My First Million - 3 Stories Of People Making Millions In Weird Ways
Episode Date: November 19, 2024Episode 651: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talk about the Polymarket whale who made millions off the election, Ozempic for sleep and why Martha Stewart... would have been our Billy of the Week in 1999. — Show Notes: (0:00) The rise and fall of Martha Stewart (19:04) Ozempic for sleep (33:10) The guts and brains of Polymarket's whale (44:55) Betting vs gambling — Links: • Isaak.net - https://isaak.net/sleepless/ • Polymarket - https://polymarket.com/ • Chainalysis - http://chainalysis.com • Vitalik blog - https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/11/09/infofinance.html — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: Need to hire? You should use the same service Shaan uses to hire developers, designers, & Virtual Assistants → it’s called Shepherd (tell ‘em Shaan sent you): https://bit.ly/SupportShepherd — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth • Sam’s List - http://samslist.co/ My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano
Transcript
Discussion (0)
All right, Sean, there's a documentary that R and I, R.A. and I were texting about, did you see it? It was called Martha. It was on Netflix. It was about Martha Stewart.
I haven't seen it. I actually don't know really anything about her.
Great. This is so great because Martha Stewart was a beast.
I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like my days off.
On the road, let's travel. I really couldn't tell you five things about Martha Stewart. So, like, was she kind of the first?
influencer, like a celebrity influencer who then started launching products?
What's the story?
Martha Sewer was a killer.
She was a total shark.
She was way sharkier.
If you only know her as her put together image of like this housewife who cooks,
everything I'm going to say is going to blow your mind because she was a total shark.
So I'm going to give you a little bit of her background.
So basically she's born and raised up in the East Coast.
She goes to Columbia University.
While she's going to school, she becomes a model.
because she was a cute woman when she was young.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Wow.
She was fantastic.
Yeah.
Good for her.
Very pretty woman.
Yeah, go Martha.
She gets married at a young age, like 19 or 20 years old, but graduates Columbia and
her father-in-law helps her get a job as a stock broker.
And by the way, she studied architectural, like, history or something like that
at Columbia.
Nothing to do with stocks.
And so at the age of like 24, 25, she gets this job.
And you're probably wondering, how on earth did Martha Stewart?
become a stockbroker. Well, I am wondering. When her father-in-law first met her, he was like,
you have this like it factor. Like, you are so charming. You are so put together because she had this
vibe at a very young age in her 20s. She dressed it fantastically. She was very charismatic.
She was clearly driven and hardworking. And this small like 10 person operation that was a stock
brokerage, they needed a saleswoman, a salesperson. And it was all men at the time. I think this was
in the 60s.
was all dudes. It was a very male
dominated industry, but
she comes into this interview and eventually
works there, and they comment on
how she's dressed perfectly.
So perfectly that you're sort of
intimidated when you first meet her because
she's like perfectly put together. But then
she's like really charming and warm and you're
like, oh, I like you.
And so she starts like as a
salesperson, basically at the stock company, basically
working at with clients
and getting them to like trust them and things like that.
And she kills it. And so listen
of this, at the age of 26, according to this documentary, she said she was making $135,000 a year,
which equivalent today is a million dollars a year at the age of 26 as a stockbroker.
Pretty crazy that she went from being a model to a stockbroker and that short amount of time.
And she kills it.
And she does it for like six or seven years.
Like it's like a legitimate career for her.
And she suggests that one of our clients buy this stock that was like a dollar and it went to like
$10.
So it killed it.
Then they bought a little bit more.
and it goes something huge to 50.
It was like this massive stock and it made these clients all this money,
but then the $50 stock goes right back down to like $8 or $10.
And so technically her client had still made a bunch of money,
but that roller coaster ride of like making a little bit of money,
then making a ton of money, then losing a ton of money,
it like left her kind of distraught.
And so she bailed because of that like journey.
And so she quit.
And so in the,
when she's like 30 years old or late 20s,
she moves out to actually where I'm living now,
Westport, Connecticut.
She was like, you know, I want to have a kid.
I want to like try this housewife life, whatever, and do this thing.
And she moves out here and she sits around for a very short amount of time.
And she's like, all right, I got to do something.
Like, I can't just sit here.
And so they buy this like kind of shitty house.
And she like totally turns around and redos the whole thing all by herself.
She paints it.
She builds this beautiful garden.
She learns how to raise goats and chickens and like plant her own garden and like creates
this amazing like estate out in Westport, Connecticut, which now it's fancy.
back then it wasn't particularly fancy.
And so eventually she gets really into this.
And she's like, you know, I kind of like this housewife life.
What if I start hosting some dinner parties?
And she creates these lavish, amazing dinner parties.
And eventually all these rich guys who come are like, hey, do you want to like cater my party?
And so that's what she starts doing.
And so she builds a business as a caterer that she said made her a millionaire.
And her whole schick back then for this catering business was she goes, I'm going to make everything by scratch.
And so Westport, Connecticut, we're about a,
hour and 10 minutes from New York City. At this time, people start realizing that she could actually
operate on like three or four hours of sleep. And so she would go to like catering, the catering
business, by the way, it's like, that's like the hardest thing on earth. Right. You know,
it's brutal. It's a really hard business to pull off. And so she was famous for going to the
farmer's markets in New York at 4 a.m., getting all of her produce and then going in the morning and
baking all of her food. And so her famous saying as her catering business was basically,
I make everything from scratch.
And not only does she just make stuff from scratch,
one time she saw this brochure that was doing a recreation of like the Pilgrim's
Thanksgiving.
And there was like a basket of fruit that was like overflowing.
And she was like,
that's what I'm going to do.
And so she was famous for creating these like charcutory boards of like overflowing meats
and fruits.
And she says something that was actually really inspiring.
She was like,
I wanted to turn this into experience.
And like I wanted to make this like fruit board.
She was like,
it sounds trivial,
but that was my art.
And I was going to make like,
these baskets of fruit overflow with strawberries to show that this table is where like generosity
like like like you know like an abundance and all this stuff and it's a massive hit she builds us
into a big business to the point where a few years in she goes and she caters a I think it was
like penguin publishing or something like that like one of these publishers party she caters it
and it's a really big deal you know she's doing like the met all these museum and art museums in
New York and this is a big deal like she's doing this catering company or this publishing company
and they start talking to her and they're like, dude, you are amazing.
Do you want to write a cookbook for us?
And so she does.
And it takes her like a few years, like three or four years because she's super hands-on
on writing this book.
And they were like, hey, so we want you to do this cookbook?
Just put in a bunch of recipes and some black and white photos.
And she was a nobody.
And she goes, not a chance.
We're doing colored photos.
And we're actually going to do like 500 photos.
And just give me the budget.
