We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP388: Lessons from Druckenmiller w/ Trung Phan

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. On today's episode, I sit down with Trung Fan. Trung is a writer for the hustle and focuses on tech and finance. He's also a purveyor of hilarious financial content on Twitter, which is an unusual skill set in my opinion. His popularity recently afforded him the opportunity to interview legendary investor Stanley Drucken Miller. In this episode, we talk about the biggest takeaways from his discussion with Stan, Trung's background in real estate in Asia and thoughts on Evergrand, what opportunities

Starting point is 00:00:28 in the market are the most exciting at the moment and a whole lot more. Trung and I had a lot of fun covering some topics that neither of us cover very often and I learned a ton. So I hope you will as well. So without further ado, here's my conversation with Trung Fan. You are listening to The Investors Podcast, where we study the financial markets and read the books that influence self-made billionaires the most. We keep you informed and prepared for the unexpected. All right, everybody. I'm super excited to be sitting here today with Trunk. Trung fan. Trong, you have a very interesting background that I'm excited to dig into a little bit. This is your first time on the show. Thanks for coming on.

Starting point is 00:01:16 Absolutely. Tip, man. Been a long time listener. You guys study millionaires, right? We used to. And then, you know, with all this money printing, I love it. All right. Well, first of all, again, I could just briefly touch on your background. It's super interesting. So I'd love to first understand where this passion you have for writing about tech and specifically finance comes from and how you came to kind of write for the hustle over the last year and a year and a have. Right. So for any listeners that aren't familiar, the hustle is, it's a business and tech newsletter that goes out five days a week. We have a 1.7 million readers, I believe. And I've been there about 15 months or so. And just to answer your question of how I got interested in writing,

Starting point is 00:01:54 the hustle, I don't know if you've ever read the hustle tree. I'm guessing you have. I'm a subscriber, yeah. Okay. So there is like a more, you know, irrevering kind of, you know, jokey kind of tone. But basically, the hustle was a marriage essentially of two of my previous careers. Ten years ago, I was living in Vietnam, but I sold a comedy film to Fox at the time. I was pretty young. I was mid-20s, and I really wanted to get into film writing and comedy specifically. And anybody unfamiliar with the film business is when you get your script option, they get basically 18 months to hold it. And during that time, they can create it, develop it or do nothing with it. It's up to them. Basically, getting your options sold is like you're still on the 10-yard line of your

Starting point is 00:02:31 own end zone. There's like 90 more yards to go. So it never got made, but I kind of kept the dream alive. Over the years, I've worked on other projects, and I've had a pretty actually big production partners, nothing's come refreshing. But how that marries with the hustle is that during the time when I was making no money trying to become a filmmaker, I was working in finance and technology. First, an asset management company in Vietnam, and then in banking and at a fintech firm in North America. And basically, those kind of parallel things combined with the hustle when I joined 18 months ago. My fintech firm was acquired by S&P Global in 2018, and I decided to leave. and the hustle was basically my ability to combine knowledge I had in finance, tech, and investing with kind of humor.

Starting point is 00:03:11 And now it's all in this dusty, you know, Frankenstein known as my, mostly my Twitter account. Okay, let me get this straight. Well, first of all, you're one of my favorite Twitter follows, so it's very entertaining. But you're talking about living in Vietnam, selling a script or optioning a script to Fox, working in asset management birth period, and then developing your own fintech company? No, not my own. I would be, we're studying trillion. Yeah, exactly.

Starting point is 00:03:37 That would be that episode. No, I worked for the name of the fintech firm is called Kencho. It basically did AI analytics for the financial. It was like a AI meets Bloomberg kind of pitch. So along the way, you've started writing for the hustle, and somehow along the way you found yourself interviewing, San Jacimiller. How did that happen? How did that story evolve?

Starting point is 00:03:56 How did you find yourself interviewing Stanley? So one of my colleagues at this fintech firm, I worked for him. He also left and he started another fintech company called Toggle AI. One of the founders of the company previously worked at Stan's family office. So Stan is an investor in the company. And he had been like, he knew I worked at the hustle and they're kind of targeting. They also did analytics in the investing space. And they're looking to increase their brand name amongst the retail crowd.

Starting point is 00:04:22 And they're like, hey, man, we see some really stupid things going on in your Twitter account. Would you be interested? And along obviously with the hustle's audience is under 35s, you know, investors, entrepreneurs. So would you be interested in interviewing Stan Druck and Bill? I mean, What kind of question is that? I was like, yes, of course.

Starting point is 00:04:35 Tell me when, where do I have to fight to? What kind of equipment am I bringing? So that happened in May. And he had become very concerned about the money printing that had gone on with the Fed since the pandemic started. And I think he wanted to take the opportunity to find as many outlets as possible to tell the story. And the match with Toggle AI was, again, the younger audience, which is where the hustle and apparently my Twitter account is, a lot of the comments I'm seeing.

Starting point is 00:04:59 But yeah, that's how the meeting with Stan happened. and he was super gracious with his time and his answers. And he'd obviously done this before, right? He just knew how to insert his lessons within really entertaining stories. Well, I thought you did a great job. I thought the questions were fantastic. I appreciate that, man. It was a great interview.

Starting point is 00:05:18 What were some of your biggest takeaways from that interview or maybe some of the biggest learnings from him? I asked him, what to you makes a great investor. He just obviously had said this before. I really just loved how he framed it. He just said, about diversification, doesn't necessarily agree with. He wants, in his career, he wanted to find bets that he could go all in on. And famously, the example that he brought up was, of course,

Starting point is 00:05:41 breaking of the pound on him and George Soros shorted the pound. He shorted up to 10 billion, and then making a billion on the trade. And the way he framed it was that he had gone into George's office and said, hey, we had this really good opportunity. I think he was short it. We put 100% of the fund in it. And then the exact word he used was that George looked at him with great disdain. It's like, why aren't we putting 200% of the fund? are like, why are we getting even more? Why aren't we just letting this to the moon, right? And I put as much as possible.

