We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC055: What is the Cantillon Effect w/ Sahil Bloom (Bitcoin Podcast)

Episode Date: December 8, 2021

IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN: 04:38 - Sahil's thoughts on curating content online. 10:45 - Why Sahil has gotten interested in Macro and sound money. 17:13 - What is the Cantillon Effect and why ...is it important? 17:13 - Sahil's thoughts on how a person can use this macro concept for investing. 30:10 - Portfolio construction in today's environment. 30:10 - His thoughts on alt-coins. 54:57 - Who Sahil follows. *Disclaimer: Slight timestamp discrepancies may occur due to podcast platform differences. BOOKS AND RESOURCES Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, and the other community members. Sahil's Twitter Account. Sahil's Newsletter. Sahil's podcast. If you're new to the show and don't know where to begin listening, check out our We Study Billionaires Starter Packs. Browse through all our episodes (complete with transcripts) here. SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: Bluehost Fintool PrizePicks Vanta Onramp SimpleMining Fundrise TurboTax Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. Hey, everyone. Welcome to this Wednesday's release of the podcast where we're talking about Bitcoin. On today's show, I have Mr. Sahil Bloom. Sahil is a Stanford grad that spent the last decade in the private equity space. He's recently come into the Bitcoin community, adding valuable content and breaking down various important ideas without the confusing jargon and complexity. On today's show, we talk about the cantalon effect and how it's important to today's macro
Starting point is 00:00:25 environment, among many other important topics. So without further delay, here's my chat with Sahil Bloom. You're listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by the Investors Podcast Network. Now for your host, Preston Pish. Hey, everyone. So here I am with Sahil Bloom. And Sahil, thank you so much for making time and coming on the show. Thanks for having me, Preston. It's an honor.
Starting point is 00:01:01 And I've been following you for a really long time. So I'm excited to finally be able to do this. I can't believe that we haven't had a chat one-on-one like this. We talk a lot on DM and whatnot, but it's great to finally do this. Yeah. It's funny. Like the last 18 months have been a hell of a whirlwind, right? I mean, you and I think first connected probably, I don't know, it must have been like May, June of 2020.
Starting point is 00:01:25 And, you know, at the time, the world was obviously a very different place. We were in the like depth of despair post-COVID, the market crash, etc. And where Bitcoin was at the time, it was a very, very different world. And so it's funny. like our platforms and everything we've been doing has developed alongside our relationship and friendship, you know, all along the way. Tell people a little bit about your background and just more about yourself if they're not familiar with.
Starting point is 00:01:51 I grew up on the East Coast, born in New York City, and then was raised in the Boston area. Father was a professor. He was at Harvard, so he grew up just outside Cambridge. I played baseball. My whole childhood was just kind of like a near-do-well kid. I ended up, I was fortunate. I got a scholarship to go play baseball in college. So I went out to Stanford, 2009, played there 09 to 13. Unfortunately, it hurt my shoulder. I was a pitcher. Hurt my shoulder and kind of derailed any aspirations I had had.
Starting point is 00:02:17 And honestly, had no clue what I was going to go do next. I was like trying to figure out, like everyone else, what my journey was going to be, what my path was. It seems like from the outside looking in, you have everything, you know, well put together, et cetera, but I was totally lost. And at the time, I ended up meeting this group that was just starting an investment fund in the Bay Area, got linked up with them, ended up taking that job as well. one of the first analysts at that firm and really stayed there over the course of six, seven years
Starting point is 00:02:41 and kind of just rode the wave as the firm continued to scale. And we raised more money. We were investing in cool things. And because I'd been early there, I got a lot of cool opportunities from the early days there. I had my first experience with Bitcoin in 2014, had a crazy friend on the baseball team who was like mining this stuff in his dorm room instead of going to class. I had no clue what the hell he was talking about. But that had kind of started me down. not just the kind of crypto and Bitcoin rabbit hole, but also just down the like technology and future rabbit hole. And so while I was building my career in more like mainstream traditional finance, I always had this eye towards the much more interesting things candidly
Starting point is 00:03:19 that were happening in this like futurist world. And none of it made sense to me, but I had started reading because of that and talking to people. And you know, for that, I'm very grateful because now I live in a world and am operating in a way where I get to actually work on that with more of my time. And so COVID hit, I was like very in the trenches of this mainstream finance role. All of a sudden, I had more time on my hands. I decided, you know, to start writing as kind of a way to fill some of that time. I'd always loved writing, sharing creative work, but never really had an outlet for it. So I picked up my Twitter account, which I'd had for my baseball days, probably had like 500 followers at the time. This is May 2020. And started writing, started writing
Starting point is 00:03:57 these threads, basically just trying to break down finance and business topics in like, a purely accessible, digestible way, like not talking over people's heads, not doing the like TikTok yolo into options, really low stuff, just shooting down the middle and shooting straight with people. And I just found that it clicked. And it resonated with people. I really enjoyed it. I was getting a lot of value from cementing my own learning on these things.
Starting point is 00:04:21 And so I kept at it. And, you know, we've seen it obviously, but it's kind of snowballed over the course of the last 18 months that I've been working on it. And it's been fun because I've gotten to meet a lot of really cool people like yourself. and like all these people that I get to interact with on a daily basis now in the broader Twitter community. So let me ask you this. You've picked up on this really unique psychological effect, or at least I think it is,
Starting point is 00:04:45 of people sharing content specifically on Twitter when it's in a thread format. You could take some of your posts, put them in an article, and post it. And I think that you'd have way less engagement, like one-tenth the engagement if it was in an article format. But when you break it into a thread, for whatever reason, there's something happening where people want to keep going down. And obviously, it's phenomenal content. Like you said, you're writing it for the person who's reading, not yourself or trying to
Starting point is 00:05:12 make yourself sound smart. You're writing it for the other person to actually learn the content, which is what I love. And so what is happening? Why are the threads more shareable in that? Is it something that you knew when you got started? Is it something that you just kind of figured out as you were doing it? Or what do you think? That's a great question.
Starting point is 00:05:32 So I guess there's a couple things. I mean, Twitter has always been this amazing discovery tool for content, for written form content. But they had never really developed. There was never any product adaptation, innovation with it. The platform itself was kind of languishing for a long time. Trump actually breathed a lot of new life into the platform as much as people don't want to admit it. It was kind of dying, a slow death.