I'll go ahead and I'm going to like hire a photographer friend.
and we're going to go and like organize all these photos
and take all these lavish photos at my house that I made
because we're going to make this like the Martha Stewart cookbook
where at the time typically it had just been recipes
she was like no we're going to add in about like my lifestyle we're going to have these
photos one of the photos and this is like her kitchen look how lavish that is like
what do you see the most full kitchen I've ever seen
there's literally 9,000 pots and pans hanging above her
and then she's surrounded she's like
Her kitchen looks like a shakrudery board.
It looks like an overflowing shircudery board,
but she's one of,
she's like a piece of salami in the middle.
And that's like the whole,
her whole schick.
Basically, she,
she says this.
She's like,
I'm going to sell perfection.
Because she was.
She was a perfectionist.
She was actually a pain in the ass to work for.
And the first book was called entertaining.
And it was about like entertaining guests, basically.
Yeah.
And like creating an atmosphere of like warmth and things like that.
And it was a massive hit.
It sold.
650,000 copies.
What do you think?
I feel like Nick Gray is the new Martha Stewart.
I'm just going to put that out there.
What Nick Gray is doing with the two-hour cocktail party,
I think he's just a young Martha Stewart right now.
Yeah, well, and she was like one of the early influencers
because this was in the 80s,
this is when mass media is really becoming a thing.
And it's a massive hit.
And so like these women buy these books
because it's not just about cooking,
it's about like being better,
being aspirational,
like perfecting a craft.
And she sold the shit out of this lifestyle.
And it was her lifestyle.
And she basically said in the documentary,
she was like,
I had visions early on
of creating this Martha Stewart Media Company
all about me because I'm great.
Like I am what,
like she was very confident about that.
Opening up the business plan,
I'm like,
all right,
Martha Stewart's Media Company.
It's about me.
Next page.
Because I'm great.
Next page.
age. But she was, I mean, she was, so like, there's a lot of bad stuff that has gone on. Like,
basically her husband cheats on her. She cheats on her husband. Her daughter's like, dude,
she was a cold mom. People complain working for her. They're like, dude, she's just a fucking asshole.
And she was. Like, throughout the documentary, they get her on camera being rude to her employees.
And so, yeah, she's like a perfectionist. And she, she was like, I'm not, I'm not sorry for that.
I'm a perfectionist.
Wait, so fast forward through the business side. So she does the cook,
cookbook. Cookbook's a hit. Massive hit. And eventually, one thing leads to another where Kmart,
which was just like Kmart today back then, it was like, you know, lower, lower status store.
She partners with them to create like a line of betting. And people are like shocked. They're like,
why would this upscale woman do this? And it turned out to be a great move. It was really cool.
And then she partners with time and she creates a series of magazines. And she's the editor of the
magazine. It goes really well, but she's like, I want to own this son bitch. And so she raises
$85 million and she buys the magazine and three or four years later takes it public. And I
show the financials of her business. I think it was called Martha Stewart Omni Media. Basically
she buys the business and something like three years later takes it public. In year three,
it's doing $130 million a year in 1997, $130 million in revenue.
And it's a behemoth of a business.
So basically they've got the TV show.
They have tons and tons of magazines.
They have merchandising like the Kmart deal.
It just crushes it.
And it goes public and she becomes the first ever self-made women's billionaire in America
and just annihilates it.
But then something really bad happens.
So basically, she's worth like 400, 500, 600 million at this point because the stock was going up and down.
Apparently, she calls her stockbroker.
She's like, hey, I want you to sell this one stock.
So she sells this one stock and she made like 30 grand off of it.
Turns out a lot of people think that it was insider trading.
And so the DOJ interviews her and figures out this whole thing and does this massive investigation.
Turns out the charges of insider trading are dropped.
they're like you did not insider trade however so sorry she sold her own stock or she sold
a sorry just a different just a stock and only 30k so why was it a big deal anyway it was so it was a big
deal because we're just uh we're we're basically there was like enron and a bunch of things like this
were happening at the time and the doj was like any insider trading any like corruption we're going
we're going like really hard against all of us and so she like sells some stock it's suspicious
turns out that the CEO of the company whose stock she sold, he was, in fact, corrupt.
And they're like, but you knew him. What was going on? You knew that this drug wasn't going to
pass. You sold the stock, whatever. The DOJ investigates her. And they're like, you actually,
that looks clean. It looks like you didn't know anything. However, when we interviewed you,
you told us some small fact about how you were on a schedule to sell this stock. Turns out you
weren't on a schedule. And so you lied to us. And so we were going to put you in federal penitentiary
for five months for lying.
Not for insider trading,
but for lying about this like somewhat
not that big of a deal of fact.
And so kind of bullshit, kind of not.
Like she did lie,
but like she got five months in the federal penitentiary
and she's like 50 years old.
And at the time when all this trial shit happens,
that's when we realized that Martha Stewart,
she's kind of bad.
She's bad because there's all these stories
where it comes out,
she's a little rude.
So, for example, her stockbroker has this assistant who would talk to Martha mostly.
And there's examples of the stockbroker's assistant being like, dude, she was the meanest person ever.
For example, one time she called and I had to put her on hold.
And I go back to talk to her, she goes, hey, if you don't change that waiting music, that tacky waiting music by the next time I call, I'm going to have you fired.
And just hung up.
Just like hung up.
Like there's like repeatedly like a bunch of stories where she just did, she was not like very kind to people.
and that kind of swayed public opinion of her.
She goes to jail for five months, and it sucked.
It sucked for her.
It was not good.
She gets out of jail and she ends up doing Justin Bieber's roast, which again, changed
public perception of her because at this point, everyone was like, man, it's kind of fun
seeing Martha Stewart kind of downfall because she was a perfect woman.
Like, F her, it's kind of nice.
Like, it brings me up to see this person.
Yeah, I knew she wasn't so perfect.
Yeah.
And she's just, like, hilarious.
She talks about how she, like, shanked bitches in prison and how she, like, made this shank with just, like, a piece of pencil and some bubble gum.
And you could do one, too, at home.
I'll show you how.
Like, it, like, kind of humanized her.
It was pretty cool.
But her getting arrested, it decimated the stock.
So she was, like, on the documentary, she was like, I think I would have been worth $10 billion.
But when I got arrested, my stock went way down.
They ended up selling the company for, like, $300 million.
and it was kind of like the, it could have been like a great company, but it kind of wasn't.
However, throughout this whole thing, this whole documentary, Martha, like, has shown time and time again,
she's a bad, bad woman, like, in all sense of the word, as in like, she's brutal, she's smart,
she's conniving.
Her stock is only going up in your books.
That's all I'm hearing.
All I'm hearing is, let's just summarize.
Good looking lady already.
off to a good start.
Then goes from model
to sales slash stockbroker.
All right.
Amazing.
One interesting thing, that's cool.
Two interesting things.
You have my attention.
Third interesting thing,
self-made,
first kind of major
trad wife influencer.
Does the cookbooks,
does it her way,
is ruthless with the details,
has a no-nonsense attitude.
She's a stickler.
These are all,
I mean, these are your safe words, dude.
