The Compound and Friends - Want-trepreneur

Episode Date: October 22, 2021

On this week's episode of The Compound & Friends, Michael Batnick, Howard Lindzon, and Downtown Josh Brown discuss private and public markets, trend following, having an edge, Robinhood, pandemic influenced businesses, envy and insecurity, the next wave of investors, and much more! This episode is brought to you by Direxion. Visit https://www.direxion.com/leveraged-etf-education for more information! 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

Dude, your podcast keeps getting better. Which is some great ones. I told him that we listen to every episode. It's really good. Thank you. He knows. Snap just decimated the earnings. Good number.

And they're... This can't be right. What is this? Is that... I said that can't be right, right? It's down 18. Holy f***. It's down 25%.

That is right. You don't want Snap? What? What happened to Snap? It's down 25% in half the hours. I wonder if Twitter is down 25%. Wait, what the **** is happening? Hold on. Seriously.

Why is Facebook down 7%? What is happening? Did they just report earnings, too? Snap is down 30%. Twitter is down 7%. What is happening? Hold on. Supply chain problems?

Mem supply chain. Twitter's down 7%. What is happening? Hold on. Supply chain problems? Ah! Mem supply chain? There's a shortage of millennials. Why are you late? What's your excuse? I wasn't even thinking. What does that even mean? It was around the corner. I didn't know time mattered. I heard your calendar's a debacle, your calendar

management. Dude, me too. I didn't know tasks could be separated from meetings. I was at Bryant Park yesterday at 11 o'clock. I said, dude, you want a cup of coffee? He goes, we're meeting at 2. I said, I'll wait. I'll just wait three hours. By the way, we got to lower the volume on that.

It is so loud. No, it's on purpose. Are you doing one every day now? No, once a week. Thanks for listening. We're good. We're good. We're good.

Very confident in my assertions. All right. Yo. Yo. You know who that is? Let me play it again. Very confident in my assertions. That's Ben Carlson.

I don't know Ben. He doesn't know Ben Carlson. You don't know if you know who Ben Carlson is? Not from the voice. Not from the voice. I'm excited about how many people later how many people how many people dude you're surprised you're so you're so canadian actually this will run tomorrow it's okay how many people 17 all guys no i don't know i don't know the crew uh you will know it's still 75 percent of it yeah phil's coming phil's phil's in traffic right now. Who else am I in?

Is JC coming? It's All Stars. Are you just hanging here in chill? Michael Santoli. Oh, Santoli. Yeah, he's the best. Are you coming? I'm shepherding Barry.

I got to go to this FACACTA event. So I can just work here in chill? It is FACACTA. I have to literally wear a shirt and a tie. Not a tie, a shirt and a jacket. I mean, you're a grown-up, right? Do you ever... Howard, when's the last time you wore a jacket?

Trying my nose. When's the last time you wore a jacket? You don't wear sport coats. I have one today. Yeah, I've seen you. I've never seen you in a suit. Yeah, I mean, last time there was a party here, I wore a three-piece suit,

and Jim O'Shaughnessy and I became friends. You know, you actually pioneered the suits with sneakers thing, but I think out of necessity, because you're always running from one thing to the next. Pioneered? Come on. Actually, Quincy Smith was early at that at CBS. But you were doing that 10 years ago. People were not doing that 10 years ago.

15. People were like, what happened to your shoes? Now nobody's saying it. Nobody's saying that. So true. By the way, I'm going to give you a lot of flowers on today's show. He deserves it. What flowers? I don't know if you saw the doc, but you were very early to a lot of stuff, and

I'm going to make sure everyone knows it. All right. Howard, did you meet John? Yeah. Have you ever met Duncan before? It's Big John. I know Duncan. It's Big John. You guys are doing a great job. This room turned out to be a great room for them. No kidding. This is all Josh's idea.

It is a great idea because I actually watched it. It's a write-off. All right. I'm so excited for this. You know, I really am. Yeah. I'm a little tired, unfortunately. Dude, step it up.

I really am. Yeah. I'm a little tired, unfortunately. Dude, step it up. 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. Today's episode of The Compound and Friends is brought to you by Direction. Direction's leveraged ETFs are powerful tools for short-term active traders, but they're definitely not for everyone. So know the risks, trade boldly. For investors tools for short-term active traders, but they're definitely not for everyone. So know the risks, trade boldly. For investors looking for longer-term investments,

Direction offers strategic and thematic ETFs for precise exposure to satellite investment themes. Direction's latest leveraged ETF is Dozer. That's D-O-Z-R, the Daily U.S. Infrastructure Bull Two-Time Shares ETF. Offering two times the daily return on infrastructure stocks. Go to direction.com slash dozer to find out more. If you're a bold, short-term active trader or thematic investor, Direction has ETFs built for you. Before investing, carefully consider a fund's investments, objectives, risks, charges, and expenses contained in the prospectus

available at direction.com. Read that carefully. Oh, my God. We did 20 of these? We have high hopes here, Howard. Step it up. All right. Look alive.

Let's go. Welcome to the compound and friends. Very special friend of the house today, Howard Linzen. Where do I look? You might know Howard from early, early days of financial Twitter, founder of StockTwits. Called the 1929 Talk. Called the crash in 29. Who didn't?

Wonderful job on that one, by the way. You probably know Howard's social leverage. You probably heard of the fund. He is absolutely smashing the venture game. I don't think there's any doubt. Oh, Panic with Friends? Okay, we're going to talk about that later. I love it.

I listen to every episode, and I was on one. Yes, you were. Early. When I was learning. Yeah. I don't think you liked my appearance because I didn't let you talk at all. But I don't know if you love that. All right, so Howard's in the house.

What do you think of New York City these days? New York is still my favorite. I would say New York, Amsterdam, Coronado, Tuscany, Phoenix. Yeah. Okay. In New York, I have this love relationship. Do I buy? Do I rent? Do I stay at hotels?

As you go through life, now I'm 56, and it's like What are you doing? You do Airbnbs, though, right? I hate Airbnb because I'm manscaping, and by day two... Dude, it's a lot with the manscaping. By day two, it's like I need a maid. It's just disgusting to see my own body in the sink every day. Why do you have to do that when you're here? Because once you manscape.

How fast does your hair grow? What are you talking about? I definitely, listen, I have a whole doc. That's a plug for one of our companies. Yeah, we know. I can't believe it. I have a whole doc of things I wanted to get to. That didn't even make the top. That's a plug for one of our companies. Yeah, we know. We know. I can't believe it. I have a whole doc of things I wanted to get to. That didn't even make the top.

There's a doc? Yeah. That didn't even make the top 500 things I wanted to talk about. Listen, for a successful young man with money in New York City, it's a good place to be. It is. And I'm off topic or on topic. There's no off topics. This whole show is off topic.

Emptiness, sir. You know my kids. You don't know if you're going to be a good... You're parents. You've got a baby. But your kids are growing up in front of my eyes, just like mine grew up on the internet. As a 15-year-old girl now,

I don't know what to say to her or what to do with her. No, you guys are doing fine, I see. But you don't know. All these people, it's just like the stock market. Oh, yeah, you're doing this wrong, you're doing that wrong. You don't f***ing know. Here's when you know. The fact that my daughter and I are walking around New York

and she's 23 and has a job. By the way, shout out to Rachel. Shout out to Rachel. I watched Rachel grow up. I met Rachel when she was 8, 11. So I was like, we stressed over her growing up. Guess what? I finally know that we might have done a good job because she –

you know, in a world where abundance of time and abundance of money in the world for people born on third base like myself. Time is not abundant. Time is scarce. Time is scarce, but abundance of time in their life. They have free time in the sense of 24-hour workdays. When you're 18, it does not feel scarce. Yeah, now it does.

So the fact that she has chosen New York and appreciates New York for like what it always has been and what it is, I think we've done a good job as a parent because that's the time when you want to live here. And so she understands risk. She understands living her life. She understands everything to me, whereas my son is the opposite. Wait, wait. Back to Rachel. Was she ever growing up like, Dad, let me get this straight.

We're Jewish, but we live in f***ing Arizona? Like, what's going on here? No, because it's a desert. She goes, do we have to do the 40-day thing? So she felt at home in the desert. Yeah. She's like, why would people go to Toronto? She was the opposite.

Right, right, right. No, she felt right at home. She was always looking for, so we would light a bush, and she would say, oh, it's a Torah. So I didn't meet you guys until you were in Coronado, which was like a dream world. Wait, you went from Phoenix to Coronado? I didn't know that. So I was born in Toronto.

My dad – most Toronto people, like New York people, especially Jewish community, goes to Florida, Del Boca Vista type style. And my dad didn't like Florida. He discovered Arizona and he liked the desert. And so we grew up going to the desert for spring break or Christmas because we were, you know, privileged. Did you go to, you went to ASU or U of M? Yeah. So I ended up falling in love with ASU.

Who wouldn't? Right. And I was like, dad, I'm going to ASU. Was that mid 80s, late 80s? Mid 80s. Must have been insane i can't even tell you couldn't even do any of the stuff that you were doing then uh yeah i mean it was just a flip-flop type of dry heat it was just dream world yeah especially

for a kid coming out of toronto where the sun i just like the sun so i've been chasing the sun since i was 20 so why did you move to coronado? So there's a thing. My wife's parents have a home there, but there's a thing. Just like the migration out of the cold to Florida, people in Phoenix, in the heat, go to San Diego. And there's a big Jewish contingent. It's a congregation of the

Mexicans coming up from Mexico City to Coronado, and the Jews coming from Phoenix. And they squat, and they fight. And it's a land off it's a land it's a battle for the barbecue pretty sure I know all right and uh it's just a congregation of people from Phoenix they call them zonies that go to San Diego in the summer to get out of the heat of the summer so where are you where are you I mean you're you're all over the world but where are you mostly now for for taxes and family, we're in Arizona. Okay. Both my kids went to U of A.

Right. And my wife went to U of A. And then for summers, we travel, but we're at Coronado. The kids grew up in Coronado, though, which is great. It's like an idyllic place. Incredible. I miss the Dell. I miss the Oktoberfest.