Starting point is 00:05:52 And it was, you know, it was kind of revived, as it were. But what I noticed when I first came to Twitter was that threads weren't really a thing. No one was like really doing them. And I needed to write a few tweets to explain the thing that I was trying to explain. And so there wasn't actually a good way to do it. You couldn't like add to a thread the way you can now. And so you actually had to tweet below the other tweet and just hope that you kind of numbered it so people would read it. But the reality for Twitter was I think they very quickly realized that threads were a great way to keep people on the platform.
Starting point is 00:06:22 So rather than just having the like single piece newsbyte, long form content all of a sudden on Twitter, it was like a blog and Twitter. form. And what I did was, you know, I admired all these writers like Ben Thompson, these technology writers, Benedict Evans, all these guys that they have these repositories of content and then they were able to link back to prior things that they'd written to kind of like establish foundations. And I started doing that with Twitter. So earlier threads I'd written, you know, maybe I'd written a thread on call options or maybe I'd written a thread on short squeezes. And then when I'm talking about the GameStop situation, I'm writing a thread on what happened with GameStop, I'm able to loop back to that foundation building and link in there. And so I kind of just created over time from testing and
Starting point is 00:07:03 learning this like Twitter native blog that kept people on the platform. And so when you think about for Twitter, they wanted to prioritize that. So from an algorithm standpoint, the Twitter algorithm favors threads enormously now. And that has been the case and it's developed and it's even more so now where thread content is the best way to kind of grow your Twitter following into scale because it's being prioritized. It's being shared more. I never thought of it from the, Twitter prioritizing it. I was going about it from this vantage point of, you know, maybe people read the first tweet and the buy-in there is so minimal for them to just scroll lower. And then they're like, okay, I'm kind of into this. But if I cut on an article from Bloomberg or whatever
Starting point is 00:07:45 it might be, I'm making a commitment of like two to five minutes. And I'm saying, ah, you know, I'm not going to read that. I'm just going to skip over. There's also just the traditional media thing where I don't know. I think people at some point were just fed up with all of traditional media and left or right wing wherever it stood. It was just like a lot of this is garbage. It's clickbait headlines that have nothing to do with the actual content. And so part of me thinks that like decentralized media and Twitter was a cool place for people to escape. And so it became more shareable because people just liked that. But to your point, if you look at my tweets and my threads, you'll notice common features there where like everything is very spaced out. I use a lot of hard
Starting point is 00:08:26 enters. I try to make it a very like optically engaging experience and readable rather than just being blocks of text. Because personally, like when I see blocks of text now, my attention span and society's attention span has gone like this over the last 10, 15 years as content has gotten more bite-sized. And so I tried to play into that. And then basically I was like, okay, well, you still need a place to expand on these things. I'm going to have a newsletter and kind of use that to expand on the ideas, but Twitter will be where I keep it really, really short, punchy and more viral. I love it. And it's so readable. It's fun to kind of go through it. You can come back to it. You can bookmark it. I don't know. There's just something about it that just works so much better than some of the longer
Starting point is 00:09:06 form. I think it's an amazing platform for learning. I mean, I've learned more from being on Twitter and engaging with your content, with people in the, you know, whether it's in crypto, web three, all of these communities, I've learned more on Twitter than I have from like any book, class, anything I could possibly do. And so it's like Twitter's become the new university in a weird way. And I know that's become sort of a meme and people talk about it. But there is some truth to it and they're starting to play more into that. So it'll be interesting to see where it ends up two, three, four years from now. It forces people to get to the point.
Starting point is 00:09:38 Like if you can't describe it in that, sure you can go deeper, right? But like a reply or if I have a question, like if I can't get it into that, well, then it's just too long of a question in the first place. It's like... I agree. It's also an idea meritocracy, which just on the surface is such an awesome thing. I don't need a fancy credential. I don't need an Ivy League degree. I don't need any of these things to grow.
Starting point is 00:10:01 Like, you can, you know, a kid on the street in India has just as good of an opportunity to go and create and build an audience and scale as, you know, some kid who grew up in Westchester and is like, you know, getting all the country clubs and whatnot. And that's a cool thing. You know, when you live in a world where technology is actually enabling more of a meritocracy and more of an even opportunity playing field, I'm all for unequal outcomes. I always say this. Love unequal outcomes.
Starting point is 00:10:24 I'm a capitalist, I'm a free market guy, unequal outcomes totally with it, but unequal opportunity, not with that. And so I think, you know, if we can figure out ways to even the opportunity playing field, you're always going to have unequal outcomes because that's how markets work. Some people are going to rise. Some people won't. But we need everyone to have the same basic opportunity level along the way. Love it. So you get into, you're in the hedge fund space or you're in the fund space and you have an interest in money, economics. Talk about like, What got you interested in that particular space? If you can talk about some of the types of things that you were doing deals with, something like that.
Starting point is 00:11:03 Yeah. So, I mean, I'd grown up in a household that was not at all associated with finance. It was associated with economics. So my dad was an economist. And so I'd been around concepts of money and economics, but more in a theoretical sense than in an actual sense. My dad was never in, I don't even know if my dad owns a stock, you know, to this day. It was never a thing in my household.
Starting point is 00:11:22 We didn't grow up in a financial household. I went to Stanford, had no idea about it, because I was playing baseball. I was like kind of dicking around, trying to figure out if I could go play professionally. And then I started this job, had absolutely no idea what it was a private equity fund, had no clue what private equity was. I had, you know, read the like barbarians at the gate, bad, scary things about private equity. And then the reality was much different than that candidly, like counter narrative stuff. But it was like, basically we were going in and investing in these businesses and there was
Starting point is 00:11:50 debt involved, not that much. It wasn't like the heydays of private equity where these guys. were throwing 95% leverage onto a deal because things had gotten clamped down post 07, 08, 09. And so basically it was like a really cool learning ground of just seeing businesses. I mean, I spent time at some of the coolest businesses across America. And our fund was doing mostly more like value oriented stuff, which meant it was a real meat and potatoes businesses.
Starting point is 00:12:14 This wasn't the like high flying tech companies in the Bay Area and in Silicon Valley. It was like, I mean, I went down to a catfish farm in Louisiana and got to hang out for a day with this guy that's like the catfish king of Louisiana. And it was the coolest set of experiences at a young age that I could have because I was really getting to see kind of the lifeblood of American entrepreneurship in a real way and had a great experience, really enjoyed getting to work with a lot of these entrepreneurs. But along the way, I just started to kind of pay more attention to what was happening with the Fed, with mainstream economics, with the markets, things that were happening post-0809 that I wasn't exposed to that I started reading up on.
