The Compound and Friends - Pilot

Episode Date: June 4, 2021

Welcome to the first episode of The Compound & Friends, a new podcast from your favorite financial and investing commentators. This week, Michael Batnick, Packy McCormick and Downtown Josh Brown discuss: the Fed selling its pandemic-era corporate bonds and ETFs; Bitcoin, Ethereum, and NFTs; overdraft fees; banks vs DeFi; the "crummy" business of food delivery; Amazon and weed decriminalization; Vimeo's public listing; and more! Follow Michael's blog at theirrelevantinvestor.com Follow Packy's substack at notboring.co Follow Josh's blog at thereformedbroker.com Obviously nothing on this channel should be considered as personalized financial advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any securities. See our disclosures here: https://ritholtzwealth.com/podcast-youtube-disclosures/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Remember when this was the bubble? It's so funny. Where did this close? Down 14%. That's actually nothing. So at these levels, it was only up 70% yesterday. Or whatever.

Dude, this was the bubble in January. I know. You can't even say it. I saw that yesterday. It's incredible. January was a dress rehearsal. I don't know how this came back. That's the amazing thing.

My closing point on this is the board and markets hypothesis may be a little bit out the window. Wait, don't make the closing point in the opening of the show. Are we recording? Yeah, it's recording right now. Perfect.

This is Hollywood East. What's the stock doing? Up three in the aftermarket. Nothing. All righty. You're the only person. You still use f***ing points. I'm having friends.

You use... Percentages? You use points for every stock. It's up two percent. Josh will say, GM's up two points. The Dow's up... We're up 500 bips. He's just a points guy dow is up like we're up 500 bits he's just a

points guy he's a points guy that just made me really nervous are we are we officially going it's real now are things being recorded yeah things are being recorded things are happening all right welcome to the compound and friends all opinions expressed by me michael batnick and our cast mates Welcome to The Compound and Friends. All opinions expressed by me, Michael Batnick, and our castmates are solely our own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Ritholtz Wealth Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for any investment decisions.

Clients of Ritholtz Wealth Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. All right. I wasn't sure how I wanted to open the show, but I guess I'm going to do it very unofficially because who cares really? No, I don't have like this long preamble, but I just want to give people the point of why we're doing the show the way that we're doing it. So we're actually live. You could probably tell because there's no buzz in the background from Zoom, which is I feel like how most of the podcasts that we've been listening to for the last 15 months, give or take, sound like a Zoom. You guys did too, but I just got sick of it. And I just said, the city's coming back. New York's coming back.

Let's do a show live. And more importantly, no more conversations with people that we barely know that we're not really that interested in. Because that's another, I think, thing that happened during the pandemic is like, you listen to these podcasts and the conversations just felt very, like, almost like, why are they even talking? Let alone, why am I listening? So we wanted, and that happened to me multiple times. So we wanted to do something that was about

financial markets, the economy, technology, business, pop culture, all the stuff we usually talk about, but we wanted to do in a live format. So Michael Batnick is here. Those of you that are avid podcast listeners, definitely already subscribed to Animal Spirits. Mike's got a pretty good blog.

I'd give it like a seven. I'll take a seven. Is that fair? I'll take a seven. And we have Paki McCormick with us today. And Paki's sub stack is called Not Boring. And it's my favorite sub stack. And I read pretty much everything that you write.

And I try to send as many people to check it out as I can. you write. And I try to send as many people to check it out as I can. And you don't know this, but I've had like seven people say, thank you so much for talking about that thing. I'm obsessed with it. So let me tell you this. So I just, I was just texting Morgan before about what we're doing. And I told him that we're doing it with you today. He goes, I didn't follow Paki until recently. He's good. So I said, I've learned a ton from him over the last year. So Morgan said, good writer and good analysis. Rare combo. Cool name too. Well, the good thing about the newsletter format is that I can edit.

I think I'm going to be exposed as the idiot that I am today. So this is going to be fun. Well, wait a minute. Where's your name come from? I couldn't say Patrick when I was younger. So I said Packy. I love it. So your birth certificate says Patrick.

Patrick McCormick. Okay. I thought it was short for pachyderm. Well, yeah, my parents are huge Elephant fans, so yeah. Alright, so Packy is here, and he's going to stick around for a little while, and we're going to talk about a whole bunch of things

that we thought were interesting this week. Duncan's in the house, and John Grayson, and Duncan and John have built this studio for us, and I think did, like, an amazing job, like far beyond my expectations. There are wires everywhere, which I think is a good thing, right?

You need wires. Probably some fail safes built in just in case. I think the first thing worth getting into, and we threw some headlines in the doc just to chop up, but I think it's interesting that the Fed decided to announce that they're going to sell down their corporate bonds and ETFs. And I think that was one of the most controversial things the Fed did during this emergency, was like, buy bonds in the open market from Goldman Sachs and Google because they're investment grade or AAA rated.

And arguably, nobody really needed them to do that. And I think that that did have an effect. Huge. Just on the market psychology. Huge. And people bidding up stocks. It was almost like everything is now backstopped. Even things that traditionally weren't, like tech stocks. I don't know.

I talked to somebody who invested in Carvana early after it crashed. And a big piece of the rationale was they had a bunch of paper out and the Fed was backstopping everything. And so let's buy Carvana. after it crashed. And a big piece of the rationale was they had a bunch of paper out and the Fed was backstopping everything. And so let's buy Carvana. And it's been an incredible trade for them. So I think the effect that that had on the whole market was massive. I was surprised to see.

I didn't realize how small it was, relatively speaking. They had $5.2 billion of individual bonds. Not a lot. And $8.5 billion of ETFs. If it doesn't start with a T. It doesn't really count during this whole thing. It's a drop in the bucket, but the psychological impact of it cannot be understated or overstated. They didn't have the chance to buy more because all these things went back to all-time highs within like three months. So them doing this really screwed over the distressed

guys big time. How bitter do you think they are that before they had a chance to swing, the bat was on their shoulder, the Fed stepped in? So who is that? Like Howard Marks, Warren Buffett, people that would normally be feasting in an environment like this. Like the trade was made like within two weeks. So I think also if they remove that support from the market

and it has no impact, which I assume it won't, they might rethink ever doing that again. Actually, I want to ask you guys about this. So Ben has this theory that because of the nature of fiscal response this time, that it's just going to be this way going forward, that anytime there's a stock market crash, an economic event, that the Fed is going to step in and that we're going to continue to have these really fast bear markets, but the prolonged bear markets are sort of off the table. I don't buy that really at all, but I'd long, the prolonged bear markets are sort of, sort of off the table. I don't buy that really at all, but I'd be curious to hear your thoughts.

I think there's a couple of aspects. One is that, that the Fed steps in and the other is that people expect that the Fed steps in or that prices will go up or you see a bear market like, you know, crypto in 2017 and everybody who bought then is rich. And so I do feel like people are buying, I mean, buying dips has become a meme at this point, but I feel like dips are getting bought much more quickly now. Plus the Fed coming in. I do think that we'll see fewer sustained bear markets. What, what, what is the, what is like the psychological impact on people when they

see that the Fed can just basically, and the Treasury too, working together, just invent dollars. Why would you expect, why would you not expect Bitcoin to rally in that environment where people like it's all made up anyway? Why is my fake thing any different than your fake thing? I think that had a really big, I think that gave a really big boost to just the idea of doing anything other than dollars right so i i was thinking about the way i explain bitcoin to people not that a lot of people ask me my opinion other than my friends but i never and then they started asking me about ethereum recently so i wanted to bring this up with you because i thought you're uh i your sub, what do we call it? A post? Yeah. Okay. So your post on Ethereum was sick. But when people started asking me about Ethereum,

then I would like revise how I used to explain Bitcoin. And now I've landed on this idea that Bitcoin's gold 2.0, whatever people say, and Ethereum's more like Amazon web services. Am I going wrong with that? I think you're not. I mean, I think on Bitcoin, you're right. And I think on Ethereum, you're maybe not going far enough. It's almost like AWS, but that you have to pay for with Amazon stock if you're a company. And so it's this thing that is kind of the underlying structure for anybody building on Ethereum,

which is where most of the apps being built and crypto are being built. But then to operate on it and to buy other coins or to buy things or to pay gas fees, which is how Ethereum will make money soon, is that whenever you do a transaction, people have to pay these gas fees. All of that is in Ethereum. So it is like AWS in a way, except for the fact that you have to pay with Amazon stock. So there's just these couple of ways that the price of Ether can go up. And I don't know if there's another asset out there like Ethereum is.

Yeah. So like, all right. So, so Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency that trades on the Bitcoin blockchain. Ethereum is a blockchain, but its currency is Ether. Yes. So that's a, that's a big difference right there for like the casual person that's just trying to understand this stuff. Do you think it's interesting that people are just willing to buy Ethereum

now without knowing anything about it, just because they hear influential people getting excited about it? Like that's probably what's driving most of it. Or do you really think all these DeFi applications just require there to be more interest in like Ethereum or could it be both? I think it's a little bit of both. I mean, I think certainly there's just like, the person who's buying Facebook stock or Amazon stock

or anything else probably hasn't analyzed Facebook and Amazon's financials. I think there's definitely that segment of the market. But there's also a huge amount of Ethereum that are just locked to power a lot of the DeFi applications. If you wanted to buy an NFT, chances are you're either doing it in Ethereum or in Ether, or you were paying at least gas fees and could be up to $400 to buy an NFT.

So there's all these different use cases where you need to buy Ethereum as the currency for that piece of the internet. So I think most of the value was coming, or most of the run-up has come from there. And then certainly there's a huge specularity. Why do the NFTs require Ether to operate? Is it just because that's the platform

that was easiest to build it on? That's the platform that's easiest to build it on. There's obviously TopShot. I know you're a big TopShot guy, and you can do that. Former. Former TopShot guy got out of the top. You got your money back? I only took a 15% haircut.

