This Week in Startups - Macro insights with Rose Technology CEO Alex Campbell + TCG Crypto's Gaby Goldberg | E1430

Episode Date: April 8, 2022

First, Jason chats with Alex Campbell of Rose Technology, a data analytics tool and marketplace that helps organizations more clearly understand macro trends (1:28). Alex is a former trader for Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater Associates and shares some incredible insights on the global macro environment across Chinese real estate (10:45), investment rates, Bitcoin, Tether, historical financial crises (43:36) and more. Then, for another edition of "OK Boomer," Producer Rachel Chats with Gaby Goldberg (1:08:45) from TCG's Crypto investment arm. They talk about resources to get started in crypto (1:28:52) and why Gaby invests at the intersection of consumer and crypto. Check out Rose: https://www.rose.ai FOLLOW Alex: https://twitter.com/ABCampbell Charts referenced by Alex: https://bit.ly/twistchartsrose FOLLOW Gaby: https://twitter.com/gaby_goldberg Gaby's Web 3 Reading List: https://bit.ly/GabyWeb3List FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood (00:00) Jason intros the show (1:28) Interview with Alexander Campbell of Rose Technologies (9:35) First Republic Bank - Discover what a long-term financial relationship can do for you. Visit https://firstrepublic.com/startup today to learn more. (10:45) The property bubble in China (15:40) Patterns of migration and economic impact (19:49) Rocket - Go to http://getrocket.com/twist and use promo code TWIST for 20% off your first placement. (21:04) Predicting recessions (25:48) The transaction costs of different payment networks (30:55) Embroker - Get an extra 10% off insurance for your business at https://Embroker.com/twist (32:14) Discussing the long term value of Bitcoin (36:07) Risks of holding Chinese real estate bonds (43:36) British-American economic history (54:50) The changing world order (1:05:10) How you can get in contact with Alex (1:08:45) OK Boomer with Gaby Goldberg of TCG Crypto (1:28:52) Gaby's best Web 3 resources

Hey, everybody, hey everybody. Happy Friday. We've got an amazing interview for today. I sat down with Alex Campbell of Rose AI. Basically, Rose AI sells a data analytics tool that helps organizations more clearly understand macro trends in the world. Alex formerly worked at Ray Dalio's Bridgewater Associates, so he's a smart cat. And he's got some really amazing insights on the global macro environment. We talk about Chinese real estate, you know, that whole Evergrand, a tether connection, Bitcoin, and so much more. It's an amazing conversation. And then we've got another edition of K. Boomer from producer Rachel. It's going to be a great show. Stick with us. This week in Startups is brought to you by First Republic Bank, where everybody gets a personal

banker who's reachable by phone, email, or text, and through First Republic's banking app. Learn more at firstrepublic.com slash startup. Member FDIC equal housing lender. Rocket. To hire in today's competitive market, you need outstanding recruiting. Rockets, expert recruiters paired with ML candidate matching, set them apart from the rest. Get 20% off your first placement at getrocket.com slash twist. And, Embroker. Embroker's startup insurance program helps startups secure the most important types of insurance at a lower cost and with less hassle.

Save up to 20% off of traditional insurance today at imbroker.com slash twist. While you're there, get an extra 10% off using offer code twist. everybody, welcome to another episode of This Week in Startups. Today's guest is Alexander Campbell. He is the CEO of Rose Technology, a company founded in 2018, that lets hedge fund investors create and share complex financial models. Previously ran an oil and gas commodity training portfolio at Ray Dalio's Bridgewater Associates, a really unique place in the world to work. You probably hear us talk about Ray Dalio's books and thinking on the all-in podcast all the time. That's the largest hedge fund in the world. I believe that's still true. Today, we're going to chat a bit about his company and a lot about what he's seeing in the macroeconomic environment. It might be relevant to founders, investors in the audience. Welcome to the program, Alex. Hi, thanks for having me.

So tell me a little bit about your company. I know you recently raised a $5.5 million seed round just in September of 2021. What is the product you're building? Is it built and who's using it? And what are they using it for? Absolutely. Yeah, Rose is a product and a company born out of my frustrations as a guy trying to work with data and finance. I was a Lehman prop trader a long time ago.

I was a commodity guy at Bridgewater and different kinds of investing. And in that experience and just talking to my friends in the financial markets was just always very shocked and kind of appalled at just how painful it was to do the physical work of financial services in particular. investing. Most, you know, you hear about quant, you hear about systemization, you hear about AI. You were talking about open AI earlier, right? And people see that and they go, what if it runs a portfolio? And then you get into the bowels of these machines that are financial institutions and it's people ripping around spreadsheets and, you know, fighting engineers, fighting investors and just a total mess. And so Rose was designed to kind of try to bring some West Coast product thinking into a very East Coast problem, which is just how financial services companies buy,

sell and manage data. Just those three things. We do dashboarding. We do analytics in that package. But the core idea is that, you know, imagine you're some scrappy kid working at Bridgewater trying to find new data sets, trying to find new alpha. And just coming to the point where, you know, your fund manages effectively billions of dollars of risk, but to buy a $5,000 time series about, you know, what's oil

inventories in some part of the world or whatever takes you about six months. and tons of time, tons of human capital, tons of people just burning themselves out. And so the goal for Rose is to be a place where people can find data, buy data, and eventually share it publicly. So a marketplace in that way. There could be sellers of data

and they could go find buyers of data and to translate from hedge fund or I don't know if it's quants who do this, but there are people who are making trades to sort of translate this into the most basic English. You're trying to make a trade that beats the market. That's alpha, right? Alpha is the, correct me if I'm wrong, the increase that you get in return above what the market did that year.

So if the market did 8% that year and you did 16, your alpha would be that eight points, correct? Yeah, more or less. I mean, it's the edge. Exactly. Exactly. And yeah, sorry, go. Okay, so you have a group of people who want to trade. They want to beat the market.

One of the tried and true ways to do that is to get some piece of information. not inside information from the company, which we know is illegal and publicly traded companies, but some data that is existing in the world. We always hear about how many cars are in the Walmart parking lot or how many shipping containers are getting, you know, off of the thing. And we watch a TV show like billions and they have all kinds of ways to figure out data. But this is the reality. There are people in the world doing this for a living.

They try to make a very big trade, $100 million, a billion dollars, $10 million, whatever it is, based on some new set of. of data. This is a discipline in the world today, correct? Yeah, and I think it sounds a lot more mystical than it is. I mean, let me take a very simple example. Imagine you're a bond investor and you care about inflation and you invest in global bonds and you don't know what inflation in India is. You don't know what inflation in Brazil is. You don't know what Hungary inflation is, but your LPs, your investors may be asking you to take positions in those bonds and just finding out what inflation is is actually incredibly

difficult. And so, you know, Alpha is probably the most specified version of it when you have data that's been cleaned and refined and all these quants have been messing with it. But it extends all the way to, you know, the growth guy who's on a spreadsheet at some startup who is just trying to find, you know, the latest mortgage rate or the latest, you know, student loan number or whatever it is. There's someone who is at a financial services role, even, not just a company, who is up at 11 o'clock 2 a.m., just looking for data. And right now, they have two choices. They can kind of hack it together manually.

This is why investment bankers work until 5am every night. Or they can try to use data vendors, which give them an incredibly painful process. And then even after you get through that process, you still need human capital to clean that data up. You need quants, you need engineers. When you hear about all these funds looking for Goldman's hiring MIT kids, they're not hiring them to go put on big trades. A lot of times they're just hiring them to run data infrastructure. And it's incredibly expensive and we're going to make it better. So how do people get that data?

You talked about data providers, people selling data. Is that a big business in the world? Is it like an underground? Is it smarmy and like dark sets of data being given on flash drives to people? Or is it more pragmatic than that? Like literally somebody creates a mechanical Turk, you know, or a Fiver job and says, go to a supermarket in Brazil, take pictures of these 50 items with their prices,

and upload it to this drive, and then they pay another person to go in there and write what the price is per pound of bananas and for milk. Well, this is the key problem, right? Finding good data is a different skill than building a data product. So you have these legacy data vendors, and everyone knows about Bloomberg and these kind of folks,

where Bloomberg is that product is actually pretty good, but there's a huge tail here. And imagine you spend 90% of your operating income, finding good data, and then you kind of throw together some product at the end of the day and try to sell it. Most of these products really suck. And what ends up happening is that as a consumer of data, you have to invest in engineering or talent to go and find and clean and navigate those processes.

You also have to deal with a vendor economic model that requires them to sell data for 25K, 75K, you know, $100,000 because they have this legion of sales, folks running around trying to sell stuff badly. So the way it works right now is basically like selling insurance. If you want to buy data it's about as painful as like buying renters insurance, which as you know, is probably

not that fun. Yeah, no, it's a ton of friction. You've got to find the person, you've got to work with a salesperson. It's not like you just are buying an app in the app store. No, and imagine you have some gigantic portfolio running, right? And the data coming in is driving that portfolio and the computers aren't working

or the guys aren't answering the phone or the time series you really need the sales guys out for vacation, right? It's kind of ridiculous that we can't buy data like Amazon or Airbnb. So that's what we're doing. So people who have a dataset can put it on your app store, if you will, your marketplace, and then you take a cut of it, you take 30% of every sale or something. Is that the business model? We take 20%.

We take 20%. And then we're trying not to get people to go into our data platform. There's a million data platforms, a million, you know, looker, Tevolo, all these people trying to visualize your data. The pain here is buying, selling, and just sharing data. And you might be in Excel, you might be in code, you might be an R, Jupiter, you know, C++, who the hell cares, right?