Starting point is 00:12:53 I've always been a fan of history, so I started reading more about, you know, historical bouts with hyperinflation. I'm fascinated by these kind of like extreme events of history and what we can learn from them. And so then all of a sudden, COVID hits. And you're suddenly living history. I mean, it was this, I had this profound realization. I was texting friends about it waking up, like, this is a once in a lifetime thing, a once in a generation thing that is happening to us right now.
Starting point is 00:13:19 And it's pretty rare that you realize that in the moment. But it was so abundantly clear. And so I quickly started to just pay attention to things that were happening. What are people talking about? What's the Fed saying? What are central banks globally saying? Who's acting quickly? Who's not?
Starting point is 00:13:33 And you just start to realize like this whole system, so much of it just makes no sense. And like the way that people can just go create money out of thin air and how people react to it. And then the way the markets were going while people were literally, there was millions and millions of people that were out of jobs, networking, staying at. home and the market's going like this and soaring. And so it just felt like this is my one opportunity in my life to learn on the ground in this way. And I need to just immerse myself in it. And so I basically just started waking up at four every morning and just reading, listening to things,
Starting point is 00:14:06 reading for several hours. I had more time on my hands because I wasn't traveling. And so I just went all in on trying to understand macro. Were you still doing the private equity stuff? Yeah, I was working 80, 90 hours a week on that. I just wasn't traveling. And so, I had more time because I wasn't constantly on planes. So I was doing that as my day job. And that was, you know, I'd kind of start emailing and stuff at 630 or 7 in the morning and be done by 630 or 7 at night. But in those off hours, I couldn't go out.
Starting point is 00:14:34 I couldn't hang out with friends. We were locked down in our houses and in California too. So it was like really locked down. And so basically I filled those hours with just reading and trying to learn and trying to get, I mean, even 2% as smart as some of you guys and some of the really smart people out there, I figured it would arm me. And alongside that, I've always had this powerful realization that you have to put skin in the game with these things in order to learn.
Starting point is 00:14:57 And so, I mean, I call it like pay to learn or something like that. But basically, you have to have skin in the game if you want to like really try to understand something. And so what I did was, like, I'd saved up some money. Fortunately, you know, was in an okay financial spot. And I was like, I'm just going to, anything I'm learning about, I'm just going to throw some skin into the game so that I can actually care about it, follow it and try to learn. And I did some, I mean, really dumb stuff.
Starting point is 00:15:20 I got sideways on a hilarious short on the S&P 500 that like I woke up on a Monday. I actually didn't short it. This is a funny story actually in hindsight. I had bought some puts on S&P 500 and I'd never traded options, didn't know anything about it. And they swung, they were in the, like I was in a great spot. I'd made a bunch of money on them and didn't think anything of it. I just thought they would expire and I would kind of get the cash out. And then I woke up Monday morning and had this massive short position opened on S&P 500
Starting point is 00:15:47 because of how the options had expired in the money. and I was so confused sitting there and that day the Fed came out with some aggressive thing and I'm seeing the market just going up, up, up, like the whole day and I'm sitting there with this like, I mean, it was massive. It was like the size of the entire account short position that was just getting into the red and going the other way. And I'm sitting at my desk, like losing my mind. But those, yeah, I ended up getting out of it and lost a good amount of money but not devastating. But basically those kind of moments, like the amount I learned from that experience, horrible as it was, is just, you know, I ended up.
Starting point is 00:16:19 just incredible in hindsight. And so it's like you need to have those kind of things. You need to get like bloodied and bruised in the arena in order to really learn sometimes. I could not agree with you more. And anybody who's been in the markets for a very long time who says they don't have a story like that are lying. Totally lying. You got to get completely wrecked on something. It's just it's like lost porn. Everyone calls that now. I think it's a good thing. I was talking to Howard Linson recently. It's like the Stock Twit's founder. He's a really funny. guy, had him on my show recently. And he was talking about how it's like modern day gladiators. Like you go talk about, you kind of own up to your failures and the things that have happened to you.
Starting point is 00:16:59 And it's not about going and bragging about all of your great successes. It's about owning both sides of it. And just like being open about the times when you got completely destroyed on things just as much. And I think that's a cool thing in general for everybody to learn alongside each other. No doubt. Hey, so you recently had a thread that was outstanding. First and foremost, is it can till in effect or is it? I pronounce it Cantillon. I've heard that too. I've gone and looked and tried to figure it out.
Starting point is 00:17:26 I mean, it's funny because the guy Richard Cantillon is like pretty, there's not much on him. You can't find much on him. He died under really suspicious circumstances too, which is a funny separate story. But anyway, give us the inside scoop for people that aren't familiar with this. Why is it important? Get into a little bit of the specifics of the theory. So the Cantalon effect is named after this guy, Richard Cantalon. French economist, philosopher, businessman, I suppose. He grew up in the 1680s. Not a whole lot
Starting point is 00:17:56 is known about the guy. He made a bunch of money in the Mississippi bubble. John Law is like the famous Mississippi bubble speculating on the Mississippi company, which spectacularly exploded. I have a threat on it somewhere, but John Law had to like run away dressed as a woman because people were chasing him down. So it's kind of a funny whole side story. But basically, this guy made a bunch of money speculating on that. And I think he learned at a young age, proximity to power really mattered. He had a bunch of powerful connections through his family, through his employer, and that led to him making a lot of money at a young age, Richard Cantalon, that is. And so when he was older, I think it's about 1730, he writes this piece, which ends up being his only real contribution
Starting point is 00:18:36 to economics, but it is kind of considered to this day, like the cradle of political economy writing. And in it, he talks about a number of things, but one of those things is something that's become known as the Cantlon effect, which effectively says that there are distributional effects to new money creation. What does that mean? So when you have new money enter a system, it doesn't just like kind of poof appear within the system and everybody gets the same benefit from it. What he's saying is that the flow path of that money, where it enters and how it flows through the economy, really matters, and it matters in a way that impacts people differently. And so I was writing about it, and I was trying to figure out a good, simple way to explain this.