I was thrilled with that. There you go. You have your cash? yeah, I'm good so Flow made it easy to buy with your credit card or do whatever else and so Flow is a separate blockchain that is really being used for NFTs like TopShot

and for gaming and their whole thing is let's make this as easy as possible for just regular people to get on and start doing crypto-y type things and get some of the benefits but also have some of the benefits of centralization if you want to be a little bit more decentralized a lot of people have been building on ethereum so openc or the big people pieces or all of those were being done on on top of ethereum and so for that you needed ether to interact our nft still thing? NFT volume has dropped dramatically. I can't believe it. I am a

this is a Gartner hype cycle to a T kind of guy. I think NFTs over time will be just kind of a new way that people own and transact digital assets. And I think there will be a long life for NFTs. NFTs that are selling for tens of thousands or millions of dollars are

probably not going to be back for a little while. So Dan Revell tweeted, how optimistic are you on the future of Top Shot? So very optimistic, solid collectible, on the decline, or dead. How many people do you think said very optimistic? I think 5%. Yep, 6%.

Dead, 46%. That's terrifying. 46% said it's dead. How fast could something like that rise and fall? So the peak hype was at the end of February. What month is it? We're in June. So March, April, May, it died.

Three months, it died. Wait, when was the peak? End of February. Okay, that makes sense. That makes sense. And then- It's been three months. It's crazy. The narrative went from, look how much money I'm making, to, f**k, I can't. That makes sense. And then- It's been three months. It's crazy.

The narrative went from, look how much money I'm making to, fuck, I can't get my money out. Yeah. They fucked that up. They did. They messed that up for sure. You need off ramps.

Yeah. I mean, my whole thing on this has always been that NFTs are going to collapse to the price that that same thing, if it were equally scarce in the real world, would cost. And there was this massive premium for just being an NFT for a while. And I think that disappears.

Because there were so few. Because there were so few and because it was new and it was something that you could do with your crypto. You'd spent the past four years with nobody caring about this thing. You have tons of Ether and you can buy some things when you're rich in this small little piece of the economy. And so there was this massive kind of premium on top of NFTs just for being NFTs. I think NFTs live on, but without that huge premium for being NFTs and more similar to

like, this is what the equivalent card would cost in the real world. So some random current second year player's card is never going to be worth much as a physical card, as an NFT. And I think that's probably where it goes. But you get a LeBron moment, you know, or that Ray Allen shot back in the day of a Heat Spurs, like that's gonna be worth a lot of money. And so I think that's how it plays out.

Was there a moment in February where like, if somebody took a picture of a Michael Jordan autographed basketball, it could have sold for a higher price as an NFT than the actual signed basketball itself? I think so. That Banksy painting, didn't they burn it, destroy it, and then resold the NFT for a higher price as an NFT than the actual signed basketball itself? I think so. That Banksy painting, didn't they burn it, destroy it, and then resold the NFT for a higher value?

Yeah, they sold that shredded painting for a ton of money too, but they might've sold the NFT for a higher value as well. In your post, you said that, or you tweeted that, I'm considering putting a high net worth or high percentage of my net worth in Ethereum. Tell me why it's a bad idea. What was the best rebuttal?

Wait, what did you do? So I do this sometimes when I'm getting ready to write a post. I'll say, give me the bear case. Because the way that my brain works, I see the bull case and I'm an optimist. I'm like, all right, tell me why I shouldn't do this. I think the vast majority of the responses to that tweet or something like, there's one and only God and his name is Bitcoin.

And I think probably the best rebuttals were really around, there's a couple of big events coming up for Ethereum. There's EIP-1559, which changes how gas fees work. It's going to lower the cost to transact is what people need to know. It'll lower the cost to transact and it will mean that you're burning off some of that ether.

So right now, the gas fee just goes to whoever's mining, so whoever's running the kind of math puzzle on their computer. They get that, and then it kind of leaves the system because they have to pay for computers, and they have to pay taxes and all that. Now, it'll actually get burnt down. So there's two pieces. Half of it or so gets burnt and just goes away. And so theoretically— Which limits the amount of new or so gets burnt and just goes away. And so theoretically- Which limits the amount of new Ether that's created by mining. Exactly.

And then there's ETH2, which switches it to proof of stake and adds sharding. And so it'll make it faster and then it'll make it ESG friendly because it won't be bad for the environment because you're not using all this compute to run these math problems anymore. And you're essentially voting based on how much Ethereum you're willing to put up. Both of these things are happening this year. Both of these things should be happening this year. EIP-1559 should be happening next month.

I just have a question. Who's in charge of that? Who decides? I know there's a foundation. Jerome Powell, I think. Yeah, he just prints more Ethereum. The Ethereum foundation, theoretically, is like organizing the voting for everyone to decide, yes, let's do this as a community.

But who says today's the start date? There's two different things happening. So EIP means that it's a proposal. So somebody puts that proposal forward and says, we should do this. And then the community votes, and then it goes into effect. I think it's called the London Fork is when it goes into effect, when there's some change to the blockchain where that starts happening. ETH2, my understanding is that it's more of a, you're kind of getting buy-in from the community and you're kind of feeling the community out. So they actually already have the proof of stake blockchain running. And at some point,

they're going to merge it. And I think that's going to be, you know, maybe six months out from now or so. They're going to merge the chains, and then people essentially kind of vote with their dollars. And so most people are saying, you want to be on whatever chain most of the dollars are on. And so as long as they've gotten enough buy-in and they feel they have enough buy-in that everyone's going to go to the new chain, then that chain works.

Will there be a stub like they have with Ethereum Classic? Exactly. I don't know if like they have with Ethereum Classic? Exactly. I would imagine there's a stub as well, and there's probably people who, I don't know if they go back to Ethereum Classic because maybe that's the real OG chain, and if that's the hill you're going to die on. I got a Zach Morris timeout just for a second.

Can you explain what is the difference between proof of work and proof of stake? Yeah, so proof of work is, just like Bitcoin, the way that you have to add blocks to the chain is by computing some algorithm to prove, there's some math problem essentially that your computer is solving. It gets harder and harder to solve,

so you have to spend more money on electricity and compute and all of that. And that's Bitcoin. And that's Bitcoin, and that's how Ethereum works right now. Then there's proof of stake, which says- Which is, and the primary criticism of that is about the environment. Totally.

So proof of work is very electricity intensive, which is not great for greenhouse gases and emissions. Okay. And if you're a holder, it's maybe not as good because the money then leaves the system as well, because you're paying for all these external things to make that happen. A miner doesn't necessarily have to be a holder of the thing. So you and I could not own any Bitcoin and go set up a rig and then earn Bitcoin. Whereas with proof of stake, what you say is... We're giving money to the utility.

And you're giving money to the utility and to the government. And so what happens with proof of stake is that you say, to do it actually on Ethereum, you need to say, here's 32 of my Ethereum or of my Ether or more, and I'm putting these up and I'm going to essentially vote on whether things should, whether this is a good transaction or a bad transaction. And you earn money and that's the kind of,

when you hear about yield in Ethereum forsaking, that's what happens is you're kind of earning some of the gas fees that people pay for putting your Ethereum up and voting essentially yes this is good or no this is not good. The security feature here is that those staked ETH can be

taken from you if you're a bad actor and if you're wrong in the way that you're voting or if you like contradict yourself in multiple times. So that's the security mechanism there. I would totally lose my ETH. Why is 32 the right number? I have no idea why 32 is the right times. So that's the security mechanism. I would totally lose my ETH. Why is 32 the right number? I have no idea why 32 is the right number. And there's other things like Lido,

which let you stake fewer. If you're on Coinbase, I think there's a wait list where you can stake your ETH. So there's ways that other people are pooling. But if you want to just go direct, then it's 32. Oh, let me ask you this.

Sarah, you're the right person to ask this question to. As I'm trying to learn about this over the last few weeks and months, there's only so many hours in a day that I could dedicate to this. But the people that are like- I keep sleeping. Like the people that really are fluent in this, are these rich crypto people that don't work a full-time job or this is their full-time job? Like how are people getting fluent in this? time job? Like how are people getting fluent in this? I think people spend a lot of time in telegram groups and discords building, actually trading on DeFi. So I'm like rookie level. Like

I will own some ETH and, and stay there. I'm not staking on Aave or yield farming or doing any of that. I'm really just kind of basic. I believe in kind of Ethereum and so I believe that if more stuff gets built, it goes up. But there are people who are all day out there trading just like you would be a day trader. They're making a ton of money. What are they trading based on? If they buy or sell

something, what is the thing that's making them do that other than price? Getting excited about something going up or down a lot. Are there things making people do things in these currencies? I think it's like a hyper version of the stock market or the bond market, depending on which asset you're talking about. So there's some people who are investing in things because essentially these tokens for some projects

are like owning early equity in these projects, except they IPO immediately. Or they IPO at some projects are like owning early equity in these projects, except they IPO immediately. Or they IPO at some point really, really early and the tokens you can look at as kind of shares. But also because things get, imagine if Stripe or some very early stage hot company traded in a liquid market in the very, very early days, there'd be a lot of volatility.

And all of their transactions were open and you could see what was happening with that, and you could see how much money they were making every day. There'd just be a ton of volatility. So it is like investing in a company, but early. And then there's just straight up trading or pumping or whatever else. So people mock the fact that all these cryptos are moving on memes. But what else is there? They're not corporations. They're not

issuing press releases. They're not announcing new like products. I mean, some developers are, but the currencies themselves, like the actual computer code is not doing anything. So the only thing to move it is people's opinions. And sometimes those opinions take the form of jokes. If there was a, if you could get a piece of Stripe, they broke you off a piece, what's a valuation where you would say, can't do it? Is that like $300 billion? I ran this poll. It depends how long they stay private.

If I thought they were just going to stay private for the next 10 years, and this is my only chance, I would certainly buy it, $300 billion. And seriously, I think they have a legitimate shot at becoming a trillion-dollar company. They're a company where there's just all these different places where you'd expect a company to get dunked on that they don't. Like Hacker News, they don't get dunked on.

