The Wolf Of All Streets - The New, New World Order: Joe McCann, Microsoft Strategist & Trader on Life After Covid

Episode Date: July 23, 2020

Joe McCann, Microsoft Strategist, Professional Algorithmic Trader, and Creative Technologist started his career working doubles in a pizza shop. After studying philosophy and logic in college, he went on to develop algorithmic trading systems and manage millions in other peoples' money. He has successfully beaten the odds due to his appetite for risk and his ability to manage it. Joe McCann and Scott Melker further discuss being DJs, transitioning from odd jobs to deep tech and finance. why he has “risk” tattooed on his wrist, Russian Roulette and risk management, ‘The New, New World Order,’ the relationship between trading, gaming and competing,the speed of disinformation campaigns, why what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, the shift from land jobs to cloud jobs and so much more. --- CHOICE IRA by KINGDOM TRUST Don’t be part of the 7.1M Bitcoiners who have bitcoin and a retirement account but don’t have bitcoin in their retirement account. With Choice IRA by Kingdom Trust you can hold bitcoin in your retirement account. The first 1,000 users to open a Choice IRA will receive $62.50 in free BTC - visit RetireWithChoice.com/WOLF to join the waitlist and secure free BTC. --- VOYAGER This episode is brought to you by Voyager, your new favorite crypto broker. Trade crypto fast and commission-free the easy way. Earn up to 6% interest on top coins with no lockups and no limits. Download the Voyager app and use code “SCOTT25” to get $25 in free Bitcoin when you create your account --- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe.This podcast is presented by BlockWorks Group. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworksgroup.io

What's up, everybody? This is your host, Scott Melker, and you're listening to the Wolf of All Streets podcast. Every week, I'm talking to your favorite personalities from the worlds of Bitcoin, finance, trading, art, music, sports, politics, and basically anyone else with an interesting story to tell. So sit down, strap in, and get ready, because we're going deep. Let's go. Today's episode is brought to you by Choice, by Kingdom Trust, and Voyager. We'll learn more about them later on in the episode.

This podcast is powered by BlockWorks Group, the only events and podcast production company I trust. For access to the premier digital asset conferences and in-depth podcast content, visit them at blockworksgroup.io. I promise you will not be disappointed. Today's guest is an absolute beast. He's a strategist at Microsoft with expertise in trading, technology, artificial intelligence, consulting, and more. He's spoken at conferences all around the world, including WCC, where we met for the first time.

But more than anything, he's a really creative and interesting thinker and has a unique take on markets, on global situation, and basically everything that's going on right now in the world. So I'm really excited to talk to Joe McCann today. Joe, thank you so much for being here. Hey, thanks for having me. So you told me that you have a colorful background, quote unquote, and I have no idea what that means. So if you wouldn't mind getting into that, I'd love to hear it. Yeah. I'll try to keep it short because it's generally all over the place. So first, you know, I was born in Northern California, but I've lived all over the United States from the point that I was born until I graduated high school at 17. I lived

in 14 different cities all over the United States. So all over the South, New England, the West Coast, of course. And then as an adult, I just very always much been interested in entrepreneurial things and also just like creative stuff. And so the fact that I've landed in a tech specific industry is not kind of how I would have pictured it because I ended up first, um, I was a chef at a restaurant. Uh, I used to throw raves in Portland, Seattle, and LA. I had a couple of techno record labels. I was a DJ. Um, I nice, I ended up, uh, teaching myself, uh, options for X and, uh, equities trading. It's about 20 years ago. So right around.com, very interesting time to learn

trading. And ultimately ended up on Wall Street as a trader for about a year at a prop desk and left that ultimately to, because I was, this is about 2005, 2006. I just believe that these are all moving to machines and algorithms. So I started writing software. I actually have a degree in philosophy, which doesn't get you much except maybe into law school. So I didn't go to law school. So I for the course of over the course of the next five years, I went from, you know, being a sort of lonely junior webmaster web developer, to the CTO at one of the top ad agencies in New York City. And when I left Mother New York, which was the ad agency, I started a company called NodeSource. I knew a lot of people mother yeah it's awesome

yeah i love both i honestly probably my my one of my my most memorable experiences in my professional career such an amazing place the people the creativity it's amazing but i i went totally opposite of the spectrum and started an open source enterprise infrastructure company called NodeSource. So we were kind of like, if you're familiar with the company Red Hat, what they do for the Linux operating system, we were doing that and do that for Node.js, which is the, at the time, the fastest growing open source technology on earth. It's now the most pervasive, one of the most pervasive technologies on the planet. Loads of folks in crypto that write bots and trading systems, they all use Node.js. So I did that for about five years, took that business from like bootstraps all the way up to raising over $40 million in venture capital, moved into the chairman role back in April of 2018, took some time off to reflect and

relax. And as one does, I started writing quantitative trading strategies and algorithms for cryptocurrencies. That was how I was relaxing, which is pretty pathetic. That oddly enough landed me at a fairly well-known institutional hedge fund here in San Francisco, where I ran a quant trading desk and strategy there for about eight months, left that and really decided, you know, learned a ton about kind of the crypto space, you know, pre and during and post the hedge fund. But what I wanted to really focus on was kind of the compute and storage paradigm shift that's happening over the next decade. And that's cloud computing and AI. And so I was very fortunate back in May of 2017. I was actually asked to present when I was still CEO of NodeSource to

Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, built some relationships there and reengaged with some folks last summer. And now I'm loosely called a strategist, but that's such an abused term. It encapsulates, you know, kind of deep thinking around emerging technologies and trends, understanding developer ecosystems, and frankly, broader thematic kind of macro trends. I wrote an essay back in April around kind of my second order thoughts around what was coming out of or will come out of a post COVID world. And a lot of this is, you know, remote from everything is remote work from home, a lot of this type of stuff. So just really interesting things that I get to do and to do it at a company that's the size and scale at Microsoft. It's just like one of these once in a lifetime opportunities. So super stoked to be doing that. How do you have time to trade? Because I follow you on your Telegram group and

it seems like you're doing that 24 seven without a single second of break. Yeah. Yeah. So this is, I get this question a lot. Um, I actually don't trade, uh, uh, as much at like actually execute as many trades as people think. Um, I do call out certain trades. Like today I was pretty active because there's been a lot of opportunity in the stock market today, but in a lot of cases I'm just monitoring things and I'll post about it. And in some cases, I won't post for days. But the reality is that what I learned as CEO is time management, number one skill. And so the way that kind of I am glued to a screen and have adapted kind of the way that I multitask, you know, if I'm on a call like this, I'm obviously not traded. And I'm but i'm not on calls like this

eight hours a day and so it actually for me is a way to kind of uh not think about work but still have work in the back of my mind so that it kind of it brings up these like refreshing thoughts or ideas that that kind of stems serendipitously. And oddly enough, by being engaged in something like trading, and I've made this claim for a while now that we talked about this at WCC is, is it's kind of like a video game. And so there's an entertainment aspect, there's an algorithmic aspect, there's sentiment, there's means there's all these things. And so as I'm watching this stuff play out in the developer, excuse me, the trading ecosystem, if you will, oddly enough, it stimulates ideas in other areas of technology that have nothing to do with trading.

So I'm not going to sit here and say that trading is actually improving what I'm doing with my job directly, but it has an indirect effect on how I think about technology more broadly. So you have very well managed ADHD, basically. Exactly. That's me too. That's funny, because, you know, I was never diagnosed as a kid, obviously, I'm in my 40s as well. So we came up in an era when ADHD, I guess, just wasn't even a thing. Right. But like, I, you know, I got diagnosed in my 30s. I started medication and I actually killed the medication for coffee as well. And I find that that works. But it's like ADHD became this sort of superpower once you learn to harness it. So a lot of what you're saying resonates with me the way that I

go through my day and sort of behave. Actually, it's kind of funny. A lot of things you said resonate with me. I was a DJ for 20 years. That's how I made a living. I was doing like a lot of raves in Philadelphia and stuff. I was an anthropology major at the University of Pennsylvania. I like went fully liberal arts, useless major. I could, I guess, become a professor. I wanted to be Indiana Jones. But you said you were a philosophy major, which jumped out to me. I think I once read that philosophy majors, uh, like make the most money compared to any other humanities degree. So you guys probably make like 50 grand a year versus 48 for anthropology. But, uh, why, why philosophy? And I guess like, what lessons did you learn from actually studying philosophy that you've carried through? Yeah. Great,

great question. So, um, so my, oddly enough, I have a bachelor of science in philosophy, which is rare. Usually it's like a bachelor of fine art, you know, and my, the reason it's a bachelor of science is that I focused in logic. So it is, it's a bit more on the math sides of things, but it's still technically philosophy. And so that's one of the reasons why programming became very second nature to me because programming is all logic. I mean, you have to learn the syntax and, you know, scaffolding and infrastructure and things like that. But when you're writing code, it's a bunch of logical paths that you're that you're going down and how these things kind of interconnect. However, there were pieces of the philosophy that had nothing to do with logic that had a lasting

impact on me. And one of them was the, the writings of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, but particularly Nietzsche, how he kind of thinks about the world is very much how consistent with how I think about the world and how other people that are more contemporary think about the world. So I'm a big fan of Nassim Taleb, who wrote Anti-Fragile and Skin of the Game. And so a lot of those philosophical underpinnings to how Taleb thinks is rooted in Nietzschean thought. And so the way that I think about risk management, the way that I think about asymmetry and optionality is not directly correlated to say Nietzschean principles, but I see the kind of natural extension of Nietzschean principles into Leib's work with things like anti-fragility, for example.

You just touched on what I believe is obviously the most important facet of trading, which is managing risk. Most important facet of life, you could argue, but certainly in trading. How do you approach risk management with the amount of trading that you're doing and also, you know, obviously living your life? What are, I guess, the core things that you like to focus on to make sure that you don't get absolutely destroyed while you're, you know're doing a podcast? Yes. Well, first, I should share with you that I have the tattoo risk on my wrist. So I am... Not the board game?

Not the board game? No, no, no, no, no. This is actually from... This guy Faust is a calligraphy and graffiti artist in New York, did this for me. And I got it many years ago, but I've always been a risk taker throughout my entire life, especially with the entrepreneurial work, jumping around in different careers, you know, definitely not a low risk path. But what I, as I've gotten older and wiser, there's something very soothing about having

an appetite for risk, but also having a framework for how to manage risk. And I think that is something that takes time to develop, mainly because humans are these emotional creatures that don't function like, say, a computer program or an algorithm. And so one of the things that I, a lot of the mistakes I made in my early days of trading, 2019, 18 years ago, etc., and still get caught up from time to time in it, is allowing my emotions to kind of take over what would be a logical reaction to something, or could be viewed as illogical. And so one of the things that I do

specifically with crypto, because, excuse me, because crypto is 24 seven, and there's lots of market inconsistencies and arbitrage opportunities and looseness in the way that things trade. And I love to sleep, I had to build a system that would actually monitor this for me. And so I've been fortunate enough to write a lot of my own software that actually does some automated risk management. Now, when I'm doing my sort of manual trading, I have a threshold in mind with what I'm willing to put to work and what I'm willing to risk. Because I was explaining this to a hedge fund buddy of mine yesterday over Telegram. I said, the way that you become a good trader is first, you have to blow up your first account.

