The Pomp Podcast - #1153 Bill Perkins | Millionaire Talks Elon Musk, Dan Bilzerian, Dying With Zero, & SkyFi

Episode Date: February 6, 2023

Bill Perkins is one of the most well-known natural gas traders in the world, and the co-founder of multiple companies including satellite imagery provider SkyFi. In this conversation, we talk about Bill's philosophy around dying with zero, the book he wrote about it, natural gas, oil, energy markets, Elon Musk, Dan Bilzerian, & poker.  ======================= Announcing LYCEUM | Miami, a day-long event on March 4th, 2023 in Miami hosted by Pomp. We’re gathering an explosive group of experts to engage in a series of fascinating discussions. We'll cover topics from investing, emerging tech, scientific research, sports, music and more.We have some massive names being announced via Twitter throughout January so stay tuned for details.This will not be your typical event and it certainly won’t be one you want to miss. We’re going to learn a lot, make some smart friends, and as always, we’re going to have fun.Spots are limited so head to lyceummiami.com to buy your ticket today. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 200,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ =======================

What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. We have no advertisers on this podcast, so it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Bill Perkins is one of the most well-known natural gas traders in the world,

and he's also the co-founder of a number of companies, including satellite imagery provider SkyFi. In this conversation, we talk about a lot, including Bill's philosophy around dying with zero, the book he wrote about it, also what he thinks about various natural gas, oil, and energy markets. And then we even talk about fame and what it's like to be friends with famous people, why Bill decided he didn't necessarily want to be famous. And then we finish up with a little poker talk. Cheating, winning, big hands, and why billionaires love to just fork over cash when they're playing various poker players. I always enjoy talking to Bill, and this conversation was no different. I hope you guys enjoyed.

And once you get done listening, jump on Twitter and let us know what you think about the conversation, including what you liked and what you didn't like. I always appreciate the feedback. Here is my conversation with Bill Perkins. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. here with me uh every time that i see you on the internet i talk to you uh i see anything you're doing it just looks like it's fucking fun and part of that is in line with this book you wrote called die with zero right uh which i read and i was like man this is like the book that i would imagine you writing because it does feel like you authentically live your life that way where did

this come from like why why is that the mentality of like literally die with zero and have as much fun as you possibly can i guess um i was just talking about last night like my greatest fear is not running out of money or looking like an idiot you can look at my twitter and i'm an idiot uh often enough it's actually wasting my life like you get one ride you know and i don't want to be 60 70 80 or even 55 and look back and like holy shit i wasted this time period of my life i wasted my ride you know i didn't say enough i love yous i didn't take enough vacations i didn't take the trip i didn't do my best at x y and z how much of that is though because you've been skilled and fortunate enough to make money and i think you have this confidence like you could continue to

make money if you weren't in that position would you be more focused on not running out of money is it like a luxury no no when i started thinking about this when i was broke like kind of what's the meaning of it all yeah you know and it's like the money is a tool like hammers and saws right like i'm not there to get hammers and saws i'm there to build houses so i always wanted to build a life right and whether it be a hut or whatever and it's kind of what life am i going to be able to build with the resources i have right obviously i'd like a nicer hut or a nicer life but it was about not wasting those periods in my life not wasting my time like really like you get one ride hit the grave with scars and bruises and and a broken heart and and just really enjoy it just

enjoy the ride and then it's like well what does enjoying the ride mean to you you know get off autopilot like really think about that because for each person that's totally different right was there a moment in your life where it like opened your eyes and you were like i have to change something or did it just kind of gradually happen over time it was gradually i read a book called your money or your life a lot of people and that's kind of like the the bible to the fire movement and it really uh kind of hammered in the concept of uh your time and your money and life energy and the concept of enough and so i was like what does enough mean for me what are the things i'm working for right like why do i go to work besides survival right like what does thrive

mean to me and so those concepts early i didn't really have like diet zero ready to write in those ages at that age but it was coming to me you know it was dripping in and like i was thinking about the issues and what does it mean and when do you spend the money and when do you peak with your money is it a number or is it a date right right obviously like if you're at 80 it's like you're not striving for the number right so yes you know all these all these things that are in the book you know kind of came to me over time and i wrote the book to save my own life right i was like i need to get all this shit down in a mental model that i can use that i can go and reference and um how old were you when you were thinking about this uh i started it in my 20s and

blathered and argued with my friends all the way through my 40s and then finally you know it was just like i wanted to build an app to just like here you go bill spend this much this year spend this much on charity spend this much skiing go do this spin the wheel for potluck activities so you don't have a cookie cutter life based on your culture like i wanted to just like super app there's not enough computing power in the world and too many variables but what i could do is have the mental models on how to think about your life and your resources and how to use them up use all your resources in order to get the maximum net fulfillment what's fascinating to me about like the number is when you're young as i was asking about your age um you usually come up with a

number and if you're like half as successful as you ever thought you would be you hit that number pretty quickly so i remember being in college and i started playing around with uh foreign currency trading and i was just like if i could make two thousand dollars a month i could live forever right like and i could like not work and then you get on the road where you're like two thousand dollars doesn't really you know buy you much uh maybe the number should be a little bit bigger than that and so at different points in your life i think that you one you realize that like expenses change uh your lifestyle changes like that but also to you gain this uh i think some of his confidence some of this is a skill set to actually hit higher numbers and i do think

that there's this element of like some people if there's a number they have in mind it is very much limited by what they think is possible right few people are like oh i don't have any skills i have no experience but i want to be a billionaire or i want to be this and mean it now some people just say it but unless you have some path or you can see like the light at the end of the tunnel it's hard for people to have high ambition because it just feels like they're like screwing around they're wasting time whereas with this it's not about a number it's more of anyone can do it like you can go travel around the world on a budget right and you don't necessarily have to be the richest person ever no and you can have the experiences and so it is almost accessible to

more people in the world than just oh you have to make money and then you get to enjoy these things yeah a lot of times people tell me like oh uh it's easy for you to say when you're rich and i can tell you every single place i've been in the world there's been somebody doing it at one one thousandth of cost looking at the same thing i'll be in capri looking over and be like this is beautiful and this is awesome there'll be somebody who just backpacked over took the ferry on a super saver and they're having the same damn experience and enjoying life i went to thailand and i'm like these people are happier than me they're doing something right you know what do you think they were doing i think they were living in gratitude and they were appreciating things and they were

more present and they didn't have this concept of like uh uh relative deprivation you know it's like you're rich and like well that guy's richer than me so i gotta be rich you know i mean that type of thing and so i i think those the uh those things go a long way because it also cracks your head open to like what you really want based on your resources not envying what somebody else has or this other life you should be living yeah it makes me think of two things one is um there's this whole idea of happiness being uh what are your expectations and then what are your results in relationship to the expectations right so you like you become exponentially more happy if you just have very low expectations right because you just constantly achieve you know what the

expectations were so there's no letdown and that's like an interesting thing but also uh i was reading a book recently 4 000 weeks by oliver berkman and in it he has a quote from scott adams the cartoonist right and he says uh you can have all the money in the world but if you don't have a flexible schedule the person with a flexible schedule and less resources will actually be the happier person yeah i i i would agree with that i would agree with that i i think it's like understanding what you want and actually doing that and being in gratitude right and and you know a lot of people i i speak to a lot of like very way richer than me people whatever who have been habituated into this rat wheel um and like i said like the goal is to build

houses and they're just collecting all these hammers and saws they're like look at all these hammers and saws i have and i'm like that's not the goal the goal is to build houses you know and and you know to build a life right and they're not they're not using the tool right they're going into chucky cheese getting all the tickets and then walking out like and walking out mean dying with all these chucky cheese tickets and i was like the purpose isn't the tickets the purpose is all the prizes up there now they're cheap prizes and stuff but you get my analogy right well everyone's been to some degree around someone that they think is successful it could be Hey, this person is, uh, got a higher, you know, job role at a different company is the same

industry could be somebody who's been around a billionaire or some, you know, monetary achievement. But if you like go on a trip with them or around them while they're on a vacation, and if they're the person who's like walking around outside at dinner and they're on the phone the whole time versus the people who are actually sitting at dinner, enjoying it. Yeah. I always think to myself, like you can have all the money in the world, but if you've got to answer that phone call in the middle of dinner, while you're on vacation, those guys are batteries they're like working for you right like it's like go make the product cheaper faster better or whatever it is for me like you don't really

have a life like and and you've been habituated to think that this form of slavery that you've enslaved yourself this addiction you have is is what's making you happy and it's not you know but like you can't argue with a heroin addict like you have a problem with their heroin addiction You know what I mean? They don't. They're like, I'm happy as hell. Right. And so and so it's kind of, you know, it's it's it's really a book about like when you dig into the book. Right. It's really about, you know, taking your wealth, your health and time and maximizing your fulfillment. But it's really about awareness and getting off autopilot. Yeah. What is the path for you in terms of your balance between work and then that life enjoyment? Do you have like a schedule that you try to stick to? Do you have like a specific framework that you like have everyone around you be aware of so that they know, oh, Bill's not here in the office right now or he's not doing this because he's off enjoying life? I mean I generally enjoy my work kind of follows me because you know thanks to technology you can be anywhere you have your phone you have your work at least in the fields that I'm working with right there's slack for all the different companies there's trading apps and we built our own

in-house thing that's on on your phone so the real thing for me is to realize in this time period of my life what experiences belong how much and am I getting that out right so like if I'm not spending enough time with my my wife or my kids or talking to them or seeing these events then i know i'm out of balance right it's really really hard and takes uh being off autopilot and focusing to know what balance means for each person right for some person might be like i should be skiing my ass off because i'm gonna win the ski nationals and i should be training i'm i'm not training enough right but it's understanding what your goals are during that time period and making sure you're allocating your time to it right uh and on the trading side how much trading do you do on your

phone i would say from a hundred percent really a hundred percent uh a lot of a lot of times it's it's a it's a slack message to my clerks going hey execute this or do that but there's a app called ice web mobile i can't recall the last time i put one on a desktop in order on a desktop i mean actually i went in the office the other day and i was like hey can you guys set up the mobile i mean the application on my computer and it's like oh forgot my password you know what i mean because i'm always you know i mean i'm always thumbprint logging in on my phone then 2fa and hassle and then i still didn't use it i was like i went into the other room and i used you know i used my phone and so i am so used to the phone being the source of all things work and play and

twitter battles and whatever that i rarely use a desktop and to the point where my wife was like this is hurting your eyes you need to start using the desktop you can open up more windows you'll be more productive or whatever but it like then it's like i gotta i gotta i gotta be there but she's right like i'm i am hurting my eyes and i should start using the computer more so maybe that'll change a little bit when i travel how big are the trades you're doing off your phone and like how often is this like you're like doing multiple trades a day no i'm not like a the stock day trader jamming i'm a seasonal positional trader so you know i i manage and prune the position but they can be extremely large they can be like oh i gotta get out sweep you know at least

for is a percentage of our fund like eight figures nine figures oh yeah six figures uh i mean our fund right now is a half a billion dollars we're a very volatile fund so we have a pretty large var so i mean you know our p&l swinging 10 to 10 to 6 10 to 50 million 60 million a day yeah uh so whatever that is yeah well the reason why it's interesting is there's a lot of tech ceos maybe not a lot but a number of them that have publicly stated they don't use a laptop or desktop they're doing things off of uh their phones but they're usually doing email they're doing slack many things you just described but when you're trading that most people the i think external perception would be oh you got to be in front you got to have to 17 screens right i have all my fundamentals on