These are all the things that you enjoy.
So this is really up your alley.
Like, I mean, like, how do you feel about Martha Stewart right now?
Because it sounds like even when she's bad, it just made her more good in your books.
Sort of.
I mean, she paid the price.
So basically, like, her husband left her, her kids.
Like, she's got a bad relationship with her children because of the way she behaved.
And she basically, she's 83 now, by the way.
I didn't realize how old she was.
And, like, she hasn't had a relationship since her husband and her broke up.
So she paid the price.
there's a cost to be the boss, you know, and she paid it, but she is, in fact, the boss.
So I do have a lot of respect for her, and I also think that there's downsides to achieve what she achieved.
But I'm shocked you didn't know that, did you know any of this, like, how she's like,
not really.
I knew she had like a cookbook or was on TV and that she sold, like, stuff to women.
That's kind of the extent of what I knew about Martha Stewart.
Dude, she's great.
And so another big takeaway, and I'll wrap up here, is how big of a company you could start and have just off the back of one person.
Like, it was the Martha Stewart brand. And she was like into that. Like a lot of people would be fearful of like having that burden, having that on your back of like literally a thousand plus employees and billions of dollars of value. And she was totally into it. And she loved it. And I love those types of personalities.
Right, but it sounds like this company wasn't that good.
And your numbers table here, by 2001, it says total revenue, $295 million, net income $21 million,
which is obviously that's good.
That's not nothing, but it's not a $10 billion company to make $21 million a year of net income.
And then it says from 2003 to 2015, which is like three presidents, it says consecutive annual losses every year except for one year.
So was this really a good business?
or was this actually just a lot of work for nothing?
No, it was good.
I mean, you have to think of a few things.
One, you know, it was making $300 million a year in revenue,
and a lot of it came from publishing,
and publishing means subscription magazines.
So, like, that's, like, pretty good.
But then the internet came and just completely, like,
obliterated that industry.
I mean, that was, like, magazines are probably, like,
the worst industry to be in.
So, like, yeah, there's a lot of what-ifs.
And the timing was such that she got arrested
and also, like, you know,
Amazon was created and the internet was created.
So yeah, there's a lot of like what ifs.
I feel like if she was, I think she was like 30 years too early.
Like I think if she had the internet, she could have become a juggernaut.
Because it sounds like her talent and her ruthlessness, that combination was going to serve her well.
And it just, she needed a better medium.
If she could have just owned her own her own Instagram and TikTok channels and built
everything off the back of that.
I think she would have been the number one sort of like women's or mom
influencer. She arguably was that anyways of her era, but the market 100xed.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, like I think a lot of these like big celebrities, I think it was a little bit easier
to be a big celebrity in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s because there was less of them.
Now anyone with the cell phone can become a celebrity in like six or 12 months.
So it's hard to say.
But by the way, her businesses
still do like a billion a year in sales.
Okay, gotcha.
You have something in your notes here.
Typical day of 60-year-old Martha Stewart.
Yeah, read that.
It says she's 60, but she looks a decade younger.
She's been up since 4.30 a.m.
She answers her email at 5,
takes a 3-mile walk with her trainer at 6.
She tours her garden at 7.
When she tours her garden,
she's thrilled to discover a duck and 13 ducklings in the swimming pool.
By 7.30, she's whipping up corn,
gruel for a visiting waterfowl.
I don't even know what any of these words are.
Like an animal. And building a wooden ramp to help them get in and out of the pool.
A duck.
Okay. She's doing all this stuff for a duck. Her TV crew arrives at 8,
her hair and make up 830, and then she's shooting her TV segment by 9 a.m.
Yeah, dude, she's crazy.
Dude, I literally woke up like 19 minutes ago, and I rolled out of bed and I put on this hat,
and then I started, I clicked play. I don't think, I don't think I'm built for this.
She's a machine. You know how, like, people say stories of, like, how Trump can only
operate on three hours of sleep. That's like a real thing, by the way. There's like a, it's like a,
it's like a, a thing. She's another person. She's famous for only sleeping like three hours
a night. Perfect segue. Can I tell you what my best topic was that I wanted to talk to you about?
Yeah. OZempic for sleep. So there's a guy, his blog is is isaac.net. And he wrote this post
about sleeplessness. And he basically says that there's a set of people that are famous who have
the short sleeper jeans. A set of genes for where, you know, about four to five hours a night
is a full night's rest for them. And he says that, you know, Mozart, Thomas Edison,
Sigmund Freud, Margaret Thatcher, Obama. And he's like, even my lab mate, this guy's a researcher,
he's like, have this thing called short sleeper syndrome. And people thought that short sleeper
syndrome would be you sleep less and maybe you're able to operate that way, but, you know,
it's got to be bad for you. Sleep we know is sort of the.
the best thing for you. It restores the brain and the body and all your function.
And so these people must be dying younger and have more disease, right? And it's like,
no, actually, they don't. These people just simply have the benefit without the cost.
They sleep, you know, they need about three hours less sleep than the rest of us,
but they don't pay the price in terms of, you know, the health consequences of that.
And so he goes on this post and he basically outlines that we...
Who are these people, by the way, in this photo?
So he says, my favorite family is this family called the Johnsons from Utah.
And the Johnsons from Utah are a set of researchers, and I think a bunch of them have this short sleeper genetic makeup.
And so they've been researching this for a while.
And it's about 1% of people have this thing where you don't need as much sleep, and it does not seem detrimental to your health or your productivity.
And they've studied why is this?
What is it?
Is it one gene?
Is it not?
And they've basically, like, there's four kind of, like, protein changes that they've noticed,
of, you know, variations in the glutamate receptor, GRM1, blah, blah, blah.
So there's these four things.
And then they've done some tests in mice and others where they do, like, knockouts.
So they'll knock out one of the genes and they'll see if it, you know, makes the mouse sleep less or sleep more.
And they try to understand the...
Can you do that to a, like, when you say knockout, does that mean, like, you're a living being
or when they reproduce?
A living being.
That's how the body works.
You could just like...
Actually, I said that with so much confidence
for somebody who has no idea,
but I think that you could do that.
I'm a bio major.
You could check that.
That's a fact, yeah.
But I don't know if you could do...
I don't know if this is done at the embryo
or in the living thing.
But the point is they've tested this in mouse models.
Mouse models don't always apply to human models,
so there's some question there.
But the researcher sort of points out,
actually, you know, usually when mouse model,
when things that work in mice
don't work in humans,
it's because they tried it
and it worked for the first time in mice
and then it takes a long time
to even try it in humans
and maybe it won't work.
He's like, in this case,
we're observing it actually in humans
and then we went back to mice
and tried to recreate those genetic mutations
or those genetic changes.
And so this is really exciting.
So what he's talking about
is like in the same way
that we found drugs like OZembek,
which could modify your appetite.
It could change your need for food in a way that had all these downstream health benefits, right?
You change your need for food.
You reduce your need for food.
