142. RFK Jr: Based or Batsh*t? And Why Worldcoin Wants Your Eyeballs 👀 - Transcripts

Art is a dumb name. Don't. Wow. Wow. You're coming out spicy on my bar.

It's so good. It doesn't even need a name. It's literally called chat GPT. It's like what it is. There's no name. Okay. Bard is kind of chat GPT.

What's GPT stand for? I never knew that.

No, that's a nerdy one. Generative pre transformer.

Yeah. I think you're pretty close.

Yeah. It's a pretty cool name transformer. Uh, what's the T? It's not the, it's not the transformer. It is.

I think it is. Nope. Yeah. No, pre-trained transformer, pre-trained.

There you go.

There's the guy.

Thanks, Jamie. Pre-trained transformer. Um, yeah, no, chat. GPT is on another level and Nixon public denial.

I got my barred. Okay. By the way, I, uh, I was using barred a lot this week and it's, it's a piece of trash. No, it really is. It's like terrible.

It lies constantly. It just hallucinates about everything.

It was really useful for looking up the rules of board games when I was using it, which was kind of interesting, but you don't have to, you can connect, um, GPT to web now, which I started, uh, screwing around with today. Actually, I spent hours preeminently better. Just, um, yeah, it's going to the settings menu and you check that, uh, there's something to enable it. And then you select the web browsing model and it's, yeah, it's great. It's way better than bars. Maybe want to just go short Google to be honest. Wow.

Dude, they jumped the gun hard. They jumped the gun hard. They're playing catch up and they sort of are over indexing on confidence. They obviously like told Bard to be as confident as possible in its answers to give this like level of certainty. So it just causes it to hallucinate way more than many of these other models. So, I mean, they're all built differently. Everyone will choose their model. If you want your model to lie to you and appear hallucinate and hallucinate and just be high with you, that's fine. I like a little, uh,

All right, I'm done with this roast.

All right.

I actually don't feel confident enough to defend it.

No, I kind of liked this. I wanted this little bar GPT.

It was, it was fast. It was free. And it, it like scrolled the internet, right? It like crawled the internet.

I used it for a betting advice.

Have I used it for or did you use?

Yeah, because it gives you the real time like betting lines and I'll tell you like stats on how many times someone hits the over over a season.

That's pretty bad. Yeah. So that was pretty cool. All right, boys. So first of all, welcome to everybody. Yeah. Welcome. Yeah. Welcome to our second ever all together in person live stream episode in the studio. What are we drinking? We're drinking some.

What am I not drinking?

Illegal mezcal reposado.

Pick a brother up.

Oh, you oh in that sense.

I think you may you don't want any And while he's pouring that real quick gracias as we say good shit Eric is switching screens hands-free. No, just kidding. We've got Jordan in the studio, guys. You guys can't see him, but he's back here swapping screens, taking care of everyone. Thank you, Jordan, for joining us.

Thank you. They will have a budget for another camera, maybe. Jordan Cam. Jordan Cam.

This is just a normal 40%, 80-proof bad boy. So I will not hopefully not be slurring.

Yeah, we haven't done six hours of pre-gaming either.

Yeah. Oh, has everyone hit the two drink minimum? Calcium just reminded me. I'm at one.

Guilty. I'm at one. I'm sorry. I'm going to level with you. The technical difficulties really cut into the drinking. By the way, you're getting a lot of compliments on your pants.

Well, I finally fit back into them because I bought them on sale one day, on clearance, and I couldn't fit into them, but I was like, I will.

It was one of those purchases. Yeah, it was one of those. And then would you get a waist size 30, 29? What do you got there? I think this is a 31. I could see you fitting into the 31. Yeah. Yeah, snug. It's the eggplant for me. You know, I think that's what's standing out.

My root. My dick. Yeah, that's a different reference.

No, that is not where I was going at all.

I literally thought you were talking about it.

Well, we've been demonetized before we even monetize.

Thank you.

Thank you. Wow. You're 31. That's incredible.

Today I am. I'm a 31 as well. I call bullshit. I will take my pants off right now.

If anybody in the chat wants to $9, Steven will take his pants off right now.

I will do it. You don't think these are 30 ones?

I believe I mean, the confidence alone makes me believe it, but slim.

I believe it. Slim, slim.

At one point I was more of like a 33. Now I'm a 32. 33 was comfortable though. I liked it, but I'm all, I'm all hips. All apps. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, all right.

So what are we doing today?

We're going to do some, let's give a brief overview of where we think this will go today. So, um, first off, um, well, I don't know what order we want to take this in as well. Is there a preference here? We definitely want to talk about what's been going on the week. I know Eric's had some stuff on his mind. He's been looking at a real estate deal.

Yeah. It's got the, it's got some of the financial stuff out of the way first.

I want to hear anyone else got going on any general off alpha. Um, world coin, very interested, uh, there, uh, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Caught up on some of his content recently. Excited to hear what you guys think. And, um, maybe talk about the movie air. Maybe.

Maybe we'll see how it goes.

Yeah. Okay.

Should I leave it off?

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, so one of the privileges of going to a rich private high school is that you get to go to school with the owner of the Lakers kids, owner of the Chargers kids, but also one of my old classmates runs one of these real estate investment funds that Nick's always talking about, the GPLP real estate investment structure. So I was presented earlier this week with an opportunity to invest in one of these real estate deals, and I've never done one. I've never even looked at them. So I didn't even know where to begin in terms of analysis. So I thought it would be cool exercise to run this deal by you guys and particularly, you know, like the the king of mailbox money, the king of these real estate investment deals. I want to run by Nick. Nick's already taken a look at the PowerPoint. Let me describe this really quick. This real estate deal, it's small by Nick's standards. It's a 22-unit building in San Diego, like a residential multifamily. It's a couple blocks south of downtown. For those who don't know San Diego, like if you go a couple of blocks south of downtown, it's like not that nice.

That's right, baby.

So what did you see there, Nick? The first thing you looked at was the cash on cash return. Is that right?

Yeah. Well, you kind of teed up the story of this deal first, which is this deals in the hood. And so the first thing you typically look at is what class and business model we're talking about. So there's class A, class B, class C. Class A is your high net worth, very great area town. Your class C is the hood. Essentially, we call this maybe a class B minus C plus C plus maybe being a little generous I'd say and then the business model is a value add So they're gonna go in there and fix it up and and lease stuff for hire other business models are like development new development Some are called core which is literally you buy it and just do nothing with it So we looked at that this is a class C Business model that is value add in that class tells us what we should expect for the cash on cash in the annual return so typically in these lower income neighborhoods, you'd expect the cash on cash to be higher. And maybe the annual return, the overall annual return to be lower because maybe we're not going to get that much appreciation.

You're not going to sell it for like a ton of money.

Maybe, maybe. So that's what we were thinking going in. And it seemed like over a 10 year period, the average cash on cash was around 6.5%. And they were underwriting, let's call it round up to like a 12% annual return. So right off the bat, like it's lower than my 15% annual return that Nick requires 15%. Right, because you need a premium for the illiquidity, right? You're not going to be able to touch this money for seven to ten years. So I think you need to demand a premium to like what you would expect.

So with this deal, there was a hundred K minimum investment. Is that pretty common?

Yeah, and I'd say if you're a first time investor to people who do these deals often, you cannot ask for an exception. Like don't hesitate to be like, Hey, this is the first one I did was a hundred K minimums. Like, listen, guys, I never had done a deal like this before. A lot of money to give, you know, one company. Can I go in for less? And they were like, yeah, no problem. They're always looking for younger new investors. They need to keep the pipeline full. Fresh blood. Yeah, fresh blood. So don't hesitate to ask for an exception. They often give it.

So this historical, you're basing off what? The historical, like... The annual return. Oh, just on what I've seen before, but also like what... No, but for this specific property, where'd you guys get that?

Oh, um, well, that, that was what they put in their projections.

They said 12%.

Yeah, their projections. So we, uh, we looked a little closer. Uh, it does average to 6.5% over 10 years, but in the first one to three years, it was like 3%, 3.5%, 4% in year one, two and three. Sounds a little low for, like I'd say a low income area.

Here's the deal. On these multifamily deals, what you have is you have 22 units, apartments, and then you're renting those out to tenants, and those guys are paying their monthly rent, and that comes out to the 2% or 3% cash on cash return. On this particular deal, because it's in the hood, and these are old apartments, what you expect is that you're going to get less rent up front and then you can like refurbish and remodel these places and then like up the rent to more of like a market rent over time.

So these were 50% under market rents. And we were trying to figure out why is the cash on cash so low. So we looked at some of the exit cap and purchase cap rates. We don't need to get into it, but essentially a lower cap rate is a higher valuation. A higher cap rate is a lower valuation. So it seems they paid quite a bit for this. They overpaid for the property, which is why maybe we're getting a lower cash on cash. Also, the loan to value, which we'll get into the loan a bit, they're not leveraging as much. It's like a 40% loan to value. So that would also be why it doesn't compare to the cash on cash you typically see in a deal like this. Let's talk about a few things real quick. So in the cash on cash, you typically want to make sure there's not a refinance, you know, like scheduled into the assumptions.

Yeah.

Yeah. So you don't want to see that in there. And if you do see it, ask them for the financials without the refinance in there. Um, we talked a little bit about the debt structure. We did, we did look at that. We want to know, is it fixed or floating? Um, we want to know, like, are there any prepayment penalties? Cause if there are, you're likely not to get a sale of the property within five to seven years. And you shouldn't expect maybe a refinance within that time period, which is kind of part of the beauty of this thing. When you can sell it, you could 10 31 it, um, when you refinance, you can pull some capital out. So if there's prepayment penalties, you shouldn't expect that, um, because

A 1031 is when you have that loophole where you can just roll the proceeds directly into another property and you pay no tax on it, right? Tax-free, baby. Real estate tax loopholes are epic.

They're a beautiful thing. It's my whole life wealth accumulation strategy.

Biden's going after the crypto trader tax loopholes. Yeah, we're too boring. Leave us alone. In the budget. All those rich crypto traders making bank in the... Oh, wait a minute.

Last thing on the loan is just you don't want to make sure not leverage to the tits. So like, you know, I think 65% loan to value these days is kind of about as high as you want to go because they can also juice the numbers by just leveraging higher, which we've all done.

So this particular deal was like a pretty, pretty reasonable loan to value. It was like in the 40s, 30s to 40s. It was low. Yeah. It was low. So that seems safe. The fixed rate debt was 5.6%. Not terrible. Not terrible in this environment. I think another thing you were looking at is the property manager. Right.

So the person you're giving the money, ideally, they'd be the ones to manage the property for several reasons. In this scenario, they were using an external property management firm. So you're saying most of these groups sort of have their own property management branch to their... Like a wholly owned subsidiary of their firm that actually does the property management onsite, leasing out properties, fixing the toilets.

Usually just dominate one region, one city.

So you picked up to be able to do that. On the main thing is that ideally they have a property management company in-house and they also manage properties nearby so that They get economies of scale and you get economies of scale on your investment so you can save on that. When they outsource the property management, the property management firm gets economies of scale and they don't necessarily pass those on to you, the investor.

And the property manager might not have skin in the game in the investment themselves. They themselves don't have skin in the game.

Sure. They're not incentivized to fill the properties. Also, insurance vacancy is low.

Yeah. And play this out real time, right? So this company comes to the property management firm and says, hey, we're looking to buy this property. Can you give us some quotes on what you think you can get for rent? Well, they're probably in it for a long term, but really the incentives lie for them to show them something good so that this firm follows through on buying the property so that they can get the business. So in general, I have a policy of sticking to investments where the property management is in house.

Are the fees that the general partner takes something that is crucial to you? Is that something that's really important?

It's not necessarily like a deal breaker, because at the end of the day, all you care about is what's getting paid in your pocket. So typical deal structure is a preference, meaning you get paid a return before anyone else. So this deal had a 7% preff, which means if you put 100K in, the first 7K Goes to you and they have to pay that and they have to repay that if they don't in previous years before they can even take a dollar So then they to be after the 7% prep they typically take anywhere from 20 to 30% This one was kind of right in the middle They take 25% of the profit after you've earned 7% a year

And that all seemed pretty standard. Yeah, pretty kosher. And then what about... I'd want a higher price. Yeah, what would you take?

I think with some of the deals, if you put in a million, you get a 10% price.

Yeah, I'd want a higher price.

Yeah, that would be nice. What about the investment from the general partner?

So that's a good point. So you always want the general partner to have capital in and there's little loopholes they use. They'll say, well, putting in 10% of the capital and then small fine print, it'll say in deferred fees. Meaning, meaning you're going to pay them fees when you put in your money and they're going to call that part of the capital and just kind of mark up their equity.

Yeah. Very sneaky. That's sneaky. Yeah. So I mean, I like that.

part of me empathize with them because like they probably, if they're doing like 10 deals a year, like you just run out of cash to like... Sorry if you guys said this already, but does this group have like a pretty established track record here?

Well, that's a good question because that's one of the first things Nick asked me. And the truth is, I just went to school with this guy, like I don't know his like career background. And like when he sent it to me, I didn't really do much diligence on that. I just know that he's been doing this a long time. His family has been doing it. So I I didn't really inquire.