Starting point is 00:06:05 And what ended up happening. And I don't know if you're familiar with Frederick Necker. He's a kind of a thin, twit personality. So Necker value, a great substack. And no Frederick from Twitter. And he took the interview actually and wrote a really long post on it. And he said, okay, you know, the hustle and Trong interviewed Stanley and they got this great answer.

Starting point is 00:06:24 But, you know, I just want to peel apart the onion a bit because I think it's easy for someone to say, you know, obviously in hindsight, find a, I see. single bet you can go on in with high conviction. But he laid it out, I was like, why did Stanley have such high conviction, right? He basically put these five mid a pyramid to explain why Stanley had such high conviction. Stanley, during my interview with him, was able to speak on some of the reasons why, but because of the nature of the interview and the questions, he didn't go super in depth into it. But what Frederick laid out was essentially like, so at the very bottom there was obviously incredible research by the quantum fund. He had been looking at the exchange rate mechanism

Starting point is 00:06:59 for between the pound and the Deutsche Mark at the time. They've been studying it. And something did realize that there was just mismatch between the economic policy and obviously the political wherewithal, right? I'm sure a lot of your listeners are familiar with why the ERM was created and why the opportunity came about. But for anybody that's not, I'll just do a quick KLDR, which may or may not be 100% accurate.

Starting point is 00:07:21 But essentially, England had joined this exchange room mechanism to agree to keep the exchange rates with various European currencies within a ban. And that was ostensibly supposed to help trade. So, you know, there's not wild foreign currency fluctuations. But the German economy was after the fall of the Berlin Wall when the east of West Germany combined, it created very, very significant inflationary pressures. And typically a central bank to deal with inflationary pressures, raise interest rates. As these pressures are building and based on Germany's history with inflation, right, hyperinflation in the 1920s was led to the rise of Nazism. It's actually in the Constitution that they just have to control this. But conversely, the inflationary pressures are happening in Germany. In England, England was going through a recession. And how do you combat a recession? Of central bank move, obviously, is to cut interest rates. So there's this ban, which is keeping this exchange rate at a certain level, but they're going in different directions. And this is where Stan's research came into play, right? And so there's Stan's research. They actually identified a very specific thing, too, is like the floating rate on

Starting point is 00:08:20 UK mortgages, I mean, UK mortgages have floating rates. So if England was to step up their interest rates, if Germany was to increase, it was a direct tax on the UK population, right? So it would have been very politically unpopular. So that's the research. That's the bottom layer. The second layer was Soros, a Hungarian, knew a lot of the political players. And so he knew their personalities. And he understood, for example, the German central banker. He kind of knew that the direction he was going to go. He knew these people very intimately or at least knew about them very well just from being a European hedge fund manager. And then the third step was essentially, they had done all this research, Soros kind of knew the players, and then Chuck Miller goes in, and he said, it's been very clearly

Starting point is 00:09:01 established, it's his idea. But it was, as we mentioned, it was the sizing that Soros does, right? He says, go for the jugular. That was a difference. To summarize, Frederick said, why did Stan have all this conviction? And it's because of for these various reasons, right? But having said that, there are these type of opportunities of Bill Ackman famously a year ago with the credit trade that he made right before, I guess, the pandemic hit the States. You can have these levels of conviction. But yeah, that was the number one mean lesson that it took away. It's like, don't try to be super diversified. Do the right things to have this level of conviction when you do go all in. But having said that, he also said that in his mind, having this level conviction actually reduces risk. The exact

Starting point is 00:09:36 quote he had was, I put all my eggs in one basket, but then I watched the basket very closely. I think that's a Mark Twain quote. And his comment on top of that was that if you have all this underlying research. You know all the people involved. It's actually a less risky trade because your mind isn't being pulled in all these different directions. I have a portfolio of 25 different stocks because I'm an idiot stock picker that is underperforming the market, right? But if I just had one trade that I knew back and forth, I mean, that's a lower risk trade in his estimation. Let's dig in on this one a little bit because I think it's such an interesting topic to discuss. I think that when you're just starting out in investing, you do get that diversification

Starting point is 00:10:11 advice quite a bit. And I think there's a distinct difference. and strategy there because easiest, I think, definition or breakdown of it I've heard is simply to grow wealth, you have to be concentrated. And to maintain wealth, you have to be diversified, which I think is a good distinction. It's so interesting to me, though, because while I agree with that, you know, I'm juxtaposing in my mind with a quote from Howard Marks. And he basically said that his father had a story about a gambler who one day hears about this race with only one horse in it. So he goes and he bets all the rent money on this one horse and halfway around the track, the horse jumps over the fence and runs away. You always have to factor in some risk,

Starting point is 00:10:48 right? And it sounds like with these bets they were taking, they had so much conviction that they saw really no risk. It was also very asymmetrical, right? I forgot to add that. The other part of it, why it was such a in their eyes, a no-brainer trade was because of the ban. They knew that the currency can only go only so much, right? And in their mind, it was a very asymmetrical trade because their downside is very covered based on the agreement of the mechanism. Invest to the point where you can go to sleep at night, right? Because if you're not, I mean, you're just ruining your life. That's such a great point. You know, another pretty famous concentrated bet that I don't think a lot of people talk about that much is Warren Buffett's American Express bet. I'm going to get the

Starting point is 00:11:28 numbers wrong. I'm going to have to go back and research this. I think it was something like 75% of his fund. But I really think that people like Buffett, and I think Sandra said this in your interview is when you study the greats, there's really only one thing that is underlying, like, one common denominator with all the greats. And they all had these massive concentrate, high conviction bets. Absolutely. Actually, because I don't want to lose a thread on Buffett, because I know he's such a mainstay and probably the reason why this podcast even exists. I'd love to have your thoughts on this kind of thing. I just thought about it recently. I'm sure other people have written about it. You know, Buffet was famously criticized for not being a tech investor, right? He never invested in Microsoft,

Starting point is 00:12:03 even though he was very good friends with Bill Gates in the 90s. And with the positions he would have put on, I mean, that trade probably worth $50, $100 billion, right? And then also invest in IBM, which is total bust. But I think when they did the position in Apple in 2016, and I know it's one of his lieutenants that kind of brought the position to him, but they put in, I guess, 30 to $40 billion around 2016. I think including dividends, the all in return on that,

Starting point is 00:12:25 is looking about $150 billion now. So as a public market tech investor, I mean, I'm going to ask you, no one's ever had a position that lot. That must be a public market on the rank on the tables. That's got to be number one, right? $150 billion. It is. Yeah, I'm pretty sure you're right about that. Yep.

