The Overton Window Is Shifting | Anthony Pompliano

Transcript

if you look over the last specifically four years but even really the trend over the last decade or so is we essentially inverted what people wanted all of a sudden the government kept telling you no you can't speak freely no you can't transact freely no you can't do whatever the thing is that you want to do and for the last you know 12 years there's been one guy who's represented the change and that's Trump hey everyone just wanted to take a second to tell you about our latest conference taking place from the 18th of March to the 20th D New York we'll be hosting some of the largest allocators asset managers and financial institutions in the industry such as Kathy Wood Michael sailor Mike novag Gratz and many more plus me and Santi will be recording a live episode

for Empire listeners you can use code Empire 10 for 10% off just click the link in the show notes to take you to the event page all right let's get into today's episode this episode is brought to you by ZK sync join the elastic Network today at ZK sync. iempire thanks to ZK sync for for making today's episode possible P what's happening man not much how are you good good to uh finally have you here long journey to get you on the pot good to see you how's life everything's amazing nice um so I want to have you on because I think of you as someone who has a very holistic view of like what is happening I think there are people who we've had on Empire who talk about markets there are people who talk about politics or people talking about

money um I think of you someone who has a very holistic view of all this stuff how do you maybe we can start as as high level as we can possibly go which is how do you make sense of everything that's happening in the world today I think that there are two different trends that uh are hard truths people don't want to admit but they describe so much of what's Happening across the economy politics um and even what people personally are choosing to spend their time and energy on the first is uh one big assumption over the last 50 years was globalist uh kind of Pursuits is a positive trend uh and we should push that to its extreme we did that and I think that the lesson that we learned

although people don't want to admit it yet is that the pursuit of globalism actually ended up hurting a very large portion of the population but that portion of the population is the silent majority and so the people in control of media the people in control of Finance the people in control of Corporations the people in control of cities they've benefited from this so you hear is this has been good this has been good keep going but actually the you know 60 to 70% of the population has been destroyed by this uh kind of pursuit of globalism and it's not just a thing in the United States the the US is the thing that maybe is the most intimate to us we understand it we live here we you know

uh understand a lot of the economic data but this is something that's happened to all around the world and the idea really is that uh the promise was you're going to pursue cheap products those cheap products are going to come from lower cost of Labor so you scour the world looking for efficiency efficiency sounds good right that that that's something that you should want if you have lower cost that should lead to higher profits if you have higher profits then ideally you'd be able to pay your employees more you be able to invest more in R&D like there's this whole academic theory that goes into why this was good in hindsight of 50 plus years of chasing this down what you find is that one the products were cheap in price but they also were cheap in quality and so

you can look across a bunch of different consumer goods and see that people replace them much more often so yes the sticker price is cheaper but over a 10 or 20 year period you know how much of your wardrobe how much of your furniture is getting pass down to your grandkids probably not that much right yeah probably zero yeah nothing and so you're having to Reby these products over and over again and depending on the the good and when you buy and a bunch of different things maybe it's the same price as just buying it one time and and it being you know kind of long lasting and high quality but maybe it's more expensive so you don't really get the quote unquote cheap aspect uh in price that maybe people thought they were going to get the second thing is if you chase efficiency around the world

there's always someone willing to provide lower cost labor and so when you do that what do you do you push manufacturing you push all sorts of uh kind of domestic activities international well in most regions in the United States from a landmass standpoint those jobs dried up so now what you have is you push people from a middle class down from a socioeconomic standpoint and rather than the American dream being this uh social and economic Mobility what you actually have is you have Mobility downward which in most uh countries is actually not what happens in most countries you pretty much if you're born into a certain part of the economy you're just stuck there you can't go up you can't go down right there's a safety net but there's also

kind of a cap in America because there is the potential to go up it also means that there's an elevator down mm and so when you look at that you can see that maybe 20 years ago 20% 30% whatever the number was of the population they were upset but it was still a minority then they grew to 30 40 50 now we're probably over 50% and I think that also is u a huge reason why you see the populism rising in politics that's why you see somehow the Republican party is now the party of the working class right you see um so many of these kind of like second and third order effects all can be tied back to this idea that we just chased efficiency around the world we gave up the resilience both from a supply chain

standpoint which was exposed during covid but also we gave up the um the the job opportunities the economic opportunities in most of Rural America and so there's this great book that I highly suggest everyone read is called Twilight of the elites and it's written about France but I think it's applicable to the United States and what they write about in this book is this idea that U during Medieval Times there is uh castle walls that are set up and the monarchs or the people in control they're within the castle they have safety they have abundance of food they have all these kind of benefits but people outside of the castle walls they're screwed they're the Surfs right they got to do all the work and they don't have all the benefits we still have that model is what this book argues it's just that now

what we've done is we've erected walls around our cities and so where's all the job opportunity inside the cities but most of the people can't afford to live in the city so they are priced out it's unaffordable to them and therefore they're pushed outside the city uh limits when they're pushed outside the city limits now we're trying to sell them the same way we sold them globalism this idea of like remote work oh don't worry you can have the same Economic Opportunity you don't need to live in the city you can live at home right in some Far Away place and you can sit inside your house and just have a laptop but the truth is if you go and you talk to business owners guess who gets the promotions guess who gets the higher pay guess who gets more of the opportunity inside of a business the people who are

in the office and so it becomes this really weird dynamic where uh that globalism trend is one huge piece that can be uh sewn through economic political even to some degree geopolitical uh uh kind of developments in the country uh and in the world the second thing is uh a technology story which is um there are two ways that you can think about uh investing and and building businesses there's a bucket of what are you betting on that's not going to change in the world and then what are you betting on that is going to change in the world and so a Warren Buffett is somebody who would bet on things that are not going to change in the world a Jeff Bezos is somebody who's betting on things changing in the world right you can kind of go through these different examples but there really you can

bifurcate uh from a an investing standpoint and a building of a company standpoint are you in a position to bet on change or are you in a position to bet on stasis and both work there's many ways up the mountain but the reason why that's important right now is because there is such an acceleration of Technology that's happening that it is actually breaking many things that previously uh were thought to be Unbreakable and so you can see this with um maybe something like uh take the Rockets Rockets really good example there are companies who 25 years ago thought it would be impossible to get reusable Rockets okay that makes sense somebody did it but the reusable rocket although that is a huge breakthrough and

has immense economic activity that kind of drafts off of it and now is a lowcost solution to get to orbit and space and all this stuff what people tend to forget or or underestimate is what are the second and third order effects so then we get starlink because now we have reasonable Rockets those reasonable Rockets are because somebody wanted change so that change has this like kind of chain reaction of events well when we get starlink now all of a sudden guess what should happen Wi-Fi should go down on phones so plain Wi-Fi productivity should go up right like you start to see all these order effects and so the rapid acceleration of Technology uh changing is kind of a parallel story to that globalization because now all of a