Now you eat less.
Obesity goes down.
They've seen that it helps with things like addiction to alcohol.
There's like all these other things that people are noticing with these.
That's the OZempic case.
This guy's saying you could do the same with sleep.
And is this guy, Isaac, is he the researcher or is he just blogging on this?
He's a researcher who is blogging about this.
Wow.
Got it.
And he's basically saying that, like, potentially we could create something that does the same thing that how OZembe reduced your need for food, that we could reduce your need for sleep and make you mirror these people who have this already where they don't suffer the consequences of less sleep.
And he's like, you know, you do the math and you're like, if you're saving three or four hours a night of sleep, you basically, it's like the world's best longevity trade.
So what most people are trying to do with longevity is like, oh, if I'm living until 80, can I live till 90?
I'm living 90, can I live till 100, 100, 110?
And they're trying to push off that last marginal decade of poor health where you can't walk as much, you can't see as well, you know, if you're in pain and all that stuff.
You're trying to push that back as far as you can.
This would make it so that you actually just live better.
Like the days where you're healthy, you have more days.
You're awake for more of the time.
And it's the equivalent of an extra 10 years, but you get the 10 years not at the end.
You get it sort of all along the way while you're in your best health of your life.
that would be the promise of this.
And so how exciting is that?
I feel like it's possible that somebody's going to make an OZMPIC for sleep,
and it's going to allow us to, instead of needing eight hours,
I can sleep for five and feel just as good as I would on eight.
He says, this is like adding 10 more years to your life.
An 80-year lifespan, eight hours a day is asleep compared to 80 years with four hours of sleep.
That's 10 years.
This is amazing.
And on top of that, by the way, there's people who suffer from insomnia and narcolepsy.
And like, there's all these actual, like, sleep apnea.
There's all these things that affect people sleep.
Maybe you could alleviate those along the way, right?
Like, if, you know, there's thousands of Americans who have those problems, could you also improve those?
Okay.
First of all, this is amazing.
That's a great fine.
I'm reading his blog.
His writing's really great.
It doesn't write, like, that's why I was shocked that he's the researcher because he's, I think, like, there's like a quote where he goes, this is crazy.
Like, they don't normally say things like that.
Yeah, they don't have personalities, usually.
This has profound implications.
By the way, he's 22 years old.
He's a PhD student at MIT,
exploring brain simulations as an alternative path to beneficial AI.
And in the past, he skipped out of high school
in rural Austria to graduate early.
In his gap year, he created a $1 million nonprofit
and ran the most viral tech conference of the year
that had Sam Altman and others come.
He's self-taught Mandarin last year.
and did his undergrad at Berkeley in two years.
Guy's a winner. Doing well.
And he owns Isaac.net.
You're like great domain name.
Isaac with a K.
This guy's great, man.
What I was going to say was, is this, I've never,
I've heard of, you know, that gene a little bit that you're discussing.
But it's just funny that there's just some kid with a, well, a 22-year-old with a
personal blog, and this is the first time that I've ever heard about this, is this...
That's what I'm saying. It's fascinating. But if he's just talking about his blog, is this like
something that actually has, like, why is there not more press or press releases on this topic?
Is it actually legitimate? There is now. We just broke it, dude. This was the tipping point.
You're going to see other people working on this. You're going to see people talking about this.
There's going to be misinformation everywhere. It's going to be great.
This story is awesome. Just because I like Isaac.
And also, I would like to do, I would like to not sleep.
Would you rather be skinny like a Zempic and not, and eat less or be like chubby or whatever you?
I could sleep only five hours instead of eight.
I don't give a shit.
I would be the fattest man on earth.
No, just joking.
But like, that is a way better superpower to need less sleep, to get back three hours of time every day.
That's debatable.
I think that people will always prefer to be skinny over sleep, less sleep.
People are dumb. That's so dumb. If they prefer to be sitting over, have an extra three hours of life every day.
If the average 25, if you're like, look hot or live to 90 versus 80, they're going to choose hot over sleep any day of the week.
Well, this is why we don't ask 25 year olds questions. The brain is not fully formed yet.
This is a great fine. His blog, according to similar web, just shot up to 125,000 visitors in October.
What did he, like before it was nothing.
this in November. So that's kind of cool.
So Ben found this and he sent it to our friends.
Our friend invested in a company that made a JLP1 drug and sold for billions of dollars.
And so he sent this to him because he's like, oh, you did that early OZMPIC thing before.
OZMPIC was like a known thing, like seven years before he invested in this company that was going to work on that.
And it paid off in a big way. So he sent it to him.
And that guy was like, I don't know how you found this.
this is the best thing I've read all year.
I'm so excited about what you just sent me.
And it was such a great example of Ben being Ben,
where Ben has on one side a really curated feed
where he'll find interesting things like this.
He'll be fought.
He doesn't follow many people,
but he'll be following a guy like this Isaac guy.
And then he knows who to route the information to.
And he's like a,
he's like FedEx.
Like he doesn't touch the package.
Like when I get this,
I immediately start doing research.
I write notes.
I go talk about it.
I'm not passing it to somebody smarter.
Ben's like, he's like a FedEx guy.
The package comes off the conveyor belt.
He grabs the box, tosses in the truck, drives it to the address,
drops it off, and doesn't ask any questions about what's inside.
He just knows that's useful for you.
I think this is useful for you.
And he just does that all day.
I had him like add me to all these group chats.
He was always texting people, but I said, yo, just add me.
I just want to be a part of these.
So now I'm in probably like 60 group chats where it's me, Ben,
and a mutual like acquaintance or friend.
And he's just doing this all.
day. He's just routing packets to each
to different people about, I think you're into this
kind of thing. That's ridiculous.
How is he going to monetize it?
Can he ever monetize this?
Yeah. Dude, we monetize this
phenomenally. This is the secret of Ben.
He just tries to be useful.
And then he'll be like, hey, yeah,
remember that guy like you met
a year ago who you then
didn't talk to ever again? I'm like, yeah,
I think so. I think I remember that guy. He was cool.
He's like, yeah, so I've been texting him, you know,
we text daily. And he's got this
new thing and he's taking off and he wants us to invest. He's not letting it anyone else in.
And then we invest in it. It's incredible how this karma just comes back tenfold for Ben.
And he never asks for anything. He never asks. It's amazing. He texts me a fair bit, like just
like, um, saw this thing. You might like it. Like, you know, I, so I'm the recipient of some
these things. And I, I hate texting. Like, I hate like being at my computer and like constantly
having to go back and forth with 10 different people, which is how a lot of people. Which is how a lot of
with computers look right now where you're like, it's between Slack and messages. You're just
like going back and forth with 15 or 20 people at all times. And you're like, what did I do all day
today? I just shit chatted. I just shit chat it. So I don't like doing it. Do you fall into that
trap like throughout the day where you're like, dude, I just like texted people all day.