It just has to happen. First 10. Right. You got to blow it up. Then you just got to be in this. You got to feel that feeling and be like, why did I allow that to happen? How did that happen? And then you build your account back up over time, or you take another crack at it at some point in the future after you've reset. And then you blow that count up too. You have to do it at least twice because in my opinion, the first time can just feel like a fluke or maybe you, you know, you can talk your way out of it. But the second time that it hits, you realize, actually, I need to fundamentally change the

way that I structure my trading and also my risk management. And so by having those experiences, by having those kind of battle scars, you know, oddly enough, a Nietzschean principle is he actually came up with the phrase, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. And so if you have a risk management system that enables you to benefit kind of from taking those those jabs and uppercuts, if you will, and body blows, but it doesn't actually kill you, it doesn't actually blow up your account, you actually come back a stronger trader. And, you know, Taleb has a very similar mantra where he talks about ergodicity within systems. And an example of this is where if you take Russian roulette,

I would, I'm not condoning anyone ever played this game. Do not take Russian roulette, I'm not condoning anyone ever play this game. Do not take Russian roulette. Yes, do not do this. But the idea is that with Russian roulette, you can basically win, you know, N number of times in a row and, you know, collect whatever gambling money you're expecting from that.

But the second that you're wrong, it's not this game over, you're literally dead. And I think that if you can have a risk management system that says what doesn't kill me makes me stronger. And also that I need to live to fight another day. I think you're going to be in a much stronger position with how you think about managing your risk going forward. At least that's what I've been doing. I still tell people, look, I've been trading for 20 years. I got a ton still to learn. I still, you know, make some mistakes from time to time. But those two core principles is kind of how I think about managing a risk. That's interesting. I think of it the same way. It's just you have to get absolutely destroyed to see it. But the thing it's, you know, the old adage, like, you

know, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. But, you know, I think that it's a rare breed that actually learn from those mistakes and, you know, sort of have the self-reflection and dig deep and realize why they made those mistakes. I think that most people are gamblers and are probably just going to keep getting destroyed over and over and over again, At least from what I've seen. Side note, you're talking about Russian roulette. Did you ever see the movie, The Deer Hunter? No. It's in my Netflix queue. Yeah.

You have got to get it, Christopher Walk. I'm not even going to tell you now because, but there's a Russian roulette scene that's a true classic. And I think of it at any time someone mentions it. So you talk about bouncing around a lot, having a lot of jobs, taking a lot of risk in life. Have you ever had a desk job where you just had a boss and you sat there and you worked or has it always been sort of your own path? No, absolutely.

I mean, I tell this story because a lot of people don't believe it because they're like, oh, Joe, you were the CTO of this ad agency and you started your own company and you were a CEO. And they think that this success is just like overnight, right? My second job in tech, this is not a joke, was for a technical consulting agency in Austin, Texas. And we were working on doing the redesign of a state website. Texas.gov was the website. And when I showed up to work the first day, I was, I was really excited. I was like, yeah, you know, glad to be here. I want to, you know,

I was like the user experience, creative director or whatever, thinking about like how to make a state website actually interesting, which in and of itself is a challenge. And I was like, so where's my desk? And they're like, oh, yeah, we don't actually have a desk for you. And I was like, excuse me? They're like, well, what we do have is this table in a walkway to a printer that stares at the wall. It's like office space, put them in the basement. Absolutely spot on. I thought I was, I was in a scene of office space.

These guys can't be serious, right? They were serious. And so for one full year, I sat at a table facing a wall next to a printer where it was just nonstop printer paper coming out, people coming up and grabbing stuff. And so I finally got a little clever with it. I actually printed out a color piece of paper of a window that would be looking outside so that I could at least have some semblance of the outside. So I had that job. I actually had a great manager. Um, I still chat with the guy from time to time today. That was probably about 12 years, 11, 12 years ago. Um, but that was a, yeah, that was a nine to five kind of punch the clock,

uh, type of a gig. I mean, my first job when I was 13, I was a dishwasher. So I've done a lot of stuff in my life. Um, it wasn't like I, you know, kind of landed where I'm at today by chance or just pure privilege. Yeah. My first job was sampling dog food at a pet store. Like I had to hand out Iams and Eukanuba samples to pet things. Taught me a lot that I never wanted to work in a pet store. Exactly. Yeah. When I worked at this Italian restaurant on the Gulf coast in Mississippi, when I was in high school, um, you know, I was 13 dishwasher worked my way into like a pizza cook position.

And I remember it was my summer going into, I think 11th grade. So I must've been like 15 or 16 and, uh, the other pizza cook broke his arm and the the boss uh my boss came to me and he said hey hey joey you're gonna have to work doubles now and i was like oh more money this would be great right i worked i think it was like 38 doubles in a row during the summer in mississippi i think you're in Florida. We've got that bad humidity. And I remember, I remember so vividly coming into work one day,

like the 30th double in a row or something. And he looks at me and I'm just, I'm beat. I'm tired. Right. It's hot as hell in there. It's 30, you know, whatever, 15 hour days in a row. And he's like, he's like, Oh, he's kind of poking fun of me. Are you tired, Joe? He's like, well, you better get used to it. Cause you're going to be working for someone like this for the rest of your life. And at that moment, I was like, hell no, dude, I'm going to find a way to not be like this. That would have been the perfect mic drop moment to quit, but you can't do that as a teenager. Exactly. Oh, really? Yes. Yes. I got

to ask you, you work at Microsoft. Why does everyone think that Bill Gates is going to vaccinate microchips into our brains with 5G technology? You know, the shorter answer is I have no idea. And the longer answer is, is that this is actually something that I've been keeping a pulse on for about, I don't know, probably since the Trump election when he won the presidency, is how unbelievably quick information and misinformation and propaganda can distribute online., uh, online. It's, it's unbelievable. It's fascinating to watch. It's, it's, it's disheartening in many cases. It's hilarious in other cases. Um, but there is something to be said about how, how quickly, um, you can actually launch a disinformation campaign and how many people will actually believe it. And so, you know, I'm talking with a friend of mine, this guy, Balaji Srinivasan, who was early on, you know, calling out the COVID crisis and back in, I think, January. Brilliant guy. He used to be cto of coinbase