But getting that data to the people who need it easily, fast, and in a way that's compliant and actually versatile is the goal. Listen, in business and in life, long-term relationships are the key to success. And First Republic Bank believes they're also the key to your financial health and well-being. That's why every First Republic client gets their own personal banker to serve as their guide, confidant, and single point of contact. Have you ever had money issues and not been able to reach your bank quickly? I have and it's absolutely brutal.

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In fact, about 70% of their bankers have been with the bank for over a decade. Discover what a long-term financial relationship can do for you. Visit FirstRepublic.com slash startup today to learn more. That's firstrepublic.com slash startup member FDIC, Equal Housing Lender. All right, you brought a couple of examples with us. the one I'm sort of most interested in is Chinese property companies. We've been hearing over and over again

that there's a property bubble in China and we keep hearing about this company Evergrand. People were speculating this could be a contagion-like collapse and maybe this will take down the whole market and maybe tether, which by all accounts seems to be either a fraud or completely mismanaged in some way. I mean, I've never seen more red flags on a company,

and more legal entities investigating them and a more insane management team that has like two of four executives fighting with people and then the other two seem to be on the lamb or hiding out somewhere. Putting all that aside, I said all those things, not you. What are we seeing here with this top 200 Chinese property companies chart?

Yeah, so... I see a blue line and a red line. If you're not watching, you can go on Spotify and click the button We now have Spotify video working, or you can go to YouTube.com slash this weekend and look at this episode. So this analysis is an extension of analysis we did last summer where we were the first people to come out and say Evergrand was dead. Before the bond agencies, before Twitter, before really anybody, we said Evergrand is dead because the mark-to-market losses on their balance sheet are now higher than the market cap of all their equity, which is not a hard and fast rule. Okay, there's no hard and fast rule to say when a company or a sector is dead.

But it's a pretty nice framework to think about when you think about, you know, a company that's supposed to be an ongoing concern that has listed equity, when, you know, the equity is about, I don't know, 5 billion and it's got 20 billion of losses on the balance sheet already priced in. That's when equity and debt markets are kind of disagreeing. And in particular, the debt markets are saying this company will restructure this debt at some point. you will take a loss, here's what we think the loss will be. And so this chart is applying that analysis to all of the Chinese property companies we could

basically find. And what it says is- So we're looking at this, the blue line, just so we're clear, is the market capitalization of 200 Chinese property companies. This is what the public stock market says they're worth. And they were going up, up, up from 2000 to now, and then slightly coming down off of maybe a 2017 peak. then there is the implied bond losses.

And the implied bond losses are taken because a private set of data or... It's not actually private. This is all public. This is... Okay, so the bond data is public as well, but it's not aggregated perfectly, I guess. So you have this data set of bond. You need rows. Like, that's kind of the thing here is... So you have the bond data.

And then you can pair these two things together. And then what you see is the losses from the bonds, the bonds that are, I guess, underwater or something that are trading poorly, is just spiking up massively, which means there was some sort of bubble or something Fugazi happening all this time. Maybe,

or maybe it was as simple as they built all these properties, they overvalued them, and then they couldn't monetize them. Sell the apartments, rent the apartments, rent the office space. There's this gigantic money machine.

If you can go to the chart before this, it kind of sets it up a little bit. I think it should be the money one, which I think we got a lot of Westerners. Money creation, U.S. versus China. Got it. And I think most Westerners don't really catch on to this. You know, I kind of caught on to this because I was literally looking at commodities and

China was the big demander of commodities. So I started looking at, you know, China with their financial crisis toolkit essentially. And most people don't realize that as of around the financial crisis, there's now more money in China than in America. And if you see that little blue jump at the end, that's COVID of us printing a bunch, you know, if you're on Twitter or the internet, you hear money printer go burr and that kind of stuff. And it's just remarkable how our money printer going bird is nothing compared to the party that's going on in Shanghai right now. This is like new information for me. This is incredible.

I always assumed that the Chinese were more fiscally irresponsible and didn't print as much money. I mean, I know that they put their thumb on the scale. They murder their own citizens for reading certain books and torture people, reeducate them and put them in concentration camps. But I thought that they were thoughtful about them. of money they printed, what this is showing is sometime in 2008 it looks like a flip happened where the amount of money created in China

went on a tear and outpaced even the United States including the money printed during COVID and that their COVID printing was a steeper curve than ours. So what is the most positive interpretation of what China is doing? Is it that they needed to print more money because their economy was going so well?

I'm trying to figure out what's going on here. We don't have the chart with you right now. We can post it later, but essentially it goes into real estate. You have this gigantic secular trend of, you know, essentially urban, sorry, rural peasants moving into the cities, urbanizing, you know, taking factory jobs. That's the kind of good story. There's an enormous amount of wealth that's been created through that, you know, the global economy, basically. But as a result, what normally happens in rapid industrialization with a lot of money printing is you get a financial crisis. either because the money leaves or because the banks tighten Japan is a classic example of this,

where Japan had a very similar model to China up until about 2015. And they took the pain. So you go back and you look at the 80s and what happened with Japan, they basically realized that they work over their skis. They raised interest rates. They took some currency hit and they've been dealing with deflation since. China kind of reached that point and then did the opposite and said, you know what, we have a big problem in our banks. Real estate is now as expensive as it is in America in China by and large and the incomes are about a third. And, you know, seeing this as an investor,

I thought, well, this is unsustainable. This looks like a great opportunity to kind of, you know, take a macro position and was just a macro position be short the real estate market, short the real estate companies. There's a couple ways. One, you could short those bonds if you have an which, you know, we weren't able to get. But the other one is just very simple. It's just buy gold. And buy gold, denominated not in dollars. So most Westerners buy gold.

They buy GLD. They buy gold futures. When you buy a gold future, you're paying dollars for that gold future. And the problem is that on days like today, days like the last couple of months, gold and dollars will both rally at the same time due to safety. And so what ends up happening is Americans who are already kind of long dollars go, oh, man, my gold is falling because it's not doing well. when actually golden R&B or golden euros or golden yen is like doing amazing.

So, you know, we think that especially for non-American investors, right, people who don't naturally have a lot of exposure to dollars, given the geopolitical issues, given inflation, given everything, you want to have dollars and gold. And so I think that that's, you know, the best portfolio protection. I went around. I pitched a bunch of, you know, sovereign wealth funds. I pitched a bunch of people who fund LPs and venture funds. And I said, look, you're benefiting from this secular tailwind.

interest rates going down, the Dale Swinson model of pile into private equity, pile into venture works in a deflationary environment where assets are getting marked up. When this situation reverses, mortgage rates are 5%, home prices are looking a little, you know, stocks are already juiced. That system works in reverse. And I think a lot of venture investors aren't really considering, you know, just the impact on the multiples, the impact that real yields will have when they rise. When that happens if it's because of inflation, gold will do really well and counter people's equities. Gold will get smacked if we have a great outcome and there's no inflation. But most venture investors already have that in their portfolio. They don't need more of that. So if the multiples

are going to continue to compress in growth stocks, the exits will be smaller for venture capitalists. And if they're buying at high prices, the returns between, even in their big winners, Between the reality of the public market and the suspension of disbelief and the lack of discipline in the private markets is a recipe for underperforming the overall market or maybe even gold is your position. Yeah. It's pain. It's pain. And that's what the central bank is doing. Pain equals bad returns in your problems. Yes.

Yes. And when the Fed is tightening, they're trying to hit asset prices to slow everybody down. And when COVID happens and they print a bunch, they're trying to raise asset prices to make everyone feel rich. so that they don't, you know, stop spending. This seems like somebody who just decided to take a exit ramp at like 60 miles an hour and it says like posted speed 15 and they get halfway through it and the car is fish-tailing and they just decide to slam on the brakes and turn wildly. And like we could have just gone a little slower into the turn.

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that the recession because of the, you know, what's it called when the bonds flip? Yield curve. yield curve flipping. What's the technical term for the yield curve inverts? Inverting. Yeah, the inverting of the yield curve. You know, people are, I guess when the yield curve inverts,

people are really not bullish on the future anymore. It's a bet on the Fed, right? So the Fed is sitting there trying to fight inflation. The bond yield is the expected future path of those interest rates. And so when people expect interest rates to go up and then down again, they're saying, whoa, the Fed is height is tightening. That's going to crush the economy and then they're going to have to ease. And so it's this weird thing where people kind of don't believe that they're going to tighten as much as they say they are.

Got it. And to certain extent, they believe that the Fed will get what it wants. I mean, you know, everyone says the best indicator for a recession is the Fed tightening. The Fed tightening is to create a recession, to slow down inflation, to slow down demand. Right. The issue is that if you have an oil crisis happening, you know, or World War happening while they're tightening, the effect on domestic demand is not going to be as important as just the inflation that you're getting from all the energy prices exploding. Got it. So we are in, in a way, uncharted or a very unique, perfect storm, if you will.

I think we're in the 70s. I think this is, I think we're entering into the 70s where energy prices and commodity prices will reset higher. We're debasing the currency. We responded to World War, to Cold War by printing a bunch, right, and getting inflation. and then Volker showed up and tightened a bunch and crushed the Soviet Union. And so we might be in the same kind of narrative here where we print a bunch, you know, energy prices get out of control. And Powell tightening, you know, actually matters. Now, there's one, before we move on, there's one link between these two things, which is the Chinese economy is still dollarized. It's still pegged. So when we tighten, dollars go up, right?

So if you think about those Chinese property companies. So they're buying power goes down. they have to give more to get less. And the value of the debt that they have pegged to dollars goes up. So that red line actually goes up as the currency goes down because a lot of those property companies are dominated effectively or actually in dollar liabilities. And what is the, so you had a couple of other examples. Maybe we can do a couple more examples.