Honestly, it's one of my favorite places in the world that I've ever been to. Well, you guys are not doing conferences, and it's the best thing ever, but I can't. It was so much work. Yeah, yeah. Right? And you guys have people professionally doing it. We're going to the best thing ever, but I can't, I can't, it was so much work. Right. And you guys have people. We're going to talk, we're going to talk about your events, but this is a good segue because I want to talk about some of the stuff that I had learned from you and didn't even realize how important it would one day be. And arguably I probably missed the boat if I had really listened to you. to you but 10 years ago you were walking around talking about the edge that you had by understanding both the private markets and the public stock markets yeah and today that's like oh yeah of

course so like every major hedge fund is now making private market investments dan loeb crossover they all are dan loeb just started a fund if you're a hedge fund and you're not a crossover, it's because like the paperwork is slow. Like that – but that's standard. But when you were doing this in 2011, that wasn't – 2009, that wasn't obvious to anyone. Why do you think it took so long for some of the smartest people on Wall Street to see that as an advantage, being on both sides of the IPO? I mean, I think it's just – it's – yeah, I don't know. I think – Because you're smart. You're not that smart.

No, you don't have to be eight years ahead is the lesson, right? You only have to be a day ahead. Like we traded in 99. You weren't doing it. But Josh and I and Barry were 20-minute delayed quotes. Let's just – that let's just that's where we were so tickets so to think that people wanted to do crossover they had an edge on retail so so the lobes of their time and lobe was the lobe of this time and other people they were

banging their brains out on yahoo finance talking about akamai and we were 20 minutes behind yeah now we're 20 minutes ahead of the institution so they had to learn tech they don't want to learn this so the first answer is they don't like the fact that they have to be crossover i think they're gonna get their ass you don't think they like it now they like it because it's sexy and they can get fees but they're overpaying they're not really vcs what what what tiger's doing and he's publicly said is they're trying to get market returns. Is that Chase Coleman? Genius. But he's just polluting the – what was an artistic kind of industry with money to turn it into the S&P. Do you think he says no to anything?

Of course. But I think – because they're huge. I haven't seen around the financing that Tiger Global was. Because if he's not doing a D1, CO2, SoftBank. So of all the big changes of the last two years, and I get so much wrong and we all get so much wrong. If you had told me, and we work now as a SPAC, if you had told, if we all were honest with ourselves,

when we saw WeWork, we all said, wow, that's a miracle that that thing didn't get public because that would have led to a crash or some kind of, you know what I mean? They tried to bring it public for $40 billion. Yeah. A week later, it was worthless. Well, that was the top. But it wasn't.

So that, like I said, if you had asked us if that was going to be the top in any normal era. For WeWork, it was the top. Yes, it was. OK, but that means nothing. So in 10 years earlier, with rates are at three or whatever, that was a top. Yes, it was. Okay, but that means nothing. So in 10 years earlier, with rates are at three or whatever, that's a top for a lot of things.

People said Alibaba was a top. Hang on. If it gets public and that gets pissed on the public, the one thing I couldn't have predicted when that happened is that one SoftBank would lead to 10 SoftBanks. Right. That felt like, forgetting about a top for WeWork, that felt like a top for SoftBank.

It went the other way. For stupid money. Everybody became SoftBank. Correct. Why? If you had told me that would have happened. Yeah, yeah. Who cares why?

So you're asking me. I hadn't even thought about that. Okay. That's crazy. So it's not about the why. It's what happens, the unintended consequences of this. That's all I care about. It's now think about how I'm supposed to make money when there's 20 tigers.

Well, stay in your tigers well i thought they were gonna stay in your lane this is never a better time to stay in your lane like i i'm saying and it turned into 20 soft bank i thought the south the saudi uh sovereign wealth fund was gonna call out a hit on this guy when the we work thing blew up what do they care so they're earning zero percent so let's just let's just rewind to giving howard a little bit of credit that he deserves you were so early when we were you guys both of you were at – was it a Goldman event? It was in the Goldman building and you were like literally cursing on stage about the people in the audience who didn't know what the fuck they were talking about. And I'm thinking like what a dick.

Like I love you, but like what a dick that you're just like assaulting the audience. But man, have you been right about thein hood and everything else going social at a 2014 benzingo event i remember laughing like everybody laughed but this is funny look at these games these guys are playing there's toys and if i just invested in any of these companies like you were boom robin hood's your i mean robin hood is what the investment is not close to my best investment no but it's the one that you have become most publicly associated with because I think- I wouldn't have predicted that.

You have been part investor, part advocate. And you've been right about pretty much everything that you've been saying about why their model is better than the brokerage model. And most people don't know the brokerage business, but you do. I know the brokerage business because I know I don't want to be in it.

What's also interesting is that, Howard, you were saying, like, not everyone's going to Vanguard. Everyone did Vanguard, but then everyone also traded. Like, they both happened. There was so much more money. And they'll continue to happen. That's a good point. And so the big point I've always made with the Shaughnessy, and they did Canvas, and they just sold Canvases. You know, you guys are good friends with them, too.

They sold themselves. They sold themselves, obviously, at the point. But the Vanguard was Robinhood. They just hoarded technology. So I get this out early because I didn't put it in the doc because I don't know how to get into Google Docs because I'm a venture capitalist.

I'm waiting for a better product. We should have given you a Discord. I'm waiting for a kid to bring me a better Google Docs. Wait, what do you mean by that, Vanguard hoarded? Meanwhile, APIs, everybody talks about APIs. Yeah, yeah. Vanguard invented fractional ownership. You had to – they have – when you bought S&P 500 15 years ago, you were buying fractional shares.

Right. And they decided to not give you a choice. They said, S&P 500. This is how you trade it. This is how it is. Yeah. We own the technology. Magical, S&P 500. This is how you trade it. This is how it is. We own the technology. Magical, whatever it is.

Fractional ownership. And if they had just reversed that and given away fractional ownership and said, hey, why don't you take out Goldman Sachs or Exxon and have the S&P 499? There'd be no Robinhood. But you knew they were never going to do that. I didn't know that. I'm just saying, I didn't know. Here's the ingenious of Robinhood.

It's not that I'm smart. It's that they're dumb, Vanguard, and that Robinhood got the right design at the right time on the right platform with the right execution. And luckily, there's payment for order flow in the United States. We could argue all day. Who cares about that? It's part of luck. Everything had to happen correctly, and the incumbents and the media were talking about, you're too dumb to invest, passive, passive, passive. And they were lying about what passive is. There's no such thing as passive investing because Vanguard's

a momentum fund. It's just a slower overturn. It's a slower churn momentum fund. But Vanguard's not dumb. They were never going to open it up. That's what they do. They do index funds. It's no different than Facebook or Google or Microsoft. It's not about being dumb. They were never going to open it up. That's what they do. They do index funds. It's no different than Facebook or Google or Microsoft. It's not about being dumb. It's about technology

like Jurassic Park when you mate two male dinosaurs that still somehow have an offspring. And in technology... They would never want to make money the way that Robinhood makes its money. I don't even know what that means.

No disrespect. They would not be interested. They're an index fund company. Robinhood didn't have a business model when they started. We didn't invest. But Josh's point is. Robinhood didn't come to me and say, we have an idea. Payment for order flow for options and crypto.

It was 2014. It's not Vanguard being sold. They're an index fund company, period. That's all they are. Wow. I'm just saying. And active. I'm sorry.

Some kid who got fired. Yeah, they're low cost. Hundreds of kids came into Bogle's office. Clothes done, clothes we don't know, but hundreds of kids came in and said, I got an idea. Because Betty in Iowa hates Exxon, we should offer a $4.99

fund. And Bogle fired that person, and that person is now in Russia working for Boris Yeltsin. So whoever is in charge over there. But the point is, yes, they knew this stuff. They just – this happens at Schwab. That's why they're Schwab. Schwab, when we went to them with stock to us and said let's build a community, the people who are being paid $150,000 a year to be in charge of products or Schwab's community were like, oh, we can build that.

So we'd walk out of the meeting and some product person protecting their job would say, we can build that in two days. And then the lawyer said, you're right, we can do that. That's why companies get disrupted. So what was your edge? How did you do this? Was it social media? Was it knowing the right people?

How did you do this? I don't know if I have an edge. My edge is that I am on the street like you guys talking to people, eyes and ears. We all have eyes and ears. And as you're just like an artist who never got paid until Web 3.0 or at scale, that's why Web 3.0, people are now getting paid for their eyes and ears. There are little different views of the world. And my view of the world, much like Larry David is to comedy or Jon Stewart is, I talk to a lot of people. I have a cynical, weird view of the world. I see the world differently than other

people. And luckily, we live in a world with 0% interest rates. And I've built enough trust that people trust me to express my view of the world in the form of venture capital. I think you also, though, have a very open mind. I don't want to say for someone that's older, because you're not old, but you would agree most people your age who started around when you started. Yeah, I was late. Everything is no, no, dumb. Right. No, I mean. I have a young soul. Or seeing the risk in everything before even seeing the opportunity, which I only struggle with personally, by the way. I'm married to a bankruptcy attorney, so she sees everything as a zero. Shouts out to Ellen.

Because people walk in in trouble to her. So everything I showed her was like, this is going to fail. But that's your edge. Most people see risk. I said it. I only see opportunity. Most people see risk. You see opportunity.

And then software came along, and you almost have to be a thief and a putz to not make money when companies have 95% gross margin. So when I started as an entrepreneur, whatever you call it, wantrepreneur, fake entrepreneur, when I was 28 and we started The Grip, I invested in The Grip. The world was a physical. I like it. Yeah, there's a lot of wantrepreneurs. We're at all-time high in wantrepreneurs.

I love it. I'm stealing that. That's an old term. Everyone on earth is now a entrepreneur. Correct. But that's the media, right? Like everybody, the world needs, everything goes back to Caddy. The world needs ditch diggers too. You make a lot of money.

Ryan Graves lives on an island in Hawaii. He was an employee, I don't know, tenant, Uber. There's not enough number twos, number threes, number fours. Everybody wants to be Zuckerberg. So you get a lot of wantrepreneurs. And now you have endless printing, so you're going to get more wantrepreneurs. So speaking of wantrepreneurs, are you seeing the landscape changing? It's not just Sequoia and Benchmark and all those guys now.