and uh we were chatting about like how could we get back to a point where you actually have some kind of verifiable trusted root source of information and and i don't have the answer for sure but what i do know is that as things like deep fakes, and for those of you who don't know what a deep fake is open source software to create deep fake content. When those become as trivial as an Instagram filter, you will see, in my opinion, one of the most wild cases of nonstop disinformation on the planet, because you will literally not be able to trust your own faculties as to what is real or not. And we already see that to some extent today. And a lot of it's just reinforcing our own biases. The fact that something like COVID is a politicized event in the United States, in Brazil, for example, is testament to that. So now add in the ability for people to create effectively deepfake content on a whim and distribute it across platforms the size of TikTok and Twitter,

things will get, I think, worse before they will actually get better. So you think they'll somewhat peak and then it'll become so absurd that people may actually seek real information and we may be able to discern what's real again, basically. Potentially, yeah. I mean, I certainly think that's one scenario that could happen. I think another one that may happen is that the continued erosion in what we consider our trusted institutions, whether it's the US government, it's the CDC, it's the New York Times, it's Fox News, whatever your source of information is, it's an institution. I think we're starting to see that, particularly with respect to the media, their business models are dictated by engagement.

And we know from technology that controversy and anger and violence triggers engagement online. And so you see companies like the New York Times have, you know, they've had countless amazing journalists for 160 years. But their current advertising model, they will sell you a subscription, but they also have ads. But the subscriptions are also designed just like an ad-based model to glue you into the content only available on the New York Times. And if other people are sharing this controversial content or this enraging content, you're going

to sign up for it. And I'm not picking just on the New York Times. This is the model for legacy media. Cross the board, both sides, every, yeah. And so I believe that if people recognize that we can't really rely on these institutions of trust to provide us information that we believe, then where does that information come from? My belief is that it gets pushed back to the power of the people. So this concept of citizen developers, excuse me, citizen reporters, citizen journalism, the decentralization

of information, news reporting, etc. I mean, we're already seeing this today, right? If you pay attention to what happened with George Floyd, that was not a local Minneapolis news reporter filming that man's death. That was a bystander, that is a citizen doing that work. And then the subsequent protests and all the police brutality that stemmed from that, those were filmed primarily by citizens being shared all over these distribution networks, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, that the old media guard does not control. And so there's pros and cons to that, obviously. But I think the next iteration is, you know, iteration one is,

you know, New York Times, Fox News, Washington Post. Iteration two is Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok. Version three has to be some sort of decentralization, pseudonymity associated with the journalists and reporters themselves so they don't get canceled, something along those lines. And I do believe that we can find a way to fund this through cryptocurrency. Interesting. So we didn't really get into, I guess, your Bitcoin story. We kind of superficially talked about how you got into it as a trader and that. So you just talked about decentralization and its use case for the media and blockchain. So where do you think now Bitcoin and blockchain fit into the exact narrative and everything that you just discussed? Yeah, great question. So I first got introduced to Bitcoin. I don't remember if it was late 2010,

2011, but I read the white paper. Yeah, well, let's be clear. I didn't get to buy it because I heard about it. I don't remember. I don't, I don't remember exactly how I heard, but it was passed along to me. I got the white paper. I read the white paper and I was like, I got the white paper from a technological standpoint immediately. But as a trader, I was like, where's the market? How do I trade this thing? And it just wasn't, it wasn't easy. Right. And so I was like, all right, cool technology. I've seen white papers like this in the past. I've seen like interesting technology, like open source technologies, for example, start to get like some traction behind it. But like, there's actual decent liquidity, the price has increased pretty dramatically. But then I was also like, you can't short these things. There's no hedging instruments, there's no derivatives, there's none of these things that

exist in like a mature market. So I dabble a little bit here and there. But the reality for me is that like Bitcoin as an asset, as a trading mechanism is awesome because it is, its killer feature currently is speculation. And I know that I will get flamed nonstop from maximalists about this, but I don't care because it's true. I say it all the time. It's the greatest free market in history and it's the most tradable asset I've ever seen. So exactly. And so from that perspective, I love the asset and trading the asset and using, you know, various strategies to generate income from it, et cetera, et cetera. The technology, you know, some people will say, oh, I'm in it for the technology.

And it's like, no, you're not. You're in it to make money. Like, that's why people are in Bitcoin for the most part, for the most part. However, if you dig deeper into the technology, one of the things that stands out to me, and this gets back to this concept of trust is, uh, I do think that there is a case to be made that a decentralized peer to peer, uh, distributed ledger, Bitcoin's blockchain can act as a trusted, excuse me, an untrusted but verifiable source of truth. So I'll give you an example. Today, if you go to any website, that website has its domain name registered with some registrar, and they get access from some organization to enable them to provide those

domain names. So you have a centralized authority that we have to trust is going to resolve all of these domain names. What if that centralized authority gets influenced by state actors? What if that centralized authority determines they want to cut off some set of domains because they don't agree with its content? We now have a kind of an Achilles heel because you have this single point of failure with respect to literally the Internet, right? So what if we could actually use a distributed ledger as this trusted root of truth. I'm not suggesting that it's so easy to build an application like that on top of Bitcoin's blockchain. But the premise that we can move away from these centralized single points of failure where we have to instill trust in human beings and can move that to something that trusts economically incentivized machines, that to me is incredibly powerful with respect to

the technology behind Bitcoin's blockchain. Don't be a part of the 7.1 million Bitcoiners in the United States who have Bitcoin and a retirement account, but don't have Bitcoin in their retirement account. Seriously, you can hold Bitcoin in your retirement account and not just GBTC. How can you do this? Through a self-directed choice IRA by Kingdom Trust. The first thousand users to open a choice IRA will receive $62.50 in free Bitcoin. Visit retirewithchoice.com slash wolf. That's R-E-T-I-R-E-W-I-T-H-C-H-O-I-C-E dot C-O-M slash W-O-L-F. Podcast listeners receive extra points to move up the waitlist and get their choice IRA first. Do it right now. It's time to take control of your financial future and free yourself from the restrictions of classic retirement accounts. Are you sick of paying ridiculous fees to trade crypto?