Starting point is 00:19:15 And I use the example of like a tiny little island society. And I use that because it's easier to envision these things I find as a general framework if you kind of think in very simple terms and use that as a framework and then kind of expand out into more complex things. And so the island society, you're living there, you wake up one morning and find a million dollars on your, you know, on your doorstep. You open it up. No one knows you have it. There's a million new dollars here. What do you do? You take it and you
Starting point is 00:19:40 start spending it. You go and buy a really nice clothes. You go buy a house, a bunch of land, all this kind of stuff. And when you do that, the market has not reacted to the fact that there's all this new money there. So you, because you're the one that has it, are able to go benefit from that. You go and buy things at their current market prices. You go and spend a bunch of money and your standard of life has dramatically improved. You're like living lavishly. You have great clothes. You got a watch. You got a house, land, all this stuff. But then suddenly the people who you distributed that money to, but with your purchases, don't quite have the same experience. Now, the sellers of those goods, the workers that produce the goods that you bought are now in
Starting point is 00:20:15 an environment where prices start to rise because suddenly there's an awareness that there's more money in the system. So demand has surged, supply has yet to catch up, and prices start to rise as a result of that. So now when those people who've received your money are going to spend it, they're actually looking at rising prices. So their life, their standard of life, has not improved in the way that yours did. And so this is like a simple example, and it's a tiny microcosm of what a lot of us were looking at and seeing when the Fed started printing all this money in central banks globally, but, you know, the Fed, U.S. was probably the closest example for us.
Starting point is 00:20:49 All of a sudden, this massive amount of new money is flooding through the system. Vast majority of it came from the top. I mean, everything they were doing, infusing money into the banking system to try to kind of open up the overall gears, as it were, was all going from the top. And what did it do? Asset prices got massively inflated. Look at housing. Look at the stock market as like the most clear example. Who owns stocks? It's rich people. It's the wealthy. Who has the vast majority of their net worth tied up in it in these assets and real estate and stocks? It's the wealthy. And who takes the brunt of it now that we're feeling real inflation. inflation harm.
Starting point is 00:21:26 It's the poor. It's the workers. It's the wage earn. The people who have continued to earn, you know, maybe their wages have inflated a little bit, but not enough to compensate for the fact that for the fact that prices are rising as much as they are. And so when I looked at it, I mean, I originally looked at it back in kind of mid-2020 when we first started to see it. You were seeing rich people and the share of wealth increasing dramatically as this was all happening. And then you were seeing poor people kind of getting screwed over, frankly. And it was all a result of the system. And, you know, the Fed, they tried to do certain things, right? Like they had the fiscal response with the stimulus checks and they were trying to do things that supported people
Starting point is 00:22:03 on the bottom. And they actually did an okay job of getting some of those things out there to where I think most people, you know, there weren't people starving in the streets in the U.S. at least, I hope. But there were these massive distributional effects where the rich got richer. And if you were a wage earner, too bad. You were like, you missed out on what was probably the largest transfer, you know, the largest wealth creation event of our lifetimes, if you were an asset owner. And so that's kind of the general story around the cancel on effect. And I think it's a fascinating macro topic because it relates to so many of these different things. I'm always looking for connection points. And it's a macro story and it relates to
Starting point is 00:22:41 the Fed. It relates to money creation. It relates to all this policy. But it also relates to crypto. It relates to Bitcoin. A lot of people look at it and say, well, Bitcoin is fixed. There's 21 million Bitcoin. It's deflationary naturally. And that's a big thing. And it's a big topic of discussion. And I personally just think it's something worthy of discussion. It doesn't need to be political. People should not want massive distributional effects to money creation. It shouldn't be a thing that we seek. And so we should talk about it and look at it. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right. I want you guys to imagine spending three days in Oslo at the height of the summer. You've got long days of daylight, incredible food, floating saunas on the
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Starting point is 00:27:18 Back to the show. So as a person out of private equity, I'm sure you have friends in venture capital. do you think that this effect of like how all this additional Fiat units are being added into the system and being in P.E. being venture capital, I mean, they're seeing a huge amount of the first cut how that Fiat's going to be allocated into the system. How do you see that impacting really kind of the Bitcoin and digital asset space? Because it almost seems like a lot of, especially in the VC side, they're just trying to get the money out the door. Because as you're well versed on general partner fees versus limited partner fees
Starting point is 00:28:00 and how that whole system works, if they've got a fund that's $100 million fund and whether they raise the $100 million or not, they're collecting fees on the $100 million, they want to get the money out the door so that it looks like they're doing something. So how much of the space is being warped from how it's actually being allocated to productive projects versus just getting it out the door to suck fees? There is no doubt that capital is unbelievably abundant right now. I mean, the common narrative within the VC landscape has just been that capital is a commodity at this point.
Starting point is 00:28:34 And so VCs are actually scrambling to figure out how they differentiate because everyone has money. And so if you're a company, you can raise money from literally anywhere. And so it's actually being more selective and figuring out who you're going to take the money from. Does it create distortions? Absolutely. I mean, the pricing on VCs are complaining about it, I'm sure, but the pricing
Starting point is 00:28:52 on a seed deal, pre-seed deal used to be like $5, $6 million post-money valuation, you're lucky if you can find a seed deal under like $20 million, a hot seed deal under 2025. And so there's clear pricing distortions happening. We see it across the market. I mean, P.E. multiples in the stock market, within private equity, multiples have continued to rise because people are raising and have all this capital. Plus, rates are, I mean, manipulated super low, right? Like, I can go borrow money at basically nothing.
Starting point is 00:29:19 I don't know what you can go get a mortgage at today, but it's a number. insane and rates are artificially low because the government's been manipulating them. They're not free floating. They're not market determined. And that all creates distortions because what it leads to broadly is people having to move out the risk spectrum to find yield. And so when your risk-free rates are basically zero, I think Tremath wrote a great thread on this.
Starting point is 00:29:39 I wrote a thread on it at one point. Basically, you just have to go chasing yield. And so you go further and further out the risk spectrum to find it. And that creates a lot of distortions and it creates a lot of risk-on behavior that when people point and say there's a bubble and something has to burst, it just looks that way, right? You continue to stack on top of a house of cards. You keep putting the cards on top and you know, you hope that no one's going to come in and give it a little knock at the bottom. And at some point, the Fed, you know, the government broadly, they just happen to everyone wants to kick the can down the road.
Starting point is 00:30:08 No one wants to be the one person who's, you know, it's on their watch that the big, you know, the big event happens or that there's a pullback. And so everybody just does whatever they need to to kick the can, kick the can, kick the can. But eventually, chickens come to roost, right? So how do you think through portfolio construction based on these circumstances? Because, I mean, it's just, and we're not even talking about zero rates. We're literally talking about negative rates across the board when we talk in real terms. I mean, with CPI at 6.2, the 10-year treasuries at 1.5.
Starting point is 00:30:38 CPI, too, is like CPI, right? Yeah, and that's the number they're telling you. Yeah, it might as well be China reporting out numbers. It's really kind of getting to that point. And so if the number they're reporting to you is producing this real negative, call it 300 to 400 basis point return negative, like how does a person construct a portfolio in those circumstances and feel like they're like making wise decisions? It's a really challenging question.