we have a in-house thing we call skynet that you know has all the fundamentals i can slack and ask questions that are not there or particular graphs um i formulate my view and you know our positions are more like a super tanker we're not a speedboat zipping them now and day scalping at least for me there's other guys are going to the office and they may do that um and so i all my traits are mobile and it's a blessing and a curse because you know i'll be off the coast the off the mouthy coast on a boat and you know my neurons are attached to and thinking about hey i gotta pay attention to the situation have the fundamentals change have whatever let me check the market you can always check the market it's it's it's a little annoying you know yeah um but it's also

like it is a weird thing right like you get more information when you're on the go you get access to the markets because now you have the phone with you yes but at the same time uh you probably have to be somewhat thoughtful about hey i'm about to make a decision even in like the right mindset right if you're kind of like i just use an extreme example like if you're like i'm about to go drink i'm about to you know go here do this whatever i got my wife like all these things are going on and oh by the way uh and you make an offhand decision that could swing yeah that's one thing like i do not i do not uh trade when i've had alcohol or anything like that and you know something in the market shuts down for a little bit and then it's overnight and it's like

fuck i can't i cannot i'm paralyzed for making the decision i mean i usually give the clerks and instructions etc like if this happens or whatever but we're very uh like i said we're we don't have to make big decisions yeah the tanker doesn't turn bit you know quickly it can if it needs to right something blows up it's like we know what to do this is emergency but what's always been interesting to me is you have uh almost multiple uh chapters of your life right but you're living them at the same time most people are like okay i did the investing thing or i went and then i started a company or i went and i played poker or whatever you're kind of doing them all at the same time right and like that is your life how did you get into starting

the technology companies or investing in the technology companies because when you're doing like energy trading or the other types of trading usually those are two distinct skill sets different mentalities different capital pools but like trading energy or other types of financial assets and doing tech investing maybe there's some crossover hedge funds that are starting to do it but outside of that those are really been two different industries yeah i think personally i'm kind of curious i you know in science and technology and in trading you know you're always you know we're fundamental shops so we're value add on top of information right that's what we are um you know and so you're just hoovering information analyzing it and then you know

turning it into actionable intelligence and so the more information you can have the better and sometimes uh you know you ask questions like well how could we know this you know one of my favorite things starting back in the centaurus days was why guess when you can know we always say that like my my clerks my research like why you guys fucking guessing just call up the government and ask them the question there's a there should be a person there who's required to answer the phone and give you the information and so that kind of mentality sticks with me and which is like no big secret now because it's so long ago and a lot of people left but one of the things i did was like why can't we run the weather models faster and know the weather faster than the national

weather service comes out and they're like oh a bunch of people tried it and they failed i'm like whatever like i never let the failures of other big guys whatever stop me long story short uh i bought a six million dollar ibm supercomputer and hired some what you know weather experts understood the models and we did that and so you guys were able to predict the weather better and faster we're not able to predict it we're able to run the model that everybody's looking at faster than the National Weather Service. So basically, the National Weather Service publishes its first day forecast

and the initial conditions, right, that they started to run the model on. We come in, we pick up the initial conditions, we stick it in our computer, and then it runs it faster. So they get to day four, we catch up to them, and then we run it faster. So we have the full forecast before everybody gets to, like, day six.

And that had value for a while, and then everybody kind of knew something was going on because the market was moving. quicker. And technology like that, it's kind of like, how could I use technology to give me information that will give me some sort of alpha in the market? And one of the things I was getting frustrated with is, why are we guessing what the frat crews are or the rig counts are? They have the survey and you guys do the statistical sampling. Explain what that is, by the way. Oh, so frack crews are what comes along to basically put explosive in the well they just drilled, right?

The rig just came in, and it drilled a well, and let's say it's 5,000 feet. They pour a line, and it has concrete, but they put explosives to run crack to have the gas and oil seep into it. So that's an indicator of what future production is going to be, right? and it's very important to kind of understand you know when you're trying to figure out supply and demand balances what future production is going to be and it's kind of an area i was like why are we fucking guessing you know what i mean like that's what people were doing previously they would yeah they're guessing they're kind of like they may maybe they're making a good guess maybe not and i was just like we can know exactly like why don't we why don't we um use satellite data

and optical recognition and machine learning to to track every single reagan frack crew in the United States of America. We would know better than the actual operators. And we do. And that was actually born out of another science project. I don't want to bore you, but there was this... You might have seen me retweet at From Slaves. So Cornell University had this thing called Freedom on the Move, where they were trying to crowdsource people to read these old-time newspapers and turn them into plain text right okay and i'm an impatient guy as you probably know and i was like fuck that shit why don't we build the optical recognition thing hoover all these things and kick it out so i had my uh my clerk do that boom we trained it on 2 000 ads and then

it's like i got it son then we fish put 10 000 50 000 ads and it's like boom here's all the plain text and then we're like okay it's all in plain text but feature extraction the computer doesn't know what that means so we built a uh a model to train it to understand like what does hype mean what does scars mean what does mulatto mean what is what is what is job description trained it on 2 000 ads and then boom it's like i got it so now you can feature extract any runaway slave ad and you can do things like the seasonality of runaways what was the number one job from runaways what time you know you could search by name sort right and so there was this buried history in the data and so once i did that out of just plain curiosity historical curiosity right like i'm

not social just during the war warring i'm just like i want to understand our history and i was like why can't we do that for rigs and frat crews just get satellite data so then we ran the experiment and we're like okay negotiated forever getting satellite data why is it so hard to negotiate it ah we're about to get into skyfi soon uh so uh the satellite industry has long been a government-focused business right it's spooks spies very expensive systems going up uh the government agencies are the customer long rfp long sales process etc so all their systems their salespeople etc or for that process it's not geared for like hey i instantly want an image and i just want to show me the price i'm going to buy it right and so i went through this process

uh almost pulling off my eyelashes to buy like 1.75 or 2 million dollars worth of satellite data over two years and i was like shit i'm trying to give these guys like almost two million dollars it's taking me three months to cut a deal and you know they were trying to region restrict me and all kinds of other crap i'm like no my region is the globe right sorry hitting the mic here uh and and anyway long story short we we we got the deal built the machine uh and we are we don't guess we know we know what every single frat crew in america is doing we know what every single rig is and we can do it for canada or we can look anywhere how much money can you make off that information if you had so that's the question right like so you're looking at it it's like it depends right

Like this is the epiphany I had to like create one company and then because one company gets created and then another company comes out of that. And so I was like, you know, at the time I'm a small hedge fund. I'm like a hundred and something million dollars. I split the bill like 60-40 because I'm smaller with another hedge fund. They're like, yeah, we can use it. but that information may not be the proximate cause or the leading indicator in a whole year. Maybe once in a year, maybe not, right?

It may give you an edge. So it's really a gamble on whether or not you'll be able to make a lot of money off of this, right? You can make $10 million, $100 million, $150 million, right? If you have a view different from the market because you have satellite understanding or even even like in a local region like hey there's too much production getting hooked up into these gathering systems for this region so this region's prices are going to crash right

uh and so but that may or may not happen right but it's kind of like a nuclear weapon like you just kind of gotta have it right just in case and so i thought to myself i was like i'm building all these tools right i built this super computer that you know we got rid of because you know nws eventually went to every time they switch computers you have to switch computers because that's the way it works and they went to a model i was like ah the weather doesn't matter as much anymore actually started mattering again and i'm actually looking at doing it again but doesn't doesn't matter as much and um bottom line is my aum my dollars at risk is not big enough to take advantage of the tools I'm building.

And so kind of kicked my CTO out and said, you know, we're digging for gold here and we have the best shovels, but we need to sell shovels, not dig for gold. And so- Because there might be other people who can use these tools for bigger hedge funds. Yeah, it's like the gold rush, right?

Like who got rich? The guys who sold jeans and shovels. You know what I mean? There were a couple of guys who were really good at finding the gold and I'm very good at finding the gold, but it's tiring. and and and i i don't have enough aum to take advantage of the tools i have right like i got

this big giant shovel and it's just like just me and a couple guys in a shop it was like this would be much more valuable selling to other people right and there's other industries that have more value at risk like the insurance industry right billions and billions of dollars at risk they would like to learn things about what's the what's at risk here whose house is going to burn down if there's a fire here i have like you know 20 billion dollars at risk here i want to know which houses i should be insuring or not insuring or what houses i should be notifying that hey man the defensible space around your house is is not that great could you please move the picasso out of your house while this fire is going on right being proactive and warning people

And just all kinds of ideas like that. And so, and I also thought, where is the most value at risk? And I came to the conclusion it's the ocean. Interesting. Because like 90% of commerce is on the ocean, right? And there's also military risk on the ocean, illegal migration, sanctions violation, illegal fishing, pollution. Like most of the value risk in terms of either commerce or like environmental risk, et cetera, geopolitical risk, it's all on the ocean. And so I was like, well, if we can know where every single rig count is, why can't we know where every single ship is?

Why can't we track and tag and know every single ship? And the ocean has a problem called dark ships. These are ships that turn off their automatic identification systems called AIS. And then, you know, they're off for many reasons. They're broken or they're too small or whatever. But a lot of times people turn them off to do Nafar-ish shit. Mainly illegal fishing. Mainly sanctions violations.

Sometimes drug running, right? Whatever it is. And so... And for those that don't know, this AIS is like basically a GPS that Coast Guard, whoever, would basically track where they are, what they're doing. Right. It was originally built for collision avoidance, right? Like, so ships don't crash into each other.

But it's grown into insurance companies track them. Like, hey, are you going off path? We didn't insure you for that. What are you guys doing? And so that's it. Knowing, like, I didn't go into the details of the satellite data. It's a data fusion product. There's other data, state data, that gets built into it.

But it is a direct measurement tool. So is tracking every single ship. And there's multiple problems you've got to solve. This is a massive metric fuckton of data that you're downloading to do it from multiple sensors, et cetera. But being a trader, you're trading is dead diffusion, right? There's a supply and demand issues. There's a demand side. You've got to get all these data sources and be like, okay, this is the data.

This is the demand side. And then there's a supply side. You've got to get all that, right, and fuse the data and come up with your opinion, right, of what's going on. And the same thing comes over the ocean, right? So we had this, like, hey, we're fucking, you know, delusion that we can solve it while all these individual satellite operators were trying to solve it. And we realized that they never could. One, they don't have enough satellites up aboard. And two, it's a data fusion problem.

So you have to work with everybody else. So Synmax was born. And it was like, here, you guys go sell shovels. Sell shovels on energy trading. And then go solve this dark ship problem, which we think is like the big, big, big kahuna. Okay? Okay. So one thing when you're trying to build this, you know, that's got to solve 10 problems at once. But one thing you have to do is buy satellite data and train your models, right?

So I'm walking around with a sack of cash trying to spend like quarter of a million dollars, half a million dollars to buy satellite data imagery from operators. And these are people who already have the satellites in the air. Yeah, yeah. So these are commercial operators up there. And there's a disconnect between how you want to buy, which is basically like, here's my second cash. I just want to call up, like, buy it. Fine. Here you go, sir. Here's your sign up.