That's a perfect example, though, because this is how people often hear about these deals, right? Oh, I know of someone who does this. My friend's investing in it. Should I invest in it? And we're trying to make sure the audience is a little bit smarter than the average bear when going into this.

So when you were talking to me about it, you were talking about the track record, but you were specifically talking about like how many deals have they done in like the last year or so? And this was like kind of alpha for you.

Yeah. So you typically want to compare, like if you have someone that you invest with, typically you want to compare how many deals they're doing a year compared to like a good company. Cause often if they're doing a lot more deals than the average company, probably means they're just too aggressive in their underwriting. Like they are, they are trying to bite off more than they can chew. They're being too aggressive in terms of what they think is a good investment. You want a general partner who's turning down like 95% of the deals they see. So if someone's like, Hey, we're doing like 12 deals a year and

You know the the benchmark the good guy over there is doing three kind of red red flags start to go off in terms of their underwriting Okay, here's another thing that we wrote down is like the alpha here is like understanding how they use the depreciation

Oh, yeah. So typically, you won't find this often, but one of the benefits of investing in these deals is that the depreciation writes off your profit. So that cash on cash you get every year, spend it. Spend it all. Don't save any for taxes because the depreciation is going to be greater than the profit. When you get your K1 at the end of the year, essentially your tax return for owning a piece of that LLC, you're going to show a negative, which is a beautiful thing.

Even if you're getting paid tax-free dollars.

Exactly. You receive cash, but your tax return shows negative. Sometimes they get a little tricky where these GPs the general partners will not pass down the depreciation to you as the investor in a prorata format So if you own 1% of the property you don't necessarily get 1% of the depreciation So we don't we don't like that and we always like to ask because it's typically not explicit in the business Do you have a checklist of these items? We're going through it right now brother well do you have a checklist yeah i have a gp checklist like i interview them all and i ask them the same set of questions and then in the deals now i just like do yeah it's a spreadsheet okay it's called a gp questions i feel like this should be like a google doc or a notion

Yeah, well Nick's gonna mint it as an FT and then sell it to you guys.

Let's see here. What else should we go through? Let's talk about a little about stress testing these deals. So let's actually talk about the deal itself because all we talked about is like structure and debt. There's main things that increase your return as a multifamily owner. It's pretty simple. It's really three things. It's population growth. wage growth, and job growth. So you need to understand what makes up the local economy of that area, so in Southeast San Diego. And I'll give an extreme example just as a comparison. You look at deals in Houston heavily reliant on the oil industry.

So guys with, uh, with this particular deal and it's a 7% cash on cash return, did that sound compelling enough to drop a hundred K of your own dollars?

That sounds terrible. No. That's what I was thinking. Okay.

So what I was like, as you zoom out at this whole thing, I was, I was like, I'm looking at the entire universe of investable securities and asset classes. Yeah. Like treasury bills are paying five and a quarter with zero risk. Like why lock up your money, go illiquid. and risky when you can get a 5% cash on cash return.

You can farm like 7.7% now on Arbitrum and Compound.

Yeah, but duration is on stables.

Yeah. Like, I feel like nobody's talking about this as well. We don't have to derail it though.

No, yeah.

Let's table that. Yeah. I think duration is an important factor. If you know you need a certain amount in real estate. And you need to deploy the capital in order to stay at the allocation level that you require. And that's the best deal that you have. First of all, I don't think you should ever feel pressured. A person should never feel pressured into investing into a deal simply because it's the best one in front of them. Patience goes a long way. But my point is, these are the types of deals. The reason I like them is because It's a set and forget. I don't have to go and worry about like, okay, I got to swap out from T bills and go into stables and then go back into cash because everything's burning and then go into crypto.

There's the turtle and slow compounder and rabbit in the hair.

Yeah. Jordan, Jordan thinks this, this 7% is killer.

He knows, he knows. I want to give a rebuttal to this, right?

If there's the gambler and then there's the, the person with the, the tolerance for risk that is willing to Strike gold, you know and you gotta ask yourself which guy you are. I think I tried to be that guy Over the last few years and I'm definitely not that guy and I think that's an important lesson and any money that I lost in this last cycle to me was just like pure Like investment in my own self to realize like how I want to invest going forward and I spent so much time and energy and time on planes Rewriting and writing and rewriting my investment thesis to just ingrain it in me so that I would not perform some of the same behaviors and actions that that I did in this last cycle because I just thought it's a new game. It's a new game. It's a new game. And we talked about that so much on this pod.

Well, you know, we call that my man wisdom.

Yeah, exactly. So I agree with everything you're saying, but also one thing that I noticed in talking with Nick earlier, it's like these deals make a ton of sense for a certain investor type. Like it's tax-advantaged structure, meaning like you get that, you get that like cash on cash return. That was my follow-up.

So this doesn't factor in any taxes, right? Yeah. Because if you bring taxes into it, I could see that being. Taxes are always in it. But it has to be. Yeah. I mean, but when you're saying 7% cash on cash, you're saying like... That's post-tax. Oh, that is post-tax. Yes, because the depreciation, typically for the first 10 years of the property... Well, I don't understand why everybody is falling over to get 7% on San Diego real estate, Jordan. I don't get that.

But also, the other thing is like, keep in mind, your T-bills are taxed as well. That federal government pays you, and then they tax you right back on that five and... State exempt, I believe. State exempt, correct. So yeah, the type of investor. And I would say if you have enough liquid cash for whatever you're going to need over the next handful of years, then yeah, you can invest in these. If it's your only 100k or maybe you have 150k saved up, put 100k in an illiquid deal, probably not. right for you. If you do have that cash, and I've gotten this question like three times last week, I know maybe right now is not the good time to do these deals, but a good deal came across. You like it, I like it, should I do this? If you're severely underweight this asset class in your portfolio, then do it because it may be worth starting the compounding clock. Now, but that's another huge factor.

Yeah.

Because one of the benefits of this is not only that into a mediocre deal sooner because the way I found it really compounded my scenarios where I think, uh, um, Edmond mentioned this in the chat, like you can, once it's, uh, the renovations.

Yeah. I love that guy.

Once the renovations are done and it's leased up, you can refinance and get quite a bit of your money back. I mentioned this in previous pods where I've gotten 90% of the capital back and threw it right back in a new deal. And now off that original 100K, your cash on cash is phenomenal. So there are benefits to this that starting the compounding clock now makes a lot of sense. I'll add two other benefits we haven't talked about before. One, if you're worried about the U.S. raising taxes because of a deficit situation in the future, like we talked about. Oh, is there a deficit? Is there any debt? If you ever believe in the financial repression that at some point the federal government in the next 10 years or 20 years is going to have to raise taxes, I think that this form of tax loophole is safer than others. And so it's a good path to kind of avoid that.

Why does it say because too many rich people like it?

Yeah, bingo. Exactly. But also also, like, I think a lot of, um, I know there's people in this chat who have rental income. It's not just hyper wealthy people like everyday Americans as they build wealth over time. A lot of women get a side rental property and they won't have that.

He's got like three or four. He's got a lot. Yeah. Yeah.

So it sounds a little over exposed. My man.

It's such a cool thing to be able to do if you know your local area and you can kind of value you can walk the streets and know It's such a good way to get rich slow.

I don't mean to hate on it at all I wish I lived in like Nebraska and could buy houses for $45,000 man This is amazing.

Just buy him outright. The last benefit that we haven't mentioned before in previous podcasts is if you do believe that we would ever potentially enter a hyperinflation scenario, if we achieve a soft landing and inflation reignites, well, what better way than to own a good chunk of the CPI index itself, which is owner's equivalent rent or rent in general. This is one way to protect yourself from taxes. hyperinflation if you think those are part of the future.

Oh, damn. This is interesting. Well, before I go to that, I have a question for you. Back at you. I mean, are you chomping for the seven?

Well, you know, not the seven, but I was very intrigued based on all of our discussions previously on this asset class. And, you know, I have a home for myself, but nothing that's generating cash flows on the side, a la Nick or Steven. And I'm just thinking like, Yeah, this probably sounds pretty good, but this particular deal, 7% cash on cash is not getting me out of bed.

So now, having gone through the analysis, the checklist that Nick is going to be dropping in the Discord as an NFT, fine. Either way, drop it in. And now, having gone through this conversation a few times on the pod, are you in a position where you are going to actively look for one of these deals?

Yeah, I don't know that I'm going to be actively looking. I think where I'm at is like, one thing that I noticed about this deal in particular is that the going in cap rate becomes very important. It's like the price that you pay for a property ends up very much mattering to your overall return. And I think right now, what I'm seeing across all asset classes, it's like prices are high and risk is high. I'd really like to time it where you can get in where prices are low and risk is low. And that's just market timing. So I think I would personally like to be a little greedier on my entries. But yeah, I thought it was very... Illuminating going through this process and learning how to even just like approach the analysis part of this I'm waiting for early next year.

We talked about how like these floating rate Apartment complexes are just these guys are fucking sweating right now and they're probably able to keep it together with like a 3% rent growth rate But if that rent growth goes flat or potentially Negative and they're not able to continue to release these higher. I think there's gonna be Some distressed sellers we already saw one property come through is very distressed and that's gonna keep coming up I think over the next like nine to twelve months Jordan, let me know in the chat if you if you agree There's a pretty wide bid ask spread, you know between buyers and sellers meaning the sellers think it's worth more and the buyer's like, fuck you, no, it's not. And so there's not a lot of deals happening, but over time, I think those sellers are going to be sweating and just come to the reality that this is a high interest rate environment. We need to all raise what we expect to get from these properties. So I don't know, maybe 2024 might be your year. What about international? Yeah, I don't know. I know I've had friends in Israel.

We've got Goldman, Goldman tracks baby. Condos and Nicaragua checks in the mail.

Yeah checks in the mail brings a mailbox money guy.

I don't know why we use the New Zealand accent for a Nicaraguan accent.

Well, that's pretty good actually. It's pretty good. It's pretty good. You are really good at the accents actually. We'll see.

might go downhill quickly. I don't know any US people that do them because I don't know what happens tax wise. Like if you're in a foreign country, I know that the US tax man always likes their cut. But I've known people who live internationally to do deals in other countries like people in Israel, started buying apartments in Barcelona. So I'd be curious to look at any deals.

I'm sure you're not getting around Uncle Sam, but that's not why I think More so cost of entry, maybe you have some local expert that can lead that. Maybe there's a similar GPLP program in Nicaragua that allows you to do the same thing. Or I think what a lot of people do is they tend to want to buy their future retirement homes and they just buy them way in advance. Just a lot of different things. Costa Rica is really big for that. I remember when I met Steven. We were working on something like that. Didn't you like have some interest in buying? Didn't you?

Oh, that was like that. Oh, that was like one of those. When you do marketing and advertising and you're good at it, you get pitched with like every hair brain scheme in the book. Like everybody comes out of the woodworks and it's like, I've got this new toenail clipper that's solar powered. What do you think about it? And so for sure. You just like why? Yeah, there was a thing where some guy was crazy, right? It was, yeah, he was trying to sell some land in Costa Rica, like on the Facebook ads. I don't know. I pass.

And by the way, anyone who has to advertise for investment in their apartment complex deal, just thank you.

Thank you. So I did want to touch on this because the hundred K, even 50 K entry level is high. And I think a lot of people in the community might want to get involved in this sort of asset class, but a lot of the better sort of groups are higher minimums. But then you got fucking Grant coming in, being like, Just give me your money. Grant, pardon. 5K, 10K, whatever you got. And he's investing in every deal. And he's got BSLs, which are video sales letters, telling you how many mega-millions you're going to get by investing. I mean, it's... We love him, though.

He's our exit liquidity. Grant is our exit liquidity.

This guy has been fully exposed, by the way, as an absolute scammer. He's always obviously just come off as a very whatever. I don't even want to talk about him. But I think I think coffee Zilla does a good job covering him and I'm breaking down the scam. But what do you say to these like lower entry? Maybe not just the Cardoans, but like these groups that are advertising. Is it just that's the flag? They're advertising or their minimums are just too low.

Is that a fault? Edmund mentions that fund rise isn't terrible. It isn't. There are some good deals on there. And I think you can thank those high minimums to the regulations around these alternative investments, which require accredited investors, which is usually bullshit. But that's why these minimums exist. But you can definitely find platforms. I'll let you invest 5, 10K, like Edmund mentioned. And like I said, they're typically not terrible. But I will say, If you're an amazing operator, been around for 35 years, like one of the ones I invested average annual returns 30% across the whole portfolio, like he's not going to go on fund rise and raise money that way, right?

I've never heard of fund rise. Can you tell me about it?

It's like a platform that aggregates these deals. Specifically for these deals. Yeah, and there'll be potentially a sponsor of the deal where they're basically raising money for equity in the deal. So it's like a we funder? Kind of. this. Yeah, I would rather just like, if you don't have the money to do it, just you probably don't have enough liquid to risk it in a liquid asset class. So just just don't because like, you could also go in with your friends. Yeah, I mean, we could create an LLC together.

We could decide that we want to go in on one of these.