sudden what we've done is we've taken these huge bureaucratic bloated organizations and we're starting to smash them and so what happens it's it's like if you take a sandwich and you smash it things shoot out the sides well the shooting out the sides is all the employees and so where are they going to go if technology is taking your job if technology is you know uh crushing the bureaucracy of your business and now somebody can create a business with onet the employee base and have double the profits Twitter right great example 80% reduction double the profits now what do those employees go do and so it's a story of Technology end of globalization which really just drives what is the economic opportunity for people and in the United States in particular we've

done a horrible job of educating people so then if you go and you take a look one out of every five Americans can't read past a third grade level myself included yeah it's ridiculous right and so you say to yourself like we're supposed to be the most developed nation in the world all stuff and one out of five Americans can't read past third grade level uh that's a problem yeah and so you say to yourself okay I have a very uh kind of unique experience in life where I basically feel like I've lived in two different worlds I grew up in North Carolina I was in the military I played college sports with people who came from all over the country the problems that my friends face that come from those that part of my life have

zero overlap with the problems of of my friends who live in New York City work in finance and Tech there's there's I can't think of overlap right my friends in New York they don't give a about the price of eggs all my friends growing up and in you know kind of more the blue collar working class they all care about the price of food my friends in New York City they don't care whether they got to pay an extra 25 cents or $5 because there's a congestion tax they just are going to use Uber right they're going to get in the car they're going to go wherever they got to go my friends who don't come from that every single dollar counts they're going to calculate how much longer is it going to take to actually ride the subway and I'm going to leave early because there's zero

chance I can afford an Uber this episode is brought to you by ZK sync in 2024 ZK sync took a step toward a multi-chain future by transforming from a single L2 into an ever expanding network of ZK chains the elastic Network to onboard the whole world into crypto many specialized chains must be able to coexist work together and share liquidity institutions and Global Financial leaders choose ZK sync for unmatched security scalable infrastructure better onboarding gasless transactions and privacy first design join Over 20 chains including abstract sofon and Kronos in the elastic Network today behind ZK sync

is the ZK stack it is a One-Stop platform for building private blockchains on ethereum the stack solves all the typical privacy regulatory user experience and deployment concerns of blockchain without compromising performance or security join the elastic Network today at ZK sync. iempire thanks to ZK sync for making today's episode possible Geet is a first ofit kind dpin protocol that's revolutionizing satellite navigation Services they're actively generating onchain Revenue that's growing 500% year-over-year by providing Precision location services that are 100 times more accurate than standard GPS on Empire we always talk about finding how

crypto can power completely new business models and they're a perfect example of this they're already trusted by over 30 Enterprise customers across Industries including Automotive agriculture construction and even robotics the network is powered by its native token GE EOD and easily mined with their satellite Minor by setting up a base station you can get involved with this uh groundbreaking web3 ecosystem learn more by heading over to geod net.com or just by hitting the link in the description of today's episode okay Le let's actually talk about these two groups of friends so it does feel like the okay these two groups

of friends would have been on different sides of the political Spectrum for the last 30 years maybe maybe maybe North Carolina group of friends is voting for Republicans uh New York San Francisco Friends Tech Finance whatever voting for Democrats it feels like there is a um I'm still working through this idea like a a third party basically that's getting created where they're they're Pro business but if it's in America they're uh they're Pro business but if it's um uh kind of but Pro business but anti-globalist they're um they're actually socially liberal but very against like woke ideologies how do you think about this um what's happening with the political Spectrum right now and and maybe through the lens of these two friends as well when I grew up um

the popular thing that people would say is that they are uh fiscally conservative and socially socially liberal everybody 10 out of 10 that was like everyone would say that yeah and the truth was um that usually neither one of those things were true they said it because that was the safe thing to say but when push came to shove they actually weren't fiscally conservative and when push came to shove very few people are actually socially liberal and so what I mean by that is um everyone is socially liberal until it's them that has to sacrifice and that is just true across countries across language across um pretty much every socioeconomic status everyone says we should help others but you pay for it nobody

actually wants to do it themselves and so um I don't like that that's not good but that's just how humans work right is uh nobody is like running to the IRS and stroking twice as much in their check uh every year they were saying I'll pay what you what you want me to to pay but that's it right and so um if you actually think about what that General framework was trying to get at was people wanted to be able to do what they wanted to do let the tell the government to leave me alone and then I think that the government also should have responsibility to help people who need help right and so the reason why I describe it that way is because really if you look over the last specifically four years but even really the trend over the last decade or so is we

essentially inverted what people wanted all of a sudden the government kept telling you no you can't speak freely no you can't transact freely no you can't do whatever the thing is that you want to do and so people kept running into that and eventually got frustrated because they're like why is the government stopping me from doing what I want to do but then on the help side what they saw was wait a second you're helping people humans they're just not people that are in our country so we have veteran homelessness you know is exploding Mental Health crisis we have homeless all over the street there's drug uh issues there's you know all these different things that are going on that people are looking at and they're like objectively these people are suffering and we're not helping them and then you go to things like Hurricane

Katrina you go to Flint water uh the Water issue in Flint Michigan like you can go through all these and you're just like wait a second what is going on why why are we not getting the uh kind of government support that you would think that they need and so you say okay well the government's helping somebody who are they helping and I think that's really where then they they didn't like the answer and it doesn't mean that the government was right or wrong because at the end of the day it really just comes down to uh how you thought the government should act but if you're helping illegal immigrants if you're sending money overseas to uh allies or or Foreign Wars all this stuff like some people like that some people don't but I think it really just came back to wait a second I feel like the government is

telling me I can't do stuff I want to do and then the people who I feel like the government should be helping they're not helping and so that's where you got this massive rejection of an entire you know kind of viewpoint of the world and they basically said wait a second I'm going to go and I'm going to vote for Change and for the last you know 12 years there's been one guy who's represented the change and that's Trump and so it doesn't mean that like one of the stats that I always uh think about we'll never know the answer to this how many people voted for Trump because they liked Trump versus how many people voted because it like anybody but Biden right or anybody but Harris We'll never know right but it does feel like um it got to the point where you know even folks that you

wouldn't expect those New York friends right um I know somebody who's in a uh uh a social Media Group in that group are a bunch of uh middle-aged women in New York City who all have children the things that were being said before the election you would think that you were in a group of farmers in Alabama yeah objectively a group that would on paper vote for Harris they would say it this friend of mine would show it to me and they're like these women are writing in here saying I have voted you know Democrat my entire life my parents like if I ever told anyone right because they can all write in anonymously all stuff and they're just like I've had enough of the crime