Here's your API, whatever. Yeah. It wasn't like that. Yep. And I couldn't believe myself because I was looking at, like, some of these guys' sales and their annual sales. I was like, how could they behave this way when somebody is walking in here trying to give them a quarter of a million dollars, a half a million dollars on a fucking experiment? Yeah. It's not even the real product.

it's a fucking experiment to get to the real product right and so um in one meeting where i was trying to buy data uh i i i i kind of like lost it as i do uh and i was like look i like you but i don't understand why the fuck i'm sitting here talking to you like I should be able to just call I could order anything online from cars pizza massage you know I mean groceries you know people buy my friend bought a building on loop net eight years ago he bought a doctor's office in Texas never seeing it in New Jersey on a cap rate right like what the this like what the hell's going on here you know and so I I stopped myself I was like why am I ranting i should just build it like this is the time and so i called my uh my editor from my movie

making days which we still have movie making capabilities all stuff i was like here here's my idea make a commercial and he made a commercial i was like yeah this is it this is what we're gonna do and so at the time we were calling it sat bunny you know what i mean that was the name sat bunny and uh we were like yeah i'm gonna do this and so um why did you make the commercial um you know i i it's an easy way to visualize what it was right like we had this like this is what it is i should be able to order it on my phone like i order a pizza or anything on amazon and like you you select your area you test the sensor you want to do it takes the picture delivered to your phone right like you're james bond like shit you see on movies like there's a satellite right

and so it's easy to visualize right a pitch deck and papers it's for me to visualize and for other people that i'm gonna align and and just work on right like build that see that commercial build that thing obviously it's not going to look exactly like that but this is what we're going to build so everybody got the sim max at the time people got excited whatever and but they're working on oil and gas products etc and i went to my friend josh bear capital factory in in in austin and i was like i'm working on a lot of shit i'm probably going to need to pass the hat around for some money you know sid max is doing this and he goes look this may sound strange you think you're offering a value play by just investing the simax you got to split the two out

he's like they just like one thing right and so sid max or the l anyway that shit out skyfi and it became its own own company right uh people think you were crazy at first hey guys what's going on? I hope that you're enjoying this conversation, but I wanted to interrupt for a quick second and tell you about a brand new conference that I'm hosting on March 4th at the Miami Beach Convention Center. The event is called Lyceum Miami, and tickets are completely free for anyone who wants to come. I'm bringing together many of the most popular guests from the podcast over the last couple of years. Some of the guest speakers that we've already announced are people like Vivek Ramaswamy from Strive Asset Management, or Delian and Mike Solana from Founders Fund,

Chris Williamson from the Modern Wisdom Podcast, Cody Sanchez from Contrarian Thinking, and billionaire Christian Agermeyer, among many others. I've got a number of amazing surprise guests as well, some that you definitely will not expect, and others that come from walks of life that you will be scratching your head as to how I even got them to show up.

But come check out Lyceum Miami on March 4th. The Lyceum was a public gym in Athens, Greece, where people used to come together, talk about ideas, and debate topics that were important to society. I want to meet people in person, in real life, once again, after three years of a hiatus from real life events. And so I'm hosting the event. And as I mentioned, anyone from anywhere can come to this event completely for free. All you need to do is go to LyceumMiami.com and you'll be able to pick up a free general admission ticket. Make sure you claim your ticket in order to get in through the doors.

Lyceum Miami is going to be a great time, so come check it out. Come hang out with me, many of the popular guests from the podcast, and other like-minded individuals. Lyceum Miami, March 4th, Miami Beach Convention Center. I hope to see you there. All right, let's get back into this conversation. No, they thought it was a good idea, but they were like, you know bill you're doing a lot of things you're playing poker you're goofing off you're wake

surfing blah blah blah like how do we saw you on instagram yeah yeah yeah oh my you should hear the oh coming up coming up you should hear the uh the the investor like our investors a headphone like they think i'm a space alien like they do not get it they're like how could you be this good at this thing blah blah blah they expect to have a robot and a suit and a tie and yeah it's all i talk about is you know the fundamentals or whatever and that's it and then i go into a room and then i trade and i'm just like you know there's no amount of money you can pay me to give up my life yeah and that was coming in before they even invested so if you're upset about my instagram or me doing other things that's fine i'm not for you right um just shut up show dame show up and

want to invest because of instagram well a lot a lot of people have missed out on the returns that i've provided because of their stereotypical typical uh ideas of what the hedge fund managers should be doing what their public persona should be etc right they have an idea and a model right of what that should be not this like guy who's like out there doing all these things all these diverse interests twitter battling you know what i mean etc right yeah and i was just kind of like personally you know i'm like fuck that shit dude nobody's gonna pay me not to live my life right and that was the deal and you know they they you know one very large investor came in a bunch of other people who knew me like knew the story of me within centaurus were like no

that that's the guy right for at least trading gas and but the the new people coming in to like hey uh the skyfi thing they're like look you may be the elon musk or there's one other guy who has to S&P 500 companies, but this is a lot. And I agree with them. I'm like, listen, guys, one of my favorite things to do is fire myself. I can't wait to fire myself, right? I want somebody else to do the thing.

I'm more a strategery, have some expertise in a lot of areas. I have a lot of range, but I'm not necessarily the guy. How do you find the guy? Network and friends. And so for SkyFi, I was like, look, I got to get a CEO. And so I had my friend Vivek bumped into this guy, Nikael, and he's all ex-Uber mafia guys. They're like, what you're describing is exactly Uber.

You know what I mean? It's very Uber, large platform, data platform, data analytics. We see it. We get the vision. I had five guys interviewing for the CEO position already. And, you know, I went through it, met Luke, Luke Fisher, who's our CEO, ex-badass, ex-everything, military, was in Uber helicopter, AVA, Stanford guy. I mean, he's just everything. Checks all the boxes you were looking for.

Way better human than I am, right? Like, it's like this guy checks all the boxes, but also got the vision right away. Like, he got my mission, right? And the mission is, like, I don't necessarily care about slinging satellite images. I don't give a rat's ass. What I care about is having an impact on the planet. What I want to do is make it easier for people to have this information so that they can have a meaningful impact on the world, right? Like, it's like when you look back at the Internet, like, when people talk about the Internet, like, what are the use cases?

And they would be like, oh, you can check your stock quotes and read newspapers, right? And it's kind of quaint, right? Like, you can do that. But if you look at the massive impact that democratization of that information has had and the easification of getting that information, it's been amazing. Yeah, of course. Like, in ways that are still happening, right? Like, the discoveries and putting two to two together and the meetings and the doctors on demand

and the health things and, like, and then the applications on top of that. Like, how? Everybody here is searching for monkeypox. Maybe there's a monkeypox outbreak. It's just amazing, and nobody has a big enough brain to give you all the use cases of the Internet when it came out. And so when people say, what are the use cases of Earth observation data? I'm like, look, everybody has access to all this other data.

Governments or very rich corporations now are the only ones who have access to Earth observation data. Right. And I'm not just talking optical imagery. I'm talking about things called synthetic aperture radar. This is a technology that uses radar to create images and gives you a lot more information and see through clouds, see through buildings, stuff like that. hyperspectral. That's basically looking at every single part, taking like a 5 to 10 nanometer gap and looking at how in that color spectrum the object reflects it back.

And when you have like, let's say, 200 slices and you're looking at the reflection, you can chemically fingerprint the pixel. That thing looks black because the chemicals on your shirt absorb all the other light and nothing else comes out, so it looks black. When you look at something green, the chemicals right there absorb all the other light wavelengths and reflect them back. But we can look at, like, green 1, green 2, green 5, green 6, green 7,

and we can see the reflection pattern. And then we're like, you know what? That's polyurethane sorbate 8050, right? Like, you can start doing that. And this is what, like, you know, when scientists, it's multispectral. When they're looking at a planet, like, I don't know, some billion light years away, and it's, like, two pixels, and they use multispectral. They're like, oh, there's clouds and water and argon.

They're like, how the fuck do they know that? It's because they're using multispectral to do that. They're looking at the intensity of the reflection of that single fucking pixel. So imagine you can look down at the Earth and chemically fingerprint everything. Yeah. Right? And so you get amazing applications. Like the big guys fly planes over, and you use hyperspectral to go,

oh, we've got a worm infestation on this side of the crop. We're overwatered here. Not enough nutrients here. Blah, blah, blah. Crop yields go up. But imagine you're a farmer in Africa who doesn't have access to that, but you can take a picture on your phone, and then there's an application layer on top of it,

and it does it for you. Like, holy shit, we've got a locust infestation. What do we do? How big of the like AI, machine learning, all of that stuff is going to end up being positively impacted, not through text only, but through computer vision, through some of these overlays, the machine learning in terms of like image recognition, like all of these other things that seem to kind of with chat GPT and things coming and coming so fast and getting all the headlines, people kind of forgot about all the video stuff, all the image stuff. It seems like, and everyone's focused on the text, but is the image stuff actually more powerful and has more application? I think from a global impact standpoint, it's hard to say which is going to have a bigger impact, especially since, like I said, no one brain is big enough to think of all the use cases. But Skyfi's vision, the first vision is, first, we've got to ease-ify it and make sure everybody can get access to it. Is it cheaper as well?

Yes, it's cheaper. there's two things we we simplify process right like i used to say if i offered somebody i said hey go get a satellite image uh in three days of this or else i'm gonna kill you and your whole family most people would be dead right like 99.999 that's how hard the process was right so we easify the process and then the other part of easification is the price you know satellite images are generally sold on like these like 500 square miles you know 100 square miles like most people the thing they're interested in the problem they're trying to solve is in 25 square kilometers or less so you know we went out and battled the operators and said hey product market fit is not

this thing you're doing like i'm trying to drag you to the promised land of where the real market is and where the real applications are so that's one part of it but if i handed you a phone this newest latest greatest phone with no applications on it it's like listen man it's got this processor and a serial bus and a gps device whatever here you go be useless to like 99 of the people except coders and people how to do that what really unlocks the value of your phone are the applications on top of it right the extraction of the data on it it's like great you got this signal coming from a gps what the fuck do i do with that signal right and so with imagery it's a signal it's a bunch of data right yeah i can give you an optical image and it looks pretty and you can count cars manually

but a machine can do it better machine can do can extract things that you can't even count a machine to tell you the canopy a machine to look at uh slightly offset images and tell you the heights and everything like that right and so the the the the vision of skyfi is one make the data available but two have an application layer an application platform made by third parties maybe one or two by us but that unlock the information out of the data because people don't give a fuck about the image most of the time they want an answer right now the social user like hey i want a picture of my wedding from space to memorialize it i get it right uh but let's say you have a roofing business right and you want to prospect clients you don't care about

the image you just care about how many roofs in this area are damaged or what are damaged so i I can contact them and get a sale, right? Well, they can take a nice image and they'll be like, well, is that roof damage? I don't know. Is this hyperspectral image? Is this all these fucking things? I don't know. No, they just want a computer to be like, this house, this house, this house, this house, this house.

And this is a percent damage on the roofs. And then they send out the letters and be like, boom, right? That's useful to them, right? People want an answer, right? Now, there's certain people that, hey, I'll do it myself. I got my own analysis. But that is the true humanity unlock of the data. And that's all AI, machine learning, you know, all these tools that will come on top of the data, right?

And so that's part of the product roadmap of Sky-Fi. Easeify, easeify getting the answers. And then the third part is storage. Like, people don't want to be downloading gigabytes of files, et cetera. They just want to be able to move them, do the data, have a nice place to keep it. So we see that all as part of our vision on giving people the tools to have a meaningful impact on their world. And that is the mission. Like my friend David Silverman last night, he was like, so do you have a target price you're going to exit this company?

I'm like, target price? What the fuck are you talking about? Like, listen, I don't care. It's not about the money. It's about the mission. Mission comes first, right? And I tell people, mission, you've got to identify what's your mission, and then everything else comes second. Now, obviously, we have to make money in order to survive and grow, and when we have a mission as big and lofty as us, as entrepreneurs, we get a fraction of the value that we create for the world.