Yeah, I like Slack because I like my projects that I'm working on, but I don't text much. I'm a very
bad textor. And if anyone's out there who's texting me, I really apologize. I probably have not
texted you back. So I'm prolifically bad at it. Ben is prolifically great at it. And that
combination has really helped. The combination has really helped. And now people, they just bypass
me all together. They go to him. And it hurts my feeling sometimes. I'm like, wait, I thought I was
friends with this person. But now I understand why, because he's just a better person. He's a better
texture. In fact, he was like, I need to make a shirt called, I reply. He goes, because that's my thing,
dude. I reply. And I can say, it's pretty easy. And I was like, you should. You should.
write like the modern day how to win friends and influence people because that's what he does.
He wins friends and influences people with the most basic, the most basic of things.
And I was like, you couldn't sell a, like, the thing you do creates like tons of value,
like tens of millions of dollars in value for us.
You couldn't even teach people this because you would say what you do out loud and they'd be like,
that was it.
I showed up for the seminar for that.
That's basic.
It's basic as hell.
But that's what he does.
And it works.
That's insane.
I think it's funny.
By the way, Google Isaac Freeman.
Very good-looking, young, stylish, black dude.
This guy's got it all.
This guy's got it all.
If he just becomes an astronaut, he's basically the modern-day James Bond.
Oh, man, he's got like cool glasses and a jawline.
Yeah.
Get him over.
You said you had a bunch of exciting things.
You want to do a lot more?
By the way, you know, we don't judge a book by its cover.
So, like, you know, looks do matter.
Let's be clear.
We try not to judge people by their looks first.
But once we take a look at what you do,
we then go take a look at how you look.
And it either is like a plus 100 or it's a minus 100.
It's a huge multiplier on my opinion of you
and how much I'm going to remember you afterwards.
I will never forget this guy.
Yeah, like if he were dorky-looking,
I'd be like, yeah, makes sense, checks out.
And then I see what he looks like.
And I'm like, aw.
Right.
It's tough to be like looking at
By the way, most people
when they have an avatar
as their Twitter profile,
it's because they're goofy looking
and the avatar is better looking
than that.
He's making me question everything.
Like there's a reason I have a cartoon profile picture.
All right?
Look at me.
If you're on YouTube,
look at me.
This is why I have a cartoon profile picture.
Okay?
That's the rule.
It's like when someone quotes your revenue,
they would have said profit if they had it.
Right?
If somebody talks about users, they would have quoted revenue if they had it.
Normally, if somebody's got the looks, they're going to put their face as the profile picture.
This guy defies all convention.
I asked someone what the revenue was recently, and they were like eight figures.
If you include the dot zero zero.
That's pretty funny.
That was pretty good.
You want to do another thing?
Yeah.
All right.
I got some cool stuff.
Oh, you got to do this polymarket whale.
Okay, yeah, this is, all right, so this is the billy of the week.
Cue the music.
A million dollars isn't cool.
You know what's cool?
A billion dollars.
So you've heard this story, I think, but can I just explain a little bit of the detail here?
Amazing.
I read about it a little bit.
Do we even know who this person is?
Yeah, so the election was happening, what, 10 days ago or so?
And the big news was sort of, I guess, like, there's a battle going on.
There's Republicans versus Democrats.
Great.
There's Trump and Kamala, great.
They were supposed to be identical.
But there was an undercard to the pay-per-view.
And so who was the undercard?
Okay, if Trump and Kamala are the main event,
then I think the undercard, a lot of it was like mainstream media versus social media, right?
You had like Twitter and blogs versus MSNBC and whatever.
And they were giving you different narratives.
Right.
And so, you know, Trump and Vance go on Joe Rogan.
Kamala goes on Saturday Night Live and, you know, The View or 60 Minutes or like, you know,
these like traditional media.
That was one battle that was going on.
By the way, who would have thought, like, you've seen Theo Vaughn?
Swing the election.
Being like a needle mover.
Insane, right?
I was saying this earlier day, I think that going on Theo Vaughn needs to be part of the national
standard for an election.
Like, I need to know if my president's going to be a good hang or not.
And I think Theo is the one who could save us there.
Yeah, that was insane.
So under that, then you have, like, the billionaire backers.
You got Elon on one side.
You got more Cuban on the other.
And it's like, they're going around, they're promoting, they're using their money
and their voice to do it.
What was the other battles?
One of the other battles was polls versus crypto prediction markets.
So the polls were telling a story at the time, pre-election, the polls were saying razor-thin margin,
toss up these swing states too close to call.
It's a 50-50 election right now.
Like, it is too hard to tell who's going to win.
And the prediction markets, which were people betting money, were saying something different.
They were saying 65-35, Trump-
going to win. And they're different things, right? A poll is, you know, you go out and you ask people
who are you going to vote for. A prediction market is who's going to get the most votes. So they do tell
different things, but the reality is still the same, which is that if the polls were accurate,
that it was a 50-50 toss-up, it's going to be a razor-thin margin, then the betting market
shouldn't have such a big spread. There shouldn't be a big favorite versus a big underdog.
And what was the polymarket spread? I think it was like 75, 25? No, it was a little less. It was
about 63 Trump, but then it got to 65. And then like, as the election started, when the news was
saying, you know, we're still too early, the odds were just jetting in Trump's direction.
They were, they knew earlier than the exit polls or the news was willing to report about how much
of a landslide this was going to be for Trump, which it was. Okay. So before it happened,
there was a question of like, is the prediction market actually predictive? And there was
some legitimate skepticism. So the pro side was, um, the betting market. Um, the betting
market versus the pole market?
The betting.
Well, it's just like even just alone.
Should we be, should we care what polymarket says?
And on one hand.
Collie market being the platform where you could take these beds.
Exactly.
And so you, the plus side would be to say, well, these are people betting their own money.
So skin in the game.
And so if you see a lot more action coming in on one side, that means the sort of the
wisdom of the crowds and the actual free market believes the odds are this.
And that might be better than just the polls where people say.
They're just saying what they're going to vote for, and it's a small sample, but who knows?
Maybe they're lying.
Maybe it's just too small of a sample to know.
Maybe it's not indicative of, there's no skin in the game there.
So on one hand, you said skin in the game.
On the other hand, you would say, Polymarket, never heard of it, banned in the U.S.
So all the betting action was from international.
So over $3 billion was bet on the election.
None of this was Americans because you can't use Polymarket in America.
Then it's also crypto holders, right?
Because Polymarket is a crypto betting thing.
So you're like, oh, maybe there's a bias.
Crypto holders are more libertarian.
Maybe they're going to go more right leaning.
And so it's what they want.
And Trump's pro-crypto.
Yeah.
So it was like maybe they're voting on what they wish for and not what it actually is.
Okay.
So there was some question marks.
Then there was one more.
Then the news came out and said, you know, we can't trust polymarket because it's manipulated.
Manipulated?
How?