And then I've got just lightning round since you're smart and understand a lot of data. I got a bunch of softballs I want to throw and then maybe a couple curve balls. So here is, what's the price of gas? Ethereum simple transfer gas prices. We're not talking about gas. That goes in your car. We're talking about the gas fees

on the Ethereum network, to be clear. Correct. Okay. So what are we seeing in this chart? Because this looks like something you took from the blockchain, I guess. A couple different places. It actually took a lot longer than we thought

and kind of speaks a little bit to, you know, why we think that there's a need also for a data market. marketplace within the crypto space. Because just getting this chart took a couple of my analysts, multiple different sources, multiple different ways. And if you think about someone who's trying to transact on the Ethereum network, just use it as currency, use it as payment, I mean, first of all, look at how volatile this line is. Sometimes it's 30, sometimes it's zero. You hear about NFT, gas being a couple hundred dollars. I just define what gas is for people who don't know, the gas fee on Ethereum. What is the concept here? So I'm sure some crypto people will blow me up

because I don't know it as well as they do. But it's effectively the transaction fee, right? The notion of crypto is that it's your money and then you pay the network to execute transactions in different ways. Sometimes they burn the currency, sometimes they don't. And the load on that network is cleared with market prices. That's why this looks like natural gas, because there are moments where demand is radically outstrip in supply and you have to rationalize everything with prices. So if there's a limited number of nodes on the network and a lot of people want to trade NFTs today because board apes came out with some new drop or something, that may be the wrong day to day to try to do a transaction. It would be like

trying to fly on Christmas, you know, week or rent a home during spring break. You're going to pay five times as much, or in this case, it looks like a hundred times as much just by flying the wrong day. Buying an NFD on the wrong day. And then when the network

isn't as utilized, the fees go down, which for demand pricing would maybe encourage people to make more trades. Absolutely. And if you go to the next chart, it's a little bit complicated because too many lines on the page, but it explains the visa fee versus the Ethereum fee versus the Bitcoin fee. And it's on log scale so that the higher numbers are actually 10 times higher than the lower

numbers. So it gives you a sense of how, you know, extreme these things are. And the effective, you know, synthesis is that when you take the number of transactions and you take the transaction costs, that as both Bitcoin and Ethereum are currently constructed, they are unable to serve as payment term payment infrastructure for most of the transactions that we would want. What that means as a financial person for me is not that these are bad technologies, but that they are actually like the old reserves of gold moving around really slowly, and we need financial

intermediaries to interface with humans. So humans don't pay these transaction fees. So we net off the actual chain. We're starting to see some of this, but I think it also is kind of why crypto is interesting in this weird space of this company looks like a bank, it looks like a trading company, it looks It's like a wallet company. What is this thing? People are getting their rug pulled under them all the time.

Because that explosion of financial intermediaries is just happening right now. And we haven't figured out who the good ones and the bad ones are. It's like we know Coinbase. We know consensus. These are the ones that we trust. But to actually solve this problem of using crypto to make transactions, we need a lot more financial intermediaries. And I think that that's an interesting case when you think about, you know,

the banks in America have a trillion dollar market cap or something. Like, there's a lot of run to throw. What I would take from this chart or human behavior is the incentive for the nodes on a network are misaligned because if you were as a node or it might be a prisoner's dilemma actually more accurately. But if I'm somebody who puts nodes on a network and the more nodes I put on, the more money I make, but the less I make per transaction, I'm making some sort of decision of, hey, what is the, the maximum we can extract from people versus, you know, having the incentive to just lower the fees, lower the fees, lower the fees, lower the fees,

to beat Visa. Whereas if this was a more concentrated competitor without this game theory going on, the right thing for a competitor to do, if you were wealth front, let's say, is you want to undercut the other wealth managers and that's your value proposition

and you're going to do that. Or you're going to have the lowest fee funds and you're going to just keep pressing that angle or your Amazon, you're going to make Amazon basic cables cheaper and cheaper and cheaper in order to win. Here is one of the issues in crypto that the node providers, the people who are putting this hardware on the network, are misaligned in there? Is that what you can read from the chart? Is that they're misaligned in their motivation? No, I just think it's the technologies are not scalable yet. It's that they literally can't process enough transactions.

Like, you know, Bitcoin can process something like 4,000 transactions, an hour or a day, or I forget the exact number. You know, ACH and Visa are transacting millions and millions of transactions. But the way that they're doing that is ACH is a deal between banks and a club that say, hey, I'm going to give you money through this system called ACH and then they clear all their trades through it. It's less that the more nodes on the network I'm going to effectively change the price

because I don't think any one producer has that much market power. It's more just you're facing a very uncertain market where to clear your trade. you need to pay anywhere from $1 to $40, which is ridiculous. I'm certain. Which is ridiculous. And it doesn't mean that people won't do that trades. It means that it will be intermediated by people taking credit risk. It means that one day, Coinbase and Consensus or whoever, will just like JP Morgan and Bank

of America take a ton of financial risk against each other to clear trades, to clear exposures. Crypto is going to have to do the same thing. We're going to have banks and crypto. Is that what they mean by like these layer two kind of transactions that occur? So Coinbase, you're saying is not going to do it on the network. They're going to do it on their own private network. They'll do your Bitcoin transaction. And then at some point, I guess they write it to the network or they do some.

Yeah, I mean, this is, it's kind of like traditional banking, but in the new world, right? So let's assume that I don't know the number, but let's assume you can only do 4,000 transactions an hour or whatever. And let's say you're a bank and you want to do 4 million transactions an hour. Well, you're, you don't, you can try to jam 4 million transactions into 4,000 pipe, but you're not going to do very well. What you can do is aggregate all those transactions and say, I don't actually have four million transactions. I have three. I owe this counterparty, $20 million. This counterparty owes me $50 million. And this counterparty owes me $500. And we clear that at the end of the day. I mean, this is the same pipes that hedge funds use to trade. So when you hear

about Archegos or any of these family offices blowing up, they just write pieces of paper with the bank and then periodically clear collateral or deliver collateral. I think, yeah, this is the point of the Bitcoin Lightning Network, right? It's like to make transactions cheaper, faster, better, and not have to deal with the Bitcoin built-in constraints. All right, I want to quickly explain to you one crucial type of insurance that every startup needs to have and you need to know about it. It's called cyber insurance.

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job, in broker. Anything with, I'm just curious on a philosophical basis and you're looking at all of these dynamics and numbers. And I don't want to trigger the Bitcoin maximalists and the toxic Bitcoin folks who seem to have pump the brakes because they realize they're kind of damaging the Bitcoin brand by being so toxic. I think they overplayed their hand and how people are just like, I would rather not be associated with laser eyes and I'd rather just buy Solana or, you know, I don't own any Solana.

I can't horse in this race. But they would rather own some other crypto than be associated with the glory of Bitcoin. And so when you look at something like Bitcoin, okay, yeah, first up, the hill, really stable, hasn't been hacked on the core. Largest project with the most buy-in, essentially, and a lot of holders and diamond hands in there. But what we've seen in the arc in technology is that something always replaces what came before it and has some better set of properties. And the thing that I've been shocked by is that Bitcoin has been sideways. it doesn't really evolve and it's expensive and slow. And I would think at some point if cryptocurrency was actually a real thing in the world

and providing massive value to consumers financially, not for speculation, but for some actual purpose, whether it was transactions or money transfer or whatever or some infrastructure, you would think that people who were bought into Bitcoin at some point would say, well, I'm tired of going sideways and not getting a return year after year. I want to bind to something that more people are using, and that's better. So what do you think of the long-term value of the first, you know, major crypto project to hit scale Bitcoin? Will it be replaced? Well, I think if you're going to take a long crypto position, you have to have some Bitcoin.

It's like the market, right? So, you know, you probably want a market portfolio. If you're not an expert, that's like classic beta versus alpha, you know, buy the market when you don't know what you're doing. I think the question about, you know, Bitcoin really resolves down to does it ever become money? I wrote a post on this like five years ago and I said, Bitcoin can be money or Bitcoin can be cool. You can't have both, right? Money is boring. When I go to the bank and I try to clear a transaction and they f***es it up, it's going to eventually they're going to pay me my money back.

I might have to be on the phone with them for 50 hours, but eventually like the system will work. The nice thing about Bitcoin was it was anonymous and it was cool and it was not regulated. And all of the things that were kind of cool about it have been steamed away over the past five years. It's no longer totally anonymous because actually you can find people and there's all these companies running around, you know, de-duping everyone's identity on the chain. You know, it's not that efficient. It's not that. It's not this.

The real question will come down to can Bitcoin transcend into money? And I really think that to do that, it's not only has to stop being cool. It has to get boring because of financial intermediaries. Right. Like you and I don't use the ECH system. We don't use visas like interchange code when we go into the coffee store. We just take a piece of plastic and like throw it at someone and say, please like make this thing worse. We smack our Apple watch against the game.

Yeah, exactly. And that experience is what the crypto companies that want to provide financial services will have to provide. They'll have to provide a way to actually use this money in an efficient way. And I think that if you try to charge people the direct transaction fee that you're getting, it will never get there. I mean, maybe this is what USDC, you know, circle and the stable coins are going to be particularly good at, maybe. It's a question. You mentioned Tether. If I can just go off on Tether for one second. Let's do that. Sure. Can you go back to that chart of the blue line and the red line with the implied losses? So we're just for people who are listening. We're looking at the top 200 Chinese property companies.