And so if we create this thing where people can have a meaningful impact on their world, solve meaningful problems, deforestation, endangered species, et cetera, we're going to get a fraction of the value that we create back. And that's, in my words, in a professional term, a metric fuck ton of money. And so that's what I'm trying to do. Is there a plan or a path to you vertically integrate? Eventually, you have your own satellites up, or do you just want to stay as a marketplace? And one of the reasons it becomes interesting is because the cost of actually launching these satellites is dropping pretty significantly over the last two decades or so. And so eventually, I don't know if it'll be like $20. Right, right.

But for a business, not an individual but a business, it will be pretty inexpensive to get satellites up into space. Is that part of it or do you think you can just stick with being in the marketplace? Yeah, so I'd rather stay out of that, right? Like I'm not trying to go and launch my own network or compete with my providers, but I'll take it even one step further. It gets even cheaper to buy satellites already in orbit. You don't even have to take the launch risk, right? Like you just buy them in orbit. How much does a satellite go for right now?

I was told $5 million. $5 million to buy a satellite already in orbit. Yeah. I was told. I'm not sure. Don't quote me on that. I'm trying to stay away from that side of it. But, like, listen, like, we're on mission, right?

And we rely on our partners, our operators, to provide us data. The same way Netflix relies on the studio houses and the independents to provide content to give to the masses, right? And what Netflix found out is like, hey, we got this buffet and these people feed the buffet, but they're not creating enough content for me. So they were forced to go into the content creation business, right? Because they have their demand to fill, right? And so I don't want to be in that position, but if I am forced to be in that position and our customers on this side, the demand side, are like, hey, I need these sensors or I need X, Y, and Z, then yeah, we'll put satellites in the sky. How much of the data is satellites versus other types of sensors or is it all satellites? Oh, it's a good question.

So there's multiple different types of sensors on satellites, right? I named a few, synthetic aperture radar, hyperspectral, infrared, obviously the optical ones. Everybody knows optical. But we're about Earth observation. So we have partners that are balloons, right? They have balloons that are static, and you get a higher resolution with a balloon. It's long lead task and down, and sometimes it's just archive only, but you get balloons in major cities. we uh partnered with a drone operator right so you can be like i need a drone of this and you

go on the app you task the drone operator the drone operator goes and takes a drone around and you know you don't need a big you know at scale image you need a very sharp drone image uh plane aerial we buoys we don't care yeah so if you can get it it's helpful you'll take yeah our our thing is we're trying to unlock the information of earth observation data and get it to the geniuses of the world so they have an impact on it on it so we are a data marketplace obviously we're starting with satellites but in theory you know if our if our uh our balloon partners we're ready to go our we already have um taskings from one of our plane operators flying around freeport lng uh which is providing information to me so i can understand when this

lng facility that blew up is going to come back online for natural gas trading so that's already going manually but soon it'll be you know automatic you know running it to the pilot get out there take the photo uh whatever i always think of satellites as like uh one of the bullshit detectors in the world yes because um if you go to the most extreme examples like uh in china they have these concentration camps to say they don't have them there's photos that appear to show something if you go to russia ukraine uh in ukraine there's uh accusations by both sides that the other side is doing something or somebody says they're making progress in either direction and then you go and you look and i saw today i don't know if it was you guys or somebody on

twitter had uh taken a satellite image of what appeared to be a cemetery you know six months ago and now it looks like it's like three times bigger and they were basically trying to draw a line between the changes in the in the satellite imagery to hey whichever side uh that's their cemetery obviously people are dying right the cemetery is grown um i saw one i think it was you guys uh sofia bulgaria and they were showing kind of like a almost like a google image or google earth and then uh through you all and so like very quickly you can start to see that like satellites again they're just providing information taking a picture right those pictures sometimes don't exactly correlate to what is being said by people on the ground yeah

yeah i think uh journalism is going to be a heavy user of satellite imagery to uh what's going on And it's also going to be a bullshit detector on greenhouse gas emissions, where you got a lot of guys saying, hey, we did this and we have a carbon offset in this area because we planted this many trees or we shut this down. And, you know, there's a long wave hyperspectral or greenhouse gas monitoring satellites going up and be like, no, that's bullshit. We can see the CO2. We can see the emissions. We see what's going on. Hey, we're a drug free zone. No, we can see the meth labs. We can chemically analyze the area and see the meth running down the street. you know there's all kinds of things you can call bullshit on that's crazy yeah yeah it's that's the that's the stuff that's coming an analysis coming that's capable like the capabilities are there it's not science it's fiction how quickly can you get the imagery so let's say um use like a real

time situation uh everyone has seen uh footage of a police chase and they got the helicopter in the sky with the spotlight right can you get imagery that updates fast enough for that type of stuff or like what how do you think about let me tell you where where we are right now and then where i think the world is going to go in and with respect to satellite imagery latency latency is like how long is it going to take me to like get the order to the satellite the satellite takes the picture and then the image comes back down so right now you have to um you place an order the satellite has to go over what's called a ground station and that's where it shoots up the commands to the to the satellite most of those if not all of them are at the north pole

because they go this way and they go over the north pole multiple times right and it gets it gets its instructions there then you know you route it to the proper satellite that's actually going to go over the the place you want to take in in the time it takes a picture then it goes all the way back around comes back over the north pole and then it downloads the data right so um So that could take, like, 24 hours? 24 hours, 48 hours. We say 48 hours from task to get your order, right? Like, if you're, like, there's no clouds, high-priority tasking,

like, within 48 hours. Technically, we could do it sooner, but the number of operators we currently have with APIs right now, we have a little buffer. We don't want people to piss. You said it was going to be within 24 hours, right? Like, it should be within 24 hours. There is going to be an Internet of Space.

And there's going to be ways for these satellites to communicate each other instantaneously through the ground station, through the other satellites, through the internet, boom, boom, boom. So then you're in a situation where, hey, the satellite's going to be over in 10 minutes. I caught it. I got instructions. It took a picture, and then it shoots you the information back, so within the hour. So it's kind of like in the Bitcoin world, the Lightning Network is this decentralized network of nodes. the satellites essentially act like a node in that situation and they're basically routing this information back and forth and whoever's closest to the north pole gets told here's

instructions to a satellite that's close to these gps coordinates find the one that's closest and that's a clear shot take the photo and then route it back to right that's where i think it's going yeah it's fascinating if that works yeah because well it does work for you know there are certain people like uh i had uh we we tested with one provider and it was like wow we got an order back within an hour like what the hell interesting we were like what are you guys doing and you know there's there's a there's a some internet communication satellites that are like kind of low bandwidth that are already up there so i don't know if they were using that or what they were doing but and also it'd be interesting are they interoperable with other companies or do

they try to keep these like close off they don't play well with each other right now i figured they don't play they do not play nice uh do you guys worry about any sort of like conflict in space like in terms of Chinese satellite and American satellite or maybe two countries? We have Chinese partners. We have Korean partners. We have Spanish partners. We have all kinds of partners, American partners,

depending on sensor, planes, drones, et cetera. And we do worry about geopolitics messing with our mission, right? Because mission comes first, and that's what we're trying to do. And so we're definitely worried about that. We monitor it. We monitor sanctions lists. we're all on top of that we'd like everybody to play nice because i'm about the masses and the businesses getting the information to make better decisions right and actually hold governments

accountable oh you said you were cleaning up this area nah you're not not only did i yeah i could see it optically i looked at it hyperspectral it's not cleaned up you know how much does it cost let's say a journalist wants to write an article uh somebody says they're cleaning up a space and the journalist says i'd love to see you know a photo from six months ago and a photo today is that like a so i guess like 20 bucks and put it on so i say like a 40 centimeter high resolution image 25 square 175 bucks also like pretty inexpensive especially if it's like a single less than a prom photo yeah i did it let's take your prom photo how about that and so and then you know as the higher the resolution you go uh when we get our very high resolutions up there

we have a partner called albedo that's going to 10 centimeter resolution now let me explain what that means because a lot of people like well can i spy on a human i'm like no you can't because that the top of the line resolution that is going up optically is 10 centimeter looking down from space so that means a pixel is 10 by 10 centimeters right like so like that you're not identifying a human from that space you can see that it is a human you just can't see exactly you can see cars you can identify this your computer can do that but like and then you have to know where the person is going to be it is a horrible spy tool on a human being it is a great tool on looking at data buildings uh uh trees trucks pollution are there counting walruses and seeing if they're

endangered you know in places you can't get to it's a great tool for that but it's a horrible horrible spy tool and i can track you much better with your uh ad tech on your phone gps or whatever oh yeah i had tech on your phone or just a guy showing one of the things i always uh think about is uh when i was at facebook in 2014 2015 that's when uh it was like the heyday of internet.org which was their big effort to bring internet to more people on the globe so that they could get internet access but also obviously become facebook users and at the same time you had google was doing um hot air balloons was like their big thing at the time uh facebook was trying to do like self-propelled uh drones essentially right like kind of like you know like the paper

airplanes do with like a kid like do that but just like on a way bigger scale and beam the internet down but spacex eventually is the one who seems to have backed into it right and so there's a couple lessons one is like maybe the first people who try it you know they can't figure out the form factor or whatever and uh uh somebody else does who's watched what they tried and didn't work and then they can kind of innovate um but also space six obviously didn't start out like we're gonna put internet satellites you know and beam it down and so it became more of this idea of like well we know this is a problem we have the capability we've already got the launch cost down fuck it right like just put the satellites up and we'll see what happens oh shit it works well how

many could we put up there how fast could the internet be like you very quickly start to do math and you realize like they built a pretty nice business already yeah to me it's kind of fascinating because everything elon musk is doing is to try and get to mars and they're like it's gonna cost a lot of money to get to mars you know so guys are like oh we're we're gonna have this satellite and we're gonna make a bunch of money he's like no we're gonna do that so we can get to mars you know we're gonna take that money we get to mars it's like oh we're building up these launch costs whatever because we were bringing down launch costs or whatever like yeah that's fine that's a great uh value add to society we saved nasa and the government a whole bunch of

money and launch costs is down and all these new satellite uh providers are proliferating right all these new startups are enabled because of launch costs but it's really to get to mars like everything he's doing you know just backing in like how could he use that to either get to mars or make more as habitable right and that's kind of fascinating right because he's on mission and so it's like oh does spacex fit the mission i mean does uh this internet satellite fit the mission yeah it fits the mission and this is why right and so you know when people like oh elon musk has like 18 you know uh billion dollars or 300 billion dollars or whatever he has you know whatever his net worth is at the time i'm like nah that guy's got about 50 million bucks because all that's

to go to mars you know what i mean like this is his mission his life's mission and so i i think it always cracks me up too like yeah he's worth that but i think a lot of people don't realize that like elon musk does not have 200 300 billion dollars sitting in cash in his bank account he like calls up his bank and is like hey is it still there right i don't think i wouldn't even i wouldn't even i mean i would guess i have no clue i don't think he has 200 300 million dollars in his bank you know why why would he you know no his he is fully invested in his mission and i really admire him for that really really admire him i also um think that when you have the ambition he has but also the capabilities he has when you see lots of cash he can quickly tie if i have access to cash

here's the thing i could build yeah right and so like it's like um kind of if you were to say to yourself there's a lot of firewood if you know how to make fires right and it's cold outside yeah you see the firewood for what it is which is fuel for making the fire and keeping well let's go back to die with zero right like the purpose of the money is to fulfill yourself right like to convert it into the experiences you want to have the purpose of money for him is the experience he wants to have is to get the fuck to mars and and turn mars habitable so when he sees money he's like oh who could i hire that's genius right that that that that will get me to mars or make the planet a better place right so that's his mission right and so the money is converted into those