There's solo GPs that are – Paki, a friend of ours. You know Paki. There's influencers that are getting deal flow. I think this is changing rapidly you know more than i what do you think yeah we're jumping around so so i was a solo kind of gp the world is changing and i'm trying to change with it not because i'm smart but because i'm getting older and i see the world in a way that's trying to stay in the game there's only one sport where you can stay in the game into your 80s, investing.

You can't do that in any other field. Golf. That's such a great point. Yeah. So I either quit and I don't think there is such a thing as quitting. You can't quit. Right. And investing, I mean.

Next option. I can quit. Next option. I'm saying I can quit. I can go biking. You have an 80 day. You can't quit. No, no, no.

You can't. No, no, no. I can quit in the sense of the engagement. There's only i can engage less how about slow down but so you get too fired up and excited about ideas to not fund them but correct but i'm saying i can't do it all the time yes so we're evolving our business so we started out i started wall stripped and i started stock twits and i didn't get good advice advice. So part of what makes me a good investor is I took money from venture capitalists. I believe, even though they're great venture capitalists and good people, they should have talked me out of my business. Which business?

Now, you don't know that until StockTwits. Got it. Okay. So I had just come out of selling Wallstripped. I had a view of the world that was unique. You know, Fred Wilson was my investor in Wallstripped. Roger Ehrenberg, the best of the best people gave me money, Mark Pincus. And I returned eight or ten times their money in a year, right? So now the world looks that I'm a genius.

I don't know anything. I don't know how to code. I don't know. It was just right place, right time, right idea, no revenue, YouTube. A lot of miracles. Now I'm an expert. That's how the world works, right? Yeah, you have standing now because you got an exit.

By the way, fast. Fast. No revenue. Yeah. I'm a YouTube expert. Now all of a sudden I'm a video expert even though I hired everybody on Craigslist. There's 1,000 guys walking around who are doing the same thing you were, but you got the exit, and they don't have

the standing that you have. But to how it's cut, the listeners can't see this. You said expert with air quotes, so kudos to you. But you are an expert. Own it. But I meant air quotes. I don't even know what expert means anymore. No, you're an expert at networking. You're the best I've ever seen in my life. You're being weirdly

humble. No, but I'm expert at networking. I'm not an expert at best deals. Because the best I've ever seen in my life. You're being weirdly humble. No, but I'm an expert at networking. I'm not an expert at best for it. And the reason that matters is because most of your best deals came because you met somebody. Or I was in the game. I was in the game. I was on the line of scrimmage. That's what it is. It's networking.

I saw a hole in the line of scrimmage just in a sports analogy way. I'm not an athlete. But no matter how big the players get on the football field, they're still 80-yard runs because holes develop that are gaping, and guys are faster than ever. And so software's just created all these edges in how entrepreneurship works, right? You'd only need a little crease and a little in software to just make it 100 times better. The best analogy that you always give is being like the little thing on the bottom of the shark. Yeah, the pilot fish. So when you go see any picture of a shark, you see hundreds of fish underneath it. And they're called pilot fish.

And they're f***ing not famous or anything. But no one even notices they're there. But if you really look and you go, those f***ing pilots have a great life. They eat all day. As long as they stay behind the shark, just under its mouth, they can trash talk. They can do whatever they want. They eat for free. They got a constant buffet.

And they just have to keep eyes pointed forward. And it's not a sexy existence. And trend following, which, you know, when I look at the nature and I saw that in the same thing with the peloton, you know, when you watch the Tour de France, it's not how much you stay in the lead. It's when you decide to get in the lead and so for a pilot fish there's probably many a times where you see a pilot fish go off and all the other pilot fish are going what the that pilot fish doing but at some point you got to make a break but you know what you know why trench filing is hard howard because a lot of people are afraid that they're too late or that as soon as they get in the trench but you have to know where the sharks are if you know where the

sharks are right if you know where soft bank and d – like I didn't know there would be 10 SoftBanks. There was a month or two where I was like joking on Twitter. This is the end. This is the top. But then the data comes to you and you see two SoftBanks. Then you see three SoftBanks and you go, wait a minute. Something's changed. I got to change my thinking because I'm wrong.

Luckily, I didn't bet all my money on there only that being the top. And I got to rethink as a trend follower, this trend may still go on. And it may even get better because now startups have 10 ways to sell their company, not just one way. It's just starting. It's just starting.

So there is a part of me with 0% interest rates and Web 3.0 and the fact that Twitter and Facebook and Netflix are too big and too slow, that Web 3.0 and the fact that Twitter and Facebook and Netflix are too big and too slow, that Web 3.0 may just be – we just may be seeing a bubble on top of a bubble or a boom on top of a boom, whatever we want to call it. And it's not – I don't like to be the guy to be bullish or bearish, but I'm like it's very – the data would say that there's a lot of bubble behavior and a lot of really bearish – like people too bearish. And I would say there's enough money lot of bubble behavior and a lot of really bearish like people too bearish

and i would say there's enough money out there it's confusing that's smart money and i start smart with quotes uh chase or whatever all these guys are doing they're not dumb they may not be smart but they're allocating capital because they are trying to vanguardize the the um vc industry because the faster they commoditize it the bigger their brands get the more money they collect to vanguardize the VC industry. Because the faster they commoditize it, the bigger their brands get, the more money they collect, and the more fees they get. And I'm just trying to be a pilot fish in this industry and stay small while these guys get big. So my biggest risk would be thinking I'm smart or an expert

and scaling up social leverage to do growth rounds. We've just stayed at three people. You just met Don or fourth and maybe about five or six. smart or an expert and scaling up social leverage to do growth rounds. Right. Right. We've just stayed at three people. You just met Don or fourth and maybe about five or six where we're still in the same weight class that we were when we started. And that, I think, is genius. Why is that so? Why do you want to stay that small? Because then you become the expert in a space while everybody else moves up a weight class

and you get more and everybody's willing to work with you. The more successful you're getting, though, the more handsome the people you hire. Yeah, dude. Don's got a full head. I mean, this – Unbelievable. He's Kith boy. I call him Dr. Kith.

Yeah. We're going to use a picture of him instead of you for the podcast cover this week. People talk to me and then he shows up at the meeting. So we're one of two people. So it helps close business. So I want to ask you about – before we leave this topic, I want to ask you about Robinhood and the pandemic. You would agree with me, this would not be, what is it, $50 billion company now? 40-ish. Okay. No way would this be what it is yet, at least, if not for what went on last year. Yeah. I mean, if you would-

Last year and early this year. Yeah. So I'm one of the lucky few that when we, the pandemic hit in february march i was here in new york i remember exactly where i was when it really became serious because i was in stupid restaurant like fancy carbones and um i'm having dinner with adam bain and all my friends and and we're talking spacks and like even though like it was february 28th yeah and like we all knew that it was what were we thinking we were joking at the time yeah we though like it was february 28th yeah and like we all knew that it was what were we thinking we were joking at the time yeah we were still it was in italy we were talking about podcast we were talking about like you know and but it was here obviously and i'm in a small room

and there's like the beckhams and like one thing dicaprio sitting over my other shoulder and i'm just like this is the greatest night of my life. And we were in COVID, right? So when COVID hit, it was like – and I had come to New York to make some hard decisions around some of our companies because I saw it coming. I didn't know how bad it would be, but we saw it coming. We were trying to help companies like get in front of this because that's our job and making some decisions about some of our companies that month. And I didn't – my wife didn't want me being in New York. It wasn't like a smart decision, but we had to do work. And obviously they closed the world down.

So in March and April, I was like, LPs are calling me. Your investments are so dumb. Everybody was like – didn't know what was going to happen. Rally Road doesn't look smart at the beginning of a pandemic, nor does Robinhood. Really. Now they're both on fire. Like completely on fire. Okay. But what I'm saying is it wasn't like I was confident that they would go jihad.

No, you could never know. Right. So in March and April, we were like, they're all down 80%. Lucky for me, those are not marked publicly. So while Zillow's down 60%, we're not thinking about Robinhood. I was just thinking of buying Zillow. I was starting panic with friends saying, wait a minute. It's too late to panic.

You should have panicked in January. So it's a buy. If you're not going to sell, you might as well buy because everything is down 50%. It was the best call of my life. Didn't make any private market investments. I just saw enough public market stuff to do. Started panic with friends. Gave me the courage to start buying things publicly, which I rarely do.

Really talk about stocks and just say, guys, if you didn't sell it, you might as well buy. And then, yeah, by May – and the other thing that private companies do very quickly is you have a board meeting. You say everybody agreed across the board to fire 25 percent of your staff. That was way better than the public markets could do. And so what you started seeing by May is everybody scrambling to hire people back. And you had DoorDash, which we all made fun of pre-pandemic, exploding. So I think DoorDash was the first sign of a real company. Why they started hiring everyone that got laid off in D.C.

Not just hiring, growing insanely. They never fired. Couldn't even find a fire. So they – we talk about Robin, but like the DoorDashes and the delivery companies benefited the most. Uber Eats, DoorDash. Oh, my god. I think Uber Eats saved the company, saved Uber. Of course, but DoorDash is the big one.

DoorDash standalone. And a firm buy now pay later we talk about robin like it was all people trading from their home no a lot of businesses really took off including shopify and amazon so so what happened was quickly is that the world stayed open or some part of it stayed open and i just was part lucky part uh well yeah part lucky did you – well, yeah, part lucky. Did you make any private investments during the pandemic? I struggled to.

And my partner Gary was amazing. I struggled to write Zoom checks, right? I was like pencils down. What do you mean Zoom checks? Meaning you could only meet people on Zoom. Zoom meeting. Here's my – As a guy who's hit the streets all my life, I'm like I got to meet the press.

Got to have dinner with them, maybe get drunk with them, talk with them, see how they behave. I struggled. And so I was very much in the public markets and throwing stock twitch. That's tough. Yeah, but my partner wrote some amazing checks over that year, Gary, without meeting people. And companies, great companies have been built. And healthcare really took off. And enterprise really took off.