It's manipulated because a couple of whales are betting heavily on Trump and that's swinging the
odds. So it's actually, there's not what the crowds think. It's really a couple of whales that are
influencing this. And you can see on Polymarket the size, like, can I see like, oh, someone just
put this million dollar bet in? I can go on Polymarket right now and look at the top 10 betters and
what they are bet on, how much volume they've bet this year and how much their P&L is. Are they up or down?
So Theo 4, I think, is the biggest one on the platform. And he has made a profit of $22 million this year.
So that's one user.
But you can go user by user and you can see,
oh, this guy's just betting on everything or this guy's one huge bet or whatever, right?
So you can go look at anybody, any betters Piedel on Polymarket.
So what they found was they were like,
hey, there's a couple of bets here that were in the tens of millions on Trump.
And actually, it all came from the same guy.
And what they were thinking was that there's four big accounts that bet 28 million.
And actually, it turns out now after the fact,
the guy came out and said it,
He had 11 accounts and he bet 40-something million.
And he, 40 or 50 million.
And he had made about $80 million of profit, actually.
Sorry, I don't know that he is at bed amounts,
but I know he made, he made $80 million profit in the end.
A French guy, I think.
A French guy.
So they were like, who is this French whale?
And the story behind it's pretty interesting because this guy was a trader.
He's like, in finance.
He lived in the U.S. at one point.
But basically he's like, I'm trying to.
and remain anonymous. I'm trying to...
By the way, on earth, where a journalist find this person?
That seems really hard. That's a great scoop.
So on Polly Market, you could see the bets, so you can go see, wow, there's a huge bet.
Then you go look at the account. You try to figure out whose wallet is this.
And because crypto is, there's a public leisure, you can actually trace back and try to find it.
And there's a company called Chainalysis. Do you know Chainalysis?
I've heard of it, just like, as a headline.
They're basically, the government goes to Chainalysis and says, we need to know who owns this wallet.
And they can go and do the forensic analysis of every transaction.
that wallet's done and tries to figure out the root wallet and who owns that wallet. And so
that's, and this is like a $10 billion company chain analysis. We have to do a breakdown of this
company. This sounds fun. Yeah, they're a fascinating company. And so they came out and they did this
analysis and there's like this web of the accounts and like, so take a look at this. Dude, this is like
all the best stuff. Like crime and crypto stories are the best stories. And so like working at this
company would be super exciting. So I know, but you know what I mean. Totally. So they come out and
say, all right, well, dude, how did you know? Why did you make such a massive bet on Trump? And this is
where the story gets really interesting. He says, he's like, I didn't trust the polls, but I trust
polling. What do you mean? He goes, I commissioned my own polls. There's a French guy who commissioned
polls in America to inform his own bet. And what he did was, he paid a polling company. And he said,
I want you to go and I want you to ask them, but don't ask them who they vote, who they're going to
vote for. Because that's what polls often ask. What do traditional polls ask? Are you likely to vote?
If you're going to vote, who are you likely to vote for? Are you certain of that? You know, whatever.
Is there anything that's going to change your mind? Would you play you've undecided?
Well, and I think they also ask who do you? I think they ask it in a weird way as well. I think
who do you think your friend is going to vote for. That's what this guy did.
Oh. So what this guy did was called the neighbor method. And what he says is he says, don't ask them who
they're going to vote for. I don't want to, people are in direct.
people don't want to reveal their own preferences.
But if you ask them a specific question,
which is, who do you expect your neighbor to vote for?
They will indirectly reveal their own preferences
and what they believe is going to happen.
And he believed that the neighbor method is a more predictive method.
And when he did this, he commissioned this poll.
He paid a major U.S. pollster to go do these polls for him.
Just like, you know, the DNC and the RNC,
they'll pay pollsters to go run their independent polls
that they're not reporting to the public.
and he wanted him to measure this neighbor effect.
And what he found was that the results were, quote, mind-blowing to the favor of Trump.
It showed a Trump landslide.
And so he thought, now this is mispriced.
The media is telling you that this is 50-50 razor thin.
But actually, my polling is showing that actually there's going to be a major landslide for Trump.
It's overwhelmingly in favor of Trump.
So now the bet is mispriced.
So he places this huge bet on Trump.
and it turns out he's correct
and his final quote was
public opinion
would have been better prepared
if the latest polls
had measured using the neighbor effect
and he specifically didn't just bet
on the overall victory
he bet on specific swing states
where he thought
this people think this state
is closer than it's actually going to be
it's going to be more in favor of Trump
using this neighbor method
which is just insane
and now of course
the French government
and ban folly market
this guy had nailed that
like just
two words
bonjour
Sure, my friend.
Fucking A.
First of all, what I respect about this is...
Everything?
I don't respect everything about it.
I don't love gambling like this, but people who have conviction on something.
They do their own analysis and they're like, no, this is the answer.
Even though all the quote, smart people or everyone's the establishment is saying this,
but I did my own research.
And then he did the big part.
which is he bet $30 million or whatever of his own money.
I think that is like those types of people fascinate me because that takes so much conviction.
Yeah, exactly.
This is, I mean, the guts that it's the brains and the guts, right?
And that's kind of, I think, the theme of the year is like, you see someone like Elon who basically swings the election,
who catches a rocket out of, you know, catches a rocket with some chopsticks, you know, is working on self-driving cars.
helped co-found Open AI,
which is changing the world.
The guy's just, you know,
like firing on all cylinders.
And it's like, why?
What is it different about this guy?
And it's the combination of the brain and the balls, right?
Like, there are other people as smart as Elon Musk.
There are other people who have, you know,
the risk taking guts as Elon Musk,
but the combination is rare.
And then you add on top of that the willingness to, you know,
absolutely work to the bone as well, right?
And then you add on top of that.
Like sacrifice your own life.
Yeah, so he's top 0.1% in like five things.
And then it's like, oh, if you just multiply 0.1% times, you know, five times over and over again, you end up with like one and 10 billion, which is like, oh, that's actually the ratio.
We do have one Elon out of the entire human population.
Dude, I thought it was impressive.
I was like, just a Timerlick, you can sing, dance and act.
And you're funny?
You know what I mean?
Super bad.
Eli just really
stepped it up.
That's a great call.
Is Polymarket
going to sustain after this?
Of course not, right?
Okay, so I've been a big
polymarket event.
I was using Polymarket
before they banned it,
like, you know, way back in the day.
You're also a little bit of a D-Gen.
Yeah, but I think a lot of people are.
How much money have you in, you've...
First, by the way, you called this gambling.
I don't believe that this is gambling.
Betting.
By definition.
Well, like, for example, you own stock.
Do you believe that you're gambling when you buy a stock?
I guess.
What are you doing when you buy a stock, right?
Yeah, you are.
I guess you would have to say that it's not as binary, but there's levels.
It's a scale.
But yeah, you are.
Just like if you buy car.
Like you and I, it exists on a spectrum.
Yes.
So like, you know, with a stock, the chair, you know,
the old-fashioned way of looking at it is I'm not, I'm not gambling.