Yeah, you can invest as an LLC and do it that way. And then it is easier to sell off your stake if you wanted to, if you had an LLC. But yeah, in general, if it's too much to chew, then it's probably too much to chew. So you should probably just focus on saving up more.

All right, cool. So we could wrap this for everybody and we had to put this into like five bullet points. Just condense this whole conversation. Somebody's like, give me the TLDR. Somebody ship some deal across my desk via Gmail. I have no idea what I'm doing. There's a PDF in front of me. Just what are the, keep it, keep it super high.

Yeah, I think you want to understand the debt structure. First, like how much risk are they taking? You want to understand the general partner. What's their track record? Have they ever had to ask for a capital call? What's their annual average return? And then you want to understand the local economy. Like where is this going and what Is that population growing? Is there job growth? Am I also, you know, betting an industry that I didn't know by some kind of concentrated local job economy? So I think those three are great.

Are you a podcaster or something? We're only at three bullets.

I think another bullet I would consider is, uh, what's the prevailing T bill rate? Because, you know, if you're going to try to get 7%, opportunity costs.

Yeah.

Opportunity costs.

But brother, like over the last 20 years, when has it been above 5%?

Uh, well, percentages over the last 20 years, not very often, but like down by taxes.

So we're at 4% now and you're not including the appreciation of, of these properties, right? Like typically when they, when they sell, you could be averaging 15% plus annual return. And granted, you need that premium because it's illiquid. So I get it.

People want to have control and they, uh, definitely don't like to lock up their money for such a long-term time horizon to know that you can earn five something.

Basically liquid is a very intriguing thing and I get that when that option is there I would I agree that's for me It's not it's not the 5.25 that I'm like going gaga over it's the idea that I'm liquid and earning 5.25 because I can pile into an actual risk asset like ETH or something and probably outperform 15% Over a 10 years where I understand about your comment.

Don't you look at those as completely different buckets? Because the money that goes into that real estate bucket for you, I thought that's more the forever bucket. So the T bill bucket is really the cash bucket that's waiting to be deployed into either the wealth creation bucket or the wealth preservation bucket. So would you actually be looking at those and comparing them and saying, well, I could earn more in T bills, but that's supposed to be your cash bucket.

It's a good question. Honestly, I think there's two things that that brings me to like first thing is like when I was studying for the CFA, we had to learn about this cognitive bias called the mental accounting bias. The mental accounting bias suggests that it's a flawed way of thinking is to like, silo your money off like this. Cause at the end of the day, you should look at it holistically. This is like your money. Where do you optimize your money for? It's like, you shouldn't just break it off into little chunks like this. I think people often do. And I think that's okay. Honestly, I don't think that's like a huge leak. Um, I think what it really indicates for me is that like, I'm just looking for higher growth. Hmm.

Hmm.

You can only do that for so long, right? Yeah, I think once I get there, that's what the framework exists for, ultimately, right?

Yeah, and I've shared my framework. I want to stay safe, and then I want to pile under risk, and I want to ride risk.

That's why I like it, and I like better understanding it, because I look at that, I'm like, wow, man, I need to put more into certain buckets. You know, I'm under overexposed in certain

I was trying to segue us 10 minutes ago, but I guess it wasn't a very good segue. Well, apparently not.

Segway denied.

Obviously, it wasn't clear. That was good. That was good.

It wasn't clear by the discussion on the bullet points throughout.

You get a little more clear, man.

We had a meeting about this on Friday. What if I segue you segue? You made an email in your inbox. What if I really segue you segue? It would be a review report card for you. Anyway, I'm trying to figure out how to segue from real estate to eyeball scanning for free money. Okay. Yeah. Tell us about Worldcoin. Are you talking about Worldcoin? Yeah, I wanted to talk about Worldcoin. First of all, I'm curious.

Yes, but wasn't it? I thought it was like a year and a half ago. Like, I thought it was like ages ago. I think it's much older than that.

It is old. Well, isn't it like 2011?

No. No, I think it's like a 2020 thing or 2021 thing or something.

I remember when I came out and people were saying, like, would you scan your eyeballs?

Yeah, it was like a funny thing at the time, for sure. For people who don't know what the hell we're talking about, world calling is this crypto kind of headed by like Sam Altman is behind it, right? ChadGBT guy and some other people. May 2013. 2013. Yes, sir. Wow. Well, look who did their research, not me. Damn, that came out in 2013. I know. It doesn't make sense. Wow.

What's the dollar amount you would accept to scan that?

That was that I'm so glad you asked that because that was that was that was the thing I wanted to segue this with. Like how much money would I have to pay you guys to scan your eyeballs and forever put it on the blockchain? Hold on a second.

I'd do it for a ham sandwich.

One person here has clear. I'm certain who has clear.

No, not me. I have clear.

Okay. Well, I have scanned my eyeballs. You're in the game. What's the difference?

Well, the difference is you got to pay for clear. You don't get a ham sandwich.

I mean, the moment you introduce these types of like biometrics and, you know, fingerprints, eyeballs, it's minority report. Like let's go there.

Okay. For the record, I actually think I am more pro-worldcoin than the generalized crypto community by a lot. Like I think in crypto, it came out, they did the eyeball scanning and everybody was immediately like, and then obviously- Well, that's because people are sort of like at a loss with what to do about the inevitable future that exists.

This is so inevitable. This is literally- What is inevitable? The title of Kevin Kelly's book. The inevitable was all about the loss a huge chunk of it was about the loss of privacy the end of privacy and we need to accept that and live in that world and better regulate that world and think about how we want to build products in that world rather than fighting against it because ultimately like and and thinking about how do we prevent totalitarian authoritarian societies from taking over and controlling us and monitoring us it's inevitable it's it's it is it is the Angle and the trajectory at which technology is evolving and fighting it seems to be useless the only option seems to be I mean I was talking to you about this year It's like move to a farm. That's it It's like you're either going to be part of this society or you got to go live off the grid And I think that's like where the road is gonna fork is people are gonna have to decide like I'm either gonna accept these technologies and sure you can be diligent and conscious of which ones you opt into. But I mean, all it takes is like the way the passwords leak. All it takes is one password to leak, and then you're gone.

Like you're- Okay, but if I have to devil's advocate you, why does the listener out there have to accept the inevitability that their eyeball will be scanned and then put onto the blockchain?

Because if Worldcoin's not going to do it, someone else's, it's inevitable.

But why?

You think you're going to stop the whole thing from happening?

Well, do you want to get into the conversation about the proof of humanity and why that would be beneficial?

Because I think there's a lot of interesting threads behind world coin.

I just want to say there's no difference to me between world coin and clear. That's what I'm trying to say. Okay. So it's already happening. It's already there. Oh, you're just trying to prevent it from happening in crypto. You're trying to prevent.

Well, let me ask you this. How much would I have to pay you to scan your eyeballs for world coin?

I don't know what that really means. I mean, I've already scanned my eyeballs for clearance.

Imagine I give you the orb. I'm like, here's the world coin orb. And imagine just having a world coin. I'm just going to send you a dollar value of stable coins. How much would it have to be? Here's 75 bucks. Would you do it? What do I get? You get money.

Just money. 75 bucks? I don't need that.

How much money?

75,000 bucks. I mean, you wouldn't do it for $100,000?

Well, okay, but there's so many underlying questions. Do I, like, what is that going to lead to? You just put it saying, like, I already did clear. Of course I would do that. Right. Because clear gives me a clear benefit. I pass the line. Right. The benefit is you get money. Yeah, yeah, just like getting money is not the same as being able to say like, okay, fine, I'm getting money. I'll take $10 million. Okay.

Does anybody have a serious answer, Eric? How much that is my serious answer. You, you, if I offered you a million dollars to look in a world corn orb, you wouldn't do it.

You'd say, no, I mean, I probably would, but I'm trying to get to the point. Trying to get to the root of your question which is like what does that entail is there some sort of are you going to pull the rug from under me as soon as i as i do that because i know what do you mean pull the rug from under you can i trust this organization is it going to be used in a malicious way i think this is a fair question i'm using a hypothetical to simplify it i'm giving you i agree but i think he's like playing out the scenario i think this is a cool exercise like.

Like under this hypothetical, like we could play out like the pros and cons with like scanning the eyeball as well as like, you know, him taking a million or not, you know, like what, like what does he expose himself to?

If there's no exposure, I'll take 10 K, give me 10 K, I'll give you my eyeballs. But that has to be part of the equation.

So what's the downside? What's the downside?

But like the the the picture in world coin is that there's some sort of like zero knowledge proof type thing going on We're like yes, we have your biometric data But like we can't do anything with it and like I don't know it's in this kind of magical privacy world where like Nobody can access this information or do anything with it Yeah, it's kind of like a trust me bro thing and I think that has to be built into your premium like if you really thought that was true Then like, yeah, what do I get? Like $100? Sure. I'll have a dinner tonight.

I thought it was sure that my keys were secure and that was one firmware update away.

I'm a little sketched out by it because, you know, they're talking about we have a decentralized currency and at some point we'll decentralize the identity, you know, portion of this project. But like, I think what we all, like the first thing when you saw the orb, it just gave you these authoritarian vibes, right? Like, it was like literally

Black mirror exactly was literally staring into it. It was literally a photo of a guy staring into a mirror. It was like a shiny orb that reflected it. Yeah.

And so it's, you know, and I think Tonsky mentioned this, like as soon as AI came out, I was like, okay, well, if this information becomes available, like what could an AI use this, either a person behind an AI or any technical person use this data set for? I don't know. And I think that's what's real value. I can't really like put my finger on what the thread is.

And the real value is, is, is now and I think the reason that People talk about it in a positive way is what it can do for AI not how I can use it maliciously in a world of deep fakes and not knowing what reality is anymore. And like needing to prove that I'm human then I can see a lot of value in that.

Yeah, can we get that use case? Yeah, let's let's pause for one second. There's two re two main reasons I think world coin has for existing. One is the idea that Bitcoin wants to be this sort of world currency. And it's not because you get this phenomenon where early adopters just get in, they get rich, and then they just hoard it. Yeah. and nobody spends it. And you can see this in Bitcoin. It's obviously happening. This is one of the delusions of Bitcoiners, right? So the idea behind Worldcoin is that, well, we give it to everybody on the planet. You scan your eyeballs.

Yes, it's definitely the more interesting one. It might be the thing we need.

I think I think I get where you're going and I just want to say that like with proof of humanity. I think what it unlocks is what what Kevin Kelly is looking for with cryptography, which is like, how do you expand this beyond currency? And it's like, well, I think proof of humanity allows like, and it enables it to become voting and enables it to become identity and enables it to become a driver's license. Like all these things that require sort of like a proof of humanity, this thing could potentially provide and think about all the people in the world.

This is one of their pitches is like that don't have proper identification. You know refugees there's so many examples, right? Yeah, it's a big use case and so in a world where things start to get mixed up your digital identity starts to get really foggy your I mean even imagine it going as far as like for example one of the things we have is like identity theft is a problem. But imagine that concept 10 X like everyone's identity is just fucked. Your credit scores fucked. Your identity is fucked. Everything about your identity is lost and it's gray. So what are you going to do to really prove who you are and be able to say like this is me and not some. you know, scammer or not some AI version of a scammer that's being run by a little kid scammer, like there's seven of you and you have to prove which one is you or you lose your passport or you lose these like physical documents. It just becomes more and more necessary. Stephen, do you think that instead of the eyes, we could use the taint? Community question.

Community question. I love that our community is not afraid to ask the big question.

The elephant in the room, right? And Nick, I'll be, I mean, this is brilliant. I mean, are all taints as unique as snowflakes? I mean, I think that's how would we know?

Well, we've all seen Arman's. It looks exactly like mine. I can confirm that.

Are they all the same? No, but I do think this is the interesting part. Marty said something interesting. He's like, okay, you know, just to address is like, you know, let me guess, Marty doesn't like World Cup.

Let me guess. Marty doesn't want to stare at the board.

Marty's excited. He wants to put the little tinfoil action, a little mess call.

Oh, I know. I know. I know Marty's excited to tinfoil about World Cup. I just know Marty is not scanning his eyeballs. Sure. I know one thing about Marty.

But like, I was mad at Ledger. Not because, like, I think they're two very different things. And yet at the same time, I want to clarify, like, I will take all these different sides of arguments, not because I actually believe what I'm saying oftentimes, but more for the sake of conversation.

Yes, you're stress testing.

Yeah, exactly. Ideas. So, wow, that is a half a glass. That is a half a glass.

That is a half a glass.

I was going to offer to take some, but you seem quite fine.

Yeah, he's eager. We've made it through not even half the podcast. There's one fifth of the bottle left.

So look, my problem with ledger was not ledger. My problem was that at the underlying, the fabric of the technology that we thought was the most secure path to storing our crypto was not actually as secure as we believed it to be. And now there's all this conversation from the CTO of ledger and working on firmware updates, but it doesn't seem to be directly addressing the core issue either. And it just seems like they're continuing to like try to show their listening to their users, but not actually getting to the root of the issue, maybe just like cooling it down and blowing it off and pushing it out and then bringing the feature out later. God knows what they're up to. I think that was very revealing. This to me is a completely different thing. We're dealing with a situation where I find the inevitability of our privacy being lost to be inevitable. Like it's just an inevitable thing. I'm not happy about that. That is not something that I'm like, man, I would love to live in a world where I have absolutely no privacy. Everything is listening to me all the time and my eyeballs, my ears.