experiences yeah you know and so if you look at kind of like you listen to him you know i haven't listened to everything he said or you when you sit down and talk to him it's like this guy's on mission he's relentless about the mission you know i did a uh analysis which is uh i googled and i looked at uh companies that he has started now before everyone gets into the huge debate let's just say the companies he's been involved with he started i know that some people like to argue whatever people did on the internet um but if you go down the list it was like you have paypal then you have uh spacex you have tesla you have neural link you have boring uh company and then you have um open ai open ai right so not including twitter or anything just these are companies that

he was around in the beginning right what however you want to characterize it and he's done that since he's basically 20 and he's like 52 or something yeah so the guy is averaging one multi-billion dollar company every five and a half years yeah it's it's kind it's quite impressive i mean i don't know if there's another person in the history who has been able to accomplish something like that no not not at the level maybe an investor has like invested in stuff like the john rockefellers maybe they had a lot of companies yeah but not each individual company was this big yeah and and and the impact right is just amazing right like i i love uh when people talking about tesla in the beginning and you know people buy the stock not buy the stock or whatever

but i was like you know if you if you listen to him like i listen to what he says he's like the purpose of this company is not to make money or whatever it's to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles what a wild fucking success that has been like he fucking knocked it out of the park like with that mission right go stand in any city in america that has any level of density and you will see a lot of teslas yeah but it's not even his car he's like i don't care if ford or somebody else comes like i want to accelerate the adoption i want to blow out the park and now every single one is like holy shit governments everybody is like this was a pipe dream and they pooh-poohed him ford and gm ceos were talking shit about tesla i remember like is it like the

they scoffed at this guy and it's like he's like it's just amazing the the impact he's had whether you agree on the impact or not right like people like electric cars and the devil and cobalt and whatever it's just fucking amazing the impact he's had on the world with respect to electric vehicles. When you think of somebody like that and other business leaders, I was at a dinner over the weekend and a friend threw out this idea. He said, what did Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos know as to why they sold a lot of stock at the end of 2021? Top of market, right? And we started to kind of talk through the details and debate a little bit in terms of kind of why those types of people uh were able to time markets when many hedge funds and others who are that's their job

right it's time to market weren't necessarily successful and one of the conclusions we came to is like they have such an immense amount of information right now some of that information is things like satellite imagery uh different reports all that also some of that information is what i would consider more like human intelligence right yeah a lot of freaking people on the payroll who are really connected who got tons and tons of conversations going on and they're just understanding kind of what is actually happening, whether it's economically, geopolitically, or whatever. And so you start to say to yourself, like,

I've always thought from an inflation standpoint, a company like Square has access to way more information that's more accurate in real time than, let's say, the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But also these guys that everyone loves to yell and scream and hate on, like, actually, maybe we should be asking them for our opinion about stuff. Like, they've got a hell of a lot of information. They see a lot more than maybe other organizations. They see real time what the impact of raising rates is.

are like amazon probably has a good sense of what the consumer demand is a thousand percent a thousand percent right like they understand what's going on they have they have they have a pulse on they have real-time data and they have real-time trends right that's looking back old reports clerks bringing in looking through papers they're like oh no no no this is what's really going on real the bureau of labor statistics there's an article in the wall street journal and i i knew that they were doing this a couple years ago but i figured at some point they had solved the problem. Um, but supposedly it's still going on. I think they employ less than 500 people across the country that literally walk with a tablet into like the

grocery store. And they're told very specific instructions, sometimes multiple pages to describe one product to make sure that you go and you get the Campbell's chicken noodle soup with low sodium. Like it's gotta be the exact one. And then they are in the grocery store and they type it into a tablet and manually input what the price of that item is. And then they go to their next like task and they go find the next product in a different store or a different service or whatever it seems ludicrous since that all these prices are online you can just grab them and then you can actually request the store to post it just it's just kind of you know there's there's the government is not designed to be fast they don't have the accountability that

that a company does a company is not fast and on top of it and getting the information they don't exist right the bls is going to be there whether they fuck it up or not whether it's slow or not and so they're just like this this kind of like we need to innovate we need to be fast we should be doing this better we should be saving money that that doesn't exist as a matter of fact i think there's actually a negative incentive because if you don't use your budget in a program they just cut you of course and so there is a perverse incentive to spend and need more uh to request more budget the next year right like i think one of the welfare programs has more administration uh straight of course than the actual program than the dollars they give out

i i i i i know this is true on one of them i wish i had the name of it right now but it's actually not that surprising right like if you have a small program and you just have people you can't get no but it was a fairly large one it was a fairly large one it was like snap or welfare or whatever It was like it's like the administrative costs exceeded the actual benefits they were doling out. Yeah. Right. And so like it's kind of like supports are kind of like UBI theory. It's just like direct payments to the people and fuck all this bureaucracy or whether you can spend it on this or that. People know how to spend it. But I don't go into that. I want to ask you about oil prices and what's interesting to somebody like me who's very uneducated,

but at least understand some of the milestones over the last three or four years is when we saw the oil futures price go negative, I think it was, right? For kind of the forward delivery or whatever. I think there's a lot of people like, what do you mean oil price is negative? Like, what does that mean? So you kind of learn a little bit, right? In terms of storage and why somebody would sell a contract at a loss and all that. Okay, cool. Got it. Then you fast forward to like Russia, Ukraine, and all these sanctions hit Russia. And you're like, wow, that's probably going to like really screw them up. And then like at the end of last year, I saw a statistic that actually trading with russia on a dollar denominated basis was up because the prices of many of the commodities had

skyrocketed so while there may have been less trading based on other measurements in pure dollar denomination it was actually up like 20 30 percent yeah and then you hear these stories of like germany still has to buy oil so they're not going to buy it from russia or name your country they buy it from this guy who buys it from russia they buy from china who bought it from russia and just marks it up 2x and slaps the chinese flag on it yeah yeah and then you see countries like india who are like i have shit what y'all are talking about we need the oil we need the wheat right we're gonna still keep trading with these people and like we're gonna stay out of the politics of all this yeah how do you as somebody who pays a hell of a lot of attention and actively

trades and stuff how do you process the information that goes on in something just like the oil market and actually get a good handle on like what is going to happen next yeah so um first i want to put a disclaimer i'm a i'm a a leading expert on natural gas i know and oil you know i'm i'm i'm dangerous right like so so put that down but like it's kind of interesting most people those are the same thing unfortunately yeah yeah like go ahead yeah yeah so uh but yeah it's true it's like um you look at like pipeline flows into germany but you know of natural gas because they're like oh no no no russian natural gas but if you look at the lng flows from russia like their way up right so oh wait we put it on a ship you take it but if it's in a pipeline a lot of it

is it's theater right and i don't even know if some of the politicians realize it's theater and so you know we look at the supply and demand balances on global we look at we look at how they're hiding things how they're moving things how the flows are moving you're just redirecting flows and making the system inefficient which actually results in more demand right it's It's fascinating. It's an environmental disaster, right? Like, Russia's right here. You're going to, you know, you can take the crude oil this way, pipeline gas.

No, we're going to chill it first. Then, you know, we're going to put it on a ship, and then we're going to liquefy it and put it here. And so it's like, it's a very, very weird relationship. Like, we're fighting here and giving these guys guns to shoot these guys, but we're buying oil and LNG from them here, but not through the pipeline. and we know it's going to china and then they're they're you know putting it on a tanker and then chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga all the way around it's like i thought we cared about the environment you know i thought we cared about emissions not just co2 but pm10 particulate matter socks and knocks and so you know as a trader we're just like you know fuck the bullshit

let's just count right i graduated eighth grade i can count over kindergarten kindergarten i can count right and so we just count and then like some of us do some more interesting things like we call up our buddies in cinemax and be like show me the ships that are violating sanctions pulling crude oil out of iran and russia and loitering at sea and moving around right which is the tech is something they can do right and so is it big it's a lot it's a lot more than people think yeah and so um you know and they you know i guess you don't necessarily need to do that you can just track all the oil and storage right and try and try and get an idea there right like you use a sledgehammer sometimes you want to use tweezers you know it's very nuanced position

and sometimes it's a sledgehammer position where it's what cracked me up on this is uh singapore i guess a lot of the storage i don't know if it's natural gas or oil or maybe both uh was uh was drastically uh backing up and they were very concerned and i saw a piece i think maybe in bloomberg they were talking about like this is just russian uh oil that is just being sat here for longer periods of time uh and they had a bunch of kind of opinions as to why they were doing it what they were doing with oil or whatever and i was just like man that's like kind of crazy that specific areas in the world are backing up with the storage right the other guys don't have it and etc but like you know as an oil trader you have so many different variables right like you

got all these different areas and you're just trying to look at global balances and kind of that's what they're looking but yes you have these like mini distortions in storage and price etc right these governments create all these price distortions and these incentives some of these incentives are terrible right for the environment uh just in general and and some may be good but That's what goes on. And some people make money trading the spread. And you give people an incentive. The behavior will happen. Incentives work. What about the incentives here, like Keystone Pipeline and all that stuff that to the average person, they will hear a pipeline got shut down, gasoline prices spiked, and whether true or not, they will connect. if we hadn't shut down a pipeline prices would be lower like how do you evaluate i mean people have a like it's like it's like going into a doctor's office of a brain surgeon and be like you know

trying to like guess like oh because this happened that happened and you might get it right or etc but there's it's a little bit more complex than what people say and you know the news is so uh you know i go on cnbc right and it's a good show um you've been on cnbc plenty of times they don't give you that much time right like they'll ask you a question it's like you got to get the the sound bite out right and and a lot of people also don't have a lot of uh time or attention to hear the long explanation and truly understand what's going on and so it's like you know we don't have enough refineries it doesn't matter how much crude is flowing around we have refineries here in the united states of america right we've lost refining capacity in the northeast

right california doesn't have any refineries and it's like they have all these taxes that's why It's always super expensive in California, right? If a refinery goes down there, it's like, oh, my God, right? And so there's multiple factors going on all the time. And the news is like, oh, they just want a simple answer that somebody, a layman, will accept, right? It doesn't even have to be completely true, right? It could be misleading. And that's kind of the world we live in, right?