I've had enough of the you know migrant issue I I've had enough of I'm walking through downtown Manhattan and I feel like I got to look over my shoulder like it's personal safety it's all this stuff and so the reason why I look at it through that lens is what really ultimately happened is the rural areas somehow their experience got exported to the cities and when you export that now of a sudden you look at the world differently but when you live in kind of the Ivory Tower you don't have the same problems so to your point about I have these two different groups of friends in the last four years they started to actually have overlap of their problems right my friend who lived in Manhattan worries about their safety as much as my

friend who lives in North Carolina worries about their safety and so then you start to say to yourself well how did we get there and it goes back to the ideas of globalism and Technology change and all this stuff and the part of the conversation nobody wants to have is you know one of the big questions over the last four years is like why did Biden open the Border open the Border not as a national security policy he open the Border as an economic policy I disagree with it I don't think he should have done it but if you go back and you look basically what they did was inflation exploded how do you get inflation down you need a deflationary force you need to overwhelm the system and when they open that border and they let it millions of people it was an economic policy to try

to flood the country with cheap labor to drive down cost the problem is that you hurt all of the American citizens that are there competing for those jobs now and so you get in this very weird world where politics and economics are now banging heads with each other and the things that you should do to optimize for economics can actually be really really bad for your country your Society the fabric like all these other kind of you know non-economic factors that um I think a lot of people really care about yeah I mean let's talk about that now cuz there's two there's two I mean there's a big macro thing happening which is tariffs and then on a more micro scale in the industry we operate in in crypto there's this strategic Reserve um so maybe maybe we can talk

tariffs first um I'm curious two two angles on tariffs so the the headline that is I think most people agree with if they read the headlines and it's clear the market has reacted this way is Trump impact Trump putting in place tariffs tariffs equal bad costs go up bad for business and so the Market's been spooked it just feels like overall chaos in the market so I'm curious just wrong okay let's go there um pretty much everyone's understanding of tariffs is wrong and the reason is because if you ask people to explain tariffs I've done this for I don't know 50 75 people something like that they all tell you the same story tariffs are inflationary if you put tariffs it drops

us from uh free trade free market perspective to now a manipulated Market uh the Importer pays the cost and ultimately the consumer Bears the brunt of it okay we don't have to go back I could sit and talk about how our country was built on tariffs and how uh all of our government revenue came through tariffs uh the Coast Guard was literally built used to be called the cutter Revenue Service uh it was built to collect the Tariff was 5% flat tariff on All Imports to the United States pretty much every founding father was Pro tariff um and the idea was tax everybody else outside the country to benefit the citizens versus what we have now which

is you tax the citizens to benefit everybody else outside the country right so you can imagine federal income tax didn't exist as federal income tax got uh increased tariffs came down there was kind of a reverse relationship and uh it's easier to tax your people than tax people outside the country so it makes sense you know kind of what the incentive was how we got here but we don't have to go back to the 1800s to understand how this works go back to 2018 there are three major products that Trump put tariffs on and Trump basically um ran what I call the Tariff experiment and to be honest when he first announced this stuff back in 2018 I was pretty skeptical I was like you know got an Ecom solar panel Tariff was it so he did solar panels washer machines and steel washing machines

washing machines and steel and uh what he did though was he cut federal income tax from 39.6% down to 30 37% and he implemented the tariffs now the tariffs are very surgical they were on three products it was very specific it wasn't these blanket tariffs which we can get to but if you go and you take a look at uh washer machines washer machines uh saw when the Tariff got put on a rise in price within 18 months so by the end of 2019 we actually saw washer machines were cheaper than before the tariffs were put on why did that happen well a great example is that two Korean manufacturers of washing machines said I don't want to pay the Tariff so they came to the United States they each

built manufacturing facilities in the US they created thousands of American jobs and we ramped up domestic production and so if you ramp up the supply the price Falls because demand doesn't change for washing machines and so we actually ended up 18 months later with cheaper washing machines in America rather than before the tariffs got implemented so a lot of people say oh well those were just the two Korean manufacturers okay let's go look at solar panels same exact thing happened with solar panels we had uh solar panels mainly coming out of China we put a tariff on them 25% uh that tariff led to more domestic manufacturing of solar panels as we increased domestic manufacturing we also actually saw towards the tail end of Biden's uh term a an explosion of demand

as well because he started to put in all of these rebates and and kind of incentive systems but what we got was lower prices demand never slowed down and we were able to collect more Revenue because now anyone that was shipping solar panels from China to the US was paying 25% uh to the US now here's what's interesting before Biden left office he actually increased the solar panel tariff from 25 to 50% so he doubled what Trump did and the reason why he did it was because it was working so you say to yourself okay so that's two different products now where the products within 18 months of the Tariff being uh levied were cheaper than before the tariffs were were implemented so we go look at steel and steel China has basically completely destroyed the steel

market in terms of they just flood the world with steel and so good for China right they're producing a lot of this stuff but us steel production was uh not operating at capacity so the whole point of the steel tariffs was we want to put this tariff in place and we want to get us steel manufacturing up to at least 80% of our capacity we put the tariffs on guess what happens we stop importing as much immediately us production spikes prices fall and So within 18 months us Steel is now cheaper than it was before the Tariff and now if we go to 80% or more uh manufacturing capacity guess what we're hiring more people we're investing in American manufacturing all this kind of stuff so in every single one of the examples in 2018 not only

were we able to drop the federal income tax but also we were able to drive prices lower not higher we were able to collect more government revenue and we ended up creating more American manufacturing and more American jobs so you look at that and you say to yourself well wait a second that's everything opposite of what I've Been Told hold tariffs do and the reason that people are so worried about tariffs is because there is one like ailles heel of them if you put tariffs on products where you cannot replace the foreign manufacturing or production with domestic manufacturing and production then yes prices will rise and it ends up being a bad thing what Trump I think has done which is very unique is he has said this is not just a foreign and domestic game

what he's actually said and he's explicitly said it which I was surprised he he did this he has said listen I'm putting the tariffs in place if you're a foreign manufacturer I'm not taking them off you should just come here to the United States and produce the good here in the in the US so we see tsmc recently right Biden passes this chips act they start to build facilities in Arizona then all of a sudden Howard lutnick and Trump they go with the tariffs and they basically strong armed tsmc to create even more facilities in the US so people look at that and they say okay it's actually not a a Trump win it's not a Biden win it's both of them in their own way stick and carot are able to go and get tsmc to come here and now I believe that they're going to do eight different

facilities in the US invest about $160 billion and it's estimated they're going to create at least 30,000 jobs in total and so you say to yourself wait a second all we're trying to do is incentivize people if you actually want to build products and create things for the American economy come build it within our borders and hire our people to do it rather than people out externally so if you take this to his natural conclusion what I think should happen which I don't know if it will is that we should actually go from a world where we default zero tariffs and then we run around and we say oh we don't like what you're doing okay we're going to add a tariff oh we don't like what this country is doing add a tariff that is using tariffs as a punitive kind of uh punishment instead I think we should