Oh, The Hunger Games.

Hunger Games is real, but so is a beautiful society. of a beautiful, egalitarian, thriving society. That all trends move in one direction, but also address two sides of a coin. And I think that's what we have to get comfortable with, personally. I think that you're going to live in a world with no privacy, and it's going to be used in ways against you that you are going to hate, depending on where you are and the level of rights that you have. But in other societies, it's going to be beautiful. And that's what we have to watch out for. And that's why being a participant Matters that's why having discussions matters like having these discussions and creating a sense of awareness So that you know how to vote and who to talk to and how to share these ideas matters That's why that's why I like this shit because if we didn't have this then we would just be dumb blind 1984 society and and that's what you have to protect against so and to address that

Yeah, no. And to bring it home and support your point, like your thing reminded me of a time when the internet became a thing, my dad was like very into early technology, but also at the same time, like very distrustful of it. And still to this day, like does not have a cell phone, but he was just like, there's no way I'm ever putting my, he was really into the computers, but he's like, there's no way I'm ever putting my credit card into a computer, would never type his actual date of birth into anything, give out his actually, he was just like, nope, it's going to be an idea. And to us now, that's just normal. We do that. We don't think about it. And we think of what my dad was doing 20 years ago as being like quaint and silly. And like, maybe that's how Armand's grandkids will think about scanning their eyeballs. And they'll listen to the spot and be like, ah, it's so weird that they felt so odd about it.

I do agree that not participating and slowing down the amount of information you put out there is probably good. It's probably net good in the short term. We have a mutual friend who's very private, who tries to never put his information out there. I think it's probably net good for him. And he's five years ahead of us, right? Like where all of our information is going to be out there. It's going to get leaked multiple times and all these negative things will happen. But you also get to participate in wonderful things. And so it's just a decision every human being has to make.

Alright, well speaking of decisions every human being ever has to make, pretty soon we're going to have to vote on a president and one particular candidate has been making a big, big splash recently. Some have labeled him a conspiracy theorist.

Martin, he's the presidential candidate.

It's not Marty. It's not Marty, but he would be very entertaining up on stage. I have no doubt about that. We are talking, of course, about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He's been making all the rounds doing the podcasts and in a way that I really respect, like he's going on like hour, like the all-in episode, I think was two hours and he sat there and talk through all of his stuff. He's gone on, you know, uh, like breaking points, um, crystal and soccer and ran into some opposition there and, but he's willing to talk to people and to be in long format. Um, and I think he said some super interesting stuff. We haven't talked about him much yet. So I wanted to do a, uh, temperature check with you guys, uh, see how you guys are feeling about him. Is, is anybody here? thinking of, of possibly voting for him.

Hold on.

Hold on. Because, hold on. Between him and Joe Biden. Because hold on.

I'm, I'm, I'm so middle curve. No, left curve about this. Like I don't follow this stuff like you guys do. Oh, okay. What do you need to know? So when I, When you guys even first broached this topic, I was like, okay, yeah, whatever. But then I listened to the all-in pod, and that's all that I've consumed on this gentleman.

So Eric and I are going to be on one side of the conversation here just to clarify. That's all I have as well.

Okay. So like, and first of all, like you guys know that I don't watch mainstream media. I don't like consume news. Like I like policies, uh, discussions to know where I land on them. I have very little interest in knowing where anybody else lands on them.

Like this is not my, my, well, you sound like a good representation of like 80% of America. Okay. So I think this is actually quite useful. Yeah.

So, so here, let me give you a brief rundown of my, um, Emotional logical journey as I heard this man speak on all in okay first thing I heard was like The oldest guy I've ever heard in my life talking like I was actually only 69 Yeah. So I was listening to the audio as I'm like on the treadmill. And I thought like, because, uh, David Sack, I think introduced him and he goes like, Hey, so here's a 69 year old man, like, and he goes, hello.

Okay.

So, so you should know before we go any farther, you do know why? No, he has a speaking condition.

Okay, so when I heard that, I was like, oh, you're making a joke because of he mentioned your age. And then he kept talking like that.

I'm like, but I actually think this is something he's going to have to deal with.

Oh, yes. I agree because people react to it. Yeah. He, he, how did he get that from a, he got it, he got it from like, so did he get it from like a,

Is that why he's like anti? I don't know the source, but I think it was like, I don't know, maybe 10 or 20 years ago, he came down with a condition disease that makes it hard for him to speak, almost like his vocal cords kind of convulse while he's speaking. He's very open to talking about it. But I think it's going to be like, um, you know, the moderator is going to ask RFK like, Hey, do you want to speak about what your, your condition? I think it's important because I'm going to go to Joe Biden, like, would you like to explain yours?

Well, I thought it was important for me to understand because we often make fun of our current president for the way that he speaks. So nobody's out of bounds, right? I tend to be a guy who doesn't like to make fun of anybody except for my friends. But when I heard this guy speak, I was like, Well, this is unelectable.

I had the same thought. Like, I don't think you're wrong for thinking that. I knew he had the condition and I sort of, I mean, I guess I don't really know why, but I sort of knew it. But like, I knew people were going to think that.

I think they can just like borrow like a voice and AI generate all his speeches and just like kind of a little voiceover.

Okay, so that was what I just want to say that was my first impression and that was like, you know, that that I think there's a normal human.

It was like a shocking reaction.

That's gonna be a lot of people's first impressions, I think. So that was my first. But then when I heard him speak, uh, first of all, I want to give credit to a podcast that I have like, Lost respect for overtime like the all-in podcast. I I just kind of like stopped listening to it. Yeah, but when they interviewed him, it's just a huge ego fest.

It was a it's an ego fest. Thank you.

It's a huge ego fest. And these guys are not likeable. I don't think they like each other.

No, they don't. And that's like they don't like what I capture from there.

I'm not trying to be likable. They're not friends.

I think it's great. I love it.

It's almost like it's like it's like watching. It's like listening to secession. It's like it's not. Yeah. It's cringe worthy. It's real.

It's cringe worthy and how much they like actually hate each other underneath the surface. It couldn't be more obvious. And okay. So like I, I just like stopped listening to all in because I found him a like not, not really educating me that much. And then B just like, Really not entertaining. So I like free bird. So Oh my god, I like them individually.

Hold on.

I think we free bird free bird is the most educational out of all.

Yeah, for sure. I really like sacks. I know he's not super popular, but like I find sacks to be like very cringy.

No, I like him. I like him. Okay. So as the conversation went on, the interview went on, I was like, oh, they're actually asking him great questions. And I thought those questions were amazing. And the conversation was great because RFK Jr. was playing ball. Like he wasn't shying away from many of the questions. Um, you guys brought up in our, in our like meeting that like, hey, give this a listen. Like he doesn't shy away. And on the things that he doesn't shy away from, he doesn't like hide from me. He's just like, uh, I got to learn more about that.

Yeah. Yeah. Talk about that. So you guys mentioned it before I listened to the episode and you were like, yeah, it was so, it stood out the way he did that. So when I went into the episode, I was expecting it to be in this way where it's like a little contrived, where it's like he's trying to make sure that he comes off as this scientific wise sort of person who doesn't have the answer to all things and needs to go think about them. But it was never said in the same way. Every time he said it, it was like in a different context in a different manner. He didn't always say like, well, I need to go think about that. It was just like, sometimes he said, I don't know enough about it. Sometimes he said he needs to dig deeper into it. Sometimes he said he doesn't feel comfortable answering that. Sometimes he said it would be incorrect to answer the question.

He goes, well, strategically, it doesn't benefit you to show your heart.

Every politician's answer to be quick.

But Joe Biden has said the opposite.

Well, people get mad at him because they're like, you're not supposed to. Do that. That's like 101.

That's the strategy to not show the cards and he showed the card.

Plus one to just say the way that he did that was unlike any politician I have ever heard. And it was very genuine.

So I want to give the floor back to the guys who know this individual well and knows policies. Like, I honestly am sitting here. I don't know if he's running on a Democratic or Republican platform. Like, if he's like, I think Saks said he's a Democrat, but if he's a Democrat, then he's not running because Biden's going to be president. Like he's pulling it like almost 20% right now. But like the incumbent doesn't get

I'll also be in this like same pretty ignorant camp and then you guys can actually No, I want I want to hear what you guys have to say I want to I want it because you guys probably reflect what most of the people listening or thinking yeah, so I'm like I don't even know like I guess I walked away from the whole thing but just being like sad because I like the guy. I walked away from it saying like, I'd love someone like that to be president. I'd love to have something other than Biden and Trump.

So I had a different conclusion, but I want you to keep going.

And every time I'm exposed to a political candidate who's like actually refreshing and interesting, I get a little sad because I know they have no chance. I hate the system. I hate the fact that this guy who's refreshing and anti-establishment and actually seems to speak in a way that is not like robotic. And so one great thing that Chamath said was he applied a framework to like the two types of candidates. I liked that. I was like, okay, good job.

What was the frame?

It was just like the, the puppet and the genuine. like you're either a puppet for the establishment or you're kind of like a genuine radical type. I shouldn't put Trump in that category, but he put Trump in that category is like, you're genuine in terms of your authenticity, which I actually do think Trump is. And I put, I put RFK junior in that same camp and it's like, It's not the time he's running against an incumbent. There's no chance. So I just walk away from these things going like, I don't know, man, like, I don't want to get my hopes up. So it's just a simple, simple response to that. But I felt that while he had some like, uh, I thought he brought some great conversation and courage to the COVID conversation. I thought that was really good. I know that the all-in guys also like disputed and got lost in a little bit of like some of the stats and how he coupled certain studies together and just like put it all in one bucket. But his openness to being wrong was beautiful. He was just like, just show me and let's have a conversation and let me understand where I've misstepped and let's have a conversation and don't just label me a conspiracy theorist.

So can I ask both of you, um, you know, one of his main like pieces of his platform is anti-war, right? Like he obviously does bring it home. He wants to bring it home, but he, he looks at it as like the wars are a cultural weakness. There are economic weakness. There are geopolitical weakness. How did that argument settle on, on you guys?

There was one thing that stood out to me up front, because I was like one of the earlier parts of their conversation. And again, consider me a middle left curve, okay? And consider me a guy jogging, listening to this guy in my ears, who sounds like he's Gandalf's grandfather. And he's like, no, I just wouldn't have any wars. I'm like, Of course you wouldn't dude, you get run over like you're a chump.

No, that's not fair.

No, no, no. OK, so that was my initial reaction. OK, but because of his voice.

Look, what Eric is saying is honest. Like this is how human beings reacts to political candidates. That's why when like Michael Bloomberg was running, everybody's like he's he's like a dwarf. like making jokes.

Let me keep going. Let me keep going. And then I'll like add something fresh to the mix. So, uh, he's, he's an attorney by trade. And he was saying like, no, I would, I would, I would like legislate out of wars. I'm like, well, I don't know that that's going to work either. Okay. So I mean, with the war thing, I just thought like it sounds easier to say than to execute. I don't believe it. I think ultimately where I want to bring something new to the mix, like where I landed on on him broadly was like, I think there's like two stages of presidency. There's campaigning and then there's the administration. I don't think he's that electable.

I think you should have him as an advisor because I think he's he's a good executor But maybe not a good campaigner like he's a good executive.

I think he'd be a great advice I think he like has a lot of great knowledge and he like demonstrated that very clearly in the interview like His knowledge is awesome. But like if I'm having that reaction What what are what's most people gonna think I think this is where actually

He might gain a lot of popularity very quickly if he can get in front of audiences because what he's saying is exactly what people are ready to hear right now. Anti-establishment is the answer. I honestly believe that. If the conspiracy theorist in me is like, there's no way he's going to get a platform. There's no way he's going to get in front of the right people to be able to campaign. There's no way the Democratic DNC is going to give him a chance. But if he can throw a wrench in the whole thing and cause a ruckus, I don't know. I don't know how that worked. Maybe then at that point there could be a chance, but I just don't see it in this stage, in this part where Biden is just serving a second term. I could see it in four years. I wish he was running in four years.

Let me throw it back to you, Nick. Do you think he would arbitrate his way out of the Ukraine-Russia war?

Can I can I withhold for a second? Okay, because I like this asking questions. I just have one more question, but I will answer that one. For you guys in particular, he mentioned some things that most people classify as conspiracy theories. So I want to know if his arguments resonated for you. So he mentioned a few things like he mentioned the CIA had something to do with his uncle's death. Yeah. It's fascinating. Yeah. And that the intelligence agencies are kind of like, the tails wagging the dog in the sense of like, they're essentially feeding leads to the military industrial complex to like, here's some more wars for you to start. There's that one. There's that industry is in bed with kind of administration branches.

This is what the majority of people, I believe, want to hear.

Yeah, I think I was already on board with that, and that was like finally a voice saying yes.