Like, I think that's why, like, somebody was telling me, like, somebody actually sent me a message. It was, like, a long-form answer I did on Pita Adia. And he has kind of, like, more of a, like, a Joe Rogan-style podcast, right? Three hours all over the fucking place, right? And it's, like, you know, the people that really want to understand something dig into a topic. That's great. But you show up on CNBC, there's going to be a five-minute segment. There's always the hello, how are you, right?

a couple questions you just gotta get it out get it out right you know what i mean and if you're good at getting it out you get invited back if you try to have too much nuance yeah yeah they're like wait this guy fucking boring us with his nerdy ass experience on how refineries work he pulled up a chart exactly they're like get the fuck out of here bill perkins just you know what i mean tell me is it up and down and what stocks do you pick you know what i mean like and that that's kind of the show i forget who it was uh i always say that uh bill ackman and carl icon yelling at each other a couple years ago on cnbc single best moment ever on the history of cnbc but a very close second was i can't remember if it was um uh leon cooperman or ken langone i think

one of the one of the two uh they had uh senator warren elizabeth warren came on yeah and uh he was like i'm a billionaire how did i get a stimulus check and he was like actually like pretty complimentary about a bunch of stuff but like he had this one moment right and he was like asking a politician like how did i get a stimulus check and i remember just thinking like dude where else are you ever gonna see yeah yeah politicians billionaires investors like all like they're interacting and i was just like this is amazing hey guys i hope that you're enjoying this conversation as you probably realize we don't run any ads on this show that's right all the other podcasts all the other youtube shows that you watch

they have advertisers we don't have any direct relationships with advertisers and we simply create this because we enjoy doing it. Now that we do that though, we have a team. And if you'd like to support us, one way you can do that is to go subscribe to the Pomp Letter. It's a daily letter that I write to about 235,000 people about my personal opinion on financial markets,

business, technology, and Bitcoin. Just go to pompletter.com and you can sign up there. I'd love to have you join us. And it's a great, easy way to support the work that the team and I are doing on a daily basis. all right let's get back into this conversation yeah they have they have a they have a great show and they have great great uh soundbites but i i you know i get i get a little frustrated with the sloganeering you know i mean like even on twitter and and the short count etc it's like

people throw out a slogan right and and it's like oh if i identify with that slogan he's just right i like it you know whatever without really going into like the policy is it really effective right and so i think people have gone the opposite right they're like party first then policy then people and it's like no people first then policy then party you're talking about the difference between rationality and tiktok brain exactly exactly like literally i think that tiktok brain has like infected a very large portion of the audience and they literally cannot think yeah yeah it's like yeah every you know all these different i'm not even going to say them because i don't want to get by the mob but there's like all these slogans i'm like oh really does that is that how does

that work yes is that really effective does that really help the people you're talking about but people use the slogans because they work right like i i'm a big believer that the market will ultimately find the things that work and the reason why people keep using all these different slogans whether it's for political reasons for financial reasons for social justice like all across the whole spectrum of every single freaking topic in the world they use the slogans because they work yeah like let me come up with the tribalist what gets the tribe riled yeah you draw a line in the sand and you say us versus them yeah yeah and you just like say tribalist things like you know whatever it is you know and so and which which then everybody starts to adopt

that format and we don't get like deeper understandings correct anything all right there's one more thing i want to talk to you about so uh in fishing and in chess yes there's been a bunch of fucking cheating scandals yes the fish the fish video but is by far the craziest one they're slicing open the fish for those haven't seen it there's a fishing tournament there's these two guys who had i guess gone on like a pretty crazy run they'd won a bunch of tournaments and at the one fishing tournament it's kind of like filmed on a phone from far away and then they get closer and they slice open the fish and there's weights that have been put into the fish which obviously make them way more and therefore add up to more weight that you have fished which

means you win the tournament right and so it comes out these guys are like yeah we did that uh are bad essentially and they're like no that's cheating i don't know kind of where it's gone from there but like it was very obvious there was cheating involved in the chess world there's talk of like anal beads or some sort of vibrating something like whatever weird shit's going on in chess but there was a lot of cheating scandals there was some of the major players were like quitting matches because they thought there was cheating going on magnus famously uh like play one move and just left left right what is going on in poker there's no talk of any cheating in poker from what i've seen well there's there's or is there talk yeah there's definitely talk uh there

there's what are the accusations or like the things that people think happen and like what is your analysis in terms like is there cheating to the degree that the fishing and chess people seem to think in their industries in poker or there's not as much of that definitely online uh they're constantly rounding up cheats people colluding real-time assistance it's a problem because now that you know the computers you know poker is a game of skill for all you congressmen lawyers out there otherwise we would be able to beat computers right like that you cannot beat the computer in poker right and heads up right over time like and so um so people people have real-time assistance etc online and in live poker what is a real-time assistant like what do they

Oh, so that means basically a computer is helping you and telling you what to do while you're playing. So you may have it on like a different computer. A different computer. And you're like feeding it. Yeah, you're just feeding it and you're just doing that. Or you actually have it plugged in and it sees all the action and it just tells you what to do. Which if you were a cheater, that sounds like a pretty good way to cheat. Oh, yeah.

It's like the computer just tells you what to do. Yeah, your RTA is a big problem in online poker. And they're able to detect it? Yeah, they're starting to detect it. So, you know, it's like an arms race, right? then these guys have these like poker detectors it's like you know what's the odds that this person would actually make these correct plays at these frequencies etc okay you're out of here you know what i mean like that type of thing so they don't have to prove it it's more of a

probability game for many times well yeah you can statistically prove it right yeah uh what what what can a human do and then you can look at them at different scenarios where they weren't cheating and be like oh this is how you played here versus a computer score and then here you played in this you know in this scenario where it's you know you can use a computer and then you like that's code for you sucked and now you don't yeah yeah yeah exactly exactly so you're a piece of shit and then i look at you a champion um no dude i read a poker book yeah and then you have these uh live game cheatings where people like when you play a live game and they're being streamed you know the the back has knows what cards you have oh so there's there's there's there's been accusations

of people getting signaled of what people have cards from the back office or capturing the you know you know these these guys have loosey-goosey security and you know there was a criminal who actually a known felon who was in the back one of these things and this lady got accused of receiving signals on the stream it looked like a chair was vibrating there was all kind of yeah yeah and and it was like the weirdest weirdest situation where it was like you would never call you would never ever know ever play that way in a hand unless you were monkey tilted and you just didn't give a shit about money right and and even the words that she used like didn't make any sense right and so and so there was this huge like you had to

been cheating type thing the guys who she beat in the hand you know freaked out and the whole community freaked out and you know she's not that great of a poker player uh she would admit that i'm not dissing her right and and so and her story was like you know i was just nervous and whatever it was a lot a lot of like things like pressure and just goofing off and you know on her side like when you play tv poker it's not real poker i mean it's real poker but it's like you know you're being streamed you know you want to do some goofy shit right because you want to look like a badass on tv like the weirdest shit happens on tv poker that doesn't happen like say when the cameras aren't rolling right there's more of a performance and so you think she was

cheating i don't know man i went back and forth i went like from like 80 90 she's cheating to like nah it's just one of those weird things you know and so i i don't know and i and i realized like it was it was just taking too many too many of my neurons like why the fuck are my neurons here i'm off mission i'm definitely off life if it came out and was proven without a shadow of a doubt that somebody was cheating would it change anything that you did in poker i mean i'm very not play in certain tournaments yeah there's certain things like they're like oh you got to come play at this place where there's cheating come on i'm like wait a minute they they they fuck this up they did this they did that all these weird things happen like why am i gonna go sit and play there

And they're like, no, we'll have a lineup that we trust, and it'll be people we know, and we'll 100% correct it. But it's a turnoff. Yeah. It's a turnoff. You know what I mean? Like, it's not sexy. You know, it's not fun. And, like, you know, I play poker to socialize and meet all kinds of interesting people, to test my skills against other people, and to win, right?

and to realize like you take one of those away i don't really want to play yeah right so i don't want to go play with uninteresting people even if i'm going to win i don't care i you know like i don't want to play in a lineup where i'm going to get killed so i had to get better and learn right and you know i mean and i don't want to test my skill sets so will you play in any game where there's good players or is there kind of like uh tiers where you're like yeah i'm better than you know tiers five four and three but the tier one folks maybe i'll set those out i'll just i'm not afraid of any i'm not afraid of any lineup do you play them all yeah i mean i i and honestly i've always been that way so before i was saying it's just like i don't give a fuck i'm goofing

off it's a lot you know i'm playing i'm trying to get lucky as opposed to win a skill but i've gotten better in poker because it was becoming a very expensive hobby and now i'm to the point where like fuck you let's go you know what i mean like i how did you get better um there's a company called hybrid poker right uh there's two founders called uh well i'm a co-founder but i'm a small piece um called matthew gonzalez and matthew boyd and they trained me interesting right i'm a very bad student because i got a thousand things going on and poker is not like the highest priority on my life but uh somebody challenged me online and i was like oh you want to challenge me you want to see what this old dog can do so i actually went into the lab study they trained me um and you

know he was spotting me some big blinds but i was going to beat him out right anyway and they quit i won the challenge right because they quit because i was a lot stronger than they thought i would be um and and how long does it take to get better was this like it was a lot an hour it was no no no no it was at the time they were training me it was like every day i had to play then there was hand analysis and then there was study and you know god bless my fiance she was my fiance at that time she was like okay you know like at 10 11 o'clock at night i'm doing two hours of hand review and then you know every time you know practice play study practice play study and i was like this is a real fucking job um but you know my pride was on the line my ego was on the line so

like let's go and so i told them i was like guys everything you're teaching me should be codified and it should be a game i should learn by playing and so now they built this app where you can learn by playing and it teaches you gto and how to play a gash game or whatever and they'll add stuff and it's a beautiful ui it's it's great so hybridpoker.com for all you poker cash games like you want to crush your poker cash game go to hybridbroker.com shameless plug uh but that's that's how i got better and and i'm you know i got better and i'm a shitty student like i am i'm like just distracted right like i had to you know i put my time in there but over time if i if the incentive is not high i'm like i'm not gonna go study you know what i mean like you know people

say well what's your hack and i was like uh what's your you know when it come to me with trading this is an example i had a potential investor come in come talk to me and they were like well what's your edge and i was like my edges i fucking study you know what i mean like i study every single thing i obsess over this it's like going to harvard and be like well what's the edge of the kid who's an a student he fucking studies you know when you came to engineering school in college that guy got an a and i got a d you know i mean barely barely passed because i was running around chasing girls trying to play football not trying to study and he studied right and so now the game is going to be amongst those who's the you know the wizards are going to be those who study and

put the time and effort into it right and you know i put in enough effort to be like a c student in poker now c plus if something's going on you know i'll jam it and then you put the cameras on me and i can't help it i love the goofball i cannot help it i cannot help myself i love to do weird shit so like i am a i'm a uh i'm a i'm a favorite to do some crazy shit and if it works i'm gonna win big money if not how much money have you won you think are you up no no no in tournaments i'm up lifetime like tournaments i take a little bit more seriously yeah because the pain of spending two days in a tournament not getting knocked out and not getting any money is just like enough negative incentive to be like i'm going to take this seriously and so um i

actually have a very good roi in these high rollers and and these uh uh tournaments in cash games uh i'm terrible i mean like my lifetime is negative but yeah i guess you're fucking around i'm fucking around and and you know the worst game is omaha i don't know if people out there know almaha i love and hate that game you know what i mean i had a guy come on uh the show who i won't name um he played poker i think he was like very good at poker um probably somebody you would know and uh he after the conversation you know cameras are off everything and uh uh he says to me uh you play poker i was like not with you and he goes uh no no we we should uh play some time you know invite some of your friends we'll go it's a good time you know i'd be chill whatever and i thought

for a second i was like that's what this that's how this guy makes money is he's not going to professional players he's going to play with my friends games in cash games game selection is the is the biggest part right like it's not like you know my friend dan right dan blazarian you know everybody was like you couldn't have made that much money playing poker blah blah blah you suck and it's true dan is not a good poker player like i i would destroy dan playing poker like he's he's not that good but he just played people worse and richer than him yeah right like he's just got to be better than the guys he's playing against right and so he killed it right he killed it how much do you think he made or how much does he claim well i know i know i know no

i know he made 50 million dollars playing poker i know that 50 million yeah i know he made 50 million playing heads up against one guy oh against one guy and like against one guy one guy and then he and one game and that one game like over a series of games yeah uh and then i know uh how much money does that guy have he's a billionaire yeah if you lose 50 million playing against one guy you probably should stop playing that guy yeah except you know these guys have cash flow 250 300 million dollars a year like this is their whatever they're they're old guys they're gonna die the money's gotta go somewhere and they're entertained playing poker there's guys who actually literally they think this whole living there's people who were 75 100 million

dollars multiple playing one guy who likes to play poker there's one guy right interesting he and he likes his menagerie like you know there's certain people that like to have famous people around them pay them to come and be on their yachts and do shows and sing and there's certain people that like like to play poker and they want to see if they can beat the best or beat guys and goof off and um how much of like the professional players lifetime earnings whether known or unknown do you think comes from playing like these whales that are not professional versus the tournaments i would say very little because the professional guys never get into those games so if you become like the wizard like you're like a uh an ike haxton or or or or so-and-so like at that level