It's time you try Voyager. It's hands down my favorite place to buy and trade crypto, and it's 100% commission free. Voyager gives you easy access to more than 30 top crypto assets, and you can instantly transfer cash from your bank account so you never miss a trading opportunity. Even better, you can now automatically earn interest on your crypto holdings. Transcription by CastingWords so many people are making the switch to Voyager. Visit investvoyager.com or search for Voyager on the iTunes or Google Play Store and get $25 in free Bitcoin when you use the promo code SCOTT25. That's investvoyager.com, promo code SCOTT25 for $25 in free Bitcoin and start trading today. And what about Bitcoin itself? What's your view? Obviously, we've, you know, everybody, we have the maximalist, we have the store of value, we have the digital gold, we have the

it's garbage, literally across the board as to where Bitcoin stands. And I mean, I've been asking people this question for years, obviously, but never has it been more relevant, I think, than now, you know, with the global economic crisis, however you view it, and obviously infinite money printing and QE and all of these things. So has the, you know, has the Bitcoin narrative changed for you at all in the last few months? Or do you have a very specific view on what it is? So for me, it's, it's, for me, it's always been about having this alternative way of managing your wealth and property. There's something powerful about not allowing an institution, again, that we have to trust with our wealth, right? So the United States is very unique in the sense that we don't

experience hyperinflation or extreme devaluation of our local currency because we are the preserved currency worldwide. So for us, we're like dollars are just dollars are just dollars. But if you go talk to someone in Peru or the Philippines or Mexico. It's very different, right? Argentina tends to default on its debt about every 10 to 12 years. And the rich people in Argentina aren't hurt by that. It's the poor every single time. And to me, there's something uplifting about the ability for someone to park some of their wealth in an asset that that government cannot control that protects them and can provide them some level of safety and mobility the next time that there's a devaluation, for example. There is something to be said about Bitcoin as a store of value, as a hedging instrument with respect to other capital markets so when we saw um basically

every asset class correlating down in march including bitcoin to some extent um very briefly yep very briefly if you look at the time my buddy travis cling tweeted this a while back he said i think it like from like from like the end of fe of February to like the end of April, Bitcoin, you know, lost like 40 basis points or something. That's a store of value when you have this incredibly volatile, traditional market breakdown, right? And so with what the Fed and the Treasury has currently done, and let's be clear, the other central banks around the world are just kind of seeing who can print more money first. Right. This is this is a net positive tailwind for the narrative of Bitcoin as a hedge against the fiat experiment. The difference is and this is the thing that I always get shit for, but I always make very clear to people is no one cares about your narrative, right? What matters is the price.

And if the price is not reflective of, if the price doesn't change, if it doesn't go up, if it doesn't move in the direction that continues to support your narrative, your narrative is bullshit. And so unfortunately, like I still believe that it is a great way to maintain some level of sovereignty around your wealth and property. I fully believe that. Do I believe that that's gonna be a tailwind to push Bitcoin to 100,000? No.

Do I think that it's a good way to hedge against the collapse of fiat currency? Yes, but I'm not going to make investment or trading related decisions based on that. And that's where I think a lot of people get lost. They get caught up in this idea of like, the Fed is printing so much money. It's like, yeah, that's what they do. That's what they do. And everything keeps going on. So I don't see that changing. The last, the halving event, complete non-event. Every idiosyncratic event that should have impacted price over the past even six to nine months, irrelevant. And so that's why I say

to people like, you can have your narrative all you want, and I commend you for that, but it's not going to matter if price doesn't change. And don't assume that the narrative that you have is actually going to influence price. I actually think that that's true and is a really important statement about everything we're seeing now way beyond Bitcoin, which is interesting, not something I've thought about, but I mean, never in my life, certainly I'm 43, but never has there been a time where I've seen people so married to their ideas about things that are so separated from fact. And beyond that, so unwilling to even address the possibility that they're wrong, even when presented with indisputable facts. And I think that COVID and it being politicized in the way it has,

has exposed that more than anything. I also happen to live in Florida, which right now is like, you know, I'd literally be better off like living in Bangladesh right now with regard to COVID, which is absurd, but you know, I live in a hotspot. So what do you think about that? I mean, do you think that's true? Yeah. So, so what you're describing, and this is kind of what we were touching on at the beginning of the pod was there's a, there's a, a psychological phenomenon that only human beings, uh, at least that's my understanding, only human beings have called loss aversion. And this concept of loss aversion, it's a very simple concept to understand. So let's say you buy a stock at $100 a share, you buy one share

for 100 bucks. And let's say that that's a lot of money for you. Uh, the first time you buy, you're like, all right, great. I just got some news that this company is going to blow out earnings or whatever, right? Buying one share at a hundred dollars and you wake up the next day and it's at 96 and you're like, okay, not a big deal. And then the next day you wake up, it's at 92 and you're like, ah, it's probably just a blip. And then a couple of weeks later, it's down to 80 bucks a share. And you're like, ah, well, you know, the earnings release is coming out. So it's definitely going to lift the price. And then four months later, it's down at 50 bucks a share. And then in your mind, you say, well, I'm making this a long-term investment. So I'll just hold on to it. And then it goes down to $10 a share. It's down 90%. And you say to yourself, ah, well, I can't go down

that much further. I mean, it's already down 90%. And the truth is it can go down another 90%. And you say to yourself, well, I can't go down that much further. I mean, it's already down 90%. And the truth is, it can go down another 90% to a dollar, which would be a 99%, right? So my point is, is that we do this as humans, because we don't like the idea of being wrong and losing something of value. It's something intrinsic about us. This is why machines are really good at trading, because this doesn't exist. So for example, and you can check my Twitter timeline, everybody listening, if you don't believe me, this is all timestamped out there. Back in March, when the markets were cratering, everyone was panicking in mid-march about like oh this is going to go down another 40 this is like my approach was very simple when when the volatility index the vix the gauge of fear peaks that will be step number one for a bottom march 18th vix peaked at 88. Five days later, equities bottomed, right? Then we had the unemployment