Starting point is 00:31:09 I think it's more challenging for people who are soon to retire than it is for me. I'm 30 years old. When I think about investing, I think about the next 10 to 20 years. probably. And so for me, if I'm my age or around my age, I'm thinking really long-term horizons, like what technologies are going to be a huge part of our future? Semiconductors, pretty safe bet semiconductors are going to be a huge part of our future. And so I'm making personally, you know, money where my mouth is on this, I'm making personally like large, long-term sector-based bets on things where cybersecurity, I think is going to be a
Starting point is 00:31:40 huge part of our future. I can't see a world where that is not a thing. And so I ascribe to the, I think Jeff Bezos talked about it, like what will stay the same, rather than. than worrying about what's going to be different. And so I kind of think about it that way of like, what's going to stay the same? Well, cybersecurity, like digital is going to be a huge part of our future. Technology is going to be a huge part of our future. And cybersecurity is going to be a massive issue. That's going to be the wars of the future. And so if I can invest in a sector like that, I feel good about that maintaining its pricing power long term and being able to scale. And so there's certain industries where I still feel fine about investing even at these prices
Starting point is 00:32:11 because I know the macro is just so good. And the tailwinds long term, you can overcome. the inflation and whatever happens. Will there be a pullback? At some point, absolutely. I just can't. I mean, the last few days before this recording, the market has tanked on the news of Jerome Powell's renomination. And I just can't see it not having a steep, harsh pullback. But if you're investing in things that you feel good about next 10, 15 years, so be it. I always come back to hard assets being in times like this a very core party or portfolio. I bucket things like real estate, land into that. I think like farming probably holds up pretty well. I mean, food production, I think probably holds up pretty well. And then obviously, Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies. I don't have as
Starting point is 00:32:52 much of a perspective on the like hardness of something like an Ethereum or Solana or some of these new technologies. I think those are interesting as futurist technology bets. I don't think that they've played out their thesis around being like truly hard asset bets in the way Bitcoin has. I mean, Bitcoin has proven, it's like the Lindy effect, right? It survived as long as it has. And so it's starting to prove that it will survive longer. It's like that famous thing from Taleb, who I know is not well liked within the Bitcoin community, but it's a very powerful comment that he's made around it. And so I think Bitcoin has kind of proven that and falls into the hard asset bucket for me.
Starting point is 00:33:27 The other stuff within the space is more like futurist bets for me and something that I believe will be a part of the future, but maybe not within that hard asset allocation. But to the point on, I have a soon-to-be retiree. I mean, my parents are kind of hitting retirement age. It's a lot more challenging my question because they have. have a lot of their retirement account sitting in like, you know, Voo, like the S&P 500, right? And what do you do? Do you pull it and sit in cash?
Starting point is 00:33:51 Do you spin it into more of a hard asset allocation? It's a little scary because you literally, I mean, you could see a 20% pullback. I mean, God forbid, but maybe it happens in the next couple of years. We've been saying that for the last eight, but maybe it happens. And so that is a much more tricky question. And honestly, not one that I feel particularly well qualified to answer. Join the club. You mentioned Powell's reelection.
Starting point is 00:34:15 What are your thoughts on that? That one really surprised me. I ascribe to the wisdom of crowds on things, generally. I'm a big fan of this thing. Cal She is the name of it. It's like the only CFTC regulated event contract marketplace. It's an amazing, really fun platform, K-A-L-S-H-I.com, and they had a Fed nomination market on there.
Starting point is 00:34:36 And so it's like predicted, except because it's CFTC regulated, there's no limits. So you can trade big numbers on it, which is fun. And that had like, I don't think it ever went above 30% that he was not going to be nominated. So it was always saying he's going to be renominated. And so I was kind of looking at that and saying, okay, I actually feel pretty good about those odds, like 70% that he was going to get renominated. I was surprised by the response to it and how, you know, suddenly the market started pricing in rate increases and, you know, further tapering.
Starting point is 00:35:06 And I thought it was interesting, just seeing the market really get hammered, especially the tech names over the last two, three days after the announcement came out. But look, I mean, I think, again, it's like the safety choice for Biden. I don't know what he thinks about his chances in 2024. But I think he's looking at it and saying we need continuity and stability. And what do I gain out of trying to go pick someone else rather than just sticking with the guy that everyone knows and that the markets have, you know, for better or for worse, gotten comfortable with? And it seems like him in Yellen, since now the Treasury and the Fed are basically tied at the hip, they seem to have a good, they seem to have independent. They're independent institutions. They seem to have a very good relationship, which is kind of required when you're going through the current situation that we're going to continue to go. I mean, I fully expect, and I assume based on your comments that you also expect it to continue to accelerate from here where their coordination is going to be required. Yeah, I think so. And look, I mean, they're going to keep saying the same things. They're going to keep saying inflation is transitory. That whole thing cracks me up because everything is by definition transitory until it's not, right? Like you can just say, oh, yeah, it's transitory. And then when it's not, then you kind of change your mind. And so they're going to keep saying it and eventually it's not going to be transitory or it will be, maybe. My guess is it's not because I'm involved with a number of businesses and none of them are planning to lower their prices. We've now taken price because we had to. And none of us are saying, okay, let's take
Starting point is 00:36:32 price this quarter and then we'll just give it back. It's fine. I mean, all of these consumer businesses are basically saying, okay, we have to increase prices, and then those are the prices, and we're keeping them there. And I think, like, anecdotally, that is a pretty good indicator that prices are not just going to come down magically as soon as the supply chain constraints loosen up. They're obviously doing things on energy with the Strategic Oil Reserve, which I actually think is probably right, pressures OPEC a little bit and kind of play a little bit of a geopolitical game. But it's, you know, it's a long road ahead. It's going to be. be interesting to see, but honestly, it's sort of the like boring pick because we're going to get
Starting point is 00:37:06 more of the same. I think some of the stuff Yellen's been talking about with like the taxing unrealized gains. I just was like, eyes wide. What the hell are they talking about right now? This is like insane. But we sort of live in this world now. It's a little bit like we live in a world where politicians are playing the viral social media game and policymakers are playing the viral social media game. And so instead of trying to be. and rational and, you know, work with the other side and hold hands to try to get things done that are rational policies, all they're trying to do is get the one sound bite. The one little thing that they say that's crazy enough that it goes viral or takes off or it gets memed
Starting point is 00:37:46 because that's how they're growing their own personal brand. That's how they're getting the big book deal later. That's how they're running for a higher office, Senate, president, whatever it might be. And that's like a little sickening to see that were in this. When I was a kid, I had huge ambitions to one day try to run for office and go into public service. And even through college, I had these ambitions. And I think that a lot of young people now look at public service and look at going to Washington as just an ineffective way to actually create change and create value relative to the other options they have.