There's a political candidate saying these things, like that's what was interesting to me is like, the courage that that required knowing that like most people that say these things get canceled or we're getting canceled is huge. And this is Robert Kennedy Jr. saying these things. So to me it was very enlightening and Not enlightening. It was very admirable to hear somebody say that. So, yeah, I mean, did it resonate? Yeah, it was real. It was real as fuck. He's the kind of person that would be in this podcast and talking about the things that we talk about all the time. And we'd be like, yeah, Robert, exactly. It'd be like exactly, Robert. Like we said that.

We'll leave that outside the presidential interview series.

I think that if you wanted, you could go and you could pick at his arguments and you could find things to correct, but then that's just cheap. Anybody can do that. I can do that with Neil deGrasse Tyson. I can do that with Sam Harris. Anybody can do that to anybody. You can do that to anybody. But generally speaking, Everything that he said was directionally something like positive and reinforcing of values and beliefs that people have today after everything that everyone went through with the pandemic. One of the biggest failures, one of the saddest things we've ever experienced. By the way, the thing that I thought that he said was most interesting to me is like his conversation directly at the debt, directly at the budget. The economy is a disaster. It's not working. It's getting worse.

Can I ask you something?

Yeah.

Like I thought the content of his message was great, but don't you think there's like, uh, to be electable, you need like content and then you need like the vehicle of delivery. Right? The vehicle of delivery is a big part of electability. I think it behooves you to be a tall, white, male, confident, younger-ish, or at least seeming younger. And this guy didn't strike me as electable based on what I heard on this podcast, even though the content of his message was, I thought, incredible.

I think that that is an old idea. Like, the old idea is that politicians are supposed to be presidential, electable. And I think what we found is that people just want real. I think we found that with Trump. And I think that Trump is not presidential, not regal in this like way that he speaks at all. I mean, Steven dropped a meme yesterday is like, or, or Rizzy did or whatever. It's like, what, what does he say? Guy. Uh-huh. Yeah. I'm guy. So really what it was was Steven needed a break because he was running to his account.

Rizzy is actually my alt account. And spending like 10 hours on Twitter. That's why he left the discord.

So my point is I actually think that what's more important than like appearance now. is do you speak to the ideas that represent the collective psyche of society today that represents enough people? I think society's ready for that.

I think you bring up a good point, and we brought up this point before. I think Stephen's mentioned this point before, but I think the alfalfa in over viewing a political landscape is that it's no longer left and right. That is a false framework. It's four quadrants. Right. You do have left and right, but now we have this like kind of like we can put them in label in very different ways, but establishment and anti establishment. You could view it as authoritarian libertarian, I think, but like there's clearly four quadrants of political candidates and political viewpoints. And I think if you view that. If you view politics and that framework, it makes a little more sense to you on why Trump does well and why there's a difference between Joe Biden, who's the most popular podcaster on the right? He's very anti-establishment. Ben Shapiro. Like, or sorry, I should probably do a different comparison, but like...

Who would be the... There is a large faction of the right that, yeah, like Tucker is more anti... There's a large faction of the right that would consider Ben Shapiro and the Daily Wire to be sort of like conservative ink.

All right, so it's all Mitch McConnell and Ben Shapiro, right? They're both, they're both McConnell's very hard core conservatives, but like they're very different on the establishment, non-establishment spectrum. So anyway, I think that's an important point to bring up.

Let's, let's go, let's go to you. Like, like, let's understand this at a, at a, uh, let's go from elementary school to middle school and then maybe take us to our future. Yeah, drink up buddy, drink up.

Well, I think the beauty of this thing, first of all, is that he did a two hour podcast and why haven't we heard of him before?

Did you notice he didn't want to rap?

No, he was fine. Do you know why? Do you know why? And I know, I know Stephen knows why, but like he did a interview with ABC, like, I don't know, two or three weeks prior. He got chopped up.

Yeah, exactly. Hatchet job. Hatchet job.

I mean, they literally changed his whole message, essentially. Of course. And so that's typical. That's probably why DeSantis launched on Twitter spaces today, because he knew he wasn't going to get rugged except by Twitter technology and Twitter servers, which it did did rug the spaces. But in any case, like, first of all, Twitter was dead. It's might be coming back.

Oh, dude is very not dead. Definitely being facetious.

So I don't know I think that that's a first standpoint is that the media hasn't given someone like this a voice and I don't think they'll necessarily give him a voice back to your point about You know, is he electable? Will he actually be on a debate stage with Joe Biden? I want to see that I think 20% won't give it to him 10% deserves it and the DNC has he has more than 10%

Yeah, he does. What do you need? They're going to have a hard time keeping him off.

What do they need to do? What does he need to do to get on?

Well, I mean, at 20%, there's no way they'd be able to keep him off. But they've already changed rule. Like they changed the rules.

Yeah, it's like getting on the New York Times bestseller.

I mean, you saw what they did to burn. They absolutely just like shoved Bernie off a cliff. Right.

The DNC is clearly playing to we want Biden to face Trump again, because we know that's probably the only candidate he can beat. We have a playbook for it. It doesn't have to do anything.

Well, not only that, they just know they can control Biden. Like they don't want an RFK in there because they can't control it. Like RFK is good. He's like, he's like a Trump with a D in front of his name, but like without a lot of the things you don't like, right? Like he would go in and just blow up a lot of stuff.

One thing we didn't say is I just admired how much the guy spoke like a genuine human being. He's a person. He's very authentic. He was a human and he had heart when he answered the trans question. I thought the answer was fair and great. He's like, this is hard. This is hard. And I have like a daughter and a niece and this is what she's gone through. And yet at the same time, I believe in like bodily autonomy and these are hard things. And this is the best answer that I've come up with. And he had opinions. But he also knew where to draw the line and not have an opinion.

He doesn't answer everything. He's full of shit. They're full of shit. Like you can't have an answer on everything. Who has formulated.

Political training has taught you to just spin what you don't know. So like you can't you can't answer. I don't know. You have to spin it.

Because otherwise you're not signaling to which base should stand up for you. If you say that, if you say, I'm not sure on that, I need to go do my homework on, on vouchers. It's like, well, if that's my like single issue.

Then you don't have my vote. And maybe when debates come, he'll be prepared for that. I agree. I hope there's a stage where this will happen. I don't know what Biden's going to do, but I know the DNC is trying to insulate him from RFK and not proposing debates. They've already said on the major news shows there will not be debate. The president is the leader of party. He will be the presidential candidate. And there's no exceptions. They've already drawn a line.

This is where I'm sad about the whole thing. It's just like, what's the point of getting

Um, can we go down to the issues a little bit? Yeah. So, um, please, uh, the, the war thing kind of hit home with me. I mean, we're a generation who's, who's seen not big superpower wars, but we've seen, uh, us getting involved and entangled in kind of forever wars. And man, there was one point he said, we spent $8 trillion in Iraq and got essentially nothing for it, except we destabilized democracy.

Less than nothing. We killed more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein did.

That was one of the quotes. He said, we destabilized democracy in Europe by, you know, ejecting so many refugees to surrounding countries. And we turned Iraq into an Iranian satellite, essentially, which is the whole purpose of, like, we did not want that to happen.

A strong Iraq was good for, you know, the neighbor.

Right. And so his point is, you know, in terms of military, we should withdraw from the world. We should make it extremely expensive and deadly to try to attack America. Fortress America is a term he used. And we should project our economic power more than our military power, which is essentially what China is doing. Like they're projecting their economic power as like potentially the largest economic you know power in terms of gdp in the future and they're signing trade deals and and they're pushing more diplomatic power so that that aligns with me as as this generation like that we all subscribe to just because of we've we've seen what that's not that different than what trump said and did correct so he's very much in line with trump on on arguably if you're peter zion

You're saying a lot of these, the last handful of presidents have been moving in this direction.

Ryan's pretty pro-Ukraine war though, right?

I don't know his stance. I just know his analysis.

But he does have some overlap with what you're talking about for sure.

Do you think he oversimplified some of the solutions between China and Taiwan and Ukraine and Russia? No, Peter. No, sorry, RFK.

I think he answered them with the time that was allotted. I just don't, I don't, I think he could have gone deeper.

I don't know. It's kind of like a yes or no. It's like a yes and no thing. We don't have to be over there. They tell you that we have to be there because X, Y, Z, but I think a lot of the X, Y, Z was manufactured in the first place. 100%. And what I really like about RFK is that he hones into, I think, two of the most problematic areas of capture in American politics. And that's the military industrial complex and big pharma. And if you look back on the last 10 years and what's really been just absolutely wreaking havoc. It's kind of those two things, or 20 years, call it. I don't know if it was on the alt. Did he have the quote about how like, on the all-in podcast about how big pharma has been like a negative in the last like 15 or 20 years or something in terms of life expectancy in the United States.

He mentioned that, but you know, he also mentioned that we've set up incentives for them that, you know, like no upstream testing, no downstream risk and no advertising to push a product.

Yeah, he did such a good job, I thought, of communicating how these government bureaucracies, like the NIH, for example, Like the incentive structure, like he speaks to me really well because I am, I really do align with a lot of this sort of, there's a lot of like economic right wing ideas that I align with. Like I like a lot of the stuff that's at the core of what like, you know, like a Milton Friedman or like a Thomas Sowell says, right? And I do believe a lot in incentives, right? But he does a good job of talking to that type of brain and then spinning it to a left-wing mindset. He says, look, fossil fuels are actually the most economically inefficient and expensive things that exist. And he's like, they only exist because the market is distorted. We're taking all these costs and we're putting them on these people and allowing these other people to extract profits. And that's not the free market. And that's a good argument for having government to go in and control these things. And I was like, yeah, that actually makes a lot of sense. That really spoke to me in a way that I think a lot of people haven't spoken to me before. And he described how like the people who sit on the NIH have all of these incentives to allow these drugs to go through.

The stats about how other countries dealt with COVID is staggering. I mean, what do you guys think about that?

I think he nailed COVID. Nailed it, right? And like he said, what I was feeling was that.

Wanting to hear for so long.

Was that we actually violated a lot of our freedoms in terms of locking down small businesses, which I thought was.

We printed money. We ticketed people for surfing. Yeah, I mean that. Hold them out of the water and put them inside the homes to become radical spreaders.

Yeah, and that's like a tangential example, but it is it is definitely like then Nigeria example That was the vaccine example But I did think he hit it on the head in terms of you know, maybe we had solutions to this disease But the pre-existing laws Prevented his chick in that interview as he was like his basic thesis was

They suppressed stuff like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. Because the incentive wasn't there for those. Because if there was like a sort of known treatment available on the market, they wouldn't have been able to push for the emergency use authorization. Of the vaccine. Yeah, and I know that there's been some, there's obviously been some pushback on a lot of stuff he said from the left on this. I mean the incentive was money. It seems very obvious to me that like people, COVID taught us like so many lessons, right? Like one of the lessons I learned was that science is kind of fucking bullshit. Like they dropped the science world on you, right? But then every time you look deeper, it's like, oh, here's a study. Who funded the study? And oh, Bill Gates funded the study.

I think what you're saying is the religion of science is bullshit. So science as a philosophy, science as a

Science isn't science isn't science anymore.

Well, it's not necessarily fact because science is a process in itself like the scientific method is constantly evolving like you can't just take a time stamp and time and say well the science one time said this like it is an evolving method.

There's a point in time in COVID when Fauci literally said

I am the science.

Trust the science. No, he literally said, I am the science. And I was like, all right, well, I'm out. He might as well have said, join my cult. I'm just like, out. That became very dogmatic. It's like the opposite of science. That's like when you read like the Orwell books and they just make you think the thing is the opposite thing. Right. And you're like, no, that's not what it is. That drove me nuts. So like hearing him speak about that, really resonated with me.

And I think you have a few more. Um, in a world where America just sort of withdraws and we are the number one, uh, sort of like military force in the world where the number one economy in the world. So there's a target on our back. And I think that most people believe when you are number one, whether it's in a playground or on a soccer team or in the political landscape in geopolitics, there's a target on your back. Someone wants to be number one, you're number one. So one of the ways, the way that we've dealt with this up until now is to be a military superpower and police the world. In a world where we stopped doing that, how safe are we really? How sound is that philosophy of just beefing up defense, beefing up economy, investing in our own people, in our own economy, sounds really good to me. But does it work? Do we even have an example? Do we even have a way to look at that? If you look back at every great empire that has ever existed, are they ever just sitting back and controlling their borders?

Yeah. I mean, like, I think from like an actual safety perspective, United States is always safe just from geography, right? Like we have two huge oceans separating us. We have a neighbor to the south that can't put his pants on straight. And, you know, you have your feeble neighbor to the north.

That's a pretty big economy. And it's, and that, that, that peso is stronger than ever. It's doing, doing well, but it's doing really well. It's doing better than the dollar.

But the other thing about geography too is like can you produce like food and natural which we can also do that so like we are self We are you know We've been blessed like to be born here because we can self actually self sustain Argentina could probably also sustain if they weren't so corrupt they could produce food for themselves. They could probably defend spend very well. But I think there will be an economic damage if we don't. And I would probably say that it's maybe a good trade-off. And the economic damage is that the whole world has been under the assumption that you can move a container from one country to the other without any threat of violence to that container. Moving goods back and forth is something that... But that's what we've been protecting. Right, that's what our generation has no idea of what existed outside of that right before world war two We didn't understand that like oil may not necessarily move safely from one part of the world to the other and now we Have like been accustomed to a world. We're just goods trade back and forth easily And so if the US does withdraw and doesn't be the policeman of the world You know, there there there may be more economic disruptions.