reverse that I think we should start with a five or 10% blanket tariff on every single thing coming into the United States and then run around and say we want more of your products or Services let's drop it so that we can incentivize you use tariffs as an incentive system not as a punishment system when you do that now all of a sudden what you're doing is you're saying look for the products and services that we don't necessarily need they're not critical for National Security we can't we can build ourselves whatever hey you got to pay the Tariff 5% isn't a huge deal 25% which is being levied right now against Canada and Mexico that's a pretty big number so 5% on all Goods would be actually much more uh kind of stomached uh better by the economy than having some big number and so if you start with that 5% and now all

of a sudden you use the tariffs to incentivize rather than punish I think what you can do is you can have better command and control over the products that people are creating for you and you actually end up with more American manufacturing American jobs so if you go to the market why is the market freaking out because the Market's thinking about it the old way right they're thinking tariffs are bad but my favorite stat looking at 2018 was if tariffs are supposed to lead to more inflation why did inflation go down between January 2018 and January 2020 uh 2019 so over the year where he put put the tariffs in place actually inflation went down and so you say to yourself it's because what people think about is they think of tariffs in silos and so if you go and you look at countries like the

Netherlands Netherlands has a 25% vat right a a value added tax that is uh you could think of it as a tariff on Goods that are being imported uh it's kind of a a consumption tax they have no inflation it's like 1.6% or something why is that because they've had it in place forever like for decades okay well if there's no change in the vat then there's no inflation so what is the quote-unquote inflation that's associated with tariffs it's not the Tariff that's inflationary it's the action of putting it on so that's why you get that initial spike in price is because you went from no tariff to now you have a tariff but then as the system works itself out within 18 months the prices are lower so it comes back to this idea of the market is thinking

tariffs are inflationary tariffs are bad but I think what we're seeing already is that the threat of the Tariff we have the Leverage this episode is brought to you by ZK sync in 2024 ZK sync took a step toward a multi-chain future by transforming from a single L2 into an ever expanding network of ZK chains the elastic Network to onboard the whole world into crypto many specialized chains must be able to coexist work together and share liquidity institutions and Global Financial leaders choose ZK sync for unmatched security scalable infrastructure better onboarding gasless transactions and privacy first design join Over 20 chains including abstract

sofon and Kronos in the elastic Network today behind ZK sync is the ZK stack it is a One-Stop platform for building private blockchains on ethereum the stack solves all the typical privacy regulatory user experience and deployment concerns of blockchain without compromising performance or security join the elastic Network today at zync doio Empire thanks to ZK sync for making today's episode possible geod net is a first ofit kind dpin protocol that's revolutionizing satellite navigation Services they're actively generating onchain Revenue that's growing 500% year-over year by providing Precision location services that are 100

times more accurate than standard GPS on Empire we always talk about finding how crypto can power completely new business models and they're a perfect example of this they're already trusted by over 30 Enterprise customers across Industries including Automotive agriculture construction and even robotics the network is powered by its native token GE EOD and easily mined with their satellite Miner by setting up a base station you can get involved with this uh groundbreaking web 3 ecosystem learn more by heading over to geod net.com or just by hitting the link in the description of today's episode I get the sense that you are very happy

that Trump is President and maybe didn't like some of the things that Biden was putting in play you talk about immigration I'm kind of reading between the lines you talk about tariffs kind of reading between the lines how do you think about there there's an article labeled you you know Trump loud voice on Pro Trump or something like that like I'm just curious how you think about your own political views um I'm a hardcore independent um you know one of the things that uh I challenge my friends a lot of the time is whichever political party they subscribe to um can they say something nice about the other one and can they critique their own party and you know behind closed doors I think if people heard me talk uh I think people publicly believe that you know I I think everything Trump does is amazing

I think everything that Biden did is stupid um a good example I think of why that's wrong is you know Biden's economy as much as people you know said hey the guy's asleep and you know kind all the critiques or whatever stock market hit alltime High After alltime High crypto was ripping right like like all these things and so yeah you could be like hey that happened despite him shooting himself in the foot the whole time but at the end of the day like his policies led to a great stock market performance right okay there's a hell of a lot of things I could critique him on right and I have uh extensively same thing with Trump is that there's a lot of things I like that he's doing but also there's a lot of things that I'm like come on man right and so you know one of the things

I've publicly talked about is uh when he went after the uh um like the the uh priests or whatever in in the thing it's like look I I just I don't think that's the way to treat people right and so you know the truth is that if you support somebody 100% then you're probably in a cult right the way I think about it is if you can look at whether it's a political candidate a human a business person an investor whatever you should be able to say here are the things that I agree with them on here are the things I don't agree with them on right you know I think people have been surprised I've been very critical of the administration on the crypto reserve and to the point where people are like wait what I thought that you wanted this and it's like no I don't think that it's

just like blind belief in the these organizations or these people it is very much trying to figure out like okay forget the political parties for a second here's a topic how do you think independently about it and what do you what do you agree with and what do you not agree with but the problem is like that's very difficult to do especially on the internet so usually those Nuance conversations end up being had in private more so than you know in public Co opened the window for over for everyone accepting that these Overton Windows change quicker than people realize um and I think that yeah Co was clearly at least for me in my life the first big moment in time where it was masks you know shutting down travel um all these big ideas and then you know

you weren't allowed to you got you know kicked off of Twitter if you said that it came from China and then very quickly the Overton window changed and then you know there's obviously big reports that some of these things were wrong and you you see it I mean mainstream media saying Trump would never win and then he wins and things like that um you're talking about these tariffs are there any other like things that are starting to feel obvious to you that maybe when you look out at the public you say it doesn't feel obvious to them yet but I but I see this coming well I mean Bitcoin wasn't you know over the last decade or so was very obvious um and uh you know um one of the things maybe that uh I've never publicly said before but um why not do with you uh I never got

vaccinated um and it wasn't like I was so uh hardcore about it or whatever uh it was more of just um look I'm like a young relatively healthy person uh if I need to do that I will but I'm also not like going to you know a bunch of places where there's a bunch of PE at risk people or whatever I'm just going to kind of like hang out by myself whatever and um I think what really bothered me early on was uh uh the political flip-flopping of they're like railing against the vaccines coming too early and most of the Democrat Party in particular was like the Trump vaccine is unsafe they're rushing it whatever and then it flipped immed was like everyone

needs it you know type thing and so whenever I see um an acceleration of a story that goes from hard one view to hard the other direction I get very skeptical and um you I mean 2020 2021 like there was a bunch of these examples um but but I think that's something I've learned over time is like whenever you see the the kind of volatility in in a view um without a a easy explanation usually a time to be somewhat cautious um and then I think also there are uh a lot of things in maybe just investing in general and so you know a good example is like um one that blows my mind is intrinsic value right uh if I go online right now and I say there's no such