And trading really took off. Lucky for me, I had made my investments in crypto and stocks well before right i think all the people that are writing checks into fintech now are overpaying and you've stuck to your you've you've always stuck to your knitting in terms of like you're doing consumer finance you're doing b2b finance you're doing uh i. You're doing B2B finance. You're doing, I think— Infrastructure finance. I think consumer discretionary, like fun stuff, like the manscaping, which we're not going to talk about again. If I see you doing, like, gene editing investments, I'm going to be like Howie Jump the Shark.

Yeah. But you've never done that. Don't you get pitch deals? Do you ever say, like like this is not my area? Always. I mean it's lucky for me people pitch me that way because then I'd have to dig in and pass. Right now I am of the – No biologics.

Yeah. When people know from reading my blog, they're not going to pitch me something. I don't like it. And if they do, I dismiss so fast because if you spend two minutes researching me, which you should do if you're asking me for money, you should know what I do. Let's keep it moving. We've got so much to get to. All right. So you said that speculation is the new entertainment.

Yes. Obviously. I wish I had made that up. I just heard it in a pitch. The biggest entertainer. It just made me like, whoa. The biggest entertainer of the pandemic year. Portnoy.

Portnoy. But who? Terrible. Well, we could get into that. Great entertainer. Great entertainer. Amazing. A great entertainer, and most of the entertainment involves tasting pizza or speculating. And he's great at both. But he's bad – there's good speculation and bad speculation.

Yeah, but he's telling you he's bad at it. It's like good naked – no, I don't trust anything he says. So come on. You don't think he's in on the joke? All right, go ahead. There is no joke, okay? You guys all want to make fun of Robin Hood. Let's be honest.

We should be... He's running a casino. He's on whatever the f***ing Hannity show or whatever that asshole is that used to be on CNN. Who's the guy with the hair that's before Hannity? I don't watch that shit. Okay, but whatever. These f***ing flamethrowers are telling us

that Vlad and Baiju have to go to jail. I'm not judging. That guy runs a casino where 50% of the kids in college go home at a weekend with a steak or without a steak. He has no – he has every right to comment. You're talking about the online gambling. David Day Trader? Yeah.

Forgetting David Day Trader. I'm talking about people that use a bully pulpit to talk highly about other people when they're in the exact same industry, unregulated actually. And, and, and telling us who's a crook when they're running a gambling operation, meaning zero credibility.

If he was there making fun of Fox, that'd be funny. You don't like that. He, that he attacked. He runs a brokerage. He attacked Vlad. I don't care if he attacked Vlad.

I care that he's saying they should go to jail. Yeah, it's aggressive. It's aggressive, meaning I thought he was funny. Yeah. I think he is funny. You lost my – when you interviewed Trump for clicks, you lost me. You know, I liked him. I was blogging about how genius it was because it was, like, disruptive.

But he took that trust and just pissed it away. Forget about that. I'm not saying he's not a genius. I'm just saying I don't like it. The idea, though, just generally speaking, that speculation has become entertainment. Correct. Can we stick with this for a second? Is there room for that to continue much longer?

I don't think that this is necessarily depending on a bull market because I think... No, it has nothing to depending on a bull market. Because I think- No, it has nothing to do with a bull market. There's always- This is a lifestyle. Exactly. There's always stocks going up.

And I've said, don't take this the wrong way, that Robinhood is the most addictive app on the planet. Yeah, it's a game. People don't get unaddicted. It doesn't matter if the market's going- I'll take the other side. You might be right. I'm not positive.

No, guys, this has been going on. It would finally have a product that works. So does this stay in a bear market? What do you think? Of course. I think so too. Trump, do you see the volume that traded again? They invented a meme token about a SPAC today. SPACs were left for dead for

months until today. And a SPAC went up 500% today. That's a special situation. They're always special situations. It's Trump related. That's the point. There's always a special situation. If it's not stocks, it's crypto. It's Trump related. That's the point. But so if it's not stocks. There's always a special situation. If it's not stocks, it's crypto. It's like special purpose in the dirt. Everybody has a special purpose.

And there's enough global ideas floating around that there will always be special, what do you call them? Situations. I think that people can trade. The casino moves and it stays in stocks. It's a casino. And then it's already in NFTs. And we have data on this from Felix Salmon writing at Axios. That sucking sound you hear is the outflow of meme chasing dollars from the stock market.

He hasn't been right ever. No, this is data. His data is biased to whatever he – how he reads the data. He says Cardify, market research firm. Oh, yeah. Because they're a huge multibillion-dollar data company. This is interesting. 500 – let me give you the data. He says, uh, Cardify market research firm. Oh yeah. They're a huge multi-billion dollar data. It was interesting. 500. Let me, let me give you the data. 500,000 users who allow them to see the money flowing in and out of their account of those users, 30% of money put money

into places like Robinhood or Fidelity that facilitated stock trading, blah, blah, blah. So what he's saying is in January, they put $37 million into the stock market and withdrew $19 million. In September last month, investments were only $16 million, but withdrawals were $26 million. They're going into crypto. They're going into NFTs. They're coming out of stocks. That's not surprising to me. And that would contradict.

I think a lot of the shit they were putting money into was blown up. They were big in SPACs, big in electric vehicles. I have a SPAC and I don't think it's a bear. I think it's a bear market for promoters right now. But then Trump just put an end to that. SPACs are in a bear market. SPACs are in a bear market because there's a lot of bad deals. They can come back in two seconds.

They did today. Yeah. How much longer do you have to do a deal with your SPAC? Like 15 months. But going back to that data... Oh, you have a while. Yeah, but it's not a while. Was it a two-year period initially? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So we've done some... I don't want to talk about the SPAC. No, you can't. But is it in the back of your head that the clock is ticking or not really? Yeah. It's in the back of my head that I'm 56 and I have to pee right now. My prostate is like screaming too. But on the data part, good, bad data, it's like what is data? I mean the data is in the eye of the beholder.

We can paint data to say what we want. Okay. What really is happening is that we are lighting up the world with superhighways. There's an on-ramp. Robinhood is just one of the on-ramps now. Shout out to on-ramp. Yeah, I love on-ramp. On-ramp is also an on-ramp. I love it.

But shout out to the people that are playing the game. The game has just gotten bigger and better. More inclusive. I'm happy to call the stock market a game. But in the game, and Robinhood is the best at it if it's called a game, you have an account and you have money in it and you have a stake. And your idea – the goal of the game is to take your stake and get it upward to the right. Many people don't.

Maybe most people don't. Maybe some people should do Vanguard. Maybe some people should just be in cash. But once people learn the game, we should be teaching people the't. Maybe some people should do Vanguard. Maybe some people should just be in cash. But once people learn the game, we should be teaching people the game. And if we're arguing over whether we call it, we're doing it the wrong way. Is that the right way to learn the game? I think everybody should learn. Unsupervised, go trade options, use leverage, do whatever the **** you want. But now you're putting words in my mouth. What I'm saying is it's not perfect. But what I'm saying is the game has to begin, right?

Like shoot-em-up games are games. Kids learn multiplayer games through shoot-em-up games. I don't endorse it. I never played them. I think they're dumb. But you do learn something. Like my son who doesn't really play games and that game that Tencent was popular, whatever, where you're all playing at the same time.

Sometimes it's like don't engage in the first 10 minutes of a fight. Let 70% of the people kill themselves. Then show up and you'll survive longer. where you're all playing at the same time. Sometimes it's like, don't engage in the first 10 minutes of a fight. 70% of the people kill themselves, then show up, and you'll survive longer. So sometimes just the game is about surviving. What are we doing here? Let the games begin. It's an Aikerman.

Yeah. Oh, got it. So we need to- All right, the games have definitely begun. No, I'm just saying the ramps are lit. Yes. People are onboarded. Yes. Okay?

That's what I bet on. People want to yell at me for Robin Hood or yell at me for Vlad. That's not what I – I don't know what the hell I was supposed to do. I was betting on millions of people being denied onboarding. Dude, you were right. You were nailed it. You're right. But I'm not right about their behavior or what payment for order – I have no point of view of any of this. When I wrote a check at a 10 million valuation, my bet was that tens of millions of people needed to be onboarded.

I was right. You were right. You were right. I don't have any comment on whether the stock's worth 40 billion or 10 billion or 50 billion. You were right, because it was not clear that this whole generation would ever be interested in stocks. It was clear to me. Right, but I'm saying- Okay, sorry. That's where I will take credit for. The data wasn't there. Exactly. You had to know it. So you quoting Felix Salmon is why I take offense to it.

OK. I deal in the belief that I have eyes and ears. Right. And I have domain experience in what I know. And the more voices I hear, the worse my decisions will get. So I don't give a fuck what CNBC or Felix Salmon or Bloomberg say. Not because they're dumb and not because I hate them. Because they mess with my head and I see the world differently.

And I get paid and people pay me for my views, not to ask other people what they think. Do you remember all the articles about Gen Y or millennials hate stocks? I probably wrote a bunch. it was true at the time like their parents got blown up a couple of times while they were teenagers they hate banks and they well we know without a doubt but you remember you remember like that all of that talk about and they had every reason to get stocks and they did yeah they did okay because they had shitty tools yeah i agree with that And they had shitty delayed information. Now they have a telegram group that Daniel Loeb isn't in and that Selick Salmon isn't in.

They have a group that the guy down the street who had a hundred bagger in Salon or Polygon is part of. And he understands tech and he understands a little bit of inside information about drops. And they can go on to some feed on Discord, which don't know you know what i'm saying like this inside information is now everywhere and before inside information was one pipe and it was guarded by the fed and it was paid for with who could get closest to the data with the most bandwidth now the most bandwidth doesn't necessarily mean you win the The weirdest, the longer you hang out and the right Discord channel matters. And having more capital is kind of a disadvantage.

Having agility and trading these penny NFTs is better. Having a life is a disadvantage. Having a life is a serious disadvantage. Because you're not dialed in on everything going on. I'm getting it. Having a life is my new disadvantage. Correct. How many deals are you looking at these days? I have a life. I'm getting, I'm old. Having a life is my new disadvantage. Correct.