So so are you saying that the disruptions or rather that the repercussions and the negative effects will not be for us. Like there's no real risk of like withdrawing when it comes to your, you know, 70 inch flat screen TV that we have over here, just $600 anymore.

Yeah. Well, can I, I can ask you a question about this? I was thinking about it as I was doing my jogging, listen to this guy talk on all in, like I was thinking like, okay, so we have a lot of phones to use by the way, the strung in version that come with the iPhone run with those.

Yeah. Wow. They don't pop out.

I got normal ears. And then you run fast enough.

Dangle. Just dangles the whole time.

Yeah. I just, I have normal shaped ears and the off the rack headphones fit my normal ears. I got big ears, bro. Hold the town nose.

Take one look. It's all in proportion, baby. All in proportion.

It's my arm in proportion. If it was a proportion, my ears would be six feet.

Oh, I see. I see. You got the opposite problem.

Sorry. So I was thinking, sorry, I was thinking that we have these alliances. I think we just achieve success. Sort of like NATO exists, right? And these are like, you know, like an alliance with a lot of the Westernized countries, but the US outspends all of them combined in military. If this is an alliance, shouldn't they contribute? to this alliance, it feels like they're not doing that.

Right, and they notoriously don't. And there's an article within the NATO agreement that says you have to contribute x% of GDP, which I think historically most of the other countries have been below that number. You have a key economic power, Germany, who's probably got trauma between building up a strong military domestically. So there are things at play there.

And Germany really screwed itself, unfortunately. I feel bad for them. Yeah, it's okay.

It's okay. They can build back. But yeah, I mean, I've described it as a series of mousetraps around the world so that if any one bad actor were to like go off and try to like, I don't know, breach someone's sovereignty, these mousetraps set off. But I don't know if I no longer believe kind of my own perspective anymore because You can do that same thing, but economically. You don't necessarily have bases around the world in military alliances. You can have economic alliances that inflict pain. What was it, the Trans-Pacific Partnership? I think it was one of the things that Trump kiboshed right when he got in office. It was an Obama thing. Yeah, it was. And I was kind of sad that he did that because it would have really thwarted, I think China's like encroachment in that area economically. So I do think you can kind of replace this military, you know, I don't know, like expeditions that we're doing with economic alliances particularly.

Yeah.

Not to delve too back deep into money, but... Can we go back to RFK a little bit? Yeah, what else is on your bullet points?

Well, like, energy... I want to hear more of your take. I know you've got some good takes.

So energy, you know, they pushed him on nuclear, right? Yes. And he actually brought up one issue that I had never heard before. Which one? Which is that... um it is not economically viable if no insurance company will ensure these nuclear sites i had never heard that before and i mean either and like rfk i need to do my own research but like he is saying like you know these things need to exist for 30 000 years so you amortize that and. Is is the cost actually as economical as we say and that that's something that I've never heard addressed I do think there is a full restart of nuclear technology that we can do that is safer smaller maybe more decentralized than than we imagine it or have imagined in the past but I thought that was interesting that he brought up a take against nuclear that I hadn't heard before and kind of threw me off and I thought that was interesting too.

I thought another thing was interesting and you probably actually have a good take on this. He was really, really into solar and wind. But my understanding is that the problem with solar and wind is that they're intermittent and our battery technology as a human species is terrible. So I don't feel like he gave a good reason Why we could just go to what did you think about well?

He did say that the grid was not up to par for that kind of technology, right? That's not necessarily that we can like transport the energy There's obviously loss when you when you transport a lot of those physics though. It's not the grid Yeah, yeah, I do think like batteries are a solution, but like You have the same issues with fossil fuels, that it does harm to the environment. It does harm to humans by mining these rare earth minerals in order to produce these batteries. Hopefully, battery technology will accelerate. I know the quote unquote, inflation reduction act is investing in battery technology. I think it'll be good if we can do that domestically. Yeah, I don't know. I think he explained that, you know, wind and solar is not necessarily like a cure-all. I don't necessarily agree with him that, like, fossil fuels are the most expensive. Like, I think we've talked about in the past how we think it's potentially immoral to deny, especially third world countries, access to fossil fuels because we have different questions.

Yeah, maybe a different question.

Is uh, is social security on your bullet points because I that's something that's not to me Yeah, so he said that um, you know refining and touching entitlements is Is a red line for him? He will not touch them and he I think he made a very heartfelt response that is almost a better argument than say like the closest thing he said to sounding like a politician But it was honest so it didn't come off like a politician Yeah, Stan Druckenmiller says, here's the Excel spreadsheet. It doesn't work. I can cut them. Don't give them 100% of loaf. They can get 80% of loaf. I'm sorry. I'm the rich guy saying that, but the math doesn't work.

But these people have been putting their money and working and setting it aside and the government's been taking it and they deserve it. Yeah. And the fact that it's going to be like defunct in like 10 years or whatever it is is a joke. It's ridiculous.

He made like a good heartfelt response. It's like, no, we should take care of these people instead of sending money.

Well, hold on, Arman. I got a question to that. We're also paying into that. Yeah. And we're going to get none of it.

It's going to be gone. That's literally what I'm saying.

But they paid into it and you're saying they get all 100% of what they paid in and they get whatever they deserved, but we're paying into it and we're going to get zero. Who do you think I'm talking about? I think you're talking about the old people.

I'm talking about all of us, everyone who is taking a portion of their income and putting it in the social security pool that has ever put it in deserves to get it.

So, I mean, this is a zero sum game. So when he's talking, he's talking about old people. Sure.

But he's not talking about future old people.

No, he's not talking about future old people. He's talking about, we'll drain this pool to the people who deserve it because they paid into it. But we also paid into it and that pool is going to be empty. That pool is gonna be empty.

I'm I'm I don't know if you guys are operating on the same assumption But I've always operated that I will never receive that money in the same year. I'm not counting on that.

I wonder if I agree, but if you and they deserve it We pay into it. We don't deserve it.

No, we do deserve it is absolutely I'm not saying I agree you're saying that it's a zero-sum game either zero and we don't If your generation elects a different generation

I'm talking about literally a different generation.

You're speaking to the other generation.

You pointed to me, but you meant them.

If your generation elects a bunch of politicians, I think you're literally the same age, but you might be older than me.

If your generation elects a bunch of politicians who promise you a bunch of free shit and you buy into that and you elect them and then 30, 40 years later, the bill comes due And then you go, oh, well, we were promised it. And it's a legitimate question. Do you still deserve the money? You voted for it. And you were basically saying, no, let's let the kids pay for it. I'm not saying that I necessarily agree with that, but that's what people would say. These social security didn't just get dropped from the heavens. A bunch of politicians pitched it and a bunch of people said, yes, give me the free money. And then they didn't do the math on it, obviously. And now it's basically like a Ponzi scheme. Do we deserve to pay everybody everything that they were promised? I don't know.

I think a better question is, how do you fix the math and turn it into a positive sum game?

There are easy things to do. And I think Stan Druckenmiller has mentioned a few of these, but like, you know, these inflation adjusted numbers, right? Like every year.

First of all, means testing is like the lowest hanging fruit of all time.

That's the best one. I agree. Like we shouldn't. Never receive social security.

My parents get it. Like there's no chance. That's dumb. They don't even want it.

It is literally insurance It's called it's social insurance and you only use insurance when you need it and so people who Really need it should get it but people who are on the borderline or definitely don't need it should should not get it like can those people at least not have to pay into it No, because it's a, you know, insurance is based on risk pools, right? Like everyone, like a health insurance, young people and old people put into the same risk pool.

You could be in the best shape of your life, pay new health insurance your whole life and never get sick and you're paying into it and somebody else is super sick and they get paid out. And that's okay. And that works. But it's adjusted. No, it's okay. It's pooled risk. And I think everybody's okay with that. So long as it serves the people that it needs to serve.

Yeah, so I think that that's that's one. Should we raise the age potentially? I do think the inflation adjusted numbers like, you know, Stan Druckerman made a comment that the inflation adjusted increase for social security was like 8%. And like, you gotta ask, like, did the average person who has an average salary get an 8% increase in their salary? And answers probably no. Hell no.

What are you saying? They boosted payments by?

Yeah, there's something called COLA, which is like, the payments adjust according to like, I think it's weighted to CPI.

Oh, so you can't even inflate it away. No.

Oh, Jesus. Yeah. So I think those two things are kind of easy ways to go that, um, you know, maybe if, if RFK looked into it closely, like, okay, well, and it stood out to me because he said, no, this is a red line for me.

When everything else he said was like, Oh, I could look into that deeper, but he was like, with this one, no, this is a red line for me.

And I was like, he's, he's right. Well, he's old. Well, Well, any politician who says that they're going to cut that will lose. Yes.

And that's the problem with this situation is that there are more old voters than there are young voters. So if you just enter the old voters, that's how you win.

That's why, that's why like all the game theory just points to like Bitcoin going up.

That's why all the game theory points to that's what's going to hear any of the majority.

Like, yeah, yes. You just accept that that is how the system is set up and you could fight it or you could just

play accordingly.

Play the game.

Play the hand you're dealt to the best of your ability.

But it's, it's, it's shitty, but that's also politics.

And that's exactly where I've stood from the moment we started this podcast. We were talking about Elizabeth Warren, everything I said, like, I don't care about all of these policies. I just want to play the hand that we're all going to be dealt. Like, well, some of them,

Don't set up that way. I think Social Security is one of the ones that it's just like everybody has to play their card or you lose, but I think There is maneuverability and some of the other stuff.

Yeah, and truth be told is like I mean you see this all over the place like a voice Using your voice matters like you can you can affect change if there's like a mass use of voice and if there's a mass use of the The power of exit you can like exert change and those are the two Does the two forces of the mass have to exert change in it? If you use them, then you can.

I would rather see, you know, I think some of these like means testing is good. I think the COLA revisions is good, like the inflation adjusted, like bring those down. I don't want to see raised taxes, but I wouldn't mind if they rug pulled our generation. Because the older generation is used to these retirement plans, which are defined benefit, right? Your pension plan. Like, I work for this company. I'm assured a certain amount for the rest of my life. Our generation isn't used to that. 401k. You got to put in your own money in order for that to grow. And there's this new perspective that we have as a younger generation, like, I have to take care of my own retirement. I have to contribute to it in order for it to exist.

Position in life might have something to do with that. Yes. Okay. Yeah. Good question. Yeah, just to be fair about it like do you think the average person your age would feel the same way if they means test it?

That's all for right like we still solve for like the whole purpose of it was like You know the people who can't work who yes, can you know? They're they're supposed to get this benefit this insurance.

Okay. Can I make an argument for why? The opposite should happen. Yeah, okay, so if what this coming yeah, so There's no scenario, I think, where we just kick all the old people out in the street and, like, let them die, right? Of course. So I think one of two things happens, like, either A, you, like, keep the Ponzi going, they keep going, and then they die, and then they sort of pass on all their stuff. And then they just have all these assets, and then they just transfer to the next generation. And then those people get the assets. And then you're still in this paradigm where a certain select bunch of people got to buy all these assets and then have them run up to inflated prices. And then they're just handing them down. And then a bunch of people are sitting there like, ah, The other alternative I think is that you, in the present moment, you extract a bunch of money from the existing wealthy population, you just directly take that money and then give it to them, right? Because in the other way, the younger generation is going to pay.

I sort of agree with you. And this was like my stance. from the moment we started our pod was that, uh, estate tax is the way to actually do it because like, you know, Nick's going to dodge taxes his whole life to intend that we want to exchange this. But like ultimately it can be captured if you tax it upon his death and then like the stuff that he's going to pass down, you know, like it gets taken out of the asset pool that gets passed down. I don't want my kids to have that money. Right. You don't want to have it either. But like the fact that it, the fact that it passes essentially tax free now is, um, I think it's a problem.

I don't have a problem from a moral perspective with estate tech. It's the answer. I wonder if the problem with it is that you squeeze money out of the economy in some way and then it ends up harmful. That's the thing I worry about. But I think for people who argue that it's some immorals, I think it's a silly one.

Those people need to look at the alternatives like you said like it's either going to happen that way or it's going to happen in a more tangible way that you're going to feel during your lifetime.

The other thing people have to understand is if you got kind of rich in the 90s and then you invested a bunch of money in the stock market and real estate and then at 30 X. But that didn't happen because you were a genius. It happened because our genius bureaucratic overlords, they ran this warped policy that just inflated assets to the moon through gasoline all over the fire. It's not like unreasonable to me to have the government come back and go like, Hey, you know how we just made you really, really rich by artificially manipulating the market for interest rates? Yeah, we're going to claw some of that back. Like that's, that's not like, I don't have a problem with that. Like people who got rich that way, it's not like they risked their lives. They risked like so much. So start some crazy business. They just bought. a house and they bought the NASDAQ and then we just sent valuations.