There was this book called Uncanny Valley where this woman goes out and writes about her experience working in Silicon Valley, and she kind of is bear bearish on kind of everybody that she met except for the fictionalized-ish version of patrick collison like any like they're just kind of unimpeachable and they have this product that just is core to the workings of the internet at this point um and the ability to expand from there into into a bunch of other things and you just can't bet against that that. So yeah, if it was my only chance for the next 10 years, I'd pay $300.

Otherwise, I think probably in the $100 plus range. Could this be the biggest IPO ever? Is it approaching that territory? I don't think the IPO for another couple of years. So I think by that point, certainly it could. It'd be funny if they wait till they're obsolete and the next thing came along. I wanted to ask you,

so when you write this thing about Ethereum and you obviously have done like much more work on it than most people, and there are people who are willing to write about it who have done no work, which is another interesting aspect of just crypto journalism in general. But you like do a ton of work on it. Is it possible to do a ton of work on something for you and just like not be bullish on it? I almost feel like it almost forces you to convince yourself that you're you're a bull. If you spend that much time, at least it does that

to me. It's a good question. I think that's my natural state anyway, is to say, like, doesn't he seem like optimistic? Just generally? Yeah, that's my I mean, that's my problem. I've grown up in this. So happy. I my first my mean, that's my problem. I've grown up in this. Look at that put on. He's so happy. I, I, my first, my, my first internship was on the energy trading desk in 2008 at Bank of America. So first part of the summer, everything up, second part of the summer, everything down. And for whatever reason, that experience did not make me, you know, any, any more cynical.

If you spend six, if you spend six weeks reading about Stripe and talking to people that are customers and people that are developing things based on it, and you just get all fired up about it, how could you walk away and not be bullish? That's my personality, too. And Stripe and Ethereum, too, were two that I came into knowing that I was going to be pretty bullish. And so in both cases, I asked the same question about Stripe, which is, can anybody give me a bear case on Stripe? And there's a few. Valuation. Valuation. Payments is a bit of a commodity.

They're not in certain countries in the world. Shopify is a big one. Was it Shopify is a huge customer and so there's customer concentration and obviously Shopify will move. Shop pay is built on Stripe? Shop runs their payments all through Stripe. And since I wrote that piece,

that was the biggest bear case and I called it out in the piece. And they've deepened their partnership with Stripe because I think both companies realize that there's real value in specializing. And so the more the companies realize that there's value in specializing, the better that is for any API-first company

where you can just plug in a few lines of code or hundreds of lines of code depending on how complex your needs are. The only thing that would make you bearish on Stripe is if they buy DirecTV. And I wrote this in the piece too, but with the Collison's... We're a media play now.

With the Collison's though, that's the hard part about any bear case because no matter how smart I think I am, I know that they've thought 50 levels deeper than I have on anything. So if they bought DirecTV, they have the benefit of the doubt on a lot of things. They invested in this company called Fast,

which I don't think anybody understands why they did that. And so that's the first time that I've ever seen people be like, what is Stripe thinking here? But for the most part, that's like the ultimate bull case on them is that they probably thought more about whatever they're doing than you ever possibly could. And so even buying DirecTV in stripes and people would

give them the benefit of the doubt. Also, when you're a private company, you pretty much can do whatever you want. You can take shots on things that don't work out. It's like it's very closely held shares. And it's not like somebody can come along and run an activist campaign for a private company. So I think like you get that benefit of the doubt. Hey, Paki, last thing I want to ask you on this crypto stuff is, you know the chart that goes around or the data point that Visa does X transactions per second, 3,500, PayPal does 240, Bitcoin and Ether?

This is that chart, right? They basically do zero. Relative to like, why is this chart bullshit right? They basically do zero. Yeah. Like relative to like, why is this chart bullshit? Or what's misleading about this? Or explain this. Yeah, so I don't think this chart's bullshit in any way. And this is actually one of the things that surprised me

as I was doing research in the piece, was that before just kind of being a casual observer of the space, I thought that if Ethereum with, you know, with ETH2 and with the Layer 2 scaling solutions on top of it, which are essentially people doing a bunch of transactions above Ethereum and then batching them

and putting them back down in Ethereum, I thought if they couldn't get to kind of parity with Aviza, they could never be the global payments layer, they could never be internet money and all of that. And maybe true, but there's a bunch of other blockchains that can do a ton of transactions per second. So there's Solana, which is one that I wrote about the piece. So a lot of the actual execution, whether that's on payments, whether that's on trading or whatever, can either happen

in an Ethereum L2, it can happen in Solana, there could be other chains that come where a lot of that happens. There's real value again, just like with Bitcoin, to being kind of the chain that has the most money invested into it. It means it's harder to attack. And so the more on-chain activity that happens in 50 different either layer ones like Solana or Ethereum L2s, the more there is to settle on Ethereum. And I think that's where Ethereum's real value is, is the settlement layer for all of this.

Does anybody ever like, but Visa works fine? Why are we bending ourselves into pretzels to worry about doing transactions where it's already so easy to transact with a credit card? Yeah, but some of it's not. So, for example, Ben was trying to send me a couple thousand bucks, and there's a limit

to what you could send on a daily basis. So it's taking him like four days to give me the money, which is a pain in the ass. Why does it have to be that way? First of all, what did you buy from him? But second of all, how often are you going to run into that problem in your regular life

that you need to transfer more than a few thousand dollars? But why should that even be a hurdle at all? I don't really think it is because you can do an ACH wire with a bank, but you have to be a banked person. Yeah. I mean, there's also, I mean, I think that's why things like NFTs

is a bubble and DeFi is, you know, people make fun of it for being essentially just trading a bunch of fake money against different fake monies. On DeFi, the criticism is like, what's the point? Totally. And so I think for both of those, and same with NFTs to a great extent, but I think you need these kind of like bubbly use cases

in the beginning to just attract enough attention that there's enough developer energy that at least it can get to a pretty good level where people ultimately, as there's more and more development, can feel like it's fairly easy to transact like you might with Visa. But I don't think even Ethereum or some crypto fanatics would say anything, but I don't think a lot of fanatics would say,

we're totally replacing the credit card system. I think there's some online payments that will work better if it's on a blockchain and there's some where it's just really easy to swipe your visa. But the people who say it's going to basically eliminate banking as we know it are the loudest voices in the room. They get the most attention.

So I do think there's some element of that. And then you ask yourself if all these DeFi coins disappeared tomorrow, would anyone notice? Would it affect anything that's actually happening in the world? Would it make the world the worst place? I'd like to say,

yeah, we'd be missing all these opportunities to do X. I still don't really fully understand what X is. Some of these DeFi protocols will let people who otherwise couldn't take out a loan, take out a loan. You can say, maybe that's really irresponsible and we shouldn't be doing that

and the whole thing might collapse. But they're all super over-collateralized. And so maybe if you're a person who has bad credit or you are an immigrant who just moved to a country or you're in a country where it's not easy to take out a loan, then there's real value to being able to take out a loan on a DeFi. And are they doing that?

Yeah. They're doing lending using Ethereum as the smart contract or using ETH. And then there are coins that are layered on top of Ethereum where people can literally

lend money and or borrow money. So everyone's always looking for a real use case, right? Like what is the use case? What is the use case? Did you see, so somebody did an open letter

to Weisenthal, which is kind of hilarious. No, I didn't of hilarious. No, I didn't see that. On DeFi. And one of the things. He loves that shit. It was, it was,

it was well written. It was funny. I learned something. One of the, one of the things that they've linked to in the, in the post was this thing called paper chain. And it is, John,

throw this up. It's faster payments for, for creators. Have you, have you seen this package? I've not seen paper chain. So this is an example of, I can't explain what they do, but they get

money to creators quicker than they ordinarily would. Creators from who? Who's paying the money? Fans, I guess. I don't know. So it's like Patreon. Wallet and card funded by your streaming revenues daily. So yeah, I don't know if that's...

I don't know how much exists on paper chain. Switch creators, maybe. But the point is, we're looking for real-world use cases. We also have to acknowledge that it's day zero. Totally. Maybe we have to be a little bit patient and it's coming. It's being built. I'm not seeing it. I don't know what's being built.

It got a lot of, just because it is such an exciting thing to explore, I think it's gotten a lot of hype early. I think all those use cases are being built now. And I think compared to the bubble in 2017, that was a real bubble. There was nothing there at that point. Now there are protocols and apps and other things

that are actually getting real usage. And so it's less like a bubble. And I think there are more and more and more real use cases. I think DAOs are incredibly, incredibly interesting in that they let groups kind of, as the world moves faster and faster and things get more and more fluid, they let kind of these organizations form and break apart over time. So they're like a 21st century LLC? Yeah, like a 21st century LLC that you can spin up without necessarily knowing the real identity. I talked to, you know, we had Bordelon

Musk on our Twitter space at one point. And if you believe in the pseudonymity angle of the biology, Shrinivasan, we should all be pseudonymous or else we're going to get canceled and we're not going to be safe. To be pseudonymous and to be able to get paid for something, crypto is a heck of a lot better.

And it doesn't mean necessarily it's the dark web or that you're doing a drug transaction, because it is all still very trackable. But just the fact that you can have something that's not tied to your actual name and social security number and all of that, it helps poor Elon Musk make money when he really couldn't before without setting up,

he's been looking into how to set up a shell LLC without tying it back to his name, but he said crypto is the way to make money. That's a good point. You're're somebody that for whatever reason, professionally, personally, you just don't want to be banked under your real name, but you're doing something that's creating value for people. They're into it. They want to pay you. This is like a pretty obvious use case then. Yeah. Again, though, that's so narrow. How many pseudonymous people are creating anything of value?