How many deals are you looking at these days? I mean, looking is a great question. Define looking. You got anybody see a deck, whatever. Engaging has always been the same because you really, so I'm trying to engage better,

which, so, so the Zen of this, like Fred Wilson, the people who have mentored me, Roger Ehrenberg and Brad Feld, the Zen of this is filters. And I think – I forget where I read it first.

It's not information overload. It's filter failure. There's always been information overload because you have eyes and ears and you have a nose. What matters is, oh, that smells like shit. Like could you – if you can smell shit and if you have the right filters, you win. And so building filters, like me following you and listening, which podcasts I choose, not being an expert in every podcast, there's only so much time in the day. So filter failures is the key that I try and tell people. And that's why Twitter is so popular. And so hated is, do you listen to the fire hose or do you listen to four people? Right. And I think if you listen to the fire hose or do you listen to four people? And I think if you listen to the right four people,

Twitter is the most valuable product in the world. I have very much like gone in that direction after years of going the opposite direction. Because you were a contributor to the fire hose. But I was doing a link fest on my blog five days a week and picking 10 articles every morning for myself and other people to read. It was great at the time. I don't think that that would help me now to read that many different sources.

It would help you in the sense that you— I need to focus on what I trust at this point. It also would—again, there's no right answer. If it's not helping you, you made the right decision. It's only helping you if it gives you some sort of satisfaction. I stopped six, seven years ago. If it's leading to misery, the good decision is to stop doing it. Yeah.

And so those are good decisions you make. The fact that you're on this podcast or whatever we call this and I get to come on is a thrill for me because I want to be able to talk with my friends candidly about this type of stuff even if we're ranting and rambling and upsetting a few people. this type of stuff, even if we're ranting and rambling and upsetting a few people, is because we get to talk with the people that we trust and share with other people, or they don't have to listen. Like, we're not like, so this is like the greatest opportunity to flesh out ideas and listen to people. So I want to talk about the fire hose and envy and insecurity. And I wrote this thing this morning about like the new fear and greed, I think, is actually insecurity and envy.

And it's like versions of fear and greed, right? But it's very distinct to this moment. And the envy part is obvious. Just watching people become billionaires overnight, 22-year-olds who don't know anything. Like that's killing people from a sentiment standpoint. Middle-aged people who are working on Wall Street in middle-class jobs, they're watching this circus going on outside their window,

and I think it's making them, like, almost consider buying weapons at this point. So I think there's a lot of that going on, and I think that colors a lot of the market commentary and now everything is a bubble, right? Um, and then insecurity, like, do I, will I even have a job, uh, because of all this disruption, all this innovation, uh, especially in financial services, how, like, how big of a factor do you think that is in the way people are investing and the way people are investing and the way people are now thinking about their portfolio,

taking huge bets or whatever? Like I feel like I'm seeing a ton of it. Yeah, I think we are. But it happened and it's like Elvis versus whoever, U2 versus Celebrities of the Day. I think you're overthinking it. I think that was a great piece. I'll go,

I'll go delete it now. No, no, no. I think it's, I'm not married. Fear and greed is anxiety, is some form of anxiety.

Yeah. And I've, I've battled with anxiety for a hundred years, but no one called it that. They called it mood swings. They called it depression, but I just basically battled from anxiety from the house that I grew up in because my,

you know, because my parents created this for the sense of anxiety because you had to be a doctor, lawyer, accountant as a Jewish kid. We all have anxiety. We're calling it fear and greed now, but it's basically, I mean, how am I doing? It's the Jones. You're right. That's what it boils down to. It's where do I stand?

Yeah, where am I at with keeping up with the Joneses? It's just a new form of it because now there's two economies. There's a physical one that's defined by the skyscrapers here and the roads, and the world is flat around the argument versus the cloud, which is everywhere. So first, we still have arguing. We have people arguing about valuations. Why are we arguing about valuations when we could be picking gold off the street or off the clouds? So they're arguing over the wrong things. There's nothing about opportunity. So I think I can only go back to the original question with Rachel. It's like,

how do we raise our kids? Because when I was a kid, as a Jewish kid in an upper middle class or wealthy neighborhood, you had three choices. You had good friends. They were all going to be lawyers, dermatologists, doctors, accountants, whatever. So that was what you had to become because that meant – that was the status symbol. What else would you do? Are you going to be a furrier or a deli owner? There was no internet. Yeah, that's how you were able to court a young lady from a family that your parents would approve of.

The scale before the internet meant open a one retail store and hopefully it became a hundred retail so it was the gap or abercrombie that was yeah same store sales was the original sporting goods same store sales was was the cloud that's right okay then the cloud disrupted same store sales because it's it's how many sales per second and so so if we look at the internet there was a moment of fake internet before the internet, which was QVC, when everybody said, this is the greatest. Oh my God, I can watch TV and buy shit. And I had made an investment pre-internet in a company called The Grip, which is in the QVC Hall of Fame for selling squeeze balls on QVC.

I might've bought one. Okay. So I saw the internet before the internet because QVC would staff up a hundred floors in Philadelphia with people answering the phone and they had the little thing on the counter, but there was only one channel, but that was the internet. And if you got on TV and you saw the numbers going up, QVC wasn't even sophisticated enough to know about profits per second. They were just like, if it was spinning and people were buying and Betty, keep the product on. Keep talking. Keep talking. Get back, Howard. Play the guitar. Do you have a ukulele? And so that was the internet. And that would be like saying Shopify, there's one store on Shopify.

So all these people talking about they know the future is is like just before the internet was QVC. And we thought that was the greatest thing ever, but it was one channel with one host selling one product 24 hours a day. But it made retailing unlimited. That's what it did. It took the governors of geography off of retailing. But what I'm saying is we have people arguing about this stuff and all they should be thinking about is how do I help my kids? And we had, so if you had to be a lawyer, doctor, accountant, you had to go to school and then you had to go to grad school. And so your parents had all this pressure of doing this. And so that became ingrained in culture at a wrong time. Like should a parent, should a kid

have 200 grand in debt? I say not. I'm not saying like AltaShare or somebody or Peter Till says school should be dead. I'm saying parents need Altasher or somebody or Peter Till says schools should be dead. I'm saying parents need to make better decisions and they got to help their kids make better decisions because the on-ramps are different, right? Really, as I tell my nephews and kids right now, you have three choices. If you can't code, you better be able to sell, okay? Because you're going to be selling shit that the coders make. And you don't even really have to go door to door anymore. You got to put on a headset and follow a script and talk and send an email and follow up in an email and close, close, close, close, close. And if you do that rat race, right, which used to be the IBM salesman going or the vacuum salesman going door to door, and you have your job on LinkedIn for a year, recruiters are going to find you for the next great widget or the next great sales force. So there's a whole new way to accelerate through the curve and people are arguing about nonsense.

All right, Duncan, cut that entire part out. So the anxiety, what you call fear and greed, is from people being on the wrong path because people are worried about the wrong things. That's what I have to say. Let's talk about Web3, speaking of the future. All the money is going here. Every day. I saw some announcements today about this company.

It doesn't even matter. There's so much money going into Web3. What are you doing there, if anything? I'm super bullish, but I say this as a person. You don't have lasers in your eyes, though. Some breaking news. Breaking news? Drumroll, please.

What do you got? I don't have a drumroll. Well, the breaking news is we're evolving like everybody else around Web 3.0. I got lucky in the sense that I was an investor in eToro in 2010, and the first person that mentioned Bitcoin to me was Yoni Yassi, who was a good friend of mine in Israel, and he was like, buy Bitcoin. And it was 12 cents. I remember looking at it at Mt. Gox at the time. And I was like, leave me alone.

Just take my money and invest in eToro. Okay, here we are today. And I still remain bullish because guess what? Who am I going to talk to but Yoni Asya? And he's not selling. Who else would know more than Yoni Asya, right? So it goes back to information overload and filter failure. So am I bullish?

Yes, because the people who got me into it are still bullish. And they only have reputation risks and their own capital risks. They're not promoters. They were early believers in the Bible or whatever we're going to call this or gold or whatever you call it. I don't care. So I'm bullish. I didn't know it would be called Web 3.0 just like – so great. They finally have a name for it, right?

And staking is a lot better than Satoshi's. Like the words are getting better, first of all. Sushi swap? And the marketing is cool. I own some. But Uniswap and SushiSwap are very cool. But they're just like information – or they're just highways that people trade on top of. So how – today –

Hang on. So on – I'm bullish but in a different way. I don't have the skills. I'm not in the Discord rooms. So I'm evolving my business model to take advantage. So we at Social Leverage have decided to evolve our business model. Yeah, we occasionally will continue to bet on founders, but we have evolved our business model to be more of an emerging manager because we think the winners of tomorrow will look different than the winners of today. You're smart.

Like you had Paki on. Writers are the new promoters. You're smart. Like you had Paki on. Writers are the new promoters. You're smart. I don't know if I'm smart. I'm evolving. Is it the same skill set? It feels smart. Howard, to pick a founder versus pick a manager?

Yeah. And so for years, hedge funds had fund to funds. And they were a disaster. Right. And so they got rent office fees on fees. And that played into the Vanguard model. So why is what you're doing different? Hang on.

This podcast will slow down. 140 characters or longer? It's not that it's different. The timing is better. Okay? So let me give you three examples not to give away the secret. Fees matter, always have. But also fees don't matter more than they've ever not mattered in the sense that everybody's thinking about fees at a time when alpha has never been higher because technology is going like this globally, nationally, deeper, wider, whatever you want to call it.

The funnel looks – just goes like this. It's out of San Francisco now. It just keeps breaking and breaking and coming from different angles, right? So at a time when there's this much crazy dispersion and returns, why am I worried about fees? Like if I suck at it, I suck at it. And the fees don't matter. And if I'm great at it, the fees don't matter. The middle is, yeah, it sucks. If you're going to be, if you want market returns, you should pay zero. Vanguard exists. If you want market returns in VC, put your money in Tiger. They're trying to get you 10 or 12% a year. If you want to take risks, this goes to your argument,

or is the cats out of the bag? Kids want to take risks because the only job satisfaction that exists today is picking winners because you're working from home, you have 24 hours in the day, your parents, if you're lucky, your parents are rich, the money's coming to you to avoid estate taxes, so you might as well learn to invest because that's the new doctor. The new lawyer is learning how to allocate capital so you have life satisfaction and job satisfaction and can pass the money on to kids. We could argue about the rules, but the way it exists today is you're going to get rich from somebody who hands you down money. So you're going to start meeting with people who are making blockchain investments. We already did. Yeah.