Starting point is 00:12:39 Yeah, so, and he did it in his 80s, which is, to me, which is just insane. And I also bring this up because watching the crazy stuff that's happening, you know, NFTs, dogecoins, all the cryptos, is just having the understanding that Buffett may be the greatest tech investment ever in the public markets in terms of absolute dollar returns in his 80s, even though his entire career was not tech. That gives me a little bit of comfort in being like, you're going to miss a lot of things, right? But like if you can get one right, and to your point, you can get one right, like you did with MX or standard with breaking the Bank of England,

Starting point is 00:13:07 and various other investors have done. You've got to get one. I think that mindset's also very important because especially now, how fast markets are moving that how many asset classes are out there is if you get psychologically impinged every time you miss out on something,

Starting point is 00:13:20 it's over, right? It's freaking over. It's so true. And I can't think of one I've had, or I've come across yet where I'd be willing to put more than 100% of my money into something. So I'm still waiting for my one shot here.

Starting point is 00:13:33 But I do agree you only need one. What's crazy is, so he breaks the Bank of England in 19, I think 92. And then the dot-com bubble comes around, right? And he is short it in 99. He's like, this is insane. These valuations are absurd. And he tells me this on the podcast. But what's crazy is that he was already at that point, one of the most established

Starting point is 00:13:52 investors in the game, right? At that point, late 40s. And he, in 99, he actually was able to turn a profit. This would be another lesson. But I'll finish this one first. It's like, after he turns a profit in 99, I think he was up 35%. in the year 2000, he had taken his money out of the market and he had watched two of his junior portfolio manager, lower level portfolio managers. The market was still ripping and they were making

Starting point is 00:14:13 a killing. And he said that he personally could not watch them make a killing. And he went back in the markets and put a three billion dollar position on. And he says he called the top by a couple weeks and he had lost basically three billion dollars. And his lesson from that was just that you put your emotions will never go anywhere. It doesn't matter how successful you are, right? This is one of the most famed trades ever made was by Stanley Druckman and George Soror. 10 years later, he's still fighting these emotions and takes one of his worst losses ever. Even after he had made a huge win in 99, and him making that win in 99 was actually another lesson I learned from him. It's the Mark Andreessen quote. He's a strong opinion, Lucy held something to that effect. So in 99, Stanley was

Starting point is 00:14:58 very adamant and he was very confident that the market was overvalued. He was sure. He was shorted the fund. I think he was short $200 million in various next stocks or maybe even just in NASDAQ, but the market was still moving against him. The same way it moved against him in 2000 in the sense that his portfolio managers kept going up. In 99, even though he in his bones knew the market was wrong, he just said, I don't want to fight the tape anymore. And he flipped it. He went long. So it's funny because tied in the whole dot-com thing are two of his lessons, right? He's like, you can have strong conviction, but the whole, a cane's quote, if the information changes, I can change my mind. And in 99, with the information change was that it was

Starting point is 00:15:32 clear the market insanity wasn't going to change, right? People were going to keep money into the market. Keep on holding these bets. But then the second end of the ying to the yang or the yang to the ying was in 2000, even after he had made this incredible turnaround in 99, the emotion is like, you can never stop fighting emotions. So those, to summarize the lessons I have now at this point is like make high conviction bets and untraded high conviction bets. And then you're always fighting your emotions. And then the third one, strong opinion, is loosely held. Turn it around if it looks like it's going against you. The last thing I'll add on that is he never uses a stop loss. He says it's the dumbest thing ever. That's what he says in the podcast.

Starting point is 00:16:05 It doesn't make sense to him. He's like, okay, if the position's bad, just cut it. Cut it because it's bad. Don't cut it because it went down 20 percent, right? Cut it because the thesis changed. It's amazing to me that in a year where he lost $3 billion, he still managed to not have a down year. 30 for 30, right? 30 percent on average for 30 years, didn't have a down year for, was it 30 years or how many years? I don't think he's ever taken a down year. But yeah, he lost on that trade. I guess he had made enough. beforehand to like the L. He actually found that going through different asset classes, so he did, he does equities, fixed income and obviously FX. He said that a benefit that he solved from that was it never forced you to make a trade in the sense that if you're only a credit trader, right?

Starting point is 00:16:48 You might only get a once in a generation trade for five years, right? It goes through the credit cycle. But he's like, you know, I'm playing all these different things, which is almost even kind of counter to his first thing, which is like be so concentrated in one thing, but I guess, I mean, different brain, right? Drucker Miller's on that level. The whole point being, I guess he wanted to keep on being able to find these once-in-a-lifetime opportunities. And to do that, you have to be able to trade in many different asset classes. Because again, going back to credit as an example, you might only get it once in a decade, trade once in a decade. However, if you're playing in four or five different asset classes and you know them well, you can build these levels of conviction,

Starting point is 00:17:20 you'll get these opportunities more often. And he brings back the point being that, let's say he himself was a credit trader. If you're waiting around for these once-in-decade trades to make these high conviction all in bets. You might talk yourself into making some pretty bad bets, right? You're like, oh, I haven't done it all in bet like three years. It's like maybe it's time. So I found that lesson actually very interesting. 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 got long days of daylight, incredible food, floating saunas on the Oslo Fjord. In every conversation you have is with people who are actually shaping the future.

