The Pomp Podcast - #373: Matthew Dellavedova on Investing as a Professional Athlete

Episode Date: August 31, 2020

Matthew Dellavedova is a professional basketball player for the Cleveland Cavaliers of the NBA. Dellavedova won an NBA championship with the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2016 and has become a fairly active investor across various asset classes, including real estate and venture capital.  In this conversation, we discuss Delly's basketball career, playing with Lebron James and JR Smith, how he got interested in investing, why he likes real estate and venture capital, which deals he has done, and what his current thoughts are on Bitcoin. This was a crossover episode with Matthew's new podcast, The Delly Podcast (episode 8). ============================ Athletic Brewing is re-imagining beer for the modern adult. We love beer. But we also love being healthy, active and at our best. No matter your motivation, if you want to keep a clear head and drink healthier, we are here for you. Athletic makes non-alcoholic beer that you don't have to compromise to enjoy. The beers are fully flavored, clean ingredients, and a fraction of the calories of full strength beer - they fit in any occasion. Check out www.athleticbrewing.com for more details and free shipping nationwide. ============================ Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 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://www.pompletter.com

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Matthew De La Vadova is a professional basketball player for the Cleveland Cavaliers of the NBA. De La Vadova won an NBA championship with the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2016 and has become a fairly active investor across various asset classes, including real estate and venture capital. In this conversation, we discussed Deli's basketball career, playing with LeBron James and JR Smith, how he got interested in investing, why he likes real estate and venture capital, which deals he has done, and what his current thoughts are on

Bitcoin. I really enjoyed this conversation with Deli and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode though, I want to quickly tell you about our sponsors. The first is BlockFi. BlockFi has got three separate products. You can buy and sell crypto. You can deposit crypto and take out a US dollar loan against your crypto collateral. Or you can use my favorite product, which is their interest-bearing account. It earns you up to 8.6% interest using either crypto or a stable coin. Both Deli and I are investors in the business. We're really big fans. BlockFi recently raised a $50 million Series C, and they're off to the races. Fast growth for a great company. so go check out blockfi.com slash pomp again blockfi.com slash pomp and start earning up to

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and off your first order. Lastly, don't forget that I write a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business technology and finance. I break down complex topics into easy to understand language while sharing my personal opinion on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at pompletter.com. Again, pompletter.com. All right, let's get in this episode with Deli. This one was a lot of fun. I hope you guys enjoy. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp

as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. all right guys bang bang i've got the man here himself deli what's up man thanks for having me pom absolutely well i i guess uh we should tell people right off the uh off the start we're doing a joint podcast i did this one time before with jason calcanis and people loved it so we're doing a second one uh if you listen to the deli podcast go subscribe to the pomp podcast if you listen to the pomp podcast go subscribe to the deli podcast but uh i just wanted to jump on and just talk with you. So thanks so much for doing it. No, I'm looking forward to it. I'm a bit of a

rookie to the podcasting game, but I've been listening to yours and picking up a few tips along the way. Absolutely. So let's start maybe with your background. Most people know you as an NBA player, won an NBA championship and kind of have that side of your life. But what they don't know is you spend a lot of time thinking about investing and kind of being very intelligent, strategic on that end. Just help people understand how did you get to the nba first and then we'll get into the investing stuff yeah so i grew up in australia in a small country town um i moved away from home when i was 16 to go to the australian institute of sport which is uh olympic level training facility uh from there went to college in

california for four years uh and then uh i've played for the national team so i've been to two olympics for australia which has been absolute highlights um and then tried out for the the 2013 draft did about 20 nba workouts went on drafted uh got on a summer league roster with the calves then training camp and then eventually made the team what is it like to go undrafted right i think when people hear that it's like this weird thing where they're like wait a second you end up winning an nba championship like how do you go from undrafted to that so what's the feeling like when you put all this work in you met all the teams and then the draft comes and goes and no one calls your name uh it's pretty crushing really uh because the you know the percentage chances

of making the nba after you go undrafted aren't very good at all um so you know it was it was really disappointing i was watching it uh with some close friends at my college coach's house um spoke to my agent soon after and he said you know you've got it's going to be okay you're going to get another opportunity um to go to summer league and try to prove yourself there and then go to training camp again and prove yourself there and uh teams bring in 20 players to a training camp there's 15 roster spots uh 13 of those roster spots are already taken so basically there's seven guys competing for two spots um you it was funny we were getting ready in a basically a visiting locker room um so you knew you weren't on the team um going into training

camp and it it was a tough grind but uh makes me appreciate it every day yeah what's the uh kind of culture or relationship those seven guys have as they're competing is this like a friendly thing or is this like at all costs i'm making this team and i know that if i make it that means there's one less spot for these other six guys uh it's a it's definitely a weird dynamic um but i would say it's it's friendly that there's a sense of camaraderie there that you know you know you're all in the same boat and uh basketball is a sport where there's a lot of player movement and you're going to see people you know down the road whether it's uh play with them that season or it could be five years down the line so it's definitely competitive but uh there's a sense of camaraderie

there because it's a highly stressful situation and nobody really understands it apart from the the seven people in that room yeah um and then obviously uh you go on and you play with some of the biggest stars today right with uh i think lebron was on that team kairi uh jr smith i mean there's a whole roster full uh what is it like kind of going undrafted then signing you know pretty big contract and getting to play with those people and then ultimately play for the nba championship yeah yeah no it's um amazing kind of feeling to go from that to to then winning a championship um kevin love was another one on on that team and um so the first year was a year before lebron had come back to cleveland um so we actually missed the playoffs that year and then

at that some league was when um you know he announced he was coming back and and everything changed like what are guys on the team saying yeah it's just like such a go like a crazy dynamic right it's like he left there was this vacuum and then when he announces he's coming back i think fans see uh like outside looking in but are you players like all texting each other being like Like, wait, is he serious? Or like, what is the kind of conversation? Yeah, I think we're in Vegas for some league when the announcement happened.

I think it was on ESPN. And then we had a shoot around or a game day that day. And I think the GM came over and whispered something to the coach at the time, David Blatt. And you could see his face kind of light up in a big smile. And then they announced it. and everyone's like wow this is pretty crazy but then I think the next thought at least for me was I hope I'm still on this team because a lot can happen from summer league to the time the season

starts and at that point I was on a still on a basically a year by year deal so even after I made the team in that September October time period they could have cut me any time before uh january 15 before my contract was guaranteed for the rest of the season and then they had an option for me uh the next season uh as well so you never really uh have a secure place yeah um and then last thing i want to ask about basketball is uh you play with jr smith and uh my friends and i like he's one of our favorite players mainly just because he you never know what he's going to do he might come down the court and i think there's a famous uh LeBron interview where he's literally like that guy I'll shoot from anywhere he just crossed his

half court he'll chuck it up uh but he seems like like super cool nice guy or whatever what is it like playing with him it's funny because after you know the LeBron and Giannis questions he's probably the teammate I get asked the most about and he's awesome I mean I love JR he he always had your back as a teammate um he had the nickname 9-1-1 because when the shot clock's running down you can you know give him the ball with two or three seconds left and those are the type of shots he makes he's a shot maker and uh i'm happy he's got another opportunity now with the lakers yeah that's pretty cool um all right so you're in this uh really interesting position which is uh your professional athlete so there comes kind of public notoriety with that um you have uh a

quite public um income right in terms of people know the contracts and things that you guys sign And it's millions of dollars a year in many cases. But you also spend a lot of time investing. And so what I want to maybe start with is just, you know, when did you start to be interested in investing? And then maybe we'll go asset class by asset class. But just talk to me a little bit about, you know, you spent your whole life trying to make it to the NBA and play at a high level. This, I think, to many is an afterthought. But for you, you take it very seriously and spend a lot of time on it.