A lot of this depends on how, and this is where my bullishness kind of compounds on each other. If you believe that there's going to be a metaverse and that people are going to have multiple personalities for work and for other things. I have no f***ing time for that at all, I'm going to tell you right now. I will not be participating in the metaverse. We'll probably all be dead by the time

it really takes off. I don't even like my own personality. I'm not going to create new versions of it. We'll probably all be dead by the time it really takes off. I don't even like my own personality. I'm not going to create new versions of it. We'll be dead. That's the ultra bull case too, is that you live more and more online under different names and then it becomes super valuable. I get paid W-2 from the company I work for

and then my alter ego, which I guess I'll just out myself now, is Ram Capital. I will use crypto to get compensated for virtually opening a supermarket in Illinois or whatever I'm doing with that persona. Right. Okay. I, I look, I'm, I'm like sympathetic to the idea that nobody knew what all that fiber

being laid was going to eventually be worth. Right. And like the late nineties, but wall street was funding it. So they laid it. Yep. And then in 2005, YouTube, like there's a Saturday night live skit that goes viral.

And all of a sudden there's not enough fiber like overnight. Yep. Right. Like, so I understand that that all the rails that are being put into place in defy, somebody is going to come up with something that crosses over and becomes a mainstream thing. And then it'll be like, thank God

there was all this funding for all these projects because it turns out we needed this stuff, we just didn't know what for. So I would buy into that. And there's challenges as well. I think the connection between digital and physical, and these things called oracles, is really hard too because those are-

Wait, what's an oracle? So an oracle is something that essentially says, it connects the stock market to the blockchain, or it connects weather in Tampa to the blockchain, or whatever. It connects how? Now we're past my level of technical expertise, but I think that the challenge there is that those are a little bit more centralized and easier to attack.

And so there is this oracle problem where to actually connect the blockchain to offline things and real-world things where you can have predictions markets based on the weather in real time or any of that. I see what you're saying. Okay. That actually becomes a little more centralized and easier to attack.

So it is way harder to do a lot of the use cases that people kind of expect out of crypto that rely on it being connected to the real world. So there are real challenges. Meaning, let's say there was a situation where people wanted to bet on the weather. And you said, there's not going to be a middleman or a trusted party.

This will be trustless. There's going to be smart contracts. And if it's above 72 degrees, the people who are betting that way automatically get paid. What connects the money to actually make that crypto transaction take place, even if it's a smart contract? Stripe.

How do I stake my AMC stock? Oh, I think you need AMC coin to do that. No, dude, that's old school shit. That's 200-year-old technology. You want to stake it so short sellers can borrow it? That's a huge business. I was only joking. I'm not even thinking about that. Speaking of banks, let's not get off of this. I want to talk about this overdraft fee thing.

So they've been going up pretty much every year forever and they fell during the pandemic, which is, I guess, an unintended positive consequence. I think they've been steady forever. They never drop. They never drop. They never drop. Okay, fair enough. But then last year, like people didn't need them because either they weren't doing anything

or they just like they were flush with cash in a way that they never were before all at once. How is this even still a thing though? Because even though it was down 10% in 2020 versus 2019, it was still $31.3 billion. Is this the use case for DeFi? Well, I was going to say, not necessarily.

Maybe, yeah, depending on how broad you are with DeFi, I think this is certainly one of those use cases where even if you wanted to punish people because they were taking more money out than they put in, then you're at least paying it back into the system. And if you're an owner of ETH or whatever coin that system works on, the people are getting rewarded versus the bank getting rewarded. And I guess you could also say the bank has shareholders and whatever else.

But yeah, I think these are the types of things that, you know, I think give the arguments for crypto and then kind of like the zealots give them their power when you see the $31.3 billion being taken from the poorest people in the system. What do we think the average net worth of people with overdraft fees, where this $31 billion comes from? The bottom 20% of the income distribution, for sure. Come on.

JP Morgan did a billion and a half dollars in draft fees. Less than 1% of revenue. They wouldn't miss it. For them. Drop in the bucket. They wouldn't miss, I mean, everyone would miss a billion and a half dollars. What do you think happens without the overdraft fees? Do you think people

just go crazy? You just don't let them turn it off. You don't need blockchain for that. Just turn it off. The way they onboard you as an account at these banks, I think is like they just throw it in there. Like, oh, we're going to hook you up just in case you ever have like a payment due or whatever.

We're going to set this up for you automatically. You don't have to worry about it. And you're just like, yo, I'm not going to, I'm not going to miss any payments. Right. Like, that's just like most people's mentality, I think. So they're like, all right, throw it in, whatever. And then inevitably that's, that money starts to run up. And then you think about like, you think about like, well, what would be a better solution? Because we also don't want people to not pay their bills on time. So do you offer it for free if you're a bank? Like if you

start feeling pressure from some crypto project where people are banking there instead of your bank, are you ultimately forced to abandon it? Like that would be interesting to me. So. And it can happen. Yeah. I think that's like when you talk to people who are messianic about this stuff, that's a really great example of something that I think would get a lot of people interested. If they can have a wallet instead of a bank account. And I don't know if we're 10 years away from that or one year, but that I think would make a difference.

Well, meanwhile, we're talking like DeFi is getting all of the attention. But bank stocks look really, really good. I don't know if banks are the best performing sector over the last year, but I think they might be. So there was this article. Top three, definitely. There was this article in Barron's. They showed a chart where they did this thing

showing the average daily returns on days when inflation expectations rise. Not surprisingly, banks are a big beneficiary of this. And bank stocks look amazing. So it would be pretty ironic if bank stocks continued to have like this sick run where nobody's paying attention to them. Why are banks one of the primary beneficiaries of prices rising for everything?

Just from a revenue standpoint? Maybe the expectations of interest rates to follow suit. I don't know what else could be. So it's counterintuitive that you're going to have this whole DeFi revolution take place and the top performing stocks in the market are like JP Morgan, Bank of America, credit card companies, but that's the truth.

It's such a small, yeah. I mean, it's still a very small piece of the overall economy. It's just a small, noisy piece of the overall economy. So do you think, like, how much attention do you think is being paid to this? Because obviously the banks missed crypto, as a lot of people did, probably myself included.

What's the likelihood that they're not paying attention to this stuff? Are they totally asleep at the wheel? No. I mean, I think every bank, JP Morgan definitely has a crypto team, and every bank. Goldman had a crypto team. They had a crypto trading desk, I think.

I'm sure they have people internally who are looking at crypto. I think it's hard right now to figure out how you'd use it if you're a bank, but I think that you'll see, certainly, some projects where,

you know, banks I think are, I forget the name of the chain, but there are some banks involved in helping to build kind of a new chain where a lot of things, you know,

either on Wall Street or the banking sector more broadly can transact and settle. I guess what I'm asking is, are they just really going to roll over and just be like, here, take it? I don't think anybody's going to roll over, right? Like the banks, the regulators,

I think there's going to be a lot of pain there as well. So the narrative that like defies the future of the financial infrastructure, like they know what's up. Like the banks know that people are talking about this. The banks are going to be forced to use whatever the Fed puts out. So when they, when you get, when you get like legitimate central bank, digital currencies, whatever the U S version of that looks like,

the banks will automatically be using whatever that is to do stuff. So they have to have these teams in place. So what if that fixes a lot of this? Well, so that's what's interesting to me is, is that good for Bitcoin or a threat to Bitcoin? Good question. I don't know about Bitcoin in particular. I think it's good for that, I don't know,

it depends what level you're playing this. Like, for the zealots who say that they want a more fair and open system, they would say that that is way too centralized. And so I think then it becomes, I don't know, I think the scenario there gets really weird where you have all of these people who've made a ton of money on crypto

fighting against almost kind of the central governments of all of these different companies who are fighting back. I don't know how that plays out in any way, but they would say, if the Fed can control this thing, then it's too centralized. And that is not something that just general crypto people or the people who are invested right now are going to move over to.

Because I look at some of the biggest landmarks from the last few years, like this is going to be a big event for Bitcoin. They all seem to be negative catalysts in the end. Futures. Futures trading put the top in in 17. I think everyone knows that. Yep. You had a two-way market for the first time ever.

What else? Coinbase IPO seemed to have marked the top in Bitcoin. Everybody thought that that was going to be Bitcoin's coming out party. I'm saying Bitcoin, but I'm speaking colloquially about all of these things. If there are people making the case that, look, central banks have realized that crypto is the future. They're all going to have their own cryptocurrency, I'm not so sure that's so great for the existing cryptocurrencies that have been marketed as an alternative. Yeah, I don't think anybody in this space would say that that would be a good thing. China's obviously working on it.

The US will work on it. The ECB. They're all going to do something. I think they like the idea of just real-time censorship of where the money's being spent. Not censorship. That's the wrong word. Surveillance. It's a lot on crypto, but last question for me. Did you put a large percentage

of your net worth? Are you working it? What's up? I'm working it. Large percentage. We're not talking more than 50%. If I can get to 15% or so. That's large. Are you like dollar-class averaging? I'm like dollar-class? Or are you like timing? Whenever there's a big dip, I'll buy.

And I also have like very small kind of weekly buys. But if there's a big dip, then I'll buy an Ether too. So I was doing dollar cost averaging for years, like set up through Coinbase. Not big dollar amounts. But then like Ether got cut in half last I guess two weeks ago and I was just looking at it and I'm like

wait I can't wait the next six months to put money in like if I'm really doing this then I have to take matters into my own hands I don't even know if it's worked out

that well yet but you're up 50% if you bought that if you bought the I didn't get the bottom come on I got pretty close

I got like 1770 I think or 1780 it was like right in what was low on Ether Or 1780. It was like right in that. What was low on ETH? 1750? I think it was like right around 1750. I think I got in 1770, 1780. Classic Fibonacci. Is food delivery the worst

business ever? Other than DeFi, it might be. And this seems like a mad rush to like there's a lot of competition here and it is the shittiest business ever. There was a quote that I almost couldn't, I had to read this like four times from Grubhub chief executive, Matt Maloney.

He said, food delivery is and always will be a crummy business. Wait, who is that? Grubhub chief executive. That's what he said? Yeah. I couldn't even, I'm really like- Does he have a pure firm?