There are market capitalization in blue, which goes up and then stalls. And then the implied bond losses, which spike massively start to spike in 2000. and 18 and then go on a tear in 2022. And this is because many of the dollar bonds for about half of the Chinese property sector are trading at $20 a bond, $40 a bond, $40 a bond. I mean, it's not just Evergrand. It's about a third of the sector is totally wiped out, right? Now, the interesting thing about Tether is that Tether has not said that they have Evergrand, but they have not said that they only have American commercial paper. And what the rumor mill is saying, and it makes sense, is that when you think about reserves,

Okay, when you have reserves for a central bank or for a stable coin, the creditworthiness, the liquidity, the actual reserve quality of that paper really matters. And not only has Tether apparently accepted Chinese property company paper, but they've, in exchange for Tether, but they've used that as their reserves, meaning that some of the bonds in this chart are in Tether's portfolio. Wow. Probably. Probably. I don't know. Okay. I mean, that would be the reason not to disclose it. If you were to disclose it now, you would create a run on tethers. Because it is likely that if they have any Chinese commercial property in their portfolio, it's not zero, but it's trading it 50 cents in the dollar, it's trading it's 20 cents

in the dollar. And I'm a Lehman Brothers guy, okay? And the thing that caused the gigantic cluster in 2008 was not Lehman bankrupting on its bonds to other banks. It was when it bankrupted on its commercial paper that was used in commercial paper funds that, you know, a role like, I don't know, GE's like, you know, accounts payable or like Boeing's accounts payable. And so this fund, I think it's called Federal Reserve or Federal Trust or whatever, broke the buck, meaning they declared that they no longer had a dollar's worth of assets behind their dollars' worth of liabilities.

I think that it is plausible. I don't know, and maybe I would get sued about this, whatever, or at least we need more disclosure, that there are losses in the reserve portfolio of Tether, which would be very interesting. And, you know, makes sense if you're tether and you just want to help people get capital out of China, you take the paper and run with it. And smart money, we assume. I don't know if you saw the Wall Street Journal story by Peter Rudegar. I think I'm pronouncing his name, correct. Rudigar maybe.

He basically found out that some short sellers were betting against tether. And that is particularly interesting since it's a stable coin and it's never gone below like 99.99% of its, you know, pegged value. So the concept of shorting a stable coin is... Sounds great. Well, I mean, it's like somebody guaranteeing you like, hey, this is an ounce of gold.

Would you like to bet that this ounce of gold will be less than an ounce, a half an ounce of gold? Well, it's supposed to be an ounce of gold. What we're saying here is, well, if they picked commercial paper from China, my lord, they could... Their ounce of gold could be worth a half ounce or 20% of an ounce.

Yeah, the point of a reserve is that when someone comes to you for their dollar bill, you say, you can have the claim on me that I'm going to pretend as a dollar, or you can have my asset, right? You can have both. That's the stable part of it. Everything's backed. Everything's back. So it is the case that if you have any kind of central bank or any kind of, you know,

asset reserve situation, and people come to the bank or they come to the stable coin and they say, I'd like my dollar bill, I'd like my dollar bill. Eventually, they'll have to find other people's dollar bills. to exchange for whatever they have as reserves. So if they have a bunch of Evergrand paper or like Sunac paper or Kaiser paper or who knows what the hell of paper they have, they then have to take that paper

and find a dollar bill that wants to have that paper. Not going to happen, right? Wow. Yeah, that is crazy when you think about it. And if you short a stable coin, I'm just thinking this through logically, the stable coin cannot go above a dollar. It's pegged to the dollar.

So by definition, it's not going to go on a tear and you're going to have to cover at $6. Well, that's why it's a good risk-reward bet. I mean, it sounds like, I don't know, I would probably join that bet. Like, it depends on how much they're paying to borrow the money. Right. Oh, they pay interest on shorting the tethers. It depends on the situation.

6 to 8%, I think, is the annual interest rate. That mechanical thing that I described, that people coming for the dollar, that's what shorting is. Right? Shorting is saying, I'm going to take your liabilities, and I'm going to sell them in the market because I don't think they're worth anything. I'm going to get dollars today for that sale process. Wow. That's kind of mind-blowing.

You know, and it's just crazy when you think that all this stuff in crypto exists. You worked for Ray Dalio, obviously. I want to get into that a little bit while we wrap up here. You've been an incredible guest, by the way. Oh, thanks. The crazy thing here when you think about it is what happened in the regulatory environment that we allowed a company to amass $60 or $70 billion in people's money on a global basis and do whatever they wanted with it

and do an attestation of like a top level two page PDF? I mean, just what is the regulatory environment for traders at a place like Bridgewater? You know, and you want to do stuff, like how much compliance and detail work and care goes into working at a hedge fund when compared to what would be

one of the largest hedge funds in the world, tether, and they can do whatever the f*** they please, with no ramifications or guardrails? Well, yeah, I mean, two reflections on this. One, like, I think, you know, I'm a Bridgewater Bowl. I think they get a bad rap. I love those guys. I think they're the best, probably some of the best investors I've ever met.

And I still, you know, I learned a ton there and they have a lot of respect for them. And I think that a lot of the reason that funds like Bridgewater get a bad rap is due to the compliance that they're under. that you have to kind of impose really draconian weird rules on your employees when you have these really crazy compliance rules that you have to follow. And when you think about actually like a global financial institution that has investors from all over the world and different regulatory environments and some of them can't trade something and some of them can't have, you know, oil or whatever it is, it just gets massively, massively complex as you get bigger.

And then to your point, it's just hilarious almost how unregulated crypto is. I mean, you remember when people were to ICOs and just literally, just ripping people off. I mean, I had to sign so many pieces of paper to launch a fund. I can only talk to people that have like $2 million. Right. It's like, if you don't have $2 million, I can't even talk to you. Meanwhile, crypto is running around like, you know, kids out of high school, like getting

their checks and like putting it in. And then they run an ICO and they're like, we raised $2 million. Right. And we never built the product. And we went to Puerto Rico. Yeah. We're in Puerto Rico now paying 1% tax if we pay that at all. And my favorite was in the first couple of years of crypto, people were trading like,

crazy. They had no idea what short-term cap gains was and why people tend to hold things for a year and maybe have a different strategy than flipping stuff. And they're like, oh, well, I have to pay for those trades. I have to net those out. I don't even know what I did. They were just like, what do I do here? What's your best guess as to what happens in the United States? Because we already start trying to kick Bitcoin out. They are doing the digital rem and B. They forced McDonald's to take their digital currency. So what happens here in the United States? Are the United States going to let crypto run amok,

or are they going to tax it and regulate it so that it is subservient to the U.S. dollars digital version? Well, I have one more chart, and it's a synthesis. So what this is is a synthesis between these two worlds, because we've talked about China not taking any pain, right? And just printing, printing, printing, printing, printing. What this chart shows is 200 years of American economic history, British American economic history.

and the blue line is the drawdown in stocks, how far stocks go down. So you can see that there's this, this is the Great Depression, right? There's COVID. There's a great financial crisis. And when I went back and looked at all these historical crises, what I learned is something very, very simple, which is these always happen, first of all, and they happen to do a very predictable pattern called bubble, bankruptcy, bank failure, bailout. Okay, bubble.

That's a lot of bees, okay. A lot of bees, right? It's nice that they're all bees. bubble in that something good happens, right? Back in the day, it was like Ohio opening up or like railroads or like roads. Like we had a bubble in roads in like 1750 or whatever, okay? And all these prosperity. Yeah, prosperity.

Technology, right? Like in 1929, it was. Innovation. Efficiency. It was radios, right? Back in the day. And then it was TVs. Now it's like, you know, smart cars and blah, blah, blah.

And that attracts capital because the asset returns are so good because it's needed. That then leads to too much leverage. that leads to bankruptcies, and then there's a conversation between the state and the financial system about who gets bailed out when and where and how. This model clearly applies to crypto, right, because you have this enormous explosion of assets, enormous explosion of wealth and financial intermediaries, and there will be a cleansing at some point. And in that cleansing, the government usually decides, who do I bail out? Now, there's a very important thing here, which is the government bailing them out with dollar bills, right? Because the government doesn't print crypto. So in a world

in which the financial system, like a bunch of stablecoins, imagine there's like $4 trillion of stablecoins or whatever, and they actually have one of these issues, you would certainly see a bailout, right? And the government would. The government would bail out a bunch of crypto dipps who had on NFTs? If enough assets were held, right now it's just a bunch of crypto right? But imagine every mom and pop has like a 10K position or whatever and like, you know, Wells Fargo blows up. And they go, oh, I don't have any deposits and they go to their local representative and then they bail them out. And this is how it's worked for thousands of years. Yeah, but hold on a second. Tether is like this amorphous organization. It's like Spector or something

from a Bond film. They go belly up. Nobody's going to bat for Tether. I'm not saying Tether. I'm just saying World Movie 4 10 years. Oh, 10 years. If this thing becomes regulated, this is how it becomes regulated. It's the inherent bubble and bust nature of American economics or Western economics or, you know, whatever. Yeah, but what you're talking about with the Western economics are assets that are government regulated. So the thing I would say is, you know, the dot-com stocks were, they did IPO, they were regulated by the SEC, the housing market. That was all regulated and it created a bubble. If people are taking their money and like trading it for bubblegum cards in their backyards, which is essentially what NFTs are, Beanie Babies,

whatever, I mean, I know some of them have some value, but that's like buyer beware stuff. That's just people buying, you know, like I said, comic books and trading cards or I don't see the government bailing them out. I don't know. It's a really interesting thought bubble.

It's an interesting thought bubble. If it all went away, if let's say Bitcoin crashed and all that money went away and Tether went away, USDC, $51,000, $82 billion market cap of Tether, if we put all the crypto projects,

I wonder what coin market cap says they are, but it's trillions. What happens to the world? Like, I don't think it's big enough yet to matter. Is it big enough to, it's not big enough to matter, right? They'll be paying, but it would be like pain like I lost money betting on the Jets. I'm an idiot. Yeah, and just to be clear, there's $5 trillion of property liabilities in China that are currently stressed, right, on a $70 trillion asset class.