Starting point is 00:38:19 And that's sad. And it's a big change that's happened over the course of my life. And I think it's unfortunate. And I think it leads to this slow, vicious cycle of, lower talent ending up in Washington, not a lot of young people. We're just going to have older and older people going to Washington, making decisions that are kind of dated, not grounded in the future and what it looks like. And it's upsetting. And so I do think we're in for a real reset and need a real reset as it comes to policy, term limits, campaign finance reform, all of these
Starting point is 00:38:50 things that I think could start to wedge into it if we want to end up in a better country for our kids than what we're in today. So on that, you recently had a thread where you were talking about this baby grant idea. Now, just explain the idea. And I asked this question with a little bit of hesitation because I think you know why. Here we are talking about how we got all these policies and we're printing all this money and it's not money that we actually have. It's all debt. And the last thing we need is more policies.
Starting point is 00:39:23 Lay it on us. Let's hear what you got. Well, this was my fun for a into talking about policy on Twitter and getting called a socialist, which I am so far from. So it was pretty funny for me to hear it. I'm a pretty moderate guy overall and definitely a free market guy. So it was definitely a step in a funny direction for me. But basically, I've seen people talk about this in principle before, and I was trying to lay out a few kind of concrete thoughts around it. But the idea is every baby that's born in the U.S. and take the U.S. as just like an example of doing this, you create and fund a $10,000 investment account for them. And that is funded by the government. So already like, yes, there's money from
Starting point is 00:40:06 the government on this. And you start letting that compound. So that money is then basically allocated into kind of an automatic account or you can opt into, in my world, you can opt into a number of different kind of allocations of accounts. Maybe there's one that has some allocation to Bitcoin or crypto, but generally speaking, it's something that's exposed to markets, its assets, so that everyone can really participate in asset appreciation. And so the whole idea is you aren't leaving people behind and you are allowing them to invest both in their education of understanding how these assets work and actually financially in the future, in the growth and the economic progress of the country. And so my whole thought is,
Starting point is 00:40:48 is you don't need this to be like some central pillar where it's this massive amount of money. I think when I did the calculation around it, it was something like, you know, you had like, I don't know, 20. I need to pull up the exact number. But basically you have $10,000 for each kid. I think there was 3.6 million kids born in the U.S. in 2020. So it was something like $36 billion of annual cost. Sounds like a massive number. Put it into perspective, the U.S. spent $6.8 trillion in 2021. So it's like a half a percent of that. The $36 billion would only be like $5.5. percent of our annual defense budget, so you could reallocate some of that. So it doesn't necessarily have to be net new spending, by the way. Maybe the government just spends a little less than it is
Starting point is 00:41:26 and puts it into something like this. But the idea is these kids would then always have a kind of piece of skin in the game. And whether you're born rich or you're born poor, you have some stake in the growth and expansion of the U.S. economy, compounded at 8 percent. If it's in the S&P 500, that 10 grand is like a million and a half bucks inflation adjusted by the time you're, by the time you're 65. But the bigger thing is the education aspect. And that's what gets me excited, which is you now along the way have this, have this real stake that you could build an entire education ecosystem around. So, you know, now parents are kind of talking to their kids about their investment account and the things they're invested in. You're having those
Starting point is 00:42:06 conversations. You're talking about taxes. You're talking about budgeting. You're talking about how you could spend it on college and do it tax in a tax-efficient manner. So you're starting to like create a portal for those conversations to happen in a real way that I think is pretty interesting. And I don't know if the number is 10,000 or if it's $1,000 and it's just a tiny amount. But there is something interesting to me about just creating opportunity for everybody to participate in the economic appreciation of the overall economy. I think this is the hard question that pops out of that. What prevents it from being like any of the other programs that exist today as far as like
Starting point is 00:42:42 retirement accounts for people that they're paying into that like, our generation is never going to see that, but yet we're paying into those types of government programs every single year. I think it has to be privately run, government-funded, privately run. I don't think the government can do anything efficiently. I'm like generally in the mold of if you want something done well, you can't let the government do it. And so I personally think it could be government-funded, but then you could create a whole ecosystem
Starting point is 00:43:08 of jobs around actually the private management of this. And I think people need to have, you know, a license to kind of work with it and make their own decisions along the way. And so maybe it's through 18 at standard. And then at 18, they can start using it, toying with it however they want. But I do think it would have a really, really interesting effect over the long term of more people being educated, more people understanding markets, people investing in their own future. They would go invest. They'd want to learn. Maybe they would learn more about Bitcoin because they were because they were diving into it from the early. days when they were a kid, they were having the conversations. But the reality is we still have a country where like over 50% of people don't own a single stock. And so there's a lot of people left behind in this like broad economic growth that we've been experiencing as a country in the innovation. And so it's kind of a cool way, I think, to get at that. And I personally view it as like somewhat bipartisan. I think it's very progressive and a little bit of a crazy idea. And I said that in the threat. I think it's a crazy idea. But I'm all for talking
Starting point is 00:44:09 about crazy ideas. I don't like the, you know, go yell at someone and call them an idiot because they said something crazy. I think it's, if there's something interesting, maybe it's one nugget that's interesting with it. You can kind of run with that. But I do think there's something interesting here. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. No, it's not your imagination. Risk and regulation are ramping up and customers now expect proof of security just to do business. That's why VANTA is a game changer. VANTA automates your compliance process and brings compliance, risk, and customer trust together on one AI-powered platform. So whether you're prepping for a SOC 2 or running an enterprise GRC program, VANTA keeps you secure and keeps your
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Starting point is 00:47:39 slash income. This is a paid advertisement. All right. Back to the show. All right. So you recently had a thread on the Evergrand situation, which is a really, really big deal, in my personal opinion, right? And you wrote a great thread on this.
Starting point is 00:47:55 And for people that are listening, we're going to have links to all of these threads that we're talking about that Sahil wrote laid on us. What's your take on Evergreen? Canary in the coal mine, man. Is this the canary in the coal mine for China? That's the big question. And Evergrand is this Chinese property developer, one of the largest in the world, massively over levered.
Starting point is 00:48:19 They basically were allowed to, as the whole Chinese property sector was, basically finance their growth with just insane amounts of debt in a bunch of different complex ways and different places. And so they got way over their skis. suddenly, you know, the Communist Party decided that they didn't want the Chinese property sector, this over levered, made some new rules. Evergram was in a bad spot on that, couldn't borrow money. And so the whole thing, you know, we've seen de-leveraging spirals before.