thing as intrinsic value I will literally it's like I'm the devil all these I've actually seen you do this and I saw you get skewed yeah yeah and and then I always go and I look at the people's returns and they never outperform the S&P 500 right and the the reason that um I think it offends people is because people they need mental Frameworks that have social consensus to feel Comfort but whenever I see social consensus I get very nervous because in my mind most of the time the social consensus arrives at something thing they're wrong whereas I think other people see like their safety and numbers like a lot of people believe this so they must be right um I just have seen it too many times where it doesn't mean

that the the non-consensus view is right it just means that like I'm going to be skeptical and go try to figure out what's right here because there's too many people go down the rabbit hole there's too many people yeah there's too many people who have cessed around a Viewpoint that now it's obvious people aren't like actually doing the independent work themselves right so like I'm gonna go do that I might arrive at the same conclusion that the consensus has but like I need to go do the work to have the confidence to to know what to believe here and so intrinsic value is a great example where um the belief around intrinsic value is that you can look at an asset you can tell what the the uh objective value of it is and the reason why that's not true is because if I show you an asset it

could be a stock it could be a piece of real estate it could be uh you know a piece of gold whatever and I ask you well what's the intrinsic value you're going to tell me a number based on some formula that you use but if I go ask another super smart sophisticated person what the intrinsic value is they may tell me a different number through their formula and so it can't be intrinsic if there's different viewpoints so right so it goes back to this idea of like value is subjective and so those types of things really rattle the kind of framework that investors in particular have but if you just extrapolate that out to all of society you say to yourself okay there's a lot of commonly held beliefs that when you actually unpack them they're not true and so you know the one that um was probably the

most controversial thing that uh that I wrote In the book was um Luck's not real I had a feeling you were going to say I mean this just sent people over you know I mean lit people were like writing me all kinds of crazy messages whatever and my point to them was like both academic studies and anecdotally you can see that uh most of the things people point to as quote unquote luck are actually mathematical probabilities and the reason why we like to use luck is because it helps us feel comfortable explaining things that we otherwise don't want to acknowledge and so if you and I are in the same situation something happens to us and the example I always use is we walk across the street we get hit by a bus we

both lose our right leg show up to the hospital somebody comes up say Jason what happened say oh I was really unlucky I was walking across the street I got hit I lost my leg holy and then they come up to my bed and they're like what happened I'm like man I'm so lucky to be alive same exact scenario you got lucky I didn't same same scenario yeah but same outcome right so what it shows is that actually luck is a psychological concept right and the way that you become more lucky is you start to tell yourself that you're lucky and if that's the case then luck is not real it's just how you view outcomes I ask I I'm sorry for cutting off but I ask this in every interview how uh how lucky are you like a question we asking the final round of interviews

for people how lucky are you and I want people to tell me I'm 10 out of 10 lucky luckiest person in life because they make it they make their own luck by saying that yeah and and it goes back to this idea of like if you that luck is not real then you're as lucky as you believe you are yes right that's right yeah um let's uh let's actually go deeper on this idea that there's no such thing as intrinsic value everything is a meme can you just yeah expand on that like does does it stop let's just go right to the heart of it um because I I I I would guess where you're getting at is something like Bitcoin there's no intrinsic value right there's no cash flow something something like Tesla maybe a cult stock or something like that let me let me give you a framework

of um you know the one that really gets all the the Boom rors upset is Brookshire hathway is a meme stock and by saying that immediately people ah you know whatever but let me explain so birkshire hathway is obviously a very good business they have incredible assets there's cash flow there are tangible you know value to these assets all this stuff but there is a what we can call a buffet premium we can call a buffet bump if you're going to call it a premium or a bump you can also call the Buffet meme right it's all the same thing but let's say that Berkshire Hathaway is 90% amazing company 10% Buffett premium so

that means that if B uh Buffett was to pass away and you know Greg able or whatever who's supposed to take over uh he's running it 5 10% lower valuation simply because Buffett's not there anymore Berkshire is still a great company whatever but the Buffett premium goes away okay Tesla 50% amazing company 50% Elon premium people always point to oh it's trading at this insane valuation compared to the other car companies all this stuff right so the like Elon meme the retail craze adds to the valuation multiple so Tesla's still a good business but the reason why most of the you know kind of

Wall Street world doesn't understand the valuation is because they can't wrap their head around that Elon you know premium that gets associated with it it's not the 5 or 10% Buffet it's like 50% okay let's go look at djt stock the Trump Media company that is like a 10% company 90% Trump meme because it has $4 million of Revenue and it trades at like a six or seven billion dollar market cap so obviously anyone who looks at this objectively is like it's probably not actually worth that how do you get to that valuation 10% is based on what the company does 90% is on like Trump you know premium or whatever you want to call

it the last iteration of it is just the Trump coin just take get rid of all the company stuff and just do 100% meme right right and then you get the uh Trump coin so the reason why I give that framework is it's actually a natural extension of like what has been in motion now for decades I'm not saying that it's a good thing I'm not saying that the highly you know percentage meme you know type valuation stuff is sustainable or it'll be around for a long time I'm just saying that the same thing that is giving the Buffett premium the Trump premium is just like you know 90% of the value yeah so when I I look at that I say to myself okay everything is quotequote a meme to some degree you know Warren Buffett is um I I literally have a bust of Warren

Buffett in my office right and I think people are always uh very surprised at the like uh um you know kind of a paradox of I can attack him and think that he's probably not the most moral person he's probably not a a really good uh uh example of like I don't want my kids to grow up like him but I can also really respect his investment track record his patience his kind of wisdom and learn from him and do all that stuff I can also think that uh Buffett is um probably somebody who is relatively close-minded when it comes to technology and change all stuff but I can respect the fact that he has built his entire career on betting on things that don't change and stuff right so like understanding and unpacking these people is really

important but if you go and you take a look at the quotequote meme Warren Buffett is the original Finance influencer he would only talk to One journalist she would disclose we're friends she edited his annual letter but man that was pretty effective because he kept getting really positive coverage because his friend was writing about him he actually people don't know this started out one of the first things that he ever did was he created one of the original newsletters he used to send out gambling odds uh for horse racing and he had this whole thing and he would send out the odds and he's basically just like gambling at the horse track then he actually bought stock and

would go and write uh op-eds in like National newspapers basically being like go buy this stock again you can't hold what a 212 year old guy does to you know somebody who's 90 years old who's got the track record but I still think he's he's he's he's still sculpting this persona it's like you ever seen the videos of him pulling up to I think it's like McDonald's every day he gets the big or he gets the you know whatever he gets in the morning it's like the fried fish or something market up or down that is a meme that is the marketing like I watched he lives small house Nebraska this is the this is him perfectly sculpting the Persona of Warren Buffett yes it's all it's all branding and by the way it works like you you you cannot hate the player you gota you know kind