but you don't have any fame or cachet they have no reason to sit down with you interesting you're So if they know they're not going to win and it's not like a moment to flex. No. A Phil Ivey or a Phil Helmuth or a Daniel Negreanu may be able to get in some of those games maybe once or twice because it's like, hey, I want to meet the famous guy and I want to play poker with him. But they're not going to be able to get $200 million, $150 million out of the billionaire class of poker. right the guy who's like very good very solid who's not a pro right that's willing to stake but interesting right they're going to become centi-millionaires or you know and are they entering these games with their own money that they could lose or they getting staked by people

uh they some of them are or their own um money that they can lose but most of them are getting stake than selling off pieces like they used to say like oh when so-and-so wins all of new york hurts right because sometimes they win and like all of new york feels it right like i felt it one where i i i had a piece of somebody that was going to play in one of these games and they they happened to lose and was just like shit you know write a check god damn you you know what i mean like but but uh you know and that's the game right like the billionaire is like oh i'm gonna put pressure max pressure on you like i'm gonna hurt you guys you know like they're just having fun you know i mean they're just having fun and to them it's not nearly as high stakes yeah no no

no it's small stakes like if it's like the easiest way to win money off of me in a poker game is put me in a low stakes poker game because you don't care and i'll lose like the most ever possible for the level of blinds like like it's like wait we were only playing one two how did he lose fifty thousand dollars you know it's like because you're goofing off you're having fun you're putting people in pressure and they're figuring you out right like you're completely out of balance you're not playing gto you're just having fun and then the next thing you know you're like oh wow i'm in the hole i lost 50k you know in high school i knew i was not good at poker but a bunch of friends like to play and my only uh strategy to try to win i tell my cards fucks with people like i would

literally and of course sometimes you lie yeah right and then they would never know they're like you know you tell them three four times you flip the cards over after the hand or you win whatever and like they're like this dude really telling us his cards and every once in a while you get home right and you probably don't win nearly as much as if you're just good at poker but uh i used to enjoy the like mental fuckery exactly you can put on your friends right i know that feeling of them being like wait a minute this dude told me he had an ace when we started he won't tell me what his second card was you know okay fine i fold he only flips over the ace but he won't show me the other like all that kind of stuff yeah and i used to enjoy it but man do your

friends get pissed yeah i used to yeah you you i used to when i was first playing and goofing off guys go all in and i'd be like look if you don't have a pair i don't have a pair but i'll call you if you don't have a pair so they have ace king right obviously right yeah and i'll have like seven eight you know what i mean like off i'll be like fuck it 60 40 let's go you know what i mean like let's let's try and get lucky you know and they're just they'd just be sitting there sweating like holy shit you know just because i like the the the pressure i was just a degenerate what's the biggest hand you've ever played uh i don't know like one two million dollar pot 2.5 million dollar pot you know so that's like a million of my money

a million of their money yeah i mean did you win no just recently happened in omaha motherfuckers really yeah it's so like uh i mean it's just a sick game sick sick game but uh what's the biggest hand you've seen someone else play well i i was so i was in i was in london this is a funny story i can't tell the names okay but i was in london playing omaha and i was like i'm gonna check your instagram i'll know exactly who it was yeah yeah so so these so these degenerates are playing i'm like i'm gonna go to the box i want to be a real degenerate let's go to the box london it's a fun place like how can you guys just see here all day it's like three days of playing cards i'm like i'm going to the box you guys come to box in and out so i go to the box

i come back they're like oh my god you missed it we had a 10 million dollar pot this guy you know they go through all the thing to like the one of guys goes listen don't put your money in okay i have aces suited and or whatever like don't put your money in the person knows they have aces at least aces but not double suit it knows he has aces they go put your fucking money in or fold because they re-raised and they re-raised and they're like put your fucking money in front i was like i'm telling you i have aces i they had to show them they like literally tell them i have aces right like a big pot you're not fucking with somebody and then the other guy has to call because it's possible but so they have this like 10 million

dollar pot the person who has said put your money in fucking fold to the guy hey he said had king spiked the king on two boards almost scooped the whole fucking pot but the other luck box guy over here you know river to fucking run a runner straight and chopped it so they they've split like 4.5 million dollars that's the that's the biggest spot i've i've could have been part of i wasn't there glad i wasn't there because i probably would you know you're probably like well shit i gotta call it's for the story exactly i gotta call too much money syndrome you know what i mean so omaha brings the sickest degenerates out yeah you know but like it's got to be fun though right to like sit there for three days and play i mean it's a lot of fun i mean i enjoy the

people um you you get to talk and and and have a lot of time with people that you like uh and love um but it also gets tiring like we can have fun doing other stuff like let's go see some sick twisted demented shit at the box london and then go out or whatever you know i want to go to frameless and see this digital art museum which is cool you know what i mean and so that's part of my whole like be balanced life you know like what experiences do i want to be having and like yeah playing poker with my friends and goofing off and trying to hurt them financially you know but not too hard but not too hard right is is uh is fun but i i also you know want to have these experience and these other experiences you know parties as a matter of fact one of the uh people

is like all right perkins next time i promise you we're gonna go out we're gonna actually have this experience i know what you want we're gonna do it i said okay we'll play poker we're gonna do it deal yeah where can we send people to find you on the internet who uh who don't already follow you on instagram yeah yes oh gosh so if you're not a gosh if you if you guys like want you know to i'm on twitter where's the professional bill and then where's the party bill uh party bills on instagram i'm bill perkins um i'm i'm less party on twitter yeah uh i'm at bp22 um and i'm more i have another account which is uh us energy usa energy nat gas um which is all just natural gas talk right i had to separate them out like but what's this fucking hot take you have about

like libertarian politics and shit like that get the fuck out of here i read through your twitter account before you came this day and there was like normal normal whoa okay and i was like i think i found some of the more hot takes than me yeah yeah like he comes in you know getting out you know but one thing is good though about twitter is like i will people have changed my mind like i have conceded arguments like i'll be like i concede you're right you know yeah and i get value out of that but a lot and that makes people want to uh engage the next time because they're like look he's gonna fight like hell in this argument but if i make a good point he will change his mind and i actually think people over time learn who does that on twitter and who doesn't

yeah and the people who don't eventually be just like dude fuck off like i just find it worth it yeah yeah i use it for the exchange of ideas and i debate to come to an answer sometimes just debate to like just be right right like i'm trying to get to an answer or a better solution and a lot of times you know your biases or your entrenched beliefs or etc like we're really just arguing some sort of philosophical belief that's probably not going to change yeah but sometimes it's really like oh no you're right this policy is a better policy or yeah right like i i have been swayed over here on this situation right and so um that's why i write in the mornings and i get emails back and like sometimes people send me an email and i'm like wow that was like very thoughtful and like

they included links yeah whenever you see the hyperlink you're like oh fuck they got they got like or at least like i didn't probably see that yeah right and so like maybe it doesn't even prove what they're actually saying but you just know that like they really care because they took the time to go find the link and hyperlink you yeah all right fine i'll read it yeah i've gone i've gone through that and i actually i purposely i have a lot of accounts i follow that are completely way out of my political spectrum like i don't agree with like 80 or 70 to say or not that i don't agree what they say like they correctly identify the problem or the issue but their solution i'm like 90 against it or whatever but i don't want to be in an echo chamber yeah of course

and twitter allows me not to be an echo chamber and i'm like okay i i get this perspective i know where they're coming from i feel their pain you know you know i just don't necessarily agree with their their their solution and so i enjoy that aspect of it because i i link in uh lincoln i liken um uh it's kind of like when you're a parent you love the kid but mom and dad have drastically different ways and ways no don't do that he's gonna turn into a pussy we gotta we gotta you know like blah blah blah you know no no you have to do this way right like and so it's like that's kind of like america right like like we all like and you know except on twitter we start to demonize each other right like no you're just a fucking racist blah blah

blah oh it's easy to say you're a rich guy blah blah i'm like no no no i care about this kid and i think this is the best way to raise you know to get things done in america and so you know i think um that understanding on twitter is kind of missing it's i think that uh there are people that want to burn it down of course of course but i think it's missing um and so it you end up valuing the people who you know are there for the same reasons yes right and those are the people you want to read those are the people you want to engage with those are maybe you don't even do it publicly you may dm them or whatever right but like you very quickly over time realize like what's worth your time and what's not yeah and uh if you're new to twitter it's very hard to do that

and then also like i always see somebody will like join twitter who's like well known or something they'll tweet stuff and immediately they're like responding to everyone like this amazing right like i gotta like interact with people and then they have like a hater and like you see them respond and you're like oh no don't do this and one of the one of the best ones that is similar to this do you remember when uh steve cohen uh got on twitter and somehow he got in an argument with dave portnoy no no portnoy said something and cohen like responded but like was kind of like going after him like kind of playing the card like i'm a billionaire or whatever and and like said something like let's take this offline and dave like quote tweeted him it was

like uh nah that's where like shady shit happens you want to have a conversation like out here in public and i was like dude steve put the phone down like there's no bank account that's getting you out of this one and next thing you know like he like deleted his account a couple days later or that day or whatever right and of course like the internet you know there's a fucking war when it comes to it was like you know portnoy and the barstool guys that came back with a billionaire's head they were like we like literally bodied them off the internet how about when they tried to uh like they sent the reporters out for portnoy about like rape or sex or something and he had receipts you know what i mean like they and i was like he was right like i think it was in business

insider that went after there was a couple of them but it works in both directions because like you have that and then on the other side uh cnbc uh they were staying outside the twitter headquarters and i don't know if you saw the two kids uh oh yeah that was two guys whatever yeah like i was like the second you saw you're like genius like they got them and the tweet you like check a couple times throughout the day like is the tweet still up tweet still up they haven't realized it yeah and the internet is like on fire yeah right because they're like i cannot believe someone tricked the reporters and like again there's enough stories like eventually somebody will get tricked whatever but uh it does oh yeah they get me sometimes they

got me they're like guys they're like uh this is a parody account i was like oh oh see that that's how they get you right that was my uh my prompt for uh quality time with my wife well that's what we're doing right now yeah we don't know so so no no like i generally like you know it's a lot a lot of life is behavior design like people like how'd you lose all this weight whatever and i was like you just designed for success yes and so like internal prompts or reminders are the worst and so just a lot of it's just like set a prompt set an alarm um i also think um was it james clear in atomic habits he talks about uh you can actually set the habit not by doing the full thing you want to do but like if you want to go to the gym even if you just go for five minutes and you

do that every day day after day after day after day eventually you stay for 10 minutes 15 minutes 20 minutes like and now you're a person who goes to the gym and you don't have to invest two hours to get started whereas if you put the two hours in like you're probably not going to stick with it i agree i agree here right yeah part like it's like i'm so scheduled and i have a full life like i need like to design my life to to have this level of productivity that i want and that i enjoy I have to one I have to delegate I have to hire smart people I gotta fire myself all the time like you're fucking fired

and then I have to have prompts I have to have a lot of prompts what else do you have prompts for? everything I have prompts for like go work out go do this call my friend you know what I mean check this a lot of the prompts are like already on my phone

fucking twitter notifications must twitter battle I actually just decided I actually just decided to delete my chess app i saw you tweeted that yeah because um that's something i can do later in life and enjoy and it's taking away from time uh for activities i should be doing now with friends or whether it's poker or goofing off or etc how many hours a week were you spending on the chess app i i need to go do the analysis but it was too much and it was like infrequent like i'll have six or seven

games going you know three day games whatever and then at late at night i'd be up at night doing speed chess battles forever yeah because speed chess is so goddamn addicting and i was just like i should be sleeping i should be thinking about something else these neurons should not be dedicated to this puzzle it should be dedicated some other puzzle yeah right whether it's a social puzzle of like how do i get closer to my daughters or uh or like a business puzzle in skyfi or sim max at a very high strategic level or what do i think about supply and demand balance in october 23 for natural gas like these neurons were getting sucked up and i'm like they don't i can play chess until i'm 95 online like i do not need to do that i need to be connecting

with people and using these neurons for other things so i'm just uh i'm gonna do have the courtesy to finish the last three games and then i'm gonna delete the app till for another 10 or 15 years i love that i mean i will play live like when i sit down with dan um we play live that's another social you play chess or you play poker yes we play chess we just sit around honestly like people think when i like uh go to go to his house like there's girls and there's orgies and whatever it really is just playing chess and talking about life like what is it what is love the difference between love and fear and and connection what do you think you learned from dan bilzerian and what do you think he learned from you oh wow that's a good question um

let me look at dan well one thing is he taught me i did not want to be famous at his level and so right after i got divorced right there's this whole formula to getting famous in the way he was doing it right it's like show your life create a thirst trap have all these girls around people don't care about this post that blah blah blah then you can move on to other things and you have this big fame platform and i was of the ilk that once you have a fame platform you can you know natalie portman's not the expert but they have her speak in front of congress right like Charities will be like, get the famous guy on, et cetera. And so I felt like it was powerful and monetizable, right?