So I was lucky enough to first invest in – How do you know who knows what they're talking about and who doesn't? It's all gut instinct? Well, I was making these bets when no one was. So I was betting on people in 2016 and 2017 and I made a lucky bet in a company called Multicoin.

I could have put more in, but I invested a certain amount of money in Multicoin. Are they behind Solana? Yeah, they were the first money in Solana. Son of a bitch. I really am because I'm not smarter than you. am because I'm not smarter than you. Right? Like I'm not smarter than you, but I feel a little bit guilty because my job is to not piss them off at this point because I want to stay in there.

Oh, that's interesting. The blockchain guys don't want any notes from you. What's he going to tell them? In the same way that social media. I'm just trying not to upset them. It's like Seinfeld. It's like I'm like Newman. I don't want to be their Newman at this point.

I'll get them water. Hey, do you need anything? Can I do your laundry? Do your kids need a favor? Call their parents for them. We saw this today. It's every single day on TechCrunch. Today was this company Parallel.

Do you know who Parallel is? I never heard of them. You might have. It's a sci-fi card game based on the Ethereum blockchain. They was this company Parallel. Do you know who Parallel is? I never heard of them. You might have. It's a sci-fi card game based on the Ethereum blockchain. They raised $50 million today at a half a billion dollar valuation. It's every single day.

So I don't read TechCrunch because I did that in 2006 when the numbers were smaller, but it was the same amount of announcements at Web 2.0. And I almost killed myself. Would it drive you crazy? It would drive you crazy.

So I think it's great to read TechCrunch because it's keeping you guys current. No, but I mean it keeps you guys current. I've learned with filter failure is that it's a boom. To argue that would be crazy. We could argue about being a bubble on podcasts and on Twitter all day. But it's a boom. So get my fucking goggles on on my boom goggles on and try and back really smart people at reasonable prices. We're in a world of momentum and I'm trying to not

find value. I'm just trying to find good people. John, let's solve these charts. So it's a boom. It's a boom. It's a boom. It's the biggest boom that's ever happened. And it's global. Next one. Next one, guys. So, I saw this number today. $74 billion in capital invested in Europe. It's a record year. $115 billion in exits. I mean, just insane numbers. So, the annual value was $115 billion

through Q3. Already five times the amount reached 2020. That's Europe. Let's look at the United States. This is the venture capital investments. It's hilarious. It's Europe. All right, let's look at the United States. This is the venture capital investments. It's like breaking the top of the chart. It's hilarious. It's just, it's absurd. But what do you, but I'm saying there's,

they're printing money. Where do they expect it to go? The real bubble is in bonds. Like if we're really going to be, make fun of like why, like let's dig down to what Josh was saying. It's like, he's not really, Josh is open-minded about it, but he's like, it's a game because the people at the Fed made it a game.

So before we get to this – hold on. Bonds can't be in a bubble. Here's why. I don't know a bubble. I'm saying there's – as advisors, I do this joke. We joke about the 64-year portfolio. It's not broken. It is broken.

It's stupid. I, as a somewhat wealthy person person now have not thought about a bond and if my advisor recommends a bond and i talked to charlie i own it at ria compound shout out to charlie and charlie helps manage my money is that he he can show me all the portfolios he wants and you guys could show me all the portfolios i want but i believe there's a new approach to managing capital right and bonds are being disrupted. They're being disrupted not by – they're being disrupted by software. They're being disrupted by margins.

They're being disrupted by entrepreneurs. They're being disrupted by the Fed. They're being disrupted by the government. They're being disrupted by crypto, which yield staking 5% of that 30% in crypto. Yeah, there's risk. But theoretically, there's risk in bonds too. You could stake 5% of that 30% in Solana or Bitcoin or Ethereum and earn, we don't know the history.

We just say today, I don't have enough data. But the data I have says go take 5%. You owe it in a staking crypto. Earn 6%. And that gets you your whatever you would get in the 30%. And now you can have cash and not even take risk. So cash is a bond. Cash is a bond.

John's from Capital. Shout out. He's amazing at that. We also know though that when shit went south for innovation in 2000 and 2002, the NASDAQ fell 85% and treasury bonds went up. So we know that that- Well, treasuries are different than- Yeah.

Or treasuries are not against- Corporate bonds might as well be a stock in a crisis. 2% to Microsoft. I don't know. Throw that chart back up. So what I want to say, Howard, is you're talking about valuation. Look at where we've come from. Yeah, I mean, there's a bubble in valuations, but that's – I don't know how to – I don't know when it ends or how to stop it.

I'm not saying don't play. I'm just saying what you're seeing is that prices keep going up. Yeah. And I think this is a one-way train. Eventually this is – But this is annual median valuation per round. You could have a 3D bubble while the rest of tech booms. Yep.

Facebook – Snapchat's down 30% today. I think Ethereum's down 30%. Snapchat's down 30% because Apple's doing things to their business model. It has nothing to affect Web 3.0. As long as money's not completely flowing out of the market, we're not going to have a crash. When you're looking at deals. And I don't know what makes that happen. What does valuation mean to you?

If you're bullish on a company, is there a valuation where you would say, listen, I love what you guys are doing, but this is just – All day I say I love what you're doing. But it's too expensive? I'm insulted sometimes, I tell them. So it matters to you. So I start every conversation right now is like before we get into a 10-minute presentation, where are you raising it? And then if they say $15 million, I go, it's not for us. Are you looking at pre-revenue companies?

I actually ask what the valuation is. Wait, $15 is too high? For me. Wait. So that helps me. That's my filter. Got it. Are you looking at companies?

Why are you calling me? Do I sound like an asshole? I'm not saying you can't be worth a billion, but I do the math myself, and I've been in the dance in the end zone, and the math doesn't make sense to me. So is this seed or pre-seed? It's a good question. But you're not seeing anything less than $15, are you? the math doesn't make sense to me. So is this seed or pre-seed? It's a good question. Just, just... But you're not seeing anything less than 15, are you?

I'm seeing stuff at 30. Right. And I'm like, why are we on the call? Like, I mean, good luck. But let me ask a dumb question, because I'm curious about this. But I don't make the rules. But let me ask you a question. I'm just a participant. You're buying a company you hope to be worth $300 million one day. Why does it matter if you're paying $15 or $30?

If you're doing it just a one-off, it doesn't matter. If you're doing it as a professional, it matters. Because every bullet I fire in my world has to do a certain thing if it works. So every time I write a check out of our fund, we have to think if we write another check and another check, will that investment pay back the fund based on what we think the TAM is? So TAM, total addressable market, still does matter to me. I don't like to argue what TAM is because we've been proven wrong. But some data that I believe based on my eyes and ears and my years in the business, right, gives me some scope. Not Felix Sama but my eyes.

Meaning when I started doing deals, one on two was how seeds were done. When I invested in Buddy Media. What does that mean? When I invested in Buddy Media or when Wallstrip was started, when I raised my seed money, it was like 2 million pre. It was like a crazy high valuation. Everything is the rest of like seven-year, 10%, I think 30 is bananas. So assuming that 08 was wrong and things should have been priced at four, then things should be priced at 8 to 10 now or 12. But a movie ticket –

And they should be great company – or they should be the best of the best. A movie ticket is a costume box. And so when someone tells me – this is a good point. When someone says to me – because we're backing young managers now. We're trying to coach them. When they tell me, well, he's the best, I go, what does the best mean? Because if he was the best, he may be the best coder and he may have the best – went to Stanford, be the smartest math guy. But if he was really good, he would understand cap tables and he would understand momentum and he would understand public markets because these are now all factors in crossover. And every entrepreneur needs to be a crossover too. It's not just the investors. The founder needs to understand the

stock market. Guess why? Because they're allowed to. They're allowed to have a Robinhood account and a Coinbase account. So if I talk to a founder and another person says, well, he's the best. And if he was the best, he would understand that valuing his company at 10 million, he can still be a billionaire. But we need to make money too for the risk. And we understand that things go sideways for a year or two. And if they raise it 30 now, okay, based on the TAM and my brain

from doing this for 15 years, they have very little room for error. And momentum is a very- It sounds like margin of safety. Yeah, but yeah, it's they have very little room for error. And momentum is a very- It sounds like margin of safety. Yeah, but yeah, it's like there is no room for error if you price these things for perfection early. And based on the liquidity factor, if I'm going to pay public market prices for something,

I want to be able to trade out of it. So I love momentum stocks because who cares what they're valued at because I can sell it a minute later. But if I'm going to pay momentum prices in the private market and be stuck for 10 years, I want to pay the lowest price. But Howard, if you have a fund and you've raised money from investors and you have to deploy it, how do you – Who has to deploy it?

Where is – I don't even know what that means. But if you have committed capital from investors, don't you want to put that to work? And therefore, don't – Want to and have to is the same thing. Say that again? Our anxiety is about wanting to do it, but it shouldn't be about having to do it. No one wants us to do it. Meaning, we try and tell our investors,

these are good questions, we try and tell our investors, well, how fast are you going to deploy it? And we go, how would I know? If six founders with the right price and the right product walk in one after each other, am I supposed to say, no, we've already done three, we need to wait three months to write our fourth? I'm in the pattern recognition business. That's such a great point.

If six people walk in in a row with the right place, right time, right product, get the on board, right? Like get rocket ships show up. How do I know when they're going to show up? Right. There's no way. So, so have to want to is a really big, important thing. I want to deploy it. I have to make returns to be to stay in the game. And I think we're putting a lot of pressure. So you are smart. I told you you're smart. It's not smart. I'm experienced. I have eyes and ears. I have some scope of what is undervalued and overvalued. Just a scope. So this is what you say. If a client says, how quickly are you going to get my capital invested? You say-

Well, that's the beauty of us being perceived experts at this or us telling our investors we're good at this. We tell them. We promise our entrepreneurs we can write a check in three days if we have to and want to, not because someone else is writing a check. Who cares if the other guy is writing a check? We don't even know that person. Let me ask you though. You might have met that person on Zoom. So a family office, you like them.

