going to buy 20 billion um and then another there's another company i'd never heard of that does bitcoin mining that now they're also uh selling loans or trying to you know do this convertible debt into i think what's happening here is they're trying to do a squeeze people are trying to do a squeeze here which is there's only a certain amount of bitcoin available and i was looking listening to pomp he started doing his podcast again i think um and he's awesome we'll have anthony pompolino on the program again i love anthony i think he's great because he's also kind of right in the realistic bitcoin maximalist but not a pumper oh i like that yeah it's kind of good like you can believe in bitcoin without like trying to get people to do this i love notion i love it i use it all day long i have built my company around notion and every startup claims that when you add ai to a product it's going to change everything but notion has actually done it Our twist team, we use Notion all day long.

37:47Databases, calendar, note-taking, even the ad reads. When I read ads here, I'm reading from a Notion page. And I love that my team has embraced it. When you introduce Notion into your company, everybody's going to feel less stressed because everything you do is documented. And when a new person joins the company or somebody has to learn a new task, they go to one of our playbooks that we've made internally. Now AI has taken that up a notch. You can search across all of Notion and your other apps inside of Notion, and then you can generate docs in your style, right? They'll also analyze the PDFs and images that you upload to Notion, and it'll chat with you about anything.

38:26So imagine everybody in your organization collecting knowledge, and then you have the ability, easy peasy lemon squeezy, to ask questions about that. It is brilliant. Notion is my favorite tool in the world right now. Keeps everything in one place. It makes me feel like our organization is not losing knowledge. And you know what? Sometimes people retire. I have this every year or two. I lose a great person because they move on to another adventure, or maybe they want a career change, or maybe they retire. And you're like, oh, what happened to all that knowledge? It's now saved in Notion. I want you to try Notion for free by going to notion.com slash twist.

39:01That's it. All lowercase, notion.com slash TWIST to try the most powerful, easy to use product for You're recording all of your data in one place. It is so magical. And you know what? I'm using it for everything. I have one for my personal family office. I have one for inside. We have one for all in. Everybody is using Notion. You don't want to lose data. You don't want to lose knowledge. Notion.com slash twist. And when you use our link, they know you're supporting the show. So Rumble, as everybody knows, is like a YouTube conservative YouTube kind of situation. And I think Saks is on the board of that company.

39:36um so i don't have a problem with rumble at all but when i see ceos of other companies trying to put pixie dust on their stocks to you know presumably either make a good financial decision or is it to get marketing to get more people interested in your stock for not the core business yep but for this other business this makes me a little nervous and so here 60 public companies could issue equity to buy bitcoin this is you know he's now got a leaderboard here he's tweeting the hodl top 60 publicly traded companies with bitcoin on the balance sheet and he's literally listing their number of it so now what i find challenging about what michael saylor is doing or concerning is twofold one people are saying this thing can't go down it's a sure bet whenever i hear sure bet too many times i get nervous and then looking at people you know putting out this list he's kind of implicitly in my mind encouraging people to join this list and as you can see from the replies when i ask any questions about mister you see hundreds of people who are along mister which you know they tend to be accounts that are not that old attacking me yeah those are the people who are along it i had the same thing happen to me over and over again alex anytime i criticized um the monkey nfts uh board ape yacht club i would you know i'd be like guys this doesn't make any sense you spent a half million dollars or a million dollars on an nft are you telling me shares in uber or airbnb or robin hood you know stocks i own stocks i don't own buy it in microsoft like there's other things that have core asset value like be careful over here and if you have 95 of your value in a crypto monkey or bitcoin maybe you know balance it out a little bit for the safety of your family and your future diversification is is smart for everybody but i take it you didn't take part in the multi-billion dollar round into yuga labs and their board ape collection you didn't uh you didn't put some launch money in there i didn't um i'm shocked by that depending on timing you could have made a lot of money but i always look at the core value and what we call in the business the quality of the revenue and so when you start looking at the quality of the revenue you know who gave you the money where did the revenue come from yeah what did they what value did they get so it's pretty obvious like when airbnb gets 10 or whatever their take rate is of your thousand dollars say you know they made a hundred dollars from you yeah the other two parties in that transaction the host and the person staying there they feel pretty good about it right and if you talked to all three