numbers, you know, come through and would complete horrifically bad numbers. But they basically peaked, I think the second week or the first or second week when those initial jobless games came out, and they started to come down further. But I recall so succinctly, there's some of the chats that I think you and I are probably in on Telegram, very knowledgeable traders, economists, you know, financial folks, basically saying in mid-March and early April, oh, we're going to have years of, you know, we're not going to recover for years. It's going to zero. The all that's going to zero argument. Right. What that says to me is a fundamental misunderstanding of how the Fed and the Treasury work. And then furthermore, to your point, they don't want to be wrong while

this thing keeps rising and rising and rising. And so what do they do? They keep saying this, the valuations are out of whack. None of this makes sense. It's a great market. And every time they short, they just keep getting run over by people like me. Because when you have that much bearish sentiment at a bottom, and then you get all of these people with these narratives that they cling on to, while the market just rips right back to new all-time highs for the nasdaq and approaching all-time highs for s&p that is a number of people not willing to give up on being wrong there's a thing that i mentioned to our to my traders in my chat is that there's nothing wrong with being wrong i'm wrong all the time when i'm trading like let's be clear anybody

that says they have a hundred percent hit rate is completely full of shit and you should run from them. The problem is when you stay wrong. If you're wrong and you don't course correct and you stay wrong, you're like the guy who shorted the bottom on March 23rd and has been trying to reshort this thing all the way back to new highs. It just doesn't work. And it has a lot to do with that loss aversion of being married to one's point of view. Yeah. I mean, whenever I'm talking to people,

new traders and everything, the first thing I say going back to risk management is that I never plan a win. I always plan a loss. Like I approach every trade as if it's going to go the wrong way. So that like, if I'm planning to lose and I'm not going to change my plan once I lose, right. It's kind of a completely different way. Also, when you talk about trading and being wrong, I don't even view trading as binary in that way because right and wrong would imply that you believe you can actually see the future, right? It's not right or wrong.

It's just a guess that you manage in a certain manner so that your losses are slightly smaller than your wins, right? I mean, so I 100% agree with you. And I think that that is the core of why people lose money trading is that they revenge trade, revenge trade, revenge trade, and they, you know, they got to get it back on that same asset, no matter what, and they keep being wrong. But what's interesting is, so I was shorting very aggressively through March, April, and then I was wrong, not at the dead bottom. But you know, a month later, I tried to short again, I got run over, and then I waited, you know, like a rational

human being. But then I read that on Wall Street, I think April and May, 13% of hedge funds were profitable. So you're not just talking about like average people who are going to feel bad that they shorted this. You're talking about the big boys were missing this over and over and over again. So you're talking about people with billions, not like your average Robin Hood, Davy Day trader, right? Yep. That's absolutely right. I mean, and so, you know, there's an article that came out in Bloomberg, I think just a couple of days ago about some very prominent, you know, multi-billion dollars under management hedge funds that have been around for a while that are, you know, your traditional long short hedge funds are just closing up shop. People have held these folks to such high esteem for so long as, oh, they're market wizards. They're Ivy League grads.

They have all of this prestige and brilliance about them. And when the rubber really hits the road with something like a volatile trading environment for the first time in 11 years, the world's best hedge funds are collapsing. I mean, this is ridiculous that you're getting outperforming. This is when they should thrive. They should do the best. This is exactly when they should thrive. You're getting outperformed by an index fund, which is literally just buying on a regular basis into the S&P 500. And it's outperforming you. Furthermore, your day-to-day traders, your Robinhood traders, your Wall Street bets, basically, you know, Zoomers and millennials that are pumping up hurt stock, for example,

when it's filing bankruptcy to hedge fund folks, they will say it doesn't make any sense. And it's like, that doesn't matter anymore. The game has completely changed. And if you use what the Fed and the Treasury are doing as a backstop for the markets, coupled with people that can't go outside, people that can't gamble on sports. People get that, you know, they play video games, but most video games don't have a money making, you know, aspect to it. This is the perfect storm for breeding this new generation of day traders or traders, or you have your folks that are doing things on TradingView.

I see the shirt you're wearing. I'm a huge fan of TradingView. I think it's the best. Send me this, man. It's great. I love TradingView. It's amazing. There's an entire sort of new renaissance of innovation around trading.

Certainly kicked off by crypto, but now where we're at with the stock market and things like Robinhood, yes, most people are going to get wrecked. I was just going to say they're all going to get wrecked. They're all going to get wrecked. But what I'm excited about is that there's this sort of renaissance around the concept of trading and how it's evolving. And I think this is, again,

one of the things that we covered at WCC is kind of how I think, you know, we have these mega competitions for Fortnite. And I think some kid, he was like 15 or 16 years old, won a $3 million purse for a video game. Like, imagine that starts to cross over to things like trading crypto. And of course, we're seeing that with the competitions on FTX and Binance, etc. But now you've got it in the stock market. And I'm not suggesting that retail folks on Robinhood that have a few hundred dollars in their account are actually moving markets in general, but they are absolutely having an impact on price for individual names. Which is crazy. I wish they had given away $3 million prizes for us playing Pac-Man at the pizza place when we were kids. There was no incentive for that. Which leads me

to one question is that when we're talking about the emotions of trading and all this, you've worked at a shop. So did you find it more challenging when you were trading other people's money than your own? Like emotionally, was there a difference there? I know a lot of poker players who play a certain way and then they get backed and they get completely destroyed because they, you know, their risk level changes. Did you experience that? Yeah, it's a great question. So, um, I, when I was being, when I was effectively building systems to trade other people's money, um, there's a level of responsibility, I think that comes with the maturity of your kind of trader experience that I, uh, had with other people's money

more so than my own, which, which is a bit odd because I have certainly a looser approach to how I manually trade. But my systematic stuff is pretty much locked. But when it was like, all right, this is other people's money, the level of fidelity around the quality of the systems that I wanted to build and how I wanted to respect that and how it actually traded or how I actually impacted the trading strategies. There was no like, oh, I'll just cut this corner here. I'll kind of get to that later. It's very different for me. I take that very seriously. In addition to that, when I was a CEO, I raised over $40 million in venture capital for my company. I took that money from investors very seriously, right? Now, venture capitalists tend to have a sprain prey strategy where they'll, you know,