I'm assuming you're not taking money from people because you have to anymore. So you actually like them. And they give you money and they give two other managers money, not at the same time, but just generally. They have multiple people doing venture, okay, or angel or whatever. Yeah. You're not deploying because you've got this kind of margin of safety idea about what you need to get invested in, which makes perfect sense to me.

The other two funds are f***ing flinging spaghetti at the wall. And in this environment, they look brilliant because they're getting exits via SPAC, via a bigger round at a higher valuation, soft bank, whatever. And you're doing the right thing, obviously, but you're not playing the game the way the game is currently being played. Do you have the standing in the community for people to be like, I get that Howard is not playing that game, and I'm glad to have somebody doing it the old-fashioned way that he knows works?

Yeah, it's a good question. I don't think doing it the old-fashioned way that he knows works. Yeah, it's a good question. I don't think there's an old-fashioned way. I think to be – I shouldn't say old-fashioned. I should say like – Yeah, no, I know what you're saying. Like it's professional. The perceived professional.

The professional way. We've read enough books. We've seen enough great – you've talked to enough experts. Trust me. I know that you do and you see them walk through the doors here and you've talked to them and tweeted with them and podcast with them and read them. And so have I. And now I'm not – I mean all the mistakes I've made is by not sticking to a certain set of parameters. And those happen to be passing on card at $4 million.

Not because I thought it was overvalued because I thought one of our our other i didn't want to invest in two companies doing the same things you know angel this time i passed on trading view because i was an investor in chart iq right trading view was a 10 million valuation i was like well you know the russian and i'm already back with uh shalee for up here still he might be russian too he might be a spy he might be the He might be. He has the hair of a spy. He's way too good looking to be for real. There would be a TV show and it's like, oh, yeah, everybody knew he was a spy. I don't trust that guy. So Eddie surfs, not the web.

No, what I'm saying is we're going to miss all the time. So we try and be honest with our LPs. They know who we are. We write. We're like, we're not expert. We're like, this business is so big. The ocean is so big. The cloud is so big.

There are so many people bragging and making money. There are so many people making – I'm in Solana. Everything that I've done about Robin hood is a joke compared to the returns in solana yeah so once you've seen the end zone i don't know what i don't know what it is but i don't know why the beauty is i didn't have to know because i understand my business i have no ego that i had to pick solana my genius there was i loved the idea of crypto and decentralization i had no idea how to play it so i bet on a a bunch of people doing it. Solana's a better Ethereum for NFTs or something? Better, not better.

It's a different blockchain. They built it. It goes up. No, they built it. There's Qualcomm guys who understood scale at a different – no one would have backed them coming out of San Diego or Anatoly. A lot of people I heard passed. I probably would have passed.

I didn't even get a chance to see the deal. My buddy Vinny Lingham did, who's a good friend of mine. Just say the less you know, the better. You trust the person that brings the fear. You have to trust the person. Yeah, yeah. And therefore, that's filter failure again. You have to build filters, and you're going to be wrong.

I've bet on some really smart people that are completely wrong. But I'd rather bet on the people at this point in the cycle than bet I don't have enough knowledge to go deep enough on all these things to bet on the technology or on the business model. So I am now in the people betting business. So I want to make a hard pivot and talk about conferences because you threw some of the best conferences I've ever been at. And it turned out one of them was like – one of them was i met aaron klein from risk allies yeah shout to aaron that's probably like the most money i've ever made in the private i'm definitely the most money i passed on that you passed on it you weren't in my business so you didn't see the potential the way i did i don't know anything about venture but i was just like i want to be involved with this

didn't pass because i didn't think it would work. I passed because of stupidity of value. Because I had models that didn't make sense. I didn't like the cap table. I didn't like how much he owned of the company. If I look at my notes, and I've talked to Aaron about it, I was like, I'm an idiot. I didn't think he owned enough of his company. I didn't like who else was on his cap table.

I liked him. I saw a problem. And what you got right, and I didn't have a grudge against you. I was just like, I don't think – I was like worried about things that I probably shouldn't have worried about. Yeah, yeah. So the great news is that he's rich. Yes. He's hopefully not mad at me.

He killed it. I am mad at myself. Okay. That's why I'm Larry David because we should all be mad at ourselves. And there's more opportunity for everybody. Yeah. So he's an example. Now he will invest money and contribute to the system.

He's an example, though, of the type of entrepreneurs that you had right under all of our noses in 20 – I think I met him in 2012 in Coronado when you did it at the movie theater. Yeah, it was great. Okay, but you had 50 guys like him him probably 30 of whom have gotten exits and whatever they were pitching us that day yeah it was the right time to be doing but then you did it in 13 and 14 and 15 like it kept going so your network is like deep like have you ever thought of like cataloging these are all the guys that i introduced to money or all the people i've put on stage somewhere no because then that would would mean Fred would do it because my alpha

monkey or whatever, the pandemic of what I'm doing started with Fred Wilson. Dude, you're like Bill Walsh. You've got like the big coaching tree. Yeah. But you do though. It's a beautiful thing. But if I'm measuring, look what Fred gets to measure. For FinTech, you really do though. And then he probably has someone who got him into the business. So all you can do is pay it forward.

I don't know if you read this, but like or I told you the story, but the other night, I'm having a great day. And I carry a bag around like you see here. There's nothing. I haven't opened the bag all day, but it weighs 700 pounds. I don't know what's in it. Pens and cards and Tic Tacs. Where are we going with this?

Laptop. And so at the end of the night, after one of my 12-hour days, I leave it in a cab. And I'm like, mother f***er. And I get upstairs and I'm like, I'm f***ed. Because it's a taxi and I go to my Wells Fargo account. It's like the charge hasn't even shown up on my Wells Fargo. Like the guy's at home already or someone else has grabbed the bag. And I'm like, what do I do?

Like it's a real, like what was in the bag? Am I ambien in the bag? Am I Adderall in the bag? Like, is it weed? Like, what are the cops going to say? What does this scene look like? Like, I'm just trying to piece together what I lost, you know? And I'm changing my Gmail, and I'm worried about my crypto accounts.

But then I realize that my Apple's locked. Like, these are the things that go through your mind. And this guy turned in my bag to the police station. The police? Called me at one in the morning sick. Because I have... This is in New York City? Yesterday? Two days ago. Oh, wow. I don't remember the question, but I wanted to tell the story

because there was a point to it. This guy blew my mind because I wasn't even going to pay him. Oh, so you were going to pay that forward. Yeah. We all need to pay this shit forward. I'm with you 100%. How'd you pay him, Ethereum? I paid him cash. So I call him,

Don, who you just met, he's a whiz. I couldn't even track the guy down because the systems are so antiquated. And then I go to the police station and she calls me at one in the morning, the cops, and they say, we got your bag. And I'm like, alright, thank you so much. You know they went through that mother----. I don't know what happened.

100%. But this is a funny story. So she goes, and I write down notes. It's one in the morning. I'm half asleep. And yeah, he left his card and his name. And I said, thank you. I'll be there.

And at 7 a.m., I trudge up to 51st and 1st. And they have a harder time of finding the bag six hours later than anything. And I get my bag. And it's like a crime scene. It's like in an evidence bag. And every piece of my bag. So note to self, keep your drugs. I could have been in a lot of trouble if there was stuff in there.

And every piece of my bag was separated. Not in New York. And no phone number for the guy. So a new person on duty, and they go, what? We don't have a number. Get out of our police station. We got stuff to do. So Don tracks down through the medallion who this guy is and he calls me back.

Like I leave a message. He calls me back and he goes, don't send me money. And I'm like, well, you know, and I write about it and I ask my blog like what people should do and people say you should buy him a laptop and I'm talking to the guy and he's like, I don't want anything. And I said, I'm Venmo-ending money right now because i don't have venmo and i go what do you mean and he goes i have zell and i that was a moment of sadness because he said zell and i had to go on to my bank of america or whatever i have in zella money and

and you can only pay it forward and i plan on surprising this guy for the next 12 months right like so what fred did and what we're doing and what Aaron Klein's going to do, we've got to keep throwing. And this is the money multiplier that the media doesn't get. Aaron's not going to put his money in bonds. He's just going to put more money in startups. So we have a mass.

So long story short, we are on this massive multiplier that the government started that thinks that these kids are going to, what, sit on their cash and buy Porsches? No, they're buying NFTs because they're using it as their logo. They're starting businesses. They're investing in businesses.

They're backing their friends. How do you measure this? So the TAM of that is bazillions. And the more people I back versus the companies I back is how I leverage that. The TAM of everyone being an investor and speculating and collecting, it's huge. Bananas. It's a bazillion i want to finish this topic just by saying you know once again more flowers for you but like the idea of a community being an investment edge yeah i think is maybe more common

now um i think there are a lot of people who like to self-style themselves as contrarians and they're missing out on this uh good luck with that but but you have always said the the best ideas are going to bubble up from your peers your friends your colleagues not from barons no and i like you're you you are incontrovertible i am like why are you reading it talk to your friend you you you made it you made enough enemies today we'll leave that all. All right. Empty nesting. So like what are you doing with most of your time? Are you and Ellen antiquing? I know you spend the summer in Italy.

That's why you're going to miss Future Proof. Future. Oh. Well, biking. I don't spend my summers in Italy. I love biking so much. Yeah, I saw all your pictures this summer. It's crazy.

And it's my yoga. It's my yoga, right? So everybody says, oh, it's bad for this. It's like the one time you shut your brain off. It's the one way. Looking at the road is the only place. I can't do yoga. I feel the hair on my chest.

Like, it's gross. I don't want to be close to myself. But biking, there's enough noise and enough stuff that makes me meditate. It's the only time I get peace. And it just so happens to be a low impact. Yeah, somewhat dangerous. I'm sure it has side effects and it's risky. But it's the one thing that I do that I get to be silly and like remove from the stress of who I am or my own brain.