So kind of where does that interest come from? yeah um it's uh something that uh growing up my my dad uh my mom's a school teacher so she's always stressed the importance of education and then my dad uh is a school bus driver but now he's been in real estate and he's been um subdividing land for probably the last 15 years and he's really tried to educate uh me and my sisters and just teach us little things along the way so i've had that background and education and that kind of got me interested in in real estate from a pretty early age uh and then um didn't make basically any money until my first contract um with with the calves that year and and started learning about stocks and bonds and

different things and found a financial advisor and and they've taught me a lot and I always ask them a lot of different questions and then there's just conversations that happen in the locker room between players and I've always tried to pick the brain of the older players and the veterans because that that's the easiest way to learn is you know from their successes or their mistakes things they've gone through and um a lot of veterans are really helpful and they want to pass on their knowledge to the next generation i think that's something that's really cool in the locker rooms in the nba um but i guess the main one of the main things i'm interested now is uh venture capital and that's probably happened over the last three to four years um i had a small

allocation in my portfolio through my financial advisors and would always ask them questions about what it was. And then as you start reading more about what other players in the league are doing, yeah, the conversations in the locker room happen a lot more around that. And that's what I've been focusing in on the last four years or so. And it feels like this has become much more popular, obviously, in all professional sports, but the NBA specifically, I think there's been a lot of kind of media coverage on the teams in the Bay Area, just because that's kind of the center of tech. But I think in conversations that you and I have had, this is happening in every locker room, right? Like there's players who are becoming more interested in this. And so as you're talking

to your financial advisors. How much, I think, education did you get or interest did you get in terms of just like, oh, if we invest in innovation and hold it in the private markets for long periods of time, that'll drive returns versus it being more company-led. Hey, that specific company I really like and I want to invest in that company. So was it more of like, I want venture capital exposure or was it just you found individual companies and built the venture capital exposure through the interest in individual companies? uh i would say a little bit of both i think early on uh you know you get brought different opportunities and um you know i send it through to my financial advisors see what they think

and that led to more conversations about you know venture capital in general um in the off season they set up a few meetings for me with with different people and in san francisco uh who were very helpful and i think that's something that i've really enjoyed is how helpful everybody is in in the the vc industry um a lot of people have taught me a lot of things and um jason being one of them i've been to his launch uh incubator a couple times in san francisco uh nick crocker from australia has really helped me out and introduced me to a lot of people over here and i just enjoy being around people who are trying to be their best uh in that given field and um i find it very energizing to talk to somebody for 30 minutes or an hour and and pick up a lot

of the knowledge that they have on a specific subject something that i hadn't known about before and you get to learn from an expert for 45 minutes it's a lot of fun this is why i like you is because that's exactly what i like about the whole podcast stuff right it's just you get to sit and talk to people and learn from them. You've made a number of pretty cool and interesting investments. I'll let you kind of pick which one you want to talk about. But maybe we'll talk about like an individual deal that you've done and kind of the process you go through. I've kind of gotten to see it, you know, firsthand. And you surprised me, I think when I saw how much diligence you did and kind of reference checks and all of that. But just what you know, is there a deal that you want

to talk about um maybe get through the process yeah um i'll talk about two um and then i'll ask you about your process as well but um first one a recent one is uh levels the constant glucose monitor and um actually saw it on twitter um and the eight sleep founder mateo another company i've invested in was tweeting about this um constant glucose monitor uh had a screenshot of a graph that showed his glucose going up and down and so i messaged him about that just asking what it is and um it looks really interesting and uh he said he had got involved with them um told me what he liked about it and then i asked him to introduce me to one of the founders sam uh emailed him he sent me over some info we got on a call um they eventually sent me one out for

me to try myself um i think after the call i had with him i was that impressed with uh what they had built so far and and where i could see it going and how big of an issue um i guess obesity diabetes is in the in the us and around the world that the opportunity is massive to really help out a lot of people and for the company to be successful um but i i made sure to try it for a few days first and and really loved it i've learned some interesting things um around 2 p.m i kind of dipped down a little bit but if i have a handful of almonds um that that keeps me pretty level um but overall i was eating pretty well so that that's one example um the other one is is block five which uh you introduced me to um set up a call with with zach and brian from block

five um learn a lot from them and then i have a couple of other i guess contacts in in the crypto industry who uh i spoke to and messaged with and they all said really good things about block fire um and then i also which i think is great for founders um listen to i think three or four different podcasts on of zach talking and it was interesting to see the growth uh over time of the company um from just speaking to zach and seeing the graphs but then also going back and listening to him speak about what they were planning to do in the future and then seeing that already in the company. I thought that was really cool. Yeah. So I didn't know that you were going to say that one, but on the BlockFi one, that's the one that I got to see kind of firsthand,

right? And I remember when, after you got off the call, you're like, hey, this is interesting. And I think most people at that point would try to make a decision, but your process was much more, look, I've got this network of people who are professional investors. They're familiar with the company, some that are investors and some that might not be. Let me basically leverage their work, their diligence, their years of experience. And ultimately, I think that helped you get to the point where you want to make an investment. But that process, I think, is not utilized that often by a lot of athletes. They want to make the decision. And so there's this element of humbleness, of like, hey, I might not be the expert. I'm smart enough to make the

decision but let me get as much data as possible is that kind of how you you looked at it yeah definitely i think that's something i've definitely got better at because i think as an athlete you you have a high level of confidence and uh you like to think it translates to a lot of things but um you you have to be open to learning and and getting the opinion of experts who are doing this day in and day out because you know my main job right now even though we're in the off season is basketball keeping in shape making sure my body's right for next season um but then you know lunchtime in the afternoons this is definitely what i like to work on and i think one of the the cool things about twitter uh is being able to dm somebody um and ask them hey i'm looking at

this investment and if it's a existing investor and just saying can you jump on the a call for for 10 minutes and just give me your thoughts and um that's how i got in touch with uh michael arrington and he was awesome with uh you know his feedback and and and what he saw in blockfi and um just general info on crypto which um you know i'm pretty new to i'm still learning a lot about but i think twitter um i'm realizing that the power of it just to be able to dm somebody and and get on a call that day yeah it's uh i always joke and say it's what linkedin should have been right it's basically serving as that uh before i keep uh peppering these questions what questions you got for me yeah well i mean what what is your process for for looking at a new investment i know

you do a lot of crypto stuff but if there is something where you're not you know uh expert or you want to learn more, how do you go about finding references or is it the existing investors or just people with general knowledge on the topic? Yeah. So I think one probably difference between the way that I invest now definitely than I used to is there's a lot more follow on capital. And so we kind of have the ability to write smaller checks early on, work with the founders, see them execute and kind of build conviction over time. And so what that allows us to do, to some degree is like, we can take a little bit more risk and be wrong a little bit more often, because you're saving most of the capital double down on the winners, right. And so