parties all three parties would be like loved the transaction loved what i paid you know and i i loved it so much i gave a rating there's a rating system built in yeah now you put that onto like nfts you know the person buying the nft what value did they get i don't know signaling prestige i mean in status invitations to nightclub events with a bunch of other people that also hold i mean so that's really i mean alex you nailed it there was some value there status is a value people buy purses that have value so you did identify some value so then you have to say well what's the quality of that revenue so and over time like what is the quality of the board apes yacht club okay if they were i haven't heard anybody talk about the parties you know beyond like crypto week in new york five or six years ago when everybody was trying to get into that one party and now it's like have you heard of anybody coveting going to it i have heard of people coveting going to the super bowl or f1 so you know those tickets are obviously got some value i see sponsors buying value there to reach those consumers i see people watching on television there's some entertainment value to it so that was the problem i had with the board a abes jacob a four hundred thousand dollar nft going to a party in manhattan and getting to put one on your status i it didn't feel like a proper trade of value oh no it was terrible and you have to pay me to go to go to a party in manhattan with a bunch of other uh crypto fans like myself because i don't think we're great company um i want to make a point about marketing though jason going back to what you said about his twitter account and the level of noise and i want to contrast that with court if we can get that website pulled up this is one of my favorite websites in the entire world this is the benchmark website it has nothing on it it just says benchmark and then it has their address and then that's all they need to do because benchmarks money does well and they don't need to pump they don't need to get you on their side benchmark doesn't want me to wear their shirt they don't want me to come to their party benchmark doesn't care and that is how I know that they're super serious I mean Michael seller just tweeted 45 minutes ago at the start of this program a clip of um fun strat you know the guy who's always on um uh cnbc and you know it's like fun strat on bitcoin it's just a matter of time and then a rocket ship you know should a publicly traded ceo be doing the rocket ship you know to the moon emojis when they're holding this stuff you know that's the thing that i think if it does come apart you're gonna have a problem and here mara this is where you can start to see a contagion or a frenzy occur so this company mara i've never heard of um and they uh did this tweet uh this morning so i'll read it out for everyone who's on the audio version today we announced a proposed private offering of zero percent convertible notes of 700 million with a$105 million option.

45:22Proceeds to be used primarily to acquire Bitcoin and repurchase existing 2026 convertible notes. So MicroStrategy has done this, issued new debt to pay off other debt. Companies do this often if they can get a lower rate. In this case, though, once again, we are seeing the same strategy. Borrow money at essentially no coupon rate, Jason, as they say, and then expect the stock to appreciate. So when it converts later on, everyone's happy, happy. As long as Bitcoin keeps going up, this might work. Might. i mean the question you have to ask yourself is what could go wrong um and so that's the you know i'm gonna just tweet that what could go wrong so i'm gonna tweet live here what could go wrong i'm retweeting the michael sailor uh retweet of mara now you'll see in this tweet how quickly i get attacked like it is going to be nuts how quickly uh people just me asking a question what could go wrong like it's isn't that a value a valuable question to ask when you're making financial decisions what could go wrong we'll check in and on at the end of the show that's fine give it five minutes but having seen your feed i don't doubt what's coming um it just as a last thought uh if you have to build a religion around something probably you're making up for something i'm going to keep saying that because i keep thinking it's true and um i you know we will have more about this and if you are a michael saylor fan we are trying to get him on the show and uh we'll come back to this in time but jason let's move on to something else and pomp let's make sure pomp comes on the show tomorrow or wednesday so producer maddie please uh and maybe also um vinny lingam friend of the pod we get pomp and vinny come in and talk about this strategy that would be a good duo let's have that one tomorrow wednesday okay what else do we have on the docket we this is like taking over a lot of cycles a lot of cycles and i'm holding my bitcoin i'm not selling it i'm holding i'm benefiting from this i'm just concerned what happens if 10 more people do this like it's this is jason if you want to have less bitcoin on the show and i say this with nothing but kindness to my friend uh tweet about it less because because you go into the zoo and then you i love the tigers and then you're like the tigers are roaring we have to talk about it i just like whenever i see something that doesn't make logical sense i like having a conversation about it and if the market cap of micro strategies was 20 percent more than their bitcoin holdings i would say okay you got eight billion dollars in credit for 40 billion in