And so I happen to plan these trips with friends and I'm just lucky now I'm an empty nester. So we're planning ahead and, yeah, unfortunate. Kids are out of the house. Kids are amazing. So the kids are out of the house, but obviously COVID had them back in the house. And so being an empty nester is like how we measure – it's like launching your kids is different than raising your kids. And I think I was lucky that I wasn't raising my kids during COVID. I think parents had a – like you with the kids at home.

We can do a whole lot on that. We won't. Yeah. But I'm saying – so I luckily didn't have that. I was in the process of launching my kids and that got delayed. That's a lot easier than raising your kids. We luckily had gotten through that. And my son loved COVID because the world slowed down and

he got to catch up maturity wise and didn't feel the pressure of the world. And my daughter hated COVID because she was on the path. She was already going. She was already. They slowed her down. So it was like everybody lost. Yeah. Luckily, my son, no different than my digital portfolio, benefited. He learned that golf was going to be his life and and so maybe he's more ahead of other people so i just think being an empty nest is one of the greatest joys um but it could change every text can change your life so i'm kind of drive by a baseball field that the kid played on and say those days are over like because i'm my kids are teenagers and i'm already like they don't have little league this Yeah, you should enjoy that you did it

and you should enjoy your free time. I mean, I'm just pretty selfish. Always was with my time, but I'm pretty selfish because I used to waste a lot of time running around to things. You also have a million friends and a lot of ways to kill, to not kill time, but occupy the hours of your day with stuff that you love. And fulfilling things that I like.

So I try and focus on the stuff that fulfills me. Who's in the bicycle group? Who are these guys? Crazy good people. The Europeans? No, it's like just people that just like biking. It's not a big crew, right? And now what's super great about golf, I was an investor in golf.

Now golf, even though I'm not a great golfer and never was great, but I'm starting to enjoy it again. golf and even though I'm not a great golfer and never was great, but I'm starting to enjoy it again. I feel like as the world widens and everything gets more tech, less tech things are, you can make money in like, so while everybody's focused on being a zillionaire, I can focus on being a thousandaire because golf and cycling are neglected. And so you can build a great Shopify business doing cycling stuff or golf.

Like G4 came out of nowhere as a roll-up and become a fashion company yes on instagram i'm like man i'm 56 and i could actually start a business in my passion you don't need semiconductors yeah you don't need semiconductors i don't need staff i don't have to yell at pearlman and pierce no developers no developers it's just artiste and writing and being using my brand so i'm super excited about being passionate, and I think we have to teach our kids to chase their passion. And luckily, they don't have to be a lawyer, doctor, accountant. Not a knock on lawyer, doctor, accountant.

But if we talk about automation, those are the three things that are going to get automated the most. Art can't be automated. Life is good for you, Howard. Yeah, life is good. Dude, you're killing it. And we love you, and thank you so much for coming. We're going to do favorites,

and then we're going to go for Italian Howard. Yeah, life is good. Dude, you're killing it. And we love you. And thank you so much for coming. We're going to do favorites. And then we're going to go for Italian food. Yeah. I'll go first. I got three, but I'll do them quickly. I do. Sorry. Did you listen to this? Jeff Curry on Joe and Tracy?

Not yet. That was today. If you want to understand what's going on with commodities right now, stop listening to all these maniacs. Listen to the Goldman Sachs commodity strategist who actually talks to the CEOs of commodity companies. Basically, he's talking about Max Payne being probably three to six months. What does Max Payne mean? Higher prices? OK.

Yes. Well, no, not necessarily. It's about scarcity and availability more than price. So the question is like, how much higher could oil go? How much higher could copper go? Why isn't that void of supply being filled by people bringing on capacity? These companies have had horrible returns on capital for their investors for 15 years. For the first time ever, it feels like their stock prices are going up again and cash flow is going up. They're in no rush to jump in and say, let's head capacity. Like they're finally making money. And this could go on for a couple of years before somebody finally says, OK, we'll drill. So I thought it was really insightful way to think about commodities.

It's not macro. It's stock market shit. All of these CEOs are obsessed with seeing their stock prices go back up. Hence the game. That's right. You saying people don't want to play the game. These people have seen the game. They've read the playbook, and they said, you know what?

Kills the supply. Now, eventually, they're all going to cheat because they want to get ahead of the next guy. Somebody will. Ego will prevail. That's right. So somebody in Russia will say, LOL, keep watching your stock price. Do you listen to Odd Lies? I agree with that. Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Allaway?

Too geeky. But I did a good job being on one. I killed it when I was on it. All right. Jeff Daniels on Smartless. That was good. The best. Jeff's secret of success.

I did listen to it. I love Smartless. I was early to Smartless. I'm not a fan of any of those three guys. But together good. The best. Jeff's secret of success. I did listen. I love Smartless. I was early to Smartless. I'm not a fan of any of those three guys. But together, they're hilarious. They're witty. And they hate each other, love each other, which is genius. They break each other's balls, but it's good.

Jeff's secret, real quick. Jeff's secret of success. And he's had a very long career now. And he's crushed it. He just acts like he's always about to be finished yeah i mean i when i listen to jeff it reminded me of me it was just like deprecating self-deprecating said an agent told him in the 80s i live in phoenix you don't have to be in silicon valley to be a good investor right so he was saying like he stays in michigan because an agent told him

when he first got started any minute now i might call you and say it's over yeah he's a legend that was his ethos. Hold on. And Something Wild was a great movie. The Squid and the Whale is one of my favorite movies ever. Maybe I didn't see it, but Something Wild was phenomenal. Last one. We don't have to spend a lot of time on this. Are you a Succession guy?

Love it. Okay. What did you think of the first episode of Succession 3? I mean, it does such a good job of making you despise people one minute and like them the next. I love and hate everybody on the show. I only hate. I love hating them. But you also want to root for them. Kieran Culkin.

Douchebags. I love it. Yeah, but I also like them sometimes. Romulus. I don't think it's my favorite show anymore. It's just a little over the top. What is your favorite show? I think favorite shows are ones that end. I think Seinfeld is my favorite show anymore. It's just a little over the top. What is your favorite show? I think favorite shows are ones that end. I think Seinfeld's still my favorite show.

I don't like the way HBO doesn't let me binge. I'm just a binge guy and I don't want HBO telling me how I should watch my... I just don't get it. I just am so insulted by it. What, HBO Max? I'm insulted. What's smart, it doesn't mean I'm happy about it. Some shows build.

It's smart for them. I just hate them for it. They want people talking about the show, though. If everyone's watching on a different schedule, it doesn't happen. It's their choice. I'm just saying it's made me not like the show because I can't appreciate it week to week. I need to go through six. The joy of binging is why do I want to go to the theater? And therefore, I want to be at home.

I spent money on my TV. I have the right popcorn machine. I have the right blankets. My wife and I get to do this together. We don't have to get COVID. Whatever all those things are, and HBO is saying, nah, because it's better if you chat about it. Or watch an old one.

That sounds like Wells Fargo. Watch an old one. Yeah, no, no. You're right. But I'm a sucker that watched it week to week, and now I'm fed up with it. You forget what happens. Oh, for sure.

I do, too. Me, too. I don't care. That's age. Yeah. All right, favorite. Did you bring us a favorite? What's new in your world?

What should we be excited about? I think what you should be excited about is that everything's the travel. Okay. Yeah. I mean, come on, people. It's enough. Americans need to – no, you shouldn't travel just to travel, as you guys don't anymore, and you shouldn't just go to every event.

I'll go to Nashville in two weeks. I can't wait. Go where you want to go. Yeah. And so that's what my favorite thing is. And you can still hate airlines, and you can still hate Goldman Sachs, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't travel. Favorites, what do you got? My favorite thing is basketball. I'm happy the Knicks are back.

And the Suns are back. I got season tickets this year, so I'm excited. The Knicks have a real team for the first time, and it feels like my life, so I'm happy the Knicks are back and the Suns are back I got season tickets the Suns are good the Knicks have a real team for the first time and it feels like my life so I'm thrilled oh they're good the Knicks it's like a playoff game every night

we have a real team that's exciting people are going absolutely crazy in the preseason games right like it's not been like that since 2000

that's exciting my son is like dad what is going on like they're winning I said no you don't understand this is like normal for a what is going on? Like, they're winning. I said, no, you don't understand. This is like normal for a lot of other teams. The game season is two games old. How can you declare?

I'm sure they'll all be injured in two weeks. But right now, it feels, you were at the game last night? Yeah. Listen, I went to a Suns final game. I hadn't been in one in 30 years. I mean, it was fun last summer. Good weather, suntan, being in a Suns finals. Yes.

And they won it. They were up 2-0. I mean, it looked like a lock. And then that freak just was so good. Dude, you're the man for coming by tonight. Thank you so much. That was fun. We'll have some fun later.

We want to remind everybody, if you want to watch clips from today's show, do what Howard Lindzen does. Go to YouTube.com. I do. Slash the compound RWM. Are you seriously? That's serious. Yeah, rough night.

Oh, you were at the game last night. That's serious. Let's go. Don't bring that energy in this place. All right. Idon'tshop.com for the latest in finance blogger apparel. What? And we have a new item in idon'tshop.com.

Yeah, we do. Which you will be delighted to see. Let me see it. There it is. Look at this shit The Compound by Peter Pate so this is a graffiti artist

who did that let's do a collab you wanna collab with us? yeah can we do Panic with Friends by The Compound? yeah what would we do?

like a pair of boxer shorts? what are you thinking? socks socks I like where your head is at alright go to idonshop.com anything else? we're good?

I love that I think that's it alright that's it guys thank right, that's it. Guys, thank you so much for joining us. We'll be back next week. Thanks to Howard. Great job, John. Duncan, you killed it tonight.

Great job. And we will talk to you all very soon. All right. So you feel warmed up now? Ready to do this? So where do you get the champions? Thanks again to Direction. Investing in a Direction Shares ETF includes possible loss of principal

and may be more volatile than investing in broadly diversified funds. The use of leverage by the funds increases risk. The Direction Shares ETFs are not suitable for all investors and should be utilized only by sophisticated investors who understand leverage risk, consequences of seeking daily leveraged or daily inverse leverage investment results, and intend to actively monitor and manage their investment. The funds are distributed by Foresight Fund Services, LLC. you