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Starting point is 00:21:58 So let's discuss the dynamics that are playing out there in Asia and you've written about some conflicts bubbling up even in the South China Sea since 2014. Are we seeing some kind of acceleration of that? Talk to us about the dynamics at play. I think at the top level, the answer to that question is obviously the semiconductor manufacturers are primarily in Taiwan, right? Like if you're in rank ordering, TMSC is at the top, Taiwan, semi-conductor manufacturing company.

Starting point is 00:22:22 And China has laid claim to Taiwan, right? Like for ages. The fears around Taiwan are similar to what's happening in Hong Kong, right? When the handover happened in 1997, when Hong Kong was given from the British back to China, was mandated by a treaty that was done centuries ago or 100, whatever. During the late 1800s, there were supposed to be freedoms put in place, right? Like the rule of law and a certain democratic allowances. And China has just mostly stripped those away.

Starting point is 00:22:47 in the decades since. And a lot of people now are concerned that something similar will happen in Taiwan. This is not used to anyone. China has made very clear statements about Taiwan is a province of China, right? And so Stan's position was that he doesn't think that China will invade Taiwan before the 2022 Olympics. They don't want to deal with an international boycott. But afterwards, he has a feeling just like, there's just, it's like, anything can happen. And again, my personal perception of it, very as informed as you can be as a guy living in Canada,

Starting point is 00:23:17 that reads the internet. And the other part I frame about this is like even the China experts don't even know, right? Like people that spent all day dealing with China have been dealing with decades, they'll readily admit they don't really know what's going on because it's the Chinese Communist Party. It's a very inscrutable structure. Obviously, Xi Jinping has ultimately control the top. I think something I read which is very interesting is, so she is much more ideological than his two leaders before him, Hu Jintao and Yang Jemin. He's much more ideological. His father was one of Mao Zedong's close lieutenants. Kind of went up up and down with Mao like anybody does. A lot of the close leaders did. But so he's called

Starting point is 00:23:51 a Prince Ling, which is somebody that is a child of somebody close to Mao or within his inner circle, that first generation of communist leaders. And what I read, I can't remember where the sources, but I found a very interesting always was that Mao knows that the demographics for China are very bad, right? It's estimated by the end of the century, it'll be half the size it is now. So call it 7 to 800 million. That has a lot to do with just richer countries, have less children. Also, the one child policy is having terrible effects on their economy and future. growth. And so Xi Jinping knows the demographics are not in their favor. And he also, the Chinese Communist Party had witnessed basically from financial crisis to the election Donald Trump that the West

Starting point is 00:24:29 was a lot more shaky than the perception of the superpower. Let's just focus on America, right? It's like that this financial crisis, they're supposed to be the goal standard for capitalism. And then China is watching this full financial crisis unfolded like, wait, the system, you know, maybe we can carve our own path, which is what they've obviously gone and done. So the financial crisis happens. And then election Donald Trump just exposed so much political weakness it looked like to them in the country, right? It's like, how could this country be so divided? And whatever you think about Donald Trump, obviously the whole election and his four years in office, but it's very rocky, right? And China, Xi Jinping, I'm looking at it. It's like, okay, demographics are

Starting point is 00:25:03 not in our favor. America's not looking at as strong as they really are anymore. And then you add what happened recently with Afghanistan. And he knew there's a window. So that's why to this writing, he's been so aggressive. He knows that China has this small window to really kind of solidify, itself. And something, if you want to put yourself in the shoes of the Chinese, just think about the South China Sea and their waters, right? It's very comparable if you're North American or American listening to this. It's basically what happened with America in the Caribbean and Latin America 100 years ago, 150, 100, 60 years ago. The Monroe Doctrine under President Monroe in the 1820s was essentially like, okay, a European state imperialist, you're no longer wanted in our backyard, right?

Starting point is 00:25:40 It's like, we don't want you kind of in our waters, in and around Latin America. We don't want to deal you, we're kind of the, we own this region now. And then Teddy Roosevelt kind of followed. He didn't start the Spanish-American War, but his policies afterwards when America basically kicked Spain out of Latin America in the Caribbean was also like, listen, this is our backyard. Please don't come in. If you do, it's going to be some problems, right? And so China is kind of looking at the South China Sea, Taiwan, that whole region, like, wait, this is like, this is our backyard. Like 150 years ago, America put their foot down and kept the waters to themselves, controlled the seaways. It's like, we're just going to do the same, right? So they're logic.

Starting point is 00:26:15 totally makes sense from a geographical perspective. I think it's a little bit more difficult for them in the sense that America really is just an island, right? It has Canada to the north and a very small, Mexico to the south. No real threats. China is bordered by 14 countries. And it's fought with India. It's fought with Russia, Vietnam. So these are all contentious relationships.

Starting point is 00:26:37 So just to answer your initial question is like, that's the threat, right? China wants to secure their position in their own backyard. And I think they understand they have a small window to do it because demographics are not going to be in their favor moving forward. So I think that is kind of the overarching threat. Then if you layer that underneath is the fact that for the global economy, because there's so much semiconductor manufacturing equipment there. And, you know, the quote unquote semiconductors of the new oil, that's the threat that stands seeing, why that's so disruptive. So what I'm trying to understand, rather, is should China make a move on Taiwan, is there risk of destabilizing the region? I mean, markets react to conflict, I think, generally speaking.