say they invest in 100 companies, 90 of them fail, a few of them make their money back, a few of them make a little bit and then two of them are like 100,000x, right? I respect that, but they have to go raise that money. They take months and sometimes years to go raise the capital for their funds to then go invest in companies like myself. So I took the responsibility of that money very seriously as well. So if I was in my early twenties and someone said, you know, Hey, here's a $5 million book, go nuts. I would probably have a very different answer to that question, but given where I'm at now, I would have absolutely taken it. No doubt. Swung for the fences every day too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think the same. I don't know. I find as

like a person trading my own portfolio, obviously, I mean, if you have a community like you do on Telegram or on Twitter or whatever, you get people trying to throw money at you all the time, whether real fake or otherwise, I have no idea, but first of all, I'm not licensed. But second of all, and they don't realize that's actually a crime. But second of all, like I sleep, you know, it's a 24-7 market, as you said. So if you're talking about a crypto fund specifically, I sleep very well right now with my own money. I wake up. I don't think that would be the case if I was trading millions of dollars for other people and knew that Saturday morning at two o'clock in the morning, something could dramatically, you know, dramatically change the look of my book. Look, I mean, you know, this is one of the sort of liberating aspects of not working in an SEC regulated industry is that I'm just trading my own book again, right? And I can trade whatever I want. I don't have to get some approval. I don't have to, you know, because when you work

on Wall Street or at a hedge fund or, you know, a PE firm or a family office or something, there's these regulations and policies internally and externally that you have to follow that just kind of disable you from being able to do kind of like the stuff that I do. Can't do anything on your own. Yeah, exactly. So like if you check my Telegram channel, you'll see just, you know, all kinds of different trades that I'm putting on and calling it like that is completely off the book. You can't do any of that when you work at Wall Street or at a hedge fund. No. Yeah, I think that you're inside trading. I mean, I think people don't even realize, like, you know, I went to Penn, obviously, in the 90s. So I have a lot of friends who are in and out of Wall Street. Some of them, like,

even have like a wife who works on Wall Street, and they can't personally even, I'd be like, buy Bitcoin and be like, I got to check with my wife. She asks her company, they're like, you can't buy Bitcoin and literally can't touch it. It's pretty unbelievable. But yeah, I like the freedom definitely of being on my own. And I'm not sure that I would have the capacity to, I guess it's a bit of self-awareness, but I am always interested for people who have done both. So I totally to pivot to something else.

You recently wrote the Medium article, The New New World Order. And I know that you aim to sort of map patterns from past to present. Can you talk about some of the discoveries that you made in that article? Because I think a lot of it really is very hyper relevant with what's happening right now in the world.

Yeah, yeah. Thanks for reading. It was super long. I had, I think our buddy, yeah. Thanks for reading. It was super long. I had a, I think our buddy. Yeah. Well, you know, like long form reading is such a lost art these days, you know, um, I actually read my books too. I don't listen to them. I know that's crazy, but our friend, uh, Alex Kruger told me, he's like, he's like, dude, it's 30 minutes long. I'm like, I had to get my thoughts out, man.

So yes, it's called The New New World Order. It's on Medium. You can find it a million different ways on the internet if you want to go read it. The attempt that I was making in that essay was to just kind of try to think what would be some second order and third order effects of what we're seeing with respect to coronavirus and how that is going to shape the world in a post-COVID sense. And some of the one of the major things that stood out to me, whether there's two and we're kind of seeing them actually come to fruition. One is this this concept of proof of health. And so, you know, the idea being like right now, as an American, we can't fly to fruition. One is this, this concept of proof of health. And so, you know, the idea being like, right now, as an American, we can't fly to Europe, period, right? Now,

imagine if we had a system in place that says, hey, I, you know, and let's assume also, there's a vaccine or whatever, right? Immunity passport. Immunity passport, right? Like, imagine there's something that proves that we, uh, that I can actually enter your country or your state or your place of work or whatever, because I've got this kind of immunity passport, if you will. Um, we're starting to see bits of that smattered throughout the world. You look in the areas of Southeast Asia, for example, they're doing things like this. Um, I think Australia has something in the works. I believe it's probably only a matter of time in the United States. Again, it'll be overly politicized and there'll be tons of

propaganda on the internet about how it's all about tracking you and this and that, et cetera, et cetera. So that's one thing that I do see a lot of activity around. I still think it's very early, but there's, there's things happening. The second one that is very obvious that, that I was pointing to is this dramatic shift to remote work and what, and what impact that is going to have on not only the category of workers, but also what kind of stems from that. So the first piece here is the category of workers. So for decades now, at least in the United States, there's been this adage of white collar workers and blue collar workers. And blue collar workers tend to be, you know, folks that are working construction or doing delivery or, you know, these kind of what I would consider more manual labor jobs, not easy, right? Just more

manual labor in a general sense or services related in a general sense, blue collar job, white collar job, typically, you know, more like consultative services type business, you know, lawyers, doctors, whatever teachers, excuse me, not teachers, computer programmers, et cetera, right? Those are kind of white collar jobs, et cetera. Now we've got this shift away from blue collar and white collar to what I'm calling cloud versus land. So you've got folks that like myself, work at a tech company where basically nothing's changed except that all of my work is done from home over Microsoft Teams, which is, you know, Zoom, whatever, Hangouts, et cetera, right? For land workers, life is very different. And if you look actually at the initial

jobless claims numbers, excuse me, and you dig into them, about 87% of jobs lost are folks that are traditional blue collar workers. So a lot of those workers are completely displaced. We don't know if those jobs are coming back. We're not seeing those jobs coming back. And a lot of those workers are completely displaced. We don't know if those jobs are coming back. We're not seeing those jobs coming back. And a lot of those folks are actually turning towards the economy work just to get some sort of income or something, right? That's one aspect. There's this shift from blue collar, white collar to cloud versus land in terms of the job itself. And then the second piece is really, it's kind of like putting my product manager technology technologist hat on, which is my belief is that video is the new