So I think we had this conversation in our Discord maybe like 12 months ago and I think people in our Discord, I don't remember names or anything, but I think the counterpoints were like, well, I've set up my kids with this, with this sort of lifestyle based on my hard work. And it's like, okay, that's true. And the kids will benefit, you know, like they will ultimately like reap the benefits of your hard work, but like the alternative is You pass that down and they're going to get fucking squeezed to hell on their own taxes. Like, is that better?

Well, I don't want to like estate tax people who have like $4 million or something. I'm talking about. Like a hundred. This is like how to capture a point where people are fine. And a lot of that wealth like didn't come from your big brain. It came from.

Well, even if it did, like I think that there's a way to capture the Bezos Elon type. Well, if it's like, well, you can enjoy the fruits of all your innovation and labor. But then when once you go like, OK, now you owe. That's fine.

Like I think the current level is something like I don't know roughly around 10 million dollars where like there's there's no taxes. So I mean There's there's room there, right? Like there clearly is and you're not talking about the person who's Inherited, you know, like passing down like 50 grand, right? Yeah, you're talking about significant amounts of life changing.

Yeah, I know worth essentially just means testing yet again again The people that didn't die with zero

Right, right.

Should have spent more suckers. Anybody want to add? So Rumpel in the chat said, estate tax is double taxation and should be removed.

So it is double taxation.

It is. Yes, it is. But so many things are. Right. Is that inherently bad? Just on its face.

I mean, there are a lot of things that are either going like my, my whole thing is named the better way because you're going to, you're going to capture it one way or another. You have to because we're at this extreme deficit and extreme debt level. How are you going to close the gap?

If we can't grow our way out of the deficit. uh, if we can't inflate our way out of the deficit, we have to tax everyone in, you know, cool income tax.

So this guy rumbly, what do you want? 75% income tax.

We are double tax, right? So like when I earn something, we all pay tax on it. You go to the cash register, you buy something sales tax.

You invest in the stock market, you sell that stock, capital gains tax.

I agree that taxation does suck when you're sort of being taxed on your labor and stuff that you do. You creating value for yourself, right? That sucks. Where I don't think it sucks is where you participate in a game that is sort of rigged in your favor with these like rules and regulatory capture and whatever you want to say it is and like you get to put your money in this like magic box that like 100x is your money and other people can't use the magic box and the magic box only exists because of these like structures that shouldn't be there. If I take 30% of your money that you make from the magic box like You didn't do anything. You just put the money in the magic box.

It almost seems like it should tax the magic box even higher.

I will say I'm worried about like, um, uh, not illiquid assets getting, getting passed down, right? So, you know, if there's a $20 million house, How do you handle that situation? Or if Logan Roy passes down to Kendall Roy, his Waystar, Royco stock, how does he handle that?

I think these are all really interesting, but they're all focused on the citizens of the country. What did you guys think of RFK's proposals for how to fix the deficit? went to the Fed and how we are spending and allocating our budget and all toward Ukraine and wars and military spending. If all we did was just suggest a few of these things and not spend so much money on COVID shutdowns and helicopter money, we'd be in a very different position.

I think that argument is going to resonate very well over the next 12 months.

The truth is it's going to require both. It's going to require cutting of spending and increasing of revenues. How do you do both? The Dems right now are in a battle with the Republicans over the debt ceiling, which the Democrats won't even bend on cutting a single dollar. They won't cut a single dollar. How are we going to cut anything? We can't even raise a debt ceiling when we have to pay our bills. We have to do both. We have to cut spending and we have to increase revenues and neither are happening.

Right. Stop spending on, like, I think we stop spending on war. Like, we're never going to stop spending on, like, old people and health care. But yeah, there's a lot of stuff we could, I think, stop spending on. I'm personally of the mindset that we're in a completely fucked situation. Everybody in the world is in a completely fucked situation, and we should just take advantage of our reserve currency status and be like, Yeah, sorry, everybody. We're just going to print a bunch of money and try to just boost GDP. What do you think's been happening here? Sorry about that. That's the game that's going on. We're in a good position to do it. It is, I think, the game theory optimal.

Path to take I think I I think austerity is stupid when you were like the reserve currency of the world to go down Yeah, I'll start it kills you so you can't do that So I think like ultimately biology is right, but his timeline was just fucking ridiculous, but it ultimately is right It's like you need to

You need to print dollars and then basically sell those dollars for a hard if you print those dollars in such a way where you create like 10% inflation, but you juice growth to like 15% Can actually kind of work it still sucks for all the people who already bought all of your bonds and they're totally screwed and But you're pretty good.

That's the game we're playing, but I don't think that the growth.

I don't think that is the game we're playing right now. I think a lot of people aren't going fully down that path. I think the right certainly doesn't want to go down that path. I think they sometimes talk about it in the realm of we should bring manufacturing back home and anti-China stuff. then you can kind of bring them on board. But I don't think they're of like the generalized mindset of like, let's spend all of this money. And well, I shouldn't say that there is like this populist wing of the right. I think that does kind of believe that it's not like a monolith. But I don't think that's like a totally right wing position right now.

By the way, I think that was Balaji's point the whole time.

It was, but he just, like he muddied his waters by putting his own deadline on it by which he had no fucking thing.

I actually, like, thought about this a lot, and I think he knew what he was doing the whole time. But he never even explained it that way, because he's... No, of course he didn't, because if he said it that way, then the message wouldn't have landed.

Because... So he could only tell you in hindsight... But that's everybody's point, and they're looking at him like, that is stupid.

But he got your attention and you had the conversation.

i mean i think like our general our groups like investment thesis like holds that that we we see these problems we don't think our political structures are are made to solve these problems so we just have to like fend for ourselves and be a little selfish and like make sure that we survive and thrive in that area which is like We've realized that Bitcoin, Ethereum, cryptocurrency in general, maybe the fastest horse to beat us. If there's other tax-deferred ways like real estate, that's a great way. And yeah, I don't know. I feel like we're on the right track to, if this does play out in the bad scenario we're talking about, we'll be good. And I hope that's the case.

What do you say to your, honestly, your hypothetical relative in Croatia? Sorry. No, but that's that you would not say that you would, you would not just say sorry.

I'll stable coins. I mean, I mean, like you, you want to, you want to be US dollar denominated, right?

No, like, like just imagine, like you love this person. They can't pay for their life. They're suffering. What would you say to the people that aren't in the privileged position of being, you know, in the country that is a reserve currency?

I think next right, you hold your wealth and stable coins.

But you can. That wasn't my question. What do you say to that person?

You tell them to hold their wealth in stablecoins.

I mean, like I do think like still, you know, the thing that made one that gets depigged every other week or which one?

They're fine. Like the like, I mean, the USTCs are there. They trade premium. Die USDC, USDT. They're all better than the Lebanese currency for sure.

But I do think like I think, you know, whether you lived in a very thriving economy or not, like entrepreneurship is still like a great path, no matter where you live. Like if you can work digitally or be an owner, I think that that path still exists, right? Like whether wherever you live. The dominant in dollars as much as saying to like work online Freelance that's a shitty take to like I do think that's like a good path But I was so not reasonable for like most people so I don't think I don't know if that

No, no, no. Why not? I think Bologi's framework is the right one. Just buy Bitcoin and that's his fucking message.

Okay. 98% denominate in dollars and then 2% denominate in Bitcoin and then try to get exposure to dollar rate. This is just the way it's going to play out. If the ship is sinking, the US is not going to be throwing lifelines out everywhere in the world because every politician who's in office in the US is going to get raked over the coals if they Throw anybody in the US under the bus right like the whole fiat system is Destin to crash into the iceberg at some point We are steering the ship we get to decide who gets on the lifeboats and we get to like that's the kind of cold hard reality of how it is and to think that we're going to Just save a bunch. It's just not It's just not going to happen.

I mean, Armand, you're getting encouragement on this question, and it's kind of like, I don't know if I have a good answer. I mean, ideally, you could live in a country that doesn't have as much taxation as we do, but you earn in dollars somehow. Somehow. I don't know. Export something. I don't know.

Yeah, I think that the solutions that we might come up with are going to be intelligence solutions, first of all, and mostly inaccessible solutions that just will not be accessible to the majority of people. when the rest of the world starts burning because this scenario plays out, my concern is what do the majority of human beings on this planet do? I'm simply trying to get to that. I'm honestly genuinely wondering.

They suffer like the majority of humans always have. The difference this time is like it's actually... The majority of humans today are not suffering. No, throughout human history. This has happened a lot.

No, hold on. This arc has always been going in an up and positive direction. But it has, it has. And this is the first time that it definitely has downturns. Yeah. So the question is just how to prevent the majority of people from getting really hurt.

But what I'm trying to say right now is the problem right now is actually like a knowledge gap. Throughout most of human history, you were just fucked. Like there's literally nothing you could do. Now, there is actually stuff you could do. There's a large knowledge chasm to cross. If you're like, well, you have to understand the nature of the dollar reserve system and cryptocurrency and how to hold a new stablecoin. Yeah, that's obviously difficult for people, but it is theoretically possible at least now. So that is a hopeful thing, I think.

So the best kind of version of what we've come up with is to buy USD denominated.

Denominate your life in USD as much as you can. Hold your cash in USD. Take payments in USD.

As an Ecuadorian, as a Venezuelan, as a Bolivian, as a Croatian.

I have hired people in Upwork. And they say, I want, I've literally had people on Upwork in South America say, I want to be paid in stablecoins. Can you do that? Like they know. Yeah. And like it is possible.

Yeah. I mean, shout out to my friend, Mike, you know, ZipDev, like they run this company that helps you recruit and our friend, I should say, Eric and I. Yeah, I mean the majority of people that they, so this is like a site for basically connecting with developers, especially a great service for being able to find developers that work in South America. And the benefit of developers in South America is first of all, these are very smart talented people in like Argentina and Mexico and Chile. But the time zone is really good compared to like Europe. Yeah, when you're in the US, but yeah, the majority is people want to be paid in the dollar and not only that but like, you know, especially in Mexico like that currency like I said is holding very strong and so yeah, there's just a lot going on there with You know the currency exchange market is like Extremely volatile right now and especially in this market where a lot of startups are just like struggling and You know laying off, but then you have a lot of startups growing in the generative AI market. Yeah, there's a lot happening there, but Okay, I think we're in a good place to Kind of a palate cleanse.

Yeah, let's do it transition. By the way, we forgot to do this earlier even though I made a note Everybody in the chat if you can like the video really helps us out. What does it do for you? It boosts the video. It boosts my testosterone. It lets more people out there.

I thought it was more for us, for you, emotionally.

No, it allows more people to discover the awesome podcast and community that you have all discovered. You're doing this for everybody else out there. Please, please hit the like button on the stream. Yeah.

And most people listen on podcasts and Spotify, but if you're hearing names, you're like, who the fuck are these people there?

Yes.

Members of our community in the discord. So join the discord at alpha pod.com. They're also probably in the chat right now. So if you would like, you can listen to this on YouTube, the replay or join us live every Wednesday night.

Um, so yeah, we're going to start throwing your comments on the screen. We're going to start doing all this stuff in the pipeline.

Yeah.

So we're going to make, we're going to make this pod. And we're gonna make this an event and Ultimately, I think the people that get the best experience of the ones that show up live We're gonna put comments on the screen We're gonna set up all kinds of stuff to just make it very Community driven one thing that we've always said if you've never heard this before is the community is the fifth man or the fifth person since there's definitely women out there as well Yeah, the fifth person of this pod and it would not exist. It would not exist without the community. So for sure Well said, sir. Thank you. All right. All right. Did you guys see Tetris? I did see Tetris.

Tetris was really good. The movie? Yeah. I didn't see it yet. Oh, it's so good. Well done. I've watched at least three documentaries on the making of Tetris. But you haven't seen the movie? No, I haven't. I haven't either.

I played it on Game Boy.

Where do I watch it? Have you guys seen Kingsman? I did watch one and one and two. Yeah. You know, the young kid, the main guy. Yeah. What do they call him? Bugsy, Bigsy, Bugsy. It'll come to me in a second. So he's the main guy in Tetris movie, but like a completely different character. Exy. Exy.

Well, I lived it, dude. I played that game.

But at the end, they do show the actual people in this whole... You've seen the movie because you played the game?

I set up Rose to be five tall, and then I would just... Oh, get the fuck out. You know, when you throw that vertical line down, and you get the five-liner, and you're just so satisfying.

The game? The game, I think, shows up in the movie.

Dude, the fact that you don't even know how satisfying it is to get the five-liner down... First of all, I'm probably the only person that has it on their phone.

Dee-dee-dee. Probably the only person that has the official Tetris game on my phone. Wow. You guys have it on your phone?

No, I still got the Game Boy.

And I'm playing games on my phone. I thought you of all people would understand that.

It's the only game I have. So, Eggsy crushes it. Nick, can I talk to you? Because these guys are just going to chirp and say nonsense about the movie since they haven't seen it.

I've seen the documentaries. I know the story. Great story. No, no, no.

Oh, no, this is the good one. So what did you think overall?