So here's some said? Yeah. I couldn't even, I'm really like, Does he have a pure firm? So here's some numbers. Yeah. DoorDash on average is left with 2.5% of a customer's overall bill. You would never launch a business for that.

So they get 90 cents on an average order of $36. It's unbelievable. They've been in business for eight years. They've never had a profit. So what they're saying is,

well, only 6% of the US population uses DoorDash. So there's room, you know, there's room for penetration. For what though? How do they make money ever? More than 90 cents from, it's like you make more money selling a candy bar. John, throw this graphic up here of, of, of where the money's going. Like I just, it just seems to be like, I don't know how the math ever works on this.

Is that Paki on his scooter? That's me after ETH tanked a couple of weeks ago doing a couple of deliveries. The argument that you make if you're a food delivery bull, which I'm not, but the argument that you make is in China, they had a very similar dynamic going on and a very similar competition going on. Meituan, Dianping won, and they're a $200-plus billion company now.

And when you win, the big question I think for all of these companies, Uber on the ride-sharing side, the food delivery side, DoorDash is whether or not they're a winner-take-all dynamics in this market and whether or not there will be a winner-take-all. Meituan is the shining example. The other kind of bull case for them is

if you own all of these customers and they're interacting with you a few times a week, then can you sell them other stuff? Can you be the local logistics arm for everything that people need? They're telling the street, like, people are going to have their dry cleaning picked up. Well, liquor is a new thing. That's a big thing. Just look at this. All right.

So food is $24. You end up paying $35, which, first of all, it's outrageously expensive. The restaurant of the $24 gets 19. Delivery person takes $8.91. And scroll down, John, show us the coup de grace. Look at this. DoorDash, 90 cents. 90 cents. What are they eating? Wait, how much does the driver make in here? I can't even tell. Delivery fees and tip, $9. So you can't regularly order meals that are $36. It's too expensive.

How could you live like that? That's like room service in a hotel. It's like $36. It's too expensive. You can't make that part of your life on a daily basis. So how do they improve their margins? I don't know. Cook their own food.

Ghost kitchens and just come. Cook their own food. Ghost kitchens and just come up with their own food. And I mean, I'm not saying they'll do it, but like that would be one way. Like almost like supermarkets sell private label. They have their own

like brands within the store. So what if DoorDash launched a Tex-Mex concept that was as good as Chipotle and cheaper because they're delivering their own shit. I don't see it. Neither does Wall Street, apparently.

They'll certainly do. I mean, the other thing on DoorDash and all that is that the restaurant looks like they're making a good chunk there. Being on DoorDash and Uber Eats and all of those has crushed restaurant margins as well, when before it was this tiny piece of their mix, and during COVID it became a

bigger piece. And so restaurants lost a ton of money. Many had to shut down. So nobody in the whole stack is really that happy with it. I think Uber Eats saved Uber. I think that stock would have went to $10 if they didn't have it. And what's so funny is right before the pandemic, I remember, I think it was maybe January or February. I don't know, it all blends together. I was at Delivering Alpha, the CNBC massive conference, and we had Chanos on a panel doing the show, and he's short all these things. And he's like, they should get rid of the delivery food.

It'll always be a shitty business. He's right, obviously. But I think if Uber didn't have that, that stock would have just absolutely cratered and maybe not even recovered. And now it's close to a record high. Well, the stock looks like crap. Now this could,

this could change. This could change in a second, but I mean, that's Uber. We'll throw it up. What do you mean? It looks like crap. The all time high is 64.

It's 48. Doesn't look good. Where do you think that stock would be if they didn't have Uber Eats? Way lower. Way lower. I'm just saying. Apparently they had.

I talked to somebody yesterday who used to work at Uber and is in the space still. And he said that before they couldn't convince the drivers. And their whole thing was, you'll get this driver and throughout the day they can do all these different things. And they could not convince drivers to do food delivery. And now they're having a really hard time convincing drivers to go back from doing food

delivery after the pandemic, because food delivery meant you didn't have to carry somebody in your car. You were getting bigger tips or all these things. And so now they're spending, I think, $250 million to do a kind of reactivation campaign on the driver's side. So it's a weird dynamic. Hey, remember how much you loved schlepping people to the airport? Well, now you can. If you were, if you were, if you were faced with the choice of doing one or the other, would you do food delivery or would you do like ferrying people around drunk to parties and shit? I wouldn't do that.

Food delivery. You put a podcast on. Yeah, food delivery. Put your mask on, go in and out of these stores all day, not deal with anybody. Food delivery was like the only job I didn't do as a teenager. I feel like I did a lot of jobs. I was not one of them.

You never delivered pizza? Nope. Me either. Nope. I delivered pizza to people's tables. I was a waiter, but not in the car. No, but you never like did Chinese food, pizza. No.

No, I never did that either. I don't think my parents would have let me do it because of the way I drove and still drive to this day. All right. So these are obviously not great businesses, but maybe if there's one or two of them that take over all of America, it's not good enough. Let's get into Drizzly, which Uber bought. And I guess DoorDash has its own version or will.

This seems like it could be a great business. Why? Because these are high dollar amount purchases. Like, I don't mean like order a bottle of wine, but people are like, we need liquor for the house. We're having a party. I feel like I kind of like going to the liquor store. I love it. So I'm not going to do it, but I could see maybe younger people who don't care about that. Just being like, yeah, it gets the, I just feel, I don't know, in every town in hours, it's right on the corner. And there's like several of them. It's just easy to go to the bottle, go to the store, grab a bottle. I go to this warehouse in the town next

in Freeport and it's the best liquor store on earth. I swear to God. Oh, the behind BJ's? Behind BJ's. I mean, the guy, like the guy, like the owner, like literally will walk over to you and walk down the aisles with you. I've never been inside. And before you know it, you're like seven, $800. You just went in there to get a couple of lots of one. But so I guess the thing is with Uber and all these deliveries is that it's not just going to be food. They're going to deliver everything to you. They're going to solve the last mile.

I guess what is everything? Because Amazon's delivering everything to me. What else is there? So it's goods and I guess local services. And so Amazon is any good. And then any local service will be fulfilled by a DoorDash. How lazy are we? Incredibly lazy.

Lazy or optimizing. There's a play on laziness. I don't like it. I don't like the whole thing. Let's keep it moving. Speaking of lazy, Amazon and weed? I thought this was interesting because, so Amazon said this week they're going to do their own version of weed decriminalization. They're going to stop testing

the people that work for them or most of the people that work for them, um, for, I guess, marijuana use. And how many hundreds of thousands of employees do they have? They're testing for weed. I, well, maybe when, just when they hire, I don't think they're doing random, like urine samples. It's so dumb. What's the point? It's so dumb. Just assume, so if I'm Amazon, I think about whatever facilities I have in California, I just assume everybody's high and not even bother testing.

Totally. They're spending a ton of money right now. They're advertising pretty heavily on The Daily, which is the biggest podcast in the country. What are they advertising? Advertising employment.

They're saying, did you know that we don't only have $15 an hour minimum wage, we also have six weeks of parental leave and X, Y, and Z. So they're spending presumably millions of dollars. Part of that is a PR campaign. Part of that's a PR campaign for sure. And part of it is that Amazon is just becoming,

they're eating up all employment right now. And so just to limit yourself by drug testing people doesn't make any sense. I got a temp job from a family member when I was unemployable. And they were like, she was like, all right, you're going to get drug tested tomorrow and you're going to start next week. Tomorrow. Yeah.

So I ran to the Walgreens or whatever, got the flush, good to go. Yep. I had a buddy who had the fake dong and did that whole thing for banking. That's aggressive. Yeah. So if, like, I guess tech companies would never be,

other than maybe Amazon and a couple, like they just would not be in the habit of drug testing because I think you have this kind of like techno-libertarianism that tends to be at the upper echelons of that world. Could financial companies continue? Were you about to say finance? Aggressively finance.

Could companies in finance continue to test people for drugs and get the best talent, like technology talent? That would be tough to, I guess, on some level, they should be testing. Like a large bank, people are going to be handling other people's money.

You want to make sure your employees aren't on opiates and stuff or something like that. Yeah. So it's cool if you smoke weed, just if we find anything else, we might have a problem. I mean, it's tough there. If you're saying and there's some people who want to be in an office, some people who don't, some people who smoke

weed, some people who don't. But if you're stacking all of these things back to back to back where you're saying you have to come to the office, you have to get drug tested, you have to do X, Y, and Z, and then Stripe, to go back to them, is saying, yeah, one of our hubs is remote, and we don't drug test, and whatever. And everybody's high all the time. And everybody's high all the time.

I mean, once we legalize it, you see what's happening. There's people high in the streets all the time. Well, so it's more than legalization. It's destigmatization. Did I do that right? Like, they're making it like it's like nobody, it's the sameization. Did I do that right? Like they're making it like it's like nobody, it's the same as somebody goes after work and goes for a drink, which has been acceptable forever.

So now if you're saying that that's like what the new world is, then how can you, are we testing people for alcohol use? No. So I think it's heading in that direction. I have a don't ask, don't tell policy here at my firm. I don't really care. Imagine trying to do this. I mean, I'm maybe not a good pothead, but like, imagine trying to do this job high. It sounds miserable. No. And, and the type of people that are attracted to

financial anything, I don't think are like the type of people who their life's ambition is to be high every day. Like, I just don't think those two things overlap that much. Probably cocaine is a way bigger issue on Wall Street. I actually smoked, the only real period of my life when I smoked. I was about to say, you actually smoked cocaine. Yeah, the only period of my life where I really did was when I was in banking and had to work until late,

had coffee until midnight, and then had to get home and go to sleep. And so that's the only time really when I smoked. You're cool with us. It's okay. Is there anything else you want to confess to before we move along? Oh man, there was that one time. All right, we'll save that.