So that's where I think the contrast is really stark because we have this very laissez-faire system where people grow and they do all this crazy stuff and then some of them blow up every now and then and we save some of them. but we carry out most of them. Right now in China, no one's really taking pain. There's a huge process around, like, the bonds are all selling off. The Westerners aren't investing anymore.

They're not really recapping anybody. But no one really knows how the bailout's going to go. No one really knows what a Chinese, you know, like bank failure bailout system looks like because they're continually able to perpetuate the rolling money machine. So they're covering it up, basically.

They're propping it up. With more printed money. And so theoretically, if they print that money and their economy is growing and they have positive GDP growth, maybe they could cover their losses like a gambler paying off the Vig and eventually the principal, or somebody with a bunch of credit card debt. That's a possible scenario. One more chart for you, which is, yes, they can do that. That would be true except for half of the economy is already investment.

Okay, so China has done more investment as a percent of GDP than any country in the history of reported economics. Okay, hold on a second. Let me slow down there. So investment in what? Property. And fixed assets. So they went ham taking all of their profitability and putting it into housing because everybody was moving from the north to the south.

It made everybody productive. They've got a billion people who need to work on stuff. And why not work on building bridges, roads and housing and apartments? But the fact is they probably overbuilt by some factor. they did the same exact thing Japan did and here's Japan right but they make Japan's thing look like a kindergarten party right because it's a bigger economy it's half the economy and it's still going so Japan took their pain in the 80s and the 90s and now it's back to normal and that makes sense right if you if you literally like nuke a country and then they need to

rebuild themselves like they're going to need a lot of investment right Germany has a lot of investment here too but no one has ever done the scale of what China is doing and why that matters is because as they stop investing in property, GDP falls. So the math that you said around, hey, it's okay to print 15% a year money growth when your economy is growing 10% a year. But when your economy, because of lockdowns

or whatever, is 1%, all of a sudden, that rolling debt stock becomes really important. Which is why, like, you know, she's facing a very interesting tradeoff here. It's very interesting you say this because I've been saying on the all-in pot over and over again, listen, we're giving

and this was like a year and a half ago, and obviously things have changed. We're giving all of this credit to China. When I saw that, what they did to Jack Ma and Ant Financial, I was like, well, that's the end.

Because if they don't have entrepreneurs creating massive value by creating super innovative companies, then they have nothing. Because it's not like they're going to be able to just compete forever with factories as their stand-of-living goes up,

and now they're up against Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, and other places where it's going to be cheaper, or the same price. And so they don't have the lock on cheap labor anymore. They have a group of people who are expecting their kids to do better than them and their standard of living to go up and they can eat a steak and they can get a car and they can be like Americans.

If that were to stall and then people would have to go back to a farm in the north, that's not possible probably. I don't know, maybe it is that some people would then opt out of the modern society and go backwards or this could create a revolution. And at the same time, nobody's creating value and the government is shutting down and all this money coming in from the West stalls and people are not buying shares in Alibaba. All that money, didn't China get to sweep all that money? That was great for China that people were buying all those shares because the shareholders were the Chinese government and Chinese citizens. So now they're opting out of the global money wealth creation machine.

Yeah, they've picked a handful of policies which are all kind of contradictory in a way, right? You want 100% lockdown, right? You want a tech crackdown. You want a property lockdown. You want to support Russia's like crazy foray into Ukraine and maybe go to Taiwan. You want all this stuff. And I think you see something that, again, it goes back to this West versus East thing where the U.S. has this crisis every 10 years, every eight years.

It's very chaotic. It's very, you know, tumultuous. The pain that we face from lockdown, the truckers in Canada, all the people riding by masks, people in China still want to go. outside. It's not like they love lockdowns and being shoved into like weird, you know, cafeterias and stuff where they have to like sit with a bunch of other sick people. It's just they have perpetuated this lockdown to the point where I mean, you're going to lock down for 10 years with a with a, with a not as good vaccine. It's not going to work. This is what happens. I think, you know,

now that you repeat it back to me, all this crazy stuff, if you were to think about the decision making process, it's not a decision making process that would happen at Bridgewater when you guys have those meetings where you try to make each other cry and kumbaya, like the anti-Kumbaya, Like the anti-cumbaya stuff. Did they make you cry? Stanford made me cry. I took a class at Stanford called Touchy Feely. Oh, no.

Really? What's that? It's called managing groups and teams. I was in all these, like, you know, I was a debater, I was a trader, and then I went to California to try to not be in a . I had that work out for you. I took a bunch of classes. And like one of those classes was managing groups and teams.

And, you know, it's like you take a bunch of, you know, wannabe alpha males. You stick them in a row and make each other cry. That was the experience. It was great. Yeah. Okay. Listen, I'm a New Yorker in California. They've been trying to make me not a...

For 20 years. I didn't think they're making much progress. Yeah. But, you know, if you look at that decision-making process, we're going to lock everything down instead of letting Amacron rip. We're going to get rid of the... Because of the vaccine, which is even more crazy.

It's like you're going to perpetuate the lockdown with a vaccine that doesn't work because you're supporting your old people. But remember, you have a... You have an economic machine that looks like this. You can't slow it down. Well, I mean, if you were cutthroat like them, you know, I hate to say it, but less old people who are not productive in the country would actually be,

if they were truly sociopathic, they would say old people are a drag on the economy. If we were to pair of the herd, that's who you would want to get rid of. It would be less drag on the economy. So putting that aside, they then opt out of Western economies and take D-D and take other companies off of the American stock exchanges where people are flowing money in, then they get into this crazy relationship. It seems like mercurial bad decision making by somebody who's not well informed, which is what happens in dictatorships eventually. And this is what I've been trying to explain to my besties on All In Pot or other, and anybody who will listen is dictators eventually

dictate. Dictators eventually dictate. And when they do, then they make bad decisions because they're making decisions in a unilateral fashion with a bunch of yes men and women around them who are scared to death of telling them the truth. Whereas Ray Dalio is like, let me get a bunch of young people in there and try to get them to destroy each other in some battle royale so we get to the truth. Am I correct in terms of like, how do you think about my decision making lens there of how those decisions were made? So I don't want to talk for Ray, but he has a framework on this that I think is helpful where

he talks about the changing new world order and he's probably more long China than I am. And, you know, dictatorships are, they seem very stable when they're working, right? And they're very unstable in the case that you laid out, which when they get boxed into something and they have to make some radical decision like, oh, we got to invade Taiwan because we're out of dollars or whatever, right? There's another part of that process, which is also when you change the dictator, it's incredibly disruptive. So we went and looked at data on this over a couple hundred years. And, you know, if you think about it, we have regime change in America every four to eight years. Yeah. It's on a cadence.

It's on a cadence. It's a process and oh, my God, we're going to have all these protests and maybe Trump's going to take over and everyone's freaking out about that. What happens when she dies? Does his son win? Like, what's the process? Right? What happens when Putin goes, right?

And so you get these things of, yeah, it's pretty stable, right? But when the monarch dies or whatever, it's like total chaos. You know, the Russian palace coup that goes back 400 years or whatever. So like, yeah. Well, we don't have to talk about working with Ray, but we can talk about his books and these theories. I love this chart, and I think we should just end on this. Let's pull up the the big cycle behind empires, since we're talking about the rise and decline of them. Here we go. You got a new world order starts. You could pin this to being like, say, I don't know,

China, you know, embracing the West and building iPhones. You have peace and prosperity. You get that prosperity dividend. I don't know if the charts come up for people here, but it's basically a bell curve. Let's pull it up for my team. You've seen it, I'm sure, before. And then some debt bubble starts and you get some wealth gap. A bunch of people make money on crypto, a bunch of people make money on real estate, a bunch of people make money in growth stocks, whatever it is. You get a big wealth gap. And then maybe that bust happens.

You got to print a bunch of money, maybe give some credit, bail some people out. And maybe that gets people to protest and start a war or a revolution of some type. And then you have to restructure the debt and then you have a new world order. It doesn't have to include a revolution or war, I don't think. But when you look at this with America and you look at this with China, where do you see us on this? So I think, I think Ray miss is one huge thing in this analysis, which is he talks about the dollar reserve, he talks about the pound, he talks about the, you know, Dutch Gilder and the, you know, Spanish dollar. Each of these countries was a Western trading commercial liberal environment, essentially. Okay.

And there's this guy McKinder who goes back and he talks about land powers versus sea power. and it kind of connects. Okay. The dollar is the Global Reserve, not because Britain self-immolated. Britain spent their treasure to kill the Nazis and to kill the Germans. They fight the Germans, right?

They handed... No, killing Nazis is okay. Don't worry. You're not going to get canceled for that. And if you do get canceled for them, what world are we living in? They did it twice. It was the Kaiser, right?

The Kaiser and then the Fuhrer or whatever. And it's that German nationalism. And if you think about, like, ethno-linguistic, homogenized nationalism, which you have in China, which you have in Russia, which you had in Germany in the 30s, which you had all over the place in Europe in the 30s, it's a very powerful force, and it tends to want conflict. And so for me, the like 100 years from now, who's the global reserve currency,

I wouldn't be surprised if the U.S. trashes the dollar to beat China. That doesn't mean that China will be the reserve currency. It means that some other Western power, Europe, whatever, would kind of become the home of that safety. Norway. You're not to starve a wealth fund in the world. I think if you actually want, if you actually are predicting, and I'm not speaking for Ray here, I have no idea what he thinks. But if you actually think that China will be the reserve currency in 100 years,

you have to think that we will fight a war over Taiwan. That's the bottom line. And then we lose. We lose a global conflict over Taiwan and Korea and Japan and Australia. And, you know, I don't know. I'm not a military theorist, but what I can tell, I'll bet on the West. Of course you bet on the West. I mean, Xi Jinping could be going crazy right now.