holdings not too worried about it is it for me i'd rather own my own keys then we'd be having a completely different discussion when it's two to three times and then they have debt load and if the debt load becomes greater than the value of their holdings or maybe even equals 50 of the value of their holdings which right now it's uh lower than that it's about it's like a sixth of it okay yeah seven billion of 50 billion no no yeah you said they have 40 billion so seven of 40 i think is what we're looking at so it's a fifth or something so okay maybe that's okay you know there's a hey 20 leverage lifestyle man some people just love to be on that on that financial edge i on the other hand i am more conservative but that's fine because in the free market you can make your own choices and i don't have to catch your falling knife or put my face over a rocket that's about to go straight to my skull either way i can opt out and go have fun all right sequoia's chinese arm hunts for global deals now i presume that we picked this because it discusses kylie jenner and vodka um but the the fda this is their former arm right well sequoia's yeah former chinese armor should say as a reminder for everybody in june of 23 three sequoia said it was going to split into three entities uh one for us and europe one in china and one in india and that actually i believe was consummated in january jason of this year yeah okay sequoia being the greatest venture capital firm of all time and they had a great run in china lots of distributions but as everybody knows um our government and our relationship with chinese government has made it such that um yeah there's a lot of concerns with investing over there and investment in china has gone essentially from us and the west to zero yes and so we're talking today about sequoia capital's former chinese unit now called hong shan and there was a great story in the financial times digging into how they are investing their both uh yuan denominated and u.s dollar denominated funds and the gist is that it's having a hard time finding places to put all of its capital especially when it comes to the dollar denominated funds because if we're dealing with dollars and perhaps um lps that are privy to other government regimes it can be a little bit difficult to get money in and out but there's some complaints jason that these funds have been raised and so presumably they're collecting fees but when they're not deployed the chance of them generating that juicy irr or essentially how much money they bring back um is going to be slower and perhaps smaller so i can understand the lps being a little frustrated here but at the same time i i wonder where you can really put a you know dollar denominated fund from a chinese venture capital firm to work it almost seems like an impossible task yeah this is a financial time story the quote that i saw was they are deploying the u.s fund but very slowly one limited partner told the financial times hong shan has only invested 10 to 20 percent of its two later stage funds both sides at 3.6 billion according to two people familiar with the matter This gives it four to five more years to invest the remaining sum.

50:57The group has been quicker in deploying its earlier stage fund, the seed and venture funds, which are 480 million and 1.3 billion respectively, and have between 20 and 35 % invested. These people added, I think, you know, some of this might have to do with geopolitics, but another piece of this is there's more value probably, and more interesting deals occurring with new companies than with companies in years four five six which is where or seven where you might deploy these larger sums of money in other words if you're going to put 100 million or 50 million or 250 million into a company which would be the check size here maybe 50 100 um you know it has to be a series c or something in that range you know what traditionally and that means 50 million in revenue 25 million in revenue 100 million in revenue and it just might not be great inventory there so maybe they're being judicious and it's hard if your seed rounds are all three million dollars that means for every one bet you would place with a late stage fund of 50 million or let's say 60 million to make the math easy you'd have to place 23 million dollar bets that means if you have to meet with a hundred companies to find the one you want to invest in or even 50 it's 50 to deploy 60 million 50 meetings let's say but at the earliest stage you got to meet more companies so it's a hundred meetings and 220 investments of 3 million each to the same capital 100 times 20 is 2 000 meetings 2 000 meetings means you have to have 10 000 possible companies to look at this is a lot of work you know a lot of work i know this because our fund gets ballpark 20 000 applications a year that's kind of our run rate uh we'll get 500 in a week no big deal um i've had to actually slow down my tweeting of stuff but we'll do 100 meetings in a week no problem uh and man that's a lot of work it's a lot of work so that's probably what's happening here so what's so how are they combating this what are they doing about it because if you have that much capital and you have a you know a go-ahead license from your backers you need to get busy so hong sean is opening offices in london and tokyo they are looking to invest in northern Asia and Europe, which is interesting because what we're going to see here is essentially the Hongshan group competing with their former besties at Sequoia, you know, Sequoia, Sequoia, still Sequoia, and they're going to butt heads.