Oh, this is the last headline I wanted to do. The investment case for Vimeo. Dude, I had no idea this was a public company. I know nobody does. It like went public in the dark. Did you know this, Bucky? I saw that they went public. It was the third HBS female from the 2011 class or something to take a company public, which is pretty amazing. That's notable.

All right. So basically this thing came public under cover of darkness. It was not a SPAC. And it was like a spinoff because this was part of the Barry Diller empire. It was part of IAC. So maybe that's why it didn't get that much attention. I can't really figure it out. But the business looks like it's a great business.

And the IPO flopped, like right out of the gates. I don't know if we're pulling up a chart on this one. VMEO is the ticker. And it looks like- I got the ticker. And looks like- I got you, John. Looks like nobody actually really wanted it. So it- Oh, this just came public.

Dude, like last week. Oh, okay, okay, okay. So it opened above 55 and it's 42. All right. It doesn't even have a 50-day moving average. This thing's a baby. It's a baby. Well, what's the valuation? It's not a baby. So that's what I

want to tell you. 5 billion, 10 billion, 7, 7.2. Okay. All right. Let me give you, let me give you the rundown. Hit us with some numbers. 200 million users, 1.6 million of whom are paid subscribers. How many memes? How many memes? Well, I'm not sure like what you're paying for there. 190 countries, okay. Vimeo claims 350,000 new videos are added each day, which is big but sounds small because all of this is taking place in the shadow of YouTube. The platform has over 100 billion video views, which again, I don't really think that that's that big.

There are rappers that have 100 billion video views, right? Probably, assuming. All right. First quarter of 2021, Vimeo's revenue hit 89.4 million, up 57% year over year. Trailing 12-month revenue, 315 million. So 7 billion market cap on 315 million. Math in my head is, what is that, 20 times sales?

Yeah, 22. So I don't know if that's a lot or a little. What do you think? 22 times sales on 50-something percent revenue growth. Like, is this company getting full credit and it just had a bad IPO? I don't know. 70% gross margins, not bad.

What do you watch on Vimeo that's not on YouTube? I think a lot more embedded stuff, right? For corporations. For corporations. If you're putting something on your site, you're probably doing it more on Vimeo than you are on YouTube. Yeah.

So like Amazon is one of their biggest customers. So I guess Amazon is serving video on their platform, I guess, in the product reviews. Why hasn't YouTube bought them or Google bought them? Well, because it was part of IAC. It was owned already. All right. Next question.

That'll do the trick. All right. Moving on from headlines, we're going to do a little overbought, oversold. So leaving aside the technical analysis terms, overbought or oversold, what are we paying too much attention to? What's being thrown out or ignored that shouldn't be? And I thought the MGM deal probably didn't get enough attention.

It had a one-day news cycle. This is the second biggest deal Amazon's ever done. It's eight and a half billion bucks. Just behind Whole Foods was like 13 billion. And when you think about what they actually have in their library- MGM's library is not that great. It's James Bond, it's Rocky.

I feel like it has the potential, though. When Marvel got bought by Disney, nobody was excited about it. People were like, eh, they had a couple of movies. I feel like it has almost that level of potential. So this is what they have. James Bond, Rocky, Pink Panther, Silence of the Lambs, Robocop, 12 Angry Men, Basic Instinct, Moonstruck, Poltergeist, Raging Bull, Stargate, Thelma

and Louise, Tomb Raider, Magnificent Seven. Every one of these things could be a new franchise that just freaks people out. I guess. I think Bezos is using his, I know the Washington Post was a personal purchase, but what he was able to do there and turn that business around, MGM is having financial issues for years. I think they've been rumored to have some suitors. And I guess if any- This is fuck you money? Like Jeff's just like, I can do

it, so I'm doing it? Probably. I think if anybody can do it, it's them. And if they swing and they miss, then they could spin it back out. But this obviously folds very nicely into Prime Video, which is a pretty kick-ass service. I love Prime Video. Use it all the time.

So this probably wouldn't make you become a Prime customer. Like if they had this new James Bond show, TV show, which they've never let them do it. But yeah. So the James Bond ownership is half of it. But who's left to become a Prime customer? Isn't like half the country Prime customers at this point? Well, if you weren't

and now they make a poltergeist show and you're really into horror stuff. So you're saying this got too much attention or too little? Too little. I think it's a huge deal. When Disney bought Lucasfilm, nobody was really losing their mind over it as a

business. They were like, oh, it's funny, we'll make memes like Mickey with a lightsaber. It ended up being like a massive, massive business for Disney. And I thought the same thing with Marvel, which Marvel at one point was almost bankrupt. Yeah. So this to me could like, could have huge potential for Amazon as a business.

Not just like, oh, we're going to get more Prime members, but just the ability to do so much more with all of these properties. I'll take the other side of that. I could be wrong. I think it's NBD. It depends what they do with it too, right? I mean, Disney completely upped the cadence for Marvel

and there's a new Marvel show or movie or whatever, multiple, multiple, multiple times a year. And so it's just building more and more and more touch points. What if they do a Rocky James Bond crossover? Right, you could do that kind of stuff. What if they did a James Bond TV show, which has never happened? Don't they have The Apprentice too?

Isn't that part of the joke here, was that Jeff Bezos just wanted to buy all the Apprentice? He wanted the stuff that's in the vault. Exactly. I guarantee you that stuff doesn't exist anymore. If it ever existed, those tapes have been burned. Anyway, I thought that that could be a big deal, but maybe I'm wrong.

I don't think that we pay enough attention to productivity. Paki, you did a post or had this idea that we're going to see a trillion dollar company with one employee or something like that? That was the thought exercise. At what point will we get to the spot where technology is so good and easy to use and scale that you can reach online is so huge

that you could have one person at the center of a trillion dollar organization? These trillion dollar companies, though, are very productive and have tons of employees. For sure. Amazon's the biggest employer in the country other than Walmart. I don't know Apple's US employment. I imagine it's hundreds of thousands. So where is the productivity

that we're not paying attention to? To Paki's point, the S&P 500, throw this chart up, is 70% less labor intensive than it was in the 80s. So it takes an average of barely two workers

to generate a million dollars in revenue today versus eight in 1986. Two today versus eight in 1986. Two today versus 8 in 1986. And I spoke about this. I credit McKinsey with this level of efficiency. I wrote about this a few years ago.

I think I spoke about Alcoa. They had like, whatever the numbers were, it was sort of similar to this. They were the first billion dollar corporation. And the amount of employees that they had to generate a million dollars then versus today is just a staggering difference. Is this part of why multiples have been rising for years and years and years, decades really?

It should be. Are we double counting or does this move the needle? This has to move the needle. I mean, I think in my world where I look at this trend a lot is in early stage companies getting a lot of money really quickly. Some of them are bubbly. Some of them are just hitting revenue.

There's this famous chart, I think Bessemer maybe put it out, that shows how fast it took every company to get to $100 million ARR. And Slack was the fastest. And if you look at a lot of today's startups, they haven't hit $100 million yet, the ones I've looked at, but they're hitting $15, $20 way before Slack did.

And so there's a lot of things that you can do. You can plug in, you know, we'll talk about Stripe again. You can plug in Stripe off the shelf. You can plug in a million different things that you would have had to have a team of 10 or 20 people building before now just comes off the shelf and it's the best possible version of that thing that you get. You're doing more with way less. Do you think that you're looking at some business today that you think have the potential to do something like that? do you think that you're looking at some business today that you think have the potential to do something like that? Not get to a trillion by themselves,

but just to accelerate. Outsource everything and just be a website and a logo? I mean, the dream of all of this is that you focus on the one or two points of differentiation that your company has, and maybe that you get really, really good at combining all of these pieces off the shelf. But there are some things that touch the customer and that are what you do that you should get really, really good at combining all of these pieces off the shelf. But there are some things that touch the customer and that are what you do that you should get really, really good at.

And you put every bit of not just money and people, but organizational focus in. And you hire the best people in the world at that thing. And so you can just be a lot more focused on one particular problem. Here's the problem with that. All the stuff that you're outsourcing, you're outsourcing it to other companies. And they're looking at your piece and they're saying, we could do that shit. They're saying, Packy Corp is making 80% of the money here. And 20% of the money is going to suppliers like us to do all this mundane, boring stuff that Packy Corp doesn't want to deal with.

Because it's not helping their share price, not helping their multiple. Nobody's interested in it. But then they start to move up the chain because then they say, well, what if we had our own version of this and we actually have all the know-how to do it in-house? So actually it would be cheaper for us to do the Paki part. That is the thing that ends up happening eventually. But to be a good API for someone,

so take Twilio so we can move off the Stripe example. They're really good. By the way, this new podcast I didn't mention is sponsored by Stripe. And we want to thank our friends at Stripe for supporting what we're doing here. Stripe.com. But if you look at Twilio,

or any of these API-first businesses, where the really big ones are being built is by taking something that is so non-core to the businesses that they work with. You can't even go from, they handle all of your messaging, they're doing a little bit of customer service stuff, they handle your voice calling.

And they do that by partnering with the telcos across the world and building complex telephony routing networks and all this shit. But you can't say, okay, cool, because we're really good at that, let's partner with Shopify. Let's go take the storefront, because that's where the real money is. They're more than happy taking this very small,

fairly unimportant piece of other companies' businesses and making that piece more important and making it more predictive and saying, this is actually part of a customer relationship and not just transactional messaging. So going up in maybe that little piece, but the ones that are doing really well are taking the small, non-threatening piece.

Is there going to be a company that bundles all these off-the-shelf products, or is that just Stripe already? No, Stripe has been, you know, they're moving in financial services, but I don't know. Salesforce tries to buy

a lot of stuff. It's not going to be them for sure. So a lot of what's in that chart and a lot of what we're describing as productivity

is actually just outsourcing. Like just finding other people to do stuff that's not core to your... Remember Instagram, like the headline was they got bought for, was it a billion dollars

with 11 employees? 23 employees or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There have been more of those since. So I think the question becomes how much is cloud computing and software replacing in terms of physical manpower?