I'm buying a piece of ownership in a company that produces goods and for a
account and say, yeah, all right, cool.
Nobody really in practice treats it like that, meaning you're not sitting there like,
you know, you're not sitting there waiting for dividends.
You're not trying to own this piece of this company because you think it's going to,
you know, exit at a later date when it's a public stock already, right?
Like you're basically saying, I believe that, you know, the future earnings of this company
are going to be X, and that's why owning this is good because the share price is going to go up
because their earnings are going to go up and they're maybe going to go up at a faster rate than
the current price of the stock indicates. That's what you're supposed to buy, right?
You're supposed to buy a stock that you think is going to appreciate over time.
I think that Polly Market has the ability to do that in a bunch of interesting ways.
So first, there are the other speculation slash betting, gambling,
type of use cases. So speculating on prices of things, speculating on sports
games, sports outcomes of games, right? Like sports betting is obviously a huge deal. So there's
those use cases. There is an interesting thing. So I'm guessing you didn't read Vitalik's
blog recently about this. That's an accurate guess. Vitalik, who's the creator of Ethereum,
wrote a great blog post. Vitalik's one of my favorite entrepreneurs and thinkers on the planet.
So the blog post is called, I guess, from prediction markets into finance.
Info finance.
So he's like, you know, I have written a lot and I've supported Polly Market.
And many of you who know me might be surprised by this because Vitalik is sort of notoriously like not into the like crypto casino side of life.
Like he's not price base.
He's not trying to get rich as like his primary motivation.
He's kind of like a prude.
He's a purist.
And so like it'd be like, why do you care so much?
about these prediction markets is people gambling. Who cares? And he's like, because I don't see it as
that. I actually think that there's another category here that's overlooked. And it's called info finance,
information finance. And he gives some examples. So he's like, polymarket was two things at once.
He goes, on one hand, it's a betting site for the few people that want to bet and gamble.
But for the rest of us, we could look at how the gamblers are betting. And that would, for them,
it's served as a news site. It was like, oh, wow, Trump is doing better. Trump is improving. In the
same way that the polls are supposed to be part of the news, the prediction markets were actually
better news information. So it was information finance. He's like, that's the first level,
which was even if you're not participating in the betting, trying to make a buck,
it is very useful that other people are doing that because it's a new, it's another source of
information. He's like, it's not, it should not be the only source of information, but it
should be another one. He talks about the elections in Venezuela, how like, you know,
basically he was watching how people were protesting, how it was getting manipulated and blah, blah,
how Polymerker was actually a very useful source of information for him
in understanding what was going on in Venezuela from an informational point of view.
All right, so that was one.
Then he's like, okay, what's the other use case?
He's like, so imagine a company.
So like, you know, I don't know if you saw like Chipotle or Starbucks.
Like Starbucks just hired the Chipotle CEO.
Did you see that?
Yeah.
And he's the headline is that he's working from home,
even though he's making everyone else go back to work, right?
Yeah, and he's like private jetting in and out.
But like this guy's kind of famous for like,
He trims the menu.
He cuts costs.
And he, like, he basically improves margins.
That's what this guy's known for.
And so the amazing thing was they paid.
He's that guy.
And so, like, he's him when it comes to public markets.
Because when he switched teams, they paid him a bunch of money.
And I was like, wow, what a huge stock package for CEOs, like $100 million or whatever, whatever the number was.
But the stock jumped like $20 billion or something.
Like, it was like, I'm making up numbers here because I didn't plan to talk about this.
But, like, the stock jumped in a disproportionate.
way based on just the news that this guy was coming over.
And so, like, it was a great trade for them to overpay this guy, this talent, because it
immediately improved the overall value of the company, just the news of him joining.
And so Vitalik actually was like, just like there's, today we're looking at these as prediction
markets, you could actually use this as a decision market, meaning a company or a group of
people could set, could basically, in the way that that guy, Theo, paid for a private poll
to get information, you could actually set up a prediction.
market and say, a decision market and say, should we hire this CEO?
Or what will the share, should be?
What will the share price be in six months if we hire Brian Nichols?
And if the share price expectation is really high, it tells you in advance without having to
hire him yet what the market reaction is going to be to making this decision.
Does that make sense?
And so you can actually create decision markets and it would be worth basically paying to,
paying participants to go pick aside and make a bet in order to gather information that would help
you make a better decision about what you're going to do. And so he's like, there's,
you can actually improve judgment if you were to, if you were to make this decision. And so I thought
that was pretty interesting. And he talks about, he goes through, you know, how this might,
how info finance might affect all these other things. So for example, scientific peer review.
So right now in science, you submit a paper and there's something called the replication crisis.
which is that famous results that end up being, you know,
going to books and in the news or whatever.
Then they can't be reproduced.
That study can't be reproduced.
It's like, is it even like the definition of good science is that it's a reproducible experiment.
But that's not happening.
And in fact, there's not really a big incentive to go reproduce these because the incentive
is come out with a new finding.
You get published.
You get the glory.
You get the funding for your lab.
Spending your resources to reproduce somebody else's science, somebody else's big news.
it's not really a good use of time.
And he talks about how prediction markets
could actually create incentives
for people to go and try to reproduce these studies
because you could have people betting on
if this is reproducible or not.
And so you'll be able to profit off of
knowing that this is going to be reproduced or not.
So it's pretty interesting to see
how that might be applied in all these other ways.
I haven't read this other than what you just told me
and skimming it here.
First of all, this is like an amazing blog post.
I need to go read this.
Second, if you go to his blog,
if you go to his other posts,
he publishes like an in-depth post
every three days.
How amazing is this
that we have access to
a genius like this
who just like shares his thoughts?
And by the way,
they're like,
if you read just the headlines
and then click the articles,
they are not just like half-ass block.
These are like in-depth things
that he's publishing a shit ton.
How special of an era are do we have
where we can like go and just read his thoughts?
That you get access to this.
Yeah.
And the beautiful thing about his stuff, which is, I think, hard to, because, you know, I was thinking about this with podcasts.
It's amazing now that there's podcasts with, you know, like when we started this, I felt like there was a slight differentiator in the business podcast space because we were not just journalists, nor were really like never has been.
We had like done it.
We had started many companies.
Or we're in the process.
And we had sold companies.
We had done real things.
And so that was kind of like an interesting.
Oh, what if you actually had a podcast from?
from entrepreneurs who were actually
like more successful
than the average podcast, let's say.
I think you're looking for the term
for us, buy us.
We foo boot it.
Yeah.
But now you have all in,
you have,
now you get to see billionaires,
you know, doing this.
Reed Hoffman has a podcast.
You know, Zuck is going on podcasts.
Like, who doesn't have a podcast at this point, right?
And I think that's really cool.
And the same thing's happening in sports.