53:26And I think it's going to be very interesting to see how they either play nice or don't. But if you are a European startup, you now have another entity with lots of, you know, dollar denominated funds to go after, which is good news for European investors. But I think the thing that I take away from the story is if you have an investment thesis that is very one country predicated, you are tied in a lot of ways to that country's government and economy. And China's government, as we talked about on the show, slightly authoritarian, you might say. Yeah. And the Chinese economy has been kind of struggling in the last, I would say, 18, 24, 36 months.

54:05We have a chart that I pulled from some McKinsey data. court if you could grab that consumer confidence index um regarding china this is i think indicative of some stuff that i've been tracking so on the left here if you're on the audio um consumer confidence index from china has dramatically declined from about 130 points to about 86 points from 2020 to today and then residential property transactions have fallen off a cliff from a peak of like 125 points on the start to about 55 so massive problems in the country i don't know what they're going to do with all this money perhaps just dump it into mistral consumer exactly put it into mr it's by bitcoin engine oh no no no no no no mr all the french ai company not mr the sticker symbol and hold it um you know it's interesting the consumer confidence index here in the united states man we are in a vibe right now since the election's over people are really optimistic my understanding is black friday and today's cyber monday went really really well like i think it was up 10 year over year retail was down a bit but i don't know if that's accurate or not i was listening to uh group chat a really good podcast by some entrepreneurs you can look it up and uh they were just talking about how they're they're they're in the retail business their inside track was you know the retailers were telling us mob scenes on friday really happy with the sales and online was going way up these marketplaces are going way up so it does seem like consumer confidence here is high i wouldn't be surprised if we see credit card debt go massively up personal savings go way down during the next couple of quarters as the trump bump gets everybody really excited and the last time we had this peak zert moment what happened equities went up bitcoin went up gambling sites went up uh nfts you know vegas uh first class travel cruises and of course shopping and so consumer competent confidence is everything it's two-thirds of the economy and in china you got a billion consumers man if their consumer confidence is half of what it was a couple of years ago and ours is surging very interesting moment in time it is uh we have a chart by the way um this chart shows all consumer debt in the u.s this is credit cards and other revolving loans as you can tell it goes up rather steeply this is from uh fred which is the fed's database which we adore and um according to adobe analytics data americans spent 10.8 billion on black friday alone up 10 and thanksgiving sales were 6.1 billion up nine percent so pretty good the vibes here in the u.s are uh what was the total uh consumer debt because that includes mortgages and credit cards right this is credit cards and other revolving plans so i think okay so what is the total number there that it was 1.07 trillion so a trillion a trillion 300 million americans you know maybe it's like 280 million adults but if we just say 300 million ballpark uh yeah it's a decent amount of debt and just because you asked for it uh is that three thousand dollars a person in personal debt yeah well i was chasing the other debt uh so mortgage debt outstanding millions of dollars um today is sorry it's 19.8 trillion about about 20 trillion depending on how you count that's got an asset behind it it's not like money spent but one trillion uh divided by 300 million uh i think that would equal three thousand three hundred thirty three dollars and thirty three cents so i was letting i was letting you talk three thousand dollars per person in debt is not the end of the world but if you were to take you know the that's in that's in consumers personal debt right so each person so if you're a five family household like we are yes or a four family like yours if we include kids in this you would divide it by 330 so it'd be like 3 000 so let's put the number 3 000 there then you look at our national debt which i think is 36 trillion um public debt per capita is 103.4 thousand dollars because court is on it today ladies and gentlemen yeah 36 trillion divided by 330 million people is 109 000 that's our national debt divided by the number of citizens so 100 000 which number makes you more worried the fact that the average credit card debt is 3 000 including children and babies so probably more like 10 000 for adults or that there's a hundred thousand dollars in public federal debt uh per person in the u.s which which number makes you more uncomfortable that's a great question i you know i haven't really thought about it because ultimately it's all owned by americans so essentially every american owes ballpark 115 000 112 000 if you put the two debts together we're not even counting mortgage debt but let's just assume mortgage debt the house is the asset so we'll just kind of abstract that away here uh gosh you know in order to pay either of these down we need