Very monetizable at a very high level. And what I learned from Dan is that you can monetize it in sex. Like, that is the number one monetization of fame is that you can have sex on demand everywhere and people will come to you. More powerful than money by 100x, okay? uh but the things i like to do um travel the world walk walk around streets etc would be taken away from me forever like when i'm hanging out with dan we go out we're in italy we travel we cannot walk anywhere we're like oh look at this alley and these bars or whatever he's like i can't do it because can i get a picture can i whatever we're talking whatever we're like we'll

be having a conversation like yeah my dad died and i really didn't get along with him and blah blah blah and just constantly harass and it's like and then not only did they want a picture people naturally want to try and connect so they want to tell a story about how they know you and it's just like oh my god can we just enjoy ourselves and it's like famous people hide like they can't do the things i want to do like they can't go biking through europe and they can't do that and i was like i would basically give up my entire fucking life to create this fame thing And I was like, no fucking way. No fucking way.

Like, I just, I'm not that horny. You know what I mean? I'm just not that horny. And so I learned that. He ran that experiment, and we learned that, and a couple other things. You think he regrets it? Huh?

You think he regrets it? Oh, a thousand percent. Really? He will tell you. It's a cage. You've literally become a boy in a bubble. Like, you think J-Lo can just go walk around Brickell and be like, look at the stops? No.

Any famous person that you can think of, like, of, like, that recognizability can, like, walk around, go in a restaurant without getting harassed. You know what I mean? They just surround themselves with the people they already knew from the hood or the boys or whatever. And then they hang out with other famous people because they know, well, you're not trying to get famous. You know, you're not going to fanboy me, fangirl me, right? So they can just, that's it, right? So they have a way worse quality of life than somebody who makes like $40,000 a year because they can't explore the planet and enjoy it. I mean they can explore it, but they're in a bubble.

They're on somebody's yacht, and they can't go this way. There's security guards. They can't have these authentic experiences, going here and going there. like yeah they have these gilded bubbled cookie cutter life that every single rich person can have but they don't have the rich experiences of like the not being anonymous affords you right yeah and so i was like oh fuck no i dialed it back there goes you know just my diary like it's just my regular life you know my kids my family my dog i'm traveling here flying there or whatever and so i learned that like that was like a hot stove um and it's helpful when you have famous

friends because then you can like you know hey let's go somewhere i need the fame right or like the fame is going to be helpful yeah but your friend is yeah you can you can like they can help you or whatever but it's like it's it's really not it's really like it's extremely hard to monetize the at the the wealth i'm trying to create right or i was trying to create um i didn't see the path you know i mean like i look at like you know what did tom brady make last year and what did giselle make like giselle's way richer you know i mean like did i look at i look at like other famous people and it's like oh that's that's nice that's quaint like i'm not i'm i have bigger dreams than that right like and they had to go tap dance whatever and then now

they can't walk around like they're hiding from the crowd all the time they can't have like even like think about mike phelps right that motherfucker was mobbed all the fucking time we would walk around like i couldn't go anywhere we sat down and we were literally having a deep emotional conversation we're constantly getting rough and people they think like oh it's only five seconds it's only whatever it's like every raindrop thing because it's only raindrop but it's a fucking tsunami out here you know what i mean like you're sick of the fucking raindrops right and so and then if you don't take the picture or do the thing or pause you're the asshole or whatever you know what i mean and so like i was like this is horrible and like

like how much could he possibly monetize that in the olympics and the wheaties commercial you know what i mean like fuck that shit yeah but i also think it's um uh those individuals who end up obtaining fame many of them they were focused on something else and they get the fame there are some people who they want the fame for the fame sake and they think they can monetize and all that uh but when you actually look at how much money you make uh one it's not that much but two is the people who do make a lot of money from the fame just end up doing the thing that the rich people who aren't famous do end up building companies or making investments well it's like it's like it's like i was like wow everybody became a rapper to become a vc you know what i

mean like just skip the raps like nas is making all this money as a vc snoop is making all this money as a vc shack as a vc like i'm like the uh uh what's his name from um used to be married to demi moore has a vc company um ashton kutcher yes yeah yeah i mean like he's like actually pretty good you know so so he they are monetizing their fame correctly they're using it to call up these hot vcs and like hey it's ashton kutcher well guess what the you know computer nerd is going to do he's going to take a phone call from ashton kutcher right like everybody's trying to get into his company you know beyonce calls him or so-and-so calls them they're gonna get in so like naz or whatever like fucking naz call me and then they can bring our brand out there on the

platform so we'll get like this free advertising and so these guys get in equity in these companies and they kill it like 50 cent on vitamin water you know like they realize like oh this is the real money right this is the real money like i was actually uh basically an hourly employee you know being a singer whatever you know i had a little piece of my record deal or whatever but i can invest in a company and it can that was an exit you know that's the real money right or uh i just read this book uh by zach greenberg about uh jay-z and what he talks about is there's a number of products over the years that jay-z would rap about and there was a bunch of controversy over whether he had relationships with the brands or not and uh some of them like uh the champagne

things like that eventually it did come out that he had the relationship but for years people didn't know and so what he would basically do which i think he learned from damon dash is he would go and he would do the deal and then rap about them yeah and it would be kind of a nonchalant you know in a line or something whatever and then he would be sitting there just making money because he recorded one time it's playing over and over and over again on the radio that brand becomes a thing and like look at this genius he's not just getting paid on the plays he's also getting paid not in like traditional advertising dollars just getting the equity in companies that benefit from being included in a song which then other rappers want to rap about and like it's like a whole thing

yeah 100 i mean like like you know this thing adidas and run dmc but they already had the song but they brought the adidas executives and they saw my adidas and everybody takes their fucking adidas oh fuck we're in the rap game and so like it's powerful right because it's culture right and people do that and i just want to point out like when a company gets a 10x multiple every extra dollar you get 10x so like that's a big difference when you can move the needle with your frame like so that's the proper monetization you know dan is monetizing his fame in sex pussy right whatever can i say pussy on this show you can say whatever you want okay so he's monetizing it that way and just like i don't have that type of sex drive like i don't this is like this is like completely a

disaster and even if i could you know i'm fortunate enough to like i have a skill set that i've developed to like trade and make money in other ways right so like i can be z level famous which is perfect like one in 300 people recognize me right like one in 400 right like you know people who even before like poker or whatever like the nat gas community they they know who i am right and then you know the poker community kind of knows who i am right like they know me and so like and now the twitterverse and other reasons some people but it's it's it's it's enough where it's like get a little ego stroke you know what i mean maybe you'll get a restaurant reservation but like i can actually go backpacking and walking around or enjoy i can enjoy planet earth not where i

I can't walk around and enjoy planet earth and I always have to be like security guarded and hanging around only famous people and always in a bubble and only go to these places I also think about uh the thing you become famous for so like um there's the you're too famous right like messy he can't he's not going anywhere in the world right uh the jay-z's the you know dance whatever like yeah like they're recognizable uh and there's such a big audience that people want to talk to him um but also there's a way that some people get famous but they get famous in like kind of a cool way so uh i heard casey nest that uh i don't know if you know this guy he's on youtube he's got a you know a couple million subscribers uh became like a pretty well-known uh documentarian and uh

filmmaker and all this kind of stuff uh and he was like he loves new york because he was like in new york his just like kind of vibe yeah was super down to earth yeah so he'd be going down the street be like okay see what's up but they wouldn't mob them they wouldn't you know like do all the crazy stuff and so it was like kind of the energy he was putting out in the world also set kind of the relationship with the audience right yeah and so if you're the one who's walking around and you're getting driven around in all the cars and the security guards all this people are social animals man yeah they're just like oh i guess i'm supposed to mob you yeah we're social herd animals right i mean we're and so yeah that that that goes on but so that's what i learned like i do not

i was gonna get the pr machine and create the fame game and try and play that and i realized and you hit the eject needle fucking scratch like you need to completely change my mind about the fame thing um and then uh i guess you know what dan has been learning from me is that like love is the answer you know like i you know like dan um not fear and like not control you know what i mean like i think like you know he's had a relationship where he he's been hurt and you know what i point out to him like his wall is control you know not letting go being in control right which is fear-based fear-based living of course and and you know trying to break down that wall and and stop the circus right like just letting them know like the circus is robbing you of your

life so you said you'd smoke them in poker who wins in chess oh he won't even play me in chess anymore he's gonna listen to this and be like fucking bill went on this podcast he might he might got he might have got better you know he's he's not terrible but like i i actually had like two lessons uh it's amazing like if you get like two lessons uh or three lessons um how you just like think a little bit differently about the game and then like he was just like you're getting lessons and you're playing all the time i'm not playing you anymore like a beat them and i was just like that shit you know he might play but like let's go play like you know we'll get out hang out uh you know do stuff and just talk talk live play games now now he likes to play you know

we'll play mario kart because he can smoke me a mario kart and he can absolutely smoke me in like that zombie game where you get game selection oh yeah he's game selection yeah and he's like literally like he's really really really good at paintball interesting really good like it's like unfair if dan's on your team got it where can we send people to find more about skyfi too skyfi so yeah we actually want to talk skyfi like so skyfi you want to go to skyfi.com okay that's it skyfi.com they're skyfi.app on twitter um that's where it's at you know um and anybody you know i want to say like plug shameless plug everybody out there has has value and has a problem that they can solve if given the information right there's a lot of people like some of them have no interest right

and there's cause they care about and like when i get the information and tools uh in your hands you'll be able to make an impact right and so as we go down our product roadmap not only would be like cool i can order satellite and look at this it's like you know i really care about pollution in this area or i really care about the amazon i'm going to monitor this area for illegal logging and farming you know i'm actually going to document it and blah blah blah and make a stir and and do a gofundme or whatever it is you do i'm making up a silly example but not a silly example a real example that that you'll be able to have an impact there in the world and so i'm really excited for not just the businesses not the governments and the spooks who use spies

to try and find, you know, use these satellites to targeting and bombing people, right? But for the people that are going to have a meaningful impact on the world and make it better for, you know, I'm old, so maybe not me, but for my children. You know? I love it.

That's a great place for us to end. Thank you so much for coming on. And anyone who has not read the book or checked out Skyfire High suggests that you do that. And we'll definitely do this again in the future. Okay, I'd love to. Thanks. Thank you.