of respect what he's doing and understand how it works now the reason why I say that he's the Finance influencers uh he also has the largest capitalist conference in the world I I joke that Boomers go on Mecca as disciples right I mean it's it's crazy they do yeah and to sit there and listen to them talk right bow at the feet and uh again it works so like this is not I think people hear me say this stuff and they're like oh you're criticized like I I understand what he's doing I I respect it it's worked you would be an idiot to not recognize what he's doing and try to learn little things of how been able to do this now with all of that said you then can look at okay extrapolate out to the GameStop

guy right that looks a lot different he don't wear a suit and tie he doesn't look like the old grandpa with wisdom right all the stuff but to a new generation in a weird way they kind of sit in the same seat oh yeah he's got his Persona too the red bandanna yeah yeah so again I'm not saying that uh Buffett's bad and the GameStop guy is good but what I am saying is that uh understanding these personalities and how they're able to attract an audience and have influence and stuff like that it's like important to unpack and so maybe one other thing that I think kind of cuts through all this is a critique of the crypto world that I think is unfair is the Legacy Finance

folks will always say ah you guys never lived through a real bare Market you weren't old enough in ' 0809 okay I always ask the uh kind of the Boomer crowd how many times have you held an asset that's gone down 80% and not sold cuz I know people done it three or four times now right and they like well I never done that like okay so what we're actually getting is we're we're in this like accelerated Market cycle in crypto where you basically are living through boom and bus Cycles every four years whereas the traditional system is kind of operating on a dinosaur speed right there was the 2000 bust then you had 089 then kind of sort of had a little bit of Market gation in like 2018

then you had the covid stuff right then you had a 2022 bare Market but if you really think about like quotequote bare markets like the market went down like 20% yeah right like Bitcoin will do that in a day yep and so I just think that there's a very different uh kind of training ground now for the younger investor where they are buying stocks that have 80 volatility to hey everyone earlier in today's episode I mentioned Petra a top non-custodial wallet developed by Aptos labs they just launched NN a new feature to access defi with just one click earn lets non us users deposit usdt directly into Aries markets lending pools to gain

interest and rewards and manage it all directly from the Petra wallet Petra earn was designed to make defi more accessible for everyone you can manage your balance claim rewards and deposit directly from the app this is of course not Financial advice participating in defi carries risks to learn more visit petra. appar or by hitting the link in the description of today's episode hey everyone Jason here earlier in today's episode you heard me mention the weekly CIO Memo from bitwise in an industry as hectic fast and complex as ours it's incredibly hard to get an easy No Nonsense stream of what's actually moving crypto the memo comes from Matt Hogan bit wise's chief investment

officer he's been on the show before and he has this amazing ability to take the most complex topics and break them down with Clarity trust me on this one the bitwise weekly CIO memo is really worth the five minutes of your time check it out at bitwise investments.com memoire or just hit the link in the description of today's episode to get started carefully consider the extreme risks associated with crypto before investing this episode is brought to you by by wallet connect the connectivity Network shaping the future of onchain ux from defi to nfts swaps to staking wallet connect is the backbone of connectivity in the onchain economy

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50 years old white dude gray hair who works on Wall Street now now it's everybody in the world right now it's everybody in the US soon it'll be everybody in the world Rob like you know brokerages become digitized Charles Schwab E Trade then it you know moves to mobile with things like Robin Hood and public.com and things like that and now it's just everyone in the world with things like Defi and um you know just these these mobile apps so my first question maybe is what's driving this second question is if this is such a good strategy will we see more public companies and Tech Founders and just Founders in general running their businesses almost more as Cults less as just your typical business yeah so there's two things that are driving what I call the rise of the self-directed

investor the first is access to information it used to be that uh you had to watch um TV right or you had to read the newspaper well if you're in school I don't know how many kids you knew that brought the newspaper to school zero in my school right and then we didn't have access to TV during school hours so you basically had no access to financial information while you in school well you have no access to financial information you're pretty much not getting it if you're not getting it then you're not going to participate right you're not informed now Tik Tok Instagram X you know newsletters whatever you have this access at your fingertips so everyone's informed now everyone knows what's going on all the

time and so if you give people information they want to act on that information but there used to be a second friction point after the access to information which was I had to call up a broker a broker right to tell them what to do or I had to call up a financial adviser there was a bunch of friction there well now what happened is Robin Hood public uh many others they have brought that friction down to the point where I've got an app on my phone I can press some buttons while I'm sitting in class right uh at the most extreme example um and then not only do I have access to the market but now I can literally buy fractions of a share I don't even need to have all the money to buy a single share right so what you've done is you've just ex you know

drastically opened access to information and drastically opened access to the market and you've given these tools to people and so naturally you do that plus the backdrop of well if I keep saving I'm losing money everything's getting more expensive I got to invest and you get the explosion of the self-directed investor maybe we can tie it back to just your view of what happens from here we're talking about the markets and and tariffs and Trump and all that kind of good stuff um right now if you look out at the landscape I think you've got a bunch of any anybody in their 20 you know who's between the ages of 25 to 40 have not the made the money that they thought they would make they haven't been able to afford a home they're kind of disgruntled in their nine-to-five jobs um I think there's cha there's

probably chaos in the markets today what like what happens to S you know we haven't even really talked about ai ai flips a lot of this upside down you can now build a billion- dollar company with seven people what what what's your view of like how the next couple years shake out everything you just said is true about a portion of the population but it's also completely inaccurate about another portion of the population so what I mean by that is at the same rate that people feel like they're falling behind there's another cohort that feels like uh they're making so much money they don't even know what to do with it and that is the bifurcation of um kind of society you're getting that kind of like k-shaped uh you know wealth inequality but the group

that feels like they're making more money than they know what to do with that's a very small amount right is that the maybe you would call it the terminally online group well think of it this way um when I was growing up uh the idea of being a millionaire was like yeah oh my God right um it's still I think for a very big portion of the population it's like oh my God that's an unreachable you know thing to attain but there's a heck of a lot of the population in the United States that is like hey I need more than a million dollars right and not only do I need more than a million dollars like I'm going to blow through a million and I got to get you know much much higher and so

sure is the billionaire the new millionaire or something probably right like there's some there's some you know kind of evolution of what the Milestones are but I do think that the let's just call it the millionaire cohort is much much bigger than people realize it is and especially if it's not just cash millionaire but like net worth millionaire type stuff you know Boomers I think um 50% on average of their net worth is in their Primary Home they've just been doing it long enough now right where they a lot of them I think 42% of American homeowner don't have a mortgage a lot of them are just Boomers who have just been paying it off for 30 years right so like they get to the 30-y year market like yeah I paid it off um so when you look at all that stuff you can say to yourself like