platform battleground for technologists and developers and the ecosystem around that. And I'll give you an example of what I mean by that. So in 2008, we had the global financial crisis, but we also had the launch of the iPhone just about maybe six or nine months previous to that. And of course, Android followed very quickly after that as well. So during this major recession, we had this brand new technology really kind of come on the scene for the world. Also during that time, 2008, 2009 timeframe, when we were in a recession, you had very interesting companies start. You had Square start, you had Venmo start, you had Groupon start, Instagram, a bunch of fascinating companies all started during this global recession. And almost every one of those companies, if not every one of those companies I mentioned, benefited from the mobile phone. And so this explosion of iPhone, Android created trillions of dollars of value over the next decade up until right now, 2020. Not just from the phones itself, not just from the apps themselves, but the peripherals you could buy.

The idea that we've created an influencer culture there's entire agencies that manage influencers because of mobile right so this these ripple effects of what happened from mobile during the last recession what is that now today to me that is video video as a platform for building this broader ecosystem for developers and designers and creatives and ways of engaging and changing entertainment, music, fashion, healthcare, you name it, is all dramatically being changed seemingly overnight. And video is the one piece that is sitting at the center of that,

just like the mobile phone was the one piece that was sitting at the center of that, just like the mobile phone was the one piece that was sitting at the center of the last big thing. So for me, my belief is that video will become the next big major battleground for developers, and then designers, and then creators and everyone else. And it will impact every industry at the level that the mobile phone has impacted every other industry as well. And basically with the goal of replicating the live experiences that no longer exist in the same manner, right? I mean, how do you have a great concert experience without going to a concert? And, you know, right. Exactly. I have a really close friend of mine who I've known for, for since high school. He's an audio engineer in Austin, Texas. And you know, he was his last tour,

he was on he was on tour with Jack White. And so he was a sound guy for Jack White. And when I was visiting with him in Austin a few weeks ago, about a month ago, at his studio, he said, you know, it would be awesome if I could just sit here in my studio and mix Jack White while he's on tour in other areas, you've got this, this idea of remote mixing, right? A mixing console. And I said, well, how would you know what it sounds like in the, in the arena or in the venue? And there are ways of doing that through your monitors. Yeah.

There's gotta be a way that's brilliant too. And that beyond even like the fact that that's COVID and you'd have to leave or whatever, you also would save a hell of a lot of money as an artist, not bringing all these ancillary folks with you on tour. I mean, I've toured many times. I've done the bus around. I mean, people think that like an artist just shows up at a venue.

That artist is bringing every piece of equipment you see on stage. There's a guy that has to carry every single piece. You're taking 10 people for one person to tour. That means two buses. That means, you know what I mean? It's like insane. I had never thought about it. It just, it's hard to go on this rant, but that would, I mean, that eliminates one more guy that you're paying for every day on the road who can go out of bed and mix your show. Yeah. And so that's what I think is like, there is a desire to, how can we think about recreating the kind of pre COVID world where you didn't have to wear masks, you didn't have to socially distance, you didn't have to hand sanitize constantly, you didn't have this weird distrust of basically everybody you come into contact with. in is what are the net new things that we experience given this new kind of video distributed,

decentralized, remote way of engaging with people and things and events and whatnot. And that's where I think we'll see a ton of interesting innovation. And you're already seeing stuff today where, you know, Product Hunt is a great website that, you know, will list, you know, people that are launching new products and startups and ideas and whatnot. And since COVID kicked off, overwhelmingly, there's been a ton of innovation around things that improve your Zoom experience, right? Custom backgrounds, and we want to turn it into a game show and websites that you pull up while you're on Zoom with your friends and you can play a game. Like, none of this existed pre-COVID,

right? And so, I think for me, what will be interesting is instead of trying to shoehorn and jam in the pre-COVID world into a post-COVID world, what are the new ways we can think about actually experiencing the world in this hybrid model where you're still outside for some things, like don't get me wrong, I still want to go to an NBA game, I still want to go to concerts and parties and whatnot. But we also know that this is going to be a reality going forward. So what is going to be the next thing that takes us? So I know we're up against it, but you just touched on it. So I want to ask, how do you see the future now with everything that's happening here? I know we're up against it, but you just touched on it. So I want to ask, how do you see the future now? With everything that's happening here, I know we obviously talk about the technology that

will better our future, but that implies that we do have a new normal and we're not going back. So how do you see us moving forward six months, a year, 10 years? Sure. So I would suggest the listeners go read the essay because I covered basically- I would too, if you talk about it. I think in a nutshell, though, the kind of like the positive spin that I have on it is that during times of, you know, recession and depression and feeling destitute and feeling, you know, outraged and frustrated. These are also the times when you have some of the greatest works of human culture. So right now, we have people that are going to be creating amazing

art and music, and documentaries and other things that are going to be uplifting. And so for me, I think while it feels like we're in kind of the doldrums of society right now with social unrest and, you know, people dying from this horrible pandemic. And it seems like there's no end in sight. People are losing their jobs, et cetera. Just know that what's being produced and created will be shared with the world in the coming years and months that will actually be, I think, a net positive for us going forward. I love it. I love the positivity. I'm positive, too. I mean, I think it's, you know, it's going to be a hard while here, but I'm optimistic about a vaccine or better treatments. At this point with COVID, I feel like I'm just trying to kick

the can as far down the road and get it as late as possible. In nine months, I have a better chance with my family, you know, but I guess we'll save that conversation for podcast number two. Dude, I thank you so much for coming on. Really just a comfortable conversation. You have so much insight. I really would definitely love to do this again down the road. Check back in in a few months and see where we're at. Yeah, let's do it. Sounds good. All right, man. Thank you again. All right. Take it easy. See ya. Let's go. All right, man. Thank you again. All right. Take it easy. See ya.