that's different than, let's say, like an angel investor, who's probably going to write one, maybe two checks into a company, and then that's pretty much the allocation for the business, right. So they've got to be kind of much more accurate, right, if you think of it that way, in terms of that initial investment. Now, from a process standpoint, it also comes down to what are you investing in? And I think that because we invest so early, it's just the person. That's ultimately all I care about. And do they have a good idea? That actually feeds into an analysis of the person. Are they an intelligent person who has a defendable thesis as to why they're spending their time and energy on this idea versus hundreds of others? How do they actually

critically think about it. So do they have a good understanding of what other people in the market are doing? Maybe other attempts that haven't worked, why didn't they work? All of those things that I think investors normally ask, I just look at it through the perspective of, is this a sound decision maker? And is this person going to be persistent? If they really care about this, they're going to be persistent, and they make good decisions, we got a shot. That's pretty much all you can ask for really early on. And so part of that ends up being a lot of kind of reference checking or triangulating on like that individual person and making sure that the initial read you get through conversation is what other people who know them well agree with. And then

the part that I actually like is, you know, BlockFi is a great example. I don't remember the exact amount that we did. I think it was like $250,000, you know, at a $20 million valuation or something, right? So we were probably one of the smaller investors in some of these rounds initially. But over time, as we saw Zach and Flory and the rest of the BlockFi team execute, then it was like, okay, now we want to write big checks, right? And because we had the capital base to do that, we have an advantage in being able to almost kind of de-risk it over time. But they're a perfect example. You just bet on the right people. They were not pitching me on a bitcoin rewards credit card you know two years ago that was not part of the conversation

but but now they just kind of figured out what to what to do right yeah and what about the i guess the process of um going from an angel investor investing your own money to um in investing out of a fund where you're investing other people's money what about the the process you go through there do you have to do a lot more um i guess diligence or you know follow up write up a report has that process changed much for you yeah i think that there's uh some similarities and some differences right so like um you tend to see and this is maybe somewhat controversial view but i tend to see that people are actually uh more conservative with their own capital which most people look at as a negative, right? Being that like, oh, if you invest other people's money,

that means that you're less conservative. But in venture capital specifically, like we know that the outlier returns come from like the crazy, you know, very small probability of working type companies. So when Airbnb was raising their seed round, like they had air mattresses in their kitchen, in their apartment, right? Like that's just something that seems crazy, right? And so I do think that venture capital is like one area where having like less conservatism in the way that you think about investing can be a benefit. Now, if you go kind of, you know, overboard and you act crazy or something, then it can be a negative. So I think one, there's an advantage to that. In terms of raising other capital from other people, really what they want to see is,

again, they want to see good decision making, and they want to see kind of what I'll call just like institutional organization, right? And so that could literally be done on a spreadsheet that could be done in Google Docs, or it can be done like we do where you've got a whole team and kind of a really big, kind of robust, you know, offering and back office, things like that. But ultimately, it's just like, an LP is just wanting to know, can I trust you? Right? Like, like, they have all these crazy questions, they, you know, have all these weird things that they do to do the diligence. But like, that's what they're trying to get at. It's just can I trust you. And if you check that box by showing you have a process, you have a pipeline, you have

a way to document the decisions you make and the reasoning behind those decisions, and you give good updates and all that kind of stuff, then they're going to give you money, right? So if they don't trust you, good luck. And so I think people just kind of make it more complex than it really is because they get caught in all the details. But that's all an LP wants. It's just, hey, Deli, can I trust you? If I can trust you to make good decisions and find good deals, then why would i not give you money right and i think that's what what kind of the the focus is at least when i think of fundraising yeah yeah is it um do you enjoy the process of fundraising money from lps or is that it's weird um i've told my partners this before i hate fundraising in like

everything other than being in the room like there there's something about like the actual conversation um that's like somewhat competitive right it's kind of like they know you're there to ask them for money you know you're there to ask for money and so like but you can't just blatantly start the meeting with like i want your money right so like you're almost like uh you're playing this um it's not really a game but like there's definitely some balance right yeah and and it's one where um look these people are incredibly intelligent right so you want to be respectful, but they'd be the first to say, you probably have a better understanding of like your very niche strategy than they do. Who's, you know, they're more allocating to the experts.

Right. And so you got to kind of balance that. But that part of fundraising is super fun. And just like anything, it's, you know, you go in and you ask somebody for money and they say they'll give you a lot, you know, you're super euphoric and you feel like on top of the world. And if you ask and they say no, then you're like down in the dumps. Right. It's like, you know, same think is basketball or anything else it's like when you're when you're good at it you like it when you're not good it's depressing right yeah pretty much pretty much yeah because you've got an angel of syndicate now right yeah yeah so um that's something that i i kind of view as my next step uh in the venture capital world this is something um you know investing in the venture

stuff is something i want to do full-time uh when i'm finished playing which uh i'm not planning on it being for a while i'm seven years in and um body's still feeling good um but it was something i was going to try to do maybe in a year or two do a syndicate and then you know the the pandemic hits and i'm like okay well you know the season's on pause for a while um if there's a good opportunity uh for a company i'm going to try to syndicate one and a great company came along uh simple water um does uh home business water testing um you basically order it online they mail it to you with a box uh with an envelope to to mail out to whichever water testing company uh it goes to and then they also have a platform for the labs so um yeah i think it's a really exciting company making

that uh market a lot more efficient so that one came along syndicated it um actually co-syndicated it with uh peter livingston who i've been invested with on angelist uh quite a bit he was super helpful as were the people at angelist and um yeah kind of got a taste for it i'm working on another one right now and um yeah i think i'm gonna try to continue to do that and hopefully build a track record there that i can by the time i'm done playing um you know can show potential lps down the line yeah and and what's interesting with this is uh in the syndicates i've run a couple of them and it's i'm gonna put capital in and you basically can come in alongside me And like, here's why I'm doing it. Right. So, so it's not a, Hey,

I have this opportunity, but like, I'm not going to put any money in. You're putting your capital and then asking people to invest alongside you, which I think is a way better model than if you just had like a deal and could like somehow show it to people, but you didn't have to risk any capital either. Right. Yeah. I think that's a great model that the incentives are aligned. And yeah, I think just in general, the AngelList platform for people that are trying to learn about venture.

I think I've seen, you know, I've seen a ton of deals on there done, you know, a bit of investing on there. And it just, I think helps you almost calibrate what's a good deal. What's not a good deal. What do you like to invest in? And even if you're not actively investing, you can join some syndicates get some deal flow and just learn. And I think it's a great platform for that. Yeah.

And in terms of the types of companies that you're generally looking for in the venture space, you seem to have much more of a generalist view. Is that true? Or are there specific things that you're looking for? I would say generalists. There's no specific vertical I've found yet that I've kind of dived right into. I think it's more just company by company. And then I'll dive deep on a, you know, specific thing.

And I enjoy learning about a ton of different topics from, you know, water quality to crypto stuff, to space satellites, constant glucose monitors. There's a wide range and I like to, I think I like to keep it that way. Space satellites, you're going to have to explain that one. Yeah, so this was a later stage deal, but uh basically they send up uh micro satellites so smaller ones um and then they can basically spread them out more uh to get more accurate readings of weather um currents and uh different

things in oceans um and because of uh the lack of planes flying um you know due to the pandemic especially early on um the quality of weather prediction went down which um you know i thought was really interesting kind of side effect yeah it's um i i forget the company there's a company that i saw right when they were starting and uh they were shooting like these little mini satellites into space and i remember just being like man we don't know any like we're so primitive when it comes to all of the things that probably are going to be true 50, 100 years from now, right?