okay again it's a bifurcation and I don't know is it like 2: one 3: one one: one what like what's the ratio I'm not really sure but uh I do think that there is a continuation of these Trends and the only way that you can reverse being in the bottom half of that Trend into the top half is uh education you you got to position yourself with assets to to be able to get there and I do think that AI is probably the only like broadly applicable technology that can Empower these people to make a shift without becoming an investor yeah um because at the end of the day the people who own the resources or control

the resources they're the ones who usually end up benefiting and historically we think about that as you own a company has economic uh productivity you know kind of associated with an employees and machines Etc you can own assets right all this stuff now you can actually just own the software and the software can have that economic productivity uh kind of value to it but you got to learn it yeah and so where we're going in my opinion is uh I call it like the automated economy and what I mean by that is Bitcoin is like a automated Central Bank AI is obviously automating a bunch of stuff smart contracts are automating a bunch of stuff right you know um there's like very nuanced technology like U ZK proof

stuff and whatever like that's going to automate stuff but really what we're doing is we're just going to a world where uh code is going to replace so many of the inefficiencies and it will unlock brand new use cases for things you know streaming payments and all that kind of stuff but probably more importantly is uh we are going to recapture a bunch of our time from the road activity ities that we repetitively do and that's exciting on one hand like imagine if you got back a bunch of time that you know you otherwise were wasting but I don't think Society is yet prepared to like what are you going to do at that time yeah and um it's not a problem we haven't faced before we've always kind of figured it out uh so it's exciting on one hand but also just you know all of a

sudden half a in hat and had back you know four hours a day oh you don't want to see what that looks like yeah right like you know what I mean the transition period might be a little crazy let's um maybe big shifting gears a little bit talk about time um you know Mike and I were lucky enough to work out of your office for when we were starting block works and still to this day I mean anytime someone say what was it like to work with pomp I have I have a very clear answer which is he has the highest capacity for work of anybody that I've ever met um actually I mean you taught Mike and I a lot about just like work ethic and I mean we would go we do seven days a week we're showing up Saturdays and Sundays still recording you're right

in the newsletter every day how do you um how do you structure your day um it evolves from time to time but generally I wake up relatively early um I go work out uh I then spend some time with my family I usually write in the morning um I kind of have one I'm mentally kind of sharpest then but also too uh the writing process really forces me to kind of uh intake a bunch of information that's happened you know over the last day or so synthesize it into my what my thoughts are you know kind of outline what that argument is put it down in writing and then from there now I basically for the next 24 hours have okay the These are My Views

because I've took taken the time to write them down and so from there you can see um when I do podcasts I you know already kind of know what I'm talking about because I imagine if you before you did a podcast you sat down and wrote down every single thing you thought about you know these events whatever um TV all that kind of stuff just comes off of that so I try to spend the mornings uh really focused on the content stuff and I think that is kind of the engine for everything we do and then I pretty much spend uh midday you know all afternoon into the early evening focused on the businesses um that we run and uh yeah I don't know it's you know I was laughing when you're like you know he's got a high capacity for work because to me it's always just been um one I just

don't know anything else but two is uh this is like living a dream right like and not like a Cheesy like oh I'm living the dream you know whatever in the Army somebody's like how you doing like oh living the dream right which really meant like dude this is miserable as everybody else right um but but like in a sense of if you went back and you told like I don't know eight 10 yearold me you're like hey every day this is what you're going to get to do I'd be like that's awesome like sign me up for that right I agree with that I I feel the same way I every day I'm like this is insane I get to do this for a living I've only got one business though I only record two podcasts a week I'm not writing a newsletter we've got 80 85

employees roughly um you have I was trying to figure this I don't actually know my guess is nine to 10 businesses more more you've got um some of them have outside Capital some of them don't I think some of them you own like 50% of some of them smaller then you've got a whole investing arm right you had full T til I'm sure you got those you got Morgan Creek digital you've got uh Angel investments in like tech companies um you got kids how what's like how do you think about structuring all of it just get done whatever needs to be done yeah but actually do you do you hire like do you hire have a whole executive leadership team do you hire a bunch of young younger people like from a pure executive uh leadership

team we have only one other executive which is a CFO um we don't have a president a chief operating officer a CMO any of those positions um I think that I really aggressively pursue taking our cost centers and turning them into profit centers like this studio yeah just just everything that we do can be turned into a business and some businesses can be big some you know are going to be smaller that's fine um I'm obsessed with the businesses being profitable I don't want to run you know kind of loss generating uh type businesses um um we have only Ever Raised money for one company um everything else uh we basically fund

with the profits from the businesses that we've built and our thought process is that you know in this new world you want to sit at the center of three things and I call it kind of like the triple threat you want to be able to build companies and operate them you want to be able to uh invest capital and you want to be able to create content and if you do that correct um there's a lot of opportunity but you know it it's uh very much this idea of where can you create value I think one of the things maybe people don't really realize is I spent a lot of time thinking about um what is the solution or what is like the service to other

people so when we create a business what we want to know is okay if we put this out there into the world like who is it benefiting and what is the value it's creating and the bigger that the impact looks like or the bigger the you know kind of value driven to someone the more that I have conviction like hey this is going to work but you can always figure out how to make money right but it's just like like how do you solve that problem and I think that's why our batting average is so high um but I do think that there's a world where uh maybe one of the mistakes that we've made over time is we can hit like singles and doubles all day long and if you do enough of them you know constellation software is a great example they made over 400 Acquisitions

average purchase price around five million bucks and you string that together they got a $3 billion company not a bad run right um so you can do volume of smaller things or you can make really concentrated kind of very asymmetric you know type bets and we have historically been in the volume business versus the you know kind of slugging percentage business and so um maybe we'd be better off that's maybe more of something like a um you me you mentioned Richard Branson something like a virgin right they don't they're not buying companies for 5 million they're they are a holding a holding company essentially but they're taking these moonshop bets yeah I mean look he he at one point I think

he owned like 180 companies right so um some of them are get big right and I think that uh one of the things and I've talked to a lot of people who run these different things right I've try to understand it um if I was to make the bull case for what we're doing I would say oh what you do is you start off with high volume kind of you know really what we're trying to build is we're trying to build $20 million businesses and we've you know so far had the fortunate ability to build some companies scale them we've sold one you know kind of like it works you can keep doing that and then over time as you build up that batting average you start to like increase your ambition and then five years seven years eight 10 years in right then now a

you're going after bigger and bigger opportunities but you kind of build up the muscle memory to be able to do that the opposite argument is just like why don't you just go after the bigger opportunities to start how do you think about how the uh how the founder looks at these different Investments so basically how does the founder of a venture investment look versus the founder of someone you might partner with to go build a business the similarities are more interesting than the differences you want somebody who has a propensity for Action you want somebody who uh is detail oriented you want somebody who is borderline um obsessive you you want somebody who is