people to have jobs and create value in the world and we have ed how many i mean you have to basically look at how many people are working and how long it would take them to work this debt off 112 000 if you paid off if you're paying five percent interest on it you have just five thousand dollars a year each to pay the interest on this we're each going to owe five thousand a year in the vig maybe six thousand a year in the vig so if you're a family of four you're paying twenty four thousand dollars a year in interest on the national and your personal debt at six percent i'm just coming up with a low number not credit card you know 15 20 charge i mean it's all very disturbing i mean this is why doge i think has broken through and what malay is doing is broken through is people are realizing it's concerning i don't know which one is more concerning what do you think well i i appreciate that analysis and the way you approached that i think that i'm more concerned about the american consumer in the near term than i am in the law so i i would time ban to this in the next two years very concerned about the american consumer being too far overextended in 10 years i'm very concerned about the u.s government being too far extended i kind of asked you an unfair question now that i've answered it myself no no i i think that this is like part of the process here is to build a mental model here you're right yeah in the short term a consumer is going to at some point look at their family's 15 or 20 000 in short-term debt yeah let's say it's 20 000 for a family of five or something like it's a big number um and some of these people might have 30 or 40 000 in credit card debt but there's some group who has 20 30 000 they're going to look at that and they're paying 15 on that or 20 on it 25 probably now wow so i'm just gonna pick a number 20 20 they're paying 4 000 a year they're paying a car payment every month you know in interest this is really like a death spiral you have to pay it down at some point now let's add to it the possibility that you would lose your job to ai or to offshoring or to a new buzzword that we're going to put in our themes near shoring i want you to put near shoring near shoring is south america canada mexico same time zone near shoring uh and this is something i'm hearing a lot about developers obviously uh in south america on the same time zone shout out to lemon io one of our sponsors here on the show a lot of people are starting to nearshore we have a lot of employees in canada it's hard to get employees in the united states there's a lot of people in canada who are really smart and hardworking shout out to producer court and uh bianca and a bunch of people we have in canada who are awesome yeah so this is becoming a trend and people have a lot of developers in paraguay uruguay chile you know brazil it's a thing so i think nearshoring and losing jobs so now you lose your jobs you're on unemployment or you're partially employed and you have 300 400 interest on your credit card bill every month ouch this could get acute for people you can make that entire analogy and scale it up to the national level like okay let's say ai takes the jobs of your population you have mass unemployment which is similar to being unemployed on the individual basis you owe a lot of money not credit card debt per se the government does get a better interest rate than your average revolving consumer loan but you end up in the same spiral if you don't have enough revenue coming in and so i actually the way that i think about that now is now that we've gone through this it's not that we need to think about ubi so much as it is we need to make sure that our economy keeps having people in productive jobs as we get more efficient to ensure that we can afford to keep living i guess i mean the place to figure this out would be to look at um maybe a 10-year chart of uh credit card delinquencies which is a specific chart we can look up as you can see here percent delinquency rate on credit card loans all commercial banks it was in 2015 it looked like two percent then i guess people got um and the chart is starting at 1.4 so that's the base of the chart so it's a little more dramatic than it needs to be i hate when people do that but um during the pandemic i think people got a grace period so you have 1.5 and oh look at this we're now at 3.24 so based on our conversation and you're building this mental model of what's happening with the consumer i just thought well wouldn't if this credit card debt was getting acute you would start to have delinquencies and then after delinquencies yes the next thing would be bankruptcies so i don't know what the historic lag is but if we put a chart together of the delinquency rate on credit card if we put if we made a chart or a model of the amount of credit card debt the amount of delinquencies and then bankruptcies these things would happen in succession i think and then you put unemployment it in here oh boy it could get really spicy chart for this uh alex we'll do it tomorrow or wednesday but this is an interesting live yeah no no this will be an interesting discussion for us to watch is the health let's put this on our themes that you know the health of the consumer yes and the debt the debt load debt load health of the consumer this is something we should be acutely aware of this is what's exciting did you see bernie sanders tweet this weekend i i i have lots of yes yes i did okay you are a bernie guy