Starting point is 00:27:14 But what is the threat economically that have systemic risk to markets around the world? Right. So I think if you look at kind of the price chart for stocks after the invasion of Iraq, right, in the 20-year Afghanistan war, even the Gulf War, right? It's like, there's a, the first Gulf War when it was, many people were like, okay, this is clearly about oil. Even after that disruption, I think there's a small recession afterwards, but like up into the right, the 90s, whereas it's just booming 90s. But I think it's pretty clear that this Taiwan situation is very different in the sense that everything requires semiconductors. And also, you're putting China up against America, right? This isn't America going up against Iraq in Kuwait. This is the two big boys now. And China is no small

Starting point is 00:27:53 fry. But I think the article you mentioned that I did write, it was based on Robert Kaplan's book about the South China Sea. Because of a lot of good points, actually. He talks about how naval warfare is very different than a land warfare in the sense that things go slower, right? It's because it's the nature. It's the water. He calls water has a stopping power. So you can't move as fast. And the type of war that would be enacted here is like it'd be America's offensive versus China's defense, which they're going to be in their own backyard. So it's very asymmetrical, actually, because it's a lot easier for trying to defend the region than it'll be for America to attack. But I think that will be the disruption. It's like you take off the semiconductors and then also

Starting point is 00:28:27 the uncertainty of having one and two, number one and number two going out going to each other's next. I think that's not comparable to anything that's really happened for 100 plus years. This week, there was a very big defense agreement signed between Australia, US and the UK. It's actually the cover of the economist. It's agreement basically is that some combination of the UK and the US will be supplying eight nuclear subs to Australia. And this is actually kind of shockwaves in the region because Obama said in about a decade ago that they wanted to leave the Middle East America and focus to pivot to Asia, right?

Starting point is 00:28:59 Remember the famous pivot to Asia? But during the decade since, China has claimed more land, claim more islands, been very aggressive with its neighbors and kind of built out its position in the lead up potentially to a Taiwan invasion. But this deal that happened this week is kind of like really substantive in the sense that the U.S., especially after what happened, there was dismal withdrawal from Afghanistan. People are like, oh, they're going to withdraw from the world. This deal actually, it looks like the U.S. and Australia are very clearly kind of drawing a red line in the sense that they're going to make sure that U.S. continues to have a presence, a very strong presence with its allies in the Pacific and in and around China. The thing about the nuclear subs, and there's actually a lot of controversy because Australia originally had a deal with the French, but those are diesel subs. and they kind of, without telling the French, we're taking this other deal.

Starting point is 00:29:42 So if you Google Emmanuel Macron right now, it's just going to be pissed. And nuclear subs are interesting because they're much more difficult to detect and they can go much longer. The hindering factor on a nuclear sub is the food for the crew. That's it, right? That thing would go forever. It didn't have to feed the crew. So America and the UK are basically going to be giving, these aren't nuclear subs that have missiles. They're just like nuclear subs in the sense that they can stay in the water for a very long time.

Starting point is 00:30:05 Can do reconnaissance? And I wanted to bring that because this deal literally just happened this week. And I think it signals that if a conflict war to happen with Taiwan, because I know people have been waffling and saying the criticisms, like, I think America has just given up, right? Like after what happened in Afghanistan, the allies like, okay, can we trust them anymore? This deal kind of signals actually, you know what? You can't trust us. We're kind of really putting our foot down in the Pacific region. And they also have previous defense agreements with Australia, Japan, and India called the Quad. But this one is very serious because of a dollar amount. And because of how it was enacted and rolled out. 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

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Starting point is 00:33:38 Past performance does not guarantee future results, current distribution rate as of 1231, 2025. Carefully consider the investment material before investing, including objectives, risks, charges, and expenses. This and other information can be found in the income fund fund's prospectus at fundrise.com slash income. This is a paid advertisement. All right. Back to the show. You're bringing up a lot of stuff I want to touch on, but what's coming to my mind in this Venn diagram of sorts between Asia and real estate and poor demographics and other risks entering the market is this news of Evergrand and what they're facing. And it's gone from

Starting point is 00:34:16 being the next Lehman Brothers to maybe being a nothing burger of sorts. And it's hard to kind of gauge where we stand. So I'm kind of curious to hear from you what your take on Evergrand has been. Real estate's always been interesting in kind of communist and developing countries because, for example, in Vietnam, the asset manager I worked for at the time is running $1.5 billion. This would be 2008, 2009. Just for reference, that's about 2% of the country's GDP. So it's pretty large, right? It'd be the equivalent if someone in the U.S. was running a couple hundred billion dollar fund.

Starting point is 00:34:47 So very large relative to the economy. And it's interesting about real estate in Vietnam, I don't want to do an overarching brush, but it's because in these developing countries, and Vietnam is much less developed in China. It's probably, I think the GDP is around 2,000, 3,000. China's maybe 10 to 15. So it's not nearly as far long. But real estate's interesting because if you're good at anything, Vietnam at the time I was there, you're going to end up in real estate.

Starting point is 00:35:09 And the reason is why, if you're thrown off profits exporting shoes or exporting fish sauce or exporting seafood, there's not a lot of places to put the money other than reinvesting in the company, but where else are you going to put money, right? There's no venture capital system to put it into, right? There isn't a burgeoning services sector at that time. It's growing and slowly. So if you have all this money kind of lying around, it doesn't really matter what industry you're in, you're going to buy real estate because you know it's a scarce asset. And also, it's going to be dual use.