He could have, you know, he could be in cognitive decline. Well, let's face it. We might have that issue here as well. But, you know, leaders can at the end go into cognitive decline. Luckily, we have a safeguard for that for your election cycle and a democracy. You know, you can actually criticize. Yeah. The whole point of checks and balances is that don't trust the leader.

Don't trust the court. Trust nobody. Trust but verify. Right. Exactly. Exactly. I really think like this. What I appreciate about Dahlia is that he thinks about thinking, and I, you know, I'm listening to his book right now.

And, you know, I agree there's like, what, what has previously happened, you know, could rhyme, or it could be, we could be on the cusp of some sort of change that occurs, right? And I think what we might actually be on the cusp on, I think this is, you know, the optimist in me, is that what we're seeing is the end of dictators and the limitation, dictators hitting their ceiling, which is, The world is so interconnected right now that if a dictator does a dictatory thing, if dictators start wars in today's interconnected world, it's different than 50 years ago when they could go on these excursions and people are like, ah, what recourse do we have? What we've seen happen to Russia, their immediate devaluing of their currency, their quality of life for their citizens, their economic ability to operate in the world being completely compromised and everybody's saying, I'm sorry, what do we get from them?

Never again. Germany saying put the nukes back on. You know, we're going to go into rationing and the Germans are talking about rationing now. Like, man, they got religion quick. I mean, talk about a 180. That was the huge thing. And the thing I think that G did not consider and Putin did not consider, which is, you know, you have this green movement in Germany, this anti-war movement in Germany.

I mean, Europe came around like that. Germany was sending helmets one day. And then they're like, okay, let's go to war. or whatever if we have to. Because they know how bad this could get. And I think that that hopefully, hopefully, hopefully is enough. Because if you start to think about, okay, the EU and the U.S. and all of the West and Australia and Japan, it doesn't matter of China and Russia on the same team and trading

oil and trying to set up their own currency. Like if they try to go to war, we'll win, right? If they manage to fork the West in terms of, you know, Europe versus America, then, you know, who knows what's going on. Yeah, it's not going to happen at this point. What we need is, I'll tell you the chip we need. We got Japan, we got South Korea, we got Australia, we got New Zealand, we got all of, you know, NATO, we got the United States. Fantastic.

The piece, I think that the really interesting chip is going to be India. And we need to get India, which, you know, listen, India is a sovereign country that makes its own decision of very proud people, a very effective economy. And, you know, they're looking at the chessboard going, okay, oh, we can get cheap oil. Okay. You know, China's on the border. We'll make our own decision. We're not letting TikTok into India. Screw that.

China cannot participate. We don't want our citizens program by the Chinese government. Get the hell out of here. They're so pragmatic. They have nuclear power. They have nuclear weapons. I think that they are the... Nobody talks about India as being perhaps the most important player in all this who's, you know,

laying back. They're laying back and saying, Let's see how this sorts out because we're making stuff for Amazon. We've got startups. We've got entrepreneurship. We've got a middle class that's growing massively. We've got a standard of living that's increasing. And we have influence, right?

We make stuff. We make stuff really well. We make stuff as good as China does. What are your thoughts on India? I think you're 100% right. And the thing that just adds to your list, not everybody, but a lot of them speak English. and the economic linkages are already there, right? And so, I mean, we outsourcing.

I mean, it's not just outsourcing. It's not just, but for knowledge worker outsourcing, I'm sorry to find our point on it. I mean, are we sending knowledge work to China? Not really. We're making phones there, right? It's language. Language is too hard. So I think that, you know, when we talk about 100 years forward, I think that we could

see like an Anglo union where, you know, this is way out there after wars and stuff, where, you know, you actually have almost like a free trade union with India and a bigger movement of people because the U.S. needs a lot of smart people who speak English. And India has a lot of smart people who speak English. In terms of, and I'll close on this, I think forgetting the English part, just the fact that they have the border with Pakistan and Pakistan is clearly aligned with China means that they're on our side. Right. You can't get away from that because you have a really contiguous landmass from essentially Beijing to, you know, Moscow. and it's actually quite an access now. And you also have active people like fighting on the borders up in the X-H-N or whatever.

So I think they clearly go on our side. I mean, having a free trade, free travel, free immigration from India to America would be the power move for the United States. I've been talking about, you know, stopping the discussion of immigration. That's one discussion. And then there's talent recruitment. And we should just be looking at India and saying, these are some of the most talented people the world. These people work hard. They have a work ethic. They want to see their, a lot in life, you know, increase for their families and for their country. Let's let a million Indians come to

America every year until we fill all the jobs we have. Let's create a cross-border, you know, relationship. And then maybe what if we can settle things with Pakistan? And if Pakistan was, you know, just, they're going to have to make a decision too. Does Pakistan want to be part of the West? Or do they want to be part of the dictatorships of the world? And I don't know where, I mean, I'm not educated enough, but we'll save that for another time. This has been awesome, Alex. Thanks for coming on.

Thanks for thinking. I really think we should talk about this, you know, your case for China. Like, I would really love to have you keep double-clicking on China and maybe expand this into a talk about just what the, the bull or bear case for China. Like, what's going to happen from this point forward in China? And maybe we could talk about that offline. Absolutely. That'd be great. All right, everybody follow ABC, A.B. Campbell on the Twitter. A. B, C-A-M-P-B-E-L-L. And your domain is, rose.com. A.I. Oh, nice, nice domain. Rose.a.I. Everybody go check it out. You're hiring, I believe. So

rose.com slash careers slash jobs, something like that. What are you looking for? What's the most acute position? If somebody wants to go work for you, they think you're smart, which obviously you are very, what's the toughest job you need to fill right now? What's the top position? You know, we're not like a standard tech company and that the roles are a little bit different because we're kind of like a half financial institution and half. You know, so anyone who's at that intersection of data, finance, visualization of information, you know, scaling, scaling big engineering processes, that kind of stuff. Like, you really want to, big data, data visualization and finance. Like people who are at that intersection, it's kind of a,

you know, special skill. All right. There it is, Alex at rose.ai. Send your cover letter telling me so I'm on the pod and go work for this guy because he's smart. You're going to do well. How did I miss this seed round? How do I wet my beak on this company, Alex? Oh, thanks. Wait, when did you did the raise in September?

We raised $5 million. Okay, that was for 15% of the company. Maybe we increased the valuation 20% and J-Cal slides in a quick millie. All right, we'll talk about it. I don't know. I feel like I got a slide a quick million here. I think I got a, I think you and I got a thing. Maybe this could be the beginning of an interesting bromance.

All right. We'll start an India start up. Yeah, I mean, trust me, half my friends. I mean, when I go to my poker game, it's kind of like a joke, people are like, what's it like to be a minority? I'm like, it's like, just like two white guys, three Indian guys, Chimath, and David Sachs and I are there like, okay, this is the end of the empire. So be it.

I love it. I mean, my kids are mixed race. So I love the fact that the world is moving to, you know, like a more diverse, interesting world. Like, who wants a bunch of white guys running this thing? Like, it's much more interesting. thing. I mean, and I mean, are you of Indian descent? I take it. No, I'm just long India. Oh, okay. The way you were enthusiastic about India. I just, I just, I've met so many,

I've worked with, I met so many amazing Indian people in my time and finance. And I'm just like, oh my God, why? And, you know, they've had immigration issues and it's been a mess. And I've been like, what the hell is going on? Can we just get more of these awesons? It's, it's amazing. When I started in my career, I was watching people in the IT, industry and watching people in the IT industry say, we got to get some Indian guys in here because we get them on the H-1B visa. We pay them half as much. We make them work every weekend. And if they even say anything to us, we fire them.

They have to leave the country in 30 days. It was literally how people talked about H-1B visas. And when Trump was criticizing H-1B visas, I went on Sammy Sagan. I said, listen, I hate to give Trump credit for anything because I think the guy's a narcissist maniac, but he's dead right on H-1B visas, being abused in specifically the IT industry. Yeah. And here we are 30 years after I experienced that in the 90s, and look at who's running Twitter, Google, and Microsoft, right?

And it's all we have left. America, we don't make anything. It's just a nice place to hang out. So, you know, let's get all the world smartest people. Welcome to Epcot Center, Europe and America. You can come see what, you can come see what it was like was productive. That was what happened when I went to Florence. They were like, this place was the center of the world.

Everything happened here. I'm like, what's going on here now? they're like, gelato? You want to go see the David? Can we get you an espresso? We have tours. You know, you get a bike and ride along the river and can show you some countryside. I was like, okay, it's Epcot Center.

Sounds good. Okay, up next is another edition of OK Boomer with producer Rachel. This week, she spoke with Gabby Goldberg, a Genzi investor at TCG, who focuses on the consumer and crypto. It's another great interview from producer Rachel. What a rising star. She is. Okay, Boomer.

I understood the assignment. Thank you, everybody, for tuning in for another segment of OK Boomer. Today on the show, I have Gabby Goldberg. If you're on Twitter, you probably already know who Gabby is. But if you don't, she is an investor at TCG. Her focus is consumer and crypto. And TCG is a multi-stage investment firm dedicated to building consumer businesses. Thank you so much for coming on, Gabby.

Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. So the first question I have is, how the heck did you get almost 64,000 followers on Twitter? Have you just been like absolutely tweeting about Web3, like, since it's existence? Like, what's up with this? I wish. Well, I would say half of it was by complete accident.

And sometimes I wake up and I'm like, how did this happen? Actually, a couple weeks ago, I don't even know if I should be saying this. But a couple weeks ago, I literally got recognized on the street, which was so funny because it was like, I got stopped and they were like, I love your writing. And I was like, so interesting. because your profile picture is a JPE. I know, I know. And I was like, this is not supposed to be happening to me.