And so seeing everything from reusable rockets, like you can just see the innovation happening and it feels like that's going to be one of the next great frontiers, right? Yeah, it's like the stuff that you see in movies sometimes, that's maybe in 30 years, but people are actually working on this stuff and it's pretty cool to see

and even be able to talk to some of them about what they're working on. what about you do you i know you obviously focus on crypto but what what do you do when you see other deals i guess outside that category yeah so uh i have two standing rules one is uh when your friends start a company you have to invest and really it's really because a lot of people are the opposite so what i'll do is i'll usually write a small check um but i forget who said this somebody gave this advice and it wasn't to me directly it was like in public it might have been on twitter or i listened to it in a podcast or something but they basically were like look

when your friends start a company like you want to be aligned and cheering for their success and it's like a great way to do that even if you write the smallest check on the cap table like just having some skin in the game one uh but they were like and then two is you won't like want to jump off the building if they end up building like the next uber and you missed out right so so whoever this person was was basically making the argument that like you know upside you get to participate downside, you completely protect yourself from, right? So they were like, so like, you have to invest. So that's one rule. And then the second one is, I started out being like very generalist, and then obviously started to focus on Bitcoin and crypto. But I'll still see things

that I think are interesting. And I frankly, I don't have a great kind of plan as like what to do there. I've thought about everything from, you know, syndicating to rolling funds to just continue doing things personally. But I do think that there's a lot of stuff outside of crypto, that's obviously one interesting. But also two is the types of founders that gravitate towards crypto are very different than the types of founders that gravitate towards other things, right? And there's positives and negatives to that. And so I think that if you believe you're just investing in people, ultimately, like you want to have a lot of diversity, right? And so it's important to kind of still have access to the non-crypto stuff and do some of it even if

it's not the focus um because i think that it just kind of balances out portfolios and stuff like that yeah yeah no that that's interesting does uh what what are some of the things you've learned from uh your time at facebook and snapchat that that help you today when evaluating founders or companies yeah um so definitely at facebook specifically uh i was very fortunate just to work with some of the best people probably in the world, right? I mean, literally, there's a number of people I worked with that had been there since the early days of Facebook, like, you know, first 50 employee type thing, and they were still there. So these are people who had a front row seat. And, you know, worst argument ever would be that they got lucky. Best argument would be that they helped

build one of the most valuable companies in the world, right? And so they just had been there, and they had lasted. And so you get to kind of see like, how do they operate, right? And that doesn't mean that everything they do is perfect, but it does mean that, um, they've been able to contribute in a meaningful way to the creation of this, you know, amazing business. Um, and so when you see that, like you definitely pick up some pattern recognition of just like, here are things that, you know, the top operators do. And so when you see it again, you kind of just notice it. Uh, two is, I think that, uh, for me personally, one of the things, um, that I did when I was there, I can't remember if it was 14 or 15. I spent more time than most doing interviews. So the way that

it works is at Facebook, you end up... If somebody wants to be a product manager, they end up getting interviewed by product managers at Facebook. So there's a recruiter and all this kind of stuff. But ultimately, your future peers are the ones that make the decision, which is a cool way to uh one the existing employees make sure that the people who are joining them like meet the standard according to them uh but also two is for me it was a great learning experience i think i uh did interviews with like over 100 candidates you know in one of those years and it's just like you just get to understand like good answers bad answers in an interview right like people who think critically and and i've talked about it before but it's like simple things like one of my favorite

interview questions is, you know, Hey, Deli, you, uh, are responsible for, uh, the Facebook pages team. You go home Friday night, everything's great. You come in Monday morning and traffic dropped 50% to the product. Like, what do you do? Right. And you just kind of like give them the scenario. And a good answer to that would be like, um, you know, I would immediately, uh, look at all of the dashboards and try to identify potential reasons why, you know, blah, blah, blah, whatever. A bad answer would be like, I would, I would, you know, call an engineer and ask them what happened. Right. But the great answer would be, and this literally, that was a question I used to ask people, a great answer would be, the first thing I would do is I

would immediately communicate to every single stakeholder that we had a problem. Then I would go look at the dashboard. Right. And like, and it's just like, oh, this person's done this before. Right. Like this person is not kind of academically going through the theory. This person has been in the situation, they understand like communicating the problem first before trying to solve it is important because it gets all hands on deck. And so you just, you know, doing enough of these interviews, you realize little things like that. And so in evaluating founders, you can play some of the same games, right? You can say, Hey, you're running this business. Like what happens if X occurs or if a competitor does Y or whatever. And you can pretty much tell like, here's the

people who, you know, think critically and soundly versus people who, you know, they basically have a dream and uh and no plan to kind of get there yeah no that's interesting when when you said about how the uh the existing product managers uh interview the new one like that that would be really interesting i don't think it's legal uh in the nba but if you had draft prospects come in and scrimmage with the existing team and then the players gave their feedback uh that would you probably get a pretty accurate uh evaluation i mean i didn't even know that you couldn't do that but like that would be one amazing like if fans could watch that type of stuff they would love it right because it would almost be like a mix of um remember uh was it the end one tour you remember

that yeah and they would watch that on vhs in australia but they would like bring people you know like kind of everyday people and they would get a play and they weren't playing nba players but they were playing like the end one professional you know whatever people uh and those players would like pretty much recruit if you were the best guy in that local city you got invited on the tour right so it's like kind of the same thing it's just you can be on an nba team rather than join the end one tour yeah that's pretty cool i didn't know the n1 tour did that where they recruited people in from basically yeah just playing against them they and i forget uh who did it but they would like go to like a local town or city or whatever so maybe they could show up to

sacramento right it's like all the best basketball players in sacramento and all the worst basketball players all show up right and they basically have like these like street runs and you get the guys off the end one tour and maybe they throw you know two or three people from the local community in and i think that i'm pretty sure that there was a couple of folks who you know they just played everyone's like wow that person is really good like you should get them on the tour and they ended up joining good that's one way to get the call out that's yeah well the question is like would nba players be uh would they behave themselves if they were playing and they knew that like whatever happened on the court would determine that they would get

to determine who gets to be on the team right or would they just like play uh as my brothers call it like bully ball right would they just be like now listen that we're the we're the pros here right uh they're probably like uh yeah i like this guy he just keeps tossing the ball and i get to shoot it all the time something like that i can see that happening but uh yeah well one other thing i i wanted to ask you about is um your background in the army i mean what what is like i've never really heard you talk about that i listened to your podcast quite a bit and and what i guess skills and habits did you learn there that you kind of carry forward to today yeah um so i've obviously thought a lot about this uh i would say there's three things uh that i took away from it

one was um i call it like the mortality check which basically is this whole idea of uh i was 20 years old and when you know when you're 20 you think like you're literally superman right you're gonna live forever you are only gonna get stronger faster better looking like you know like life's going in the right direction um but at 20 uh i was basically thrown into a combat zone with guys who are older than me. So I don't remember the exact kind of average age, but they were definitely, you know, married, they have kids, they've got like a mortgage at home, like they're living real life. And I'm still living like, you know, fantasy college student life. And in the combat zone, you just see death. And that doesn't necessarily mean it's always, you know, somebody