Starting point is 00:35:35 You're going to purchase as an investment asset, but also if you are one of these factories, you kind of need to build it because those factories don't even exist, right? So real estate in Vietnam has always had a very interesting thing. And then you take the homeownership aspect of it, right? It's always a big part of the communist ideology. And they obviously vary country by country is we take property from the capitalist, and that includes real estate and homes. And then we're going to give it to the population and some capacity, right? I know typically that's around the means of productions, not necessarily how you live, but you're taking property away, right? It's the kind of overarching thing. So China's situation, from what I understand, is very interesting because Evergrand, the match was lit for this Evergrand

Starting point is 00:36:11 situation. It was lit 20 years ago with China's debt-fueled growth. But the real lighting of how it kind of tumbled to now was, but a year ago, China wanted to reorient its economy away from this crazy real estate lending. Because real estate has just eaten up such a large, part of the economy is at 25 to 30 percent. And in the early 2000s, dumping all this money into real estate was very productive because you didn't have any of the infrastructure, the homes, the buildings at that time, built them out. The example that's always brought up is how much dollars of GDP can you create for a dollar of debt? And that ratio has just shrunk, right? It used to be a dollar of GDP to say hypothetically, could it used to be able to create three

Starting point is 00:36:48 dollars. A dollar of debt used to be able to create three dollars of GDP. Now it's like you need $4 of debt to create $1.D.P. Right. So it's much more unproductive growth. And Xi Jinping, I think the way he framed was actually, he called it fictional growth versus genuine growth. And we've obviously all seen what has happening in the tech sector where China has put a very hard line on tech education, kind of reorient resources away from industries that they don't think is necessarily benefiting the country's broader missions. So a year ago, trying to reorient the economy bit away from real estate, it put three red lines into place. I think it was around what a debt to asset ratio could be, debt to equity, and then the cash to short term a debt ratio. They set red lines and said, if you're a real estate developer, you cannot cross these red lines. So over the past year, a number of different developer in real estate companies have had to liquidate assets

Starting point is 00:37:34 and also fire a lot of their staff. Then Evergrand, it just happens to be the biggest one in the space, right? So they've been able to muddle around, but it obviously came to head in the past couple weeks based around kind of interest payments. But what I found interesting is the number one resource I go to for China is Michael Pettus. I don't know if you ever read him. He writes for a Carnegie endowment. He's a China expert.

Starting point is 00:37:56 He's actually also a debt and just kind of like understands the money flow expert. He's written multiple books over the last few decades. But I found what he said super interesting is so Evergrand has $300 billion in liabilities. They have 1.7 million unfinished apartments, which total about $200 billion. And the nature of the real estate industry is the cash conversion cycle that can be very difficult. It's like, it depends on how you play it. But they did it well, right? They're pre-selling units.

Starting point is 00:38:21 So they were getting money way before. that they're building it out. But they basically ran out of money. Part of it had to do with profigacy. Part of it had to do they're expanding into like EV manufacturing and all this crazy stuff that no business being in. Part of it was a slowing kind of a home buying and the slowing of the economy in general. So if you frame all that, you have a situation now, there's a powder keg. It was lit a year ago. And now it's coming to Evergrand and they have all these liabilities. And the confidence of whether or not they can continue as a business creates, he's like, is spiraling. you know, what's it called like best files for, you know, for debt.

Starting point is 00:38:54 It's like as soon as you lose confidence in a business, suppliers lose confidence, your workers kind of don't really want to work or don't have confidence to you as a going concern. So all these things happen that just worsened the debt crisis, right? And what Michael laid out was basically, this is the Chinese government's options now. And again, I think you mentioned at the top is like we actually have no idea what's happening, right? It's like it looked like it was a new layman, now it looks like it's going to be kind of okay,

Starting point is 00:39:17 or maybe it looks like they're going to kick the can down the road. But he framed it in three ways. He said, so it's clear to him that the Chinese government wants to do one thing with the credit market. Because for so long, a real estate had been giving privilege and government was fine with having all this money going to the sector, even if it looked like some of the products were not productive. It looks like this move is a very clear, like, okay, we're actually going to force discipline on the credit market now. Right. It's like from this day forward, if you're going to as a lender or a bank lend to an Evergrand or another developer, you're going to have to use real underwriting. You can't just use the fact that government is not going to let it fail, which is basically what was happening.

Starting point is 00:39:54 It was like, every guy was too big to fail. And the Chinese government was doing everything you can to get people housed. And they would do anything to prop up the real estate sector, right? So Michael Pettis was saying that basically they want the credit market to re-rate, but there's a huge problem in the sense that it's very difficult to do this because it's in every single person's interest to unload their books, get off everything. And if everybody individually does a rational thing, the whole thing is going to collapse, right? fire sales left right and center so this is something in china's got to deal with the other thing that he has to deal with it we touched on it was kind of the financial distress there's suppliers don't think you're going to get paid the people that paid for homes now don't have confidence

Starting point is 00:40:28 they don't want to buy new home they they were also purchasing wealth products that everground was selling which is part of how everyone was funding itself and those things are going to exist anymore so they stop buying groceries or they stop buying discretionary goods right so there's all these things that now the confidence of the economies are so you have the credit you're trying to We rate the entire credit sector, but there's no easy way to do that. Now, you are trying to deal with the financial stress of the economy and how do you keep the confidence, right? There's like the way Michael said it, there's a hierarchy of the creditors. This is how he put it. He said, if you're going to have an orderly unwinding of Evergram, he said that the retail investors would probably

Starting point is 00:41:03 get paid off first for the wealth products and then the contractors and suppliers, local governments, and then you have the Chinese creditors and the last is a foreign creditors, right? If you're a foreign creditor and Evergrand, I don't think you're getting your money back. But having said that, he does explain that China has a lot of ways to make this happen. It's a closed economy. So money is not going to rush out of the economy like it did in the Asia financial crisis in the late 90s. It's closed. Very strong regulatory state. Basically, they can just tell people what to do. It's so interesting. And on that last point, you read that the central banks in China printed something like $120 billion. And I think the question to your point is like, is this just the

Starting point is 00:41:39 beginning? Does that stuff it out? It doesn't sound like it's going to do enough. We're printing $120 billion a month. Yeah, exactly. You got to step it up a little bit. Evergrand has something like two times the amount of employees is something like a Facebook, thousands of employees, and they were actually threatening to take away their bonuses if they didn't lend money to the company. Exactly. And so you are now indebted to your own employee. I mean, this is really mind-boggling stuff. And also paying suppliers with empty apartments, like they're very similar lines, right? Well, let's talk about that too, because you mentioned China's desire to up the real estate market specifically.