Like, that's not who I am. And I was like so shocked. But I guess on the other half of it, I've understood for a while, like the power of really building a brand and having something that kind of speaks for you online, especially like with our age group, like living on the internet is so important. I think there's a statistic of like 60% of Gen Z care more about their online presence than their presence in real life.

And so I got on Twitter right before COVID, probably like February or March 2020, started writing, kind of sharing my thoughts, just like reaching out to people and meeting folks and the ball sort of started rolling from there. But even like my career and venture started through that Twitter account and spending time online. Yeah, social media has definitely played a huge part in my life, especially when the pandemic hit and trying to build out your personal brand, especially in the investing space I'd like to think. And in Web 3 is super important. But I actually didn't find you through Twitter.

I found you through a blog post on symbolic systems, which is a combination of psychology, philosophy, and computer science. Symbolic systems are really interesting to me, but why are they interesting to you as an investor? Sure. Well, to be fair, I had no idea I'd be an investor when I studied that major, but it has turned out to be incredibly helpful way more than I thought. So I came into school, actually as a philosophy major, I thought I was going to go to law school. very shortly into being at Stanford,

I kind of did what every Stanford student does, and I started taking a bunch of computer science classes. Candidly, I wasn't even that good at coding, but it was this kind of intersection of computer science and philosophy, think like ethics of technology, human computer interaction, design thinking, social computing, all these kinds of like high-level topics, you could really touch on when you were in an interdisciplinary major like this one.

And so I concentrated in HCI. I worked in the virtual reality lab, always kind of thinking of, like, you know, how have our lives changed with the internet? How do we kind of meet and engage and interact and make money online and how these things change since the internet first started? And so, of course, now it's like hugely, hugely relevant. But I just studied it from personal interest. So I was going to say, how did you find out about the world of Web3?

But I guess that's a pretty streamlined path from there, right? A little bit. Yeah, I sort of came to Web3 from. a couple different angles. And I'm relatively new to the space. I kind of fell down the rabbit hole probably a little bit over a year ago. But I mean, there are people I work with who have been in a space for over a decade. And so I'm still very new to the space.

On the one hand, it was from the venture perspective. In my last job, I was an early stage consumer investor just focusing purely on Web2. And so I was looking at creator tools and the consumer marketplaces of the world like Cameo and Patreon and Kickstarter and these types of businesses. And for years, we've been pre-teachers. about this idea of the creator economy, right? Like, anybody can be their own business online. I even ran a roadmap at my last job called enabling entrepreneurship.

Basically, anybody can be a business online. And yet at the same time, the more I learned about these platforms, the more I realized they only really brought us halfway there. So a good example, I was meeting a bunch of creator tools that, you know, many of them were acting sort of as like paid Finstas on Instagram, for example. So like, let's say you're a creator and you've got a million followers and you want a place where you can engage more intimately with a subset of your top fans.

So almost like a PG version of only fans. I met a company that was creating a native app to be able to do this. And so you could download this app, follow your favorite creators, pay $5, $10, $15 a month. And you could kind of see their Finsta and what they were reading and writing,

but not to a wider audience. The problem was, and what I didn't realize, is if you're a creator that is taking in-app payments on any application on the app store, 30% of those revenues go back to Apple. And so maybe if you're a big business that, you know, is making millions of dollars through your, through your app, you know, that's just a line on the balance sheet. But for a creator, you know, we preach about this idea of being able to live a life where

you make money online, 30% is a lot of money, right? And so it was problems like these that made me realize, you know, I only, we were only getting halfway there from these types of businesses. And at a high level, all of these companies that I was looking at, these consumer marketplaces, et cetera. They allow us to build these ideas, operate these platforms, fund them. Why can't we collectively own them too? And so this was sort of like the stepping stone that made me fall down the rabbit hole and get into Web 3. Okay. So it's so interesting that you first throughout the creator economy that led you to Web 3 because whenever I think of the

creator economy and Web 3, I almost think of them as two separate things and as buzzwords. And I always wonder are both of them just niche industries that are popular right now, but they're just fads? Like, do you think Web3 is going to stick around? I certainly think it's going to stick around. I'm biased, of course, but the way I think about it is just the new era of the internet. And so as an analogy, people today say, you know, there's so many NFT projects being created, how am I supposed to tell the difference between a board ape and some other cartoon monkey project or like, what's the difference between all these things? And I guess what I would kind of remind someone who who feels that way is think about what happened in the first era of the internet when anybody could make

a website and put it online. So many of these websites completely went to zero, right? Like, I think pets.com is like the canonical example, but, you know, millions of websites were created and many of them kind of became nothing, but the general trend of being able to have a presence online, obviously has only grown hugely, hugely, hugely in importance. And so similarly, it's a next era of the internet. There's a ton of hyper on the space. There's a lot of froth. And so when people are interested in investing in this space, I tell them, of course, like, do your own research. If you're going to buy an NFT, only buy it because you love it and it has value to you. Many of these projects will go to zero because there's so much excitement around the space right now.

But at a very high level, this trend is going to continue. So I think everybody, if they're listening to this podcast, knows what an NFT is. But are there other areas within Web3 or within crypto that you think are extremely interesting, especially like specific projects? Yeah, specific projects. I mean, it's like a whole rabbit hole that we could go down into and I could talk a couple, talk about a couple that are specifically interesting to me. But I think generally, if it's helpful, I can give sort of like a high level of like what an NFT is and why it matters and also just kind of like what Web 3 really means at a high level.

For sure. So when we talk about Web 3, like you said, you're totally right. It's such a buzzword. And so the best way that I've been able to explain it to like my friends and my family. family is by going back and sort of doing a little bit, doing a little bit of homework on Web 1 and Web 2 and kind of how we even got here in the first place. So Web 1, I kind of talked about like a million different websites being created. Web 1, you know, the first era of the web, it was created in 1989.

And it had this vision of this decentralized and open network of information and data where specifically users were in control, not centralized platforms. And I guess I'll stop there and say, I think a big misconception about Web 3 is its new technology, but it's also a new value system. I would say, yes, of course it's new technology, but the value system is very similar to what we saw in Web 1, right? Users are in control, not centralized platforms. So during this first era of the internet, we saw companies emerge like Google and Yahoo and Amazon. And over the next couple decades, as these platforms reach scale, consumers ended up migrating from these open platforms and open protocols to more centralized

ones that happen to be more sophisticated. The problem with Web 1 is it was open and users were in control of their own data, and that's a good thing, but the consumer experience was pretty poor, right? Yeah. Even if you look at interviews or talk shows from the early 90s and you hear people trying to talk about the internet, they're like, oh, yeah, it's like a big billboard on the worldwide web. Like, they have no idea.

And it's very similar to how you hear people talk about Web 3 today. So the movement from these open protocols and open services to more centralized ones over those couple decades was both good and bad, right? It was good because it gave us the internet. that we all know today, right? Like, I grew up online. I think the internet is one of the best inventions of our century. And we wouldn't have, you know,

billions of people getting access to the internet unless we had moved to those sophisticated, centralized services and giving all of these different people across the world access to all of the internet's various technologies. The reason it was bad, it's kind of where we get to this tradeoff, is it made the internet a lot less innovative and dynamic because when you have these centralized platforms in control, it becomes harder for individuals and groups

and businesses to create things online without fear or concern of losing ownership of those things. And so I gave the App Store example. I think that's like kind of a very poignant example that a lot of people face. And so when we think about Web 3, in my view, it's like this very beautiful combination of Web 1 and Web 2. It'll combine the decentralization of Web 1 where users are in control of their own data. You know, this concept of ownership is so huge. But it'll also have this powerful consumer experience of Web 2. And at the end of the day, it'll have a really level playing field. And it'll take us back to the original values of what the internet should be,

which is decentralized, community governed, innovative, accessible, dynamic. These are all things that we saw in the first air of the internet. And I see us returning back to that in Web 3. So with the ownership aspect, I don't know how much probably the generation under us cares about ownership in terms of what they're putting out into the world. And I think that's just a virtue of the fact that. but they've grown up with iPads in their hands, whereas we probably got them a little bit later in life.

How important do you think ownership is going to be? Like, why do you think people now are so gung-ho on ownership? Whereas, like, in the past few years, it kind of felt like people were throwing stuff up on the internet, on YouTube, on Instagram, or whatever, and being like, we don't care as long as our work is out there. Yeah, it's a really good point. And I think generally we see this problem

and just innovations widely where you don't think it's a problem, and this is when an innovation happens, and you think, you know, how did we ever live without it? So think of like, imagine life without Airbnbs or life without Uber and you were calling a taxi. Like at the time before Uber existed, nobody felt like they needed the ability to call a car from a mobile app, right? Or, right? And then all of a sudden this happens and you don't see the world without Uber anymore.

And so similarly, I think this concept of ownership, it doesn't matter until it hits you in the face. And I think one good example, it was probably five months ago now. there was one day when all of the Facebook apps shut down for like six or eight hours. Yeah. WhatsApp and everything shut down. Yeah. Crazy. Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, anything that runs out of that organization was down. And for someone like me who just hangs out on the internet, I was like, what's going on? But for someone, let's say they run a business on Facebook or they run a Facebook group or you're a creator that makes a living off of your following on Instagram or something like that, or even all of these businesses in emerging markets that fully operate on WhatsApp.

It's a huge market. I think they all realized for the first time, you know, holy shit, if these platforms go down tomorrow, I have nothing. What does it mean to have ownership of your content, ownership of your own data, ownership of your audience, all of these things? And Web3 can enable that. Got you. That makes a lot of sense.

I also want to talk about a mirror article that you posted. I guess first you could probably explain what Mirror is and then I want to dive into Web3's mobile movement, which is the article. kind of sparks the reason why I wanted you to come on. We just had Smirk founder, Preston, Adabaryon. He's super-duper-cool if you don't know him. He's amazing. He's amazing.