Starting point is 00:48:44 This is a classic one. Psychological as well as technical started missing payments. People started knowing about that. It becomes harder to borrow. You know, the whole thing started playing out. And the difference here was it played out on a grand global stage. And China hates that. And so suddenly you have this embarrassing thing happen.
Starting point is 00:49:01 How are they going to handle it? And was it going to be, you know, one chip that fell that created financial contagion, not just in China, but globally? You know, it's been sort of quiet since the initial stuff that happened. I think it was like early October, kind of late September that it became really big news. And then it went quiet and people are kind of lulled to sleep around the whole thing. And my general view is like, this was just the early event. And, you know, I say Canary in the coal mine, I really do think that. And I think there's something here and that Evergrand maybe was just the first thing to kind of start to show us that there's warning signs and danger coming. Especially in an industry that you know is very competitive.
Starting point is 00:49:41 So when you look at the other developers in China, you know it's very cutthroat. You know it's super competitive. And if Evergrands are blowing up. They did some shady stuff. They were selling, when they started struggling, they were selling financial products to their employees and to people that bought the home saying, like, oh, you get this risk-free, crazy high-yield investment product and like telling their employees, you won't get your bonus unless you invest in this, so you have to. And then basically, it was like, we take your money and we don't give you anything back because they were just funding
Starting point is 00:50:13 losses. And basically, it was a Ponzi scheme, right? It was like, in a traditional sense, they were taking money from these people and using it to pay off someone else. And so pretty yucky and messy stuff. And as it started to play out, it was very public. And there's been some more kind of trickle effects within the Chinese property sector since. You've seen a couple of other large and some medium-sized Chinese property developers missed some payments on some debt. So I do think you're starting to see something there. And honestly, the Chinese economy has been held up by the massive growth of their property sector over the last five, 10 years. And so that's a little bit of a scary thing too, because China and their overall ecosystem has been driven by the promise that
Starting point is 00:50:54 they will continue to grow as an economy and the strength of the the Communist Party there has really been propped up and continued to hold up because of their ability to show growth and that the economy kept getting better and your standard of living is going to keep getting better. And so the question is, like, if that stops and if one of these things breaks, how does their hold on the overall economy hold up and on the overall political situation? Is it going to become tense internally? How do they react?
Starting point is 00:51:19 Do they lash out globally when that happens? There's a lot of rather scary ramifications, I think, when you actually play it out in your own mind. Yeah, and even with the government stepping in and assisting with reallocating those assets onto other people's other companies' balance sheets, that does not bode well when the assets are coming from a company that's described the way you were describing it, right, where there was just all these different bad practices. What's the actual, like, quality of these assets as they're forcing these other companies
Starting point is 00:51:51 that were competing fiercely with them to now list them on their balance sheets? I mean, it's just... Did you ever see the China hustle? Have you seen that movie? No, I haven't seen it. It's great. It's worth watching. Carson Block is in it. Who's a friend I've interacted with Muddy Waters founder, the famous for shorting Chinese
Starting point is 00:52:09 companies in the early days as their economy was booming. And there's a really funny scene in that where he was like evaluating this one Chinese company. And basically it was like this high flying company that had gone public in the U.S. And was like getting all these foreign investors. Everyone loved it. And he basically went and looked at like satellite. footage and they were just moving around trucks at a place, but actually there was zero activity at the company. It just wasn't a real company. There was nothing there. And it was so, it was
Starting point is 00:52:36 so, so interesting as just like a microcosm of, I think, a lot of what has happened over the years there. It's like, what's real and what's not? I wouldn't take any ever grand. Yeah, I don't believe in the yield of it, whatever it is. So it's going to be a, it's going to be an interesting six months or so in China, I think. And we'll see a lot. I mean, I think there was like a false alarm on Evergrand officially defaulting recently. They walked it back. Maybe it wasn't defaulting. And so a lot of it's happening quietly behind closed doors, whereas in the U.S., it would have to be super public because it would all be in court. In China, they can kind of do more things, you know, because of the control that they have. They can do more things behind closed doors and maybe
Starting point is 00:53:14 keep things quiet for a period of time. All right. So what's your framework for creating new content? This is one of the questions from Twitter. It's a good question. So I'm a big believer in just having a content engine. And when I say that, what I mean is you need a way that you can literally write every day. People constantly ask me that, like, how do you come up with all these new ideas? How do you always have things to write about? And the reality for me is I just consume a lot. I'm constantly reading and listening and learning things. Every time you're doing that, you're having new ideas or things that you could talk about, write about, and kind of teach people about. And so for me, it all comes down to my content engine. And that's what am I consuming on a daily basis.
Starting point is 00:53:53 Like, what articles am I reading? What newsletters? What podcasts am I listening to? And so for me, I'm just like, I take that and then I boil it down to what did I find most interesting? What are the novel insights that maybe I could contribute and pull out of that? And I'm using that. I basically have a notion. If anyone uses notion, I have a notion board where I drop in. As soon as I have an idea, I'll drop it in just as like a one liner. And then when I get inspired to write more about it or read more about it, I'll go populate in notes. Those notes will turn into kind of a rough outline of how I might, you know, have a thread or a narrative. or an article. And then, you know, from there, I can kind of sit down and start to populate that and build that out into something that makes sense. Here's one I like. Most underrated Twitter account that you follow. Ooh, that's interesting. Most underrated Twitter account. There's a lot. So a couple that, you know, I've really enjoyed recently that I think are just like generally underfollowed. There is a woman who's a friend of mine who's writing a lot about like Web 3 and Crypto. Her name is Magdalena Kala.