I was interested in the geopolitics part of it, like how these two countries were going to interact. What a great depiction of what it's like in a Soviet Union communist. Wasn't it hella interesting? It was. He's like, I need to get a phone to call my wife, and they're like, we can't call internationally. He's like, what do you mean? He's like, we can't call outside the country. It just doesn't exist. And then like, well, maybe your hotel has one that can call internationally, but there's a long wait time. How long? An hour? No, two weeks.

It's just like a minister. He's like, How many pants do we need? I don't know. What's Thomas soul's book?

Is it basic economics or what is the name of the book? I mean, that's one of his books.

Yeah.

That's the one that like eviscerates the central planning. Yes. Thomas soul. Shout out. By the way, can someone more popular than us get Thomas soul on a podcast? Please. He can we, how about we do? I mean, I would happily do it, but like, I just want, I want him more on the record. I want more of his words, like he's trying to get him.

Yeah. I think he has.

He just doesn't want to do. It's so weird.

Tell him he can sell his book. All he wants to do is sell his books.

I don't think anyone's trying to. I think we need to find out what his deeper motivation is. I don't think he cares to make more money. I don't think he cares to sell more books. Maybe he does actually care to sell more books for the message. We need to find out what that is.

The only pot I've ever seen him on is the Rubin report. He goes to very, uh, like easy audiences typically for his interviews, but like, I think I've only seen him on the Rubin report and like the Hoover institution, which is like just the place that Stanford, he works at. Yeah. He has.

Anyway, I would go to him. Like I would like go to, I would like rent a studio to like Stanford.

Oh yeah. I would ride a bike to him.

All 500 miles.

Yes. Yes. I would ride a bike to interview Thomas.

If you would ride a bike 500 miles to Thomas, how about you send an email to him first and get this booked? No, the email.

That's the hard part. No. He's going to say no to the email. I'm saying this is basic, just conditional stuff. Given that he has said yes, I will ride a bike.

I think if you vlog yourself bike riding 500 miles to Thomas soul's office, then he would say, no, he was just laughing at me.

He'd be like, more on.

Well, I think the answers just show up. Show up.

You might finally fit into size 31s, dude.

What do you guys think about just showing up, walking on the campus? Not going to work. I'll do it. I'll do it tomorrow. You don't think that's going to work? No. All right.

Well, uh, can we talk about air a little bit because, uh, the guy who sold Jordan the deal just showed up at his house and it worked. That's true. Just showed up at his fucking house.

I thought that doesn't work at Michael Jordan's house. You guys don't believe in dreams.

I mean, what a great fucking deal. This whole movie was about a deal.

Nike was like a couple billion bucks or something, right?

They sucked at the shoe business.

What was MJ's mom, Dolores Jordan or something? She was the fucking mastermind behind the whole thing.

They made her look amazing. She changed the whole industry of

She invented the royalty that invented the royalty her negotiation in the movie. I'm not no spoiler alerts, but her her negotiation style I thought the presence and the delivery was 10 out of 10

Yeah, we have a mutual friend who is a great negotiator, and one of the things he always says, going to negotiation, is that you have to have 100% confidence going into there, and you have to act as if. And she did. And she did. She says, you know my son will be the greatest. He will deliver. He will win championships. He will win multiple MVPs. And that was genuine. And she has to just use all of his own words.

Right? Yeah, that's true. And then he did go back and think on it, right? And then he went back and talked to Phil Knight.

He'd be like, listen, dude, sorry. I didn't close it. It's not going to happen because she wants a percentage of revenue. And, you know, I think there's a little poetic license in that scene. He's like, ah, fuck it. We'll do it.

What does Phil Knight say in the actual?

How funny was Phil Knight depiction, though?

Like I bet I wish it wasn't Ben Affleck.

I wish it wasn't. Yeah, I wish it was someone else. But it was really funny to me. Yeah, like the contradictions and the comedy of the character were so have you guys read shoe dog? No, I have not either. I've done the blinkest for it. Yeah, but I didn't know that he was like that.

A quirky like this philosophical Zen master.

Really, it has like a great Porsche. It was all for show. It was all aspirational in the early days. I think he evolved into it. He was very aspirational. He was constantly freaking out, but then trying to calm himself. He was a very funny character. I thought he was very contradictory.

My favorite character the whole thing was the... The like the actual shoe dog who was like the guy was like my entire life is basketball shoes.

Oh, you're talking about the guy in the basement Yeah, he's basically the where's my stapler. Yes.

Where have you seen my stapler? But he's like I have I have the magnum opus here. I have it Yeah, and he designs like the MJ1 or whatever.

Yeah I mean, the MJ one was pretty iconic, man. I mean, I didn't know they were all those funny things. Like, okay, we're definitely, I think, from here on forward, just let's just say it's all spoiler alert and keep going.

I mean, we're not really like anybody out there already know the story of Jordan's. It's true.

It's like a thing that happened. True. Like one thing that I thought was really cool was like, paying the fine $5,000 every time he wears the shoes and he sold like 180 million shoes in the first year it's like it's a joke they're worried about like $72 times five you know it's just like the funniest things that they were worried about just but I but I have to say really incredible of the mom to ask for the royalty and honestly Huge credit to Phil Knight. I mean, what an incredible CEO decision to say, I'll fight the board on this. Yes, this sets a precedent. Yes, every company from here on is going to want to make a shoot. Yes, every player from here on is going to want their own shoe. It's exactly what happened. Iversons and everyone has their shoe now, but that moment, that got level risk-taking level decision-making that's required in entrepreneurship was exhibited by Phil Knight. I haven't read the book, but I'm very curious.

But maybe the whole point of moving was that Sonny Vicar was the guy who deserves a credit.

I don't know if you guys are ready to talk about this aspect, but. MJ is for sure the greatest athlete of all time any sport and like all these documentaries the last dance air etc Like cement that like it's it's like the history is is told by the victors and like this is the example where it's like Okay Well, this is the best athlete of all time and here is our evidence.

I feel like a goat episode coming coming forth But like maybe the best episode of all athlete of all time is not a human You ever consider that? You ever heard of Secretariat? Secretariat was Michael Jordan's better than Secretariat. The most dominant athlete. Is that a horse? It is a horse. Most dominant athlete in a in a in a sport. Interesting.

But anyway, maybe we'll reserve it for a good episode. Because I mean, the answer is Lionel Messi. Because not only was he good athlete, but he was my good human.

So obviously, I think we already know maybe our answers, but I would still like to have this debate.

So after watching air, I had to rewatch last dance. I only went through like the first two or three and I'm like, oh my God, this guy is so fucking dominant. And then like, I had just finished watching a 38 year old LeBron James lose in four straight games. And I'm like, oh man, LeBron's good, but. It's, it's just, it's just not, it's just not MJ.

That is the debate, but it's not the same. I think that the majority of people, when they vote, I've seen this, I've seen this poll a few times and LeBron seems to win. Uh, the goat vote between MJ and LeBron, but the only reason I think that LeBron seems to win.

No, that's nobody. Who are you talking to? Nobody. You're talking to literally, literally nobody and four out of the six soccer players. That's outrageous.

Have you ever just been, like, bullied on a podcast? Like, that's what it looks like.

Like, you're just being big that are factually wrong.

Yeah, that's wrong.

On who'd you ask, Bard? You asked PN.

Oh, well, if he asked PN said. You asked Bard, and Bard said. Does Stephen A. Smith say it?

Must be true. Stephen A. Smith is God. Stephen A. Smith pointed to multiple polls where this is the fact that the majority of the time that this poll, like, occurs, LeBron seems to win it. The reason that I think he wins it, guys, slow your roll for a second. I'm literally on the same team. Just please get to the end of it because, like, it's horrible. Oh, my God. The reason he wins it is because we're living in that era. So there's a bias toward the player living in the era. I agree.

I think we got to, Jordan has a comment about Kelly Slater.

Okay. Most dominant athlete in his sport. 11 world titles. He says skateboarder, seven world titles, sir.

Porter. All right.

We'll reserve the Gretzky one is a great point. Actually, I think you can make a case that Gretzky is fucking ridiculous. Like if you look at Gretzky's name is the greatest. If you look at Gretzky's stats in his time, the problem is he played hockey. But like if he was doing that in basketball, I've been a joke. He would have been averaging like 52 a game and I'm sorry guys.

The goat discussion was completely closed after messy on the World Cup. It was already closed before the World Cup. It is double closed.

You guys already know how this episode is going to go. This future episode.

It's it's double closed. Okay. But I was a big fan of the movie. You guys don't know statistics. You should probably brush up on how that all works. You're not good at math, it's fine. Stephen A. Smith basically... Stephen A. Smith, good at math. You, not. Yeah, I found these sort of reenactments of origin stories to be really good lately.

That's gonna be good. Oppenheimer's gonna be so good. Wait, Oppenheimer's gonna be a thing?

Oppenheimer movie? Christopher Nolan's next movie is Oppenheimer.

Christopher Nolan joint.

I had no idea.

And the guy from Peaky Blinders.

This is why I come here to learn things. Bro, Killian Murphy. Great actor.

Is that the Peaky Blinders guy? Yes, he plays Oppenheimer. He plays Oppenheimer.

And it's just a hair under three hours. Which is the perfect amount of time for not only a podcast, But a great movie. So he actually said it's going to be his longest movie yet. It'll be just a hair under three hours. And people are very excited. Very excited for it, myself. The trailer is wild.

I am become God. Oh, that's good.

All right. Well, we wrapped up the bottle. Does anyone want to polish this?

Yeah, I was. Yeah, I've been waiting to polish it. The bottle keeps passing around past me.

OK. Mm hmm. One thing that I thought was really alarming is that we didn't start with the cheers. I just thought it was a little disrespectful.

Well, we came into the episode panicking because the sound didn't work to be fair. Thank you. We need to, we need to, we need to get to the point. We're just here comfortably. We're here. We're already talking for like 20 minutes and the camera turns on. We're like, Oh, hey there. How's everybody doing?

I bet you'd love that.

Didn't see there. We're all relaxed. No, this is always like, Mr. Rogers.

We ever had a relaxed episode? No, never. Steven with some puppets.

Five seconds before this episode, we thought we were going to have to pull the plug.

I'm like, I'm in my headphones. I'm like, it's buzzing. It's still buzzing.

Alright guys, that was a lot of fun. I hope you guys enjoyed it.

Say something really inspirational.

Say something really inspirational. I am become God. What is that? That's Oppenheimer's quote.

What? After he... I thought that was you quoting Dogecoin.

No, that's Oppenheimer after he invented the atom bomb.

I thought that was you being drunk. He said I am become God. Look it up.

So or watch the movie. I was I was just thinking like why is he not using an accent?

He's like the very come golf destroyer of worlds. He's actually quoting. I think a like a very coin much like a Buddhist proverb, I'm imagining. Well, you guys are uncultured cretins.

I like it. I think we tackled some presidential, like, political stuff that's pretty tough to talk about. Eric's wearing a radically moderate t-shirt. I hope we, like, lived up to that, you know,

I think RFK is, like, the closest thing we have to that slogan. Yeah, maybe. We'll see. What about? I think I am. We shouldn't do it. Yeah, we're going to, like, get pulled back into the vortex now. Hold on.

Should I? You can't. I'm going to pour it. I'm going to pour it again. We're going to start talking. His name? Who? Ron Paul. What?

I like Ron Paul. Yeah. Wait, what? No. He reminded me of Ron Paul. No. Yeah. No. Big time. No. Yep. I mean,

Mm-hmm. It's okay. Also, I like about it.

Yeah, exactly. Well, let's continue the conversation, the discord we often do every week. So I hope you guys can hop in there and I don't know, curious what you guys think about RFK. Is he electable? And if he is electable, is he even a good candidate? And will we see him debate Joe Biden?

Yeah. And one of the things I'd like to start doing is like, you know, it's, it's easy to say like, Hey, what do you guys want us to talk about? Blah, blah, blah. But to actually source that material. I think the best way for us to do that as the fifth human of the pod is have the conversation or discord and the conversations that do come up organically actually serve as inspiration for us. We often tend to jump in and have the conversations with everyone, but then they often carry over into the next week. And I think that can be a source of material for us to carry into the conversation on the pod live and then back into the conversation you know, online, on Discord. So I see it as a through line between the community, the Discord, the pod, all at once, the chat here today. So I say, let's carry the conversation in the Discord, see what comes up in the week, and then we'll bring it to the next episode.

And for $9, Steven will take a shot.

I heard that's all it costs.

Is that true? $999. If you donate $999 in an episode, I will do a shot. Is that all it takes to get your take a shot? Honestly, I feel like that's too little money for the pain. It causes me, but I'll I'll do it. You'll be fine. I'll do it for the memes. I believe in you. Yeah. Thank you to everybody who showed up for this. If you have not already, please subscribe to the YouTube.

Tell your mom we're here 5 p.m. Every Wednesday, Pacific Standard Time. Honestly, moms love this show. I don't know if you guys knew that. I'm not kidding. Tell your mom. Yeah, tell your mom.

Yeah, it's a real thing.

I know multiple moms amongst our moms that listen to the show. My mom liked our show. Moms love the show. So let's keep it real. All right. Love you guys.

All right.

Bye, everybody. Bye. Peace.