Starting point is 00:42:16 And it kind of touches on this, what's resulted as these empty cities that are all across the country. And you mentioned the declining demographics, which certainly aren't supporting that. I do have a theory about the one child policy. You kind of touched on this where you've got all these, the ratio from men to women, especially in China is so over indexed men that they're competing for women to get married. You have to own real estate. You have just as like a prerequisite, right?

Starting point is 00:42:42 So simply, and then to take care of your parents. there's a whole other cultural element there that's driving real estate decisions. But it seems like they've really overdone this idea of, hey, yeah, we're going to invest in real estate because it's a store of value. To be a store of value, it has to be scarce. And by continuing to produce it, it seems like it's going the opposite direction. So those are just some general thoughts, but what do you take? Yeah, absolutely. I agree with you. There's some numbers that wrote down just to speak to the scale of how absurd it was, right? Twenty-five to 30 percent of China's GDP, somehow tied to the real estate sector. A quarter of home buying is on speculation. And real estate,

Starting point is 00:43:12 just as an industry needs so much debt, right? Just the nature of a development. And this adds on top of the fact that China as a country, Michael Pettus was basically saying that even if it was just Evergrand, even if it was just the real estate market being over indebted, you could probably muddle your way through. But it's the entire economy, right? State-owned enterprises, local governments, households.

Starting point is 00:43:33 I think the number is 270% at the GDP, which is unheard of a country at this stage in development. I think they doubled that number, called for the mid-150% to 270 in the last decade. So just it's kind of out of control debt growth, right? And Michael's written about this extensively, but essentially when you grow via and that debt growth is unproductive, again, going back to the how many dollars does a dollar of debt produce in GDP?

Starting point is 00:43:56 If it's like $4 of debt produces $1 GDP, it's unproductive, it's like no matter what happens, it's going to have to resolve itself in some capacity. And I think the Japan example in the 90s, the lost decade for Japan, which basically turned to the last decades. is something that is often brought up. And just, again, for my un-expert brain is like the one that I see the most, the Communist Party in China has just such control over the country. I just don't, I can't imagine them letting this type of like a total meltdown happen, right?

Starting point is 00:44:25 Even if it's healthier for the country in the long run, they can't do it because their legitimacy, they don't, it's not based on democracy, they're not voted to be in their imposition. Their legitimacy is providing economic growth. So if they're to allow this implosion, a financial implosion, This is very similar to the COVID crisis. It was a crisis of legitimacy because they can't contain and keep their population healthy. Then why are they in power? The same thing's actually happened in Vietnam.

Starting point is 00:44:50 The Delta variant is just ripping through the country. So a year ago, Vietnam was totally in control of COVID. Close their borders to China, closed flights in and out. And I think there's something like less than 100 cases for most of 2020. Delta variant comes in. Countries unvax. Similar problem in Australia, actually. And now they're having a crisis of legitimacy, the Vietnamese Communist Party.

Starting point is 00:45:09 So the reason why I bring all this up is to answer your. question about how we'll kind of try to resolve, allow this to resolve itself is I don't see them letting this to implode, which means the Japan options, what's going to happen in my eyes. If that's their two options, Japan is the other, you go to Japan route, which is you're growing at 1% for the next decade, which will have, you know, honestly, disastrous effects too, right? The economy gets crushed like that, and you reorient 30% of the economy away. People don't lose jobs. Local economies aren't going to be able to pay for services on top of the fact that they're not

Starting point is 00:45:39 even far enough developed. I pay for those services. All right. So to wrap things up a little bit, I'd love to get your take. You have your finger on the pulse of all things, tech and finance, and you're writing about this stuff every day. What is exciting you the most when you get up in the morning and go to work? What are you excited to write about?

Starting point is 00:45:56 What opportunities in the market are you seeing for retail investors? What's kind of getting you going in the morning here? There's just so much intellectual energy around figuring how a decentralized crypto-based economy can help creators because that's kind of where I see myself headed. And I haven't even beginning to grasp the top levels of it, right? It's like Chris Dixon from Andresen Horowitz writes incredible threads about Web 3. Paki McCormick from Not Boring writes incredible stuff on Web 3. I find it even difficult to unpack some of their ideas, right?

Starting point is 00:46:27 But it's just that the love of ownership and how you can structure new organizations is mind-blown. And mind you, there's going to be a lot of, you know, filled experiments along the way. But I think that aligning creators' interests with their fans and giving fans potential equity participation in a creator. Like, I mean, I know because of the creator coins are a very popular thing. Big Cloud, which has had kind of a muddled history when it launched about six to seven months ago. It was basically letting people invest in individual. Like, think about Twitter, but you can invest in individual profiles. Find these ideas interesting because it really just aligns everybody and also gives people the opportunity to benefit financially.

Starting point is 00:47:01 Because right now, like, I have 200,000 followers on Twitter, but I have, I don't make any money from it. And any ideas that I have for trying to make money, not that I'm even thinking about it, but would be off platform. I'd want to push people off platform, whether it's to a newsletter or to a course, right? But if you were to create a way for fans,

Starting point is 00:47:18 I mean, there's so many of these tools, only fans, Patreon. But the crypto side of it is just that you can start from square one and build communities and have everybody align almost immediately, right? There's a lot of these crypto communities on Discord where your membership is like an NFT. So I find like these ideas, very engaging.