i'm not well okay i i like bernie as i think as a human he is incredibly principled he was standing up for gay rights way before that was um a when hillary clinton was against him i mean even before that i think he's been an iconoclast and is a great american i don't agree with a lot of his economic views but um he did say elon musk is right and jason this tweet is him saying we need to go after waste fraud in the department of defense essentially the pentagon which keeps failing its audits and i saw i put this in my newsletter a lot of people saying oh you know you know elon converted bernie it's the other way around right i feel like bernie's converted the republicans and i'm losing my mind what's going on um listen strange bedfellows right uh this happens sometimes if you look at populism as a concept um and this is what i said on all in and you remember all the guys kind of beat me up on it two weeks ago when i said you have to get the public behind doge it cannot look like crony capitalism it's so easy for people to look at a bunch of rich venture capitalists ceos and say okay they're looking out for themselves they're going into the government to get self-driving approved federally to get tax credits for solar to do this to do that to get tax breaks on capital gains as a venture capital's carried interest tax but they're the public people like to say they're stupid yeah you can't fool them forever right you might be able to trick them in the short term you have to get people on board with reducing this national debt looking for waste and bernie sanders joining the party is the ultimate populist move here it's so great because now you'll have some democrats doesn't need to be all of them and a lot of republicans and it it's not going to be all of them some of them are going to splinter and say no we shouldn't question the military spending because in their backyard they're making submarines or they're making battleships or tanks whatever they have some spending going on locally that helped them get elected and rightfully so they're trying to serve their constituents and get more jobs in their area we just talked about the importance of jobs yep fairly obvious why but we're going to need to belt tighten the easy layup is waste and fraud and when somebody fails seven audits in a row well that's where you start isn't it and if somebody doesn't come to work well that's where you start there's really low-hanging fruit here and so this is going to be great if we can find something that americans can agree on finally which is waste and fraud go there first and i'm working on the doge leaderboard by the way i'm working on the doge leaderboard unofficially i i think i think here's what i would do i'm gonna make up a i'm gonna make a proposal for doge oh god please jason the things the things the roads you lead me down i appreciate it okay here's my idea okay i agree very much with your point about uh appearance has been an issue here if we have people who are wealthy investors doing things that that other people perceive to be self-dealing it will be bad so what we should do is we should have one person from each tax bracket also as part of doge that way someone who makes 15 000 a year someone makes 45 i forget the tax i don't pay attention to them but one from each have a middle class person up a middle class love it i also think when the waste happens when we find waste and fraud we should give a whistleblower award okay so they should get 10 of whatever they save literally they save a billion dollars give them a hundred million the sec does this with whistleblowers right they do it absolutely yes yeah so you get part of the penalty or the whatever the claim is so let's give a whatever it is a 10 5 if if you if the if you identify fraud i'm talking about fraud not just waste fraud you get 10 waste you get five percent uh efficiency you get one percent you know whatever it is and so if a person says hey you know what we can do this job with one person in you know i was i was talking about um uh security systems we have an investment in deep sentinel deep sentinel uh uses remote operators to manage cameras if you pull up their youtube you'll see these cameras operating you pull up the website it should explain it deep sound is such a brilliant company we invested in because what they do is they put this camera on your door i had this at our offices it was incredible somebody comes and starts screwing around with your door yeah it sends an alert to somebody working at home who is a remote security guard the remote security guards that you hire to work at an administration building and every administration building has them they're all sitting there playing candy crush and falling asleep while eating peanut m &ms sounds like a great friday night no offense i was about to say that sounds lovely sounds pretty great here these cameras are battery powered you can pop them up anywhere or you can use your existing ones now you have one security guard what percentage of the time in the overnight shift from 9 p.m to 9 a.m does somebody walk in front of the camera for those 10 hours let's say of that shift five six times okay so you have five or six minutes of interaction of a hundred interactions how many of them are nefarious usually zero zero okay so of a thousand it's one so now what you have is you have somebody sitting there at home no office space necessary getting paid a decent salary and ai is saying there's somebody lingering