you know, well, or even somebody that's an American, right? It could just literally be you see death of people in the local communities and kind of all this stuff. And so I think it's just this like a reminder like hey we're all gonna die at some point right and so uh when i came back i think there was a big shift in my mentality of like just live life and enjoy it and like you're just not getting out alive right so like that definitely um i think one like made me not worry about all the little things that i probably you know as a 20 year old kid thought was important you realize isn't um and then two it really gave me license to like kind of go bigger right which I think has served me well. Uh, and then the other two things I learned were more like actionable

things on a day-to-day basis. Uh, one was just like discipline. Um, I was already pretty disciplined, you know, played sports in college and things like that. But, uh, this was a level of discipline of like, even when you really don't want to do something like you get home from a mission, uh, you know, onto the base, it's late at night and you know, you're going to turn around in six hours and go back out on another mission or something like you clean your weapon. And the reason you do that is because if tomorrow you start shooting in your weapon jams like you could die right and so like you just learn like every decision you make uh if you keep discipline like ends up putting you in a position where you can be successful um and then the last one was always

just like it's all about people right so even in the army where like you don't get to pick the people you quickly kind of figure out okay dilly's a good guy like you know if bad shit happens like i want to be standing next to him there's you know the other guy who's like in a freeze like maybe i don't want to be standing near him right and so you just kind of like start to understand like the people you surround yourself with can determine a lot about your life um and that's kind of an extreme life or death type situation but even just in investing or you know basketball team whatever um that stuff really matters and so i think that was like a big lesson learned as well yeah no that's really interesting i mean on a much smaller and less important scale i mean i think

as basketball players you know who you want uh you know on the court with you when the other team's going on a run or in the playoffs when when a game is close and um i guess that just builds over time through you know relying on people in in high pressure situations yeah 9-1-1 right yeah jayha here you go he'll make it he'll make it i i saw somebody uh was tweeting i think made it into a gif uh i saw it yesterday uh he's with the knicks and he hits like uh you know kind of a the buzzer's going down he hits the three and he and he turns and he's on a knee and he's got like the window with his arm or whatever and it's just like look man the guy's having fun so big sense uh real estate you uh you obviously have done um a bunch of stuff in real estate

sounds like your dad um is really interested in that as well talk a little bit just about how you've thought about investing in real estate and kind of what you've done whatever you want to year yeah so um yeah i've done a bit of stuff with my mom and dad uh in my hometown which is a small country town and um you know he started off i think doing um like some smaller subdivisions um like a rental property then some smaller subdivisions and has kind of continued to to work his way up um but just i guess understanding how you can use you know other people's money meaning like the bank's money to to get a loan to add value to a certain thing and then either hold it um to to get rent coming in or to to sell it and then move that money into another project i

I think understanding how you can use the bank to your advantage is one of the big things I've learned from him. And, yeah, I think just over time, and I know we're going to talk a little bit about Bitcoin and inflation, but over time, you know, I've known they've seen really good results. He always loves to tell me he's never lost money on land because they're not making any more of that so um well especially in australia right you you know that there's no more land yeah because you're surrounded by water uh even though there is a lot

of land um you know obviously it's a big country but um yeah you just see i guess melbourne you know the big city i'm closest to the the boundaries of it are just continuously expanding with subdivision after subdivision. So you can see it. I mean, every time I go back to Australia and we're driving from the airport in Melbourne out to Maryborough, there's just more of Melbourne to get through before you are on the country roads. Yeah. And I think that the point you're making about the banks, one of the conversations we had, you basically said, look, it's leverage, right? It's intelligent leverage. And if you're smart about kind of managing that and how much capital you put down and and all of those types of ratios and things like that like it can be your

friend um and it sounds like that's you know one of the big things that has uh kind of caught your attention and got you really interested in real estate yeah and um he got me the the rich dad poor dad book to read and and that kind of laid out um you know some really helpful things um in a pretty easy to understand way. And I think it's okay, you know, with leverage, there's obviously risk, but being in a smaller country town, you know, you're not going to have the crazy price growth over time, but you have a really good rental yield that covers the mortgage, and then some usually, so it's a pretty stable asset to be in. Yeah. And everything that you do in real estate in Australia, or you do some in the United States

to? Uh, I do a little bit over here. Um, my financial advisors have, you know, some real estate funds, uh, and then have a rental property here. Um, but that's something that's more time consuming. Um, and you, you need to be hands-on and understand everything, uh, that's going on there. So, um, because I can rely and trust on my dad, um, that's, you know, where, where most of that is for now. For sure. All right. Let's talk about it, man. Inflation and Bitcoin. What do you want to talk about when it comes to this stuff? Well, I think for my listeners and being my mom and dad and my sisters who I've tried to explain to them, if you could just give us a really basic understanding of Bitcoin, why it's important, and then how inflation gets into it.

Yeah. So I think the easiest way to talk about it is just first start with what is money, right? Money is a belief system. The reason why you and I exchange US dollars or any other currency is because we believe that it has value, right? So you're willing to accept it in exchange for goods or services, and so am I. And so with that as kind of the underpinning it then is why does somebody trust the US dollar or anything else? Well, having a government back it is a pretty damn good reason to do it, right? And that's the kind of the test of time for a very long time. Now, when it comes to kind of moving forward, most of those currencies are not backed by anything, right? And so now there's this rise or popularity of digital currencies. And so

when you think of a digital currency, there's two key components. There's the technology and then there's the monetary policy. And so just like there's a technology and monetary policy to let's say the US dollar, right? There's a technology and monetary policy to these digital currencies as well. The technology is what gets all of the kind of attention, especially in the media, right?

As people like, oh, it's decentralized, it's digital, you know, all that. Ultimately, it just means that there's no government backing it. And it means that by being a digital currency that's based on a blockchain, everything's fully transparent. And the way that I describe the blockchain usually is just when you play Monopoly, if me, you, and two other people play, we sit down, we start with the board in front of us, we put our money, which is kind of our account laid out in front of us, and then there's a bank account that's kind of off to the side.

But there's no fifth player who's like the designated banker who doesn't play the game. And so the reason why Monopoly works is because all the money that's transferred, everyone can see. So if you pass go, we reach in the bank, we give you $200, right? If I buy something, right, then I give the money to somebody. And because everyone can see every transaction, there's trust, right? Or there's verification. And so monopoly works. That's exactly what a blockchain does. It just does it in an automated fashion. So everyone can see every transaction. And that ultimately leads to kind of the truth being always available. the more interesting part to me is not the technology though right the monetary policy i think is the big kind of inflection point in terms of why this is gaining popularity and so the u.s dollar you mentioned inflation the way that it is structured is uh more and more of it is created over time and what that does is it devalues the currency so why do people buy real estate, buy art, buy gold and precious metals, all these different things, it's because

what they're trying to do is get out of the dollar. If they hold dollars, they will be worth less and less over time on a purchasing power basis. So yes, it still says $1, but that $1 can buy you less goods and services than it could five years ago. And so you're financially incentivized to get out of dollars and get into store value assets or other types of assets. that's hard right so take your mom who you said was a school teacher we basically ask her to go to work every day and to be the best school teacher possible right teach the kids and do a great job but then we also ask her to take her income and go be a professional investor on top of that and that's hard right that's why in you know especially the united states like i think

it's 45 of americans own no investable assets like there's no financial education they don't know this stuff. And so in this system where you're devaluing the dollar, investors are rewarded and savers are punished, right? Because you're just putting dollars in a bank account saving, but it's being devalued. And so now comes along Bitcoin. And Bitcoin basically has the exact opposite monetary policy. So rather than there being more and more of it created every year, there's just a set amount, meaning that there's only ever going to be 21 million Bitcoin. and there's a programmatic distribution of it. So every 10 minutes, a certain predetermined amount

is given out into the network. And this looks very similar to gold, right? It's kind of a sound money, meaning that it's scarce. But the difference between Bitcoin and gold is that Bitcoin is provably scarce, meaning that you know exactly how much are available. You know exactly how much are in circulation. With gold, you basically have estimates,