Athlete, current athletes,
past athletes,
now have sports podcasts.
before the only sports pot says you get was like, you know, hardcore fan in his, in his base,
mom's basement, you know, ranting about his team or, you know, a journalist. And now you have
this like this third thing. And the third thing is like somebody who's actually been there and done
that, who gives their perspective. Not to say it's always better, but like it's interesting that
that's now. This is another good one though. Accessible to us. Yeah. But the problem with something
like, let's say, All In or other podcasts like that is like you have to always parse the agenda.
So it's like, wow, this guy's really bearish on nuclear and really pro, pro,
solar that you go look into Shama's profile and it's like, oh, wow, he's made like enormous bets on
solar. And like, he's talking his book in a way, right? And it's okay. It's okay to talk to your book,
but it's, you have to constantly do that like underwriting yourself as a listener to be like, are they,
you know, what's the bias here? Yeah. The beautiful thing about Vitalik is that the guy is such an Uber
nerd that like you can actually take him at face value. And it's so nice to have somebody you could
take at face value and other people might disagree. I don't care. I take him at face value. And I
followed this guy for like, you know, eight years straight now. And this guy's done nothing to make
me think he's just trying to pump his bags. In fact, he actively does things against his bags,
you know, not pumping Ethereum or talking about where it lacks or what's slow about it and,
you know, underpromising what it's going to be. And I think that that is, that's great that we've
access to this guy who is not trying to take something from us in the process.
That's a very good speech on this guy. I'm going to, like, I don't even think you could subscribe
to his blog.
There's not even an email form.
Dude, his blog,
like,
so he publishes on,
all right,
so listen,
October 29th,
October 26,
October 23rd,
October 20th.
He's been writing these posts a lot.
And those posts that I just said,
I just put them into a word counter.
One of them was 6,000 words.
Now,
I don't know,
like,
I don't know how Bitcoin worked.
The dramatic look you just gave me
when you said that,
like I was supposed to,
like audibly gasp.
Dude, that's so much work.
I've written a lot of blog posts.
A 6,000 word blog post would take me 40 hours probably, right?
It's so much work.
When you are this guy and you create Ethereum, is it one of the things where like you've
created it and you can now walk away?
Or does it like, is it like a house and you got to like maintain it?
No, he's actively working on it.
Like, I don't know.
Is it like a thing where you're like,
I mean, it's bigger than just him, obviously.
But, like, yeah, he's actively dedicated.
Like, you got to, like, re-roof it every once in a while.
I don't know how these things work, like Ethereum.
I don't know, like, did you just like...
Ethereum was like a 10-year roadmap.
And so he's just, it's not even like re-roofing it.
It's like building a hotel one floor at a time.
And people are staying in the hotel.
But you told them from the beginning.
This is a 50-story hotel.
And I haven't even built all those other things that we're going to need in order for this to work.
Like, there's no elevators yet.
I know.
We're going to make.
elevators. For now, we take stairs. That's like the transaction fees and all that. The reason
I'm asking is how on earth is he writing this much stuff while doing like a full-time job?
Because Ethereum doesn't work like that. It's not like he's sitting there coding all day or
managing people. Like it's not a company. It's like a nonprofit foundation, open source project
of which he's like a steward and his champion. But he's not like, he doesn't have like 25 direct
reports. Does he have a girlfriend or wife yet? I'm not sure. I've seen a bunch of pictures,
but it's so hard with him to tell what's a meme and what's, like, reality because he's, like, so memeable that, like, when Bitcoin, when Ethereum Price goes down, and then they post him pictures of him, they're like, God damn it. It's because he has a girlfriend.
By the way.
Like, is his girlfriend just going to be, like, which way is it going to go?
So it's November 13th we're recording this. Exactly one month ago. I came on this podcast.
And I said, Tim, can I give you my one-minute case for Bitcoin? And you literally rolls your eyes and audibly groaned at me and said,
haven't you already done that?
Like, are you talking about why you like Bitcoin again?
I just want to say, the price is up 47% since I did that rant.
All right. Well, are you, are you like that, are you like that French dude?
Are you the French guy? Did you, you had you, were you smart or just, or were you smart and ballsy or just?
Go back and listen to it. It's in the episode called, did the creator of Bitcoin get unmasked at the 30 minute mark, 30 minutes and 20 seconds?
No, I'm not debating if you said that. I'm saying, did you, uh, make,
say, go listen to the case and say, did I get lucky or was I smart?
Did I have a reason?
That's not what I'm asking.
What I'm asking is, did you make the bet?
Well, of course.
What I'm saying is, did you just say it was going to be good?
Or did you actually invest your own money into it?
Dude, I'm Polymarket, bro.
I was getting in the game.
Does gambling on Polymarket mean you have Bitcoin?
Well, it's like Polymarket versus a poll.
A poll is just saying what you're going to do.
Polymarket is putting your money up saying what you think is going to actually happen.
I put my money up and thought what I said what I thought was going to happen.
Yeah, I mean, it's had a hell of a run.
Almost as good as Palantir.
Everything's fucking crazy right now, though.
Like everything, when I look at out.
Everything's too crazy.
Like, it wouldn't be, I don't know anything about anything, but it seems like it'd be a good time to make the opposite prediction.
So, yeah, you were right.
It's just like, how long are you going to be right for right now?
Everything is just like insane.
Yeah, yeah.
And of course, these are like, you know, one month fluctuations or nothing.
But I guess the thing I, the reason I thought it was bullish was because it was the same reason that the thing is pumping right now.
Because there was a whole bunch of big things, like for example, that the government was going to be pro-Bitcoin, which was always the biggest risk of Bitcoin was like, oh, even if it's, even if you're right about the technology being better, the government will never allow this.
And I was like, dude, the guy who's going to become president is saying not only will he allow it, he's bought and sold.
by the crypto donors now, and both sides are. And like, I don't know if you saw like the Congress
and like the whatever House Representative, Senate, all that shit. There's like, there's like 140 pro
crypto people now, like in active government, which is like, you know, that number was zero,
you know, seven years ago. And I just felt like these things were not priced in properly.
Now they're talking about a Bitcoin strategic reserve for the country itself. It's like,
these things, once you'd go in, it's almost impossible to unwind these things. And I just thought
that when a top two or three risk gets de-risk, that should change your underwriting on the price.
And I thought that that wasn't happening. For some reason, the price was flat and people weren't paying
attention to that one fact. What a world is... So in summary, I was right. Thank you.
You were right. You absolutely were right. Everything is insane at the moment. I hope your
prediction will be true for many, many, many more months and many more years. But it's definitely
making me nervous at the moment. Everything is insane. Is that where we end?
That's where we end. It's been a fantastic podcast. To Martha Stewart,
to Bitcoin, to the Polymarket whale.
That's called, thank you for your service.
Hot, hot heat.
The hot, hot heat was served.
You're welcome.
All right, that's it.
That's the pod.
I feel like I can rule the world.
I know I could be what I want to.
I put my all in it like no days off.
On a road, let's travel, never looking back.