here with a oh and they've got a weapon they've got a crowbar the ai then prioritizes what they should look at they then hit a button you know what deep sentinel does turns on the microphone hey can i help you and the person's like i don't need help and you're like okay goodbye yeah it's like okay well i'm calling the police and i'm about to click a button and you're going to hear a blaring alarm please leave the area and then they press a button and that camera has a giant alarm in it that goes and then they call the police you could have one security guard for i think every couple of hundred cameras right now you got one security guard for like every 10 cameras sitting at a front desk it's complete waste so we should just apply technology then we have a second investment in a company called density now i'm starting to sound like a grifter pull up density.io density has a new product called the waffle you put this thing on the show if you had him on the yeah you put the waffle into every one of we have like millions it might be tens of millions of square feet of office space that are unused by the government and we own a large portion of it you put these waffles in there it will tell you if there's zero one two or three people in a conference room in office you know whatever cafe these things cost 150 bucks you put these into these offices you can then know you know what we should sell this building and put everybody in the building next door let's say you have department of education you know you're cutting 20 of the people for the payroll to you know have austerity measures and then you just consolidate uh the office space by 50 think about how much money the american taxpayers would save this is what we need to do there's but there's so so lots of good things there's two different ways to think about money though in this case one is every dollar we save is good right like i'm a fan of incrementalism in my diet and exercise i i'm in favor of finding every dollar we can a fraud and abuse and efficiency and go for it that will get us five percent of the way there so my question then becomes what where are we actually going to start cutting off pounds of flesh because it's the it's the expenses in five percent a year medicaid yeah i mean those things are going to be hard but i mean we just have to create a culture of austerity and efficiency and you know it's five percent in year one ten percent in year two twenty percent in year three we'll get there um but it's giving some of these things like we we talked about it with um the uh company in providence that's making the uh unmanned vauten systems vauten systems pull up the twist 500 page please anytime we mention somebody in twist 500 i assume they're in there i'll pull up their web page what did he say that was 50k or 70 75k and other people were selling it for 500 so that was 85 less so there are products and services density and deep sentinel that would be 90 less than the current spend so we could just we need americans and technologists and entrepreneurs to get in there and realize there is so much waste and fraud and incompetence that's the low-hanging fruit it's not everybody of course it's not everybody but what do you estimate is incompetence waste or fraud uh as a percentage basis so percentage cost of those things of the total federal budget not including interest yeah um i'm sorry just give me a range 15 to 20 okay yeah i was gonna go 25 to 50 so we're both under 50 i'm i think there's many more gains to be had but you think there's significant gains to have this is gonna to be incredible that's the right that's the right way to think about it i think there's 20 you think there's 35 huzzah let's see who's right because my always my most conservative view has always been hey y 'all have you seen the federal deficit here's what i hope here's what i hope i've been clear i have problems with trump not a fan of the guy's personality etc if trump pulls this off and he makes a second term about efficiency in this country i will absolutely say he's been a great president i i'm not happy about january 6th i'm not happy about roe v wade there's a long list of things that i don't like i don't like the name calling all this other stuff if if he does this in the second term he will be a great president and if he wants to be remembered as a great president by all americans wants to be forgiven for january 6th and all this chaos he caused here's a way to do it all i care is it gets done at this point that's what i care about i am supporting him a hundred percent and my friends were doing it to get it done hundred percent have my support i hope he gets any percentage of this done i mean we historically we have it as a nation i think is is the way that i would kind of dig into what you just said and i would love if this strange collection of people we have for example we have musk and sanders together wanting to audit the pentagon and reduce the cost there who would have thought that was the combination but if we can get it done hell yes because you know what i would love is to leave a better future for my children now jason we're gonna we're gonna save our discussion about byd and oh yes evs for tomorrow but lots of cool data there but we're a little low on time but i do want to loop back to your tweet and let's see the results of our experiment let's see what people have to say it's gonna be i mean this is yeah what could go wrong uh it's only got 33 000 views what's your