And I think obviously based on that chart, it's maybe more than we think. Based on the chart, it looks like we're going to zero soon. There's going to be zero employees per... It's going to be that Wally scene. Everything comes back to that Wally scene like we're going to zero soon. There's going to be zero employees per- It's going to be

that Wally scene. Everything comes back to that Wally scene where we're sitting in a chair drinking soda and watching TV. We do business with- Well, we don't really,

but I gave this startup, fintech startup, to some of my people here. I'm like, take a look at their solution because they seem to be promising a lot, like specifically on price.

And then they took it for a test drive. They're like, you know what this guy is doing? And this guy just raised a ton of money from like big venture capitalists. So they took a look at it and they're like, you know what this guy is doing? He basically just outsourced everything and it's a sloppy piece of shit. None of the pieces work together. Like this is like unusable. I'm like, okay, so how did he raise

all this money? And then I realized that's what he's, he's not worried about the end customer. He's worried about selling the stock and he did a really good job of selling the stock. And then he'll use the money to, I guess, make all that stuff work better together. But if you outsource nine things out of 10, chances are, it's not going to be a good solution for your customer. out of 10, chances are it's not going to be a good solution for your customer. Amazon's not doing that. At a certain point, you might start trending down to a one-person company and then realize maybe we should add some people because it's not going well. The other part of that argument is that there's loose collections of people

who spring in and out and help each other. It's not one person sitting in a basement by themselves, but it's people, kind of their orbits crossing and leaving each other's orbits. You have AMC as your overbought. What's going on with this? I mean, we've gotten to this point in the conversation and we haven't-

Couldn't avoid it this week. We haven't talked about AMC, so we had to. But I think obviously the stock and the story are overbought right now. But I think what the interesting piece is that we haven't talked about is, if you could pull up the chart that we looked at before, this was a huge story a few months ago that it felt like it went to stratospheric levels. And if you look at the chart now, that is nothing. It's a mountain now, it was a molehill then.

Exactly, and people are not bored. It's hot girl summer right now was a molehill then. Exactly. And people are not bored, right? Like it's hot girl summer right now. People are out and about. They have other things to do. And still the meme stocks live on. I thought this was going to die down when we reopened. Exactly. What's weird is that the market is dying.

Like volume is drying up in the indices. But for what, I don't know how, how did this happen? How did this bubble reinflate? And what, the language of AMC. What was the spark? I think it was the, I think it was the,

the secondary offering with the hedge fund. Look at this. The bubble in January is imperceptible to the naked eye. Yeah. Unbelievable. But was getting money from Mudra Capital, the reason for this thing exploding all of a sudden? I honestly don't know.

I don't think it's coincidence. Yeah, but that headline broke, what, two days ago? This was going on. I guess this started like middle of May. I bought this thing before, too, before any of the meme stuff, because I was like, I love the movies. And this thing is so cheap right now. And then I was like, I'm an idiot. This thing's going to go bankrupt.

And then I missed this. But yeah, I do think the other interesting thing to come out of this. Are you still in it or you sold it? No, I sold it. I think I bought probably an average of three and sold it $250 because I'm an idiot. This is going to go bankrupt. I love how the axis goes to negative five just in case.

On this stock, you never know. Is it over? No. why not? what's still to come? they just watered the stock I don't think it matters yeah nobody cares you don't

nobody cares? I mean obviously some people care the people who are pumping it to 72 are not like oh shit now the dilution is killing me

I would have been surprised more if it's 30 or 75 yep 100% I do think the one thing that they've done that is smart and it's dumb

but the idea of giving shareholders popcorn. It's hilarious. It's hilarious. And I imagine if you're going to be a company that has retail customers and retail buyers as part of your base, I would imagine you'll start seeing more things like that happening. Dude, their cover your ass language in there

is like, we don't think that the share price is at all connected with the fundamentals of the business. Like, what else could you say other than please don't buy this offering? They pretty much did, right? They're telling investors, you guys are playing musical chairs,

but if you want to play, go for it. Here's some popcorn. Play with our stock. By the way, the troll guy, Wiesenthal, I don't think he would appreciate that title, but sorry, Joe.

He tweeted, the way crypto people talk about the power of tokens, quote, you turn customers into owners and incentivize them to evangelize the protocol, end quote. Dude, you literally just described an MLM scheme. Wait, hold on. Wait, go ahead, Josh. No, so we don't think this is over? I don't know. I don't want to say that. I think they'll move to a new stock eventually.

That's when it ends. I think it'd be very weird if we were recording this on the day that all of the meme stock stuff just was over. Oh, you got to hit me with this UFO stuff. Yeah. UFOs are oversold? Do tell. I mean, are you aware of what's going on here?

I mean, this month, the government is releasing a report with pretty much all of the unclassified stuff and all the stuff that they're trying to unclassify. It was part of, I think, the COVID relief bill passed under Trump that they had to release this report on all of the UFO sightings around the world. And so I think they call them, they have some governmental name, like UAPs, which is Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. But they're going to release a report, the U.S. Congress or somebody to the intelligence committee to the Congress is going to release a report with the government's

pictures of UFOs from around the world. And you have people coming out and saying like, honestly, we have no idea how to explain any of this stuff. And so obviously people are talking about it. It was trending on Twitter, all those things. But if these are actual UFOs and the government- Dude, I can't, I love alien movies. I love alien movies. Love them. How is this not big? How is this not the only thing that people are-

We live in a crazy world when we're talking more about AMC than we're talking about the fact that there might actually be aliens and the government has proof. I feel like if we find out there's aliens, people will be like, yeah, I get it. It makes sense.

Of course there are aliens. They have proof that there was an unidentified aerial phenomena. They don't have proof that it's a visitor from another world. Also true. So John Ratcliffe, director of national intelligence, said all over the world, there are a lot more sightings that have been made public. As for what constitutes a sighting, Ratcliffe said, we're talking about objects that have never been seen. I'm sorry, that have been seen by Navy or Air Force pilots or have been picked up by satellite imagery that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain.

So John, hit us with that video. Engage in actions. Watch this, watch this, watch this. Squirrels. No, no. Okay. There it is. There it is.

Can we get some volume or no? John's on his game. You involute? Why? They like take me to your leader? No. So these are Navy people and you hear them on video saying like, take me to your leader? No, so these are Navy people, and you hear them on video saying like,

what the hell is that? Do they talk with the Chuck Yeager voice? Like, folks, we are... So one of the potential explanations... Cruising at 20,000 feet. One of the funny explanations is that it's just like faulty software. It's just like a dot on the screen. They should just tap it twice

and it'll go away. It's actually nothing. So you think we're not excited enough about this? Not excited like we think it's good, but just like we're not riled up enough that all of a sudden the government is admitting that there's things they don't understand. I think our dopamine receptors have just gotten

absolutely smoked over the past- Oh my God, I totally agree with that. Like in other words, yeah. What are you going to tell me? What are you going to tell me at this? I just watched crude oil go to a negative number. You're going to tell me that there are unidentified flying objects that the

government took pictures of. Yeah. I believe it. I mean, at that point, why not buy more? Why not buy more AMC and just have fun with this while we're, while we're here.

It's going to be very disappointing if they open those files and it's like drunken hunters from the 1950s giving police reports of things that they saw while passed out in the woods. That'll be underwhelming. If there is something really cool in there, again, will it last more than one day on Twitter?

I don't know if anything can. Which is what makes AMC that much more amazing is that it's back. Wait, if there are aliens, what's the trade? Well, that'll be like on my show, that'll be the next thing within two days. It'll be like, okay, there are aliens. How do you play it?

Probably Bitcoin. It has to be Bitcoin. Stripe? Spacecoin. No, dude. Lockheed fucking Martin. No, you short it. You short Lockheed.

You short SpaceX. Lasers. If there's- Lasers. If somebody has gotten here and we can't get there, they have better technology. The move is to reverse engineer their stuff. It's, you know, SpaceX is old news

if it can't even get to another planet with life on it. Oh, so you're saying that the trade is capture one of these aerial phenomena. They're humanoids. Identify the unidentified. Spack it. Spin it off.

100%. Tokenize. Bro down. Yes. Bro down. All right. My oversold. Did you guys listen to Barry's interview with Carson Block?

I did. Masters in business. You listen to it? No. No? You missed out. So this is why it's oversold. He was awesome.

So I don't know him personally, but I feel like this is why it's oversold. He was awesome. So I don't know him personally, but I feel like this is this perfect case of somebody finding the exact career that they should be. Yeah, yeah. He had a very good story. Like he was like a lawyer, trained as a lawyer, went over to China, was involved in manufacturing. He saw that everything was a lie.

He saw like foreign investors, foreign companies ripping off u.s investors very easily with the help of wall street and it's like a great origin story and people along the way asking him like what the hell are you doing this for like you're being threatened by people like you have a family he i almost feel like after listening to that um he had to do this job what else would he do uh and of course I think he's, uh, what was the stat? He unveiled nine companies that turned out to be delisted frauds. Oh, he, he did, um, uh, Sino forest.

What was the, was it a fake paper company that, that, uh, a lot of big hedge funds got caught in. Uh, the, the loosen coffee or the Luke and coffee and coffee. Yeah. Was he involved in that? I think so. Yeah. Anyway, I thought, I thought that was a really cool podcast. People haven't heard it.

Mike, you got one. What do I got? Oh. I don't even know what I'm calling this. I just want to say that A Quiet Place 2 was the best sequel. When I left the theater, I was like, holy shit. That was the best sequel since Terminator 2. Was the theater crowded?

No. 25%. And I was like, wait, I needed to pump the brakes. So I Googled like best sequel. All right. It's not, Dark Knight was the best sequel over the last, call it 15 years. Why did you think this was the best sequel?

Like what was it about it? I didn't see it. Did you guys see the first one? Yeah. Okay. Oh, packy. All right. So they went back to-

We'll spoil this. Like, you know, like- You're not just spoiling it for me. You're spoiling it to our millions of listeners. It they went back to- We'll spoil this. Like, you know, like- You're not just spoiling it for me. You're spoiling it to our millions of listeners. It's like a seven-year-old movie. You couldn't talk or these like creatures would kill you. It was like Bird Box, but with- Less stupid.