Starting point is 00:47:33 I haven't gone nearly far down the rabbit hole. enough. But an example that I mentioned in kind of our email exchange was, so Jack Butcher, one of my podcast hosts and friends for non-investment advice. He has paid a lot in the NFT space. He's one of the top 10 creators on Foundation, which is an increasing back kind of an NFT market. And he did something interesting, which speaks to why I find this space so fascinating. So I know a lot of people probably seen the crazy JPEGs of Cryptopunks or on board A, right? It's just the Twitter profiles now. And what's interesting about that is Jack brought up a good point, one of an older podcast in that he said If you were to put the equivalent of a bill of your bank account saying, hey, I'm worth $5 million

Starting point is 00:48:09 in your profile picture, you'd be like, yo, what's wrong with you, right? But if you put a rare crypto punk in your profile picture that a lot of the internet side of people know is worth $10, $20 million, totally above board, right? Totally it's accepted. So he took that same kind of mentality or he found that psychology also worked for charity and a chair because he did. When the Afghanistan pullout happened, he just thought, hey, listen, I have a bit of a platform. He done courses as a visual designer.

Starting point is 00:48:35 And he was just like, how do I use my platform and kind of the NFT mechanism to raise money? So going back to the example I said, it's like it's very gauche and frowned upon to put a $5 million bill within your profile picture. But what if you were to buy an NFT and that money is routed directly to a charity, right? And also that record of you doing that just goes directly to your blockchain or it's tied to your Ethereum account. you don't have to do the action, the intentional action of telling people that you've done good. It all happens automatically, right? And I think that lowers the barrier a lot to charity. Because a lot of people, like, if you people put their names on buildings, right? And that's a very kind of, again, maybe somebody thinks a bit tacky way to show that you're a charitable person. But if you're doing charity and it's all automatically done and everybody understands that's all automatically being tracked and recorded, it kind of takes away that friction of like, hey, I don't want people to think that I'm just doing this for the name.

Starting point is 00:49:29 He's like, you know, I'm going to do it. Now we're going to start living the world where everything's just recorded. He realized this mechanism as he was doing it because he used a crypto publishing platform called MIR where he could embed NFTs. He raised $200,000, right, for Afghanistan relief. Basically, he was sending a survival kits to Afghanistan families. Like if you bought one NFT, the money was going directly to this cause, he never touched a single dollar.

Starting point is 00:49:52 So two things happen. You remove the psychology of people like not wanting to be charitable because they don't don't really know where the money is going. So you kind of move that out of the way. You also remove the part like, you know, I want to do something charitable, but I don't want to look like that guy that's doing it just because people know. So those two elements, right, those friction. That is, to me, a paradigm change of how you can use an NFT to do charity. That actually blew my mind in the sense that, like a lot of these things that you're seeing, like a digital training card is like, I get it. I get the value in that. You know,

Starting point is 00:50:17 you create digital scarcity. But does that actually create new behavior? In my mind, this charity thing is so clearly a new behavior that's enabled by the blockchain and NFTs. And that is what, I mean, to answer your question. When I wake up and see all the crazy things that are happening in the Web3 space, is like, that's definitely what gets me excited. That's a great point you just brought up about the philanthropy side of it that I had not thought of. I'm just getting my arms around it myself. I definitely, I said this on another show.

Starting point is 00:50:43 I think it's something investors really need to take note of because I think there is something different about this wave than say like the ICOs that happened in 2017 or something. There's a lot of similarities on the surface. And you could easily point to this and just say, well, this is a tulip mania. kind of, you know, Bonanza. But I do think structurally, and I think that's the thing that I want to learn more about, is what tools are used to then verify, okay, that money really did go to that charity of sorts. You know, it's on a blockchain, supposedly, but how are people visibly tracking that kind of thing?

Starting point is 00:51:16 To answer your question is that there's a startup that actually helps route funds between wallets, specifically for charity. Yeah, I mean, you can literally, it's all there. It's like, the money you bought this energy with is going to. directly to the wallet belongs to this charity. I mean, there's also, I mean, to your point, what is the layer that you're going to verify that that is the charity's wallet, right? But clearly there are people very able to do that.

Starting point is 00:51:39 These things are being implemented. But, you know, I think that's a valid concern. Squares actually done some interesting things that that suggest that they're kind of moving in this direction with creators. They have a creator bank. They bought a title and they're kind of finding these. I think they're working on a niche kind of lending move where you can fund an artist. They'll know just from their title streaming, even though title's not the biggest

Starting point is 00:51:58 streaming service. They'll underwrite an artist. They'll be like, okay, we'll underwrite your next album because we know how hard you can hit, right? I think that's in the works. And then you combine that with Twitter, I know the history of product development is not great. Somebody brought up a great point. I can't remember who it might have been Casey Newton, the journalist, formerly of The Verge. But he's the same. Facebook has a lot of baggage, right? Facebook has a lot of baggage. That's why all the crypto products are just kind of like, never really gone off the ground. And the Twitter is like, because they're kind of functionally the same, they were 10 years ago, there seems to be a lot more space to experiment. And in my eye, Twitter is a much better network network. It's like, I think, yeah, it's like the joke that only your old

Starting point is 00:52:32 uncles and aunts use Facebook. I know that's not necessarily true, but something about Twitter makes me feel like they can capture this opportunity much more. And the square element is just, all the pieces are kind of there, you know what I mean? It'd be interesting. I keep saying this, but the future will not be boring. Trong, this has been so much fun. I've been really looking forward to talking with you and following you for a long time. I've loved the content you're putting out. And this was such a interesting, wide-ranging discussion. and I know our audience is going to get a lot from it. So thank you so much for coming on the show.

Starting point is 00:53:00 Absolutely, man. Thank you so much, Shay. That was amazing. All right, that's all we had for you this week. If you're loving the show, please feel free to subscribe and even leave us a review. Trong and I connected on Twitter. So if you want to connect with me, definitely do so there at Trey Lockerbie. Or if you have your own curiosities, you can always ask us a question that we might even play

Starting point is 00:53:17 on the show at AskTheInvesters.com. And with that, we'll see you again next time. Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to subscribe to Melissa. millennial investing by the Investors Podcast Network and learn how to achieve financial independence. To access our show notes, transcripts or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decision consult a professional, this show is copyrighted by the Investors Podcast Network.

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