beef with this i don't get it the guy apparently makes you richer yet you taunt his strategy every day at the moment i mean i can only draw one conclusion from it what is that conclusion i don't know uh and run us back to you realize you want sailor to succeed right if emster fails and you have to sell off your btc holdings will go down yes i agree first you're a non-crypto guy then you say you're holding btc yes i i mean i people can't seem to hold two things in their mind at once it's december 2004 and jason's still god dear god people this is not how you make this is back to the have fun staying poor side of things which to me is just such a poor way to market this if you really believe in this just be positive i don't know i mean dear uh i mean and wow my favorite is the clown when people do the clown makeup i love that yeah was it actually you in clown makeup or was just a clown michael sailor is no longer following jason i didn't see that uh how many dms did you send him i think i sent them two i think i sent him too i mean i don't know why he is um yeah that's that's uh hashtag bitcoin is hope.com okay yeah all right well you know what y 'all uh okay so actually pause one last thing before we go that last tweet the guy said uh you're complaining about the the net asset value premium and then they just said it's reasonable good well i'm glad that person on twitter told me that it's reasonable enjoy enjoy that i guess i mean he dm'd me and he's like he dm'd me um jason i am a big fan of the all in podcast if you guys want to invite me as a guest participant sometime i'd be happy to join the banter don't do that on all in all in we don't really do that too much yeah if you ever want someone to come on your podcast to discuss bitcoin i'm available he just texted me this march 18th 2023 so i just dm'd him back i said what's your email and he and he asked me publicly to come on the pod so i mean anyway uh shout out michael saylor i know that i'm not as pretty as chamoff i think here's my prediction i think um this will come not crashing down but i do believe bitcoin will correct to the 40 to 70 000 range again i think that's historically what it's done i would be surprised if it doesn't when it does do the 40 to 70 000 um he will either be it'll either be trading under his average entry price or slightly above it when that happens i think his stock will correct people will not believe in this um there could be a recession and people need the money and then that could start an unraveling could start it it's not guaranteed could go the other way too but i think we'll start the unraveling and the unraveling will result in uh his stock price going in half so i will make my prediction here i think the majority case is going to be his stock price and the price of bitcoin will both be at half their current value in the next 36 months so in the next 36 months at some point yeah bitcoin will be under 50 or under 70 let's say and his stock price whatever it's at 390 whatever it'll be at 200 something in that range so if you want to hold it through that dip and you think then it will hit a higher peak great if you think bitcoin 1 million dollars is coming you could just put the money in there let it sit i think the better trade if i was holding mr shares i would sell every mr share i have and i would just buy bitcoin directly if i believed in it or i would buy bitcoin and then with the half i got for free i would buy whatever tech big tech company you think is the most promising that's not correlated to bitcoin or you know put it in a dividend paying fund buy a nice s p 500 index fund that costs you 0.00001 percent per year in fees yeah and then risk the rest i'll just say that i i don't think it's a fraud by the way i'm not i never said it's a fraud just so everybody's clear i never said this is a fraud or a ponzi so and nor do i think that so if michael sayler's watching or somebody says a clip i don't think what you're doing is a fraud i think it's the ultimate all-in bet it's the ultimate shove all your chips in and consolidate into one thing and i do think it's overvalued by a factor of double and you should get a premium have 20 on your bitcoin holdings 10 or 20 would be reasonable all of that's good or you can also just be like me which is by not being decentralized and by buying it through a centralized group called fidelity and then i'm ruining everyone's day okay all right uh ladies and gentlemen we're back on the fidelity by the way can you buy bitcoin through fidelity like with all their fees i don't know how they charge do you know what i'm pulling it up right now one percent a year or something it's much less than that oh no 0.25 0.25 okay so if you owned one bitcoin and bitcoin was at a hundred thousand you would pay 250 dollars a year for them to custodian your bitcoin essentially great okay if you buy mr shares you're paying fifty thousand dollars of bitcoin if bitcoin was at 100 you're paying double basically so just keep that in mind folks and you don't control it that's the other issue and there's that tied to it anyways um apart from that jason and i move on to new topics later this week tomorrow okay we can't help ourselves when it comes to financial things um he's at jason i'm at alex we have interviews coming up we have cool startups coming up we have lots and lots this is gonna be a packed week we are back we are energized We are ready to rock.

1:22:42And we'll see y 'all. Let's do it. Cheers. Bye-bye.