But those estimates have essentially, you know, drawn confidence from people for thousands of years. And so I think when you kind of zoom out, you say, okay, there's two different types of currencies, right? There's the fiat currencies, which are inflationary. And that's kind of the system we live in today, right, where your currency is going to get devalued over time. And so you're financially incentivized to buy goods and services or to invest. And if you do that well, you actually can get really rich, right? Because you can get out of the dollar, get into assets, those asset prices go up, real estate appreciates, all that kind of stuff, and you end up building wealth. But in the new system, you aren't required to buy goods and services or to invest, you can simply save. And what you're doing is you're saving a scarce asset. And so over time, that actually becomes more and more valuable in US dollar terms, right? So it's gone from, you know, fractions of a penny 11, 12 years ago to today, it's worth, you know, $12,000 or whatever it is. And so I think that's like the big difference is just a digital currency has a different monetary policy than the fiat currencies. The debate is just which one's better, right? And kind of, you know, how does that happen? But I think that's really the big difference. yeah no thank you for that and then uh i'll just ping off a few questions that they've been asking me because you'll be able to answer them better um why is bitcoin like the cryptocurrency like as bitcoin was created uh and has had a rapid rise um you know why couldn't there just be another crypto come in and take its place yeah so uh two aspects to the answer here so the first aspect is there's, I don't know, 5,000 or 6,000 digital assets now. There's only a handful that are

actually trying to be money. So Bitcoin would like to be the standard or the global reserve currency. There's others like Ethereum or Ether now is trying to be money and a couple of others. But ultimately, the competition is, let's call it maybe among 15 digital assets that would like to money. But remember that money is a belief system. And so just as Facebook becomes more and more valuable, as more people join their social graph or their social network, right, because there's more people to connect with, there's more content, you kind of get tied into it. Money has a network effect as well. And so the more people that use the same money and believe in the same money, the stronger it becomes or the more valuable it becomes. And I think that Bitcoin's advantage was

one, it was first. Two, it was able to gain adoption with a very specific type of person who had a very long-term view around sound money and the problems in the legacy system. But then three is just now we're at the point where it has the biggest network effect. And so it's got the most belief behind it. And the market has determined it to be the quote-unquote most valuable. And so if it fails, I'm of the belief that actually another one won't be able to be successful. What I mean by that is, in Venezuela, the Boliviar failed. If the Venezuelan government comes out now and is like, oh, sorry, guys, we messed that one up. But here's our next one. People are just like, nah, you got us once. We're not sure I'll see you a second time.

And so I think Bitcoin is a similar thing here where this idea of a decentralized, non-sovereign currency, people are bought into it right now from a mindshare standpoint. If it failed, I don't think somebody could create another one and be like, oh, sorry, we messed up the first one but like here's the next one right so i think bitcoin's kind of the shot um and so far so good but but that's kind of how i look at it what would you say the the biggest threats are to bitcoin um not being like a crypt another crypto passing it but why would it not become you know uh successful yeah so i think that um the number one like most serious threat to it is what I call self-inflicted wound. So basically, there's

software code being written and runs the Bitcoin network, and it's constantly being updated. That process is very methodical and intentional because there's $200 plus billion of market cap to protect. But if at some point there was a software bug that was introduced, that could cause catastrophic problems, right? And so obviously, the development process tries to and has successfully, for a long time, prevented that from happening. But that, to me, is risk number one. The second risk is there could be some sort of ownership ban, right? So the United States, you can't shut it down because it's decentralized. So what they could do is they could basically say, we're going to ban ownership in the United States. Now, that would be short

term very negative for the asset. I personally believe that other countries that are frenemies with the US, so kind of the Russia's and China's of the world, they may actually say, oh, wait, you guys are explicitly saying you're not going to use this thing. We want to get off the US dollars. We'll use it. And it actually drives adoption over the long term. But I do see that as a risk, obviously. If you're in the United States or in Australia and your government says, hey, we're going to ban ownership, that's not good. I think most people generally want to comply with the law. And then the third thing is, I do think that there is potentially in the future risk around like a quantum computer or, you know, some sort of like 51% attack type thing where just

somebody gets a superior computer. Now, what I always tell people is like, one, I don't think we're anywhere close to that being developed. But also to like, I don't know, let's say that you stop playing in the NBA, and you're the one who creates the quantum computer, right? And I said you what all the things in the world that you can use your quantum computer for like attacking bitcoin's network is probably not very high on the list mainly because once you attack the network and it's been violated or someone you know it's known that it's no longer decentralized it kind of becomes worthless right so it's not like you could like go and steal all the bitcoin because then those bitcoin would just be worthless so if like you have a quantum computer

there's way other you know way more important and much more kind of productive profitable things you could do than go attack the bitcoin network unless you just wanted to destroy it but i just don't see that as like an actual kind of high probability risk right now yeah what what about um like a few main players um getting enough bitcoin where they can basically control the price um so there's people who would uh say so the hardcore bitcoiners would say one bitcoin equals one bitcoin right Similar to one U.S. dollar equals one U.S. dollar. Now, on a purchasing price standpoint, we know that that's kind of a nuance. But from a U.S. dollar value, right?

So today, Bitcoin's at about $12,000. There probably already has been some price suppression, right? So if you go back to 2017 ballpark, it went from like $1,000 to $20,000 at the end of the year. um i if i remember correctly uh there was i think it was futures contracts got approved first so basically there was a um kind of in the legacy finance world there was a derivative introduced that allowed you to short bitcoin so pretty much it was long only and so what were people doing they were going long right and everyone was kind of seeing that their uh portfolio increase in value Well, the high for Bitcoin in 2017, and still the all time high till today, was right before I think it was like the day before two days before that derivative was introduced. And so this whole idea of like, now there's more equilibrium in the market, because there's people can go long and go short. So that was kind of step one.