scared of failing scared of where they came from scared of something you know there's a lot of people in the world who say like I want somebody who's running towards something I actually have found that we've been most successful partnering with people who are running away from something [Music] and those people have a persistent motivation that is very hard you can't teach it but also it's very hard to find um and so you know we've got people we've got one person who's runs one of our businesses he's got uh three kids and he had another one on the way I think when uh when he quit his

job hey man we better win yeah we better win yeah right um and then I also think that there's an element of uh h you want people who are curious and that curiosity is uh something that maybe the single most important aspect that no one usually talks about because you know take like the AI stuff right now we have one business where um the people on the team they take in a lot of information they kind of synthesize it they then uh create content around this whatever and so I recently said to them I said uh have you guys ever looked at any the AI stuff one

of the guys on the team he he enjoys kind of coding and you know he's learning and he said no and I said why don't you go do this and I showed him a couple of things that I had looked that he gave me a demo earlier this week he pretty much is able to automate I don't know we're probably at 60 or 70% of the work yeah and you're just like okay what else you have to do to get to 100% he's like well I could do this this I'm like if this goes right within you know three months he's going to basically have been able to automate now doesn't mean that we're going to uh be able to like have less employees what it means is that they're now going to be able to handle more clients yeah because they can now oversee it and all the tedious

work is gone and now they go from like individual contributor almost more to a manager but they're managing AI yeah right and so the only reason I knew about that was because i' had been curious about the stuff and tinkering and try to figure all stuff out and then this in part this person in particular he was very curious when I kind of gave him a direction to run towards and he went he figured out a bunch of stuff that I had no clue about and all that so I think that it's um you know I have this saying internally which people always like give me a hard time about but um I'm looking for winners and people what does that mean I'm like you just kind of know when you see it right and a winner is the same person that you could go stand outside

on the street corner in the middle of the winter with an apple stand and they'll figure out how to sell the apples they also can build a software company right it's just really like can they navigate what the challenges are in order to be able to uh to execute some people got it some people don't yeah um I got your book here I want to know how you originally came to write it because I doubt you were saying coming home tired Tuesday night saying all right the next thing I need to do is write a book well you know what they say the most motivating thing in the world is to have your wife write a book that's true that's true and then you're like how many copies did you sell you got to sell more copies than I I only need to sell one more and then I'm done I'll

never talk about the book ever again exact I'm joking u i told pla that one time she got very upset at me um it's good to repeat it on a podcast then um she is the one who uh when our first kid was born she was like you should write her a letter and I was like stop it like come I'm not writing letters and she was like you should do it and so I wrote uh the letter the first letter uh I went back and I read it a couple months ago and um thank you so much for making me a dad I'm so excited you know uh very long on like here's how I feel right now not very long on advice or wisdom and so um when our second child was born um I was like all right I kind of already got

that one out of my system and i' had written a couple of letters our daughter and so at some point uh I realized that oh this is going to be a really good way to like for me to tell them things that I want them to know um and somewhere along the way I don't 5 10 what whatever it was uh I remember saying to myself like I'm probably not going to do this to the extent that I should I need to like have a forcing function and so um why don't I just put them into a book and publish them uh also I thought that would increase the quality of them because I knew other people were going to read it and uh so I just started writing and usually I would write on every Sunday I would try to write three to five of them

and you know you just do that for a couple months and next you know you got a whole book h story my life yeah what's the reaction been um the only reaction that I care about is I have been shocked at how many dads have reached out to me and been like hey thank you I started writing letters to my kids um and the reason why like some of them even sent me the letters and I'm like oh like that cool let me start reading and then it's like d this like a pretty like intimate you know like I don't want to read this that's cool though that's cool um and I think I think it it's different because uh you know my dad and I got a great relationship uh but he's not exactly the type of guy who would ever

like write me a letter yeah yeah he he's more of like uh yeah he just looks across the room you get his Vibe I think he's saying nice work son but yeah we're good yeah thanks Dad right um so I don't know it's uh I think it it's cool to kind of see you know uh other people say like hey this something I want to do as well that's cool well congrats man um maybe the last thing wanted to ask you is just uh how you deal with hate online or just people yeah basically people not liking I mean you've got 1.7 million followers I'm sure every day in your comments it's grifter scammer like I've seen the reason I'm asking is because as blockworks has gotten bigger every day there's someone saying something negative about us and I can only imagine

when we have you know 1.7 million followers or 600,000 subscribers on YouTube what the comments look like how do you deal with that do you have do you go you hit back at them do you just brush it off do you if it's at a certain threshold then you respond but if it's not at threshold how do you think about that I used to thrive getting in the comments getting in the mud talk some you know I grew up a family with five boys like I throw down with the best of them yeah um now I just don't have time frankly uh I see it all um it's kind of like this um you know 50 Cent wrote a book and in the book he talks about uh kept trying to go on Oprah Show she wouldn't let him

go on the show so then one day he just like broke he went online just started trashing her and he says that he was at a um at a function think it was Gail King is her friend and Gail King came up to him and was like what the hell are you doing talking about my friend like you know whatever and he said uh damn if we can't be friends at least respect me enough so we could be enemies and his point was you either going to let me come on the show yeah or I'm going to use you as part of my marketing to Hy myself up right I'm going to get value out of you and that's kind of how I feel about the haters right is wow imagine how good we are doing if they cannot resist taking the time out of their day to promote our

work they spend that much time thinking about me I'm to to push it further out into the algorithm you know uh Galaxy by commenting on it I have some friends who they're uh you know the rage baiters MH that's me I don't really post to you know get those responses um but yeah it's just kind of I don't know there's been a couple times I've even like dm' somebody who said like really just ridiculous my favorite is the guys who are like uh you know they'll say something crazy you go look at their bio and they're like Dad to three kids trying to teach them to be good people in the world and every why I can't resist I'll take their tweet and I'll DM it to them I say you think your kids think you're a good person today and usually it's like a sorry man

you know yeah everyone apologizes in the DMS that's the thing always say to I by the way I get it people got a bad day have a good time whatever but it's just you know self satisfying whatever um but but I think that uh that is my takeaway yeah is that you know I I even uh one time I was uh at a mall in Miami and some kid I was walking with uh p and some kid like did a triple take like yo P and he got real nervous or whatever and I was like what's up man what's your name and he like uh and whatever but he wanted a picture so he was just like a picture and I was like sure man took a picture and uh he tweeted it but then deleted it but he had tagged me so I got the

notification so I saw who it was whatever I went I looked he just been talking mad to me for like years for like years I want to pick I kind of respected it right I was like look man you got real nervous cuz you're like oh does he know but but it was like this moment of where I was just like you know I'm not even mad right like whatever but uh I always thought about dming be like hey may you should have put know who you are know yeah so I just you know whatever let them uh let them have fun and uh a lot of people just you know they got a bad day whatever 100% good P thanks for the time man been awesome seeing you grow it's makes me very happy seeing you crushing it so thanks for coming P appreciate doing it

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