Starting point is 00:54:55 I think her handle is at Magdalena Kala. It's like Mags.Eath is her actual name and it's a bored ape as her picture. She's been awesome and just like doing a lot of cool educational stuff around Web3 that I've learned a lot from. But you think about Web 3. I'm curious what you think about it. I'm really bullish on the long-term technology. technologies that are being developed. I think 90% of it is probably fake, you know, Fugazi explodes. And like, with a lot of innovation, like in, you know, the dot com bust, everyone wanted to call the internet fraud
Starting point is 00:55:30 after it. But the reality was there were things just as much as like web ban was terrible. There were things that started during that time that became amazing and a big part of our future. And so I think that's how I think about big technological change is that you have to be aware that the vast majority of the stuff that's being developed now is not going to be a part of our future. And it's going to disappear and there's no reality to it. But there will be these underlying nuggets and slivers of amazing technological progress that either in their current form or in some form that feels two or three steps removed from it, create some level of change. Do you think we have to get to Bitcoin becoming a global money at that point in order for many of these other 3.0 protocols
Starting point is 00:56:11 to really be able to take hold? The reason I frame it that way is because a lot of the concerns that I have is just the centralization. And we're at this point where you're going up against a system that is about, I would suggest that Gary Ginsler is about to come out and declare everything a security. And if it's being listed on an exchange, like you're about to get wrecked, if you're holding something that is not truly decentralized, right? So how do you think that the timing of all that kind of plays out? I think you're right. A lot of these things look like securities, right? And so it's like the duck test. Like if it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck. And so I do think a lot of these things, DAOs and the token,
Starting point is 00:56:52 the tokenized communities, all this stuff feels like a security. And so if it feels like a security, the government is going to find a way to regulate it and say that it's a security. So I do, I mean, I do think that's a major risk and something that people are going to have to navigate around. I think that like, when you think about what the future around this looks like, to me, it's much more about the talent flow than anything else. I just, there are so many smart people that I think extremely highly of, technical people, builders, etc., that are flocking to this. And I personally am just like a big believer in follow the talent. I don't believe quite as much in follow the money because I think money lies a lot of the time.
Starting point is 00:57:26 But when really smart people and some people that I consider some of my smartest friends are like dedicating their lives to something that's 10 plus years, 15 years out in their view, that's exciting to me. And I generally, as a rule of thumb, just choose to not ignore it. I'm not like deeply, deeply invested in any of this stuff today relative to my broader portfolio. But do I want a couple call options on it? Sure, absolutely.
Starting point is 00:57:50 Any other people that you want to highlight? Let's see. Who else has jumped out to me recently? There have been a few that I feel like I've come across that have been really cool. Anna Fabrega on like future of education, ed tech stuff is amazing. She's incredible. Does a lot of cool video stuff that's been really cool. West K.O.
Starting point is 00:58:09 is another one within education that's been really fun to follow along with. And then just like a bunch of these entrepreneurs that I follow. Josh Fabian is this friend of mine, founder of this business, Metify that's about to announce a fundraise from some pretty big people. He's like, just this absolute force of nature. One of the coolest backstories was like adopted, just this amazing, gritty experience of grinding through really, really tough times to get to where he is. And honestly, when I sit down with him and have dinner with him, I just want to go run through a brick wall after because he's so freaking powerful. But people like that, I just really, I get a lot out of being around and following these people and just learning from them along the way.
Starting point is 00:58:47 Your best book in the last year? So I reread when Breath Becomes Air once a year. And that's one of my absolute favorites. There are kind of two or three books I reread once a year, so I'll name them all. That's the second time I've heard that book recommendation this week. And I've never read it. Yeah, that was probably the most life-changing book for me. So I read that once a year. First time I read it, funny story, I read it on an airplane. Bad idea, don't do that.
Starting point is 00:59:14 I was crying my eyes out by myself on an airplane. And the woman next to me actually had to ask if I was okay, like she thought I was going home to a funeral or something. It's very, very powerful. It's a Stanford brain neurosurgeon who's finishing his residency, he's about to, like, experience what he's prepared for his entire life to become a neurosurgeon and finds out he has terminal lung cancer. Right.
Starting point is 00:59:35 As he's getting married. It's a true story and he writes it in the last year of his life before he passes away. It's like, how do you rationalize when your whole life has been building to this one moment, how do you come to terms with the inevitability of your death? And it's so, so powerful and just like deeply, deeply moving. And also it just has this clarifying effect for your own life when you think about it. And so I try to read that once a year. Atlas Shrugged I read once a year, which is an absolute beast to do.
Starting point is 01:00:00 But so good. And great audiobook, too. people like listening to audiobooks, but that's like, I personally think, you know, that's like the capitalist Bible in a lot of ways. People talk a lot of crap on it on Twitter right now, you know, within these more progressive movements, but it's an amazing book, incredibly well written, narrative form. And then zero to one is one that I read every year as well. Super short. It takes like an hour, but so good and so good if you're trying to build things and trying to ideate and think about the future, just so, so sharp. So those are probably my three. And,
Starting point is 01:00:30 you know, Atlas Shrug definitely isn't for you. If you're a much more progressive, but it's a good read. And it's probably worth reading for anybody, honestly, if you're trying to just think through your own ideologies. Most unpopular take. Oof. Probably just that like blanket statements like Bitcoin fixes this aren't particularly productive for furthering dialogue around these things. I agree with actually the broad sentiment that I do think Bitcoin is extremely useful for our future. But, you know, yelling on Twitter and some of the things that, you know, that a lot of people have engaged in over the last year
Starting point is 01:01:07 on both sides, I just think are not particularly productive. So I do think we need to like continue to build nuance into the arguments and discussions we have. I like it. Sahil, thank you for making time. I want you to give people a hand off. Like I said, we're going to have it in the show notes some links to some of your threads.
Starting point is 01:01:25 We'll have a link to your Twitter account. You have a newsletter. I know you're doing some media. You're doing interviews, right? Tell people about that. I'm a little bit all over right now. It's been fun. So I've got the Twitter at Sahel Bloom.
Starting point is 01:01:38 Newsletter is called The Curiosity Chronicle. You can find it on my Twitter account. It's I think it's sawhillblum. Dotubstack.com. Who knows if I lined up on Substack long term, I'd love to move to something that's less centralized platform. I have a new podcast and show that we launched. That's all kind of filmed in person in a room.
Starting point is 01:01:55 Hope to have you on at some point soon here. We've been filming that. It's called Where It Happens. TRWIH.com is. the website, you can check it out, have released two or three episodes, and it's a blast. So been a really fun run, really enjoying it, continue to love just interacting with everyone in the community, positive or negative, always around for the feedback and love just jamming with people. Absolutely love following your account. You put out such amazing content. Thank you so much for
Starting point is 01:02:23 coming on the show. This has been a blast. Thanks so much for having me. Appreciate it. If you guys enjoyed this conversation, be sure to follow the show on whatever podcast application you use, just search for We Study Billionaires. The Bitcoin-specific shows come out every Wednesday, and I'd love to have you as a regular listener. If you enjoyed the show or you learned something new or you found it valuable, if you can leave a review, we would really appreciate that. And it's something that helps others find the interview in the search algorithm. So anything you can do to help out with a review, we would just greatly appreciate. And with that, thanks for listening, and I'll catch you again next week. Thank you for listening to TIP.
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