With volume and it was actually good. It was so good. So in A Quiet Place 2, this is not a big spoiler, but they started the movie where they went back to the day that these things came. Okay. And I did not see that coming. And they just, they nailed it. The execution of this movie was-

Oh, it's like The Godfather. They went back in time. Yeah, like- By the way, that's the best sequel ever. And then they, yeah, agreed. And then they came- I'm going to help you with that. And then they came to present day.

They just nailed it. I just, I was blown away by how good it was. And it was really, really good. The back of the theater. And this was like the perfect, perfect, perfect movie theater movie. All right. And what do you say about Netflix?

Oh, so is Netflix out of like shit? It's the worst tech stock that I follow. They have, they just came out with like a random play button. Like this is not, this is not a shuffle on your like iPod. It's an hour. You're giving this thing an hour? Yeah, like.

The opposite side of that is you can waste a lot of time and we do waste a lot of time looking for something to watch on Netflix before just settling on something. That's kind of nostalgic for me. It's like walking down the aisles of Blockbuster.

It's like the new thing. Like I kind of like wasting time on Netflix. You can go 50, could you go 15 minutes before you select something? 100%. Easily.

If you've watched a lot recently. Yeah, 100% you can do that. And I mean, they know as much about you, as much about what you'd want to watch as anybody. That's a good point. So maybe they're not going to put you on the complete ship. And then I find like the worst shit like by accident

because it's like a suggestion engine and I already watched a lot of bad shit. And then I like before I know it, I'm like watching a dramatic series about King Tut and he's like having sex in the first 20 minutes of this thing. And it's like, what even am I doing right now? This is the mummified version or while he was still alive?

Yeah, no, while he was still alive. No, but I feel like I never end up with anything good unless I deliberately go look for it. Like if Michael's like, dude, you have to go check out Ozark. And I'll be like, all right, that's really good. Yeah. But I don't get lucky on my own. I don't, but I honestly, I really, I rarely scroll anymore. Oh,

we scroll all the time. So the random button eliminates the scrolling part and you're just into something. You just start watching. Uh, you can always turn it off. I do wish that all these services and maybe they do, but had a button that just let you wash your history.

So if you've watched a bunch of crap, this Spotify, if you've listened to a bunch of crap, you can just wash it all out. Yeah. Start over. Right. Stop acting like,

you know me, you don't know me clear, clear history. you know me, you don't know me. Clear history. They don't have that. Maybe they do, I've never used it. You have to cancel your credit card and start a new account in order to do that. You have Mayor of Easttown on here.

I grew up outside Philadelphia. Wait, is this overbought or oversold? No, this is just our recommendations. It's perfectly bought. Just a recommendation. It's so good. Just growing up outside Philadelphia. You finished so good. It's so good. Did you finish it? I finished it. Not expecting, we're obviously

not going to spoil this one for people, but the accent is beautiful. Alright, so I don't know much about this accent, but I loved it. This is Delaware County, which is, is it really a suburb of Philly? Yeah, so it's where I grew up, actually. I grew up in Delaware County, but Delaware County is huge.

I grew up in Villanova, which is both like, in the show they talk about the main line as the rich woman from the main line. I grew up on that piece, but also in Delaware County, so right in the middle. There's a little South Jersey in there, sort of. Oh, yeah. It's like, you know, water, home, phone, all of that.

They went overboard a little bit on some stuff. There's one scene when she comes home and her mom's like, here, Mayor, have a cheesesteak. People in Philly just have cheesesteaks lying around. But they got Wawa right, and she was wearing a CIL City shirt, which is like a Vichon that a lot of people go to. You never hear people pick apart an accent.

I believe every accent. To me, there's no bad accent. I'm always convinced. I never know a bad accent. Oh, somebody, an actor not doing a good version. Yeah, like, unless it's like egregious, I don't know. Maybe I'm just not paying attention to it. Like, I buy every accent. I think she caught her groove.

I think the first episode, it was a little stretched, and then she really got into it. One of the things that I loved about this show was the juxtaposition of how dark it was with how jovial it was at times. Like, there was almost some moments of like seventh heaven wrapped in, wrapped into a seven. You know what I mean?

Like the light and the dark was really interesting. She's a, she's an amazing actress. So I don't think anybody else could have pulled this off. Where has she been for like the last 10 years? I don't know. I don't remember seeing stuff that she's been in for a long time. And then she just like drops this on the world and she's a producer of it.

I also, I love the seven episodes. I love waiting a week. Like I just, I loved it. It was so much fun. So I didn't watch it in real time. Oh, you binged. I watched the first one, forgot all about it

and then went back to it. And it's definitely like one of the top three things that I've seen this year. Yeah, for sure. It's excellent. I would say, is there room for a sequel? I don't want one. No, you know it's coming. It's excellent. I would say. Is there room for a sequel? I don't want one. You know it's coming.

What's the story with Youngling? It's a shitty beer, but that's like the regional beer. It's the regional beer. That and Rolling Rock, which I don't know anybody who... You got me a Heineken last night at the Nick game. Yeah, you hated that. I didn't watch the Nick game. What happened with the Knicks? You know what? They only had that or Bud Light,

which should I have brought you? Neither. I would rather drink Bud Light. Because I'm happened with the Knicks? You know what? They only had that or Bud Light, which should I have brought you? Neither. I would rather drink Bud Light. Because I'm like, what kind of beer do you want? He goes, Goose Island. I'm like, all right, I'll try. But it's like third quarter of a Knicks game,

so it's not really that realistic. But they have Bud Light or Heineken. Oh, and you're like specifically no Bud Light, right? I might have said no Bud Light. So I'm like, Heineken it is. And I know that's very specific, Heineken. Like people have that taste. But I didn't want to disappoint you.

But you hate IPAs and I love IPAs. And you hate IPAs. I'm not a huge IPA guy, yeah. Yeah, I love IPAs. IPAs are annoying. We're not going to do that this week. Wait, so the Knicks though, just go back to that quickly.

Knicks won or lost last night. All right, listen. Because I'm a Sixers fan, so I saw that. Knicks fans are dumb. What are you a fan? You're a Sixers fan? Oh, that makes sense. So the season was a raging success.

Totally. I didn't think we were going to win more than 30 games. We're not a joke anymore. It was a disappointing ending, but I'm thrilled with how the season went. I went to three playoff games. I screamed my ass off. It was so much fun.

How much fun did we have last night? It was so much fun. Ridiculous. Yeah. Do you know there's a Dow trying to buy an NBA team? They got set up with a specific purpose. I forget the name of it. Before we do that. No, which team? They don't know yet. They're just bringing a bunch of people together and they're goingO trying to buy an NBA team? They got set up with a specific purpose. I forget the name of it. Before we do that.

No, which team? They don't know yet. They're just bringing a bunch of people together and they're going to try to buy an NBA team. I hope it's the next. The Packers are a DAO, kind of. People don't know what that is. It's a decentralized autonomous organization.

So it's basically a collective of people with a shared mission, but they don't work for a company. They don't employ each other. There's no paychecks. They're just like, I guess, are they buying a coin to be part of the group or is that not even necessary?

You can have a coin, you can have governance so everybody votes in proportion to how much they own. Dude, did you not hear what Wiesenthal said? It's a multi-level marketing scheme. Fair. The Packers are more like a mutualized insurance company where the customers own the company. The Knicks are a dictatorship or an olig company. The Knicks are a dictatorship.

Or an oligarchy. The Knicks are an old school oligarchy. So this is how crypto wins. If they can buy the Knicks and turn that. Please save us. So the Sixers coin is just, let's have a really bad decade that leads to a really great decade. And we'll do it through the draft.

I could not say enough good things about what Sam Hickey did with that team. I loved the process. It required some sacrifice. So the Knicks had all the sacrifice, but no upside. And it wasn't intentional, which was weird.

Definitely not intentional. It was all risk and no reward. Exactly. All right. We're going to close things out. We could obviously do this forever. And we're so happy that we had Paki for episode. It was so great. Like, how could we,

how could it be better, right? Paki, I love you. Oh my God. I love you guys. That's a lot. Maybe we should have ended like two minutes ago. Paki, I love you too. So I thought this went pretty well on balance.

Do we have a technical hiccup, Duncan? We did. Okay. Were you super nervous while that was going on? I mean, yeah, it wasn't an idea. Okay. I know you're not on mic. Maybe you're getting picked up a little bit on the mic.

Was there a point where, Paki, where you were like, you know what? These guys don't know what they're doing. I'm out of here. Yeah. There was a point where I was like, am I going too bullish crypto here and I'm going to sound like the idiot?

But hopefully. It's not a crypto podcast, but it is a crypto world. And everybody in finance. And finance. And in finance and finance and in finance is obsessed with this topic especially the people who claim to hate it

so I don't think there's too much crypto yeah honestly at this moment in time like we might get to the point where there's crypto fatigue and we'll all pivot

but I don't think we're there yet I don't think we're close so we'll probably be talking about crypto a lot but we're gonna we're gonna have you come back how's tomorrow

what are you doing? I'll just go grab my car, go out of Jersey and tomorrow. All right. And for everybody who's listening, watching, we appreciate you guys checking us out. We're going to be doing this for the foreseeable future.

We're super excited. Brought to you by Altoids. Show is brought to you by, oh, well, just the YouTube deal is Altoids. Stripe is the podcast deal. All right.

We're going to wrap. I don't know how to end this. We're going to wrap it, and we'll be back every Friday. So make sure to check us out on the podcast. Check out exclusive clips for you, the YouTube viewer. Check us out on the YouTube channel at The Compound. All right. We'll talk to you then.

And scene. All right. So that was a good dress rehearsal. Are you ready to remember? Are you ready to do it for real? I'm ready.