The second thing is like, there's been plenty of price suppression. I think even some of the U.S. banks got in trouble in the gold market, for example, right? So like this stuff happens in markets all over the place. I keep telling myself that like, it's still so small. It's like $200 billion. I think gold's like eight or nine trillion, right? So like, it probably just isn't that interesting to them yet. When it starts to go up, I think you'll see, you know, some of the big boys like hey wait a second um but but i don't think we're there yet yeah and and speaking of where where it's going like where i know we've discussed this a little bit before but and end of next year where where do you see it going and what would have to happen for it to get

there yeah so structurally um you know as early as like summer of last year uh it became i don't want to say obvious, but like it became higher probability that we were kind of late cycle in the macro environment, meaning that, you know, we had been on this like really long 10 year bull market in public equities. And there were starting to be just warning signs, right? And not necessarily signs of like, hey, the market's going to tank tomorrow. But just you saw things like inverted yield curves, you saw, you know, very high, high number of CEOs leaving their jobs, you saw these like gyrations or market breakdowns in the repo markets, like just things where you're like, okay, we're getting towards the late end of this bull market, when it turns over, like,

that's not going to be good. And so you start to think, okay, when you end up going into a recession or depression or whatever, what can people do? And so governments naturally want to step in and help, right? So they can basically manipulate interest rates, or they can print money. And what they did with the interest rates is they're going to drop them, right? And so I was writing last summer about like, hey, they're going to drop them pretty aggressively was basically my thought process. I didn't think that they would go to zero, but I thought they would drop it. And then they're going to have to print money.

I thought, again, I don't know, a couple hundred billion, maybe you get to $1 trillion, but they're not going to print $3 trillion, right? And so fast forward to now, this whole COVID-19 thing has accelerated a lot of this. And did I foresee a global pandemic? No, I don't think anyone really did. But it definitely kind of was the pin that popped the bubble to some degree. And so what we thought would happen in the macro environment happened. They had two emergency rate cuts, dropped rates to zero, then they printed money at an incredible rate, historic levels of quantitative easing. And all of that happened almost simultaneously from a timeline perspective with this Bitcoin halving, which is basically the daily incoming supply of the asset got cut by 50% in May of this year, right? And that's programmatic. And so what I was talking about last year was like, if they cut rates, print money, and halving occurs all around the same time, it's like rocket fuel. And so now we sit here and we're like, okay, well, all of that happened, right? And so we can sit and pat ourselves on the back, or we can look and say like, well, what was the financial performance?

And so as we're sitting today, I looked this afternoon, Bitcoin's up about 70% to 75% since the beginning of the year, right? So it literally started the year, at one point it had dropped 50%, which is super scary for folks. But now it's up so that it's a 70% kind of up on the year. And it's up 45% since the halving. And so like the thesis is quote-unquote playing out. Now, to answer your question directly,

if you kind of continue extrapolating out what we thought was going to happen is we believe that Bitcoin is just kind of right on line to end up hitting $100,000 by the end of next year, which at $12,000 today is a pretty big price jump. But that's kind of our conviction. Everything we're seeing so far is like we're still on track for that uh we'll see what happens yeah and and then i guess playing

into that um i know you've probably talked a bit about it but a company uh converted their cash balance sheet uh listed on the they're listed on the nasdaq i believe they converted their cash to bitcoin what uh do you think of that and then what do you see that doing to bitcoin then other companies that are looking at this and saying is this you know a viable option yeah so a company's micro strategy and and uh i won't get the numbers exactly right but they had about half a billion dollars um in terms of uh capital decisions to make and so what they decided was about 250 million dollars they put into bitcoin uh and then they basically held a a 250 million dollar capital raised by selling some shares, right? It's kind of the overgeneralized description.

The $250 million in cash going into Bitcoin is the first publicly traded US company to decide to do this. Now, there's two things that you could say. One is, there's a lot of people who would just be like, oh, there's some entrepreneur out there or CEO who's trying to capitalize on the excitement around Bitcoin. They're going to do this. A bunch of people are going to go buy their stock and like it's more of like a stock manipulation game or kind of riding the hype cycle i went and i read the press release i read everything that the ceo talked about in terms of why he was doing it he's a bitcoiner like this is not a i'm trying to you know just ride a hype cycle i mean word for word what he described in the uh press release is the bitcoiners argument

against inflation and quantitative easing and he basically said look i'm worried that the dollar is going to get devalued. Therefore, I can't hold dollars. So I need to get to something else. And I've chosen Bitcoin as our reserve asset. We'll see what happens, right? But I do think that a NASDAQ listed company doing this, to your point, opens the door now. Nobody wants to be first. A lot of people like being second, third, and fourth, right? And so I don't know when that'll happen. And the company, by the way, was I think a $1.2 billion valuation company. So it's not like it was you know some you know 50 million dollar kind of penny stock right it's a billion dollar business so i i tend to think that um you know it'll be a positive sign long term yeah what do

you think about it uh i mean i think it's really bullish for bitcoin because i mean if you if you have a publicly traded company i mean you know if it doesn't go well that guy's probably getting fired right um but now other companies if they don't at least look at it or talk about it you know the shareholders or people are going to be asking questions if it does happen to go to you know 100k by the end of next year so um i think it definitely opens up some interesting conversations that um you know i'd love to be on the fly on the wall at one of the next board meetings at some of these big companies uh what about uh warren buffett and berkshire getting into gold um which i i believe they haven't done before and do you see that as or getting involved in gold

as a bit of a gateway to getting into bitcoin because they you know try to perform the same function really yeah um so i recently wrote about this and so uh i'm probably gonna sound like a nerd because I know all these weird stats, but it ultimately breaks down to Warren Buffett has historically been very anti-non-cash producing commodities. So gold being the big one. He's just said, look, it just sits there, right? It doesn't produce cash and he really likes cashflow. So in order to get the exposure to gold, he didn't go buy gold. He bought a gold miner, which is kind of interesting, or he still bought a business. They're just in the business of gold. which is almost like, I feel like there was like a midnight negotiation inside of Berkshire. Like

we got to get exposure to gold. And he's like, we're not getting gold, but you could buy a gold company. Right. So I think that was kind of the first thing is like, he still stayed with his principles of buying cash producing business, but it is ultimately dependent on the performance of gold. The second thing is like his portfolio is struggling right now. Right. So I think it's seven of his 10 largest holdings are financial services businesses. And I think all six of the seven or seven, I can't remember, are all down like double digit percentages. So he's actually doing pretty bad. And so those financial services on the average drawdown is like 20% to 25% this year. But then he's got these other businesses, three of his top 10 holdings

are non-financial services, and they're up like 15% to 17%, something like that. And most of that's driven by Apple. So it's a technology company. So Warren is in this weird position, I think, where if you look at the portfolio, he's held on to a lot of what I'll call old school businesses. They're not the big tech companies and whatever. And he's publicly stated over and over again, he's not the guy who understands tech in terms of the first one. He's 89 years old all that kind of stuff so he kind of changed his mind on the whole gold thing but he's still lagging because he's kind of investing in like the old school way yeah i just don't see him buying bitcoin no matter you know if he lives to he's 120 i just don't think that

he's going to do it um what'll be interesting is you know the guy's been an absolute legendary investor probably the best to ever do it uh he's amassed this incredible fortune at some point he's going to hand it over to other people and so kind of like what happens once he's not making the decisions right whether he's alive or not but just like when he's not making the decisions anymore like i think it'll be a pretty big moment if berkshire hathaway bought bitcoin right i i just don't see that happening anytime soon if for whatever reason that happens in the future i mean what what do you think happens to bitcoin well when he bought barrett gold uh i think i saw today it was up at least this morning it was up like 10 12 percent right and so like i'm

you know this obviously you know where i am giving any kind of financial advice or anything like that uh and i have no clue what gold miners are trading and kind of if that's a normal movement whatever but like people follow him right so when he makes a decision people are like oh i'm just going to do what the smart rich guy does right and so i think that uh it's only would be a positive it's just you know what what's the impact i have no clue yeah yeah and then uh you talked about gold being a non-income producing asset um i think a lot of people and i was one of those as well that thought bitcoin was was the same you know you kind of just buy and hold it and hope goes up over time. But then you told me about BlockFi, and you could earn interest on your