So cool. But you guys were both kind of talking about this whole mobile movement. I think it's really interesting. And I saw it on Mir. Cool. Yeah. So Mirror, in short, is a decentralized publishing platform. I used to write on Medium, which I think more people know.

And Substack is also popular. The good thing about Medium is it has great distribution. and great SEO, which a lot of these Web3 businesses are struggling with SEO candidly, and hopefully we'll fix that soon. But the problem is if you actually read the fine print of Medium, I don't actually own my content. And if they decide that if they want to monetize or if they want to share it, they could do so. And if I post on Mirror, the content is actually mine and it utilizes Web3 storage. So it exists permanently on the blockchain. Oh, I have a question actually about that. Then why do so many people post first on Mirror,

copy it and then post it over on Medium and then it says like originally published on Mirror? So I do that as well and I do it for distribution. We're kind of in this middle ground where I believe in the values that Mirror wants to push forward, but I also believe in kind of like, quote unquote, spreading the Web3 gospel and actually having my voice heard. And so we're kind of at this like, you know, in purgatory basically. And so I still definitely like kind of boot shop and leverage the distribution that medium provides. Yeah, that totally makes sense.

But the piece, Web3's mobile moment, it was basically or it was largely kind of spurred out of conversations I had with friends where they say. say, oh, you work in crypto, tell me all about it. I talk about crypto. I preach the gospel, like I said. And they get excited about it. And then I'll get a text a couple days later saying, oh, I, you know, I wanted to buy an NFT, but it won't let me buy it on the OpenC app. Or like, what app should I download or like, how do I do this? And then I have to say, oh, no, well, actually, like, you should probably get, you know, a Chrome extension to have a wallet in your browser and then you should engage on these sites. And it made me realize

the friction is so, so heavy, right? When we talk about the path to, you know, crypto nativity. To me, if you're crypto native, you're on chain. And so there are a lot of people who say that they're deep in crypto, but all they have is a Coinbase account to be able to buy and sell tokens on their phone. And it makes me realize, you know, if we had more powerful and more engaging consumer experiences on mobile, it would be so much easier to onboard people into the space. And so basically, I kind of started the piece thinking about how mobile changed the internet almost a decade ago. It certainly increased scale and consumer sophistication. And also, phones are like inherently personal, right?

You can do basically anything on them. You can make a call, you can take a photo, you can submit a payment, you can listen to a song. It's all of these social apps that are basically built on top of what you can do on a mobile phone like Instagram for sharing photos, for example. And it made me think what are the things that are uniquely enabled by mobile in Web3? And there are a few that I think are quite interesting and I hope to see kind of, you know, spin up within the Web3 ecosystem over the next couple of years. one of them is geolocated NFTs, so an NFT that has a specific location attached to it.

So maybe you can only go see it in AR if you're at that specific location. Imagine like a Great American Race type of thing. Augmented reality web three games, Jadu is really interesting on that front. I mentioned basically anything generally involving AR and NFTs. And the analogy that I brought up is like on TikTok and Snapchat, all of the trends of like Gen Zs and millennials using AR. for comedy or for telling a story. And I mentioned like the giant sexy Shrek trend on TikTok of this like huge AR Shrek that you can put in.

Imagine if you actually owned an NFT and you could do that in AR. I think the stories you could tell would be so powerful of bridging this like URL and I love that URL and IRL life. That is good. I mean largely like how I got into the space and why I'm excited about consumer both across Web 2 and Web 3 is there's a large gap between our physical lives. in our digital lives and they're starting to converge more and more. And so I'm really excited about the platforms and the applications that help us share our

digital lives better with one another. The way I kind of explain it is, you know, a decade ago, we already moved IRL to URL, basically taking friends that you had in real life or taking relationships in real life and bringing them online. Facebook is a perfect example. It was built off of adding your college friends on Facebook, right? Even Instagram, you're taking a photo in real life. and you're posting on Instagram.

And so largely, the IRL to URL shift has been solved for. What hasn't been solved for, and I think the reason we have this kind of like fragmentation and loneliness across the internet is we haven't solved for URL to IRL. Or if we have, I think the only place that it's actually worked at mass scale is dating apps, where you meet a stranger online and then you bring them into real life. And now you can go to a wedding and see two people who met on Tinder and you actually don't bat an eye. But in any other situation, I think it's still relatively taboo to bring like an IRL relationship or a URL relationship or experience and bring that online and bring that offline.

And so I think a lot of these applications like specifically within AR, geolocated experience, like these mobile native experiences will help to bridge that gap. So interesting you say that because I was talking to my roommates. I love meeting people off of Twitter and I've gotten a lot of coffees with people that I've met off of Twitter. And when I talk to my roommates about that, who are not as into the Twitter versus I like to call it. They're like, that's so, that's weird. That's weird that you meet people on the internet and that you're meeting them in person because you're right. It's super not common to have that URL to IRL experience. Even though we're, I feel like we're given this space to do it, we have Twitter. You can see where someone's located. But because it's not made for that, people aren't

necessarily like using that for toothful potential, whereas Tinder dating apps in general, they're made for that. So that's really cool. But you mentioned like that discoverability challenge. the SEO issue, how do you think Web3 is going to solve for this like discoverability challenge? Because until we have that, I guess it's going to be really difficult to get the IRL part, you know, going. Sure. Yeah. I mean, I think like the boring answer is just like optimizing SEO is something that we have to work on. But I think interestingly, like the world of maybe like advertising or distribution or whatever you want to call it within Web3 is quite interesting because when you have, for example, like NFTs as incentive mechanisms or, or Dow's for coordination. If you're a part of something and you have a real stake in it,

you're incentivized to share it with your network. And so you even see, you know, you can think of like Board Apeat Club or any other large 10K PFP project. They're platform agnostic, right? It's like it's not like it exists on a certain game or it exists on an app, right? It's an NFT. It's cross platform by design.

And the people like become a platform in a sense. Actually, my friend David Phelps wrote an incredible piece called People Are the New Platforms, which is like definitely a must-re But it kind of talks about this of like there's built-in distribution when people have ownership in the things that they care about online. And it completely changes the game for how things kind of spread and how you can kind of measure how media moves. If you were going to give somebody one resource to learn more about this entire space, probably just Web3 as a whole, like the basics, bare bones. Where would you point them to?

Well, I'm so biased. And so shameless plug. but I got that question a million times from friends and I decided to put together a reading list of the stuff that I like the most in Web3. It's literally Web3 reading list.com. I might have already already checked that one out. That's linked in your bio, isn't it? It is.

And I update it all the time. Anytime I read something that I like, I actually am going to add something later today that I read yesterday. But what I recommend people do is if you have no idea where to start, you can go to that reading list. You can start bottom to tops. You can read in chronological order like the Ethereum white. paper if you want to get into the technical nitty gritty up all the way up. Admittedly,

it's pretty consumer focused because that's what I spend my time in. But then if you're not on Twitter, you should make a Twitter account and you should follow the authors of the pieces you liked. And it's a great way to learn about what the smartest people in this space are doing, what they're reading, writing, who they talk to, who they follow. And then you can kind of see the ecosystem at a high level and figure out where you want to focus. Anybody in particular that you recommend following. Ooh. There's a couple of non-accounts. that I love. Nowhere of markets feels like my hidden secret,

and he's just an amazing writer and fully anonymous. Punk 6529. I'm trying to think of other people who are great in the space. Forefront is like a media and publishing DAW. So if you follow them, you can see the pieces that they write. And other internet is also kind of like a research organization of just a small group of people who write like incredible research about the internet. So I would recommend that as well.

Awesome. Thank you. And this is going to be my last question, I promise. I, like I said, I didn't find you through Twitter. I actually found you through a bunch of your writing. If you were going to recommend people our age direct made of college that are diving into a new space and want to start putting more like up their findings out on the world, I love the idea of like learning in public.

Where do you think is the best place to do that? I definitely think you should start writing, whether it's on medium or substack or mirror, wherever you want to get started. And you should cross post it on Twitter for distribution. Okay. And essentially my advice, if you want to kind of get into the space is you should be authentic and meet people and write and share your thoughts. And like the best piece of advice I ever got about my writing

is you, is you should write as if the audience is you, write for yourself. And that's it. Don't think, you know, what do other people want to hear from me? But you should write about the things that are exciting to you because then you'll never burn out. And chances are, there's a non-zero chance that a lot of other people around the world will find the things that you think are interesting, interesting as well. And it's a great way to kind of find community. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on. Gabby, where can everybody find you? I'm on Twitter at Gabby underscore Goldberg,

and I write at gabby.mere.xy-Z. Awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you. Hey, everyone. Producer Nick here. I want to tell you about the SaaS Syndicate. If you're a founder of a SaaS company with a product and market,

our investment team wants to talk to you. Head over to the syndicate.com slash SaaS, S-A-A-A-S to apply to raise from the SaaS Syndicate. And you can join Jason's syndicate of over 9,000. accredited investors at the syndicate.com. Producer Justin here, know a cool startup? Check out openscouting.com, where anyone can refer a startup to our investment team here at launch, even if you don't know the founder.

If you're the first to flag a company for us and we decide to invest, you'll get 5K in cash or 10% of our carry. Hey, everybody, producer Rachel here. Are you an early stage startup that has product and market, some traction, and are looking to raise at least $500,000? apply today to Remote Demo Day for your chance to pitch to over 9,000 investors in Jason's syndicate. Submit your application at Remote Demoday.com. Our next event is on April 27th.

And if you want to learn how to invest in startups from the world's greatest Angel investor, and no, we're not talking about Chris Saka, then head to Angel. Dot University to apply. The four-hour workshop costs $300 and all proceeds are donated to charity. To date, we've donated over $175,000. to various charities, and you can see the full list at angel. University slash charity.