Bitcoin, almost like a term deposit. Can you tell people a little bit about how that works? Yeah. So you got to remember that cash is also a non-cash producing asset for the most part, right? So if you just hold dollars, it's not like more dollars just appear out of anywhere. And we all do that, right? So I think that it's a question of just like, okay, how do you turn a non-cash producing asset into an interest bearing asset, right? And so what most people do in the traditional world

is they'll go deposit in their checking account or they'll buy some kind of treasury or whatever, but let's just say the deposit in the bank account. The bank takes those dollars and they go lend them out on the backend. And sometimes they can lend them out five, six, seven times per dollar with leverage. And so the bank earns a rate of return for those loans. So I'll make up numbers. Let's say they

earn 3%. And they turn around and they say, hey, Deli, you're such a great customer. We're going to pay you 0.03%. And so the spread, that 2.97% difference, they keep. And it's a great business for the banks. But you make minuscule interest and whoever is the borrower obviously got to borrow capital. So there's a whole kind of financial system based on the deposits that go into a bank. BlockFi basically is doing the same thing, but for crypto. So you deposit Bitcoin, a stable coin, Ether, they got a couple others. They take it and they basically lend it out to people. Those people pay an interest rate. And the difference is that BlockFi pays a very high percentage of what that revenue is back to the user. So don't quote me on it, but I think it's

like Bitcoin's like 6% interest, the stable coins like 8.6%. Like these are very high rates of return. And so what it does is it looks very similar to what happens in the legacy world. It's just not with dollars now, it's with these digital assets, right? So, you know, there's risk at your bank.

There's obviously risk in the crypto world. The legacy systems de-risked a little bit with FDIC insurance, right? That hasn't come to crypto yet. So I always just tell people like, the mechanism's the same. Go do your research. Don't go put 100% of your money in one bank.

Don't go put 100% of your money in BlockFi. But I do think that in both systems, what you're doing is you're trying to not cash-producing asset to earn interest now. And so I think that's why BlockFi is interesting and obviously why people put money in the bank too. Yeah, yeah. What got you excited about BlockFi?

I think, apart from the crazy growth, um talking to zach um i think you know as an investor or just you know holding cash right now um you're kind of looking for a place to put it and with uh the stock market going crazy you know it doesn't seem to me like it's uh a great place to put it right now i don't know how much more upside it has um you know putting it in a bond like i wasn't really you know too too interested in that and then when you said you could get you know six percent um return in in my head i was like well even if bitcoin goes down six percent i'll be even on the year that's one way i looked at it um but then it's like you're you're also getting all that upside potentially down down

the line and um even if you know it spikes like it did in 2017 and then comes back down you're still earning interest on on the way up um which i thought was really interesting yeah i look you uh we're gonna make you the spokesperson you uh you nailed it i know we're almost done here but what what do you have planned the next five to ten years what are your goals um that's a great question. I don't really do a long-term goals. Um, I think part of it is, uh, I have two rules in life. The first being, uh, if I ever do something that I don't have fun with, uh, I stopped doing it. So, you know, I'm having a blast doing everything from the Bitcoin stuff to the content, whatever. Uh, if one day I wake up and I'm just like, I don't want to do this

anymore. I literally will create a video. And she's like, that was an awesome run guys. See you later. So I think that that's always kind of the back of my head. And the second thing is I focus much more now on like who I'm doing things with more so than like what I'm doing, which sounds kind of weird, but just I found the people you surround yourself with end up like dictating a lot of it. Right. And so I just want to be around like smart people that I enjoy being around and they enjoy being around me and i respect them and and uh i tend to think that like you just kind of figure stuff out as you go so it's like just get the right people you know it's kind of like a team right yeah if you get the right guys on the court play go play basketball like magic happens

right and i think that that's you know friend groups are very similar so it's more about like who i'm doing it with more so than like what we're doing yeah uh me uh i mean hopefully the olympics go ahead next year uh want to win gold medal uh for the aussie national team we finished fourth in rio which is the worst place to finish in the olympics uh and then uh try to win another nba championship uh keep playing for as long as i can and then um run a few more angelist syndicates good off a track record and then uh get it get more into this when i'm done playing how many more years do you think you can play well how old are you i'm 29 okay so i'm still pretty young 35 is that uh i always said 40 but maybe i don't know i've got a nine month old son now and he's

a lot of fun and it is a lot of time on the road so uh i would say 35 to 40 range well i'll evaluate it when i get there all right is there anybody who i guess jordan came back pretty when like this what the third time he came back or second time he came back or whatever but is there anybody in recent history that's played uh kind of upper 30s into their 40s carl malone maybe yeah carl malone uh i mean jamal crawford just turned 40 he got signed by the nets i mean lebron's 35 i think and he's yeah you know could win the mvp and uh obviously he's a anomaly but i think with sports lines now and um you know taking care of your body for a long time it kind of adds up and gives you those extra years on the end of your career for sure all right i get asked

you the last two questions who do you who do you think is going to be the mvp oh uh you make me pick between yannis and lebron uh i think it's a coin flip because i think lebron has the has the momentum around the story as well and um i think everyone in the sports world loves a good story but um yeah one of those two guys one of those two for sure i think okay uh who do you think was the nba championship uh i think either one of those teams i think i think milwaukee is going to come out of the east i think i think the lakers are going to come out of the west uh but i think it's going to be a a tough series i think between the cliffers and and the lakers uh and then also the rap the raptors

and uh milwaukee i'm looking forward to watching both of those if the lakers and milwaukee meet you think you think lebron can take it i i would never bet against either of those guys um you know and especially uh just you know seeing him come from three one down what what he's done is just um i would never ever bet against him i i uh uh i had forgotten already how that's how crazy 2020 had been i was on the phone with a a friend and he's a big toronto raptors fan and so we were talking about lebron and lakers whatever and he's like yeah like i just think that like the going back to this idea of a story he's like and then you know you get lebron going and winning at a third team kobe like and he's and i was like oh wow like i literally had forgotten

that that happened this year right and not that i forgot that the event happened just that it was in 2020 and so you you start to like put it all together like that would be a really cool story to see happen but uh you know there's a lot of basketball to play between here and there i know it's uh looking forward to watching it's good to have it back on absolutely um all right guys before uh before i let delhi go if uh if you listen to pop podcast go listen to the delhi podcast he was real original with the name so was i i learned from you and uh and vice versa where can people find you on the internet uh twitter at matthew delhi um i went instagram youtube but probably Twitter's best.

AngelList, syndicate, make sure you sign up there. Go check out his syndicate. It is definitely worth looking at. There's a bunch of folks here who are accredited investors listening to the podcast. There's a lot of athletes who are trying to invest, but Dele, I've literally seen the process firsthand. He knows what he's doing.

So I'm excited to see what other deals he finds. But thank you so much for doing this, man. This is a blast. Yeah, thanks, Pom. Appreciate it. A lot of fun.